President Donald Trump on Saturday provided more details on an operation in Venezuela that led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro.
Trump, in an early morning social media post, announced Maduro’s capture.
Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, later announced that the whereabouts of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, remained unknown. Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, said Maduro and Flores, would face charges after an indictment in New York.
Before Maduro and his wife were taken into custody, the U.S. conducted a “large-scale strike” against Venezuela.
During a phone call with Fox News, Trump said that the strikes on Venezuela and the capture of Maduro were slated to happen four days ago, “but the weather was not perfect.”
“The weather has to be perfect,” he said.
“We had, you know, very good, a little bit a little bit few more clouds than we thought, but it was good,” he added. “We waited four days. We were going to do this four days ago, three days ago, two days ago, and then all of a sudden, it opened up, and we said go.”
The president also told Fox News that he saw the operation live.
“I was able to watch it in real time, and I watched every aspect of it, and I listened to the communication between, you know where we were in Florida and, and out in the field in Venezuela,” the president told Fox News. “It was amazing to see the professionalism, the quality of leadership, the professionalism.”
According to two U.S. officials familiar with the planning. President Trump approved the U.S. military and law enforcement actions in Venezuela more than a week ago.
Approval for the plan came before Christmas, and apparently when the mission would actually occur has been discussed almost hour by hour since then.
During the operation in Caracas, President Trump said some U.S. forces were injured in the strike, but he believes ‘we had nobody killed.’
According to one U.S. official and one White House official, several U.S. troops were injured, and all of them remain in stable condition.
Maduro’s captured came after Trump threatened that he could order military strikes on targets on Venezuelan territory after months of attacks on boats accused of carrying drugs from the South American country.
Before the escalation, there had been 35 known strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in South American waters since early September that killed at least 115 people, according to announcements from the Republican administration.
Maduro and his wife are now heading to New York, where they were indicted.
Bondi said Maduro will “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”
Maduro’s political career began 40 years ago. In 1986, he traveled to Cuba to receive a year of ideological instruction, his only formal education after high school. Upon his return, he worked as a bus driver for the Caracas subway system, where he quickly became a union leader. Venezuela’s intelligence agencies in the 1990s identified him as a leftist radical with close ties to the Cuban government.
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