Secretary of State Marco Rubio is currently in Israel with plans to head to Qatar on Tuesday, but he took some time out today for an interview with Fox News. While he and the reporter, Gillian Turner, discussed numerous topics, his clarification of some mainstream media talking points regarding Venezuela and the United States' anti-cartel activity in the Caribbean is what really stood out to me.
Turner brought up the fact that Venezuela's illegitimate president, Nicolás Maduro, has a "bounty" on his head — the U.S. State Department has offered a $50 million reward for information leading to his arrest and/or conviction — but Rubio shot down that idea and pointed out that this isn't a "bounty" but a jury indictment.
"Well, first of all, there’s no bounty on Nicolás Maduro," the secretary of state said. "What it is, is a reward for an indicted person — here’s what people forget, okay? Nicolás Maduro was indicted by the Southern District of New York. A grand jury returned an indictment. They read the evidence — they saw the evidence. They returned an indictment, not just against him personally but against a network of people in that country who used the apparatus of what they claim to be a government to conduct drug trafficking operations against the United States."
Turner also asked Rubio a question that I know has been on the mind of some of our readers, based on the comments I see in many of my articles on the topic: Why is it not considered a regime change?
Rubio started by explaining that the U.S. and "50-something" other countries around the world do not recognize Maduro and his thugs as the rightful leaders of Venezuela and pointed out that even the Joe Biden administration was smart enough to honor that policy. And then he got right down to one of the main points as to why getting rid of Maduro is in the best interest of our country:
What he is, is someone who’s empowered himself of some of the instruments of government and are using that to operate a drug cartel from Venezuelan territory, much of that drugs aimed at reaching the United States. So we’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere. He’s indicted. He’s a fugitive of American justice. There’s a reward out for his capture. And by the way, related to that, the President of the United States made clear that he’s not going to allow cartels, that cartel or any other cartel, to operate with impunity in our hemisphere and send drugs towards the United States. And he’s going to use the U.S. military and all the elements of American power to target cartels who are targeting America.
By the way, I love that powerful Monroe Doctrine-esque "our own hemisphere" language, but when Turner followed up with a question about meddling in international affairs, Rubio simply responded, "When you traffic drugs into the United States, you’re meddling into the internal affairs of America. When you are pushing drugs towards the United States of America, you are a direct threat to the national security and the national interest of the United States, and that’s what we’re addressing here."
Remember the drug boat filled with Tren de Aragua members that the U.S. military blew up a couple of weeks ago? I'm not sure if you've been paying attention — so much has happened since then that it feels like it was a few months ago instead of just shy of two weeks — but the mainstream media talking point about this is that the poor little terrorists had turned the boat around and were heading back to Venezuela with their drugs, yet we blew them up anyway.
Rubio's response? He said he doesn't know where those reports are coming from, but he clarified the situation and stated that, either way, it doesn't matter: We need to blow some of these boats up anyway to send a message (emphasis mine):
Well, I don’t know where those reports are coming from, and I don’t even know if that’s accurate. But I can tell you that irrespective – there’s a network. And the way this network runs is speedboats with multiple 350-horsepower engines, four of them. They carry drugs to somewhere in the Caribbean. From there, they jump to Puerto Rico. And from Puerto Rico, obviously now they’re in the United States; they’ve crossed the border.
So this is the network, the route that they run. We have 100% fidelity and certainty that that boat was involved in that trafficking of those drugs that ultimately were destined to reach the United States of America. And the President’s made clear: Interdiction alone is not going to stop these drug traffickers. They don’t mind losing 2% or 3% of their shipments. They’ve already sort of baked that into their economic plan.
What needs to start happening is some of these boats need to get blown up. Some of these boats need to be not just intercepted but stopped, no matter what direction they plan to head. We can’t live in a world where all of a sudden they do a U-turn and so we can’t touch them anymore. And I’ll tell you something: Since we did that, the number of boats heading towards the United States suddenly dropped dramatically. Now, maybe they won’t be sustained or continued, but we’re not — and the President’s made clear — we are not going to continue to allow these cartels to flood the United States with drugs, be it through the water or through land.
Meanwhile, as our military presence continues to grow in the Caribbean, President Trump said on Sunday that he's not ruling out a military strike on Venezuela's mainland.
Some in the mainstream media has seemingly sided with Maduro and the cartels on this one, but here at PJ Media, we support the safety and security of the United States. Maduro has become a threat to our national security, and I will continue to do my best to prove it and support Trump and Rubio's mission, even if most other media outlets don't think it's important.
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