President Donald Trump delivered a speech on Jan. 3 to address the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The United States captured Maduro and his wife in an overnight military operation on Jan. 3, Trump said, as explosions rocked Caracas and targets across the country.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Late last night and early today, at my direction, the United States Armed Forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. Overwhelming American military power, air, land, and sea, was used to launch a spectacular assault, and it was an assault like people have not seen since World War II. It was a force against a heavily fortified military fortress in the heart of Caracas to bring outlaw dictator Nicolas Maduro to justice. This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history. And if you think about it, we’ve done some other good ones like the attack on Soleimani, the attack on al-Baghdadi, and the obliteration and decimation of the nuclear sites just recently in an operation known as Midnight Hammer, all perfectly executed and done. No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday or, frankly, in just a short period of time. All Venezuelan military capacities were rendered powerless, as the men and women of our military, working with U.S. law enforcement, successfully captured Maduro in the dead of night. It was dark. The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have. It was dark, and it was deadly. But captured along with his wife, Celia Flores, both of whom now face American justice, Maduro and Flores have been indicted in the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, for their campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens. I want to thank the men and women of our military who achieved such an extraordinary success overnight with breathtaking speed, power, precision, and competence. You rarely see anything like it. You’ve seen some raids in this country that didn’t go so well. They were an embarrassment. If you look back to Afghanistan or if you look back to the Jimmy Carter days, they were different days. We’re a respected country again, like maybe like never before. These highly trained warriors operating in collaboration with U.S. law enforcement caught them in a very ready position. They were waiting for us. They knew we had many ships out in the sea, just sort of waiting. They knew we were coming. So they were in a ready – what’s called a ready position. And – but they were completely overwhelmed and very quickly incapacitated. If you would have seen what I saw last night, you would have been very impressed. I’m not sure that you’ll ever get to see it, but it was an incredible thing to see. Not a single American service member was killed, and not a single piece of American equipment was lost. We had many helicopters, many planes, many people involved in that fight. But think of that. Not one piece of military equipment was lost. Not one service member was, more importantly, killed. The United States military is the strongest and most fearsome military on the planet by far. With capabilities and skills, our enemies can scarcely begin to imagine. We have the best equipment anywhere in the world. There’s no equipment like what we have. And you see that even if you just look at the boats. You know, we’ve knocked out 97 percent of the drugs coming in by sea. Ninety percent. Each boat kills 25 – on average, 25,000 people. We knocked out 97 percent. And those drugs mostly come from a place called Venezuela. And we’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious, because that’s what we’re all about. We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country. It’s their homeland. We can’t take a chance if somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind. We’ve had decades of that. We’re not going to let that happen. We’re there now. And what people don’t understand, but they understand as I say this, we’re there now, but we’re going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place. So we’re going to stay until such time as – we’re going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place. As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust – a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so. So we were prepared to do a second wave if we needed to do so. We actually assumed that a second wave would be necessary, but now it’s probably not. The first wave, if you’d like to call it that – the first attack was so successful, we probably don’t have to do a second, but we’re prepared to do a second wave, a much bigger wave, actually. This was pinpoint, but we have a much bigger wave that probably won’t have to do. This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America – a country that everybody wants to be involved with because of what we are able to do and accomplish – will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe. And it will also make the many, many people from Venezuela that are living in the United States extremely happy. They suffered. They suffered. So much was taken from them. They’re not going to suffer anymore.

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