Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Sunday that any new leadership in Venezuela would be required “to meet our demands” after the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“When the president said the United States is going to be running Venezuela, it means that the new leaders of Venezuela need to meet our demands,” Cotton told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” “Our demands are now what they were before yesterday, that we want them to stop the drug trafficking, we want them to stop the weapons trafficking.”
“We want them to expel the Cubans and the Iranians and the Islamic radicals, and we want them to return to the civilized world,” he added.
On Saturday, President Trump said that the U.S. would “run” the South American country up until a transition after Maduro’s capture.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said in a news conference. “We don’t want to be involved with having somebody get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”
Democratic lawmakers criticized the Trump administration after the president announced that the U.S. had captured Maduro and gone through with a “large scale” strike in the country.
Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., specifically targeted Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the operation, noting comments both had made during briefings last year.
“Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress,” Kim said on the social platform X.
GOP allies, meanwhile, have applauded the move.