US Forces Took Out Drug Boat Facility as Part of Anti-Drug Campaign: Trump

President Donald Trump on Dec. 29 said that the United States had knocked out a loading facility linked to Venezuelan drug boats sometime before Dec. 26 as part of Washington’s ongoing campaign against vessels carrying narcotics to the United States.

On Monday, Trump told reporters that strikes had taken place, confirming that they had been carried out as part of U.S. anti-drug trafficking operations in the region.

“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters from Mar-a-Lago, where he was hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“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.”

Trump added that the site hit was “along the shore,” but didn’t say which U.S. military branch or intelligence agencies had been involved in the airstrike.

Trump had first made mention that U.S. forces had struck “a big facility” involving drug boat operations in a Dec. 26 radio interview, but provided few details at the time.

For days, the comment went unremarked by major media, with the administration not immediately providing any further details on the strike mentioned by Trump. Venezuelan officials also have not commented on the reported strikes or provided additional information.

It’s still unclear when exactly the reported strikes took place.

Asked on Monday whether the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was responsible, Trump demurred.

“I don’t want to say that. I know exactly who it was but I don’t want to say who it was,” Trump said.

Trump has previously stated that the CIA has been authorized to carry out covert operations in Venezuela.

Trump first mentioned the strike—the first of its kind to aim for land targets within Venezuela—during an impromptu interview with John Catsimatidis, a Republican billionaire who owns the WABC radio station in New York.

The president appeared to phone Catsimatidis out of the blue while he was appearing as a guest host on the “Sid and Friends in the Morning” show on the station.

The two men began by discussing the U.S. military Christmas Day strikes on Nigeria, before turning their attention to the Trump administration’s disruption of drug trafficking from South America by striking boats suspected of carrying drugs.

Catsimatidis raised the topic of Venezuela, saying that the country would provide a lot more oil to the United States if Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro were to leave office.

Trump responded by saying that the regime in Caracas “took our oil” and “also sent millions of people in there, from jails into our country, from jail some of the worst people on Earth, Tren de Aragua. They emptied their jails into the United States. As you know, they sell, they send drugs in.”

Trump then went on to say that he had reduced sea-borne drug traffic into the United States by 97.2 percent after introducing the policy of striking the narcotics-laden vessels.

“Every time I knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives. It’s very simple,” Trump told Catsimatidis.

“And we just knocked out, I don’t know if you read or you saw, they have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard,” Trump added, without specifying the exact location of the facility.

If the facility mentioned by the president is in Venezuela, it would be the first known attack on land since the administration began its military campaign against the country.

The Epoch Times has contacted both the White House and the Pentagon for comment, but neither responded by the time of publication.

Trump’s comments come amid a concerted effort by the administration to destabilize the Maduro government in Caracas.

On Dec. 22, the president said that the United States will keep or sell the oil from tankers it seized off the coast of Venezuela in recent weeks.

When asked what he planned to do with the oil, Trump told reporters: “We’re going to keep it. We’re keeping it.”

“Maybe we’ll sell it, maybe we’ll keep it, maybe we’ll use it in the strategic reserves,” he said during a press conference after announcing plans for a new fleet of large warships. “We’re keeping the ships also.”

The comments follow seizures of vessels and the oil they were carrying while sailing through waters off the coast of Venezuela. Trump has declared Maduro’s regime a foreign terrorist organization.

On Dec. 10, the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, seized the first vessel. Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed at the time that the seizure warrant was executed for the crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran.

Bondi said in a post on X, “For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations.”

Victoria Friedman, Emel Akan, and Reuters contributed to this report.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated what Trump had authorized the CIA in the campaign targeting drug trafficking from Venezuela. The Epoch Times regrets the error.