It started with an offhand comment. Late last week, the day after Christmas, Donald Trump appeared on a conservative radio show, and WABC’s John Catsimatidis brought up the administration’s policy of deadly strikes against civilian boats in international waters. The president initially responded with familiar talking points, claiming: “Every time I knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives.”
Moments after peddling this outrageously wrong claim, Trump added a surprising boast. “We just knocked out — I don’t know if you read or you saw, but they have a big plant or a big facility … where the ships come from,” he declared. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So, we hit them very hard.”
If true, this was a dramatic escalation: The Republican has spent weeks talking about his intentions to strike targets inside Venezuela — on land, not just in the water — but there was no indication that any such operations had begun. The president’s on-air comments, however, suggested the U.S. policy had reached an aggressive new level.
It was far from clear, though, what had actually happened. The White House wouldn’t comment on Trump’s claim. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency also refused to shed light on the matter.
We were left with limited options: Either the American president boasted about a strike on a foreign target that didn’t happen, or he disclosed a strike that his administration preferred not to talk about.
While The New York Times and CNN reported that it was the CIA that struck a port facility in Venezuela last week — reporting that has not been independently verified by MS NOW — Trump personally confirmed much of what happened during a brief Q&A with reporters at Mar-a-Lago, though he did so in the clumsiest way possible.
“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” he said. “They load the boats up with drugs. So we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area. It’s the implementation area; that’s where they implement. And that is no longer around.”
Asked whether the U.S. military was responsible for the operation, Trump said: “It doesn’t matter.”
Pushed for greater clarification about whether the CIA was responsible, he added: “Well, I don’t want to say that. I know exactly who it was, but I don’t want to say who it was.”








