Congress not notified ahead of operation to remove Maduro, Trump says
WASHINGTON — Congress was not notified ahead of the U.S. operation to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump said Saturday.
“Congress has a tendency to leak,” Trump said during his Mar-A-Lago press conference this morning.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the operation to oust Maduro “was not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on.”
Rubio added: “It was a trigger-based mission, in which conditions had to be met night after night. ... So it's just simply not the kind of mission you can call people and say, ‘Hey, we may do this at some point in the next 15 days, but it's largely a law-enforcement function.’ ”
Notifying lawmakers ahead of the operation, he said, would have endangered the mission.
Laura Figueroa Hernandez is the White House correspondent and previously covered New York City politics and government. She joined Newsday in 2012 after covering state and local politics for The Miami Herald.
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