Top Trump administration officials briefed leading members of Congress on the Venezuela operation on Monday, and lawmakers’ reactions fell along familiar partisan lines.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters the classified briefing, which included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, “posed far more questions than it ever answered.”

“Their plan for the U.S. running Venezuela is vague, based on wishful thinking and unsatisfying,” the New York Democrat said, adding that it’s unclear if similar operations will be tried in other countries.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the operation was a “decisive and justified action,” adding that Maduro led a “criminal organization masquerading as a government.”

“Now, he has learned what accountability looks like,” the Louisiana Republican added.

Some Democrats have argued the operation wasn’t legal because it lacked congressional approval. Schumer said he will push for a vote to block further military action in Venezuela. And Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters: “It seems at every turn, Donald Trump is trying to figure out how he avoids Congress.”

Republicans have largely defended the president. Johnson argued the administration acted within its authority because “we are not at war” and “we are not occupying that country.”

Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters he doesn’t believe the operation needed congressional approval, saying it was limited in scope and “done before breakfast.”

GENEVA — Fire safety inspections hadn’t been carried out for several years at the bar where a fire that broke out at a New Year’s party left 40 people dead and over 100 injured, local authorities said Tuesday.

Investigators have said they believe festive sparkling candles atop Champagne bottles ignited the fire at Le Constellation in the resort town of Crans-Montana when they came too close to the ceiling. Authorities are looking into whether soundproofing material on the ceiling conformed with regulations and whether the candles were permitted for use in the bar.

Swiss authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the bar managers. The two are suspected of involuntary homicide, involuntary bodily harm and involuntarily causing a fire, according to the Valais region’s chief prosecutor.

Regional authorities have said that safety inspections were the responsibility of the municipality. On Tuesday, the head of Crans-Montana’s municipal government, Nicolas Féraud, said that there had been inspections of Le Constellation up to 2019.

But he told a news conference the local council discovered after consulting documents after the fire that “periodic checks were not carried out between 2020 and 2025.”

“We regret this bitterly,” he said, adding that it will be up to judicial authorities to determine what influence that may have had on the chain of events that led to the fire.

Féraud said he couldn’t immediately explain why safety inspections hadn’t been conducted for such a long time.

He said that, in September last year, an external expert had been asked to carry out a soundproofing analysis and had concluded that the bar complied with anti-noise rules, without making further remarks.

The severity of burns made it difficult to identify some victims of the fire that broke out at about 1:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, requiring families to supply authorities with DNA samples.

Investigators finished identifying the 40 dead on Sunday and said on Monday that they had identified all 116 people who were injured.

President Donald Trump ordered the military operation in Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro. But in the aftermath, Marco Rubio is in the spotlight.

Tasked with overseeing the transition of a post-Maduro Venezuela, Rubio has stepped into his fourth — and potentially riskiest — Trump administration role, and the coming weeks and months could define his standing as one of the president’s top advisers. A fixation for Rubio for more than a decade, Venezuela has now become a high-stakes gambit for Trump that could shape his own legacy.

And at a news conference with Trump following the stunning capture of Maduro and his wife, an emboldened Rubio put other world leaders on notice they could be next.

“Don’t play games while this president’s in office because it’s not gonna turn out well,” Rubio said.

As Maduro and his wife were making their first court appearance in New York on federal narco-terrorism and conspiracy charges on Monday, the challenges of a U.S.-led transition were coming into focus. Rubio was already softening the president’s pronouncements that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela for an unspecified period of time.

“It’s not running — it’s running policy, the policy with regards to this,” he said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” contradicting Trump’s message. Rubio said the U.S. military forces that have been amassed near Venezuela would stay put for now, and a quarantine on sanctioned Venezuelan oil would remain to pressure the country’s new leader, Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, to fall in line.

Democrats, already seething over the administration’s decision to keep Congress in the dark on the Maduro operation, now question how far the administration will go.

“Where will this go next? Will the president deploy our troops to protect Iranian protesters? To enforce the fragile ceasefire in Gaza? To battle terrorists in Nigeria? To seize Greenland or the Panama Canal? To suppress Americans peacefully assembling to protest his policies?” said Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Rubio has been at the forefront of the increasingly aggressive and complex foreign policy of Trump’s second term. Trump first tapped the 54-year-old former senator from Florida to serve as secretary of state, then added national archivist and interim national security adviser to his portfolio, as the president has consolidated leadership positions across his administration.

It’s a remarkable trajectory for Rubio, said Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett, a former senior State Department official in the first Trump administration.

“Now he is not just influencing, but directing, leading just a remarkable engagement in our hemisphere, and potentially, remaking a new order,” Bartlett said. “How that plays out will truly be not just the president’s legacy, but certainly Secretary Rubio’s legacy too.”

Rubio has had key roles in other major foreign policy initiatives, any one of which is a heavy lift — from Trump’s efforts to maintain a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas to ending the war in Ukraine. But inside Trump’s inner circle, Rubio has owned Venezuela. For him, it’s personal: As a Cuban American senator in Florida, Rubio was focused on the abuses in Venezuela for nearly three decades, first under Hugo Chavez and now Maduro. The effort is popular in his home state, where many Venezuelans and similarly displaced Cuban Americans, including Rubio’s own parents, sought sanctuary from repressive regimes.

Cuban government television announced over the weekend that 32 Cuban combatants died in the U.S. military action against Venezuela. And Cuba, where the economy has been battered by a U.S. embargo, had been relying on sanctioned oil shipments from Maduro until the Trump administration’s quarantine.

Rubio framed Maduro’s arrest as a warning to the “incompetent senile men” running Cuba, saying, “If I lived in Havana and I were in the government, I’d be concerned, at least a little bit.”

With Rubio at his side, Trump increasingly ramped up pressure on Venezuela, including a U.S. military campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats that has roiled the Western Hemisphere and significantly escalated on Saturday with Maduro’s capture and removal to the U.S.

The policy is a significant escalation from Trump’s first term, when his administration increased and expanded sanctions on Venezuela. Trump publicly threatened to use military action if necessary and the U.S. officially recognized former opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela in 2019. But pressure stopped there.

“I think, as Rubio persuaded him, he began to see that it was going to be potentially very important,” said John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser during the first administration and who is now one of his sharpest critics.

But if Rubio has shown Trump the potential value of a more aggressive response, he now has to deliver on what Trump wants. And his influence with the president — and position as the face of his Venezuela policy — could cut both ways.

“Rubio’s job is to accomplish something close to what the president says can be accomplished,” said Neumann, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan, Bahrain and Algeria during the George W. Bush administration.

“He’s between a rock and a hard place,” said Neumann.

Rubio’s positions have already seemed to shift. The U.S. is not turning to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, or Edmundo Gonzalez, who greatly outpolled Maduro in the 2024 election that Maduro then stole. Last January, Rubio called Gonzalez Venezuela’s rightful president.

After meeting with exiled Venezuelan opposition figures last May, Rubio also called for the release of Maduro’s political prisoners and the restoration of democracy in Venezuela. Neither of those goals has been raised by Trump or Rubio since Saturday.

“Unfortunately, the vast majority of the opposition is no longer present inside of Venezuela,” Rubio said during Sunday’s “Meet the Press” interview.

He also said elections in Venezuela are “premature at this point” despite the country’s constitution calling for the vice president to succeed to the presidency and organize elections within 30 days.

The U.S. has not had a diplomatic presence in Venezuela since 2019. The State Department is making preparations for possibly reopening the U.S. embassy in Caracas if Trump decides to take that step, according to a senior State Department official.

American diplomats who focus on Venezuela currently are based in neighboring Colombia. More than half of the countries in Latin America do not have confirmed U.S. ambassadors. Those vacancies, coupled with the Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S.’s chief international broadcaster Voice of America, leave Rubio with fewer regional allies and resources.

“The challenges he faces would, in conventional times, cause him to rely heavily on his senior staff at the State Department and counterparts at USAID and Voice of America,” said Douglas Lute, a retired Army general and former ambassador to NATO. “That just emphasizes the challenges he faces.”

Richard Fontaine, the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, said Rubio’s dual-hatted roles as secretary of state and national security adviser complicate his ability to be the point person on a challenge as big as Venezuela.

“There’s a reason why you have not, since Henry Kissinger, had the role of National Security Advisor and Secretary of State been held by the same person,” Fontaine said. “There are only 24 hours in a day, and you can only be in one place at the same time.”