ABC’s George Stephanopoulos attempted to trip up Secretary of State Marco Rubio by asking the same question about Venezuela three different times.
“What is the legal authority for the United States to be running Venezuela?”
And three times, Rubio shut him down.
RUBIO: “I explained to you what our goals are and how we’re going to use the leverage to make it happen.”
“As far as our legal authority on the quarantine, simple. We have court orders. These are sanctioned boats, and we get orders from courts to go after and seize these sanctions. Is a court not a legal authority?”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “Is the United States running Venezuela right now?”
RUBIO: “Well, I’ve explained once again, I’ll do it one more time.”
“What we are running is the direction this is going to move moving forward, and that is we have leverage.”
“This leverage we are using and we intend to use. We started using already. You can see where they are running out of storage capacity. In a few weeks, they’re going to have to start pumping oil, unless they make changes.”
“That leverage that we have with the armada of boats that are currently positioned, allow us to seize any sanctioned boats coming into or out of Venezuela loaded with oil or on its way in to pick up oil.”
“We can pick and choose which ones we go after. We have court orders for each one.”
“That will continue to be in place until the people who have control over the levers of power in that country make changes that are not just in the interest of the people of Venezuela but are in the interest of the United States and the things that we care about.”
“The legal authority is the court orders that we have.”