Schiff: “He promised no more foreign wars, no more nation building, this is a big militaristic middle finger to the MAGA base by Donald Trump. We are now very much back in regime change business, and we are just being overt about it.”
Washington, D.C. — Last night, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MS NOW’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the Trump administration’s military actions against Venezuela to arrest and detain Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. The Senator raised alarm about the President’s unclear plan about how his administration will “run Venezuela,” emphasizing that they continue to dodge questions on the real motive behind their military campaign in Venezuela: gaining access to and profiting off of the nation’s oil reserves.
Schiff also highlighted how this week he and his colleagues will force a vote on the War Powers Resolution to block U.S. military action in Venezuela that he introduced with Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).
View the full interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On the Trump administration’s clear motive behind the military campaign in Venezuela, moves for regime change and oil profits to line the pockets of Trump’s billionaire buddies:
[…] Rubio is just adding one lie to another. For months and months, as they engaged in these boat strikes, they claimed this was about narcotics, it was not about regime change. They just wanted to stop these drug boats from coming to the United States, even though they weren’t bound for our shores. Tim Kaine, myself, Rand Paul offered War Powers Resolutions to bring an end to this. They had bipartisan support, but not enough to pass. But nevertheless, the administration persisted: “This is about drugs.”
Even after Donald Trump pardoned a former drug running president of Honduras, insisted “This is about drugs, not regime change.” Now they’ve gone in, used the military, grabbed Maduro, this heinous leader of Venezuela, and his wife.
[…] If this were about drugs and not regime change, you would think that was the end of it. But no, they say they’re going to run the country now, that “we’re going to run Venezuela,” and the reason they have been oddly transparent about it for the first time, it’s about oil. It’s about oil. It’s about the oil wealth of Venezuela, which has reportedly some of, if not the largest oil reserves in the world. What we seem to see is Donald Trump’s campaign promise to the oil industry that if they spend hundreds of millions or a billion dollars on his campaign, he would richly reward them. We are now seeing that reward. But in terms of that MAGA base that you were talking about, Lawrence, that he promised no more foreign wars, no more nation building, this is a big militaristic middle finger to the MAGA base by Donald Trump. We are now very much back in regime change business, and we are just being overt about it. We will use our military. We will depose foreign leaders if we can have access to their mineral wealth.
On concerns around the administration’s intervention in order to profit off oil:
[…] Arguably, at the time, for example, of Iraq, George W. Bush made a different kind of argument. He made an argument about trying to bring democracy to the region, if you’ll remember, that was part of one of his inaugural addresses. There was at least a nod to democracy. Here, there’s not even a nod to democracy. If there is, it’s disdainful shrug when [Trump] was asked about the now Nobel Prize winning opposition leader, he denigrated her, saying, “Well, she doesn’t really have the support. She doesn’t have the wherewithal.” She has a lot more support than Donald Trump. She has 72% approval in Venezuela – double Donald Trump’s approval on the economy here in the United States. But he doesn’t even make the pretense of that. He is just overt about it.
This is about oil. If it was – as Marco Rubio put it, as you pointed out – this is all about bringing Maduro to justice in the U.S. courts, it’s a law enforcement operation, nothing more, than what explains Trump saying we’re going to run the country. If this was merely an apprehension of a fugitive, that wouldn’t require us to run the country. But we are going to apparently be running the country through the number two of this corrupt Maduro regime, the former vice president now, I guess, acting president. So, we’ve only changed the top of the regime, but we are going to work with that corrupt drug running regime if it will give us access to oil.
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