Venezuela Situation: US Declares War on 'Narco-Terrorism'

[Aeneas]

So Venezuela, Russia and China conspired with US intel agencies and 'the Dems' to rig elections in the US. Sounds overly complicated and implausible. Occam's razor says US elections would be rigged by US agents. Doesn't mean they didn't use foreign countries and foreign systems to do so, but that doesn't mean that those foreign nations' govts. were involved. If this is part of the narrative being given to Trump about Venezuela, then it sounds like the same people who rigged the election against him are using evidence of their own election rigging apparatus to try to get Trump to attack Venezuela.

I agree. That is how I read it too, that the US deep State used other countries for their psyop to rig the election. It is an internal fight within the US, using their own agents operating from other countries. There is nothing new in that approach as the 5 Eyes network is also used with US allies spying on the US, and thereby bypassing restrictions on US agencies about how much they are allowed to spy on US citizens.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

So Venezuela, Russia and China conspired with US intel agencies and 'the Dems' to rig elections in the US. Sounds overly complicated and implausible. Occam's razor says US elections would be rigged by US agents. Doesn't mean they didn't use foreign countries and foreign systems to do so, but that doesn't mean that those foreign nations' govts. were involved. If this is part of the narrative being given to Trump about Venezuela, then it sounds like the same people who rigged the election against him are using evidence of their own election rigging apparatus to try to get Trump to attack Venezuela.

Aside from vague accusations from Robinson linking all three, so far I haven't seen her or Byrne directly accuse Russia and China of being involved to that extent. Once I read the Pezzullo book I'll let you know. The specific tweets I've seen so far match more what you wrote in bold - e.g. the Serbian servers using Huawei tech, and references to Russian and China just being political allies of Venezuela - with the exception of Venezuelans being directly involved. The closest accusation against China was a reference to Ratcliffe's DNI report linking China to the 2020 election interference, which the CIA apparently didn't want to show Trump. But there are no real details about what that alleged involvement was.

Robinson and Byrne seem to be claiming that the Venezuelan government/military/cartels, however, are fully involved in the voting machine scam, and the CIA works with them to rig elections in 72 countries, e.g., Brennan being part owner of the Dominion data center in Serbia. I can't find the tweet now (maybe they deleted it), but a few days ago one them tweeted about the dilemma Trump is facing, from their perspective: Trump wants to remove the entire corrupt Venezuelan system (as it's been presented to him by Byrne et al.), but the CIA wants to just have an opposition makeover, removing Maduro but keeping the election-rigging system intact. The picture painted isn't "US rigs US elections," but "international group of criminals rig elections worldwide."

 

[axj]

According to the C's in the latest session, Trump's motivation regarding Venezuela is simple:

(Beau) What is Trump's motivation for bombing boats in the Caribbean?

A: Oil.

Q: (L) He wants to start something with Venezuela, and then get Venezuela's oil. He's posturing and threatening. Is that it?

A: Yes

If the "US election rigging from Venezuela" angle was brought up to him at all, it may be not that important to him.

 

[Alejo]

The picture painted isn't "US rigs US elections," but "international group of criminals rig elections worldwide."

It's rather ironic that this would be the narrative being presented to Trump, after surviving Russiagate, him falling for it would be kind of sad.

 

[Beau]

So Venezuela, Russia and China conspired with US intel agencies and 'the Dems' to rig elections in the US. Sounds overly complicated and implausible.

I didn't see Russian and Chinese gov't involvement in AI's post. But if that sounds overly complicated, let me show you the plan for 9-11, Thomas Crooks, Charlie Kirk, etc. The Deep State plans overly complicated conspiracies that seem implausible pretty regularly.

According to the C's in the latest session, Trump's motivation regarding Venezuela is simple:

It's not that simple, and there's no way to know right now whether Trump is motivated or not by this election data.

It's rather ironic that this would be the narrative being presented to Trump, after surviving Russiagate, him falling for it would be kind of sad.

You don't think there's any possibility of this being true? How about if we swapped out Venezuela for Israel, would it then be easier to believe?

 

[Approaching Infinity]

If the "US election rigging from Venezuela" angle was brought up to him at all, it may be not that important to him.

I would think anything related to election rigging would touch a sore spot for Trump. Seems exactly the kind of thing that would get him riled up to me. In this case, I haven't yet seen any solid indication that the Venezuela angle is an op in the sense that Russiagate was. But it could always be that the Venezuelan defectors that Byrne worked with for a couple years are just telling the Americans what they think they want to hear - and creating a paper trail to back that up, if Byrne is to be believed about the type of evidence they've shared.

It's not that simple, and there's no way to know right now whether Trump is motivated or not by this election data.

I doubt there is just one motivation. Oil may very well be at the forefront. Perceptions about election rigging (whether legit or not, or to what degree) may be another. Even stopping the drug trafficking is probably on the list as a legitimate concern, even if other reasons may have more weight.

On the latter, Rand Paul kind of self-owned himself on Twitter today, posting:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1995885169832853966

Coast Guard records show that prior to the reign of “blow-them-to-smithereens” 21 percent of boats stopped off the coast of Venezuela possessed NO drugs!

Many commenters were actually shocked to find out that 79% of the boats DID have drugs, and another 7% were breaking other federal crimes. Considering that at least some of the boats without drugs had simply gotten rid of their cargo, that's a pretty high percentage, IMO. One comment:

Senator Rand Paul saying that 21 percent of boats stopped off the coast of Venezuela had no drugs on board, and he used that to suggest the United States is killing innocent fishermen. That framing leaves out almost everything that actually matters.

1st
If 21 percent were “clean,” then 79 percent were not. In any law-enforcement or military environment, a seventy-nine percent hit rate is extremely high. That alone undercuts the idea that these operations are “mostly” hitting innocent people.

2nd
An empty boat is not proof that a crew is innocent. Smugglers on these routes use fast open-hull boats. They dump their load the moment they spot a helicopter or aircraft. They also hand off bundles to another boat before contact. By the time an interdiction team boards, the hull can look clean even when it wasn’t ten minutes earlier. This is common practice on cocaine routes in the Caribbean and eastern Venezuela.

3rd
Paul’s statistic comes from classic chase-and-board cases. That is not the same thing as the current deep-surveillance strikes. Traditional chases always miss a portion of traffickers because dumping and handoffs are built into the smuggling playbook. The new system uses long-duration drone surveillance, pattern-of-life analysis, and multiple intelligence streams before any shot is taken. Treating boarding numbers as equivalent to strike targeting is misleading.

4th
The hard numbers from this past year tell the real story.The United States Coast Guard announced a record seizure of roughly five hundred ten thousand pounds of cocaine in Fiscal Year 2025. It is the largest annual total in the agency’s history and more than triple its long-term average. That increase lines up with the period when the expanded interdiction effort began.

5th
These routes are not run by hobby fishermen. They move hundreds of tons of cocaine a year and are controlled by cartel and gang networks tied to violence, extortion, and human trafficking. That is the reality on the water. A narrow statistic pulled from fourteen boardings does not change the scale or the nature of the threat.

Bottom line
Paul’s post uses a small sample from one type of operation to paint a much larger mission as reckless. The full set of facts shows something very different. The United States is hitting confirmed trafficking routes, using deeper surveillance than ever before, and seizing record amounts of narcotics. The 21 percent number does not prove what Paul says it proves. It proves the opposite.

I tried to find info on the victims of the strikes, but oddly there is very little information. You'd think that would be a huge story. Almost all who have been identified seem to be low-level trafficking mules. No info that I could find from Venezuelan media or government. This is what Grok says fwiw:

No, the Venezuelan government has not released the names of those killed in the U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats. Reports indicate that information about the victims has been largely suppressed by Venezuelan authorities, with families often remaining silent due to fear of reprisal. As of early November 2025, only a handful of names have been made public through independent journalism or family statements—such as nine Venezuelans identified by an Associated Press investigation in the Paria Peninsula region—but these came despite government repression, not from official channels. Dozens of the more than 80 total fatalities across the strikes remain unidentified.

Venezuela's National Assembly has vowed a "rigorous and thorough investigation" into the strikes, particularly the controversial "double-tap" incident on September 2, 2025, but no victim names or detailed findings have been disclosed as part of that probe. President Nicolás Maduro's administration has instead focused public statements on condemning the U.S. actions as "serial executions" aimed at regime change, without addressing casualties directly.

While the Trump administration labeled the victims "narco-terrorists" tied to groups like Tren de Aragua, locals described them primarily as low-level fishermen and laborers driven into drug smuggling by Venezuela's economic desperation, not as cartel leaders or terrorists. They often used open-hulled fishing skiffs modified with powerful outboard motors to transport cocaine to nearby islands like Trinidad.

 

[Alejo]

You don't think there's any possibility of this being true? How about if we swapped out Venezuela for Israel, would it then be easier to believe?

Possible? yes it is possible. And to that point, I suppose Venezuela doesn't have a shortage of reasons to try and mess with the US, I mean they declared that dude Juan Guaido the president a few years ago, just declared him the president and gave him the funds of Citgo USA.

But international criminal groups rigging elections in the US, probably reside within the US. What I mean is that back then they used the fact that some accounts sharing memes showed IPs in russia and said "it's definitely Putin". It's very easy these days to create the impression that something is being done somewhere specifically.

If we swapped out Venezuela for Israel, I daresay we wouldn't see the US bombing Israeli boats. Whenever there's a scandal of Israeli interference in US politics, US politicians simply bury the story.

 

[Beau]

But international criminal groups rigging elections in the US, probably reside within the US.

That is what Emerald Robinson and Co. and claiming. CIA involvement.

 

[axj]

It's not that simple, and there's no way to know right now whether Trump is motivated or not by this election data.

We do have the C's, which is one way to know - or at least have a theory with a high degree of probability of being true. The uncertainty being possible transmission errors.

According to their answer, it is simply about oil. While you are saying there is no way to know, yet that you know that it is not that simple.

How about if we swapped out Venezuela for Israel, would it then be easier to believe?

That is not a good comparison at all. Does Venezuela have most of the US politicians and much of the US media (Hollywood, news, etc.) in its pocket?

 

[John G]

We do have the C's, which is one way to know - or at least have a theory with a high degree of probability of being true. The uncertainty being possible transmission errors.

According to their answer, it is simply about oil. While you are saying there is no way to know, yet that you know that it is not that simple.

Well when asked why Venezuela offering oil for sale wasn't good enough for the U.S. the answer was "control". That could include control of more than just oil.