60 Minutes spotlighted a top Trump foe’s criticism of the astonishing strikes in Venezuela two weeks after CBS News leadership censored a damning episode on the administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants.
Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly, who serves on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said the Trump administration wasn’t thinking ahead when it launched an attack on Caracas and neighboring areas to extract autocrat Nicolás Maduro, 63, and his wife Cilia Flores, 69.
“I think having Maduro out of the country now in New York being prosecuted for his crimes is a positive thing,” Kelly, 61, told 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley. “The big question is just what comes next and who winds up in charge in Venezuela? They weren’t thinking ahead here.”
President Donald Trump stunned the world—and reportedly his own officials—when he announced that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela “until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”
“Now they say they’re gonna run the country. What does that actually mean?” Kelly said. “I think this president needs to do a much better job articulating to the American people what is the plan going forward here? And then explain to the American people, what is this really about?”
Kelly said Trump, 79, has yet to make clear whether the capture of Maduro was about regime change, law enforcement, drug smuggling, or extracting oil.
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment on Sunday.
Kelly and Trump have long been at odds over a number of issues, from immigration to healthcare. In November, Kelly joined several other Democrats in urging military personnel to refuse illegal orders in a video that Trump branded as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
The Daily Beast reached out to 60 Minutes for comment on Kelly’s appearance on the show.
The 60 Minutes episode diving into the U.S. strikes on Venezuela came two weeks after CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss stoked a firestorm by abruptly shelving a segment about the deportation of Venezuelan men to the El Salvadoran megaprison known as CECOT.
The episode, titled “Inside CECOT,” has yet to air. Weiss had insisted that staff interview Trump officials despite the show’s multiple attempts to seek comment from the administration.
But the segment, reported by veteran reporter Sharyn Alfonsi, leaked anyway after it aired on Canada’s Global TV. It included interviews with Venezuelan migrants who revealed the shocking conditions at CECOT.
“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” college student Luis Munoz Pinto said, adding that he did not have access to clean water.
The fiasco broke out after Weiss was elevated to the helm of CBS News by David Ellison, owner of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and friend of Trump.
In an email to her colleagues, Alfonsi said the story was screened five times and cleared by the network’s attorneys and its internal Standards and Practices body.
“It is factually correct,” she wrote. “In my view, pulling it now, cal one.”
Early Saturday morning, the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and neighboring La Guaira, Miranda, and Aragua were rocked by U.S. air strikes targeting military installations that killed at least 40 military personnel and civilians, a senior official told The New York Times. No official death toll has been released.
Trump later announced in a Truth Social post that, “The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country.” He did not seek authorization from Congress to launch the strikes, enraging Democrats and confusing even his own loyalists on Capitol Hill.
Maduro and Flores were seized from a military complex in Caracas. They arrived in New York on Saturday night and were taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn as they await facing federal charges related to cocaine importation and possession of machine guns and destructive devices.
“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in an X post.
In 2020, the Justice Department accused Maduro of leading a drug trafficking operation intended to “flood” the U.S. with cocaine, which the Venezuelan leader denied. In November last year, the Trump administration declared Cartel of the Suns a foreign terrorist organization, bolstering its legal justifications for ousting Maduro.
