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.”
The obvious significance of this relates to U.S. foreign policy and the possibility of an escalating offensive in South America, but there’s another dimension to this that’s also worth appreciating. There’s usually quite a bit of secrecy surrounding operations like these, though Trump appears to have disclosed the developments anyway by just blurting them out. Indeed, this keeps happening. In October, the Times reported that the president had “secretly authorized” the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela. And just hours after the article reached the public, Trump confirmed the whole story. NBC News reported at the time, “The CIA’s operations abroad are usually shrouded in secrecy, but President Donald Trump said Wednesday he had authorized it to take unspecified action in Venezuela, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgment from a commander in chief.” Two months later, these extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgments are still happening. Trump has a scandalous record of blurting out sensitive national security secrets for no apparent reason. The fact that he keeps adding to the list is extraordinary.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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