Rubio Appears to Backtrack on Trump’s Pledge to Have the U.S. ‘Run’ Venezuela

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday appeared to contradict President Donald Trump’s assertion that he and other U.S. leaders would “run” Venezuela after a stunning military operation over the weekend resulted in the arrest of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and thrust the future of the South American nation into uncertainty.

Instead, Rubio suggested that the U.S. would use its military to create “leverage” over the Venezuelan government currently in place, forcing it to take the White House’s preferred course of action.

“What we are running is the direction that this is going to move forward. And that is, we have leverage,” Rubio said when asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos whether he or other high-level American officials were currently in charge of the Venezuelan government. “That leverage that we have with the armada of boats that are currently positioned, allow us to seize any sanctioned boats coming into or out of Venezuela, loaded with oil or on its way in to pick up oil. And we can pick and choose which ones we go after.”

During a separate interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rubio lamented that “people keep fixating” on Trump’s statement, describing U.S. involvement as “running policy.”

“We expect to see changes in Venezuela, changes of all kinds, long term, short term,” he added. “We want Venezuela to move in a certain direction, because not only do we think it’s good for the people of Venezuela, it’s in our national interest.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether an oil quarantine is what Trump was referring to when he suggested that the U.S. would “run the country.” “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,” Trump said on Saturday during a press conference from his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort. “We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela, that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind.”

The White House has yet to release any details about whether the U.S. will push for new elections in Venezuela or seek to install its own interim leadership, similar to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003.

Trump’s comments took many in Washington by surprise. His former Venezuela envoy, Elliott Abrams, told CNN’s Manu Raju on Sunday that “The United States cannot run Venezuela. … It’s just not going to work.”

“Nobody else used that word ‘run’ until he did,” Abrams said of Trump. “My thought is that it didn’t appear in some paper done through a long interagency process — that it just came out of the president and that nobody else expected to run Venezuela. It would be extremely difficult.”

Prior to their capture, the Department of Justice charged Maduro and his wife with four counts of narco-terrorism, corruption and illegal possession of automatic firearms. Maduro is expected to appear in court early this week.

The arrest of Maduro comes after a months-long campaign of airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have resulted in the death of at least 115 people since the strikes began in September.

Rubio told Stephanopoulos on Sunday that the White House did not need congressional approval to carry out the arrest of Maduro — an operation that included apparent strikes on a military complex in Caracas, the country’s capital. Several Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have criticized the administration for failing to notify or brief members of Congress before acting on its plans.

When asked about the decision to keep Congress in the dark, Rubio insisted that it was not a military operation and instead was a simple arrest conducted by U.S. law enforcement agencies.

“It wasn’t necessary because this was not an invasion. We didn’t occupy a country. This was an arrest operation,” Rubio said Sunday. “You can’t congressionally notify something like this for two reasons. Number one, it will leak. It’s as simple as that. And, number two, it’s an exigent circumstance. It’s an emergent thing that you don’t even know if you’re going to be able to do it.”

As to what he hopes to see from the new acting Venezuelan president, Delcy Rodríguez, Rubio said he wants the oil industry be “run for the benefit of the people,” a halt to “drug trafficking” and “gang problems,” the removal of Colombian militant groups Farc and the ELN, and that its rulers should “no longer cozy up to Hezbollah and Iran in our own hemisphere.”

“We are going to judge whoever we’re interacting with moving forward by whether or not those conditions are met,” Rubio said.

Rodriguez was sworn in as the country’s interim leader on Saturday, with Trump quickly declaring that she was on board with the administration’s plans for the country.

“She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said at a press conference on Saturday.

Rodriguez, on the other hand, gave a differing account of her intentions in a speech two hours after Trump’s, saying Venezuela is “determined to be free.”

“What is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity,” she continued. “The Venezuelan people will no longer be slaves or the colony of an empire.”

Rubio on Sunday confirmed he’s had conversations with Rodriguez, but said he does not consider her leadership legitimate.

“This is not about the legitimate president. We don’t believe that this regime in place is legitimate via an election,” Rubio said on ABC, without giving any details on what comes next for Venezuela’s government.

As for the administration’s next moves, Rubio said that the U.S. does not plan to stop pushing for changes in the region — and implied in his interview with NBC that action against Cuba may be on the horizon.

“The Cuban government is a huge problem,” Rubio told host Kristen Welker in response to a question about whether the Cuban government is the Trump administration’s next target. “I think they’re in a lot of trouble, yes.”