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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) questioned U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Appropriations after the Biden Administration announced another wave of concessions to the criminal Maduro narco-regime. Days later, following María Corina Machado’s landslide victory, the dictatorship suspended the results of the opposition’s primary elections.
Click here for video and read a transcript below:
Witness:
RUBIO: Since I only have one question, no one else is going to ask you about this, and it’s unrelated to this matter tangentially anyway. [The Biden Administration] recently made a deal with the Maduro regime in Venezuela in which the U.S. lifted sanctions in exchange for ‘free and fair’ elections that the Maduro regime was supposed to comply with. It’s taken them two weeks now and they have violated that. They canceled the opposition’s primary election and they continue to ban the winner of the primary. They basically wiped out the election. They’ve broken the deal. Are we going to reimpose sanctions?
BLINKEN: Senator Rubio, thank you very much for the question about Venezuela. As you know, following the agreement with the Unitary Platform, the opposition reached [an agreement] with the regime on a way forward toward elections, we wanted to support that and part of supporting that was to encourage that to move forward, including by lifting some sanctions with the ability, of course, to snap them back or to put some licenses in place that can be revoked very quickly if the regime has, in fact, violated the agreement that it reached. Then, of course, we’ll take the necessary action. We’ve been very clear about that. They’re not getting a free pass for actions they take that are in contradiction to the commitments that they’ve made to move toward free and fair elections, which is a shared objective that we have with the opposition, the Unitary Platform. So we’re tracking that very carefully and happy to come back to you further as this moves along.