A Daily Reid: Redrum

The Trump regime is murdering people on the high seas, and everyone knows it

The Trump regime is in increasingly hot water regarding their murder on the high seas policy, which defense secretary Pete "Whiskey” Hegseth is now officially blaming on his subordinate: the admiral who took over for the wiser admiral who quit in October, before the war crimes began.

With that setup, watch the Regime’s Leni Riefenstahl try to explain how all of this is legal, and how it’s totally not a contradiction for Trump to have pardoned a notorious drug dealer who happens to be the brother of the president of Honduras.

Oh Karoline … here’s what the actual laws say about bombing fishermen and other noncombatants and shooting more and more bombs until every one of them is dead:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Leveling a second strike on the survivors of an initial attack on an alleged drug boat would have been a crime, legal experts say.

It doesn’t matter whether the U.S. is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels as the Trump administration asserts. Such a fatal attack would have violated peacetime laws and those governing armed conflict, the experts say.

“I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water,” said Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College. “That is clearly unlawful.”

Clearly.

And of course Trump is like, who are these people, Hegseth and some admiral??? I dunno, I was getting my tenth MRI…

Meanwhile, behold the level of seriousness with which the self-proclaimed SECRETARY OF WAR takes mass sea murder:

Precious. I wonder if he showed that to his multiple kids from various mamas he cheated on over time…

And about that notorious drug trafficker who apparently escaped DEATH BY HEGSETH because he wasn’t on a boat in the Caribbean (and also because he’s a fellow autocrat in the Americas who wrote Trump a nice letter, which means he likes Trump — something Trump really appreciates…)

Donald Trump has officially pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, according to the ex-leader’s attorney. He was released from a federal prison in West Virginia early Tuesday.

Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for playing a central role in what the Biden administration deemed to be “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Though Trump is blaming the conviction on Biden, much of the investigation began during Trump’s first term, with his now Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove acting as one of the lead investigators on the case.

The investigation found that Hernández moved mountains of cocaine between 2004 and 2022, facilitating the influx of more than 400 tons of the highly addictive substance into the U.S.

Under the protection of a machine gun-wielding, grenade launcher-toting gang, Hernández received “millions of dollars of drug money from some of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere.” The politico used that money to fuel his political ambitions, pay off bribes, and extend legal protections toward himself and his drug trafficking co-conspirators during his time in office.

The decision to release him comes just days after Hernández penned a sugar-coated letter to the U.S. president in which he claimed to be a victim of “political persecution” by the Biden administration, reported The New York Times.

Trump announced Friday that he planned to grant Hernández a “full and complete pardon,” though a White House official told the Times that the decision had nothing to do with the letter. Trump, at the time, had not seen the appeal, the official said on the condition of anonymity.

“This was a clear Biden over-prosecution,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “He was the president of this country. He was in the opposition party. He was opposed to the values of the previous administration, and they charged him because he was president of Honduras.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s approach to curbing narcoterrorism—which has involved bombing small boats in the Caribbean suspected of smuggling drugs without evidence—has run afoul of international law. It has also placed an outsized target on drug mules, potentially the lowest and least significant participants on the drug trade totem pole.

Ah, that Law and Order…

This also from The New Republic … which is a pretty big uh-oh for Whiskey Pete:

It turns out that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth knows all about the circumstances of the America’s September 2 strike on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

A clip of Hegseth talking the next day about the strike to Fox News in September resurfaced online Monday night. In the clip, Hegseth said he watched the bombing happen live.

“I can tell you that was definitely not artificial intelligence. I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs,” Hegseth said.

And here’s the clip:

Like the kids say, that Nuremburg trial is gonna be lit.

Meanwhile,

Lev Parnas

has the goods on the secret war cabinet meetings designed to set up Trump’s war for Venezuelan oil, on behalf of Americas Oilgarchs. Here’s the story from his Substack, Lev Remembers.

Lev appeared on The Joy Reid Show last night to discuss. Interview starts at 24:28:

War for Oil … the great American tradition…

The perils of being boring

One more from TNR, since they are on a roll. This has to be the best thing I’ve read about Bari Weiss and is second only to her vivisection by John Oliver…

For Weiss, the decline of the American media is best exemplified by the rise of Nick Fuentes (a Nazi), Andrew Tate (a virulent misogynist), and Hasan Piker (a leftist streamer who pushes universal health care while playing video games). For what it’s worth, she is sitting next to Ben Shapiro while she says all of this. None of these people, it should be no noted, regularly appear on CBS—or any other mainstream network.

“Those people don’t actually represent our values, and they don’t think that they represent the values or the worldview of the vast majority of Americans,” Weiss says, growing more passionate. “This is an opportunity to speak for the 75 percent, for the people on the center-left and the center-right that still believe in equality of opportunity, that still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in: liberty and freedom and individual responsibility and, on a basic level, the right to know what is exactly going on in the world. Not the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be, but what’s actually going on in the world.”

You wouldn’t know from this that there is a media ecosystem that exists outside of a handful of streamers. In fact, there actually is a media that, you know, speaks to people in the middle and aims to tell you exactly what’s going on in the world: It’s called CBS News. It existed long before Bari Weiss was put in charge….

But wait, there’s more…

What Weiss really wants is to have the power to unilaterally—or perhaps with the input of the Ellisons—determine what is “acceptable” in American politics and culture. The invocation of Loesch (a lobbyist who advocates for unrestricted access to firearms) and Dershowitz (a member of Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team) only makes it more ridiculous. These are bad people to hold up as paragons of the “acceptable”—and, regardless, both of them are already on television a lot.

That leads to another problem that has nothing to do with principle: All Bari Weiss is doing in this excerpt is inventing cable news. She’s describing Crossfire. Cable news is built on the premise that it is a stage for people of rival beliefs and parties to shout at one another. Weiss is pleased that the participants in her Free Press debates “like each other” after their arguments, but that’s actually what a lot of people hate about cable news: that the pundits who shout at each other on TV drink cocktails together afterward. It’s hard to think of anything that reinforces the media’s clubby, elitist image more. In any case, if the choice is between Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch talking about gun control and watching a Twitch stream—literally any Twitch stream—I’ll watch someone else play video games. Weiss can stack as many platitudes on top of each other as she wants, but her vision for CBS News is “CNN, but somehow worse.”

Alex Shephard, you complete me. Read the whole thing here. You’re welcome.

And if you missed the John Oliver takedown, here it is. You’re welcome, again.

But at least no one on CBS will be mean to Israel.

Overjoyed

I’m already having major FOMO about The Root 100 gala celebration tomorrow night, which sadly I’m going to miss. But so very grateful to have been included in this wondrous list!

Even with that, this is one of the greatest compliments I’ve received this year — being listed among these incredible people, in a spoken word piece by the amazing Lynae Vanee Bogues:

If you don’t know about Lynee, learn more here.

More updates and news to come. Stay safe in the waters, fam.

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