[00:00:00] Speaker 1: There's a lot to unpack about the ramifications of this weekend's events, but I want to first begin with all the new details we are learning about what is being dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve. And President Trump spoke about the dramatic capture of President Maduro yesterday.

[00:00:16] Speaker 2: It was a lot of gunfire. You saw some of it today. But he was trying to get to a safe place, which wasn't safe because we would have had the door blown up in about 47 seconds, they say, on average, regardless of how thick the seal was. It was a very thick door. It was a very heavy door, but he was unable to get to that door. He made it to the door. He was unable to close it.

[00:00:41] Speaker 1: All right. Joining me now is retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton. So Colonel Leighton, walk us through just how this dramatic mission was carried out.

[00:00:49] Speaker 3: Yeah. So this is one of the greatest aspects of it, Manu. Just real quick to orient everybody. This is Venezuela. David Culver is here on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. And the U.S. strikes in Venezuela hit all of these different target areas, everything from the Naval Academy to the port to an airbase, La Carlota, as it's known, antenna sections, the Fortuna military base, and an airport over here. So everything basically around Caracas was what was hit. So one of the key things here is, you know, just exactly how they did this. So this is one of the antenna farms that they have there. And here is something that is really important. This is basically the before picture. So take a look at all these buildings. Now let's look at after the strike, and especially right here. What used to be a standing set of structures, all gone. And similar right here. This again is at Fortuna, the before picture, a little bit of a closeup here. And what that shows you is this is actually disappeared. So the strike was very, very precise. And there are several of them. And, you know, when you go back to the big map here that shows all the different areas that they struck, they really spent a lot of time figuring out not only what to hit, but how to hit it and what would be the most effective munition to go after that. And when they did this, they brought in all these assets, including 150 aircraft of various types, these fighters like the F-22, the F-35, the F-18s, B-1 bombers even, helicopters, of course, for the extraction force. These came from 20 different bases, of course, months of preparation. And to do all of this, they started at 1046 Eastern Friday, p.m. Eastern. That's when the president ordered them to move forward. Once they did this, they made sure that they had all of these 150 aircraft in the air. They arrived at the compound at 101, and they were able to capture Maduro within minutes, basically. And at 1029 a.m. on Saturday morning, they were over the water, meeting outside of Venezuelan territory and basically ready to go.

[00:02:51] Speaker 1: Can I just ask you real quickly, how did they get into the compound and really, given all the guards, how fortified this compound was?

[00:02:58] Speaker 3: Well, basically what you do is you find the areas where there are weaknesses, and, you know, you have areas in the fence line that you can probably penetrate. They may have had explosive devices that they use. Usually what they'll use is they'll have like these satchel bombs that they can put in there and they basically like dynamite and they blow it up. They were prepared to cut through Maduro's safe room. They could have done it, as the president said, in 47 minutes or less, and they were ready to do that. They didn't have to do that specific thing, and that made it easier for them to get out at that particular moment in time.

[00:03:33] Speaker 1: One of the most stunning things yesterday was Trump just openly admitting that the United States wants to go in, take all the oil reserves, and actually move ahead and extract that oil, sell the oil, get the money from these oil sales. Walk us through exactly what that means.

[00:03:48] Speaker 3: So let's take a look, Manu, at the oil reserves here, and what's really important is this right here. Venezuela has 303 billion barrels of oil reserves, and you compare that, it's the biggest set of oil reserves in the entire world. Bigger than Saudi Arabia, bigger than Russia, bigger than the UAE, and that is something that is really, really important. Now when you look at daily oil production, what you have here is how bad the infrastructure in Venezuela actually is. From 2013, they were able to produce almost 3 million barrels per day. Go down to 2024, they produce less than a million a day, and that is the key thing here. The infrastructure in Venezuela, lots of oil, but the problem is the infrastructure actually is decrepit. It is not producing the oil that it needs to.

[00:04:36] Speaker 1: All right. Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton, thank you so much for your expertise, and I've got an excellent group of reporters to break this down even further. Politico's Dasha Burns, David Sanger with the New York Times, and Sung Min Kim with the Associated Press. Good morning to you all. David, I want to start with you about, you've been covering this for so long, what's happening with Venezuela. The question everyone has is how are they going to run this country? Trump says they're going to run it, and you have the vice president, now they said it is the interim president, Delsa Rodriguez, saying she's not going to just allow the United States to come in and run the country, so how is this going to play out?

[00:05:16] Speaker 4: So Manu, this is the great contrast in what we've seen happen here. As you could see from Cedric's description, this was an incredibly precise military operation, and I think the president and Secretary Hegseth and others were right when they said there's probably no other country in the world that could step in and pull this off in basically two and a half hours. Obviously months of planning, Cedric didn't mention it, but they even built a model in Kentucky of the entire facility that they were going to be doing so that they could invade it and invade it again and practice this whole thing. The astounding contrast here, Manu, is that there's this high that comes from grabbing the bad guy, in this case an indicted, alleged drug trafficker. I haven't run across many Venezuelan friends who are sorry to see him go. He stole the last election. So there's that part. And then there's the stunning next part where the president says, we're going to run the thing. Well, he actually got elected president in part on the argument that the forever wars were ill-conceived, that we don't know how to go do this. And you add to this the very naked grab for the world's largest oil reserves. It's reasonable to assume that there are people on the ground, a lot of them, in Venezuela, a country of 30 million people, who are going to say, we're perfectly happy you got rid of Maduro. That does not give you rights to our oil reserves.

[00:06:52] Speaker 1: I mean, that's really the contrast, as you point out. The precision of this strike, months of planning, CIA on the ground, the way that it was carried out. But what about the planning for the aftermath? Has there been planning for the aftermath to this extent? And I mean, Trump yesterday was asked all sorts of questions. Will there be boots on the ground, troops? He really didn't have many details.

[00:07:13] Speaker 5: Way more questions than answers at this point. And Manu, look, if someone had told me when I was covering Trump on the campaign in 2024 and he was talking about grocery prices, anecdotes about how Melania wouldn't let him buy bacon because it was too expensive, talking about immigration. If someone had told me then that we would be doing regime change in Venezuela within his first year of his term, I would have told you you were crazy. Now, the way that some White House allies are framing this is that they get to message this as a law enforcement operation, that the warrant for his arrest, that he's a narco terrorist, that they get to say this wasn't regime change. Yes, that was a byproduct of what we did, but that's not necessarily the intention. But then Trump goes out and says, we're going to run the country. And one of the sources that was telling me how great a message this was then heard that and said, oof, because clearly that was the response, because then that wipes out so much of what they had tried to build as the way to bring some of the MAGA isolationist folks along. Now, they're not they're not rebelling just yet, I think, in part because we don't know what we run the country is actually going to mean. And that's where the political risk is. It's all about what happens next.

[00:08:23] Speaker 1: And I mean, there's just so many questions the American public has. I mean, look at this CBS poll from just a few weeks ago. Has the Trump administration, Claire, clearly explained the position on the U.S. military action in Venezuela? Seventy three percent say no, because they had not explained that this is about regime change.

[00:08:40] Speaker 6: Right, right. And those are the concerns that you're also hearing from Congress as well. But going back to the the fact that there are just so many more questions and answers right now, even throughout the day yesterday, the president gave conflicting answers to these very key questions that the public has had. For example, at his press conference, when he was asked about potential boots on the ground, he seemed pretty willing to say that he was willing to put troops there saying we're not afraid of the concept of boots on the ground. But then later in an interview with The New York Post, he very much backtracked on that. So you're just going to see these questions develop through, you know, through the next several weeks. Obviously, the relationship, if one exists, between the Trump administration and Delce Rodriguez, he seemed to imply yesterday that she told Secretary Rubio that they will coordinate with the administration. Now, she said something opposite, something completely opposite, which may have been for internal affairs. Sure, sure. But also just, I found his answer when he was asked about Marina Correia Machado really interesting when, you know, he's saying that she does not have the support to run Venezuela when he when the administration had been very supportive of her as the opposition leader. Just all those dynamics, I think, will be really fascinating to watch in the weeks to come.

[00:09:59] Speaker 1: No question about it.