US House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday, January 5, that Venezuela should hold elections soon, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio called voting premature following the toppling of president Nicolas Maduro.

Speaking to reporters after a briefing to lawmakers from Rubio and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, Johnson added he did not expect the United States to send troops to Venezuela, a possibility that President Donald Trump refused to rule out publicly.

“I expect that there will be an election called in Venezuela,” said Johnson, the top member of Trump’s Republican Party in Congress. “Some of these things are still being determined, of course, but it should happen in short order. And I think it will need to be, so that their economy can remain stabilized and the country can remain stabilized.”

The US, for years, described Maduro as illegitimate after successive elections that observers said were riddled with irregularities. But Trump said after US forces snatched Maduro that the US would secure interests – notably access to oil – by forcing cooperation with Maduro’s vice president turned interim leader, Delcy Rodriguez.

Trump also dismissed the leader of the democratic opposition long championed by Washington, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado.

‘We are not at war’

Rubio, in an interview with NBC News’ Meet the Press on Sunday, said that discussion of elections “is premature at this point.”

Johnson defended the legality of the operation and the lack of prior notice to Congress, which constitutionally has the authority to declare war.

“We are not at war. We do not have US armed forces in Venezuela and we are not occupying that country,” Johnson said. “We don’t expect troops on the ground. We don’t expect direct involvement in any other way, beyond just coercing the new – the interim – government.”

Democrats left the briefing skeptical. Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, said: “Regime change and so-called nation building, it always ends up hurting the United States.”

“I left the briefing feeling that it would again,” Schumer said, adding more questions were raised than answered.

Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the timing of the attack “is suspicious to me,” suggesting Trump wanted to divert attention from issues at home including health-care costs.