JD Vance has revealed he was sitting in a van with some friends when Donald Trump’s Nicolás Maduro raid kicked off.
The vice president, 41, confirmed that he had been away from Trump’s famous Florida club on January 3 as Delta Force commandos stormed Caracas to grab Maduro, 63, in Operation Absolute Resolve.
Official photos showed Trump, 79, flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 54, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 45, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, 60, huddled around screens at Mar-a-Lago—with no sign of Vance.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Vance revealed he had been physically in Florida—only parked up miles away with some friends, in what he amusingly described as a “mobile Situation Room.”
“I was in a van,” he said, “in a mobile Situation Room about 20 miles away from Mar-a-Lago,” adding: “I was actually with some friends, and Marco called me probably around 10.30 p.m. and said, ‘This is going to happen tonight.’”
Vance insisted his absence from the iconic photo was all about secrecy, not status. “I travel with a very large Secret Service detail,” Vance said, arguing that a vice-presidential motorcade with sirens screaming up to the club an hour before liftoff could have tipped off adversaries.
Instead, he said, “I would just watch it remotely and ensure that we preserved operational security, which, by the way, we were able to do,” and claimed: “One of the critical reasons that mission was ultimately successful is because no one found out about it.”
Vance told the Mail that Trump was not upset about his absence from Mar-a-Lago on the night of the mission. “I was on the phone with the president and the entire team for about six hours for the entire course of that operation,” he said, adding, “I think it’s funny. The media tries to create something out of nothing.”
The raid, which began around 2 a.m. local time and lasted roughly 150 minutes, ended with Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in U.S. custody aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima before being flown to New York.
There, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged Maduro with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and multiple machine-gun offenses.
Vance’s explanation comes after weeks of speculation that he had been sidelined from the administration’s most consequential foreign-policy gamble.
A widely shared Jan. 6 New Yorker article noted that he was missing both from the war council on the night of the raid and the victory announcement the next day, and suggested his exclusion “may have owed something to ideology.”
When Vance finally defended the strike on X, he “sounded faintly lawyerly and quietly anguished,” the report said. In that post, Vance wrote: “I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing?”
Vance later bristled at suggestions he had been cut out, telling reporters, “I’ve heard a couple of things. One, that I was kept out of the planning for the Venezuela operation—that’s false,” and insisting: “My role is going to be whatever the president asks me to do.”
Trump’s spy chief, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, was also reported to have been deliberately kept out of the loop on months of planning for the Maduro mission, with aides joking that “DNI” stood for “Do Not Invite.”
Polls taken before and after the strike showed most Americans opposed sending troops into Venezuela, leaving the White House scrambling to justify the operation even as Trump boasted that the United States would now “run” the oil-rich state.
Vance has tried to square his anti-war brand with the raid by framing it as a law-and-order move against a “narco-terrorist” regime rather than a full-scale occupation, but critics say the legal theory and endgame remain unclear.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
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