Bill Barr Defends Trump Admin. Boat Strikes: ‘We Don’t Have to go and Arrest Them’
“We have always taken the position in the United States that we can use force to protect our vital national interests”
Senator John Fetterman is not the only unlikely figure defending the Trump administration’s strikes on drug boats approaching the United States.
During a recent appearance on the popular conservative ‘Ruthless’ podcast, Bill Barr made it clear that he believes there is nothing wrong with this and emphasized the need to look at the cartels as a serious national security risk.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Bill Barr Defends Legality of Trump Boat Strikes and Describes Danger of Maduro Regime: Hezbollah’s ‘Anchor in Our Hemisphere’
Former attorney general Bill Barr on Friday spoke in favor of President Donald Trump’s strikes on Venezuelan drug boats and argued that U.S. intervention in the South American dictatorship could discourage neighboring states from working with Hezbollah and the Chinese Communist Party.
“Venezuela is a strategic adversary and a danger to the United States,” Barr said on the podcast C.O.B. Tuesday. “They are a base for Hezbollah, they support Hezbollah, they’re in all kinds of deals, money laundering and other deals, to help Hezbollah to facilitate their drug trafficking into the United States.” He also described the country as Hezbollah’s “anchor in our hemisphere.”…
Barr’s comments come as Trump has ordered strikes on Venezuelan drug ships and after U.S. forces last week seized a Venezuelan oil tanker en route to Asia. Trump has ordered a blockade on Venezuela intended to prevent oil from entering or leaving the socialist state, where Hezbollah operates with Iranian support, smuggling cocaine and other drugs to fund its Middle East operations.
“You have the power of the sovereign, to act against foreign threats, threats emanating from foreign sources,” Barr said. “We do zap people with drones. That’s the use of defense powers. We don’t have to go and arrest them. And the same is true with international drug organizations and narco terrorist stuff, if they pose a national defense threat.”
“We have always taken the position in the United States that we can use force to protect our vital national interests,” Barr added.
Here’s a short clip:
Former AG Bill Barr confirms what we already knew – the Trump administration’s handling of the drug boats is totally legal. Watch this fascinating discussion of actions against the Maduro regime on today’s show. Streaming now with @HolmesJosh, @ComfortablySmug, @MichaelDuncan and… pic.twitter.com/VfENZori8E
— Ruthless Podcast (@RuthlessPodcast) December 19, 2025
If you want to see more, this video is cued to start at the beginning of the segment featuring Barr:
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Excuse my ignorance but has the current administration laid out the case against Venezuela at home and in the UN? Have they show the country is running drugs, that the boats being destroyed are running them, that the country’s leadership is behind it? If not then it should. At least it should domestically.
It doesn’t need to. It could, if this were to turn into a political problem, but so far it hasn’t. The public doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, and trusts that the administration is doing the right thing, so there’s no need to make the case to it. And there’s no legal need to make a case to anyone.
Cases have been made before. Bay of Pigs for example. I feel somewhat uneasy whenever the US takes a unilateral military action especially one designed to essentially overthrow another government,
TBH unilateral action is probably often more purely in the interest of the USA v dealing with a coalition whose members all want their concerns addressed. Consider building a driveway out in a rural County v on a City lot. The County driveway gets put in with an excavator ripping out the pathway then driving over it to tamp the earth followed by dump trucks spreading the gravel and a guy coming behind him with a smaller blade to tidy up. Done in a couple days. With the City lot gotta pull permits, pay fees, maybe send notice to neighbors to get their input/maybe their approval. Lots of talking, paperwork going back and forth but not much action for a long while compared to Country. That’s the basic difference.
Bay of pigs what’s problematic because it was a disaster and a huge black eye for the United states.
Crap. My brain misfired. I meant to say Cuban missile crisis. Thanks.
The Bay of Pigs was a disaster but US forces weren’t involved which is why it was a disaster. It was also a covert op or supposed to be.
The time to lay your case our primarily for the domestic audience but also for foreign observers is when you are overtly using force to overthrow a regime, The cases in our hemisphere that I can think of are Grenada and Panama. There was also the Dominican Republic I believe but I really don’t recall the particulars of that.
‘In the UN’.
And with that, your opinion is irrelevant.
The US doesn’t need ‘permission’ from the UN to do ANYTHING, for any reason. The very idea that we need to ‘lay out a case’ in the UN is absurd on every level.
And yes, the drug cartels have been properly and legally designated a terrorist organization in the US. That’s why the Democrats had to resort to their OMG SECOND STRIKE WAS MURDER. Because even the most rabid leftist couldn’t argue that Trump and Hegseth blowing up the boat in the first place was beyond any ability to argue.
Yep, absolutely no UN consultation much less permission needed in our hemisphere where we are the hegemonic power.
It’s not asking for permission from the UN. It is making the case for acting in such a fashion.
By the way, my opinion is as relevant or irrelevant as yours whether you like that or not,
Also, whether you like it or not I think it is incumbent upon an administration, any administration to make the case domestically for whenever military is to be used for regime change. It’s always smart to build support domestically for what you do.
Groveling to the UN would cost Trump far more support domestically than it would gain.
The case has been made domestically.
Support is around 70%. Even laughably biased Democrat polls finds majority support for it.
The strikes are legal, even the Democrats can’t pretend otherwise, hence the manufactured nonsense about ‘murdering survivors’.
There is certainly a lot of anti drug sentiment on this sub.
And there is no doubt that drugs are bad and ruin lots of lives.
We have been fighting the war on drugs for my entire life and it has been a colossal and expensive failure.
Jailing a large percentage of black men for drug use and possession has destroyed the black community.
Time for a different approach than a war
If you bomb the drug boats, that supplies ample notice that you’ll bomb the drug boats. If they come anyway, that’s on them.
It doesn’t really matter. Whether or not Venezuela wants to claim those drug boats we have every authority to blow them out of the water rather than let them bring poison into our country.
A legitimate business would cease pending court case results. A wartime outfit would come anyway.
Since when is the US government a business? If it were, it would have been liquidated long ago in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The US has been actuarily bankrupt for years.
“If you bomb the drug boats, that supplies ample notice that you’ll bomb the drug boats. If they come anyway, that’s on them.”
Well … to put a spin on it … if we’re willing to bomb boats … any boat … that sends the same message. Drug boat or not … it’s a win win for us.
There are only a handful of people whose opinion I care about LESS than fatclown Barr.
What happened to that famous ‘report’ you were just waiting until after the election to release?
General summary of the Law of Armed Conflict on the matter:
Individuals involved in NIACs do not enjoy combatant immunity and POW status provided by the Third Geneva Convention and API. Instead, they are categorised as ‘civilians taking part in hostilities’ as per Article 13(3) of Additional Protocol II (APII) or as individuals having a ‘continuous combat function.
The notion of ‘continuous combat function’ is determined by an individual’s role within an organized group. Members of state armed forces enjoy combatant privileges. Individuals with ‘continuous combat function’ within armed groups may be targeted, even when they are not actively involved in hostilities. Civilians directly participating in hostilities can be targeted ‘so long as’ they are directly participating as outlined in Article 51(3) of API. “Direct participation in hostilities” is unclear and remains contested, requiring assessment of the civilians’ action and their contribution to hostilities. Unlike IACs, belligerents involved in the NIACs have no blanket immunity.
When these guys transport drugs, a weapon, as part of an overall scheme of belligerence against the country and its people, direct or indirect, they are fair game.
To make an analogy, they’re criminals coming, uninvited, through a window in our home to poison our families.
Anybody who thinks it was OK for a Capitol Police officer to shoot Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed citizen who posed zero threat to officers, hasn’t a shred of authority with which to criticize Trump’s policy concerned with the interdiction of criminals on the high seas.
There is a doctrine outside International Law called “legitimacy”. When egregious acts are perpetrated, a nation may elect to use a legitimacy justification to use force to stop the egregious act.
Stopping a genocide would be an example. See Serbia in 1999 and Syria in 2017.
We lose 100,000 people at the cost of a trillion dollars a year on account of these bastards. That’s egregious. I have no problem with blowing them out of the water.