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In an appearance on New York’s WABC radio on Friday, President Donald J. Trump told billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis and co-host Rita Cosby: “We just knocked out—I don’t know if you read or you saw—they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.”

Officials said Trump was referring to a drug facility in Venezuela. But as Tyler Pager and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had no comment, and military officials said they had no information to share. Pager and Barnes added: “U.S. officials declined to specify anything about the site the president said was hit, where it was located, how the attack was carried out or what role the facility played in drug trafficking. There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government or any other authorities in the region.”

The reporters also noted that Venezuela is not a major producer of narcotics. It primarily traffics cocaine from Colombia. Meanwhile, Max Bearak, Simón Posada, and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times reported today that in the wreckage left behind by one of the U.S. strikes on what the administration calls “narco-terrorists” were bodies, charred fuel containers, life jackets, and packets, most of which were empty, although a few had “traces of a substance that looked and smelled like marijuana.”

At Mar-a-Lago today, Trump said: “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs. They load up the boats with drugs. So we hit all the boats and now we hit the area, it’s the implementation area. That’s where they implement. And that is no longer around.” Trump declined to say who was responsible for the operation. “I know exactly who it was, but I don’t want to say who it was,” he said. “But you know it was along the shore.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who usually posts video of military strikes on social media, posted nothing about the strike Trump mentioned, although at 4:01 this afternoon, U.S. Southern Command posted that it had struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, killing another two men. The new strike means that the U.S. military has killed more than 100 individuals in an operation widely condemned as illegal.

Tonight, Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Jim Sciutto of CNN reported that earlier this month, the CIA struck a remote Venezuelan port facility with drones, the first known U.S. attack on targets inside Venezuela. The U.S. says the Tren de Aragua gang was using the dock to store drugs and then to move them onto boats for reshipment. No one was at the facility when it was hit.

Sources told the CNN journalists that U.S. Special Operations Forces provided intelligence for the operation, but a spokesperson for U.S. Special Operations Command denied that allegation. The CIA declined to comment.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “It’s a good commentary on 2025 that the US President announces a major military attack on a foreign country and even the straightest arrows think, 50% chance it’s an attack, 50% chance president is on another cognition bender.”

Saturday morning, the day before Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was scheduled to meet with Trump for talks on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. The missile and drone strikes damaged more than ten residential buildings, killed at least one person who burned to death, and wounded 27 more, including two children.

When Zelensky arrived in Miami for his trip to Mar-a-Lago, there were no U.S. officials on hand to greet the plane. This was a deliberate snub, especially when compared to the literal red carpet Trump had U.S. military personnel roll out for Putin when he arrived on U.S. soil in August, followed by Trump greeting him while clapping, a military flyover, and a ride with Trump in the presidential limousine.

Trump’s preference for Putin was evident yesterday, too, when he posted on social media: “I just had a good and very productive telephone call with President Putin of Russia prior to my meeting, at 1:00 P.M. today, with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine.” He later told reporters that he and Putin talked for more than two hours.

At the meeting itself, Trump later told reporters, the negotiating teams “covered—somebody would say 95 percent, I don’t know what percent—but we have made a lot of progress on ending that war.” He once again referred to his fictional claims of being a peacemaker, adding: “I’ve settled eight wars, and this is the most difficult one.”

But, as Luke Harding of The Guardian noted, there is no sign that Putin is backing off from his extreme demands, including that Ukraine must give Russia much of its eastern territory. Trump’s negotiators suggest that such a concession would satisfy Putin, but skeptics doubt it. As White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Chris Whipple in August in an interview for Vanity Fair, “The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy.” But, she said: “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country.”

Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has lasted almost four years and, as Russian troops have routinely attacked civilian areas and civilian infrastructure, the damage to the country has been extreme. After meeting with Zelensky, Trump answered a reporter who asked whether Trump had spoken to Putin about the reconstruction of Ukraine: “I did. I did. They’re going to be helping. Russia’s going to be helping. Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed. Once—it sounds a little strange but I was explaining to the president, President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity, and other things at very low prices. So a lot of good things came out of that call today.”

Quite literally, Russia invaded Ukraine and continues to smash it. As former Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted on social media: “With all this talk of how to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, and a cease fire, keep this in mind: If Ukraine ceases firing, Ukraine will cease to exist. If Russia ceases firing, the war will cease to exist.”

In his comments to reporters, one passage perhaps shed more light on events than Trump intended. Defending the idea that Putin, who is bombing Ukraine in an unprovoked assault, wants peace, Trump said: “I saw a very interesting President Putin today. I mean, he—he wants to see it happen, he wants to see it. He told me, very strongly. I believe him. Don’t forget, we went through the Russia Russia Russia hoax together. And he’d call me, I’d call him, I’d say, ‘Can you believe the stuff that they’re making up?’ And it turned out we were right. They made it all up, and despite that, we didn’t get into wars, or we didn’t get into problems, but we weren’t able to trade very much or any of that, which was a shame, because, you know, a lot of success could have been had by trading with Russia. They have great land, great minerals and other things, and we have things that they want very badly, but the Russia Russia Russia hoax, which was a terrible made-up fictional thing by crooked Hillary and by Adam Shifty Schiff and bad people, sick people. They made it up. It was all a made up hoax.”

But, of course, the idea that Russian operatives worked to put Trump into the White House in 2016 wasn’t a hoax.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by a Republican, unanimously concluded that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence…the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” Further, Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort’s close relationship with “Russia-aligned oligarchs in Ukraine” meant that his “proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services…represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

In 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would not consider lifting the sanctions placed on Russia after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea. Although Republicans at the time supported those sanctions, it was not clear that Trump was as firm. Lifting sanctions was part of the story of Russian support for Trump in 2016.

The Senate committee and Special Counsel Robert Mueller put more of the story together, explaining that in summer 2016, Manafort and Russian operatives “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.” The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”

“All that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process,” wrote a Russian operative. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.

Trump has continued to pressure Zelensky into accepting that plan, so far without success. But Trump’s statement to reporters also suggests that with Russia’s economy crumpling under the weight of four years of war, Putin is desperate to grab Ukraine’s industrial regions and get rid of the sanctions under which his country has staggered since 2014 and especially since his second invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In late November, Russia began to sell its gold reserves in order to fund its budget.

Trump told reporters he had had another “very good talk” with Putin this morning, after his Sunday meeting with Zelensky.

Whether because of Trump’s or Putin’s weakening position—or both—both Trump and Putin appear to be eager to close the deal.

—

Notes:

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5665290-trump-venezuela-facility-attack/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/us/politics/trump-drug-facility-venezuela.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/world/americas/trump-boat-strikes-gulf-of-venezuela-wreckage.html

https://www.defensenews.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12/29/trump-says-us-hit-facility-where-alleged-drug-boats-load-up/

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/29/politics/venezuela-big-facility-trump

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/29/politics/cia-drone-strike-venezuela

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russia-launches-massive-strike-on-kyiv-killing-1-and-wounding-many-ahead-of-ukraine-u-s-talks

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/28/trump-zelenskyy-talks-amid-heavy-russian-airstrikes-on-ukraine

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/15/putin-trump-alaska-ukraine-00512232

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5664993-trump-zelensky-mar-a-lago-meeting/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/us/politics/trump-zelensky-peace-ukraine-putin.html

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-susie-wiles-interview-exclusive-part-2

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-documents-report-volume5.pdf (v–vii; 99).

https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl (pp. 139–140)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5665540-trump-putin-talk-thorny-issues/

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Yet Again Big Banks Are Short of Cash. Signs of Another Historic Bailout and Recession to Come?

Ominous signs that at least one of America’s “Too Big to Fail” banks is yet again seriously short of cash emerged this weekend in documents examined by James Henry, DCReport’s economics correspondent.

For the past two months the Federal Reserve has been silently injecting tens of billions of dollars of cash into banks. No one announced this. Henry found the evidence in public records that few, if any, Wall Street journalists consult, but that we routinely review at DCReport.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (NYFed), acting like a financial Santa Claus to recklessly naughty bankers, delivered $17 billion in cash to an unknown bank or banks at 8 AM the morning after Christmas.

That’s just the latest scary development that has gone unreported until now.

The sudden spate of cash shortfalls raises serious concerns about the stability of the largest banks and the utter failure of 21^st Century regulators to identify problems and protect the public.

The sudden demands for cash to cover shortfalls began on Halloween. That day the NYFed injected more than $50 Billion into one or more unnamed banks. Since then, it has injected tens of billions into banks 14 times, delivering greenbacks galore roughly every third business day.

Contrast this with the five years beginning in July 2020. Virtually no such cash infusions were made during that time, as the graphic below from the NYFed website shows.

New York Federal Reserve Cash Infusions to Banks since mid-July 2020.

While the NYFed doesn’t identify which banks benefitted, other records Henry found indicate that major beneficiaries are Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, HSBC, UBS, and likely of greatest concern the nation’s largest bank holding company, JP Morgan Chase & Co.

There’s more. Cash infusions are likely to grow enormously—and soon.

In a vaguely worded NYFed policy change on Dec. 10—which not one of the major financial news organizations has reported—the Fed flung its vaults wide open to troubled banks. The only reason the NYFed would do this is because it has good reason to expect that cash infusion demands are about to balloon.

Unlimited Cash

“Going forward, standing overnight repo operations will no longer have an aggregate operational limit,” the NYFed said.

The vaguely worded announcement seems to tell bankers that they can get up to $240 Billion in cash each day to cover shortfalls. Even if read narrowly, the policy would allow cash infusions twice per day, so up to $80 billion per bank on any one day with no overall banking industry limit.

To give you an idea of how much money is involved consider this: together the six biggest banks earned $152 billion in profits last year, less than any two of them could get in cash on a single day by a narrow reading of the new policy.

To get the cash, banks hand over Treasury notes and bonds, mortgages, and other securities, known as a “repo.” Then they get to borrow cash at face value.

The banks also pay super-low interest rates, noted Bill Black, who as a banking regulator uncovered the savings and loan scandals three decades ago that resulted in almost 900 high-level bankers going to prison. And, Black notes, should their corporate parents seek refuge in bankruptcy courts the normal rules don’t apply, another little-known government favor for misbehaving bankers.

Recurring Problem

“This comes up about every five years,” Black said of banks turning to the Fed for cash. Indeed, other Fed records we examined basically confirm this pattern.

But why? Henry and Black both argue, reasonably, that banking regulators aren’t doing their job. Previously Black showed that the much ballyhooed “stress tests” for banks are designed to ensure that no bank fails. Henry has shown that big banks flout rules and even court orders that conditioned forgiveness for past misconduct on no repeats.

American banking has what I call the appearance of regulation, an issue I explored in my 1992 casino industry expose´ Temples of Chance.

Both Henry and Black should be hailed as a national heroes for looking out for the public’s wallets. Instead, Black is persona non grata on Capitol Hill and at banking regulatory functions while I’ve dealt with public officials and academics who snarl at the mention of Henry’s decades of work without citing any flaw.

Inside Job

Black later developed a whole new field of criminology and wrote a fascinating book about what he uncovered: The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.

During the Great Recession of 2008-10, JPMorgan got billions in bailout money. The bank says federal rules forced it to take the money.

Should America face a new Wall Street debacle, JP Morgan would likely get all the help it wants, perhaps even by forcing it to accept cash infusions.

Demonstrators march through downtown Chicago Dec. 10, 2008, during the last major bank bailout. Photo: AP/Gerald Herbert

Tons of Silver

JPMorgan Chase & Co. , the bank’s parent, is of particular concern because in mandatory disclosures, that few journalists examine but our Jim Henry did, the company revealed it is on the hook to deliver more than 5,900 tons of silver it doesn’t have. Tradeable silver is relatively scarce right now, government data shows.

The bank sold contracts for silver it didn’t own, expecting the price would fall. Then it planned to buy the contracts back for less, making a profit by selling high and buying low. This risky practice is known as “short selling.”

Buying stocks or other assets and holding them in the hope the price will rise is called “going long,” which is what most investors do because its less risky.

JP Morgan got caught in a squeeze because the spot price of silver has nearly tripled since Donald Trump took office, creating an exposure that I calculate at up to $13.7 billion, roughly equal to the profits JP Morgan earns every 90 days, though likely just a costly fraction of that.

Silver Squeeze

A big problem is that there’s not enough actual silver available for trading to get JP Morgan out of the squeeze it got into through unbridled greed. The more silver prices rise the more JP Morgan gets hurt.

Compounding this, Samsung has developed a powerful battery for electric vehicles that can go a thousand miles and recharge in under ten minutes. It requires roughly a kilo of silver for each car or truck. And while EV sales are falling in America, they are soaring in China, the world’s largest car market, and other places. About 90% of new cars sold in Norway are electric.

A smaller problem arises from the Trump administration, which on Christmas Day alone lobbed at least a dozen Tomahawk missiles at supposed Muslim extremists in Nigeria. Each Tomahawk used about 500 ounces of silver, currently priced at about $80 per ounce or $40,000 per missile.

DCReport emailed and texted five JPMorgan spokespeople on Sunday afternoon but has not heard back. That’s what we experienced in the past, but if the bank gets in touch we will promptly give you a full report on their stance.

Bad Bets

JP Morgan has a well-documented history of making wildly bad speculative bets, including a 2012 deal that ballooned into a loss of $6 Billion or so, a disaster it initially passed off to leading financial journalists as a minor matter.

The bank claimed that a hedge that was meant to reduce risk had “morphed” into a speculative and unauthorized bet by a London office trader, who was cashiered.

The reality, as I reported at the time, is that a hedge—a complex legal contract—can no more “morph” into a speculative bet than my marriage can morph into a dog. But go-along-to-get-along Wall Street journalists faithfully repeated the bank’s nonsense.

Deep concerns

The sudden spate of cash shortfalls raises serious concerns about the stability of the largest banks and the utter failure of 21^st Century regulators to identify problems and protect the public.

Will Wall Street soon seek another huge bailout of the kind that the George W. Bush administration forced on the public in its final months? Congressional leaders from both parties insisted in 2008 and 2009 that such a debacle would never again be allowed or become necessary. Do you believe that?

If you think there’s little to no chance that the Trump Administration will give Wall Street whatever it wants, keep in mind that Donald Trump just blew nearly $40 billion dollars of your money bailing out Argentina.

There’s an obvious question raised by the sudden need for serial and now unlimited cash infusions now: are we facing a repeat of the economic collapse of 2008, which by some measures caused deeper and more lasting harm than the Great Depression?

Huge Cost

The Great Recession cost America the value of two years of economic output, known as Gross Domestic Product, according to Prof. Alexander J, Field of Santa Clara University’s business school. His estimate fits my own back-of-the-envelope calculations back then when I was one of the few journalists critical of the bailout terms.

Ponder Prof. Field’s assessment for a moment – two years of all the economic activity of economic everyone in America down the drain, tens of millions of people wiped out financially with many yet to recoup, while instead of being prosecuted, or at least fired, the top bankers remain in power, their gigantic pay packages growing larger each year.

Henry calls these cash infusions “bankster socialism.” Henry is referring to the de facto policy of letting banks reap outsized profits when their speculative bets win big and shoving the losses onto the rest of us when they sour.

I agree. So long as shareholders aren’t at risk of being wiped out, top bank executives will keep engaging in financially dangerous behavior, aided by dubious accounting, and so called “stress tests” that were designed to ensure that the banks would pass no matter how shaky their financial condition. The winning bets, and Fed bailouts, increase the value of executive and board stock and stock options, the losses cost them noting.

Moral Bankers?

In a heads-we-win, tails-the-public picks up the losses, who but that rarest of rarities, a deeply moral banker, would do otherwise?

Henry views the recent cash infusions as eerily reminiscent of the NYFed bail-out of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein’s strange offshore firm Liquid Capital Funding 17 years ago. When Epstein’s capital evaporated, the New York Federal Reserve Bank stepped in with cash. Epstein’s firm failed anyway.

But why did NYFed intrude into a routine business failure? After all, capitalism is based in good part on the idea that businesses fail while better managed operations prosper. And why try to save an offshore firm?

Henry, a Yale University Global Justice Fellow who has spent decades exposing illicit financial transactions, notes that Bear Stearns, a venerable Wall Street investment house, owned 40% of the illiquid Liquid Funding. JP Morgan was also involved in the firm, which was partly a criminal tax dodge. Bear Stearns soon collapsed, costing many investors the bulk of their fortunes, as did the collapse of Lehman Brothers. In both cases rampant speculation, weak internal financial controls, and see-no-evil regulators bear the blame.

Let’s hope Wall Street journalists, and politicians, get onto this story now that DCReport has broken it. But don’t hold your breath.

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The post Big Banks Enjoy Stealth Bailouts – A DCReport Exclusive appeared first on DCReport.org.

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Appendix: JUnit Max

Yet Again Big Banks Are Short of Cash. Signs of Another Historic Bailout and Recession to Come?

Unlimited Cash

Recurring Problem

Inside Job

Tons of Silver

Silver Squeeze

Bad Bets

Deep concerns

Huge Cost

Moral Bankers?

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