00:00This is CNN Breaking News.
00:03Welcome to CNN. I'm Victor Blackwell in Atlanta.
00:06The breaking news this morning.
00:07President Trump says the U.S. carried out large-scale strikes on Venezuela overnight.
00:13He says its president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Celia Flores,
00:16have been captured and flown out of the country.
00:19Attorney General Pam Bondi says both of them have been indicted
00:22and in a social media post says that they will, quote,
00:25soon face the full wrath of American justice.
00:28The Venezuelan vice president says that she has no idea where Maduro and the First Lady are.
00:36Faced with this brutal situation and this brutal attack,
00:40we do not know the whereabouts of President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Celia Flores.
00:45We demand immediate proof of life from the government of President Donald Trump.
00:50Proof of life for President Maduro and the First Lady.
00:53President Trump says that he'll address the nation on the strikes from Mar-a-Lago later this morning.
00:59Right now, it's quiet in the capital of Caracas just hours after the strikes,
01:04but earlier explosions rocked Venezuela, knocked out power, and sent people running outside.
01:10And this strike was at La Carlotta Air Base in Caracas.
01:21CNN's Nick Payton-Walsh joins me now from London.
01:24Nick, we just heard from Issa Suarez speaking with some of her sources in country
01:28about the fear of what could come next because so many questions are unanswered.
01:34Yeah, I mean, let's go through what we know has happened so far since about 1 a.m. local time
01:39and the series of explosions rocked Caracas and other parts of Venezuela,
01:43multiple helicopters seen in the air, and then clearly a U.S. Special Forces operation
01:49that removed Nicolas Maduro and his wife from what should have been their heavily fortified
01:53and secured premises in the capital there.
01:56Hard to understate quite what a move this is geopolitically by the Trump White House
02:01to remove the sitting president of a country which it considers to be a regional irritant.
02:07Startling. Successful, certainly. Daring, certainly as well.
02:11And also efficient, frankly, given what it seems the brevity, comparatively,
02:16of this operation and the impact that it is having.
02:19The Attorney General, Pam Bondi, hinting that the indictments in the Southern District of New York
02:23court will be the ones that Maduro faced.
02:26He had a $50 million bounty on his head,
02:28seeking information that could lead towards his capture.
02:32And it may well be that the delay we're seeing since Trump's tweet in the early hours of this morning,
02:36his 74-word social media post that removed the extraordinary mystery, frankly,
02:42or the unresponsibility of exactly what was happening in the skies of Caracas,
02:48very quickly to explain that, as many as suspected, it was the U.S. military behind this.
02:53It now appears that potentially the delay may be about transferring Maduro inside American soil
03:01for when President Trump addresses the nation about this move.
03:04Extraordinary as it is.
03:06But I think once the, perhaps for Trump allies,
03:09the exhilaration of removing Maduro,
03:12who has been an authoritarian dictator behind violence against protesters and opponents for 13 years,
03:18once that fades, the hard questions now must be answered about what to do with Venezuela's crippled economy.
03:25That has been the reason why Maduro has needed to be authoritarian,
03:28the mismanagement of basic things like inflation foodstuffs that permeates that entire country.
03:34What happens now to Venezuela's military, heavily hit during this brief series of strikes?
03:40I should point out the explosions we've been seeing in these videos,
03:43utterly alien to life in sleepy, peaceful Caracas,
03:47will have terrified the millions who live there.
03:50What is the likely course for Venezuela's political elite?
03:54Is indeed Delce Rodriguez the successor?
03:57Does she immediately seek a detente with the United States
04:00to prevent a similar abduction in the middle of the night occurring to her?
04:05These are all urgent questions.
04:07And I think the key thing here is for the United States to have planned for the aftermath of Maduro
04:13with the same efficiency, detail and resolve as they clearly planned his capture and abduction.
04:20The US military, very good at this sort of thing, be it bin Laden in Pakistan,
04:25Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan,
04:27Maduro, a man with lesser charges against him in Venezuela,
04:32but they fail repeatedly in what comes next.
04:35And I'm sure many in Venezuela will be deeply hoping
04:38that they now see some sort of future ahead of them
04:40where their economic and political problems become part of the United States focus
04:44and they're not just left to see further collapse.
04:47A reminder, the United States, particularly the Trump administration,
04:50wants to see many of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans on US soil go home.
04:55And perhaps a calm and prosperous Venezuela would permit that to happen at a faster pace.
05:00But we are today in unprecedented territory in Moscow and Beijing.
05:04They will be looking at how their ally, Maduro, is suddenly whisked away from a place
05:09where he should have felt security of diplomacy, of the international world order.
05:15He may now soon be in a New York courthouse to face drug charges.
05:18Russia, as I said a moment ago, is now asking for immediate clarification on the U.S. claims that it has captured Maduro.
05:27They'll probably get that.
05:29Nick Payton-Walsh, thanks so much.
05:31Joining us now is CNN senior White House reporter Kevin Liptak.
05:35Kevin, again, we're going to hear from the president at 11 a.m. Eastern, three hours from now.
05:39But I understand you have some new information about how this unfolded.
05:42What do you know?
05:44Yeah, and what we understand is that the president gave the green light for this operation several days ago.
05:51That's according to people familiar with the matter.
05:53It was carried out by the elite Delta Force in the U.S. Army.
05:57That's the same group that captured Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi some years ago.
06:01So, Kylie trained a force that went in to capture Maduro.
06:07They were tracking his location with the assistance of the CIA.
06:11And we know that the president had authorized the CIA to operate covertly inside of Venezuela, you know, some weeks ago.
06:19We saw some of what they were doing just this week when we learned about that strike on a dock facility that the president said was transporting drugs.
06:28But now we're getting a fuller picture of what precisely that agency was doing there.
06:33Now, the goal here is to try Maduro on U.S. soil.
06:37We've been hearing that from officials.
06:38We just heard it explicitly from the attorney general, Pam Bondi, who is citing that indictment in the Southern District of New York that was filed back in 2020.
06:48There was this bounty on Maduro.
06:50And what Bondi says is that both Maduro and his wife will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.
07:00But to be sure, there are plenty of questions here being raised by members of Congress.
07:04It does not appear as if the Trump administration briefed, you know, the relevant lawmakers or the relevant committees before taking that action.
07:12And this morning, it appears that the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has been on the phone talking to senators to discuss some of what happened.
07:22And some of them are revealing a little bit about their discussion.
07:25You know, Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, said that the strikes that occurred in Venezuela were intended to protect the U.S. personnel who were capturing Maduro, that the president was relying on his Article II authority, essentially his authority as commander in chief to conduct foreign policy to carry out these strikes.
07:43And I think most critically, what Rubio told Lee was that he anticipates no further action in Venezuela now that Maduro is in U.S. custody.
07:52So this appears to be it for now, what we've seen overnight.
07:56You know, this is really the culmination of this months-long pressure campaign.
08:01There was, I think, some misgivings on the part of the president some months ago about where all of this was leading.
08:08We heard that from officials that he had some reservations that this could potentially all backfire if Maduro was ousted from power.
08:16Some questions about whether this would be effective, but clearly he has put those to the side and given the green light to go ahead.
08:24You know, I think President Trump is also of the era who will remember a mixed history of U.S. interventions in Latin America, including with the CIA.
08:32You know, today is 35 years exactly since the U.S. arrested the Panamanian dictator, Manuel Nuriego, at the Vatican Embassy in Panama.
08:41So, you know, there is a long, somewhat mixed history for the president to look back on here, but clearly eager to proclaim success in this particular mission,
08:52and I think eager to show that justice will be served for what they claim is a drug trafficking charge.
08:58You know, the objectives in all of this have always, in a way, led to regime change.
09:03That was what the president's ultimate goal was here.
09:06We heard that explicitly from Susie Wiles in that Vanity Fair interview, but you also saw a number of different sort of rationales that the president has laid out,
09:14whether it was curbing the flow of drugs, whether it was curbing the flow of migrants.
09:19You also hear the president talk quite a bit about the oil.
09:23Of course, Venezuela is sitting on the world's largest proven oil reserves.
09:27And so I think when we hear from the president over at Mar-a-Lago down here in Palm Beach at 11 a.m.,
09:33it's likely that we're going to hear sort of a combination of all of that.
09:37And certainly, I think the question of what happens next in Venezuela, what the president has been planning on that front,
09:43whether the U.S. sort of has any role or anticipates any role in stabilizing that country now that the leader has left,
09:51those will be critical questions that the president, I think, I will need to answer for when we see him in a few hours from now.
09:58And Democrats in the Senate are already asking those questions, as we're seeing on social media.
10:03It's Kevin Liptak.
10:04Thanks so much.
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