Ambassador Robert C. Obrien, President Trump’s last Natinal Security Advisor in the first term, joined Hugh to talk about the events of the weekend:

Audio:

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Transcript:

HH: Joined by Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien, formerly National Security Advisor to President Trump in term one of Donald Trump’s first term as president. He is now the chairman of American Global Security, and I’m so glad to have him on after this incredible weekend. Ambassador O’Brien, welcome. Let me begin with getting your reaction to Operation Absolute Resolve.

RCO’B: Well, Hugh, it’s good to see you and Happy New Year to you as well, my friend. It was in exquisite operation performed brilliantly by first of all, our flag professionals, the CIA guys who prepped the battlefield and were down in the jungles and the urban areas of Venezuela for months prepping this thing, getting the intel right, laying the groundwork for traitors and treasonist Venezuelans, and patriotic Venezuelans who wanted to see the regime change to cooperate with our guys, and then Delta Force, assisted by the 160th Air Assault regiment, aviation regiment, the Night Stalkers getting down there and into Venezuela in the middle of the night and hauling Maduro out of his fortress and bringing him to justice in America. It’s just 100% an exquisite operation from start to finish.

HH: Do you believe it is legal to have done this?

RCO’B: 100%. Without, there was a warrant out for his arrest. He was indicted for drugs. This is not, there were a lot of political reasons to do it, but this was a strict law enforcement effort backed by the Biden administration when they were in office. And it was 100% legal. He’s now facing justice. And look, he’s pretty lucky to be in a New York court. New York courts haven’t been very generous to Donald Trump over the past few years. So he’s got a fair and impartial Clinton-appointed judge, and we’ll see how the case goes. But it looks pretty rock solid to me.

HH: Asked on Air Force One yesterday what happens next, President Trump answers, “That depends.” I think that made a lot of sense to me, but what do you think it depends upon most, Ambassador O’Brien?

RCO’B: Well, it depends on how it goes, or how the Chavistas decide to play this. Look, they’re a political party in Venezuela. They have some support, maybe 20-30% of the votes in Venezuela. They continue to participate in the process, have free and fair elections, and may have a role in the future. Or they can be de-Baathified like the Saddam Hussein loyalists were in Iraq. And I think what President Trump and Marco Rubio and John Ratcliffe are looking at is, and Pete Hegseth, is what happened to Iraq when we disbanded the Iraqi army and disbanded the government. And that was chaos, and ISIS arose, and I think they’re looking for a reasonable transition. There’s a very well-formed opposition in Venezuela led by Edmundo Gonzalez. He was elected president with like two-thirds of the vote. And since last year, he’s in Spain. He’ll be coming back. You’ve got Maria Machado, the Nobel Prize winner. You’ve got Juan Guaido, who is the acting president and former president of the national assembly. He’s in exile. He’ll be coming back to Venezuela. So there’s a very strong opposition. I’m sure they’ll enter into negotiations with Delcy Rodriguez, the current vice-president, and we’ll have a transition government, and then get on to the business of having free and fair elections.

HH: Now the minister of the interior and the head of their military have not changed. But I assume they are involved in conversations with Secretary Rubio and perhaps the Agency. Is that your assumption as well?

RCO’B: That’s my assumption, and they’ll be doing those negotiations in Spanish. Marco speaks fluent Spanish. He’ll be negotiating with them. He knows the region very well. He’s got a great team of people including folks like Mauricio Claver-Carone, who used to work for me, who was the envoy to the region for a while. And they’ll take care of business. And look, they understand what happened to Maduro. None of those guys want to be sitting in a New York courtroom. So they’ve got an opportunity here to play ball and cooperate, and potentially preserve a political future for themselves and Venezuela.

HH: Secretary Rubio on Saturday, in that extraordinary press conference, said President Trump does not play games. End of quote. You worked with him closely for two years as his NSA at the end of his first term. How do you read ‘President Trump does not play games’?

RCO’B: Well, Marco’s exactly right. He’s got my old position as well as being Secretary of State, the first person since Henry Kissinger to hold both offices. And the poor guy is working his tail off, but he’s doing a great job. And what it means is this, is Donald Trump always present parties with a fair deal. He’s an incredibly reasonable, pragmatic man. And in this case, he offered Maduro several offramps. He could have gone to Moscow or Beijing or Havana and left, and left on his own terms, and turn things over. He decided not to. He decided to play tough guy with Donald Trump. And look, Hugh, he thought he could leverage us with his illegal immigration, sending Tren de Agua guys to the United States, sending cocaine and fentanyl to undermine us, invited Hezbollah and Iran and China into the region. He thought all those things would give him an advantage. They didn’t. Donald Trump doesn’t play games, and he called his bluff, and Maduro is now in a Brooklyn jail and a New York City courthouse. And so Trump gave him a lot of opportunities, he didn’t take them, and look, this is what happens. It happened to Baghdadi, it happened to Soleimani, it happened to a lot of others when they didn’t take the deal. They lost. You had the Ayatollah a few months ago with Operation Midnight Hammer with the nuclear program. Trump said look, open your facilities to full inspections, and stop making a bomb, and we’ll leave you alone. And the Iranians gave us the middle finger, and they saw what happened.

HH: Now the most extraordinary statement in the press conference, I listened to it live, is there’s no transcript, so I’m doing this from memory. He either said, President Trump either said all of life is a deal, or life is a deal, meaning everything is a negotiation. Is that the essence of Donald Trump right there?

RCO’B: Very, very much so. I mean, look, he’s, and here it goes back to my, he’s not an ideologue. He’s a very pragmatic guy. He wants, his whole ideology is a deep love for America. Donald Trump loves America like nobody I’ve ever met, kind of like Ronald Reagan. And he wants what’s best for this country, and he’ll cut deals. I mean, look, he’s shown that. He’s shown, he was very reasonable with Kim Jung Un. He was very reasonable with Xi Jinping recently. He’s offered Putin a great deal, and Putin’s refusing that deal, which is kind of surprising to me. So he’s always willing to make a deal for peace and to end the killing, and look, war and these raids are a last option for President Trump. He would far prefer doing a deal, and doing things peacefully. And I think we’ve seen that. But if you push him too far like Maduro did, you know, he found out what happens.

HH: I will come back to Venezuela in a moment, but the President has also made a threat to Iran that if they kill protesters, and 14 people are alleged to be dead according to Reuters over the weekend as Iran convulses with protests, he will take action. What should the Ayatollah Khamenei and the IRGC understand about that threat?

RCO’B: Well, look, I saw today that the Ayatollah is already making plans to go to Moscow is President Trump enforces his edict. So that’s probably a good plan. Surprisingly, you now, the Iranian, who should be wealthy and doing well, have had a very difficult time economically. They can’t get water, you know, they’re lacking food stuffs. They said the Ayatollah’s got $95 billion dollars stored away that he’s going to take with him to Russia, which is crazy. So I think the Ayatollah and the mullahs are already making plans to get out of Dodge if they crack down on these protesters, which they apparently are doing. There are some open source information in the news, I don’t know what it means, that a lot of the 160th Aviation Regiment, the Night Stalkers, were moving to England and moving to Europe, which they did before the last attack on Iran. So you know, we’ll have to see what happens. But I don’t think the President’s going to sit back and watch innocent people be killed like Obama did in the Green Revolution when he sided with the Mullahs and the Ayatollahs over the people of Iran. And I think the President would rather side with the people of Iran over the mullahs and the Ayatollahs.

HH: Okay, let me go back to Venezuela. The last American oil company operating there is Chevron. The others were expropriated, and they were screwed. They won international arbitration awards. It is a country’s right to expropriate industries, but they have to pay for them. And they’ve been screwed. What do you think Chevron ought to do? Ought it to be standing by and willing to rebuild that, what is basically a rusted-out 25 years? We’ve got a minute left, Ambassador.

RCO’B: 100%. Chevron’s CEO Wirth is a very smart guy. Chevron’s hung in there under very difficult circumstances. A lot of people criticized them for it. I was actually in favor of Chevron staying there and keeping an American presence, hoping that something like this would happen. So Chevron can be in the lead, and I think the other American oil companies should get in there. But again, this is not to take the oil from the Venezuelan people. This is to produce the oil for the Venezuelan people, make Venezuela great again, make Venezuela rich again, make the people healthy, wealthy, and happy. And at the same time, give the American oil companies a chance to produce and then make a profit as well on the contracts that they owned.

HH: Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien, former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump, still a member of the presidential advisory board on intel and the chairman of American Global Strategies, thanks for spending time with us on a very busy news day. I know you’re in demand everywhere, and I appreciate the time. Old friend, Ambassador Robert O’Brien. Thank you.

End of interview.