Rep. Jamie Raskin waited longer than some of his fellow Maryland Democrats to weigh in on America’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, but some points he made in a lengthy statement Sunday seemed to prompt a response from Vice President JD Vance.

The United States conducted a surprise military operation in Venezuela’s capital of Caracas early Saturday, which culminated in Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, being whisked out of Miraflores Palace and flown to New York City, where they now sit in a notorious Brooklyn jail. Maduro, 63, has ruled Venezuela with an iron fist since taking over for socialist dictator Hugo Chávez in 2013.

Justification not genuine?

In his statement on the situation, Raskin echoed fellow Democrats calling President Donald Trump’s actions unconstitutional because he did not consult Congress about the operation. But he also suggested that the Trump administration using drug trafficking as a justification for removing Maduro from power was not genuine.

Raskin pointed to Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was who was sentenced to 45 years in 2024 after a federal jury found him guilty of importing cocaine. Hernández and his co-conspirators trafficked “more than 400 tons of U.S.-bound cocaine through Honduras” during his time in government, according to the Department of Justice.

“Amazingly, the president wants the people to think his unconstitutional war reflects his concern about illegal drug trafficking just one month after he pardoned the drug-dealing ex-president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, commuting his 45-year sentence after one year Hernández brought in 400 tons of cocaine to America or 800,000 pounds, saying he was going to ‘stick it up the nostrils of the gringos,’” Raskin said, quoting Hernández’s use of the Latin American word for predominantly white, non-Spanish speakers.

In a social media post Sunday, Vance said he wanted to address “claims that Venezuela has nothing to do with drugs because most of the fentanyl comes from elsewhere.” He wrote that while most fentanyl trafficked into the United States comes from Mexico, there is “still fentanyl coming from Venezuela (or at least there was).”

Vance continued by naming cocaine as the primary substance coming from Venezuela and described the drug trade as a “profit center for all of the Latin America cartels.” By “cutting out” the funds of cocaine primarily flowing through Venezuela, the vice president said cartels would be substantially weakened overall.

“If you cut out the money from cocaine (or even reduce it) you substantially weaken the cartels overall,” Vance wrote on X. “Also, cocaine is bad too!”

Vance’s post did not address Trump pardoning Hernández after the Honduran leader was convicted of charges similar to those now outlined in a Justice Department indictment against Maduro. The indictment accuses Maduro of using “his illegally obtained authority and the institutions he corroded to transport thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States.”

“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don’t act like that,” Vance wrote on X, referring to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Trump said during a news conference Saturday that American oil companies will “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure.”

‘Putin must be celebrating’

Raskin’s statement acknowledged Maduro as a “brutal tyrant” while suggesting the Trump administrator could take similar military action against other “equally brutal dictators… all over the world.”

“If Trump can invade Venezuela’s sovereign boundaries, take over the country and kidnap Maduro on the grounds that he is a vicious dictator, any other country with the will and the way can do the same thing elsewhere,” Raskin wrote. “Indeed, Vladimir Putin must be celebrating this act of naked imperialism because it gives validation to its own filthy imperialist war on Ukraine. China harbors similar designs perhaps on Taiwan. America should be leading the world in upholding the rules-based international order, not leading the world in trashing it.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin does not appear to be celebrating America’s capture of Maduro, as Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the move “causes deep concern and condemnation” in a statement Saturday. Maduro and Putin are considered allies, with the Russian leader publicly supporting his Venezuelan counterpart’s 2024 election victory while most of the world condemned it as rigged.

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