Rick Grinnell
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Rick Grinnell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, first of all, I have to say I'm still really emotional about what happened Friday. It was probably the highlight of my career to be able to represent America, to represent the president, and to watch what was happening in real time, to negotiate. Not only did we get the hostages back without paying a penny and without trading any hostages, which is really important.
But we also got the Venezuelan government to bring their planes to the United States to take illegal immigrants in our country from Venezuela back to Venezuela. They are sending the planes, and they are paying for it. I think this is the new standard. It's pretty amazing. But the negotiations were obviously very secret. I left Friday morning super early.
I went on an Air Force plane, had Air Force protection. The Air Force is amazing. They've got young people who just are totally committed and working in secret and working around the clock. We flew out of Washington, D.C. We landed in Caracas and made our way into the presidential palace. There hadn't been a White House official there in Caracas in a very long time.
And I started negotiating with the Maduro team and then eventually with Nicolas Maduro. And it was pretty... amazing to be there and to negotiate on behalf of the U.S. But we had a clear mandate from President Trump. He knew he knew what he wanted. We knew what the parameters were and the pressure was on to deliver.
first of all, to get the illegal immigrants in our country back to Venezuela. And they needed to accept all of these individuals, including the awful group, the Tren de Aragua. And we needed to make them realize that they had to take them back. And we went for everything by saying, you need to provide the planes. You need to pay for it. You need to come get them.
And there are, you know, hundreds of thousands. And so there's going to be a big group going back to Caracas. And then the president wanted us to focus on the hostages. You know, there are 12 hostages Americans, at least. We may have found a couple of more while we were there that are, in essence, hostages. They're held on really lame charges. But we had a conversation about the individuals.
It's the Venezuelans government position. It's Nicolas Maduro's position. that some of these individuals were arrested because of terrorism charges or individuals that were trying to kill the president of Venezuela or the vice president.
And what I said to Nicolas Maduro very clearly, I said, look, if you've got evidence that individuals were trying to kill you or the vice president, those are serious issues. We should absolutely prosecute those individuals. We are with you on that. We agree on that. However, we need to share information because our information doesn't say that.
Our information says that some of these individuals were simply working in the military, a former Navy SEAL who didn't do anything wrong, but you're reading their background and pretending like they were there and sent there by the US government. We in the U.S.
understand that there are millions of people who served in the military and who then leave the military and proudly carry their military experience with them as they go into life, whether they're vacationing in Colombia and going over the border accidentally into Venezuela, or meeting a woman that they were interested in for the weekend in Venezuela.
These are all innocent human issues, and it's our job to explain that. So some of these individuals, it's going to take some time, but we are very focused on making the case and sharing the information to be able to get the others out But we did have six. We were able to successfully argue that these six were absolutely innocent. They're not political in nature and they deserve to come home.
And we were able to picture. Yeah, it was pretty amazing.
Some of them were young, although the guy in the middle was young.
I have to tell one story, Megan, that I haven't told anybody this publicly, and it's pretty remarkable. You'll see if you pull up that picture that four of them are in kind of their prison blue uniforms and two are in regular uniform. And what happened was we negotiated for six and the four in blue actually had said when we got on the plane, so they said, where are the other two?
We were released into this room and we had the other two guys with us and they asked us to shave and to get ready, get cleaned up. And two of the individuals said, we're not doing this again. We've done this four or five times. This is fake. We're not doing this again. And they refused to follow the rules and get cleaned up.
The other four did, and what ended up happening over time that we only learned later was that the Venezuelan government found two other Americans to replace them. They didn't have time to get everything together, so they were in their plain clothes, and that's why there are two others not in blue.
It's heartbreaking to think that there were two individuals that could have been released, but they thought that once again, this was just a head fake from the Venezuelan government. And so they refused to play the game, not knowing, not realizing that this was for real.
Yeah, there's at least six. We think we found another two because we interviewed these individuals. As you can imagine, if you're in prison, one of the first things the State Department does is to say, who else is there? Are there other Americans? Give us information about who's there. And so we're working on that. We will absolutely go back.
Part of our work is to really push them to show the facts, right? Because these individuals are not terrorists. They're not trying to kill the president and the vice president. That's what the Venezuelans believe. So it's our job to convince them, show them the facts, and to actually dig in. This is what the Biden team didn't do. The Biden team didn't even send anyone to the prisons.
These individuals that you're looking at They didn't even get a wellness check from the Biden administration. They had no idea what was going on. Is that protocol, Rick, to at least get a wellness check? Of course. Of course. That's what we do as American diplomats is to at least get wellness check and to say, do you have a lawyer? We're working on your case. Give them information.
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