Trump details decision to authorize CIA to operate in Venezuela

By Kevin Liptak, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Wednesday he authorized the CIA to operate inside Venezuela to clamp down on illegal flows of migrants and drugs from the South American nation, but stopped short of saying they would have authority to remove President Nicolas Maduro.

The remarks are Trump’s most expansive comments on his decision to expand the CIA’s authority to conduct lethal targeting and carry out covert action in the region, which CNN first reported on last week.

The president updated the CIA’s authorities around the same time he signed a secret directive ordering the military to begin striking Latin American drug cartels earlier this summer, sources have said.

Trump tied the authorization to his efforts to go after drug smuggling.

“We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea, so you get to see that, but we’re going to stop them by land also,” Trump said in the Oval Office.

Without saying his aim was to oust Maduro from power, Trump said he felt Venezuela’s leaders were feeling pressure.

“I think Venezuela is feeling heat. But I think a lot of other countries are feeling heat too. We’re not going to let this country, our country, be ruined because other people want to drop, as you say, their worst,” he said, referring to his false claim that countries emptied their prisons and mental institutions to send people to the United States.

The comments came a day after Trump announced the US military conducted yet another strike on a boat alleged to be trafficking drugs off the coast of Venezuela, killing six people on board. That marked at least the fifth time the US has announced such a strike, escalating tensions with Maduro, who has indicated that he is preparing to declare a state of emergency to protect his country in the event of an attack by the US military.

Neither Trump nor his administration have offered evidence that these were drug-trafficking vessels, but they have produced a classified legal opinion that justifies lethal strikes against an expansive list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Pressed by reporters Wednesday on why he did not just use the Coast Guard to intercept narcotics shipments, Trump said that previous efforts over the past 30 years to stop drug traffickers have “been totally ineffective” and “never worked” when it was done in a “politically correct manner.”

Some Democrats on Wednesday questioned the legality of the moves, suggesting the president was moving beyond his authority, and noting Congress was doing little to stop it. Democratic Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont told CNN that Congress was “abdicating its responsibility by not doing oversight.”

“We have asked for, what’s the legal basis upon which you’re doing this? No answer. So what you have is a situation where the chief executive is making a decision on his own, without any oversight, without any accountability about who gets killed. And that’s not an acceptable situation,” he said.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has also been critical. But others in the GOP have defended Trump. Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday that Trump is “doing exactly what he should be doing.”

Meanwhile, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize last week, has called for greater US support to stop what she described as a “war” on her country by Maduro.

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour Wednesday, Machado echoed the Trump administration in calling Maduro the leader of a “criminal narco-terrorism structure” while asking Trump for greater “help” in unseating him from power.

At least one US military strike in the Caribbean over the last two months also targeted Colombian nationals on a boat that had left from Colombia, according to two people briefed by the Pentagon about the strikes. The deliberate targeting of Colombians, which has not been previously reported, suggests that the US military’s campaign against suspected narcotics trafficking groups in the Caribbean is wider than previously believed.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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CNN’s Kit Maher, Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Arlette Saenz, Ellis Kim and Billy Stockwell contributed to this report.