Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly told “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos that court orders to seize ships subjected to sanctions backed American military operations against Venezuela during a contentious exchange Sunday.
President Donald Trump announced early Saturday morning that U.S. military forces, including the Army’s elite Delta Force unit, captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and removed him and his wife from the country. ABC News’ Stephanopoulos kept pressing Rubio about the justification for the operations, even after he had already cited the court orders as legal authority. (RELATED: Jonathan Turley Predicts If Maduro Indictment Will Be ‘Accepted By The Courts’)
“President Trump was pretty clear yesterday, the United States is going to run Venezuela,” Stephanopoulos asked, referring to remarks the president made at a press conference from the day before. “Under what legal authority?”
“What’s going to happen here is that we have a quarantine on their oil. That means their economy will not be able to move forward until the conditions that are in the national interest to the United States and the interest to the Venezuelan people are met. And that’s what we intend to do. So that leverage remains,” Rubio said.
“Let me ask the question again,” the host responded. “What is the legal authority for the United States to be running Venezuela?”
“As far as what our legal authority on the quarantine, very simple, we have court orders. These are sanctioned boats and we get orders from courts to go after and seize these sanctions … is a court not a legal authority?” the Secretary of State asked.
This prompted Stephanopoulos to respond, “Is the United States running Venezuela right now?”
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“Well, I’ve explained once again, I’ll do it one more time. What we are running is the direction that this is going to move moving forward. And that is we have leverage. This leverage we are using and intend to use, we started using already, you can see where they are running out of storage capacity. In a few weeks they’re going to have to start pumping oil unless they make changes,” Rubio replied. “And that leverage we have with the armada of boats that are currently positioned allows us to seize any sanctioned boats coming into or out of Venezuela loaded with oil or on its way to pick up oil and we can pick and choose which ones we can go after. We have court orders for each one.”
Trump declared during a Saturday press conference on the operation that captured Maduro that the United States was “running” Venezuela, saying Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would be in charge.
“That will continue to be in place until the people who have control over the levers of power in that county make changes that are not just in the interest of the people of Venezuela, but are in the interest of the United States and the things that we care about,” Rubio said.
“The legal authority is the court orders we have,” Rubio added.
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