Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York said President Donald Trump’s extraction of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro was similar to how preceding presidents “have done foreign policy.”
U.S. troops attacked Caracas, Venezuela, and captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on Saturday. York asserted Trump’s authority on the matter while on Fox News’s Fox Report with Jon Scott on Sunday.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of opposition to this,” York said. “A lot of Democrats are saying this was a bad idea, or it should’ve been done in consultation with Congress. The fact is presidents of both parties have done this kind of stuff for many, many years without seeking the permission of Congress beforehand, and maybe just barely telling them afterwards.”
“What the president did is entirely in line with what previous presidents have done in foreign policy,” York added.
Maduro’s capture happened on the 36th anniversary of the day the U.S. military abducted the acting leader of Panama, military strongman General Manuel Noriega. At the time, U.S. troops remained in Panama for a week before detaining Noriega.
Meanwhile, the Army’s most elite unit, Delta Force, completed its mission on Saturday in two hours. No U.S. military members were killed during the operation, but six were injured.
TRUMP SAYS US ‘IN CHARGE’ OF VENEZUELA, NEW LEADER IS ‘COOPERATING’
York explained that a military response was warranted for Venezuela because the country is accused of “sending hundreds of thousands of migrants to the United States or engaging in drug trafficking that hurts the United States.”
A senior Venezuelan official told the New York Times on Sunday that the death toll for Operation Absolute Resolve had increased to 80 Venezuelans, including civilians. That does not include the large part of Maduro’s security team that was also killed, as this security team, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was “entirely controlled by Cubans” as Maduro “had Cuban bodyguards.”