Return to Transcripts main page

Inside Politics

Sources: CIA Conducted Drone Strike On Port Facility In Venezuela; Renamed Trump- Kennedy Center Met With Backlash; Zohran Mamdani To Be Sworn In As NYC's Mayor On January 1. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired December 30, 2025 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:00:00]

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR: It could be a significant escalation. A CNN Exclusive on the first known strike inside Venezuela. I'm Phil Mattingly, in for Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines in Inside Politics.

And we begin with that CNN Exclusive. The CIA carried out a drone strike on a port facility on Venezuela's coast this month. That's according to sources familiar with the matter. Now, the strike marked the first known U.S. attack inside Venezuela. Sources telling CNN, the U.S. government believe the remote port was used by the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.

Knowledge of the strike comes amid a series of strikes on more than 30 boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that the Trump administration claims are used to transport drugs, President Trump initially revealed the strike himself during a radio interview last Friday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

VOICE OF DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: And we just knocked out, I don't know if you read or you saw, they have a big plant or a big facility where they send the -- you know, where the ships come from. Two nights ago we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: I'm joined by a terrific group of reporters, including CNN's Natasha Bertrand who is one of the reporters on this CNN Exclusive. Nice to get a tip on a really big story from the President of the United States on a radio interview that I don't think a lot of people were listening to at the time but walk people through kind of the consequence of this. Why this is important right now?

NATASHA BERTRAND, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, look, I mean, I don't think we'd even know that this happened if it wasn't for what President Trump had said because this was meant to be a covert operation. This is conducted by the CIA. It was not conducted by the U.S. military, and for that reason, obviously, it was kind of a sabotage operation, the kind that the CIA conducts pretty routinely in countries around the world, and it was meant to be kept under wraps, but then the President obviously revealed it in a radio interview.

But this could be very significant, because it does mark the first time that we've seen the U.S. attack a target inside Venezuela itself. To date, before we found out about the strike, all we knew was that the U.S. was attacking targets in international waters, using the U.S. military.

They were attacking Venezuelan -- suspected Venezuelan drug trafficking boats, perhaps carrying people affiliated with Tren de Aragua, but actually attacking a target inside the sovereign territory of Venezuela itself. That is a significant escalation. And we know that the President had authorized the CIA earlier this year to expand its operations inside Venezuela and around Latin America, writ large.

So this is something the CIA has been given kind of a blank check to do by the President. But you know, I think one of the big things that we're going to have to look out for is how Maduro, the Venezuelan President responds to this, because, according to our sources, it's not clear that the Venezuelan government even knew that this strike occurred prior to President Trump revealing it publicly, because it was in a very remote area of Venezuela, it was on a port facility that is used -- suspected to be used by drug traffickers.

And so it didn't raise a lot of attention inside the country. But now, of course, now that it's public, Venezuela might feel compelled to respond in some way.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, that actually goes a long way to explaining the kind of ambiguous nature of the initial response we saw from the Venezuelan government. I think everybody was trying to figure out the scale of this. Michelle, the President was asked about this yesterday, before Natasha and our colleagues were able to pin this down, pin the scoop down. This is what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: There was a major explosion, and the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs. They load the boats up with drugs. So we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area, it's the implementation area. That's where they implement and that is no longer around.

REPORTER: Was the facility taken out by the U.S. military, or was it another entity like the CIA?

TRUMP: Well, I don't say that. I know exactly who it was, but I don't want to say who it was, but, you know, it was along the shore.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Our colleague, Kevin Liptak doing a great job of pool duty yesterday. I think there's been some talk of, I can't believe the President was the one who kind of outed this operation. He's the president. He can kind of do what he wants here. I think the bigger question is to Natasha's point, we knew the CIA had gotten sign off to take actions. They've now taken at least one action that we know of. Where does it

go from here?

MICHELLE PRICE, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: Well, I think to that point we know that the CIA was authorized because the President said so. This is again a thing that presidents typically don't reveal. This President has been very proud to tout any kind of action he's taking that seems kind of muscular, like this, or, you know, these strikes.

But from here, you know, we've heard the President say that there will be strikes on land, that they're going to continue to up this pressure. This feels like a notch up, but there's still room for there to be, obviously, much more escalation should the White House choose to go that way. The fact that we haven't seen a response yet from Venezuelan government, nor the Venezuelan opposition party, it feels like the U.S. is still kind of waiting to see how this is proceed before they another action. We hear -- hear what will be next?

[12:05:00]

MATTINGLY: Stephen, the escalatory ladder here, in these types of situations, you talk to military officials, and there's all -- this comes and this comes and this -- where are we in that process at the moment?

STEPHEN COLLINSON, CNN POLITICS SENIOR REPORTER: I think this is fairly moderate. We're fairly low level. If this was, as it looks to be, a PSYOPs operation to build pressure on Maduro and those around them, there's almost no point conducting an operation like this unless everybody knows about it.

Maybe that's why the President came out and started saying, here's what we did. Clearly, they're going up an escalatory ladder, as you say, but you get to a point when you start to think, OK, what's next? And you've got that big armada of ships in the Caribbean off Venezuela. The next steps come with a bigger price and come with more prestige that the president must throw into it.

Missile attacks, more overt drone attacks, even the use of U.S. ships off an aircraft carrier, the Ford. That puts a lot more skin in the game politically for the president. What we don't know is how this is playing inside the Venezuelan regime. Is it building pressure on Maduro? Are people there starting to think?

Well, we don't necessarily really need to go through this whole cycle with Maduro. Are we going to topple him? It doesn't seem that that's taking place. And in that sense, the operation and the ladder of escalation is not working now, and that creates the question of, what are the stakes they're going to raise, and what does the President do next?

MATTINGLY: And I think Arlette, that's one of the things that I've been trying to figure out, is where are lawmakers on this, right? And counter intuitively, I'm going to ask you about Stephen Collinson's great piece from last night, because I think this flows into the Capitol Hill reaction and where they stand on this going forward and Stephen's piece is, how Trump is trying to MAGAfy the world in a second term.

Trump is acting as the global head of a nationalist political movement seeking to shape partisan politics in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, South Korea, Venezuela, South Africa and across the Atlantic. The kind of robust nature of this element of his foreign policy isn't just Democrats have issues with it. There are Republicans as well who have raised some concerns about it.

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, and Democrats have expressed unease with the President's actions in Venezuela, but there have been a handful of Republicans. The question is, is an act like this really going to make more Republicans think that the Trump administration has crossed the line?

So far, we have seen the majority of Republicans standing with President Trump, whether it relates to his actions, relating to Venezuela, thinking about Ukraine, but there are those you think about, like Rand Paul, who very explicitly disagrees with Venezuela.

Murkowski, Josh Hawley have warned against the potential of sending troops on the ground in Venezuela. Will this type of action open the door to that? That's something that Republican lawmakers going forward are really going to think about. But really there has been a continued coalescing from Republicans around President Trump's foreign policy strategy, and it's unclear whether this will make anyone move en masse towards opposing what he is doing.

BERTRAND: And we should note that the use of the CIA to conduct this operation could be seen as yet another way to bypass Congress, because if you're using the U.S. military, you strike on land, that is essentially a declaration of war which Congress has not authorized. And so by using the CIA under this Title 50 authority, which allows them to conduct these covert operations, you don't necessarily need permission from lawmakers.

So I think it's, it's going to be -- remain to be -- it remains to be seen whether they fill them in on this and how they react following this news. Because --

MATTINGLY: Can I ask you, since we have you, which I'm grateful for your time. I know things are super crazy right now in your world, which is like an evergreen statement on national security issues, but the dynamics inside the administration on Venezuela in particular.

There was a deep dive from the New York Times. Trump's Maduro pressure campaign comes from Rubio and Miller. It reflects overlapping drives from Mr. Rubio and Mr. Miller, who have worked in tandem on policies against Mr. Maduro. Each has come to it with a focus on long held goals. How is it working inside the administration? Who's driving it? Who's leading it? Are there people that are saying, I don't know that we want to go this route?

BERTRAND: It's interesting, because they kind of coalesce in their ultimate goal of, you know, wanting to appear tough on drugs, wanting to appear tough on Maduro. Obviously, Stephen Miller has been a main driver behind this policy for months now, because he believes that it could serve as kind of a pretext, also to a mass expulsion of Venezuelan nationals inside the United States, back to the country.

And then you have Marco Rubio, of course, who is very much in tune with the Florida constituency, who is very much opposed to Maduro. And so I think these coalesce into one broader picture where this overall strategy, though, remains unclear. What is the ultimate goal here? Is it to get Maduro out of power? Is it actually to stop the flow of drugs? Because right now, neither is happening. And so that, I think, is the big question that lawmakers especially have. What. Is the overall strategy here, and what is the end game?

[12:10:00]

MATTINGLY: Yeah, no question about it. All right, we got a lot more to get to. Great reporting as always, my friend. Stay with us, the rest of the panel. Up next, quote, financially devastating, but morally exhilarating. The risks and fallout as more artists cancel shows at the renamed Kennedy Center.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTINGLY: Tomorrow night, the New Year's Eve countdown in the Trump Kennedy Center will sound differently than originally planned. The Cookers, a jazz group scheduled to perform two new year's eve performances, has canceled. While the group did not give details behind the decision, one band member, Billie Harper, shared in a Facebook interview quote, I would never even consider performing in a venue bearing a name and being controlled by that -- the kind of board that represents overt racism and deliberate destruction of African American music and culture.

[12:15:00]

A New York based Dance Company, Doug Varone and Dancers, is also canceling two shows in April, a decision that the head of the company told The New York Times was, quote, financially devastating but morally exhilarating. It joins the likes of several stars, including those involved with Broadway musical Hamilton, canceling performances.

We're back here at the table. Collinson, I think the thing that I get stuck on with this is I feel like the Trump administration loves this on some level. In fact, like read the quote from Richard Grenell, who's now the Kennedy Center president, posted on X, the artists who are now canceling shows were booked by the previous far left leadership.

Their actions prove that the previous team was more concerned about booking far left political activists rather than artists willing to perform for everyone, regardless of their political beliefs. He calls it a form of derangement syndrome. The arts are for everyone, and the left is mad about it.

COLLINSON: Historically, the Trump administration and the President particularly, has welcomed these cultural fights against what they regard as left wing entertainers. It helps the president come across in his preferred persona as the outsider, somebody that is taking aim at cultural taboos, etc.

And I think you can have an argument about whether the National Art Center, which is basically what the Kennedy Center is in the Capitol, has had programs that have perhaps trended liberal in recent years, whether that reflects the whole country, but the arts are generally a pretty liberal arena. A lot of the performers are fairly liberal.

And ultimately, I think they're going to have a marketing issue here, because a lot of the people that subscribe to the Washington National Opera, the National Symphony Orchestra, they come from the Washington D.C. area, which is, as we know, is an area where the President isn't particularly popular. So this whole idea that the President has saved the Kennedy Center, which he said was in real financial trouble, as well as its own, you know, physical infrastructure.

That could be challenged if they struggle to get programs and patrons of the arts who are on the liberal side of politics see it almost as an act of personal resistance, of not showing up to a building that's got Trump's name on it.

MATTINGLY: Michelle, the -- if you look at the board now of the Kennedy Center, boardman Trump -- Kennedy -- I'm not really sure what we're calling it right now. I don't think Congress has weighed in yet, so I'm just going to say that place where people do things. Rick Grenell, Usha Vance, Dan Scavino, Sergio Gor, presume he zooms in from India for their conference calls, Susie Wiles, the Chief of Staff. I mean, it is a full blown like we're taking this over. This is ours.

The name is just the latest, and I think most public version of what has been in place or been -- they've been putting in place now for the better part of the entire year.

PRICE: Right and this -- that's the inner circle. That's most of the inner circle, or some of the core folks of the inner circle here. When that name change happened, we heard from one board member who said that she tried to unmute herself and was unable to. And the story we got from the White House was that the vote was unanimous to add the president's name to this.

Obviously, there seems to be some dispute about that, but we have seen this president try to put his mark, and literally his name, on many institutions here in Washington. Or, you know, there was some reporting that he wanted his name on the Washington -- the football stadium that is being rebuilt. His name is on the Institute of Peace. And then there's the renovations that the President is doing everywhere.

He's been doing it to the White House. He's been talking about painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. It's gray right now. It's a gray stone. We saw the President posting last week these images of these marble armrests that he wants to install at the Kennedy Center. He'd already been doing other renovations there.

This is a fixation on a lot of cosmetic details in addition to just programming that the President -- there's been no detail that's been too small for him to be interested in at this point.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, we're showing you a picture of the armrest right now, which like, I could just picture House Republicans going into a midterm election year like seeing that and like throwing their phones against the walls, wondering why we're posting about marble arm rests. It was interesting. There's been obviously a lot of criticism from people you would expect on the renaming, including Maria Shriver, who posted on X.

Next thing, perhaps he will want to rename JFK Airport, rename the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Jefferson Memorial, the Trump Smithsonian, the list goes on. Maria Shriver, obviously, with a very real familial connection there. To Michelle's point, like the naming of all the things. Why?

SAENZ: Yeah, I mean, Trump considers himself to be a cultural icon. Think about the Trump Hotel, all of his industries, the apprentice. He thinks that he can put his stamp on U.S. culture and U.S. history by the renaming and remaking of this. But this is a president who feels -- one, he feels that he is a cultural person, that he should be leading some of the charge on this, but he also wants to have his legacy on everything that he touches.

And that's part of the reason you are seeing these attempts to rebrand, the attempts to build a giant Ballroom in place of the East Wing, putting that gold plated Oval Office sign outside of the Oval Office. He wants Trump touches to be everywhere in this country, even in these cultural institutions.

MATTINGLY: Michelle he can though, to be clear, I think the one thing that I've -- I'm not totally sure about, is the renaming of the actual Kennedy Center as the Trump Kennedy Center. But like everything else he's done, there's nothing that's standing in his way on some level at this point.

[12:20:00]

PRICE: At this point no. You know, there's something that he may not have done himself, but that he may have expressed interest in, or we've heard he might have expressed interest in, such as the football stadium. But you're right. I mean, we -- and we've seen other presidents do things like these White House -- some White House renovations or things, but not on the scale that this President has, and not on this ongoing -- it's almost like tinkering.

Like every time we go to the Oval Office, we see little more gold here and there, little more signs that it just, it seems like a continuous project for this President.

MATTINGLY: And I think Stephen, kind of where I'm getting with that, is this administration has pushed the boundaries on executive power, executive authority, on every single issue you can think of. And that was their goal. That is the plan. They want the fight, if the fight is going to come. They've also proven that a lot of the norms, or the guardrails in Washington that prevented things like this were just that norms or guardrails. There weren't statutory elements barring this, and that includes the

Smithsonian, which got another letter from Vince Haley, domestic policy advisor, Russ Vought, the OMB -- very powerful OMB director, saying, look, 60 percent of your funding is from appropriations. OMB has got a pretty big role in that. We have a lot more requests that we want you to answer, like they can do this stuff because they can control the funding at some level.

COLLINSON: Yeah, and I think previous presidents that you and I have covered, for example, were well aware that they had the power, but most of them decided not to use it because they considered, well, if the president becomes too powerful, then you're creating all sorts of other constitutional questions. What the Trump administration has done is it's identified those stress points where it can push and get very little resistance.

I think it will be very interesting in future to see a Democratic president come in. They're going to be under a lot of pressure, especially from the progressive wing of the party, to use exactly the same methods that the Trump administration has used to push their priorities, which perhaps previous Democratic presidents decided they didn't have the power to do.

Remember, on the issue of the Dreamers, the President Barack Obama once said, I just can't, you know, sign my name and change the law. Well, that's exactly what President Trump has been doing for the last 11 months, and I think it's a good chance that, if you don't have a reaction from Congress pulling back some of that power, the next Democratic president is going to use some of the same tools, although perhaps not to the same extreme extent.

MATTINGLY: There will certainly have pressure to do so by the Democratic base. I keep thinking in my head there's this famous Mitch McConnell speech during the judicial fights of the 2005-2006 era, where Harry Reid did something, McConnell's on the floor saying, like, careful what you wish for. This could come back and bite you sooner. I'm paraphrasing, Leader McConnell, sorry, but this feels very much like that moment at some point in the future. Plenty to watch. No doubt about it.

All right, in just over 24 hours, Democratic Socialist well, will be sworn in to run America's largest city. We're talking to an expert in New York City politics about Zohran Mandani's upcoming inauguration. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:25:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTINGLY: At the stroke of midnight on January 1, Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as New York City's new mayor during a private ceremony. Just hours later, the Democratic socialist will hold a public inauguration ceremony featuring the two leaders of the progressive movement, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will introduce Mamdani and Senator Bernie Sanders will administer the oath of office.

Mamdani will become the youngest mayor of America's largest city and brings with him an ambitious and politically divisive agenda. Our next guest knows New York City politics extremely well. He moderated the mayoral debate with Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa with Saturday Night Live, even spoofing it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERROL LOUIS, POLITICAL ANCHOR, SPECTRUM NEWS: Hello and good evening from New York One. I'm Errol Louis, and I am now officially the least famous person to be impersonated on SNL. But trust me, it's uncanny.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: I'm just going to say this flat out like anybody who lives in New York or works in New York and acts like Errol Louis is the least famous person has no idea about New York politics because he's like an absolute paragon of -- of the game.

Political Anchor for Spectrum News and Host of The Big Deal with Errol Louis, Errol Louis joins me now. Errol, first off, thanks a ton for doing this. I always appreciate your insight. In your most recent piece about Zohran Mamdani, you write the secret fear of the loudest Die Hard critics of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is not that he will fail as the city's leader, but that he has a very good chance of succeeding. Explain to people what you mean by that.

ERROL LOUIS, POLITICAL ANCHOR, SPECTRUM NEWS: Yep, there's, there's this talk, Phil, and it's great to be with you. There's been all of this talk that it's impractical. He's too young. It's going to be too expensive. Where's the money going to come from? We've got a hostile administration in Washington. All the different reasons why it's going to be a tough sledding for the for this next mayor.

On the other hand, if he does succeed, and I think there's a good chance that he might on some of the promises that he's made, he's really just promised to sort of alleviate some of the extreme conditions that people are living under and make it just a little bit more affordable to be here. And if he succeeds at that, it's going to kind of tear a lot of the myth off of a lot of his critics.

It's going to simply show that we've just had a really serious imbalance and maldistribution of wealth, and that the wealthy in the city have been having a party while the rest of the city has suffered.