PALM BEACH, Florida – U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio became visibly annoyed Sunday by ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos as the left-leaning host badgered him about the legal authority America had to capture and arrest Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Appearing on “This Week,” Rubio cited court orders as legal authority for the military operation.
“President Trump was pretty clear yesterday, the United States is going to run Venezuela,” Stephanopoulos asked, alluding to comments by Trump in Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday. “Under what legal authority?”
“What’s going to happen here is that we have a quarantine on their oil. That means their economy will not be able to move forward until the conditions that are in the national interest to the United States and the interest to the Venezuelan people are met. And that’s what we intend to do. So that leverage remains,” Rubio said.
“Let me ask the question again,” the host responded. “What is the legal authority for the United States to be running Venezuela?”
“As far as what our legal authority on the quarantine, very simple, we have court orders. These are sanctioned boats and we get orders from courts to go after and seize these sanctions … is a court not a legal authority?” Rubio asked.
Stephanopoulos responded, “Is the United States running Venezuela right now?”
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“Well, I’ve explained once again, I’ll do it one more time. What we are running is the direction that this is going to move moving forward. And that is we have leverage. This leverage we are using and intend to use, we started using already, you can see where they are running out of storage capacity. In a few weeks they’re going to have to start pumping oil unless they make changes,” Rubio explained.
“And that leverage we have with the armada of boats that are currently positioned allows us to seize any sanctioned boats coming into or out of Venezuela loaded with oil or on its way to pick up oil and we can pick and choose which ones we can go after. We have court orders for each one.”
“That will continue to be in place until the people who have control over the levers of power in that county make changes that are not just in the interest of the people of Venezuela, but are in the interest of the United States and the things that we care about.”
“The legal authority is the court orders we have,” Rubio added.
Also on Sunday, as WorldNetDaily reported, the secretary of state humiliated CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan concerning Trump’s daring weekend capture of Maduro.
BRENNAN: You’re describing the regime as still intact.
Why arrest only Maduro when the police chief and defense minister — both indicted narco-terrorists with multimillion-dollar bounties — are still in power?
RUBIO: You’re confused? I don’t know why that’s confusing. We’re… pic.twitter.com/IaynULOfg7
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) January 4, 2026
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