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Rep. Jasmine Crockett is blasting the Trump administration’s military actions in Venezuela, arguing that the operation was never really about public safety or stopping drugs.
During a House hearing this week, Crockett challenged the legal and moral rationale behind the U.S. operation that led to the January capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro after weeks of U.S. strikes on alleged drug-trafficking targets.
Maduro was captured in a U.S. raid in Caracas on January 3 after months of U.S. military strikes on suspected drug boats and other targets tied to the administration’s anti-narcotics campaign.
Crockett argued that simply accusing a foreign leader of crimes does not give the United States the right to bomb another country, seize its president, and kill civilians in the process.
Clips from the hearing circulating online show the Texas Democrat using one of President Donald Trump’s most enduring scandals to make that point.
In one widely shared clip, Crockett asks her colleagues to imagine how Republicans would respond “if another country decided to drop in on America, bomb America, kill civilians, because you know we have a warrant for his arrest, whether it’s for child sex trafficking or not,” a reference to Trump’s long-scrutinized ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
She added, "I can guarantee that every single one of you that is sticking up for him right now would be screaming from the rooftops. The analysis has to be the same."
Her broader message was about consistency.
Crockett’s argument came against the backdrop of a U.S. operation that legal experts and Democratic lawmakers have already questioned.
The U.S. strikes against suspected drug boats have reportedly killed 157 people since September 2025, and critics have raised concerns about the legal basis for those operations and the lack of publicly released evidence identifying those killed.
Crockett also accused Trump of pursuing Venezuela for reasons that have more to do with power and profit than public safety. In another clip from the hearing, she says plainly: “It was never about protecting Americans, it was never about bringing democracy to Venezuela, it was never about stopping illicit drugs from entering the country. Like everything else this administration does, it was about corruption.”
Other social media clips summarizing her remarks frame the same argument even more bluntly: that the war was about oil, power and political donors — not the people of Venezuela or the safety of Americans.
That claim lands in a context Trump critics have been raising since the operation began.
The AP reported in January that critics in Latin America and beyond said the raid looked less like a narrowly tailored anti-narcotics action and more like a regime-change operation in a country with some of the world’s largest oil reserves.
Trump has repeatedly claimed, without publicly releasing proof, that Maduro and Venezuela were central to drug-trafficking threats against the United States. The AP also noted at the time that Venezuela is not considered a major source of fentanyl entering the U.S.
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