US President Donald Trump confirmed on Wednesday that he has authorised the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela and said he was weighing carrying out land operations on the country.
The acknowledgement of covert action in Venezuela by the US spy agency comes after the US military in recent weeks carried out a series of deadly strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. US forces have destroyed at least five boats since early September, killing 27 people, and four of those vessels originated from Venezuela.
Asked during an event in the Oval Office on Wednesday why he had authorised the CIA to take action in Venezuela, Trump affirmed he had made the move.
"I authorised for two reasons, really," Trump replied. "No. 1, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America," he said. "And the other thing, the drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea." Trump added the administration "is looking at land" as it considers further strikes in the region. He declined to say whether the CIA has authority to take action against President Nicolás Maduro.
Trump made the unusual acknowledgement of a CIA operation shortly after The New York Times published that the CIA had been authorised to carry out covert action in Venezuela.
Early this month, the Trump administration declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and pronounced the United States is now in an "armed conflict" with them, justifying the military action as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States.
The move has spurred anger in Congress from members of both major political parties that Trump was effectively committing an act of war without seeking congressional authorisation.
On Wednesday, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said while she supports cracking down on trafficking, the administration has gone too far.
"The Trump administration's authorisation of covert CIA action, conducting lethal strikes on boats and hinting at land operations in Venezuela slides the United States closer to outright conflict with no transparency, oversight or apparent guardrails," Shaheen said. "The American people deserve to know if the administration is leading the US into another conflict, putting service members at risk or pursuing a regime-change operation." The Trump administration has yet to provide underlying evidence to lawmakers proving that the boats targeted by the US military were in fact carrying narcotics, according to two US officials familiar with the matter.
The officials, who were not authorised to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration has only pointed to unclassified video clips of the strikes posted on social media by Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and has yet to produce "hard evidence" that the vessels were carrying drugs.
Lawmakers have expressed frustration that the administration is offering little detail about how it came to decide the US is in armed conflict with cartels or which criminal organisations it claims are "unlawful combatants".
Even as the US military has carried out strikes on some vessels, the US Coast Guard has continued with its typical practice of stopping boats and seizing drugs.
Trump on Wednesday explained away the action, saying the traditional approach has not worked.
"Because we have been doing that for 30 years, and it has been totally ineffective. They have faster boats," he said. "They are world-class speedboats, but they are not faster than missiles." Human rights groups have raised concerns that the strikes flout international law and are extrajudicial killings.
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