Congressional Democrats said they were still being kept in the dark on Sunday, with no information provided to them by the Trump administration about the dramatic military action to capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela a day earlier, despite their demands for classified briefings.
“I’m a member of the Gang of Eight, and I have yet to get a phone call from anybody in the administration,” Representative Jim Himes, the Connecticut Democrat who serves as the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday on CNN. The Gang of Eight refers to the Republican and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, as well as the chairs and ranking minority members of each chamber’s intelligence committees. Together, the group is typically briefed on classified matters.
Mr. Himes said he had spoken with Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the House minority leader, who had also received no phone call from the administration.
In the wake of President Trump’s announcement on Saturday of the attack on Venezuela and the extraction of Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, Mr. Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who is the Senate minority leader, called for the administration to immediately brief Congress. They asked for the administration’s plan “to prevent a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster that plunges us into another endless war or one that trades one corrupt dictator for another.”
But on Sunday, the leaders said they were still in the dark. Senator Schumer appeared on ABC’s “This Week” to outline the questions he still had about the operation.
“How long do they intend to be there?” he said. “How many troops do we need? How much is it going to cost, what are the boundaries?”
Mr. Jeffries, speaking on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” said he did not trust Mr. Trump to run one country, much less two. “Donald Trump claims that he’s going to run Venezuela,” he said. “He’s done a terrible job running the United States of America.” And he added that Democrats would prioritize taking legislative action to rein in Mr. Trump when Congress returned to Washington this week, “to ensure that no further military steps occur absent explicit congressional approval.”
During a news conference in Palm Beach, Fla., on Saturday to announce the attack on Venezuela, Mr. Trump said he had circumvented Congress because he did not trust its members to keep his plans confidential.
“Congress has a tendency to leak,” Mr. Trump said.
On Sunday, Mr. Himes said the president was required to brief lawmakers whether or not he wanted to.
“Whether you think Congress leaks or not, the law says you must brief Congress,” he said. “This is just another example of absolute lawlessness on the part of this administration.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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