Secretary of State Marco Rubio With Sean Hannity of Fox News’ Hannity

QUESTION:  I want to start this out with a fun question.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.  Yeah. 

QUESTION:  Because there are really serious issues involving national security, peace around the globe.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  I mean, you’re at the highest level of discussions, and we’re going to get into a lot of the hotspots and success and all that.  But I’ve got to ask you, there’s a show that’s come out; it’s called The Age of Disclosure.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  Okay.  I know everyone’s probably —

SECRETARY RUBIO:  (Laughter.)

QUESTION:  Right?  Everyone asks you about it?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Sure.

QUESTION:  It’s a new documentary.  We had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities.  It’s not ours.  And presidents operate on a need-to-know basis. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah. 

QUESTION:  Okay.  That is —

SECRETARY RUBIO:  So a couple points on it.  First of all, I’m not disavowing that.  It was an interview that was done almost, like, maybe three or four years ago when I was in the Senate. 

QUESTION:  Right. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  So it wasn’t recent.  The second point I would make, I was describing the allegations that people have come forward with.  You had people that came forward to us – some of these people were navy pilots, admirals, generals, whatever, that would come forward and say that there were programs in the U.S. Government that not even presidents were made aware of.  So I was describing what people had said to me, not things that I had firsthand knowledge of in that regard.  A little bit of selective editing, but it’s okay because you’re trying to sell a show there. 

But the fundamental comments – I haven’t seen it, but the clips I’ve seen and people have shown me are fundamentally true, and that is there are things – we know this; this has been documented – there have been things that fly over the airspace, restricted airspace, be it where we’re conducting military exercises or the like, and everyone in the government says they’re not ours.  And so what I worry most about, just me personally, is that some adversary – another country, for example – has developed some asymmetric capability for surveillance or the like that we just are not prepared for.  We’re looking for missiles and fighter jets, and they’re coming at us with drones and balloons. 

QUESTION:  Yeah. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Remember the – when NORAD turned on the radars and started looking for balloons, all of a sudden they spotted a bunch of balloons flying overhead, and 90 percent of them were innocent things; a couple of them were Chinese.  And so, but we never looked for balloons because our radars aren’t trained for that.

So that really was the point I was trying to drive at.  I can’t comment on the rest of the documentary.  It has, as I said, claims from people that were former admirals, naval fighters, people with high clearances in government.  Some of them are pretty spectacular claims.  I’m not calling these people liars.  I don’t have independent knowledge that what they’re saying is true.  The one observation I had is we had people that did very important jobs in the U.S. Government who are saying these things.  So we have people with very high jobs in the U.S. Government that are either (a) liars; (b) crazy; or (c) telling the truth, and two of those three options are not good.  I don’t know the answer. 

QUESTION:  (Laughter.)  Those are the only three options.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  I don’t know the answer.  I don’t have any point of – I don’t want to call them liars.  I just don’t have any independent way to verify the things they said. 

QUESTION:  I spent time – I’ve been talking to the mother of the National Guardsman that’s in a hospital here in D.C. who’s clinging to life.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  The issue of the vetting of Afghan nationals, we learned that so many of them had so many warning signs, and I’ll put up on the screen the statistics.  We took in 76,000.  There were over 5,000 that never should have made it into this country.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Right.

QUESTION:  We were assured repeatedly by the Biden administration that they had been vetted.  There’s no way that many of them could have been vetted.  Eight hundred and eighty-six of them – I’ll put that on the screen – also are at large in the country as we speak.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Right.

QUESTION:  You put a pause on this.  The State Department has.  The President has.  Kristi Noem has spoken out.  Where are we with all of this, and how dangerous is this?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Well, the pause is actually – we’ve announced it, but in fact we’ve been much more careful since we took over, with a lot of pressure on us, by the way, to let more people in, as many of them served as interpreters and alongside us in Afghanistan, and so their lives were at risk, so we had a lot of pressure to begin with.  But we’ve slowed that process down from day number one to take an extra look at people. 

Here’s the problem with vetting people.  You can’t have a perfect vet no matter who that person is, for a couple reasons.  The first is we don’t – you can only vet information that exists, right?  So it is possible that in many cases there are things about these people you just don’t know.  No matter how much you vet them, you just don’t have certain information.  And in some parts of the world where there’s very limited documentation, very limited, you can’t just go out and interview people in many cases because of the presence of the Taliban, et cetera.  It becomes very difficult.

The second thing you can’t vet – you can vet what people have done in the past.  You can’t vet what people might do in the future.  There’s another dynamic at play here, and that is you could allow someone into our country who has no history of radicalization, perhaps they even have worked with you in the past, but they are susceptible to radicalization once they enter the United States because they don’t assimilate well, because they fall victim to some of this online propaganda and efforts to radicalize people, and two or three years later, you find that they have radicalized.

That is a threat.  That is a real threat.  It is a threat for everyone.  We have homegrown people, people in the United States, born here, that have been radicalized.  But I do think it is a higher threat among people that come from cultures and backgrounds that make them – make it harder for them to assimilate once they get into the United States, and that make them vulnerable to Arabic-language, for example, propaganda by ISIS or al-Qaida or any of these other groups that are looking to radicalize people.

So it’s – look, the bottom line is there is no effective way to allow hundreds of thousands of people to enter any country in the world and not face consequences.  You take 100,000 people from anywhere in the world, and you’re going to have some percentage of them that turn out bad.  Either they turn into criminals or potentially terrorists.  I think that threat is heightened when you come from places that have terrorist movements that would target these people for radicalization once they enter our country.

QUESTION:  There seems to be some misunderstanding.  I call it the Trump doctrine.  I have my definition of it.  Okay, I agree with the President and I don’t want America involved in forever wars ever again.  I agree with that part.  But that does not mean isolationism.  There seems to be a group of Americans that misinterpret what the President means. 

As an example, so in his first term he wiped out the ISIS caliphate.  He took out Soleimani on that tarmac.  He took out Baghdadi and associates.  He dropped the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan.  I don’t know how anybody could think the world’s not a safer place by taking out Iran’s nuclear sites.  That’s not isolationism.  That is American force used for good, and 12 days later Israel and Iran stop fighting. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.  Well, the way I would describe it, it’s not isolationism.  It’s also not adventurism, which is this argument that others have fallen into that somehow there’s a problem in the world and the only solution to it is for the United States to send military assets to go solve it.

What the President has done is he has – number one, he defines what’s in the core national interest of the United States.  There’s a lot of terrible things happening in the world; not all of them are at our core national interest.  Number two, he defines what the outcome he wants.  And number three, he takes actions that are very specific and limited to getting the outcome that’s good for our country. 

So the case in point is Iran.  Iran had these nuclear facilities.  We knew what they were.  We’ve known what they were for a long time.  And the President conducted a precise campaign.  It wasn’t a prolonged war.  It was a 24-hour operation; B-2 bombers left the mainland of the United States, came over a defined target, dropped the payload – 14 missiles or 14 rockets right into the holes of this facility.

QUESTION:  The bunker busters.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  The bunker busters.  Turned around and went home.  And that’s it.  It didn’t involve five days of fighting.  It didn’t involve 15 days of fighting.  It didn’t involve ground troops or six months.  He had a goal.  The goal was we were going to destroy this nuclear facility.  We were going to obliterate it.  He went in, he did it, he got out.  We were done.  We achieved our objective.  The objective was the destruction of the nuclear facility, which was achieved, without entangling America in something broader than that. 

That’s a great example of the limited and strategic and focused use of American power to achieve something that’s in our national interest.  It was in our national interest not to have Iran have a nuclear program that can be turned into a weapons program that could one day threaten the United States.  And the President found an opportunity to do something about it, and he did it.

QUESTION:  We talk a lot, and a lot of people talk in the Make America Great Again movement, about America First.  And I believe in America First, but I also believe that we have to have insight, wisdom, understanding that goes along with that.  And it seems like every one of the examples I just gave you where the President did use the might of the U.S. military, it’s against radical Islam. And that threat, I think when people are chanting, “Death to Israel,” when they’re chanting, “Death to America,” specific threats against our country, I have not forgotten 9/11/01.  What is the nature of radicalism that maybe some people don’t understand why it’s in America’s first interest?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Because ultimately all radical Islamic movements in the world identify the West writ large but the United States in particular as the greatest evil on the Earth.  And every chance they have – the notion that somehow radical Islam would be comfortable with simply controlling some province in Iraq or Syria is just not borne out by history.  Radical Islam has shown that their desire is not simply to occupy one part of the world and be happy with their own little caliphate; they want to expand.  It is a – it’s revolutionary in its nature.  It seeks to expand and control more territories and more people. 

And radical Islam has designs, openly, on the West – on the United States, on Europe.  We’ve seen that progress there as well.  And they are prepared to conduct acts of terrorism – in the case of Iran, nation-state actions, assassinations, murders, you name it.  Whatever it takes for them to gain their influence and ultimately their domination of different cultures and societies. 

That’s a clear and imminent threat to the world and to the broader West, but especially to the United States, who they identify as the chief source of evil on the planet.  Okay, the reason why they hate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the leadership of the UAE, of Bahrain, is because they’ve allowed the United States to partner with them.  That’s why they hate them.  They consider them infidels for it.  They hate Israel.  But they also hate America, and they hate anywhere in the world that we have influence; they seek to attack it, including here in the homeland. 

If you look at the domestic terrorist – at the attacks that have happened here domestically, the overwhelming majority of them have been inspired by radical Islamic viewpoints. 

QUESTION:  Do you —

SECRETARY RUBIO:  And that includes the shooting in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  That includes the Saudi pilot in Pensacola, my home state.  Two attacks that people seem to have forgotten.

QUESTION:  It’s also my home state.  (Laughter.)

SECRETARY RUBIO:  I know it is.  Congratulations on that. 

QUESTION:  You were my senator for a while. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  I was.

QUESTION:  You got promoted. 

Let me move to Venezuela, if I can, and then we’ll go to Ukraine.  In Venezuela, it seems like America is showing its military presence.  We’ve been taking out narcoterrorists.  A conflict about – that Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, addressed this earlier today in terms of the chain of command and taking out and the right decision to take out these boats that are bringing drugs into our country, that are killing Americans.  Maduro has been basically told by the President to get out.  Are we on the verge of a possible conflict here?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  No, so there are a couple of things that I would say about it.  The first is what the President has authorized is a counter-drug mission in the region.  The fact that Maduro is upset about it tells you that drugs are coming out of Venezuela.  If you look at these boats, they – the Maduro regime is not a legitimate government.  What it is, is it’s a transshipment organization.  It allows cocaine and other drugs that are produced in Colombia to be trafficked through Venezuelan territory and with the cooperation of elements of the regime, are allowed to sail out of – on airplanes and leave Venezuela on airplanes and ships headed towards the United States.  So they openly cooperate with the drug dealers.

In addition to that, the Venezuelan regime is a source of instability in the entire region.  Over 8 million Venezuelans have flooded into neighboring countries as a result of the regime’s activities within their own country, including into the United States.  They also happen to be the foothold of Iran.  That’s not spoken about enough.  Iran, it’s IRGC, and even Hizballah has a presence in South America, and one of their anchor presence – especially for the Iranians – is inside of Venezuela.  So we just finished talking about Iran and the hostility it has towards the United States.  Where they have planted their flag in our hemisphere is on Venezuelan territory, with the full and open cooperation of that regime. 

So the fact that Maduro feels threatened by the presence of U.S. assets in the region on a counter-drug mission, it proves that he’s into the drug business.  And by the way, we don’t – it’s not me saying it.  I’m not just making this up.  This was an indictment that came out of the Southern District of New York back in 2020 – an indictment.  It was undisputed.  Until the President decided to do something about it, no one disputed that Maduro was in the drug trafficking business.  No one. 

QUESTION:  Yeah.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Now that he’s doing something about it you have all these people on the left and others that are coming out saying, well, it’s not true and it hasn’t been proven.  We have an indictment by a grand jury – not by politicians, by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York that indicted him and a bunch of people in the regime.  So that’s what’s important to point out here. 

Now, all that being said, I also – it’s interesting.  If an aircraft carrier of the United States was deployed off the coast of Japan or the coast on the Pacific somewhere, or was deployed in the Mediterranean or in – somewhere off the coast of Europe, everybody would be happy because it would show America’s commitment to our security partnerships that we have around the world. 

But somehow if an aircraft carrier and our naval assets are deployed in our own hemisphere, that’s problematic?  I would say that if you’re focused on America and America First, you start with your own hemisphere, where we live.  What happens here – I’m not saying things that are happening halfway around the world are not important.  I’m saying what happens in our hemisphere impacts us faster and more deeply than something that’s happening halfway around the world. 

QUESTION:  Let me ask similar questions.  Do you think, especially with the drought issue that Iran is dealing with, and Maduro basically being told – pretty much being told by the President to get out, are we possibly on the verge of looking at regime change in both countries? 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Well, look, at the end of the day with Maduro – and his problem basically is that this is a guy, if you wanted to make a deal with him, I don’t know how you’d do.  He’s broken every deal he’s ever made.  Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.  If you can work out a way where you can bring stability to the hemisphere, you can make Venezuela help be a country that isn’t the base for Iranian influence against and activities against the United States, you could have a Venezuela that didn’t traffic in drugs and didn’t send people to our country like Tren de Aragua gang members and the like, that would be great. 

The problem is Maduro has made five deals with different parties over the last 10 years and has broken every single one of them.  The Biden administration made a deal with Maduro.  No one talks about this.  He made a deal with Maduro.  Here was the deal:  Maduro asked that his nephews – convicted drug traffickers – be released from U.S. prisons.  He asked that his chief money launderer, his money man, his bag man, be released from U.S. custody before he stood trial.  In exchange he promised to hold free and fair elections.  He got the nephews back, the drug dealers.  He got the bag man back.  And he never did the free and fair elections. 

QUESTION:  And he stole the election.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  He stole the elections. 

QUESTION:  Yeah.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  They suckered Joe Biden.  They’re not going to sucker Donald Trump.  And so that’s really the fundamental problem we have here.  I think the President is a unique figure in modern American history.  He is prepared to sit down and meet and talk to anybody, okay?  He just met the other day with the president of Syria, who has an interesting past, to say the least, in terms of his past activities.  He’s willing to meet with Putin.  He’s willing to meet with Xi.  He’s willing to meet with Kim Jong-un like he did in the first term.  He’s willing to meet with anybody.  But at the end of the day there has to be somebody that you can actually make a deal with.  We’ve made a deal with the Chinese, but Maduro has never kept a deal.  That doesn’t mean the President won’t try.  It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

QUESTION:  Let me ask you, maybe you spent the most time – and the President’s been clear that he thought – he thought Russia-Ukraine might end up being the easiest peace deal to make, and he said it ended up being the hardest.  It is the hardest.  Your recent comments show some optimism, and you recently said you had the most productive, meaningful meetings that you’ve had, that your goal is for a prosperous future for Ukraine, and your goal is to never have war again. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  There’s no other way to really explain it.  It’s clear that President Zelenskyy at this point is ready to make peace.  The more difficult party as an outsider looking in – you can correct me if I’m wrong – seems to have been Vladimir Putin.  Where are we in the process for you to make – for you to seem more optimistic than I’ve heard you publicly before?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.  Well, first of all, I’ll say in terms of the President saying it’s the easiest conflict, I think what he’s really saying is it’s the most illogical war.  It’s the one you logically would conclude you should end, because no one’s really winning that war in a traditional sense of winning.  The Russians are – 7,000 Russian soldiers are being killed a week.  Okay, 7,000 is more than what we lost in some of the wars we fought in its entirety.  They’re losing 7,000 soldiers a week just on the Russian side, not to mention the destruction on the Ukrainian side. 

What they’re literally fighting over now is about a 30 to 50 kilometer space and the 20 percent of the Donetsk region that remains.  And so what we have tried to do – and I think have made some progress – is figure out what could the Ukrainians live with that gives them security guarantees for the future they’re never going to be invaded again, allows them not just to rebuild their economy but to prosper as a country, be a country that has an economy that grows.  Theoretically, doing the right things, in 10 years Ukraine’s GDP could be larger than Russia’s. 

These are the kinds of things:  stop the war; make sure they never get invaded or attacked again; protect Ukraine’s longstanding and long-term sovereignty and independence so that they don’t become a puppet state – they’re actually independent and sovereign; and allow their economy not just to recover but to prosper and turn it into a story of prosperity.  That’s what we’re trying to achieve here. 

So what can Ukraine agree to given all the dynamics that I’ve just described, and what will Russia agree to?  And at the end of the day, it’s not up to us.  It’s not our war.  We’re not fighting it; there aren’t American soldiers.  It’s on another continent.  We are engaged because we’re the only ones that can.  European countries – there’s no one else in the world that can do this.  The Chinese can’t do it.  The only leader in the world that can talk to both sides and make a deal, if a deal is possible, is President Trump.  And he’s been very patient.  He’s dedicated a lot of time to it.  A lot of the top people in his administration have been involved in this. 

We are trying to see if we can bridge the divide between both sides.  To do that, we have to talk to both sides.  We have some irrational people involved in this issue, okay?  People who believe that we should only talk to the Ukrainian side and not talk to the Russians at all.  You can’t end the war between Russia and Ukraine without talking to Russia.   

QUESTION:  Right.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  But you also have to take into account the Ukrainian position.  They’ve been very brave in how they’ve fought.  But we think that now is the ideal time for both sides to end the war.  And if there is a way to bridge the divide between the two sides, we’re the only ones in the world that can do it, and that’s what we’re trying to do. 

Ultimately it’s going to be up to them.  If they decide they don’t want to end the war, then the war will continue.  But we’re going to try to bring it to an end, and I think the President should be commended for that, not attacked for it or criticized.  Some of these people have this notion that our policy should be just continue to fund Ukraine at unlimited amounts for as long as the war takes.  That’s not realistic.  That’s not reality.  And that’s not going to happen.  We’ve been saying that for a long time:  You can’t sustain the scale and scope of it.  And I also don’t think it’s realistic for Russia to continue this war for four or five years. 

QUESTION:  I would have thought on paper that Russia would have rolled over them in three weeks.  And wow.  The President at one point said —

SECRETARY RUBIO:  What people – what people forget, Sean, is that at some point in this war, Russia controlled substantially more territory in Ukraine than they do now.  The Ukrainians – if you look at what that map looked like in March or April after the invasion, or May, three months after the invasion, and what it looks like now, the Ukrainians have pushed the Russians way back from where they were.  So they’ve already achieved tremendous things because of their bravery, their courage, and how hard they have fought.  But there’s also the reality this has now become a war of attrition, and sadly the Russians have shown their willingness to sacrifice 7,000 soldiers a week —

QUESTION:  Crazy.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  — in an effort to achieve this.  Putin a couple of weeks ago said:  It may take long – we are going to achieve our objectives; it may cost more and take longer than we want it to, but we will get it done.  And so I actually think that’s their mentality.  And what we’re trying to see, is it possible to end the war in a way that protects Ukraine’s future that both sides could agree to?  That’s what we’re trying to find out, and I think we’ve made some progress but we’re not there yet. 

QUESTION:  Do you feel – do you – and how confident are you?  Last question.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  It’s hard to tell about confidence level on it, because ultimately the decisions have to be made, in the case of Russia, by Putin alone, not his advisors.   Putin – only Putin can end this war on the Russian side.  So I think we’re going to explore.  We are going to – we have tried to bring both sides together and see what proposals we could come up with that both sides could live with.  We’re going to do everything we can to make it work.  That’s what we’ve been doing for 10 months.  That’s been our aim and our goal here the entire time.  I think we’ve made some progress.  We’ve gotten closer, but we’re still not there.  We’re still not close enough.  But that could change.  I hope it changes.