MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
President Trump says he is moving his campaign against Venezuelan cartels from sea to land. What does that mean? And why bring the tools of war to bear on drug traffickers? Trump made that declaration in the Oval Office when he was asked about a New York Times report.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?
KELLY: His answer?
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I authorized for two reasons, really.
KELLY: He named immigration, alleging - without evidence - that Venezuela has, quote, "emptied its prisons into the U.S." He also cited drug trafficking. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has carried out a series of strikes on boats in the Caribbean, killing drug smugglers, according to the administration. Now Trump says that campaign is expanding.
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TRUMP: We've almost totally stopped it by sea. Now we'll stop it by land.
KELLY: Justice correspondent Ryan Lucas and Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman joined me on NPR's national security podcast Sources & Methods to discuss where this is going and whether it's actually legal under President Trump's Article 2 powers.
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KELLY: Ryan.
RYAN LUCAS: I've talked to a number of lawyers, former JAGs, law professors. They all have serious concerns about the legal rationale that's provided here. They say that it's full of holes, that it's essentially the president determining on his own, by TikTok, that we are in an armed conflict and that that gives him the right to conduct these armed strikes in essence to kill people on boats in the Caribbean.
KELLY: OK. The other big question - Tom Bowman, what does the president mean when he says the fight is moving from sea to land?
TOM BOWMAN: Well, it sounds like he's going to mount airstrikes on Venezuela itself. So...
KELLY: On what in Venezuela? Do we know?
BOWMAN: No. We have no idea. And again, you're going to war with a country. Once you start striking a country, that's called war. I'm attacking you. We've gone to war with no congressional authorization, with very little information, as I said, to the Hill about exactly what is going on here. He's pushing the envelope of presidential power, clearly. But is this a threat to try to undermine Maduro? I mean, what is this? Do you expect him to just resign?
KELLY: Nicolas Maduro, who is the...
BOWMAN: Correct.
KELLY: ...Sitting president of...
BOWMAN: Correct.
KELLY: ...Venezuela, much to President Trump's chagrin.
BOWMAN: Right. So it just - we have very little information about the way ahead here.
KELLY: Ryan Lucas, you have also been looking into the question of effectiveness. If the goal, as the administration states, is to stop drugs from getting into the U.S., will these strikes work, whether we're talking sea, land, wherever?
LUCAS: Well, I was talking to a former senior DEA official last night who said quite bluntly, no. He doesn't think that this will have any effect, in part because, one, cartels adapt pretty quickly. They will find other routes to get drugs into the United States. And then at a more fundamental level, what the administration says is that they are taking action to stop drugs coming in from the Caribbean - cocaine and fentanyl.
This is problematic for a couple of reasons. One, fentanyl, I am told, does not come up through the Caribbean via maritime routes. Fentanyl generally comes over the U.S.-Mexico border. And two, 75- to 80% of the drugs that come into the U.S. via the maritime route come via the Pacific, not the Caribbean. So if you really wanted to address the bigger, outstanding issue of drugs coming into the U.S. via maritime routes...
KELLY: We're in the wrong ocean (laughter).
LUCAS: Exactly. And the other thing is that the vast majority of the drugs that come via the Caribbean route come from Colombia. Roughly 80% come from Colombia, not from Venezuela. They're coming from Colombian cartels, such as the Clan del Golfo, ELN. A lot of them come through the Dominican Republic as, like, a way station, but I've also been told by multiple sources that there has been an increase in cocaine cultivation recently. And so what we're seeing now is more and more the cocaine from the Caribbean is being sent to Europe - will go on boats up to the Dominican Republic and then will be sent to Europe.
So the administration saying that they know for certain that the boats that they're hitting are drugs that are coming to the United States is questionable because it's hard to say whether you know that that load, that one single boat that you're hitting, is indeed drugs that are going to come to the U.S., which would be the direct threat to the United States, or whether those drugs are instead going to Europe.
KELLY: Which all prompts a reasonable question of, are there other goals in play here? For example, regime change - President Trump in his first term wanted to see Nicolas Maduro ousted from office in Venezuela, but he's still there.
BOWMAN: Well, first of all, if you say, where do you go after drugs and you start blowing up drug boats, again, it seems illegal - for what Ryan was just saying about there are civilians on board and there's not a direct threat to you. If you openly say, I'm sending the CIA into another country, clearly to undermine that leader, I guess the reason would be he wants to see Maduro go one way or another.
KELLY: NPR's Tom Bowman and Ryan Lucas talking about the escalating U.S. campaign against Venezuela on NPR's national security podcast, Sources & Methods. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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