Fox’s Peter Doocy Outright Asks Trump if ‘Campaign Against Venezuela’ Is About ‘Oil’

Fox News Senior White House Correspondent Peter Doocy asked President Donald Trump if U.S. actions against Venezuela are more than just about drugs.

Trump has ordered the military to conduct legally suspect bombings on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that he claims were carrying drugs. More than 80 people have been killed in the attacks. The Trump administration maintains that Venezuelan drugs “are killing our people,” as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put it last month. But Venezuela does not produce fentanyl, which is by far the leading cause of death among Americans who overdose on illicit substances. Venezuela, however, does have vast reserves of oil, some of which the U.S. seized on Wednesday when the military interdicted an oil tanker.

On Thursday, the president answered questions from reporters in the Oval Office, where Doocy asked about oil.

“Now that we’ve seized this tanker, is the campaign against Venezuela still just about drugs, or is it now also about oil?” he asked.

“Well, it’s about a lot of things,” the president replied. “But one of the things it’s about is the fact that they’ve allowed millions of people to come into our country from their prisons, from gangs, from drug dealers, and from mental institutions.”

Trump went on to dubiously claim that nearly 12,000 murders entered the U.S. and that “many of them are from Venezuela.” He then reiterated his previous pledge about bombing Venezuela itself.

“If you look at drug traffic, drug traffic by sea is down 92%,” the president alleged. “And nobody can figure out who the eight is, because I have no idea. Anybody getting involved in that right now is not doing well. And we’ll start that on land too. It’s gonna be starting on land pretty soon.”

In an interview with Politico on Tuesday, Trump was asked about his recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence in federal prison after being convicted of trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.

“Well, I don’t know him,” Trump claimed. “And I know very little about him other than people said it was like, uh, an Obama/Biden type setup, where he was set up.”

Watch above via NewsNation.