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This is CNN breaking news. Welcome to CNN. I'm Victor Blackwell in Atlanta. The breaking news

this morning, President Trump says the US carried out largecale strikes on Venezuela overnight. He

says its president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Celia Flores have been captured and flowed out

of the country. Attorney General Pam Bondi says both of them have been indicted and in

a social media post says that they will quote soon face the full wrath of American justice.

The Venezuelan vice president says that she has no idea where Maduro and the first lady are.

Faced with this brutal situation and this brutal attack, we do not know the whereabouts

of President Nicholas Maduro and First Lady Celia Flores. We demand immediate proof of life from the

government of President Donald Trump. Proof of life for President Maduro and the first lady.

President Trump says that he'll address the nation on the strikes from Mara Lago later this

morning. Right now, it's quiet in the capital of Caracus just hours after the strikes. But earlier,

explosions rocked Venezuela, knocked out power, and sent people running outside.

And this strike was at La Carla Air Base in Caracus. CNN's Nick Payton Walsh joins me now from

London. Uh Nick, we just heard from Isa Suarez speaking with some of her sources in country

about the fear of what could come next because so many questions are unanswered. Yeah. I mean,

let's go through what we know has happened so far since about 1:00 a.m. local time and

these series of explosions rocked Caracus and other parts of Venezuela. multiple

uh helicopters seen in the air and then clearly a US special forces operation that removed Nicola

Maduro and his wife from what should have been their heavily fortified and secured uh premises

in the capital there. Hard to understate quite what a move this is geopolitically by the Trump

White House to remove the sitting president of a country which it considers to be a regional

irritant. Startling. successful, certainly daring, certainly as well, and also efficient, frankly,

given what it seems, the brevity comparatively of this operation and the impact that it is

having. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, hinting that the indictments in the Southern District

of New York court will be the ones that Maduro faced. He had a $50 million bounty on his head

uh seeking information that could lead towards his capture. And it may well be that the delay we're

seeing since Trump's tweet in the early hours of this morning, his 74word social media post that

removed the extraordinary mystery frankly or the unresponsibility uh of exactly what was happening

in the skies of Caracus very quickly to explain that as many suspected it was the US military

behind this. It now appears that potentially the delay uh may be about transferring Maduro inside

uh American so for when President Trump addresses the nation about this move extraordinary as it

is. Uh but I think once the perhaps for Trump allies the exhilaration of removing Maduro who

has been an authoritarian dictator behind violence against protesters and opponents uh for 13 years.

Once that fades, the hard questions now must be answered about what to do with Venezuela's

crippled economy. That has been the reason why Maduro has needed to be authoritarian.

The mismanagement uh of basic things like inflation, food staffs that permeates that

entire country. What happens now to Venezuela's military heavily hit during this brief series

of strikes? should point out the explosions we've been seeing in these videos utterly alien to life

in sleepy peaceful Caracus will have terrified the millions who live there. What is the likely

course for Venezuela's political elite? Is indeed Deli Rodriguez the successor? Does she immediately

seek a detaant with the United States to prevent a similar abduction in the middle of the night

occurring to her? These are all urgent questions and I think the key thing here is for the United

States to have planned for the aftermath of Maduro with the same efficiency, detail and resolve as

they clearly planned his capture and abduction. The US military very good at this sort of thing.

Be it bin Laden in Pakistan, Zawwahi, the al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan, Maduro, a man with lesser

charges against him uh in Venezuela. But they fail repeatedly in what comes next. And I'm sure many

in Venezuela will be deeply hoping that they now see some sort of future ahead of them where their

economic and political problems become part of the United States focus and they're not just left

to see further collapse. A reminder, the United States, particularly the Trump administration,

wants to see many of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans on US soil go home. And perhaps

a calm and prosperous Venezuela would permit that to happen at a faster pace.

But we are today in unprecedented territory in Moscow and Beijing. They will be looking at how

their ally Maduro is suddenly whisked away from a place where he should have felt security of

diplomacy of the international world order. He may now soon be in a New York courthouse to face

drug charges. Yeah. Russia, as I said a moment ago, is now asking for immediate clarification

on the US claims that it has captured uh Maduro. I probably get that. Yeah. Nick Payton Walsh.

Thanks so much. Joining us now is CNN senior White House reporter Kevin Liptac. Uh Kevin,

again, we're going to hear from the president at 11 a.m. Eastern, three hours from now,

but I understand you have some new information about how this unfolded. What do you know? Yeah,

and what we understand is that the president gave the green light uh for this operation several

days ago. That's according to people familiar with the matter. It was carried out by the elite Delta

Force in the US Army. That's the same group that captured Abu Bakr Albaghdaddy some years ago. So,

a highly trained uh a force that went in to capture Maduro. They were tracking his location

with the assistance of the CIA and we know that the president had authorized the CIA to operate

covertly inside of Venezuela, you know, some weeks ago. We saw some of what they were doing just this

week when we learned about that strike on a dock facility that the president said was transporting

drugs. But now we're getting a fuller picture of what precisely that agency uh was doing there.

Now the goal here is to try Maduro on US soil. We've been hearing that from officials. We just

heard it explicitly from the attorney general Pam Bondi who is citing that indictment in the

Southern District of New York that was filed back in 2020. there was this bounty on Maduro and what

Bondi says is that both Maduro and his wife will soon face the full wrath of American justice on

American soil in American courts. Uh but to be sure there are plenty of questions here being

raised by members of Congress. It does not appear as if the Trump administration briefed you know

the relevant lawmakers or the relevant committees before taking that action. And this morning,

uh, it appears that the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has been on the phone talking to senators,

uh, to discuss some of what happened. And some of them are revealing a little bit about their

discussion. And you know, Mike Lee, the senator uh from Utah, said that the strikes that occurred

in Venezuela were intended to protect the US personnel uh who were capturing Maduro,

that the president uh was relying on his article 2 authority, essentially

his authorities commander-in-chief, to conduct foreign policy to carry out these strikes. And

I think most critically, what Rubio told Lee was that he anticipates no further action in Venezuela

now that Maduro is in US custody. So this appears uh to be it for now what we've seen uh overnight.

You know this is really the culmination of this monthslong pressure campaign. It there was I think

some misgivings on the part of the president some months ago about where all of this uh was

leading. We heard that from officials that he had some reservations that this uh could potentially

all backfire if Maduro was ousted from power. some questions about whether this would be effective,

but clearly he has uh put those to the side and given the green light to go ahead. You know,

I think President Trump is also of the era who will remember a mixed history of US interventions

in Latin America, including uh with the CIA. You know, today is 35 years exactly

since the US arrested the Panameanian dictator Emanuel Norgo at the Vatican embassy in Panama.

You know, there is a long uh somewhat mixed history for the president to look back on here,

but clearly uh eager to proclaim success in this particular mission and I think in eager to

show that justice will be served for what they claim is a drug trafficking charge. You know,

the objectives in all of this have always in a way led to regime change. That was uh what the

president's ultimate goal was here. We heard that explicitly from Susie Wilds in that Vanity Fair

interview. But you also saw a number of different sort of rationes that the president has laid out.

Whether it was curbing the flow of drugs, whether it was uh curbing the flow of migrants, you also

hear the president talk quite a bit about the oil. Of course, Venezuela is sitting on the world's

largest proven oil reserves. And so I think when we hear from the president over at Mara Lago down

here in Palm Beach at 11:00 a.m., it's likely that we're going to hear sort of a combination of all

of that. and and certainly I think the question of what happens next in Venezuela, what the president

has been planning on that front, whether the US sort of has any role or anticipates any role in

stabilizing that country now that the leader has left. Those will be critical questions that the

president I think will need to answer for when we see him in a few hours from now. And Democrats in

the Senate are already asking those questions as we're seeing on social media. as Kevin Liptac.