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Secretary Rubio Testifies Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Venezuela, Jan. 28, 2026

January 28, 2026 · U.S. Department of State · 0:07:46

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on U.S. Policy Towards Venezuela on January 28, 2026, according to the State Department broadcast of his opening statement. He described pre-operation Venezuela as “a regime operated by an indicted narcotrafficker that became a base of operation for virtually every competitor, adversary, and enemy in the world” — Iran’s and Russia’s primary Western Hemisphere base of operations alongside Cuba and Nicaragua, a partner of the FARC and ELN, and a source of oil to China at “about $20 a barrel” discount, paid as debt barter rather than cash: “This is the oil of the people of Venezuela, and it was being given to the Chinese.”

Rubio laid out three objectives, working backward from the end state: “a friendly, stable, prosperous Venezuela, and democratic, in which all elements of society are represented in free and fair elections” — with the caveat that elections where the opposition has no media access or ballot access “aren’t free and fair elections.” Objective one, he said, was stability after Maduro’s removal, maintained through “direct, honest — respectful but very direct and honest — conversations” with those now controlling Venezuela’s government apparatus. The mechanism he described: sanctioned, quarantined oil may move to market at market prices, with proceeds deposited into an account under U.S. oversight and spent for the Venezuelan people’s benefit under a monthly budget process — a short-term arrangement he said had already won pledges to buy medicine and equipment directly from the United States.

Why it matters

The testimony is the Secretary’s first full congressional accounting of the Venezuela endgame — the stability-first sequence, the oil-quarantine mechanism, and the free-and-fair standard — delivered to the committee of jurisdiction three weeks after the operation.

Sources: U.S. Department of State, “Secretary Rubio Testifies Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Venezuela” (official upload, embedded above); remarks as delivered 2026-01-28; transcript via state.gov as linked in the upload description and reviewed in the site’s private research store.