President Donald Trump said Monday that unspecified U.S. forces were responsible for an explosion at a marine loading facility in Venezuela, escalating the confrontation with the South American country over alleged drug smuggling.
“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters outside his Mar-a-Lago Club on Monday while greeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “And that is no longer around.”
Trump has been raising pressure on Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, by building up naval forces in the region, seizing oil tankers and destroying 29 boats that U.S. officials said carried drugs, killing at least 105 people since September. The shoreline attack would be the first on land, which Trump has been previewing for months.
Trump declined to say if the military or the CIA carried out the strike. He previously authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations.
“I know exactly who it was, but I don’t want to say who it was,” he said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more information. The Pentagon declined to address questions about the U.S. military’s involvement in the attack. The CIA declined to comment.
The president has declared a “non-international armed conflict” on drug cartels, with officials likening traffickers to al-Qaeda or Islamic State terrorists. Judges and lawmakers from both parties have questioned the administration’s legal authority for the strikes and for fast-tracked deportation of alleged gang members.
Trump first referenced the shoreline attack on Friday in a radio interview with Republican donor John Catsimatidis, saying the strike occurred two nights earlier.
“We just knocked out — I don’t know if you read or you saw — they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from,” Trump said in the interview. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.”
In October, Trump signed a document known as a “finding” that gave the CIA authority to undertake aggressive covert action against the Venezuelan government and associated drug traffickers, according to two people familiar with the document. The document does not explicitly order the CIA to overthrow Maduro, but it authorizes steps that could lead to that outcome, according to the people familiar with it.
Trump’s precise instructions to the CIA are highly classified. The CIA has moved to beef up its presence in the region, surging personnel to the Caribbean and surrounding area to collect human and electronic intelligence, the people familiar with the matter said.
Alex Horton and Tara Copp contributed reporting.
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