The White House has been ensnarled by international, legal, and moral controversy concerning the U.S.’ “double tap” against an alleged Venezuela drug boat. Despite the heated contestation and calls for his resignation, Hegseth refuses to release the video footage.
U.S. Representative Chris Himes (D-CT) joins Jen to elocute what many suspected from the start: the administration refuses to release the videos to save themselves. If the public saw how the U.S. conducted itself internationally, public sentiment would change “pretty radically, pretty quickly.” Rep. Himes also discusses the possibility of a land invasion in Venezuela, the future of the Ukraine-Russia war, and China’s growing advantage as America’s democracy shrinks.
Representative Jim Himes represents Connecticut’s 4th District in the United States House of Representatives where he is serving his ninth term. He serves as Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and on the House Financial Services Committee. Make sure to stay connected with the Congressman on his Substack here.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of the Contrarian. We are thrilled to have with us Representative Jim Himes from Connecticut. He is the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. Welcome, Congressman.
Jim Himes
Thanks for having me, Jen.
Jen Rubin
You have been, really all over this story and the developments in the Caribbean, from the very get-go. Now the administration is saying that, contrary to what the President first said, they are not going to release the video of the second hit on September 2nd. Is there any national security reason? Has the military expressed to you any reason why that can’t be released?
Jim Himes
No, they have not, and, you only have to see that Pete Hegseth, every time there’s one of these boat strikes, about 10 minutes later, I’m exaggerating, admittedly, there is a video on Twitter… to know that there is a very different reason that has nothing to do with national security or classification for not releasing this video, and I know what that reason is, because if America sees the United States Armed Forces watching two guys who are about to slip under the wave, who’ve just had a bomb go off, above their heads, who are clinging to a piece of wreckage—even if these guys are awful guys, and maybe they were, it is not what our country is all about, to do what we did to these two individuals. So the administration recognizes that if that video gets out into the wild, public sentiment on this, Caribbean boat adventure changes pretty radically, pretty quickly.
Jen Rubin
The president has also changed—maybe he never had a rationale, but the rationale for these has been all over the place. First it was fentanyl, then it was cocaine, now he’s talking about oil, as if there were a, a war for a colonial, possession? What is the rationale, and how can you conduct operations if you don’t have a fixed rationale?
Jim Himes
Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, this, this, whole, attack the boats thing has two rationales, a primary and a secondary. The primary rationale is to look like you are doing something aggressive against the drug and overdose problem, which is very real in this country. You know, in the neighborhood of 90,000 Americans die of overdoses—mostly fentanyl, by the way. you know, Americans die at almost twice the rate of fentanyl overdoses as they do cocaine, and be, you know, one of the many things that needs to be considered. And by the way, debated by the United States Congress, is that we’re taking these lethal strikes against cocaine exclusively.
But there’s two rationales. Number one is to be performatively satisfying, like, look, I’m blowing stuff up. Anyone who’s ever worked in counter-narcotics, anyone who’s understood the history of human smuggling for roughly the last 4,000 years, knows that when you close off one venue to smuggling, others open up. It’s not like they don’t have air route alternatives for cocaine or overland alternatives. So we’re doing this massive, controversial thing for performative reasons. That’s rationale number one.
Rationale number two is sort of a nice side benefit. The administration believes that somehow these boat strikes are putting pressure on the Maduro government. The administration would have you believe that sending cocaine north is the reason, for existing for the Maduro government. Look, there’s no doubt that inside the deeply corrupt Maduro government, there are people who are profiting from this drug, business. But they sort of regard this as pressure on Maduro, and you add in the seizing of oil vessels, which, by the way, is a legal thing to do, unlike the attacks on the small boats. And there’s this theory, inside the White House, which is, we’re not gonna invade Venezuela. Marco Rubio’s sophisticated enough to know that that involves real risk, but if we just put enough pressure on this regime, it’ll collapse. And we’ll have a democracy, and the oil will be up for grabs, which, by the way, you and I are both old enough to remember the thinking that went into the Iraq War. You know, we’ll break this thing, it’ll be a democracy, and won’t that be wonderful?
Jen Rubin
Wow. One of the other facts that’s come to light is that we’re very capable of intercepting boats that are smuggling drugs, and we just intercepted a Venezuela tanker that had oil in it. What is their explanation for why we have to blow this stuff up, rather than simply interdict, which the Coast Guard does hundreds, maybe thousands of times a year?
Jim Himes
Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I’ll give you exactly the explanation that the administration gives me, which is that, that interdiction doesn’t deter the behavior. Now, interdiction has some pluses to it, right? If you interdict a boat, you get to interrogate the people on it, you find out who the bosses are, you find out the transshipment routes, you get to look at the cargo, you get to confiscate cell phones, you get lots of really good stuff when you interdict. But the administration is not wrong when they say that’s not a deterrent. So, as it turns out, no surprise, when you kill 100 people in small boats in the Caribbean, it becomes a great deal more expensive for the cartels to actually get people to put cocaine on boats in the Caribbean.
However, and this is the footnote which eats the paragraph, as long as there’s a demand in the United States—back to what I said, about 4,000 years of human smuggling—it’s a lot less expensive now, relatively speaking, to get people to carry this overland across the Darien Gap in Panama, or to put it into airplanes. So, you know, look, if what you’re trying to do is to stop boats. It’s been effective in that regard. But if your objective is in some way to either even stop cocaine…by the way, that’s not what they say their objective are. Their objective is to dismantle the narco-terrorist networks. I mean, they’re not getting close to that. They’re not even gonna stop the flow of cocaine, because there are plenty of alternatives that today are a lot less lethal than small boats that will allow cocaine to come into this country, just the way liquor came into this country during Prohibition.
Jen Rubin
Will we come to see this so-called legal justification from the OLC, or the execute order, or any of these critical documents that might have some more explanation for their legal rationale for this?
Jim Himes
Yeah, and I mean, to give the administration credit, they—which I’m willing to do in about 3% of the subject matter here—but they did share, pretty aggressively the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel and the Department of Justice on why they think that this is, A) a just war, or a legal war, and also B) why it’s not a war. Because, of course, if it were a war, it would need to be declared and authorized by the Congress of the United States. And there’s a whole array of issues that you and I could spend two hours talking about associated with this, right?
We’ve got a meaningful percentage of the United States Navy occupied in the Caribbean right now. We are using all kinds of airplanes and ordnance and intelligence assets. I mean, this is, by any measure a war, but it’s a special kind of war, because it doesn’t need to be briefed or approved by the United States Congress. And wherever you come out on this issue, that ought to give you pause, right? We don’t do well in this country, and we’re certainly not being true to the Constitution when we decide that—Founding Fathers notwithstanding—the president should be able to unleash the most fearsome military force in human history just because he feels like it.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Now, your Republican colleagues, at least a few of them, have found some spine on issues like the ACA subsidies. Why are they so deferential to the president, spineless, if you prefer, on the War Powers Act. Congress does have a role to play here. Do they want to be accessories to an Iraq war in our own hemisphere?
Jim Himes
You know, I spent all day yesterday asking that question, because we debated two war powers resolutions, and I gotta tell you, it was just stunning to watch this, because we were making the case that…read the Constitution, guys! And to be fair, to be fair, over the generations, the legislature has argued with the executive, and it’s not a partisan thing, right? Obama and Clinton both undertook military activities that, had I been in office, I would have opposed. Now, by the way, I did oppose when Obama wanted to attack Syria. So it’s not a partisan thing, it is a, you know, do you believe in our constitutional prerogatives?
And we kept saying that, guys, what’s up here? This is your power under the Constitution. They said, but drugs are bad, but drugs are bad, but drugs are bad! That was the argument, you know, just… And look, there’s two things going on with them right now. Number one, 90% of them just are awaiting marching orders by Donald Trump, and if Donald Trump tells them to, you know, paint themselves purple and show up to work with a, you know, balloon around their neck instead of a tie, they will do that. There is 10%, as you point out, I mean, in the NDAA, we got good stuff to support troop numbers in Europe for NATO, Baltic initiatives, so every once in a while, you see just a little crinkling of, of traditional Republican thinking. But mainly what’s going on here is that they’re just consumed in the bloodlust of killing… of killing bad guys. You know, this is sort of the Arnold Schwarzenegger school of foreign policy. It’s just so emotionally satisfying to watch the bad guys go up in a big puff of smoke.
Jen Rubin
We see, you know, over and over again that our senior military ranks, do understand the Constitution, they do understand their oath. How is it that Admiral Bradley, in your view, has gone along with all of this, and in particular, that second tap?
Jim Himes
That’s a super interesting question. It’s probably the question I’ve noodled on the hardest, because I had an opportunity to talk to Admiral Bradley, and a dozen people I know who know Admiral Bradley well, to a person said, this is a good man and an exemplary officer. And I watched the tape of the killing of those two individuals, clinging to wreckage, and I just couldn’t reconcile, how does this good man, this exemplary officer, give that order? And I think the answer is, that there is a great deal of concern over this in the Pentagon.
I can’t tell you for sure that Southcom Commander Admiral Holsey quit one year into a three-year stint, because of this, but I’d be willing to bet you a chunk of my next paycheck that that was why he abandoned… you know, I shouldn’t say abandoned his post, stepped away from his post. And I just think that Admiral Bradley, who by all accounts is an exemplary officer, he lives in a context of Pete Hegseth, who literally wrote a book about how we shouldn’t have lawyers, what did he call them? Jagoffs, you know, who oozes contempt for the law, who of course reports to a president who oozes contempt for the law. And so it’s one of those, I mean, this is a Greek tragedy kind of moment, when a good man lives in a context where he ends up doing, you know, a tragic mistake, in my opinion. Again, the book will be written on this eventually, and it’ll be a fascinating thing for that reason.
Jen Rubin
Do you see, a risk that there will be direct hits on the Venezuelan homeland, or, God forbid, deployment of land troops, or does the administration understand that’s a hot stove even too hot for them?
Jim Himes
Yeah, I’ve been swimming against the current on this one for four weeks now, and I’m gonna keep doing that. I do not believe that the administration is going to do an invasion of Venezuela. And the reason I don’t believe that is twofold. Number one, Donald Trump ran as the president who’s not getting us into any more wars. And, you know, that means something to his base. And number two is the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who I’ve spent a fair amount of time with. I think Rubio would absolutely love, as would the whole administration, to see Maduro go down. But Rubio is sophisticated enough to know that a land war invasion to effect regime change in Latin America, A) would have horrible implications. Instantly, you’ve lost the Argentines and the Brazilians and the Chileans and everybody else, who are like, hey, we’re not going back to 1890, to gumbo diplomacy.
And, by the way, it’s just unpredictable. I mean, look, we would crush Venezuela in the blink of an eye, but would we lose people? Probably. You know, and how is the administration going to explain that? And secondarily. Turns out, Iraq, Afghanistan, I could go on, when you do regime change, you don’t get to predict the outcome, and… Chaos in Caracas, right? The largest oil reserves on the planet, right next to Colombia, which is sort of teetering with a refugee problem already, that it could go south in a very, very big way. So, no, my opinion today is that, there’s not a plan. But of course, sometimes the plans escape you, right? I mean, if we start… Yes, the Venezuelan Navy right now is escorting, ships carrying petroleum outside of Venezuela. What happens? You know, when we get into a shooting, you know, when two frigates, a U.S. frigate and a Venezuelan frigate exchange fires? I know how that ends, by the way, but all of a sudden, we’re at war. And so these things… these things don’t necessarily lend themselves to deliberate decision-making.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Take a step back. The administration released a document not too long ago that was sort of jaw-dropping, and that was the national security strategy. What was your view of that, and did that give you any further insight into what their mentality is?
Jim Himes
You know, if you want to summarize that national security strategy document, in one phrase, it’s, Europe is terrible, and the Russians are kind of cool. And man, wouldn’t it be cool to get closer to the Russians? I mean, where did this come from, right? And I mean, the good news is that there is a bipartisan discussion with what was in that document. The other good news, I guess, is even though it’s a presidential national security document, it doesn’t actually mean all that much, thank God. But what worries me here is, you know, imagine… look, we can criticize Europe. It bothers me that the United Kingdom doesn’t do enough to protect the rights to free speech of its people. We got all kinds of complaints. We won’t even start on the French, right? I mean, but the point is that these are our best friends.
And globally speaking, we are in a conflict slash competition with a massive rising power. China. And China has the technology that we do, they’ve got the military capability that we… not quite, but close. You know what they don’t have? They don’t have allies. And so, as annoying as the Europeans may be from time to time, to just gratuitously poke your finger in their eye is to just devastate your own standing.
Jen Rubin
Without using any, classified information, obviously. We have dismantled USAID. We’ve started trade wars with our allies. We are up to this scheme, whatever it is. We have shut down green energy and electric vehicle production and innovation. Is China better off today than they were a year ago?
Jim Himes
Well, let’s do a thought experiment. What if you’re Xi in Beijing two years ago? And you say, come up with your wildest dreams. Like, how could we most weaken the United States of America? The first thing you would do, you would say, the enduring American advantage, enduring, is their technological innovation. So, if Xi has had a couple of gin and tonics, and is like, here’s what we do. We attack the great global research universities that are in the United States. We go after Harvard, we go after Stanford, we attack them. We cut the funding for the basic research that develops AI and quantum computing and biotechnology. And then we go after the immigrants, because, again, this is Xi on his third gin and tonic, and he says, look at that! All of the technology companies in the United States, and half of the Nobel Prizes are immigrants. So we attack the immigration. We make sure that the Indians and the Chinese and the Koreans, the best of the best, don’t want to go to the United States. I mean, again, I’m being a little histrionic here, aren’t I? But…
Jen Rubin
It’s not so far off, absolutely!
Jim Himes
And then you say, what are the real core strengths of the American economy? It’s a free market system. Let’s get the president to demand equity stakes in all sorts of critical American companies. By the way, let’s bring back lots of tariffs, right? Let’s make things much more expensive for the American people, and let’s do this. Let’s break all of our trade agreements and alliances so that Europe and Asia don’t trust the United States beyond one presidential term ever again. You see what I’m doing here? Like, if Xi had told his people to develop that plan, his people would have said, sir, I’m sorry, that’s just… that’s just so far beyond the realm of the possible. And President Trump has just done it for him.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. As we sit here today, Ukraine is hanging on. Whatever dreams of a Trump peace, doesn’t really, seem, possible between Mr. Witkoff and, Mr. Rubio and the Europeans, thank God, running some interference. How does this… proceed. Obviously. we’re not giving Ukraine everything we could. There are news reports, I won’t ask you to comment, that we’ve ceased, intelligent sharing. Can they hang on for a few years? Is this just a slow bleed of Ukraine?
Jim Himes
Yeah, yeah. You know, I’ve been pretty tough on the Trump administration in our chat, Jen. I’ll be bipartisan here in my condemnation of what we’ve done in Ukraine. You know, starting two years ago, two-plus years ago, the United States government has always given Ukraine the support required to lose slowly.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Jim Himes
You know, and the Biden administration, in those first few weeks of the Biden administration had come out strong and said, this will not stand, put your troops back across the border, you know, or we will make sure that you have a million casualties, which, by the way, is their number now. That was the moment to turn this back. So today, the reality on the ground is. a best-case realistic outcome is a ceasefire along the current lines of control, and no, Mr. Trump, we’re not going to ask Ukraine to give up territory that Russia hasn’t even been able to conquer.
So today, I think the best you can hope for is a ceasefire, security guarantees that are real, because underlying this whole conversation is the fact that even though he’s probably had a quarter of a million people killed, I mean, think about that, right? That’s five times the number of people we lost in Vietnam. He’s had 250,000 people killed and another 750,000, casualties. He’s happy to keep going. And he is not interested in Ukraine’s existence. So that creates, A) a problem to getting to a peace agreement. It’s not Ukraine’s fault here. Putin’s not interested in this. And B) even if he agrees to a ceasefire, which maybe he does, it’s just the end of chapter 1 of a book. He’s not stopping.
Jen Rubin
Exactly.
Jim Himes
And again, shame on us. Look, I think the Trump administration has handled this horribly, but, you know, the Biden administration gave up the opportunity to actually have a victory here.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, absolutely, and, they delayed various arms shipments, and they said, fine, you can do it, and it was really, for bizarre reasons, some kind of self-imposed restraint that, did not inure to the benefit of Europe or to Ukraine.
In our remaining few minutes, let me switch to domestic policy. There is nominally a Speaker of the House named Mike Johnson. However, the Speaker of the House, at least when Nancy Pelosi was in charge. actually controlled the majority. That seems to be breaking down, and you folks are going to get a vote on the extension of the ACA credits. What is going on on the other side, and do you think next year you’re gonna… bizarrely have more opportunities. By the way, a discharge petition was not anything people came to rely on for decades, actually, until this group came along. So where are we, both on the ACA and potentials for luring some of these nervous congressmen who might want to keep their seats, to join with Democrats?
Jim Himes
Yeah, I mean, it’s a really remarkable thing. You know, Mike Johnson is a very small and vulnerable creature here, even though he’s third in the line of presidential succession. He’s completely lost control of his caucus, you know, as you point out, it gets boring for people outside the Beltway, but there’s all these things that never, ever, ever hap- certainly never happened under Nancy Pelosi, like a rule failing. Never, never, it never happened under Nancy Pelosi, or a discharge petition, all these things. It’s become routine for the Republicans to use those tools against their own speaker. I mean, I’ll just quote the famous Nancy Mace, because just yesterday she gave a quote which was, I think, very telling, which is that we’re going to get crushed in the midterms unless our speaker becomes, I love this image, Nancy Pelosi on steroids.
Now, you don’t want to think too much about Nancy Pelosi on steroids, but you get her point there, right? Pelosi just kept very narrow majorities absolutely in line, and she also understood something that I think Mike Johnson didn’t. This is… this is maybe not as broadly known as it should be about Nancy Pelosi, but she protected her marginal members. She would go to war for her marginal members. And that’s hard to say politically, because her marginal members were in conservative places, where they wanted to vote against the caucus, but Nancy Pelosi understood that without your marginal members, you’re in the minority, and you might as well be a club med, because you’re not doing anything in the minority.
Mike Johnson takes the opposite approach, which is that he kowtows to his most extreme right. So, Chip Roy gets to control the floor, or, you know, MAGA darling of the day. And the problem with that, of course, is that everybody else in the Republican conference realizes that that is a recipe to be in the minority. And so you’ve got the vulnerable Republicans who are going out of their minds. Because they just have to eat this garbage every single day, because Mike won’t protect them. And so, the net result… I can’t tell you, I’ve never felt this quite this much in my decade and a half here. They just despise each other. I mean, we’re an afterthought. We sort of annoy them, but they just despise each other. And the amount of venom that is circulating in the Republican majority right now is just overwhelming. I mean, you sit on the floor, and you sort of have to, you know. Create a shadow so that you don’t get a sunburn.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Last question for you. I don’t know what that thing was last night. It didn’t seem like much of a presidential speech. It seemed like, if Jimmy Carter had given the malaise speech, but was on meth, and screaming at us, maybe that would be the closest analogy. Republicans want to be seen with this guy? Do they realize at some level that he is, in fact, the root of this problem, and Mike Johnson wouldn’t be doing these horrible things unless he was scared to death of Donald Trump?
Jim Himes
You know, look, it’s why it’s so venomous over there. It’s so venomous over there because there’s two imperatives if you’re a Republican member of Congress. If you want to survive a primary fight, you’ve got to embrace the president. You just gotta be loyal, loyal, loyal. I mean, ask Elise Stefanik. You’ve got to be loyal, loyal, loyal, and don’t for one second expect that that loyalty runs two ways.
If you want to win a Republican primary your loyalty card needs to be platinum. If you want to win a general election, that’s a huge liability, right? I mean, we’ve seen this in the blue state of Connecticut, right? We’ve seen, repeatedly, in the blue state of Connecticut. Republican senatorial candidates get nominated who are MAGA through and through, who just got their doors blown off in the general. So, that’s a vice. I mean, you know, if I didn’t believe that it couldn’t be happening to a nicer group of people, I would have some level of sympathy for the brutal vice that they’re stuck in.
Jen Rubin
Well, Congressman, thank you for all you’ve done. Between you and Representative Adam Smith, you’ve done Yeoman’s work in bringing to light, this very, very unconstitutional, dangerous, immoral, and I will use that word, whatever it is we’re doing, policy in the Caribbean. So, thank you for all of that, thank you for joining us, and we will look forward to seeing you in the new year. So, happy holidays, happy new year.
Jim Himes
Wonderful, thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
