President Donald Trump said US military forces used a weapon that he referred to as “the discombobulator” during the US operation in Caracas to remove former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power earlier this month.
“The discombobulator. I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Trump said in an interview with the New York Post. He said the weapon made enemy equipment “not work.”
“They never got their rockets off,” Trump said, according to the Post. “They had Russian and Chinese rockets, and they never got one off. We came in, they pressed buttons and nothing worked. They were all set for us.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for additional information about the weapon.
In the hours after the raid, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, the president alluded to a technical capability in a news conference after the raid.
“It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have, it was dark, and it was deadly,” Trump said after the operation.
US forces captured Maduro and his wife, Celia, in an early-morning raid on Jan. 3 and sent him to the US to face criminal charges. It was an extraordinary escalation in the Trump administration’s months-long campaign against the country. Maduro has pleaded not guilty to US charges in a narco-terrorism case against him.