December 31st, 2025: CIA Carries Out Drone Strike Inside Venezuela & Russian Society Is Starting to Fall Apart
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It's Wednesday, the 31st of December, the very last day of 2025, and my, what an eventful year it's been. Welcome to the President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. night. Let's get briefed on this last day of the year, shall we? First up, we've got new details on a covert U.S. strike inside Venezuela as the CIA reportedly launches a drone attack on a port facility, signaling a sharp escalation against the Maduro regime. Later in the show, new reporting from The Washington Post shows how Russia's war is taking an increasing toll at home as social strain and public disillusionment deepen. Plus, Saudi Arabia bombs a Yemeni port city after a weapons shipment from the UAE, exposing a deepening rift between the two key Gulf allies.
And in today's Back of the Brief, a 21-year-old Texas man faces terrorism charges for allegedly supplying bomb-making materials to ISIS. But first, today's PDB Spotlight. The U.S. has now confirmed that it carried out a strike inside Venezuela, reportedly destroying a port facility or dock facility linked to drug trafficking. This was, according to what details are currently available, and there's not many of them, not a conventional military operation. According to an exclusive report from CNN, the strike was not conducted by the U.S. military at all, but by the Central Intelligence Agency. Sources familiar with the operation confirmed that the CIA carried out the covert drone attack, targeting a remote port facility along Venezuela's coast.
U.S. officials believe the facility was being used by the gang Trandaragua, or TDA, to store drugs and then load them onto boats for export to America's shores. No one was reportedly present at the site at the time of the strike, according to the sources, and no casualties were reported. The facility itself and the boats associated with it were, again, reportedly destroyed. Now, using the intelligence community, meaning the CIA, instead of military forces, does signal a different kind of operation. The U.S. military's legal authority in Venezuela has largely been limited to counter-narcotic actions at sea, not strikes on land inside the country. The CIA, however, operates under a different set of authorities than the U.S.
military, authorities the Trump administration has expanded and leaned on as it increasingly casts Venezuela-linked trafficking networks as a national security threat rather than purely a criminal one. So in that context, the CIA strike looks less like a one-off and more like a perhaps test case, deliberately contained, quiet, well, quiet until the president talked about it, and structured in a way that allows Washington to see what follows from Caracas as much as what was destroyed. And so far, what's followed is strikingly muted. Venezuela has not publicly acknowledged the strike, even as it has routinely denounced US interdictions and seizures and maritime pressure as violations of its sovereignty.
What details emerge about the CIA drone strike in Venezuela?
Regional governments have also remained notably silent, despite public resistance to any overt US military action tied to Venezuela. Now, that silence matters, particularly given the broader campaign unfolding under Operation Southern Spear. That campaign, as we've long discussed here on the PDB, centers on Washington's expanding counter-narcotics buildup across the Caribbean, although the larger context appears to be the removal of Maduro. After all, it's hard to paint this as just a counter-narcotics or narco-terrorism operation after President Trump posted on social media that, that pressure won't let up until Venezuela returns the oil and land that it stole from the U.S. Over the past several months, the Trump administration has dramatically expanded U.S.
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