Kristen Welker Presses Marco Rubio Over Trump Not Getting Congressional Approval For Venezuela Strike | EUROtoday

NBC’s Kristen Welker challenged Secretary of State Marco Rubio over President Donald Trump launching a strike in opposition to Venezuela and capturing its president Nicolás Maduro with out the approval of congress.

The transfer sparked backlash from Democratic lawmakers who argued the motion was “illegal.”

“White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair that an attack on Venezuela’s mainland would require approval from Congress,” Welker informed Rubio on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” “Why didn’t that happen? And will it happen with any future action the administration plans to take in Venezuela or elsewhere?”

Welker was referencing a Dec. 16 interviewby which Wiles informed the outlet that navy motion in Venezuela would require congressional approval.

Rubio pushed again on Welker’s query, telling her that Trump’s strike on the South American nation was “not an action that required congressional approval” as a result of it was “not an extended military operation.”

“This is a very precise operation that involved a couple of hours of action,” he mentioned. “It was a very delicate operation, too. It was one that required all these conditions to be in place at the right time in the right place.”

The former Florida senator went on to argue the mission “couldn’t afford leaks” that “would have endangered the mission and gotten people killed, or killed off the mission in the optionality.”

“We didn’t even know if the mission was going to happen. How can you notify something you’re not even sure if it can happen?” Rubio claimed. “Because in order for it to happen, you needed to have weather conditions in place … there were a lot of factors in place. It was a trigger-based operation.”

He then declared: “This was not an attack on Venezuela. This was a law enforcement function to capture an indicted drug trafficker.”

Welker didn’t let Rubio off the hook. She then grilled him over whether or not the Trump administration will “seek congressional approval for any further action in Venezuela or the region.”

“Well, we will seek congressional approval for actions that require congressional approval, but otherwise they will get congressional notification,” Rubio responded.

Reiterating his declare the operation didn’t require congressional approval, he alleged the operation is “akin to what virtually every single president for the last 40 years has conducted.”

Rubio added: “The difference is that when it’s Donald Trump, you know, all these Democrats go bonkers.”

The secretary of state doubled down on his claims that congressional authorization wasn’t mandatory for Trump’s strike on Venezuela whereas talking with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” Sunday.

“It wasn’t necessary because this was not an invasion,” he informed Stephanopoulos. “We didn’t occupy a country. This was an arrest operation. This was a law enforcement operation.”

Rubio additionally urged Americans to learn the indictment to see “what [Maduro] did for the last 15 years of his life against the United States.”

Watch Rubio’s look on “Meet the Press” beneath.