Nicolás Maduro in New York & Versant on the Nasdaq 1/5/26

0:00Bring in show music please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. The stunning overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Wall Street reacts. We're not going to make this political this morning. Says who? Says who? Our Eamon Javers with the latest from Washington. In the president's first remarks to the public, Venezuela's vast oil wealth was front and center. And the man prosecuting the case in the U.S. against Maduro, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton. Drug trafficking, fentanyl, cocaine, other similarly deadly drugs, is a global, sophisticated business where the players have the resources and I would say the infrastructure equivalent to our best-run companies.

0:51Plus. We are going through with this. It's going to happen. Here we go. It's been a year in the making. The first day of the rest of our lives, the media industry's newest kid on the block, Versant, made up from the spun-off cable networks of NBC, CEO Mark Lazarus. Everything we do is going to matter, and every little piece, there's going to be much more of a magnifying glass on what we do. It's Monday, January 5th, 2026. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand back to bye in 3, 2, 1, cue it please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We are live from the NASDAQ market site in Times Square.

1:33I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. And here we go. Happy New Year. What a way to begin the new year with a real... We are back with a bang. Well, that's good for the people of Venezuela, but also good for the people of Versant. Yes, big day today. The profit has already rolled out here at the NASDAQ for Versant. We're going to be around in the background, I would think. I don't think... We're probably not going to be actually ringing the... We're ringing the bell, folks. Well, we probably... We will be there. Versant is. Parent company of CNBC and Becky and Joe and myself, along with the other Morning Joe.

2:12He'll be here. And Mika and a couple other folks are going to be here to ring the bell. And I love the one, even calling it talent. I mean, that was in Groundhog Day. Did he really just call himself the talent? Yeah. But just calling, I mean, we use that in the loosest possible sense, but I don't know where we'll be standing. The important people are going to be probably ringing the bell. We're just happy to be included. Mark Lazarus is going to be joining us a little later this morning. We're happy to be included for an extended interview of like 30 seconds. Hey, Mark, congratulations. Do what you do so well and just keep doing it.

2:45That's going to be my question. No blood for oil! No! No blood for oil! I mean, Venezuela is loaded with oil, and they used to produce a lot of oil. And socialism, this is the result of what socialism can do to the means of production in a country. But huge questions, and this is where we're going to go with this, huge questions just about... Well, I know. I saw all the hair on fire. No, no. The ability to control it, the amount of money it's going to take to go again, if that's what this is really about. In the past, if you break it, you've got to fix it. This was already broken. That's all I'll say.

3:20But that's OK. But the weird thing is, after a week of of trying to defend Somali fraud in Minnesota, Democrats now this is the first Venezuelan criminal that Democrats have not welcomed into the country. We're not going to make this political this morning. We're going to get the latest. Says who? We're going to go to D.C. Says who? We're going to try to keep this. Speak for yourself. Down the middle here. The latest in the U.S. capture, Venezuela leader Maduro. Want to get to Eamon Javers. He's in Washington this morning with the latest as the debate continues about what happens next. Yeah. Good morning, guys.

3:57The United States says it was strictly a law enforcement operation. But Friday night's explosions, gunfire and darkened helicopters sweeping low over the Caracas skyline gave it the feel of something very different regime change in Venezuela. And by Saturday, with Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in handcuffs in New York, it was clear that the clandestine U.S. operation was about both enforcing U.S. law and changing leadership in Venezuela. Now, Maduro is expected to make his first appearance in federal court in the United States to face federal drug charges later today. And in the meantime, President Trump says the United States government will run the Latin American country for an unspecified period of time.

4:43We're going to be running it with a group and we're going to make sure it's run properly. We're going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It'll be paid for by the oil companies directly. They will be reimbursed for what they're doing, but that's going to be paid. And we're going to get the oil flowing the way it should be. And as you can see in the president's first remarks to the public, Venezuela's vast oil wealth was front and center in his explanation of what's going to happen next in that country. The country has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, 303 billion barrels, which amounts to about 17 percent of all global reserves.

5:22That's according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And even as they were briefing the press on the operation in Venezuela, administration officials, guys, had one eye on another country, Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on TV over the weekend saying that the Trump administration doesn't like the Cuban government, which was closely aligned with Maduro, and that if I lived in Havana, he said, and I was in the government, I'd be concerned. President Trump, briefing reporters on Air Force One last night, also said that he believes that the government of Cuba is about to fall, he said, independent of any U.S.

6:00action because of the implosion of the Cuban economy. Guys, Back over to you. Amen, in terms of speaking of folks in Washington over the past weekend that I know you have, what is the sense just from either members of Congress or the Senate about to the extent we're going to occupy or we're going to do whatever you think this next step is? Obviously, there's questions to some degree even about the constitutionality, about the invasion itself. Then obviously we're going to talk to Jake Clayton later today about what that prosecution is going to look like. And they're the big questions about the business community and to the extent that they're going to either go into Venezuela, invest in Venezuela, not invest in Venezuela.

6:39What are you hearing? Yeah, look, obviously there are more questions than answers this morning, Andrew. But your reaction initially fell, as you might imagine, on partisan lines. We saw Lindsey Graham, United States senator, flying on Air Force One with the president last night saying this is a great thing. This is something that other administrations didn't have the courage to do. Even the Biden administration, he said, had a$25 million bounty out on Maduro's head for information on his whereabouts and his return to the United States. So this is something that needed to be done. Democrats, on the other hand, questioned the constitutionality of it, questioned why Congress wasn't informed about this or had any role in this whatsoever.

7:20The administration said simply this wasn't the type of mission you could brief Congress on because Congress has a history of leaking. and because they didn't know exactly when they were going to be able to conduct this, given the complexity of the military operation, the need for secrecy, also the weather conditions, Maduro's whereabouts, all of that had to fall in line in one particular way in order for this operation to be successful. And they said they just didn't have time to notify Congress. So I think we're going to hear a lot more questions raised about this today, particularly what the administration's plan is for running as the president says the venezuelan government you saw marco rubio the secretary of state on tv over the weekend sort of suggesting that actually what we're going to do as the united states government is sort of more or less co-opt the existing venezuelan government and that seems to me to be guys a way of getting around the iraq problem which is where you devastate the leadership devastate the army devastate the infrastructure and then try to build an entire new government up from scratch.

8:20This model seems to be trying to just co-op the existing infrastructure, existing government officials, and just, you know, sort of nudge them to do what the U.S. government wants. We'll see if it works. Hey, Eamon, we've talked an awful lot about the oil there. How much of this also, though, has to do with concern about Chinese and even Russian influence in Venezuela and the region? We're already there. I mean, I think that's a huge piece of it. I mean, Marco Rubio on television yesterday said, look, we're just not going to allow a country with those oil reserves in our own hemisphere become a playground, in effect, for U.S.

8:56enemies, including, he name-checked Russia and China, but also Iran. You can't turn Venezuela into the operating hub for Iran, for Russia, for Hezbollah, for China, for the Cuban intelligence agents that control that country. That cannot continue. Now, I think one of the questions is what happens to Chinese assets and Russian assets in Venezuela? What does the U.S. government do with those, assuming the U.S. government's going to be in a position to decide? And then, you know, ultimately, what happens to the oil? Does the United States, you know, dial down the oil supply to coming out of Venezuela to anywhere else other than the United States to zero?

9:36That's an open question. And the New York Times is reporting this morning, guys, that a number of Venezuelan oil ships, maybe as many as a dozen or more, have left port and are making a run for it right now with their transponders off and engaging in cloaking efforts to try to see if they can get out of that area and get out of the U.S. blockade. We'll see what the U.S. Navy does about that. There is precedent, obviously, and the Constitution does give the president a lot of leeway in things like this. In 1989, H.W. got rid of, deposed Noriega. And this guy, Maduro, was a much bigger threat to the U.S.

10:13and the world than Noriega ever was. And it all held up in court, and Noriega ended up serving time. And, you know, obviously it's not exactly the same Panama versus Venezuela. Venezuela. Do we have any V.O. of the millions of people out in the streets down in Venezuela that are finally free or any testimonials that I'm seeing? Eamon, I don't know if we can run any of that, but the people down there seem to be there's a sense of relief that, you know, that nightmare. I mean, clearly there's some relief. Maduro was not a popular figure in Venezuela. You know, he had lost the recent election clearly and seized power anyway, despite losing the election.

10:53So, you know, there's going to be some relief there. I think the questions are, you know, what is the U.S. role going to be in, you know, quote unquote, running Venezuela, as the president was talking about over the weekend, and how will that be received in Venezuela? There are going to be some people who will chafe at that and say, you know, we want Venezuelans to run Venezuela. And can the U.S. sort of navigate that with this sort of co-option strategy? You know, we saw the vice president of Venezuela come out initially denouncing this, demanding proof of life for Maduro, wanting to know, you know, what's going, what the U.S.'s intent is here.

11:29She seems to be a key figure that the United States is banking on, at least President Trump is banking on, to sort of come around to U.S. view on things and become more compliant. Her tone shifted through the course of the weekend, and she called for, you know, dialogue and coexistence with the United States by the time sort of the weekend had come to a close. So maybe that bet in terms of personnel might play out for the U.S. And then you get somebody in power who will be sort of, if not pro-Western, pro-U.S., at least willing to shut down some of the things that the United States objects to.

12:03I mean, I saw different things coming from Democrats. A lot of the same Democrats that wanted to do this and are on. It was funny. I saw one Democrat, I think the one from Connecticut, Actually, the tape was played for him, and he was like, you know, because he said that this would be a good thing, let's do it. But then he pivoted to something else. But Mark Kelly, to his credit in Arizona, said, no, I think this is good. I think it's a good move. It just depends on what happens from here, and it always does. I think having Maduro out of the country, now in New York, being prosecuted for his crimes is a positive thing.

12:37The big question is just what comes next and who winds up in charge in Venezuela. the expression, if you break it, you own it. This was broken already. Yeah, Colin Powell's famous warning. And people are going to be waiting in the wings for something to go wrong and, you know, celebrating that. I understand that. But this could be good. This could be a good thing for the world eventually, Damon. It could be. Yeah. It's a high-risk, high-reward strategy, no doubt. And, you know, Colin Powell's warning was, if you break it, you bought it. Your point, Joe, it was already broken. And the question is, does the United States want to own it or not?

13:12Clearly now the United States owns it politically. And can the United States fix it? That's the governance challenge here, which is more than a military challenge. I mean, the military operation, you know, just as a non-military guy, as an outsider, watching that and reading the details of it, you know, incredibly impressive execution by the U.S. military here in terms of the timing, the delicacy of this. You know, there were some significant casualties on the Venezuelan side, but it was as surgical an operation as you can possibly imagine executed by the U.S. government. No U.S. troops killed, no helicopters downed.

13:48I mean, it's a it's a remarkable thing to witness. But the challenge is what happens next. Right. and what happens in Venezuela and can the United States government succeed in this co-option strategy or does there need to be, as the president threatened over the weekend, a second wave of U.S. military involvement there? All of that is just very unclear at this time. Okay. Amen, we're going to be talking to you a lot more and we're going to be learning a lot more this morning. Thank you. Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, the man who will be prosecuting the case against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, U.S.

14:26Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton. He says it's a long time coming, since 2011 in fact. This case involving narco-terrorism, the importation of cocaine with the facilitation of the FARC, at the use of government resources, has been there for that long. Nicolas Maduro was charged in 2020 as part of that conspiracy and a superseding indictment.

14:57you're listening to squawk pod from cnbc with joe kernan becky quick and andrew ross sorkin up and andrew q of course the biggest news venezuela's maduro facing federal drug trafficking and weapon charges in the case now being handled by the southern district of new york in manhattan joining us right now he was attorney for the southern district of new york jay clayton he is a former SEC chair in the Trump administration. We're thrilled to have you on this morning to try to understand what comes next. Obviously, you're going to be down in Brooklyn, I imagine, or I don't know Brooklyn, but in downtown later today.

15:34When did you learn this was all happening? Well, let me say Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Congratulations on the spin today. Thank you. You know, amazing that you've gotten it done this quickly and good luck with it. We had a lot to do with it. Yeah. Hey, you know. We're here. You're here. How long were you working on this? How long? Well, just to clear the air, I was scheduled to be on. Yes. And I'm happy to be on, and I'm happy to talk about this. So let's talk about it. We appreciate it. You don't look that tired. So were you working all weekend? Yeah, I was working all weekend. But my people are working even harder than I am.

16:12And when did you learn this was all going down? When, well, let's. I assume at some point somebody in Washington calls you and says, this is happening and you are going to be the one who's going to prosecute this case. Let's separate the operation from the legal. This case has been in the Southern District since 2011. This case involving narco-terrorism, the importation of cocaine, with the facilitation of the FARC, the use of government resources has been there for that long. Nicholas Maduro was charged in 2020 as part of that conspiracy and a superseding indictment. We had another superseding indictment that was unsealed in connection with this operation, furthering those charges.

17:01What is fascinating here is that if you look at the, and I would encourage the public to look at these publicly available documents as to what's going on. What's fascinating here is that there are already two people as part of this conspiracy, the former head of the equivalent of the CIA, the former head of intelligence, and a former high-ranking military leader who have been convicted, pled guilty to these types of charges. Now, the other thing that I want to say, and I'm proud to say it, I'm very proud to say this as an American, is that these are allegations. Every person charged in the United States is entitled to the presumption of innocence and has their day in court.

17:38And that's exactly how we should be treating this. Okay, so just take us through the weekend, though. So the president is down in Mar-a-Lago watching all of this. The helicopters are obviously down in Venezuela literally extracting him. You learn about this when, how, walk us through what happened in terms of how you, I mean, did you know this was happening before it happened? We knew that he was indicted. And if you were reading the news, you knew that this was a focus of the administration. And it's not just a focus of the administration on Nicolas Maduro. If you ask, and we can bring this back to New York and then I'll go back to it in a second.

18:15If you ask every New Yorker, what are the biggest threats that you see to New York and your safety? It's gun-toting criminals and transnational drug trafficking into the United States. And those have been two focuses for a while. When I got to the office at the Southern District, put aside white-collar crime, something we talk about a lot in this program, there were three things that I focused on. One, this type of drug trafficking into the United States. We put additional resources on these types of matters. Second thing, you've heard me talk about it, and gun crime is way down in the city. I'd like to think that we have a small part to do with it.

18:54Gun-toting criminals. The other is sex trafficking, particularly minor sex trafficking. So we had ramped up our efforts in connection with this prosecution. Let me ask you about this then. Because we're not going to get, it sounds like we're not going to get the full blow-by-blow over the weekend from you. Well, operations are not my thing. Operations are a military thing. The biggest question, I think, that in the country, to some degree, is the constitutionality of us effectively going into another sovereign country and extracting the leader of that country. I imagine this is going to be the argument that his lawyers are going to make before you even get into the merits of the case itself.

19:33And Andrew, thank you for saying that, because for those reasons, let's stick to facts on the ground as we know them. People have been making the analogy to Noriega. There are other precedents to look at, including, and I would encourage people to look at this, Libya. You know, Benghazi and the arrest of a number of people who were engaged in that. And then one that's close to my heart that was most recent, Pan Am 103. You know, after years and years, they finally brought to justice through Libya. Yeah, there's examples in Syria and combatants during those wars being back to the United States.

20:14So there is precedent. What I'll say from the perspective of where I sit, my people and I are completely comfortable with this prosecution. Yeah, I think his lawyers have already suggested that he's a, as a leader of another country, he is immune from prosecution. Is our argument that he's not officially elected? Secretary Rubio and, you know, that press conference from Mar-a-Lago was pretty impressive. This is a president that will stand there and answer any question. the most accessible president in my lifetime. Secretary Rubio is somebody who I think doesn't waste a word. And he was very clear about this, not only in that press conference, but over the weekend.

20:58He said, you know, we never recognized, the Biden administration never recognized, the EU never recognized, and 60 countries, and this is all in the indictment, did not recognize Maduro as the duly elected leader of Venezuela. Do you know who's going to be representing him? I do not. You do not? So have you had any communication with whoever would be representing his team? I have not. Okay. My team may have. There's a separate question. Maybe it's sort of, again, a broader question, which is if we, meaning the U.S., prepared to arrest somebody like Maduro in their home country, why aren't we? I mean, the critics of this, of the way this has been approached, beyond the questions about congressional authority and other things, would say, well, we should be going into Mexico.

21:43We should be going into all sorts of countries. They look at this and they say, well, what about the pardon of the ex-president of Honduras, who did something that seemingly seems like exactly the same thing? How do you react to that? My answer is where I started, which is the state, the biggest threats to the United States are state-sponsored crimes against Americans. and narco-trafficking into the United States, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. And one thing that I heard, which I have to say, I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm hearing this. Most of this is cocaine, not fentanyl.

22:26Right, you've heard that. Like, okay, how many deaths are there because somebody thought they were taking cocaine and there was actually laced with fentanyl? And, you know, is cocaine somehow fine? Cocaine has been a scourge in this country. you know, my entire adult life. It's an absolutely terrible drug. I guess the question is, where's the line then in terms of going into another country? And this is the question. So you would, I mean, if you're going to do Venezuela, would you do Mexico? Is this a pretext? I mean, the other question, is this a pretext? Here we are looking at the stock price of Chevron and other companies.

23:02Obviously, Chevron is really the only major American company that has a big operation there. People look even what the president said. There's an argument to be made that there's a pretext, effectively, for our ability to control valuable oil and minerals and other things. Let me take a step back and say this, that these types of questions, they're interesting law school questions. I think you have to deal with each of these things idiosyncratically. right? Did anybody we had a killer capture against bin Laden indicted for the bombings in the embassies in Africa that I don't think any American felt bad about them that many Americans feel this I mean once again write down partisan lines no but it is in court today and in court over the next year to you.

24:00I imagine his lawyers are going to argue it's a pretext for some kind of control of a country. And then by the way, there's a big question about what happens next. This is the greatest country in the world because we get to have those arguments. I'm totally comfortable with this. What do you make, by the way, to the extent that you could answer the extent there's critics out there that look at actually the... Out there? Out there. Okay. It's okay. Have you read the newspapers? No, I know. I know. There's a big question about. Do you see any of the other side of it? Do you know any of those questions pertinent about how excited people are there?

24:37They're crying that their entire family was murdered by this guy and now they're free. There's millions of people in the street. There's going to be no argument made in court about that issue. And here's the guy who's going to be prosecuting this guy. We respect the rule of law. We respect process. We absolutely respect people's rights. But people think I'm crazy, but I rode the subway up here today. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking, you know what? If people feel safe on this subway, if they think there's nobody on this platform that's going to use a gun and a crime, if they think that there aren't drug traffickers here, if all the work that my office has been doing on the parks, on the housing projects, to get gun-toting criminals, to get people who are trafficking drugs to kids off the streets, that's what the American people want.

25:22What does that say? But honestly, what would it say about Mexico, for example? That's where most of the fentanyl comes from. What I'm going to say is it's idiosyncratic. What do we know about Mexico? Without stating anything specific, what do we know about Mexico? We know that significant portions of that country are controlled by drug traffickers. That's what we know. Okay, and therefore? And those drug traffickers are bringing deadly fentanyl into the United States. from my office's perspective we're going to build cases against people like that hopefully get enough information enough to indict them right and we want them brought to justice in places where there is no discourse china or other places they can control the entire hemisphere and not one person is going to say a thing about it we are the leading country of the western hemisphere you can park back to the monroe doctrine wherever you want to go we are it's important that we are able to flex our muscles to some extent here in the, and if we're wearing the white hat and if we're doing what I think is probably, if it's not going to work for the American people, they can, they can elect different people in this year in November, impeach Trump and elect enough senators, get rid of, and we won't even have to worry about it.

26:38Let me go back to something that I've said and the American people should understand. drug trafficking, fentanyl, cocaine, other similarly deadly drugs, is a global, sophisticated business where the players have the resources and I would say the infrastructure equivalent to our best-run companies. We need to focus our resources on bankrupting those cartels. Let me just ask you a different question. Does it help or hurt your case in court for the President of the United States to talk about either taking over the country and or the resources which and the leverage that us either have in control or something else has in the in the in regard to your case.