White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is taking a leading role in the U.S. airstrikes on Venezuelans acccused of trafficking drugs, upsetting the standard governmental chain of command and expanding his powers in the Trump administration, according to a report from The Guardian.
According to three people familiar with the situation, Miller, as an adviser for the Homeland Security Council, is overseeing the identification, tracking and highly controversial attacks on Venezuelan boats. At times, this role has put Miller’s authority on par with that of the Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio.
On Sept. 2, the Trump administration announced that a U.S. airstrike destroyed a Venezuelan speedboat, which it claimed without evidence was smuggling drugs in the southern Caribbean. The strike killed all 11 people on the vessel.
Two weeks later, a second strike on a suspected drug boat killed three people, who Trump alleged were “confirmed narcoterrorists.”
Critics have described the attacks as “lawless,” coming outside any theater of war and explicitly directed at civilians.
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Miller has previously claimed that Venezuela is a narco-state. President Nicolás Maduro, via Venezuela’s state oil company, donated $500,000 to President Donald Trump’s first inauguration.
“It is a drug cartel that is running Venezuela,” Miller said in an interview earlier this month. “It is not a government, it is a drug cartel, a narco-trafficking organization that is running Venezuela.”
But it’s not clear that those killed by the U.S. had anything to do with drug trafficking.
In an interview with the New York Times, a Venezuelan woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the men killed on Sept. 2, denied that her partner was involved in the narcotics tade. She said that her husband, a father of four, was a fisherman who left for work and never came back.
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