Free Republic

A new assessment from the FBI suggests that some Venezuelan government officials are ‘likely facilitating’ members of the violent gang Tren de Aragua from Venezuela to the United States to undermine public safety in the U.S. Immediately after taking office, President Trump designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization in his executive order, Designating Cartels And Other Organizations As Foreign Terrorist Organizations And Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The executive order stated: Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal...

Venezuela’s Vice President Tareck El Aissami, an official of Syrian-Lebanese origin sanctioned by the United States for his connections to drug trafficking, is a “huge” monetary contributor to Iran’s narco-terrorist proxy Hezbollah. Citing sources on the ground in Lebanon during an event late last week hosted on Capitol Hill by the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS), Dr. Vanessa Neumann, a leading expert on drug cartels and terrorist groups in Latin America, told Breitbart News, “Tareck El Aissami is one of Hezbollah’s great bagmen, a sort of huge funder, and the money goes through the networks, and then, as...

US President Donald Trump has chatted briefly with his Argentine counterpart, Mauricio Macri, on telephone discussing the region and Venezuela "in particular", a media report said. During the five-minute call on Wednesday, Trump reiterated his invitation to Macri to visit Washington and also said that he was "very happy" because new jobs were being created in the US, the Argentine President's office said in a statement. This was the second of such calls between the two leaders since Trump won the November 2016 election. Argentina said that the two leaders' talk was very cordial, but provided no further details, Efe...

The Trump administration is slapping sanctions on Venezuela’s new Vice President Tareck El Aissami and accusing him of playing a major role in international drug trafficking. (snip) The U.S. is also sanctioning Samark Bello, a wealthy businessman connected to El Aissami who has held significant business interests in the U.S. The U.S. says Bello provided assistance or support to El Aissami’s trafficking activities.

A screenshot taken from a television broadcast showed one Chavista operative sending all the latest news about Tren de Aragua's mayhem in the U.S. to Maduro himself. Venezuela's democratic forces are a pretty observant lot, having spotted evidence of fraud in some background pictures of the regime's vote-counting houses as employees took selfies. Now, one of them has spotted something interesting on dictator Nicolas Maduro's cell phone as he made a televised speech, in a whatsapp message from one of his closest lieutenants: 𝐄𝐫𝐢𝐤 𝐒𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐳 Φ @eriksuarezn Image taken during a Maduro speech on National TV (Venezuela 🇻🇪) The Whatsapp...

Barack Obama will no doubt be chronicled, among other things, as the first anti-American president. No wonder; he’s the product of an educational system that has become increasingly radical and anti-American with each passing decade, and his mother was a stereotypical leftist anthropologist with a passion for the Third World. The pattern is unmistakable. As Luis Fleischman notes, Obama wanted to make deals with our enemies, Iran being the most dramatic example. But just look at Latin America: The Obama Administration tried to avoid confrontations with anyone it wanted to make a “historic deal” with. Most of these “historic deals”...

For my followers: my recent tweets are less for you than they are fir my pursuers. They are shots across the bow .. https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/1137799476507217921

Venezuela’s ex-vice president and now the top confidant of Nicolas Maduro is said to have tried sneaking in Hezbollah militants into his country, made a business deal with a drug lord and became extremely wealthy as the once-rich country turned into an economic basket case. Tareck El Aissami has emerged as a hardliner of Maduro’s socialist regime as the country remains on the brink of an all-out civil war due to economic misery. **SNIP** But El Aissami, while not having the same scrutiny as Maduro, has long been the subject of various investigations both at home and in the U.S....

Venezuela’s Tarek El-Aissami The Americas Report | Oct 03, 2008  By Nicole Ferrand [...] Mr. El - Aissami is a Venezuelan national of Syrian descent who, before becoming Minster of Interior and Justice, occupied the position of Deputy Interior Minister for Public Security. His father, Carlos Aissami, is the head of the Venezuelan branch of the Iraqi Baath political party. Before the invasion of Iraq, he held a press conference in which he described himself as a Taliban and called Osama Bin Laden, "the great Mujahedeen, Sheik Osama bin Laden." Tarek's great-uncle Shibli el-Aissami was a prominent ideologist and...