Venezuelan president and wife arrive in New York following large-scale strike

UPDATE (3:54 PM): Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife have landed in New York to face criminal charges.

A military plane carrying the couple landed at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York earlier Saturday evening after they were captured by U.S. forces in Venezuela.

Federal agents escorted Maduro down the boarding stairs in the dark.

President Maduro could appear in court as early as Monday.

UPDATE (3:10 PM): During a press conference Saturday, President Donald Trump said the U.S. will run Venezuela until there can be a "safe, proper and judicious transition" to new leadership.

"We don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years," President Trump explained.

The president also said U.S. oil companies will fix the country's infrastructure saying, "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country."

Also during the press conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says lawmakers were not notified of the military operation ahead of time, but were told immediately after the operation.

"We called members of Congress immediately after. This is not the kind of mission that you can do Congressional notification on. It was a trigger-based mission in which conditions had to be met night after night. We watched and monitored that for number of days. So it's just simply not the kind of mission you can call people and say, 'Hey, we may do this at some point in the next 15 days.'"

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State

Rubio says Marduro had multiple opportunities to avoid being taken captive saying, "He was provided multiple very, very, very generous offers, and chose instead to act like a wild man. Chose instead to play around, and the result is what we saw."

Saturday's U.S. military action comes after months of threats from the Trump Administration demanding that Venezuela stop drug trafficking.

U.S. forces have been carrying out strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific since early September.

(NBC, KYMA) - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife are heading to New York in the wake of a large-scale strike against Venezuela Saturday.

The strike was reportedly approved by President Donald Trump more than a week ago, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the planning.

Earlier, President Trump wrote to social media saying President Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, had been captured and flown out of the country.

He later confirmed in an interview on Fox News, as well as on social media, that they were taken to the USS Iwo Jima and will be flown to New York.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the couple had been indicted in the state, with Maduro being charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.