r assets, the possibility that they've been stolen and sold is pretty high or just in general, if you can't account for your assets, we don't know that that signals gigantic fraud, but it does signal that we don't know if there's gigantic fraud. So again, I would say the problem might not be the Pentagon. The problem might be that the way we audit either doesn't have any teeth or we're doing it the wrong way or it's the wrong people doing it or some combination of all those things. So I would look at auditing the auditing. It could be, and I'm starting to form this opinion, that it's not that something is or is not audited. It's that the auditing doesn't work because it's also corrupt or incompetent or we don't do anything about it.

Now let me ask you this. Do you think anybody got fired or demoted because they failed that? Well, Hegseth says that they're improving and that they might pass their first audit by 2028. That's their goal. I am in favor of having a goal in this case. It makes sense to have a target for when you got it fixed. But it coincidentally is when they'll be out of office. So I've got an idea. How about we promise to have everything fixed when I'm no longer here? Oh, when would that be? 2028. So are you happy that they have a plan that it will be fixed when they're no longer here? Because you really don't need to fix it if you're not really going to be there.

So I would say I'm not happy with the excuse that we'll get it done by 2028. There's something far more aggressive has to happen before then. Now I will wait to 2028 if something happened that was aggressive. So if for example they said we just shake up our entire audit process or we just put a general in jail something like that like a big shocking change. If you give me a big shocking change that clearly is directionally correct I might wait. Yeah I might hold my opinion to 2028. But if you're not showing me that anything is going to be different and it's going to be the same people doing the audit as did it last time and the same people hiding the assets I hid it last time. I don't want to wait. I do not find that acceptable.

You know, somebody criticized me the other day on social media says I would be more credible if I ever criticized the Trump administration. To which I say, that's true. I would be way more credible if I ever criticized the Trump administration. I've definitely criticized the Trump administration. I'm doing it right here. Are they doing enough? No. No, they're not doing enough. Are they satisfying me that they're even capable of doing enough? No. No. I see no signal that the Trump administration is fixing this problem. So that is a criticism. I think I'd say almost exactly the same thing if Democrats were in charge.

So the next time you say to me, "Hey, you never criticize your own team." I say, "Well, that's what this is." My own, by the way, let me be clear. My team is not Republicans. My team is not MAGA. My team is America. Right? If you're on team America, which would include all of us, you need to get this fixed. This is not about one side versus the other. This is America versus the end of America, right? It's an existential problem. It's do you exist or don't you exist? It's way beyond Democrat or Republican.

All right. Well, apparently the US is putting more pressure on these so-called dark fleet of tankers coming out of Venezuela. So I guess some tankers that were incorrectly flagged, I think that's the false flag, are being subject to a seizure. And I believe that now the third one has been seized. We already had two. And some people said, "Hey, those particular tankers are exempt because they're a different flag." Well, it looks like the flags were fake. So the US is taking the position, I don't know if it's valid or not, but they're taking the position that these can be seized. And apparently we're going to escort them to American ports and just take the oil.

Now that is a very Trumpian way to handle this, which is I'll just take your oil. Thank you. Now if some of that oil, if we take it, would we use it to offset the military cost of controlling or the military cost of leaning on Venezuela? If we do, that would be a very Trumpian thing to do. Well, thank you for the free oil. You know, I always say that Trump picks up free money. If you leave free money on a table and everybody walks by it, Trump is the only one who's saying, "Does anybody own that? Whose free money is that?" And after he asks maybe the second time, and nobody says it's theirs, he takes it. He just takes it. So clearly this is theft, but it's also free money. So very Trumpian.

Now the big mystery about the whole Venezuelan operation is does it have one purpose or does it have multiple purposes and what would they be? And I don't know the answer to this question but it could be a three meaning that if you think of it in terms of trying to accomplish any one thing then you would be confused because it's really meant to accomplish more than one thing. So the possible things, some people say, some people who are not me but are smarter than me about this topic say that really leaning on Venezuela is also a way to lean on Cuba because Cuba and Venezuela have an economic relationship that if you hurt one you would hurt the other especially if you hurt Venezuela's oil business I think that would hurt Cuba the most.

So question number one is our actions at the moment, are they designed to take down or control two countries via the Monroe Doctrine idea that you know we're the dominant or the big dog and that if you don't do what we want and you happen to live in our part of the world we're going to come for you. So I would say maybe or maybe it just makes the anti-Cuban people happy, but it's not part of the primary goal. But I guess I would argue obviously it does put pressure on Cuba, but what do we expect will happen from that? Do we expect that Cuba will have a regime change? Have we not been expecting that for six, well how many years have we assumed that if we put pressure on Cuba, they'll have a regime change? So I don't know what we're trying to accomplish other than making Cubans poorer.

Then of course the stated objective is to put pressure on the drug cartels. Well, it does that, but as many people have pointed out, fentanyl will probably just find another way. And by the way, Venezuela is not the big fentanyl producer in the first place. So yeah. Yeah, it's bad for the cartels, but is that why we're doing it? I do agree with this thinking that the cartels have become so powerful that you risk them becoming like a major military. Now you could argue they're already a major military, but they're not any match for the American military. At some point they might become so powerful that you couldn't really directly attack them because it would just be too much catastrophe. So it could be that we're thinking ahead to make sure that the drug cartels don't reach a certain scale and power and we're worried that they're coming to some kind of crossover point. So I don't think we're doing it only for that.

Well here's the fourth possible thing. The fourth possible reason is that the big money people, I don't know, the big energy money billionaires may have decided that if we can just steal the oil from Venezuela, they will make enormous profits, which presumably would happen, right? If Venezuela crumbled but we captured their energy assets, would that make any American companies richer or any billionaires from anywhere richer? The answer is maybe. Maybe.

So we've got at least four possible reasons that Venezuela itself is a problem and they want a regime change. That doing that will take down Cuba somehow, but I don't see how. That the drug cartels got too powerful. It was time to knock them down. Or that some rich people have some enormous financial gain. It's kind of a weird one. So I do not believe that our full military will move in and just occupy the country, but I do like the fact that Trump never takes that off the table.

All right, let's talk about Ukraine and Russia. There's something interesting going on here. So apparently there's been yet more meetings with Witkoff and Jared and Russian, Ukraine and mostly Ukraine and they're working on their 20-point plan for a multilateral security agreement. So what Witkoff said is an interesting hint of where we're at. He said that negotiators focused in the recent talks on quote timeliness and sequencing of next steps. Now it doesn't seem to me that you would talk about the timing of steps unless you thought you were close to agreeing on what the steps were. And I don't believe that we've been close to that before. So is his choice of words, timeliness and sequencing, is that telling us we've achieved some kind of minimum negotiation minimum state where we're close to agreeing on the content but not the timing? Because if it comes down to timing that would suggest we're close to something that could work. And I'm not suggesting we are, but his choice of words does suggest that and I've not seen that before. So that's my persuasion-related observation.

So now US, Ukrainian and European officials earlier this week they said that the problem is security guarantees for Kyiv. And here's what Lindsey Graham said. Now remember, Lindsey Graham is a very anti-Russian guy and he said recently on Meet the Press, I guess this weekend, that it was unclear if Putin would accept the current deal. So the negotiations were with Ukraine to tighten up the 20 points, but we don't know if Putin would accept it. And he says if he doesn't accept it that the approach should be to start seizing oil tankers that are carrying Russian oil and then to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism for what he says kidnapping 20,000 Ukrainian kids.

Now you know one of the problems with getting a deal is that Trump will be accused of making a deal that's pro-Putin, right? That's a big problem. How does Trump avoid the accusation that he's just working for Putin? He's a puppet of Putin and he's not trying to protect Ukraine. He's not trying to protect Europe. He's just trying to make Putin happy. Well, it's a tough one because we're at a point where Putin's going to get something out of this deal that a lot of people don't want him to get out of the deal.

So one way you could address that, which is not a total answer, is you could send the most anti-Putin guy onto the TV to say that he would be willing to support some kind of a deal that looks like what we have now. So if Lindsey Graham, the most anti-Russian guy, and nobody doubts that, so there's nobody in the world who doubts that he's anti-Russian. If he says this deal works for us, meaning America, wouldn't that be a pretty good signal that we're not doing it for Putin's benefit if Lindsey Graham says yes?

Now I'm not a giant fan of Lindsey Graham's military-first kind of approach to things. I'm simply observing that if he has a long, long track