The CIA’s operations abroad are usually shrouded in secrecy, but President Donald Trump said Wednesday he had authorized it to take unspecified action in Venezuela, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgment from a commander in chief.
“Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?” a reporter asked Trump at the White House.
“I authorized for two reasons, really,” Trump said. “No. 1, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America."
The second reason, he said, was narcotics trafficking.
“And the other thing are drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela,” he said.
Trump made the highly unusual remarks only hours after The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had authorized the CIA to carry out covert lethal action in Venezuela.
The CIA declined to comment on the report.
Asked whether the CIA had authority to “take out” the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, Trump said: “Oh, I don’t want to answer a question like that. That’s a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?”
“I think Venezuela is feeling heat," he added. "But I think a lot of other countries are feeling heat, too.”
Trump said Tuesday on social media that the U.S. military had carried out a strike on another boat in the Caribbean, which he claimed was smuggling narcotics to the United States. It was the fifth such strike since early September.
Trump also was asked whether he was considering U.S. military strikes on Venezuelan soil and said it was an option.
“Well, I don’t want to tell you exactly, but we are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of days where there isn’t a boat to be found.”
NBC News has reported that U.S. military officials are drawing up options to target drug traffickers inside Venezuela.
Trump said the lethal strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats had saved American lives by preventing narcotics from reaching the United States. He also said that after U.S. forces struck the boats, “you see that fentanyl all over the ocean,” adding: “It’s, like, floating in bags. It’s all over the place.”
U.S. officials so far have not provided detailed information about exactly what narcotics have been in most of the targeted vessels.
The Trump administration has labeled multiple drug cartels from Venezuela and other Latin American countries as foreign terrorist organizations, citing in part the high death toll from fentanyl use in the United States.
Fentanyl is mainly smuggled over land routes in small, easily concealed amounts across the Mexico-U.S. border, not by boat through the Caribbean, experts say.
The administration has offered different explanations about the goal of the strikes in the Caribbean. Officials have portrayed the operations as a bold move against the threat posed by drug cartels. But officials also have suggested that the strikes — and a ramped-up U.S. military presence in the region — are meant to pile pressure on the regime in Venezuela.
