Rubio stressed that the daring raid to capture former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro was a 'trigger-based operation.'
When pressed by Sen. Chris Coons about why Congress didn’t receive advance notification of the raid, Rubio proposed two explanations: that the operation was contingent on several different factors aligning at an exact moment, and to prevent information leaks.
He began by addressing Coons’s point that the operation had been rehearsed for months prior, so the Trump administration should have been able to address Congress.Trump threatens attack on Iran worse than 'Midnight Hammer' with military buildup in the region “One of the reasons why you rehearse it is to see if it’s even feasible to basically go to the president and say, ‘Is this something that’s even an option on the table?’ The truth of the matter is that this, not even this mission, could not have been briefed to, because it wasn’t even in the realm of possibilities until very late in December, when all of our efforts to negotiate with Maduro had failed, and the president was finally presented these options and made these decisions,” Rubio said. “It was also a trigger-based operation. It may never have happened. It required a number of factors to all align at the right place, at the right time, and a very limited window, and it wasn’t even clear if it was ever going to be possible,” he added. Rubio argued that he wasn’t able to brief Congress on the operation beforehand, even if he wanted to, due to deference to the Pentagon over operational security. “There’s also the aspect which I do not control, and that is to deference the Department of War on operational security, despite the fact that we had kept this quite constrained,” he said.“The truth of the matter is that this was leaked. We now know it was leaked by a contractor in the Department of War, that had it been published, would have endangered the lives of people or would have probably canceled the ability to carry out the mission. So this is a real tension, and one that I’m doing the best I can to try to manage within the constraints of two things, operational security and also decisions being made,” he said., involving scores of Delta Force commandos and other special forces snatching Maduro from the heart of Caracas after a cyberattack and limited bombing campaign. The raid took nearly everyone by surprise, including Congress, some of whom were angered by their lack of previous notification for such a complex operation.
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