Live updates: Rubio testifies before Senate panel on US operations in Venezuela

The Washington Examiner’s coverage of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has concluded.

Rubio discussed the progress of peace talks in the Russia-Ukraine war during his Wednesday Senate hearing.

He pointed to the fact that the United States agrees on the need for security guarantees for Ukraine.

“I think you could argue [security guarantees are] agreed to from our side of the equation. There’s obviously a Russian dynamic at play here. And of course, any security guarantees would come into play after the conflict were to end,” Rubio said.

Rubio did note the administration’s position on the need for NATO allies to increase their security capabilities, pointing out that member countries have committed to investing 5% of GDP in defense by 2035.

“Every notion of security guarantee that’s been talked about and that the Europeans have pushed is one that requires a strong commitment by the United States as a backstop, which you know, in essence, means we would be committed in a future conflict,” Rubio said.

He also agreed to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s (D-NH) request for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing with a State Department representative on the negotiations over the war in Ukraine. Shaheen said the committee has not had a hearing on the topic since President Donald Trump took office.

Rubio told Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) that oil executives learned about the U.S. ouster of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro at “the same time everybody else did.”

“In the case of Venezuela, President Trump has said he talked to oil executives about toppling Maduro and going into Venezuela before anyone in Congress knew,” Van Hollen said.

Van Hollen was referring to comments President Donald Trump made on Air Force One following the capture of Maduro, when he told reporters he spoke to oil companies “before and after” the operation.

“The oil companies were absolutely aware that we were thinking about doing something,” Trump said. “But we didn’t tell them we were going to do it.”

Van Hollen asked Rubio if he was with Trump for any of his conversations with oil executives about the possibility of ousting Maduro from power.

“I couldn’t be with him because it never happened. The oil executives were not involved whatsoever in any of the planning on this matter,” Rubio said in response.

“I think all of those executives learned about this operation the same time everybody else did,” Rubio continued.

When Van Hollen pushed back, telling Rubio that Trump has publicly said the opposite, Rubio interjected, “No, no, no, no.”

Rubio wrapped up his hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just before 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday.

The hearing lasted almost three hours, with Rubio discussing U.S. foreign policy in places such as Venezuela, Greenland, Ukraine, Iran, and Cuba.

Rubio is scheduled to travel back to the State Department for a meeting with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. The secretary of state discussed Machado in his Senate hearing, telling lawmakers that he has worked with her for over a decade.

“What we’re trying to trigger here is a process of stabilization, recovery, and transition to something where Maria Corina and others can be a part of,” Rubio said.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) pressed Rubio on Trump‘s decision to lift temporary protected status for Venezuelans in the U.S. in light of advisories issued to U.S. citizens traveling to Venezuela.

Booker bashed the decision as one of “hypocrisy” as the U.S. has issued human rights cautions about drug cartels and the possibility of threats to Americans in Venezuela.

“We have an administration that has said very clearly that they’re not only going to be lifting temporary protective status for Venezuelans living in the US, but instead of protecting longtime American residents, the administration is putting people back on deportation flights and sending them into that madness,” Booker said.

The secretary backed the revocations of TPS, which were initially announced in February.

“The problem with temporary protective status was it was granted to so many people in such a vast numbers, so quickly, without proper vetting by the previous administration,” Rubio said. “There’s a real concern that there were gang members that had received TPS simply because of the nation they came from and the time in which they came.”

Rubio said the TPS program under the Biden administration was so inflated that the Trump administration “felt it had to cancel the program in order to appropriately vet it through.”

But Booker again pushed back on Rubio’s assertion, saying he “doesn’t trust” the Trump administration and its use of the word “terrorist.”

“We’re taking people who have lived in our country for years and years and years, and sending them back into that hell, where they can be targeted, where they can be abducted, where they can be held for hostage because they know they have American family members that are still here,” he said.

Rubio said that the Trump administration would “love” to see regime change in Cuba, hinting at future action in the country.

At his Wednesday hearing, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) asked Rubio if the Trump administration would rule out regime change in Cuba, to which Rubio reacted with consternation.

“Regime change? Oh no, I think we would love to see the regime there change,” Rubio answered. “That doesn’t mean we are gonna make a change, but we would love to see a change. There’s no doubt about the fact that it would be of great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime.”

Vice President JD Vance chimed in on X to praise Rubio, his Cabinet colleague and friend, for the way the Secretary conducted himself during his back-and-forth exchange with Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL).

“Watching Tammy Duckworth obsessively interrupt Marco Rubio during this hearing is like watching Forest Gump argue with Isaac Newton,” Vance wrote.

“Thank God we have a Secretary of State who knows his facts AND has the patience of Job. Great job, @SecRubio,” Vance continued.

Vance was referring to a clash between Duckworth and Rubio, in which the two disagreed over President Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. Rubio affirmed, in this conversation, that the United States is “not in a state of war with Venezuela.”

Rubio and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) got into a heated back-and-forth about President Donald Trump’s invocation last year of the 18th-century wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants.

Duckworth asked the secretary during her time whether he would advise the president to revoke his invocation of the act because he and other administration officials have said the United States is not currently at war with Venezuela.

“That was a mechanism to remove people from our country that present a great danger,” Rubio said, explaining that while the U.S. isn’t at war with the country of Venezuela, the Tren de Aragua gang is “waging war on the United States” from the country.

Before the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, the legality of which is still going through the courts, it has been used three times in U.S. history: during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.

Rubio reaffirmed that the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela during Wednesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

“No, we’re not in a state of war with Venezuela,” Rubio said.

“The fact of the matter is that we are confronting these irregular groups, and that’s one of the great challenges of the new century in this hemisphere in particular,” Rubio told the committee. “These non-state actors who possess state-like capabilities in terms of their weaponry pose a grave danger to the United States.”

His comments came in response to a question from Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), as the two clashed, with Duckworth interrupting as she pressed the secretary on the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.

Senate Democrats voiced their displeasure with the Trump administration’s backing of acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez at Rubio’s hearing.

“It is very frustrating to me that we still have a repressive regime in power in Venezuela, suppressing human rights, yet we are cooperating with them. We are funding them, and we’re not calling out the ridiculousness of the violence that’s going on there,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said.

“I know that you’re telling us today just to be patient, but a month later, we have no information on a timetable for a democratic transition. Maduro’s people are still in charge,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Rubio. “Most of the political prisoners are in jail, and by the way, those that have been let out have a gag order on them from the government. The opposition leader is still in exile. This looks already like it is a failure.”

“I’m concerned that we haven’t really changed the regime enough, and that America’s dollars are still going to drug runners and to significant organizations who we don’t want to have benefit from the funding that we’re selling now of oil and providing to Venezuela,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) said.

Rubio acknowledged that Rodriguez is not ideal for the administration either, but that the men “with guns” and in control of the levers of power would not accept a direct democratic transition at the moment. He used Spain and Paraguay as examples of transitions from autocratic to democratic regimes.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who dubbed himself “probably the most anti-war person in the Senate,” pressed Rubio on the notion that Venezuela does not consider former dictator Nicolás Maduro’s capture an act of war.

“I would ask you, if a foreign country bombed our air defense missiles, captured and removed our president, and blockaded our country. Would that be considered an act of war?” Paul asked Rubio.

Paul noted that many Trump administration allies have argued that the actions against Venezuela have been “kinetic actions or drug busts.” Paul argued that if the circumstances were reversed, “it becomes very difficult for these arguments to hold up.”

“We just don’t believe that this operation comes anywhere close to the constitutional definition of a war act,” Rubio responded. The secretary of state made the points that the operation lasted only four and a half hours and that it was “a law enforcement operation to capture someone we don’t recognize as a head of state,” who had a U.S. bounty on his capture.

Paul pushed back, calling the Trump administration’s argument a “one-way argument.”

“But would it be an act of war if someone did it to us? Nobody dies, a few casualties. They’re in and out. Boom. It’s a perfect military operation. Would that be an act of war? Of course, it would be an act of war! I’m probably the most anti-war person in the Senate, and I would vote to declare war if someone invaded our country and took our president,” Paul said.

Rubio fired back, saying, “We didn’t remove an elected official,” referring to Maduro.

“Ultimately, we’re always going to act in our national interests,” Rubio said. “We’re always going to do what’s best for the United States and America. We’re always going to protect our system.”

Rubio denied to lawmakers that the United States is imposing a “blockade” around Venezuela regarding its foreign oil sales, which he said would amount to “an act of war.”

“Just to be clear, it’s a quarantine, not a blockade,” he said. “A blockade is an act of war. It’s a quarantine, and it’s been very effective.”

The distinction from the secretary is notable, given the administration’s strategy of exerting control over Venezuelan oil sales. Prior to the U.S. military presence in the region, the Venezuelans participated in the shadow fleet used by Iran and Russia to evade Western sanctions and international maritime law.

The U.S. has seized about half a dozen oil tankers around Venezuela since early December that were reportedly operating as part of the shadow fleet.

A quarantine is defined as a law-enforcement-led operation to control maritime or air traffic within a specific area, while a blockade is foremost a military effort, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Rubio gave a hopeful message to Venezuelans living in Florida, saying their homeland would need many to return home to help rebuild.

Addressing Venezuelans in Florida, Rubio said, “For the first time in over a decade and a half, there is the real possibility of transformation, and a lot of it will depend on them, because there are many people living in Florida and across the country who would like to go back and be a part of Venezuelan economic life.”

“Many of them are eager to do so and work. They’re going to need them. Venezuela is going to need them to come back and rebuild the businesses that were taken or lost and engage themselves in both civilian and economic life,” he added.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) ripped Rubio for not appearing before the Senate in a public testimony since the boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea began.

“We started this operation on Sept. 2 [2025] with the attack on Venezuelans and boats in open waters. Now we are nearly five months in, next week is five months. Finally, a public hearing! Wow, how novel. Finally, a public hearing in the Senate or House,” Kaine said.

Rubio and War Secretary Pete Hegseth have given U.S. lawmakers several closed-door, classified briefings on the alleged drug-trafficking boat strikes and Venezuela, though this is the first public hearing. Kaine said he has not been able to explain intricate details of the U.S.’s policy in Venezuela with members of the public because the Trump administration “has only shared it with members in a classified setting.”

“I have Virginians deployed in this operation. I can’t answer their families’ questions. Thank God we’re having a public hearing five months in,” Kaine said.

More than an hour into Rubio’s hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the secretary appears to be responding to questions from Democratic members of the panel with poise, particularly over the Trump administration’s strategy for Venezuela and NATO.

The most pointed Democratic questioning came from the likes of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who criticized Rubio for only making himself available to the committee “five months” into the United States’s aggressive tactics concerning so-called “narco-terrorists” off the coast of Venezuela before the administration’s capture of former dictator Nicolas Maduro on Jan. 3.

“I’d like to talk about the complete weakness of the legal rationale about the strikes on boats in international waters, but I can’t because the administration has only shared it with members in a classified setting,” Kaine said.

Similarly, Rubio defended the administration’s decision not to seek congressional approval before Maduro’s capture, part of Operation Absolute Resolve, reiterating that it was a “trigger” based mission.

“Mr. Secretary, the Gang of Eight has never leaked,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said. “It is critical that you consult with Congress for us to be safe. Our allies have to trust us. And for this committee to do our work, we have to trust you. Let’s work together.”

But Democrats also acknowledged their agreement with some of the Trump administration’s approach, especially its opposition to Maduro and the need for European countries to contribute more to NATO.

“I must say that you said something I like,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) said.

Rubio quipped in reply: “I’m making progress.”