Top Democrat calls on Trump to expand oil tanker seizures to target Russia
Source: Yahoo! News/The Hill
01/02/26 4:42 PM ET
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) on Friday called on President Trump to expand the administration’s seizures of Venezuelan oil tankers to tankers coming from Russia.
“He’s been using our military to interdict oil tankers because there is this ghost fleet that helps keep Venezuela’s regime alive,” Coons told Jonathan Lemire of “Morning Joe” on MS NOW. “He should be using those same tools to interdict the ghost fleet that helps fund Russia’s brutal war machine, that helps keep the Iranian regime alive, and helps support North Korea.”
“He’d get bipartisan support for more actions to get tough on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and to begin to slow the flow of money into Putin’s murderous war machine against Ukraine,” Coons added. Coons said Trump ran on “avoiding stupid new wars overseas,” and that the president has “been sleepwalking without a clear policy or a clear path forward into a conflict with one of our hemisphere’s most capable authoritarian regimes.”
“Has this really been about interdicting drugs?” he continued. “[Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro’s willing to negotiate about stopping the regime’s support for drug trafficking. Is this about access to oil? That is something President Trump’s talked about. And his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, admitted in a Vanity Fair article that this is about regime change.”
Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5670231-coons-urges-trump-action-russia-tankers/
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