WASHINGTON >> Democratic members of the U.S. Congress said today that senior officials of President Donald Trump’s administration had misled them during recent briefings about plans for Venezuela by insisting they were not planning regime change in Caracas.
The comments came after the U.S. attacked Venezuela and deposed its long-serving President Nicolas Maduro in an overnight operation, in Washington’s most direct intervention in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama.
In briefings in November and December by officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, lawmakers said they were told repeatedly that there were no plans for a land invasion inside Venezuela and that the administration was not focused on regime change.
“Because the President and his Cabinet repeatedly denied any intention of conducting regime change in Venezuela when briefing Congress, we are left with no understanding of how the Administration is preparing to mitigate risks to the U.S. and we have no information regarding a long-term strategy following today’s extraordinary escalation,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement on Saturday.
“Instead, the administration consistently misled the American people and their elected representatives by offering three differing and contradictory explanations for its actions,” Shaheen said.
The Pentagon, State Department and White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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(U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz in a statement called the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela “illegal and unconstitutional.”
(“President Trump is jeopardizing American lives and interests — and stating plainly that the purpose is for U.S. oil companies to make money in Venezuela,” the Hawaii Democrat said. “Either these companies knew about these plans in advance, or he’s ordering corporations to be a part of his effort to overthrow another government. This operation is illegal under international law and unconstitutional without prior congressional approval.”
(“The United States should not be running other countries for any reason. We should have learned by now not to get involved in endless wars and regime change missions that carry catastrophic consequences for Americans.,” Schatz said.)
Several lawmakers said they felt they had been lied to.
“The administration lied to Congress and launched an illegal war for regime change and oil,” Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said on X. Beyer’s district includes the Pentagon, just across the river from Washington.
At a news conference today, Trump said Congress had not been kept fully informed on the Venezuela plans because of concerns that word about his plans would get out. “Congress does have a tendency to leak,” Trump told reporters.
Members of Congress, including some of Trump’s fellow Republicans as well as Democrats, had been clamoring for more information about his strategy toward the oil-rich South American nation since he began a military build-up in the southern Caribbean and ordered strikes on boats he said were carrying drugs.
Democrats had emerged from those meetings dissatisfied. “I asked them what their strategy is, and what they were doing, and again, did not get satisfying answers at all,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told reporters at the time.
Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts said on CNN: “When we had briefings on Venezuela, we asked, ‘Are you going to invade the country?’ We were told no. ‘Do you plan to put troops on the ground?’ We were told no. ‘Do you intend regime change in Venezuela?’ We were told no. So in a sense, we have been briefed, we’ve just been completely lied to.”
Lawmakers said they were not briefed before the operation, although Rubio had been calling members of Congress on this morning after it took place. There were no briefings for lawmakers scheduled by this afternoon, although Republican congressional leaders said they hoped to arrange some after lawmakers return to Washington on Monday following their year-end recess.
Most Republicans praised Trump’s action.
Senate Republican Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said: “President Trump’s decisive action to disrupt the unacceptable status quo and apprehend Maduro, through the execution of a valid Department of Justice warrant, is an important first step to bring him to justice for the drug crimes for which he has been indicted in the United States.”
Members of Congress have long accused presidents from both parties of seeking to sidestep the Constitution’s requirement that Congress, not the president, approve anything other than brief and limited foreign military action.
On Venezuela, Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans had said even before the overnight action that they were worried that Trump was conducting a four-month-long military campaign without congressional authorization.
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser contributed to this report.