| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Antonio Guterres views as setting a dangerous precedent. | ||
| Colombia, backed by Russia and China, requested the meeting of the 15-member council. | ||
| We'll have live coverage of the meeting at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| Venezuela's deposed president, Nicolas Maduro, is scheduled to appear before a federal judge in New York at noon Monday to be formally notified about the charges against him. | ||
| Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, were seized by U.S. forces during a pre-dawn raid Saturday in Caracas and brought to New York. | ||
| It will be their first court appearance on criminal charges since they were extracted in a U.S. military operation on Saturday. | ||
| They'll face charges of narco-terrorism tied to alleged trafficking of tons of cocaine into the United States. | ||
| Continue to follow the story here on the C-SPAN networks and read the indictment at c-span.org. | ||
| Welcome back to talk about the geopolitical impact of what's been happening between the United States and Venezuela. | ||
| We're joined now by Ryan Berg, who is the Americas Program Director at the Sten Center for Strategic and International Studies. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| Let's get a little bit of a background here about Nicolas Maduro, how he came to power in Venezuela, and how he ruled the country. | ||
| So Maduro was Chavez's handpicked successor. | ||
| Prior to that, he performed a number of roles, I think most prominently foreign minister of Venezuela. | ||
| And Maduro is Cuban-trained. | ||
| It's something that I think is important to point out because the Cuban regime has held on for so long. | ||
| It understands power, it understands repression, it understands brute force. | ||
| And I think Maduro learned all of those things by being Cuban-trained. | ||
| And he ran the country in much the same way with, in many cases, an iron fist. | ||
| A number of stolen elections, a number of theatrical negotiations with foreign powers, most prominently the United States. | ||
| But ultimately, at the end of the day, it was about extending his rule in Venezuela. | ||
| And he is a pretty wily character. | ||
| Over the course of his career, the U.S. in particular had underestimated him numerous times. | ||
| And Maduro had played a number of administrations. | ||
| It seems like yesterday, in the wee hours of the morning, his luck ran out. | ||
| And the U.S. performed this extraordinary operation to abduct him from what the president says was essentially a fortress where he was staying and bring him to justice to face the indictment in the Southern District Court of New York. | ||
| That indictment refers to him as the de facto president. | ||
| Is that accurate and does that language matter? | ||
| The language matters a lot because there's a lot of conversation right now about the legality of this action. | ||
| It matters because we don't recognize him as the de jure president, the legal president of Venezuela, and not just going back to the July 2024 elections, which were very clearly stolen, but going back actually to the first Trump administration where there were fraudulent elections and a question about what to do regarding the Venezuelan government, whom to recognize. | ||
| So this is a language that has been used by the first Trump administration, by the Biden administration, and now by the second Trump administration. | ||
| And I think it provides some of the legal foundations for what were done, what was done yesterday in the operation. | ||
| What do we know so far about how Venezuelans are reacting to what's happened? | ||
| Well, I think there's the Venezuelan diaspora outside of Venezuela, I think, which is very happy to see Maduro flown to the United States and to eventually hopefully serve justice in this indictment in the Southern District Court of New York. | ||
| And then there are Venezuelans who are still in the country, who I think are apprehensive. | ||
| They're asking some of the same questions that we're asking, which is what comes next? | ||
| What do things look like? | ||
| not just in the coming weeks and months, but also in the coming years. | ||
| Is this the foundation for a democratic transition? | ||
| Or is this the continuation of this regime but with a different face, with a different figure? | ||
| There's so many questions to unpack here. | ||
| Yesterday was kind of the moment where we figured out exactly what happened. | ||
| And today I think we're starting to ask the right questions, which is what comes next? | ||
| And what is the plan, if there is one, for ruling Venezuela moving forward? | ||
| President Trump was pressed on this at the press conference yesterday with many reporters trying to get details from him on what actually comes next in the country. | ||
| What's your assessment based on what little we know so far? | ||
| Well, the press conference was full of information. | ||
| I must say that. | ||
| But it also left observers like me with more questions than it did answers. | ||
| And perhaps that's just the nature of where we're at in the unfolding of this very complex situation. | ||
| There were so many questions to answer yesterday that perhaps it was impossible for one press conference to answer all of it. | ||
| But again, I have a lot of questions, and I think many others do as well, coming out of that press conference. | ||
| The president referred to something that sounds to me like a provisional government for Venezuela. | ||
| There will be a U.S. role for this. | ||
| He says he will designate certain individuals. | ||
| He pointed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Hegseth, potentially General Kaine, if security becomes an issue around certain assets that the United States feels is necessary to get the economy moving again in Venezuela, but that there will also be Venezuelans involved in this. | ||
| And he pointed out that the vice president, again, de facto, not de jure, vice president of the regime, Del Codriguez, had been sworn in as president. | ||
| He also said at various other points of the press conference that anyone linked to Maduro would not be allowed to run the country long term and would not be favorable for Venezuela actually recovering any kind of economic path here. | ||
| And Delsi Rodriguez is clearly a protégé of Nicolas Maduro. | ||
| She was picked, hand-picked by him to be the vice president. | ||
| So there are a lot of questions here when it seems to come to some of these inconsistencies. | ||
| But the one thing that really surprised me, Kimberly, is that the president took ownership of this issue in a way that I think surprised many and surprised many in his base who are very clearly preoccupied or concerned about some of these long-term commitments that might be involved in sticking with a rebuilding of Venezuela. | ||
| He said, we're not going to do this in vain, and we're going to make sure that Venezuela has the best chance of becoming a successful country again. | ||
| That seems to me to imply a long-term commitment to Venezuela to try to rebuild of the kind that many of us doubted the president would support given where some of his base is on the issue of the US. | ||
| Given what he campaigned on. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And we often talk about the pottery barn principle, right? | ||
| You break it, you own it. | ||
| This coming out of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan invasion, the president seemed to take ownership of it yesterday by saying the United States will be very much involved in the rebuilding of Venezuela. | ||
| So that shocked many and surprised me too. | ||
| You mentioned former vice president, I guess now interim president de facto of Venezuela, Del Codriguez. | ||
| She gave a statement saying, we had already warned that an aggression was underway under false excuses and false pretenses and that the masks had fallen off, revealing only one objective, regime change in Venezuela. | ||
| This regime change would also allow for the seizure of our energy, mineral, and natural resources. | ||
| This is the true objective, and the world and the international community must know it. | ||
| We demand the immediate liberation of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Celia Flores. | ||
| The only president of Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro, we are determined to be free. | ||
| What is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity. | ||
| This is a very different tone than President Trump implied from the press conference yesterday where he said that Secretary of State Rubio had spoken to her and that she was planning to do what's necessary to make Venezuela great again, I think was the quote. | ||
| What is your assessment of well first of all tell us a bit about Del Codriguez, what we need to know about her, and why you think she may have reacted this way compared to what the president said. | ||
| Well, as I mentioned, she is a hand-picked Maduro loyalist. | ||
| She and her brother have played an important role in this regime for a long time. | ||
| Her brother is a trained psychiatrist and the head of the National Assembly. | ||
| He's also been the point person for Maduro for many years on negotiations with the United States. | ||
| So the two of them are steeped in the politics of this regime. | ||
| They're steeped in the politics of how to hang on to power, how power works, and how they can maneuver to stay in power. | ||
| So it's clear to me that long term this is going to have a lot of challenges and probably won't work out in terms of a provisional government somehow with Del Codriguez. | ||
| But I think that quote that you gave gets to a contradiction or a major challenge that she has on her hands internally, which is that she has to simultaneously satisfy a Chavista base which is extremely upset about an abduction operation that was allowed to happen without really any Venezuelan pushback. | ||
| It seems that the United States Air Force had air supremacy. | ||
| The United States had a complete surprise, the element of surprise, suppression of the electricity and cyber grids. | ||
| So she's simultaneously trying to satisfy that faction of the party while at the same time potentially filling this role that the United States sees for her. | ||
| It's going to be a very difficult balance. | ||
| And right now I think it's probably safe to say that if she does intend to play this role, she needs to consolidate power internally. | ||
| It should be known that she does not have control of the armed forces. | ||
| She didn't have necessarily a large well spring of support within the armed forces naturally. | ||
| That was Maduro. | ||
| That was Diosado Cabello, another important figure in the regime. | ||
| That was Vladimir Padrino Lopez, the defense minister. | ||
| So the way that this regime works is that you have various factions with different elements of control over different institutions. | ||
| And she had elements of control over the elements of the secret police and the counterintelligence apparatus, but not necessarily the armed forces. | ||
| So she's in a pretty difficult position. | ||
| She's got to consolidate support domestically, and that means appearing to be outraged. | ||
| And also, keep in mind, she may have played a role in the abduction of Nicolas Maduro. | ||
| There may have been a deal struck here. | ||
| And so in order to consolidate control, she can't be seen as having played a part in this operation that seemingly got Maduro in the dead of night, while at the same time trying to play this role for the United States and a provisional government, that seems to me a very difficult bridge to be able to span for Del Codriguez. | ||
| So the last point I'll make is that the only way that this makes sense to me is if she is a sort of figurehead for the moment, but if eventually the long-term plan is still to try to transition away from this regime and towards the democratic government that the people of Venezuela elected in July of 2024. | ||
| What did you make of the president speaking pretty openly about part of the reasoning behind this, or at least the consequences of it, being more direct U.S. involvement in Venezuela's oil industry? | ||
| Yeah, that's been a lot of the focus this morning, and a lot of the commentary is simply about the U.S. being able to get possession of Venezuelan oil. | ||
| Oil is obviously an important part of any of the strategy towards Venezuela. | ||
| 303 billion barrels of known reserves in Venezuela. | ||
| It's the largest on earth. | ||
| So you can't separate Venezuela from oil. | ||
| The two are nearly synonymous. | ||
| However, I would argue that the United States has a Treasury Department license in place for U.S. companies, especially Chevron, to operate in Venezuela. | ||
| So we're already getting Venezuelan oil right now. | ||
| I don't think the president would have to put American troops in harm's way if this was just about oil and not at all about geopolitics or any of the other strategy decisions that went into this operation. | ||
| That said, I think the president focused a lot on oil in the press conference because I think he understands that for Venezuela to grow again, for Venezuela to have any chance at having economic recovery, the oil industry is going to be an incredibly important part of that operation. | ||
| It's undeniable and it's unavoidable that Venezuela is going to have to grow in the oil sector before it grows in other sectors in order to have any kind of economic recovery. | ||
| And I think that's why you see such a focus right now, if the goal is indeed to rebuild Venezuela on Venezuelan oil. | ||
| President Trump also spoke yesterday about what he called the Donroe Doctrine, obviously a play on the Monroe Doctrine. | ||
| I want to play a little bit of that clip and then get your response. | ||
| Under the now deposed dictator Maduro, Venezuela was increasingly hosting foreign adversaries in our region and acquiring menacing offensive weapons that could threaten U.S. interests and lives. | ||
| And they used those weapons last night. | ||
| They used those weapons last night, potentially in league with the cartels operating along our border. | ||
| All of these actions were in gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy, dating back more than two centuries, and not anymore. | ||
| All the way back, it dated to the Monroe Doctrines. | ||
| And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. | ||
| They now call it the Donro Document. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's Monroe Doctrine. | ||
| We sort of forgot about it. | ||
| It was very important, but we forgot about it. | ||
| We don't forget about it anymore. | ||
| Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again. | ||
| The President there referred to the National Security Strategy, and I know that you've written about an element of that strategy, the Trump Corollary, as it's called, which really does kind of encapsulate what the President is talking about here as the Donroe Doctrine. | ||
| Can you explain a bit more about it? | ||
| Yeah, I prefer to call it the Trump Corollary. | ||
| That's the official term that the administration has given to it, and I think it's very important. | ||
| I wrote from the very beginning of this administration that I think it's going to be a Latin America-first administration that's going to be highly focused on Latin America, not just because there are a number of individuals such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio who are Latin Americanists in important positions of power, but also because the Trump agenda intersects with the region in so many important ways, drugs, migration, and the geopolitics. | ||
| So it was no surprise to me that the recently released National Security Strategy document of the United States actually led with the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| As an analyst of the region who's been looking at this for a long time, it's the first time I've seen Latin America get more than one page treatment in four. | ||
| And that section didn't just lead the regional sections, but it also led with this idea of the Trump Corollary. | ||
| And the Trump corollary basically says that the U.S. wants to restore U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and it's incredibly focused on foreign control of vital strategic assets, things like ports, airports, roads, things that could be militarized in a potential conflict, as well as the geopolitics of the region. | ||
| And I think it's really important to note here that the last individual that Maduro met with before he was abducted from Venezuela was the special envoy from China. | ||
| He had a very important meeting that day, Friday in the afternoon, with the Chinese special envoy. | ||
| It's my understanding that the Chinese were not even able to get out of the country before the operation began. | ||
| Trump said yesterday he didn't know anything about that, but I'm certain that somebody most likely told him that before he gave the green light to the operation. | ||
| And that's certainly a signal. | ||
| If nothing else, it's a strong signal to the Chinese that we are not just interested in the Western Hemisphere again, but interested once again in being the top player in the hemisphere. | ||
| And to make one more point, to kind of step back and give you a macro perspective, I think the first Trump administration and the second, sorry, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration basically set us on a path of competition with adversaries like China. | ||
| Now what I think we're entering is what I would call a consolidation phase, where both countries, the U.S. and China, are looking to their immediate neighborhoods, in the U.S. case, the Western Hemisphere, in China's case, very aggressive actions in the South China Sea, to shore up their immediate neighborhoods and get ready for a long-term competition that could span decades. | ||
| So I think that's why you're seeing so much focus on the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| A lot of folks saying, wait a second, we've been absent from this neighborhood for a long time and things have gone a little bit sideways. | ||
| We need to pay attention once again to our immediate abroad in order to have that taken care of if we're going to actually be effective long-term against China in a decades-long strategic competition. | ||
| All right, we're going to be taking your questions for CSIS's Ryan Berg about Venezuela and the geopolitical implications of the U.S. recent actions there. | ||
| Our phone line for Democrats is 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| And once again, we have a line for folks who are active or former military, 202-748-8003. | ||
| Let's start with Dorothy in Baltimore on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Dorothy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, everyone. | |
| I'm going to put out one little line of advice for Americans, and then I want to give my opinion and ask him a question. | ||
| My advice to Americans is get your water and your non-perishable foods together. | ||
| Now, I'm going to lead into why I'm saying that. | ||
| Now, Trump has or is alienating our allies. | ||
| That's what he's doing. | ||
| China is trying to combine his allies. | ||
| What Trump is setting up for us, because of the way he's talking about taking over Greenland, Panama, Cuba, you name Canada, you name it. | ||
| Now, I've heard or read somewhere that some of our allies don't even want to share classified information or intelligence with us because they don't trust Trump. | ||
| This is where we're going to fall in trouble. | ||
| Maduro probably was a horrible man and should have been gone. | ||
| Republicans can't understand. | ||
| We're not saying that this man was good and shouldn't be gone. | ||
| We're saying the strategy that Trump is using is dangerous for the USA. | ||
| I see a Goliath and David scenario coming. | ||
| We may be attacked, but not the way they think it. | ||
| It could be biological. | ||
| We're getting medicine from China. | ||
| We're getting stuff from India. | ||
| The people that we are competing against and doing all kinds of crazy stuff now, well, they need to not have no more food or medicine or anything coming from these countries. | ||
| And Dorothy, what was it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I believe they're going to attack us. | |
| And Dorothy, what was your question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, and my question would be, what is the plan for the U.S. to be safe, being that Trump is setting us up for what I just said? | |
| What is his plan for us to be safe? | ||
| Coming to what I just said. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Well, I can give you an answer as to how I interpret the same document we were just talking about, which is the National Security Strategy document. | ||
| As you said, Kimberly, it featured four pages on the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| And after that section about the Trump Corollary, there were multiple passages where it stated that the United States wanted to build secure supply chains that could not be interfered with by China using Western Hemisphere countries as places to build economic security. | ||
| I think that starts first and foremost with a country like Mexico, where labor is cheaper than in the United States and can, of course, compete with a number of countries in Asia on costs, but where proximity to the United States and free trade agreements makes it such that it's a lot easier to build that level of economic security. | ||
| The other comment I would make is that with Venezuela specifically, about 80% of the oil that Venezuela produced before a quarantine imposed by the president was actually going to China. | ||
| So China was benefiting from Venezuelan oil until such time as the president several weeks ago implemented what he called a blockade, but I think in actuality it's more of a quarantine, right? | ||
| And actions against sanctioned tankers of the world ghost, the global ghost fleet that were taking Venezuelan oil and moving that sanctioned oil to countries like China. | ||
| So there are two actions right there that I think will make the United States safer and kind of tie into the caller's question. | ||
| You mentioned 80% of Venezuela's oil going to China, but a decent amount also went to Cuba. | ||
| And there's some sort of knock-on effects for Cuba's especially economy from this. | ||
| Can you talk about that? | ||
| For a long time, Venezuela was a provider of discounted or free oil to Cuba. | ||
| That was part of the trade, essentially, that existed between Venezuela and Cuba. | ||
| The Cubans gave Venezuela intelligence heft. | ||
| They beefed up that intelligence apparatus. | ||
| And the president himself said multiple Cuban bodyguards were killed in the early morning raid on his compound. | ||
| So it's clear who was protecting him and who he trusted in terms of loyalty. | ||
| And the exchange was very basic. | ||
| We provide you security and counterintelligence against any kinds of coups from the armed forces, and you send us free or heavily discounted barrels of oil. | ||
| Sometimes they would use that internally in Cuba to satisfy domestic energy demands. | ||
| Sometimes they would take some of the excess and sell it onward on the international market. | ||
| Now it's clear that that link, that NEXIS, has been severed. | ||
| And Cuba is already from several years before, living some of its worst days since the so-called special period in the 1990s. | ||
| So Cuba is well on the brink of economic collapse. | ||
| It came up yesterday in the press conference. | ||
| Secretary of State Rubio stepped back up to the podium and commented on the failed economic model in Cuba. | ||
| And then the president said, look, Cuba is sort of on the watch list at the moment. | ||
| And so you have a lot of speculation right now about whether Cuba could be next, not necessarily in terms of a military operation. | ||
| That's not what I'm saying, but in terms of some kind of transition to new leadership as a fallout from what has happened in Venezuela and the severing or the sundering of that link on the oil front. | ||
| Jeff is in Port Angeles, Washington on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| So it looks to me like the Venezuelan military stood down and allowed, effectively allowed us to go in there and take him. | ||
| So what is their role? | ||
| I mean, these are the same people who have been supporting Maduro all these years. | ||
| So what, they're just going to be left in place to, what, take over? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'd like your opinion. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Thanks so much, Jeff. | ||
| It's a critical question. | ||
| It's something I've been harping on for the last 24, 48 hours, and even in many interviews before the military here, the armed forces, is really the deciding factor in whether a democratic transition happens in Venezuela. | ||
| We've said it before the military operation, and we'll say it again after. | ||
| Right now, it doesn't look as though they are loyal to the regime. | ||
| They haven't stood by the side of the regime necessarily, but they also haven't stood on the side of a democratic transition. | ||
| I think what's happened is that they've simply retreated, as the caller said, as Jeff said. | ||
| They allowed the attack to proceed. | ||
| There was some resistance, but not much, and the U.S. really had operational control, and this was swift, decisive, lethal, and as far as we know, no one killed on the U.S. side. | ||
| That said, it's going to be key in the coming days to actually look at what they do. | ||
| Do they step back forward and show loyalty to Del Codriguez, the de facto vice president who may well be the Venezuelan leader moving forward, at least under this provisional government idea? | ||
| Or do they remain kind of in the background, ready to take whichever side seems to be the most decisive? | ||
| If they take the side of the democratic opposition and they say, we stand on the side of a democratic opposition, in authoritarian regimes, that's usually the decisive moment when the institutional armed forces stand on the side of an opposition movement. | ||
| That usually means the end for an authoritarian regime. | ||
| And so I think it's key to look at them and to watch them very closely. | ||
| The last point I would make, and this goes directly to one of the callers' comments, is you have plenty of support within the armed forces for the opposition. | ||
| Comment that I've made a lot recently is you don't get to 70% support in an already unfree and unfair election, which the opposition proved that it won in July of 2024, if you don't have a lot of support within the armed forces. | ||
| So when people go into the private, the privacy of the ballot box, voting for the opposition and expressing their will, I think that was decisive on the evening of the operation, as the caller said. | ||
| Lots of support within the armed forces for the opposition. | ||
|
unidentified
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Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold new original series. | |
| Today with our guest, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, only the fifth woman to serve on the high court and author of the book, Listening to the Law. | ||
| She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubenstein. | ||
| And what do you hope most people will take away from your book? | ||
| I think what I want them to take away from the book is that they should be proud of the court. | ||
| And I want them to be able, I want them to understand the way the court grapples with the legal questions that matter to the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch America's Book Club with Justice Amy Coney Barrett today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | |
| July 4th, 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| And tonight, on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A, we're joined by former U.S. Treasurer and the chair of the America 250 Commission, Rosie Rios. | ||
| She'll talk about several of the events that will occur over the next year, including the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary parade back in June and other initiatives that the public can participate in leading up to the anniversary. | ||
| The movement and the moment. | ||
| And let me just say, there's a couple of moments that are unprecedented, that have never happened before in this country, that are being planned as we speak. | ||
| That is so unreal. | ||
| If I showed you the screenshot of what we're planning, your first reaction, as it was for our commission, was, you've got to be kidding, it's happening. | ||
| And it is happening. | ||
| So stay tuned. | ||
| Much more to come. | ||
| But again, what I'm most excited about is continuing our programming long after 2026. | ||
|
unidentified
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America 250 Commission Chair Rosie Rios tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | |
| C-SPAN, democracy unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
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| This is one of those great examples of the way we're getting out there. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Venezuela's deposed president, Nicolas Maduro, is scheduled to appear before a federal judge in New York at noon Monday to be formally notified about the charges against him. | ||
| Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, were seized by U.S. forces during a pre-dawn raid Saturday in Caracas and brought to New York. | ||
| It will be their first court appearance on criminal charges since they were extracted in a U.S. military operation on Saturday. | ||
| They'll face charges of narco-terrorism tied to alleged trafficking of tons of cocaine into the United States. | ||
| Continue to follow the story here on the C-SPAN networks and read the indictment at c-span.org. | ||
| Republicans from Florida held a news conference to comment on U.S. strikes conducted in Venezuela that saw the country's president, Nicolas Maduro, captured. | ||
| Members expressed their acceptance of Congress not being consulted ahead of the operation and answered several questions from reporters. | ||
| This is about 30 minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
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January 3rd marks a historic day, clearly for the Venezuelan people and for our entire hemisphere, and also for the national security interests of the United States of America. | |
| We warned that what we were seeing in this hemisphere was not political theater, it wasn't a show, that this was real. | ||
| That the President of the United States had been very clear about his policy. |