Jonathan Gilliam - FBI Special Agent and Navy Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Five fifty twos at that time here in Houston's Warning News.
We'll get into the freedom for Venezuela pard here in
just a moment, But first, I'm still fascinated by the
military operation that laded Nicholas Maduro and his wife at
about one oh one in the morning on Saturday back
in August. Is when the CIA operatives went in and

(00:21):
started tracing, you know, Nicholas Maduro's comings and goings. That's
how the whole thing kind of begins. They extracted him
from a very secure compound. I my understand new there's
quite a bit of military presence there and not a
single American lost their life, if you. Special Agent Davy C.
Oal Jonathan Gilliam joins us to talk about this. I'm
always amazed by what the US military is capable of,

(00:42):
no more so than this particular case.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, I'll tell you it's We've had these two operations
that have been very, very visual for the world. The
first the Iranian bombing hit where we flew clear across
the world in ten point targeted a nuclear program and
took it out and I ran. And then now you
know this issue the program where our mission where we

(01:07):
went into a foreign country, you know, thousands of miles away,
after having all our resources deployed to Puerto Rico. And
it wasn't just one night. It was several months of
deploying logistically getting everybody in one place, then planning and
then going out at the same time and harassing by

(01:29):
doing offshore flybys to show, you know, show of power
to Venezuela. At the same time, he had the president
coordinating his most effective weapon, which is his tweets and
his comments to Maduro, and then in an instant when

(01:50):
he didn't comply, they went in and within less than
three hours he was gone and on his way to America.
I mean it was in the actual and the actual
mission itself where they dropped in started at one on one.
They were out by three.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Am, It is incredible. And when you see that the coordination,
this is why we have standard operating procedures and we
stick to those. I try to tell clients, you know
I do crisis management. I always tell them we've got
to standardize things. This is why. And when you see
it in action, you see how the fluidity kind of
goes out the door and they're just able to like
structure everything.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Well, and keeping all those quiet given this all the
secret is the key to making this work. Correct time
Congress is belly aching that Democrats, mainly in Congress, are
belly aching that they were not notified that this was
going to happen. I don't think the Trump administration trusted
ay of those Democrats to keep it quiet.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Well, you can't trust them, period, and I think they've
shown that, you know this, the ridiculousness that they've come
out with the sound bites which we expect, you just
can't trust them to keep a secret for anything militarily.
And the other part of that is, I'll be honest
with you, there's there's a fair share of conservatives that

(03:02):
should let me back up, a fair share of people
who run and got elected on the conservative ticket that
I don't trust them either to know it. And so
there's too many people that are not trustworthy in Congress,
which is very interesting because they're supposed to represent the
people and they're the least trustworthy people that there are
in the United States. I don't know how that disconnect happens,

(03:23):
but it is. You cannot give them information that is
imminent in nature and expect our troops to be safe.
That's just a fact.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
I think one of the things the President said after
this that certainly got everybody's attention is that we're going
to be in charge. We're going to be running Venezuela
until such time as we believe that we can turn
the keys over, so to speak, to whoever the next
leader is going to be. That's something that we haven't
really done with any great success before. Is this something

(03:55):
we can pull off? Now? How do we pull that off?

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Well? The big difference here, and I think this is
important for everybody too, realizes that Venezuela is not an
ideological country. They're not a religious based country like you
saw in Afghanistan or Iraq, or Syria or these different
places where we've been. Afghanistan is a really good example
because they, you know, even if they overthrew the ruling

(04:21):
power and put somebody in, which we did, we still
were not in control of the people because the people
are enslaved to their religion in Afghanistan, So they're not
going to change the way that they are, which means
that your ability to actually find some similance of peace

(04:42):
over there is going to be virtually impossible. Well, in Venezuela,
it's not like that, you know. I was down there
eleven years ago. I saw firsthand how dangerous it was,
so dangerous people can't understand really how dangerous it is.
And it was detained when they found out I was
a former FBI agent. I was down there on a
protection detail, and I was held and it got very sketchy,

(05:05):
very quickly. But I was down there for three days,
and what I saw was poverty like I've never seen
and wealth like I've never seen, but very few had
the wealth. You could walk out of a restaurant where
they are just living like they live in Beverly Hills,
and right around the corner would be two thousand people
intense living and literally two blocks away. And that went

(05:29):
on for as long as you could walk, until you
walked into a barrio that was so deadly that twenty
five murders happened a week. So that is the other problem.
But those people are not ideologically driven. They want freedom,
they want to be the way it was again, and
so I think that's a different difference, is that they're
seeking what the president has done.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Oh right, sir, And good job of explaining exactly what
socialism is. Former FBI special agent and Navy Seal Jonathan
gilliam