The Bankrupt Premise of Trump’s Venezuela Colony

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The headline and opening paragraphs of a 1,400-word story basically reporting that Trump had sat for the interview Joe Biden had denied the NYT (okay, they didn’t mention the latter bit) focus on Trump’s plan to run Venezuela’s oil industry indefinitely.

Trump Says U.S. Oversight of Venezuela Could Last for Years

President Trump said on Wednesday evening that he expected the United States would be running Venezuela and extracting oil from its huge reserves for years, and insisted that the interim government of the country — all former loyalists to the now-imprisoned Nicolás Maduro — is “giving us everything that we feel is necessary.”

“Only time will tell,” he said, when asked how long the administration will demand direct oversight of the South American nation, with the hovering threat of American military action from an armada just off shore.

“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Mr. Trump said during a nearly two-hour interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”

[snip]

During the wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump did not give a precise time range for how long the United States would remain Venezuela’s political overlord. Would it be three months? Six months? A year? Longer?

“I would say much longer,” the president replied.

That he said that is surely news. And while I assume David Sanger will do a follow-up story that might explain this, NYT did not here.

The headline gives Trump something he badly needs — false assurances to oil companies that have been disabusing Trump of his insane notions that oil will pay for a Venezuela invasion that the US would stick around to make investments worthwhile.

But it doesn’t get into all the problems with Trump’s rapidly moving attempt to turn this into a win: even with that much longer security guarantee, it’s not at all clear this will work.

It started 10 days before the invasion, when Trump told oil companies they had to invest now to get reimbursed for nationalizations in the past.

Administration officials have told oil executives in recent weeks that if they want compensation for their rigs, pipelines and other seized property, then they must be prepared to go back into Venezuela now and invest heavily in reviving its shattered petroleum industry, two people familiar with the administration’s outreach told POLITICO on Saturday. The outlook for Venezuela’s shattered oil infrastructure is one of the major questions following the U.S. military action that captured leader Nicolás Maduro.

But people in the industry said the administration’s message has left them still leery about the difficulty of rebuilding decayed oil fields in a country where it’s not even clear who will lead the country for the foreseeable future.

“They’re saying, ‘you gotta go in if you want to play and get reimbursed,’” said one industry official familiar with the conversations.

The offer has been on the table for the last 10 days, the person said. “But the infrastructure currently there is so dilapidated that no one at these companies can adequately assess what is needed to make it operable.”

Apparently, Trump didn’t heed these warnings, and in the aftermath of the invasion he has made grandiose promises that oil would pay for the invasion.

To be fair, his first announcement — that “the Interim Authorities in Venezuela” had agreed to give the United States (or perhaps Trump personally)  between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil” which would “be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” may well be an effort to pay for the costs of the invasion.

It’s not at all clear a $2 billion payment would even do that.

DOD has been conducting periodic murderboat strikes every several days, each of which surely costs millions of dollars.

One hellfire missile, for example, typically costs about $150,000, and reaper drones cost around $3,500 per hour to fly. An F-35 costs around $40,000 per hour to fly. The cost per flight hour of an AC-130J gunship is not public but its predecessor, the AC-130U, which was phased out in 2019, cost over $40,000 per hour to fly.

The Gerald Ford has been in the Caribbean since November 16, which works out to be about $424 million (though there were already ships there). One of the $50 million Chinooks used in the attack was badly damaged. Similarly, the Delta Force lead was seriously injured, so taxpayers are paying his recovery and possibly his retirement. There were 150 aircraft used in the attack.

It was a tremendously successful attack.

It wasn’t cheap.

But within days of promising that oil would pay for his new colony, outlets started reporting that taxpayers might have to subsidize that effort.

Donald Trump has suggested US taxpayers could reimburse energy companies for repairing Venezuelan infrastructure for extracting and shipping oil.

Trump acknowledged that “a lot of money” would need to be spent to increase oil production in Venezuela after US forces ousted its leader, Nicolás Maduro, but suggested his government could pay oil companies to do the work.

“A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue,” the president said.

The reasons why are clear: even assuming Venezuela remains stable long enough to develop investments (the promise Trump is floating to the NYT), the cost of refining Venezuelan oil is just too high, particularly given current prices.

The energy-intensive upgrading process also increases the carbon footprint of these heavy grades, which could push up costs further if more governments start taxing emissions or raising existing levies.

Breakeven costs for key grades in the Orinoco belt already average more than $80 a barrel, according to estimates by consultancy Wood Mackenzie. That places Venezuelan oil at the higher end of the global cost scale for new production. By comparison, heavy oil produced in Canada has an average breakeven cost of around $55 a barrel.

Exxon’s breakeven target for its global oil production by 2030 is $30 a barrel, driven by low-cost fields in Guyana and the U.S. Permian shale basin. Chevron has a similar target, while Conoco has a long-term plan to generate free cash flow even if oil prices fall to $35 a barrel. Oil , currently trades at around $60.

While energy boards have increasingly supported greater exploration in recent years, they are insisting that this be done with spending discipline in mind in the face of rising global supplies and uncertainty over the energy transition.

Here’s a table from Bloomberg that shows that Venezuela, even ignoring the potential instability, is just not a competitive investment.

The rest of the article explains what better alternatives the majors are investing in.

Trump seems not to understand this math (or he’s engaged in another con job), because he keeps bragging about the price of oil coming down which … yeah, that’s the point. That’s precisely why imagining you’re going to have willful takers for your offer to invest in expensive-to-refine Venezuelan oil at today’s prices is a pipe dream.

Thus the bribes … er, subsidies, that American taxpayers will end up paying. On top of any deployment, taxpayers will bribe oil companies.

So it doesn’t make sense for the oil companies.

But it also doesn’t make sense for Venezuelans, because the first thing Trump’s backers will demand is that Venezuela pay off years of debt.

Analysts estimate Venezuela now owes $150-$170 billion and JP Morgan calculates that $102 billion of that is in the form of bonds, while bilateral debt to China totals $13-$15 billion.
Venezuela has not reported debt figures for around a decade and state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) has in the meantime struck complex oil-backed debt deals with China.

Despite Washington’s ousting of Maduro, the main hurdles to a debt restructuring remain in place.

U.S. sanctions — including against Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez – mean that even sitting down for creditor talks could breach U.S. Treasury Department curbs.

[snip]

“The U.S. administration has an interest in moving the restructuring forward, because without that restructuring, these oil companies will not be participating and will not be investing anything,” said Ed Al-Hussainy of Columbia Threadneedle Investments, which has Venezuelan bond exposure.

“The possibility of a U.S. government financial line of credit or a guarantee or a backstop of some sort is going to be music to the ears of investors,” the portfolio manager added.

Lee Robinson, founder of Altana Wealth which also holds Venezuelan bonds, said there was enough at stake for the U.S. itself to put a loan in place to kickstart Venezuela’s recovery.
JP Morgan said a recognition of Rodriguez’s new government by the Trump administration would open many questions.

“Should the Fund be bypassed in favour of a faster-track, oil-based bilateral program, we could be going down the road of a faster-track, less orthodox bond restructuring than what we have seen in the years since the pandemic and the advent of the Common Framework,” JP Morgan said.

Sounds like the taxpayers will be on the hook for the debt restructuring, just like the bailout to keep “libertarian” Javier Milei in office.

Moe Tkacik has written a bunch on the extraction involved here, as in this November story on Juan Guaidó’s role in it, during the last time Trump tried to milk Venezuela, making it easier for Paul Singer to acquire CITGO.

On January 23, 2019, when Guaidó proclaimed himself the “interim president” of an incredulous Venezuela, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the Trump administration would recognize Guaidó as the Bolivarian Republic’s genuine leader, and unveiled a suite of tough new sanctions on PDVSA, pitched as a bid to force Maduro to step down. The whole thing seemed like a joke, a throwback to the days when our foreign-policy establishment insisted a drug-trafficking warlord on an island of six million was the “real” leader of the world’s most populous country—though at least most Chinese knew who Chiang Kai-shek was when he fled to Taiwan in 1949 to preside over what the United Nations insisted on calling the “Republic of China.” Only the Miami Herald noted an unusual provision of the new arrangement, explained by then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who told the newspaper “that if Guaidó succeeds in forming a government, the money” from international sales of Venezuelan oil that he was freezing under the new sanctions regime “would go to him.” On Twitter, Guaidó promised this new arrangement would “prevent the looting from continuing.”

[snip]

Venezuela, PDVSA, and Citgo were legally separate entities. But in mid-February, Guaidó named entirely new slates of board members to PDVSA, its U.S. holding company, and Citgo, a move Rodríguez knew would strengthen Crystallex’s case. That same week, the glass manufacturer Owens-Illinois, which had been awarded a half-billion-dollar arbitration judgment over two Coke bottle factories Chávez had expropriated in 2010, sued Citgo on the basis that it was an “alter ego” of the state. Owens-Illinois had expert witness assistance from none other than José Ignacio Hernández, whom Guaidó had just named the attorney general of the shadow government.

That is, Trump proposes to fix the problem he, in significant part, caused in his first term.

Plus, until you fix Venezuela’s corruption problem — which Trump has pointedly declined to do in retaining Delcy Rodríguez, partly because he’s relying on Maduro’s suppression regime to offer stability to oil companies, partly because he affirmatively loves corruption — then the Venezuelan people aren’t going to see anything, even while Trump is attempting to oust China’s slightly more favorable float.

And all this is happening on a time frame — big investments and risks on the front end, very long timetable for returns to anyone — that I imagine China is taking some solace about being surprised, if it was surprised, by looking at how Trump’s obsession with becoming a petro-autocrat leaves it untouched to dominate renewables for the foreseeable future, renewables that will continue to put pressure on oil prices in a way that Trump seems not to understand.

And all that assumes Trump, or Dalcy Rodríguez, can ensure stability, something for which there’s no evidence. All that assumes that no one decides to make a target of the resources Trump has put in the middle of an increasingly volatile Caribbean.

Trump is literally making up Colonialism 2.0 on the fly. And the serially bankrupt businessman appears to be doing funny math at every turn.

So yeah, Trump is making expansive claims to the NYT. But they are part of an elaborate con job to prevent this Venezuela adventure from backfiring in a spectacular way.

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Stephen Miller Has Similar Plans for Colombia and Columbia

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Laura Jedeed wonders whether Trump is testing out a new kind of colonialism, where you basically issued orders to the corrupt illegitimate authorities, rather than installing the opposition.

Trump and Rubio’s talking points combine into a message intended not for the people of America, but for the heads of state in Cuba, Columbia, [sic] and worldwide. The message itself is simple, elegant, and ugly: do exactly what we say or America will destroy you—not your country, or your economy, or your people, but you, personally. This strategy doesn’t just let America “run” Venezuela. It allows this administration to “run” any country unable to attack us on our home turf: extract their resources, dictate their domestic policy, force their leaders to resign. All by credibly threatening extreme personal violence against any head of state who pushes back.

Credit where credit is due: it’s an entirely new approach to colonialism. Here’s how it’s worked since Britain perfected the art: you invade the country, then place the opposition party in power. That party requires your support to maintain control (if they had enough force to do it themselves they’d already be in charge). In exchange for military backup, their leader will do anything you ask.

Trump, on the other hand, has endorsed Maduro’s Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, allegedly because the opposition party “doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within the country.” This assertion is aggressive nonsense. Opposition party weakness is a feature, not a bug, for the reasons stated above. It’s also patently untrue in this case. Election monitors from several countries agree that candidate Edmundo González Urrutia beat Maduro in a landslide two years ago by as much as 51 percent. Trump and his allies know this—they’ve used Maduro’s election theft to justify invasion. It’s kind of perfect: the party doesn’t have the power to gain power by themselves, but they’re popular enough to minimize the danger of revolt. It’s the dream situation—so why isn’t the Trump administration going for it?

Most people seem to think Trump’s endorsement of the unpopular and hostile Rodríguez stems from bitterness towards María Corina Machado, the opposition party leader who received the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump wanted so badly last year. Machado seems to think so too; she’s offered to give the prize to Trump and spent ten minutes abasing herself before the Peace President on Hannity yesterday. It won’t help. Trump is petty to the core, it’s true, but Stephen Miller and the other ghouls actually running this country would never set the entire colonial playbook on fire just to appease some old queen’s ego.

The real reason, I suspect, is this: leaving Rodríguez in charge is the only move that does not require a full-scale invasion.

Unlike Machado, Rodríguez possesses a military and police force capable of holding Venezuela together. Under the old model, that force would have threatened our hegemony, but under Colonialism 2.0, she has a strong incentive to do exactly as she’s told regardless; she is, after all, one surgical strike away from losing her freedom or possibly her life. As long as she doesn’t call Trump’s bluff or get coup’d herself, it’s foolproof.

[snip]

And the administration was right: Rodríguez is already rolling over. “We consider it a priority to move towards a balanced and respectful relationship between the US and Venezuela,” she wrote on Telegram late Sunday. “We extend an invitation to the US government to work together on an agenda for cooperation that is aimed towards shared development.” So far, so good.

That’s certainly what Trump is trying to do.

But it’s wildly premature to assess whether it’ll work.

Before I explain how it may backfire, let me observe that this plan is precisely the same plan Trump (Stephen Miller, really) is attempting with the US.

What Trump plans for Colombia is little different than what he succeeded in doing with Columbia University: Make demands on the elected leader, extract tribute, change the rules to benefit the authoritarian state. Whether it will work long term has yet to be seen, but the lesson of New College in Florida shows where things may head in the medium term: with dramatically increased costs and noticeably decreased utility. Once DeSantis is out of power, the effort is likely to be abandoned, turning New College into a bigger shell than it is already is. Columbia might take longer to collapse, unless Stephen Miller doubles down on his demands.

Now consider what makes Venezuela (or Colombia) different from Columbia, starting with the guns, guns which might come from at least three different places.

First, there are Russia, China, and some other Venezuelan patron states that are under assault as well. Trump has ordered Venezuela to expel them, stop doing business with them, and sell oil only to the US.

The Trump administration has told Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez that the regime must meet the White House’s demands before being allowed to pump more oil, according to three people familiar with the administration’s plan.

First, the country must kick out China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba and sever economic ties, the sources said. Second, Venezuela must agree to partner exclusively with the U.S. on oil production and favor America when selling heavy crude oil, they added.

According to one person, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers in a private briefing on Monday that he believes the U.S. can force Venezuela’s hand because its existing oil tankers are full. Rubio also told lawmakers that the U.S. estimates that Caracas has only a couple of weeks before it will become financially insolvent without the sale of its oil reserves.

As we speak, the Trump Administration is carrying out a replay of the OJ White Bronco chase, but with an empty oil tanker headed for Russia.

Russia has sent a submarine and other naval assets to escort an empty, rusting oil tanker that has become a new flashpoint in U.S.-Russia relations, according to a U.S. official.

The tanker, formerly known as the Bella 1, has been trying to evade the U.S. blockade of sanctioned oil tankers near Venezuela for more than two weeks. The vessel failed to dock in Venezuela and load with oil. Although the ship is empty, the U.S. Coast Guard has pursued it into the Atlantic in a bid to crack down on a fleet of tankers that ferry illicit oil around the world, including black-market oil sold by Russia.

The vessel’s crew repelled an effort by the U.S. to board the vessel in December and steamed into the Atlantic. As the Coast Guard followed it, the crew sloppily painted a Russian flag on its side, changed its name to the Marinera and switched its registration to Russia.

Russia has been concerned by U.S. seizures of tankers that ferry its illicit oil around the world and power its economy, and it has made the unusual move of allowing the tanker to register in Russia without an inspection or other formalities, experts say.

Update: The US has now seized the tanker.

Will this lead to some kind of direct conflict? I have no fucking clue and neither do you, because both Trump and Putin are fucking nuts. If Trump were rational, he’d retaliate not with direct confrontation in the North Sea, but by arming Ukraine and giving them the green light to up its attacks on Russia, but he’s not rational. Russia’s economy is actually close to collapse, and it wouldn’t take much to get it there. Russia, of course, has other means it might use to retaliate against Trump.

We shall see.

China is another matter though. China not only is rational, but China kicked the shit out of Trump in his last attempt to demand obeisance, the tariffs. Trump thought he could achieve with tariffs what he is trying to achieve with Venezuela: obeisance and personal tribute. Not only have all the tariffs harmed the US, spiking small business bankruptcies and inflation (and in the process making Trump’s political support far weaker), but China used its near-monopoly on rare earths and ability to replace US soybeans to bring Trump to his knees instead.

In fact, the Venezuelan coup might be partly a response to China’s success at wielding the rare earth weapon. While there’s much I disagree with in it, this post argues the Venezuela invasion was not about oil, but about the rare earth China currently extracts.

Investigative reporting documented Chinese buyers operating directly at mining sites in Bolívar state. The Venezuelan government established official collection centers in Los Pijiguaos and Morichalito in 2023 specifically for cassiterite, coltan, nickel, rhodium, and titanium. The Maduro regime designated these as strategic resources for commercialization, meaning state control over extraction and export, with Chinese buyers integrated into official operations from the start.

The supply chain from Venezuelan mines to Chinese refineries operates through both formal and informal channels, with Chinese buyers exercising operational control at the extraction source. Minerals extracted in the Orinoco Arc move by river and air transport to Colombian border towns, then to Bogotá for smelting into refined bars. These materials are relabeled under incorrect tariff codes, transforming raw ore into processed ferro-tantalum or other classifications that obscure origin. Final export occurs through Colombian ports at Santa Marta and Buenaventura, destined for Chinese processing facilities.

Once Venezuelan minerals blend with Colombian or Brazilian ore in these intermediary steps, tracing origin becomes effectively impossible. This laundering mechanism allows Venezuelan minerals to enter legitimate global supply chains, including those feeding US defense contractors. The result is Pentagon weapons systems potentially incorporating materials extracted under Chinese buyer supervision in Venezuelan territory, then processed in Chinese refineries controlled by Beijing.

Chinese buyers do not operate at arm’s length through market transactions. They coordinate directly at the mining sites with both Colombian guerrilla groups (ELN, FARC dissidents) who control physical security and Venezuelan state security (SEBIN) who facilitate transport using official government vehicles. One miner described seeing Chinese operatives and ELN commanders “eating together, buying material together, and getting off the helicopter together.” This is not commercial activity. This is integrated operational control where Chinese buyers work directly with armed groups and state officials to extract strategic minerals.

Trump doesn’t need — indeed, the oil companies probably don’t want — Venezuela’s oil, at least not in the short term.

He does need rare earth deposits (which is also the stated purpose of usurping Greenlands).

It took us some months to understand how China responded to Trump’s threat of tariffs. It took less time to recognize China’s advance preparation for them (based on Trump’s trade war from the first term).

A lot of the coverage of the coup views it as a profound humiliation for China, not least because China’s Latin American envoy met with Nicolás Maduro the day before the coup. That didn’t stop China (and Russia and Iran) from attending Rodríguez’ signing in, so there’s a distinct possibility they’re in at least as close coordination with Rodríguez right now as Marco Rubio.

But the most belligerent thing — the thing people expect — is that China will take Taiwan, as it was practicing to do even as Trump had a fifth of deployed assets in the Caribbean preparing to invade.

With all the attention on Venezuela, there has been too little attention on vacuums created with this extended deployment off the coast of Venezuela (the most immediate of which is probably in the Middle East). But it is clear that Trump keeps launching little wars with resources most of Congress believes should be used to counter China’s expansionary plans.

But as China showed with the tariffs, they likely have ways to respond that are less direct and at least as devastating.

But China and Russia aren’t the only ones who have guns here.

So does, just as one example, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who has been indicted in SDNY alongside Maduro since 2020. Reuters describes that the US already threatened Cabello.

In the meantime, they have communicated to Cabello via intermediaries that if he is defiant, he could face a similar fate to Maduro, the authoritarian leader captured in a U.S. raid on Saturday and whisked away to New York to face prosecution on “narco-terrorism” charges, or could see his life in danger, the source said.

But taking out Cabello could be risky, possibly motivating pro-government motorcycle groups, known as colectivos, to take to the streets, unleashing the chaos Washington wants to avoid. Their reaction may depend on whether they feel protected by other officials, however.

In one of her first decisions as acting president, Rodríguez appointed General Gustavo González López as new head of the Presidential Honor Guard and the Directorate General of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM), state TV said late on Tuesday.

González López, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. and EU along with at least half a dozen other high-ranking officials for rights violations and corruption, served as Venezuela’s intelligence director until mid-2024, when he was replaced by Maduro in a reshuffle of his cabinet and security team.

Later that year, he began working with Rodríguez as head of strategic affairs and control at state oil company PDVSA.

González López was considered close to Cabello, but it was not immediately clear whether his appointment was a gesture of support from Rodríguez to the man considered the strongman of the ruling party, or, on the contrary, a sign of a rift.

The officer replaces General Javier Marcano, whose performance came under scrutiny after Maduro’s capture, according to analysts.

One thing I’ve seen no coverage of is why the US thinks Rodríguez will be secure within Venezuela now that Trump killed the 40 Cubans who were protecting Maduro. And the militias via which Cabello exercises some of his repression could carry out a deniable kind of violence.

But Cabello isn’t even the only one with guns in question. The purported purpose of this operation is about stopping drug trafficking. But unless Trump is doing what every other caudillo does — manage the trade while extracting tribute — there will, eventually, be a counter response from the cartels, which don’t take kindly to losing their markets and have the ability to exercise violence both on site — in Venezuela — but also closer to home, including in the United States. Stephen Miller has so much of US law enforcement snatching workers at Home Depot that certain kinds of crime are likely far easier to pull off. Update: About which the NYT has another story today.

Finally, there are the Venezuelan people. Maduro only remained in power with a great deal of repression, and Trump is tinkering with that system of repression. Meanwhile, Trump’s plans to expel much of the Chinese may exacerbate already dire economic conditions for Venezuelans, because Trump won’t subsidize soft power in the way China has been willing to (to say nothing of the expulsion of Cubans who were providing medical care). Where Stephen Miller’s authoritarianism has failed most dramatically in the US is the way the counter reaction to his goons has revitalized civil society in cities that stand up to the goons. And there’s already a practiced opposition in Venezuela that, as in the US, dramatically outnumbers the goons in charge.

It’s only day four. We have no fucking idea how this will turn out. While Delta Force and the CIA performed spectacularly, there’s really just a handful of people in charge, and most — like Stephen Miller, who thinks of Venezuela as an island surrounded by a US armada and therefore is likely forgetting about a porous border with Colombia — are utterly ignorant about Venezuela and childish about power.

Columbia University was easy to subjugate, because no one had guns. But even there it only happened by damaging the host. There are a lot of people with guns with an interest in Venezuela.

It’s just as likely, in my opinion, that this precipitates World War III as that it succeeds in Venezuela much less produces the treasure Trump is demanding.

Update: CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, Venezuelan Thor Halvorssen, predicts Delcy Rodríguez’ quick demise.

Reports indicate the Trump administration has struck a deal with Delcy Rodríguez, Mr. Maduro’s iron-fisted vice president, positioning her as a transitional leader. She has, it seems, convinced U.S. officials that she can dismantle the Maduro dictatorship, which would have to include demobilizing the armed militias, disbanding the dreaded secret police and ending the regime’s drug empire. But this is a fantasy. Ms. Rodríguez will fail spectacularly, leading to the final unraveling.

Venezuela isn’t like Mexico, where a state coexists uneasily with cartels. Here, the cartel is the state. Factions—enriched generals, intelligence chiefs and narco-traffickers—won’t surrender power in a Washington-brokered deal. Ms. Rodríguez herself faces insurmountable obstacles, beginning with her utter lack of legitimacy. Never elected vice president, she has less authority than Mr. Maduro, the usurper who appointed her.

I think he wildly overestimates the extent that Trump would even permit any lapse in repression.

Update: Meanwhile on Xitter, I take this as confession that Stephen Miller knows fuckall about the oil market, especially the discount at which Venezuelan oil must be sold and the price at which it is worth drilling.

Paul Krugman’s column today is on how Trump’s oil math doesn’t add up.

[W]hatever it is we’re doing in Venezuela isn’t really a war for oil. It is, instead, a war for oil fantasies. The vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.

Update: WSJ goes into more depth about the challenges Cabello may pose to Trump’s plans.

Fond of swinging a spiked club while spouting conspiracy theories on his hourslong weekly show on state television called “Bringing Down the Hammer,” now on its 556th episode, Cabello is hard to predict.

Cabello, a 62-year-old whose official title is minister of interior, justice and peace, has so far signaled unity, taking part in Rodriguez’s swearing-in ceremony on Monday, where various factions of Venezuela’s ruling socialist party were present.

But that night, Cabello was toting a rifle and riling up black-uniformed security forces before they patrolled Caracas to prevent citizens from protesting.

“Doubting is treason!” he said, before telling the armed group, “Now, off to battle in the streets for victory.”

Under a state of emergency that the government declared after Maduro’s capture, security forces were ordered to hunt down U.S. sympathizers, according to the Official Gazette, where the Venezuelan government publishes new laws and decrees. Residents in the capital reported new roadblocks around the city where armed, masked men checked the phones of ordinary Venezuelans for antigovernment messages.

Update: This offers a good explanation of all the people with guns who would make things difficult even if Delcy Rodríguez did want to cooperate with the US.

Update, January 9: This analysis lays out the difficulties of Delcy Rodriguez’ position better than I did.

For her part, Rodríguez confronts an unprecedented challenge for a Venezuelan leader: She must satisfy Washington’s demands while maintaining sufficient Chavista coalition support to prevent an internal fracture or a military coup. The Trump administration demands sufficient cooperation to enable US oil company operations, likely including transparent property contracts and regulatory stability—precisely the institutional environment that Chavismo systematically dismantled. Rodríguez making such an agreement with Trump would alienate the regime’s hardliners, who would view her accommodation as a betrayal. Thus, Rodríguez may be unable to guarantee the stability required for the business operations Trump wants to run in Venezuela.

Her public contradictions reflect this impossible position. In her first televised addresses as interim president, she demanded Maduro’s immediate release to demonstrate loyalty to domestic audiences. Less than twenty-four hours later, however, she declared it a priority to move toward a “balanced and respectful” economic cooperation between the United States and Venezuela.

This double game cannot persist indefinitely. Rodríguez must choose between accommodating Trump’s demands or preserving Chavista unity. Trump’s threat that if Rodríguez “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” makes clear that there will be consequences of noncompliance. Purging the hardliners may be Rodríguez’s best option.

Perhaps Rodríguez’s most complex challenge is managing Venezuela’s deep entanglements with China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba while simultaneously partnering with the Trump administration. This is especially the case after the Trump administration demanded that Venezuela immediately cut ties and cease intelligence cooperation with Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba. These relationships represent more than diplomatic alignments—they constitute binding financial obligations, operational dependencies, and strategic commitments that cannot simply be abandoned without triggering massive economic and security consequences.

China presents the most significant financial exposure. Venezuela owes Beijing around twenty billion dollars in loans. These debts are secured through oil-for-loan arrangements that require repayment through crude deliveries, with China currently absorbing more than half of Venezuela’s oil exports (approximately 746,000 barrels per day in November 2025).

Beyond petroleum, Chinese state enterprises control critical Venezuelan infrastructure.

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Stephen Miller and Plans for Post-Decapitation

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Stephen Miller’s breeding partner created a worldwide scandal by posting a picture of Greenland as an American flag.

The map from a far right podcaster, however well-connected, was actually less important than that the US President, the same day, told Michael Scherer, “we do need Greenland” because it was “surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships,” a sentiment Trump repeated on Air Force One yesterday.

During our call, Trump, who had just arrived at his golf club in West Palm Beach, was in evident good spirits, and reaffirmed to me that Venezuela may not be the last country subject to American intervention. “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” he said, describing the island—a part of Denmark, a NATO ally—as “surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships.”

Of course, since both Katie Miller and Donald Trump largely parrot what they’ve recently heard, both comments likely reflected the views of Stephen Miller.

Meanwhile, this passage of a story describing how Trump really hasn’t (yet) committed regime change, but instead decapitated the Venezuelan state only to leave Maduro’s cronies in place (for now), attracted a flood of confirmation bias.

Two people close to the White House said the president’s lack of interest in boosting Machado, despite her recent efforts to flatter Trump, stemmed from her decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, an award the president has openly coveted.

Although Machado ultimately said she was dedicating the award to Trump, her acceptance of the prize was an “ultimate sin,” said one of the people.

“If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” this person said.

I have no doubt Trump was pissed María Corina Machado got the Nobel Prize and he did not. But a Miami Herald story published just six days after Machado’s recognition described that Delcy Rodriguez had been pitching a Madurismo without Maduro via back channels for months.

A group of senior Venezuelan government officials, led by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, who is president of the National Assembly, have quietly promoted a series of initiatives in recent months aimed at presenting themselves to Washington as a “more acceptable” alternative to Nicolás Maduro’s regime, according to people with direct knowledge of the talks.

The proposals, funneled through intermediaries in Qatar, sought to persuade sectors of the U.S. government that a “Madurismo without Maduro” could enable a peaceful transition in Venezuela—preserving political stability without dismantling the ruling apparatus.

According to the sources, Qatari mediators presented to the U.S. two formal proposals this year, one in April and another in September. Both outlined potential governing mechanisms without Maduro in power. In those scenarios, Delcy Rodríguez would serve as the institutional continuity figure, while retired Gen. Miguel Rodríguez Torres, who is currently in exile and is not related to the Rodriguez siblings, would head a transitional government.

The central argument, the sources said, was that the Rodríguez siblings represent a “more palatable” version of so-called chavismo — the socialist ideology named for deceased leader Hugo Chávez — for Washington, since neither has been indicted on narcotrafficking charges by U.S. courts. However, former regime officials— whose accounts have been used by U.S. prosecutors in cases linked to the so-called Cartel of the Suns—have implicated both siblings in logistical support and money laundering operations.

Delcy Rodriguez is also the person who, according to the indictment charging Marco Rubio’s old roomie, former Congressman David Rivera, with acting as an unregistered agent of Venezuela (for which he is due to stand trial next month) who ordered CITGO to serve as a front for the contract. As part of the contract, Rivera lobbied Rubio in 2017 on a Maduro succession plan.

Delcy Rodriguez has been in the thick of such efforts from the moment Trump first became President.

So while the attribution of Trump’s sidelining of Venezuela’s democratic opposition — by a single person “close to the White House” — to the President’s narcissism surely has some truth, I’m more interested in that same story’s report that Stephen Miller may actually take on some of the duties of Viceroy that Trump initially assigned to the Miami-raised Spanish speaking Marco Rubio, not least because that may explain why Trump chose decapitation — retention of the oppressive Maduro regime — over regime change, replacement with a democratic one.

Having dismantled much of the U.S. foreign policy infrastructure since he came to power, Trump depends on a small number of trusted personnel and business associates to handle core issues such as his peace plan in Gaza, negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, and now Venezuela.

The National Security Council staff has been gutted and the administration has yet to nominate an assistant secretary of state to handle the Western Hemisphere.

The White House is weighing giving Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and homeland security adviser, a more elevated role in overseeing post-Maduro operations in Venezuela, according to one person with knowledge of the conversations, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive dealings.

Miller has been the architect of the administration’s anti-immigration and border policy, and took a central role in the effort to remove Maduro. He was among the handful of top administration officials flanking the president during the news conference Saturday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.

War on the Rocks argues that too many people are trying to read Trump’s decision to invade Venezuela as a statement of his ideology, rather than the result of the chaotic fight for influence within his White House.

Many observers of this administration underestimate the power struggle inside the administration and how it scrambles the output. Venezuela has been an interesting case of this. My hypothesis here is that Venezuela has been an outlet of sorts for the hawks, especially Secretary of State Marco Rubio but also others. There has been no sustained appetite for confrontation with Russia or China, and only limited room to maneuver on those fronts without significant escalation risks. Iran and Venezuela, by contrast, offered arenas for hawkish foreign policy.

[snip]

When it comes to predicting the president’s next move, too many politicians and analysts assume coherence where there is division, chaos when there is improvisation, and restraint where there is only selectivity. Trump’s foreign policy behavior emerges not from doctrine but from friction. Venezuela offered a target that felt weak, morally disreputable, geographically proximate, and manageable.

Under Trump, foreign policy outcomes are less the product of grand strategy than of episodic alignment. Observers should stop asking whether a given action is consistent with Trump’s supposed beliefs and start asking whether it is legible to him as fast, dominant, and containable. They should pay closer attention to intra-administration dynamics and to how ideas persist even when not immediately acted upon. Otherwise, the failure to predict Venezuela will not be an outlier.

Given the WaPo report (which came after Viceroy Rubio bombed on the Sunday shows) that Miller will be playing in a key role in America’s new colony, I want to situate the Venezuelan coup in Miller’s own history.

It is my belief — this is a hunch based entirely on observation, not any insider reporting — that Miller made himself indispensable when he helped Trump pull himself together after the Butler assassination attempt. Trump was completely dysfunctional after the near-death experience (I don’t blame him — everyone would be floored by that trauma). I would argue that Trump has never actually reclaimed his poise since then — throughout the campaign, he was already surpassing all decency on his political attacks, and he frequently got lost on the campaign trail, including his sundowning episode on the campaign trail. Everything people point to now as proof that he is unfit to be President was evident on the campaign trail. But Trump buried his collapse under ever grandiose fascist theater, much of it orchestrated by Miller, leading up to Trump’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, and shortly after, to election victory.

Whether or not that’s the case, it is clear that in the same period, Miller started laying the groundwork to use Venezuela as a propaganda foil for his assault on democracy, which I documented here.

  • 2023: Miller decides invoking the Alien Enemies Act will be a nifty way to deport people without due process.
  • September 2024: right wing propagandists stoke claim that Aurora, CO has been invaded by Tren de Aragua.
  • October 11, 2024: Miller stages a hate fest in Aurora.
  • October 18, 2024: After Tim Walz and others debunk Miller’s lies, he accuses them of defending gang members.
  • February 9, 2025: One of Miller’s earliest high profile raids targets Aurora but nets just a single TdA member.
  • February 26, 2025: The IC debunks Miller’s false claims about TdA.
  • March 14, 2025: Trump nevertheless relies on those lies while invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
  • March 16, 2025: DHS unloads planes of mostly innocent Venezuelan men in defiance of order from Judge James Boasberg.
  • March 21, 2025: Trump claims he’s not the one who signed the AEA invocation.
  • April 2025: WaPo reports that the NIE also debunked Miller’s false claims about TdA.
  • April 10, 2025: SCOTUS rules Trump has to make some effort to get Kilmar Abrego back.
  • April 14, 2025: Performance art with Nayib Bukele in Oval Office.
  • April 19, 2025: SCOTUS halts an AEA deportation order in process.

But then, on July 18, 2025, Trump swapped Venezuelans from CECOT for 10 Americans in Venezuela, seemingly dealing Stephen Miller a major defeat in his plan to rely on AEA.

 

 

I questioned why that happened here. And on the same day, NYT provided what is in retrospect even more critical background, a batshit insane story I glossed here. As the entire CECOT drama was proceeding, Trump was dicking around the Miami Hispanic community, which was clamoring to pressure Maduro, first halting then renewing Chevron’s Venezuela license.

  • January 31: Maduro makes a deal with Grenell.
  • February: Cuban-American Members of Congress (CAMC) pressure Trump to pull the Chevron license, which he does in late February (possibly between the time Rubio signs the deal with Bukele and the day 200 mostly-innocent men are loaded on planes?).
  • Chevron CEO Mike Wirth notes that if Chevron can’t export Venezuela’s oil, China will do so.
  • CAMC learn that Trump might reverse his decision, so threaten to vote against the Big Ugly Bill.
  • Stephen Miller pitches Trump on murderboats.
  • Trump lets Chevron license expire on May 27.
  • CAMC vote to pass Big Ugly.
  • Around the same time Trump considers a pardon for convicted drug kingpin Hernández, Marco Rubio sells Trump on a claim that Maduro is a drug kingpin.
  • July: Based in part on Wirth’s China argument, Trump reverses course, again, on Chevron license, Maduro accepts the CECOT prisoners and releases 10 Americans, including a triple murderer.

Trump’s flip-flopping over the Chevron license would lead up to Trump’s command, ten days before the actual invasion, that oil companies prepare to invest in Venezuela if they want compensation for equipment Maduro seized.

But we know that, after Miller first pitched Trump on drone strikes in Mexico, and then he and Rubio (Miller to support his fascist project including hopes to return to using the AEA declaration, Rubio to cater to Miami’s Cuban-American desires) pitched Trump to instead attack Venezuelan-related drug trafficking. On July 25 — a week after returning the hundreds of mostly innocent men to Venezuela — Trump signed an order to begin the murderboat campaign, with murderboat strikes beginning in September. That same day, Marco Rubio pretended this was all about the election Maduro stole last year. Another week later, Pam Bondi upped the reward to help capture Maduro — $50 million we don’t yet know whether has been claimed.

This would have been the period when CIA and Delta Force started practicing the snatch of Maduro.

According to a new WSJ story, it wasn’t yet a foregone conclusion that Trump would approve the attack. Maduro remained dancing in videos that reported inflamed Trump, and dancing in negotiations to leave peacefully (even as Delcy Rodriguez was working back channels to assume power in his wake).

  • October 7: CNN reveals Trump has a covert finding authorizing strikes on cartels.
  • October 10: Machado wins Nobel Prize.
  • October 15: Trump confirms he has signed a finding authorizing strikes on cartels.
  • October 16: Alvin Holsey announces his retirement.
  • November 16: Ford carrier group arrives in the Caribbean.
  • December 1: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernández, whose crimes include shipping drugs originating in and protected by Venezuela.
  • December 10: Trump starts seizing oil tankers; Machado arrives in Oslo just after the prize is awarded.
  • December 23: Maduro rejects offer to exile in Turkey.
  • Roughly December 25: Trump orders oil companies to prepare to invest in Venezuela.
  • December 29: CIA strikes a loading facility in Venezuela.
  • Unknown date: DOJ supersedes existing indictment against Maduro, shifting emphasis (without much substantiation) from Cartel de los Soles to Tren de Aragua, and including Maduro’s wife and son.
  • January 3: Trump snatches Maduro.

And immediately after Trump’s Administration imagined that they had proven their concept of decapitation without regime change, Trump started listing other places he would attack, including Cuba — high on Rubio’s list — but also Mexico (which Miller had had to defer earlier), Colombia, and Greenland.

If Marco Rubio had unilaterally won these battles, the chances would have been greater for genuine regime change; and his failure to deliver may soon sour his constituency on the snatch.

That this was, at least for the moment, decapitation, suggests Miller presided in the end.

After all, Trump also immediately likened the snatch operation to Miller’s domestic efforts to subjugate both civil society, including universities, law firms, and hospitals treating trans children, but also entire blue states, with paramilitary invasions launched in the name of deportation.

Miller’s goals are to demand subservience from everyone on threat of invasion, if not death, the stated means of keeping Delcy Rodriguez on track.

In the end, Stephen Miller is perfectly happy to get in bed with proud socialists, it turns out, so long as he can appropriate their authoritarian tools to his own ends.

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DOJ’s Politically Illegitimate Basis for Political Illegitimacy in Nicolás Maduro Indictment

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As I’ll explain below (and mapped in this table), the superseding indictment against Nicolás Maduro and his wife unsealed yesterday is a more political document than the one that first charged Maduro in 2020. One important difference lies in how DOJ attempted to claim Maduro is not the leader of Venezuela, which will be a key element required to overcome any immunity claim Maduro will surely invoke.

Before I explain the differences between these indictments, let me stress that both are real indictments, documenting decades of corruption and cooperation with drug traffickers and terrorists. Prosecutors worked hard to pull them together and investigators (in the US and around Latin America) and sources no doubt risked their lives to make it possible.

The charges remain the same as in 2020

Both indictments charge the same four crimes:

  • Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy (21 USC 960a)
  • Cocaine Importation Conspiracy (21 USC 963)
  • Two counts of use of machine guns or destructive devices in furtherance of the conspiracies (18 USC 924)

The latter charges, charging Maduro for possessing machine guns, have attracted some mockery, including from me. DOJ is at the same time arguing that DC must allow semi-automatic weapons and at the same time charging a foreign leader with possessing machine guns. The charges are there (and were put there years ago) because they’re a way to get significant sentencing enhancements for other crimes. The presentencing memo for Hugo Armando Caraval-Barrio, who was charged with Maduro in 2020 and pled guilty in June, added so many sentencing enhancements they’re having a multi-day hearing later this month to fight about which ones apply. But given the evolution of gun prohibitions in the US since Bruen (issued in 2022), Maduro may try to challenge this charge, though Caraval-Barrio pled to those same charges in June.

DOJ includes Sinaloa, los Zetas, and Tred de Aragua for reasons that likely have to do with Stephen Miller’s fever dreams

In addition to adding overt acts that happened since 2020, the Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy charged in the newly unsealed indictment is interesting — and may have further significance — because it added several new cartels that have been deemed terrorist organizations last year. The 2020 indictment focused on FARC, the left wing Colombian terrorist organization that trafficked drugs, and Cartel de Soles (the vague name used for Maduro’s corruption). But in the last year, the Trump Administration has, for the first time (and controversially), designated drug cartels that engage in extreme violence as terrorist organizations. So the new indictment names not just FARC and ELN — Colombian terrorists whom Maduro gave shelter — but Sinaloa and the Zetas, along with Tren de Aragua.

24. It was a part and an object of the conspiracy that NICOLAS MADURO MOROS, DIOSDADO CABELLO RONDON, and RAMON RODRIGUEZ CHACIN, the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did engage in conduct that would be punishable under Title 21 , United States Code, Section 841 ( a), if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States, to wit, the distribution of, and possession with the intent to distribute, five kilograms and more of mixtures and substances containing a detectable amount of cocaine, knowing and intending to provide, directly and indirectly, something of pecuniary value to a person and organization that has engaged and engages in terrorism and terrorist activity (as defined in Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182(a)(2)(B)), or terrorism (as defined in Title 22, United States Code, Section 2656f(d)(2)), to wit, the following organizations that have been designated by the United States Secretary of State as FTOs pursuant to Section 219 of the INA, during times relevant to this Superseding Indictment: FARC, FARC-EP, Segunda Marquetalia, ELN, TdA, the Sinaloa Cartel, CDN, also known as the Zetas, and each organization’s members, operatives, and associates, having knowledge that such organizations and persons have engaged and engage in terrorist activity and terrorism, in violation of Title 21, United States Code, Section 960a. [my emphasis]

This is one of the things I view as political. There’s far more substance behind the FARC allegations than the Sinaloa and Zetas ones. The Zetas allegation relies on the Zetas’, working with unnamed Columbian traffickers, use of Venezuelan ports from 2003 to 2011. The Sinaloa allegation relies on Caraval-Barrio’s protection of Chapo Guzmán in 2011. Both those allegations took place long before Marco Rubio included the Mexican cartels in his new designations. But by including them in this indictment, DOJ makes this application of such crimes applicable in Mexico, an ominous inclusion given Trump’s overt threats to pull the same kind of invasion in Mexico next.

The Tren de Aragua is likewise thin. In the 2020 indictment, two FARC leaders were included as co-conspirators, but that reflected a sustained relationship with Maduro as laid out in the overt acts. The TdA inclusion here relies on a similar move, including its leader, Hector Ruthsenford Guerrero Flores as a co-conspirator. But his inclusion relies on two overt acts that don’t involve Maduro: Guerrero’s actual trafficking with someone not alleged to be part of this conspiracy, and comments made in a Venezuelan prison in 2019. (These may be the comments that US intelligence services have deemed to be unreliable.)

f. Between approximately 2006 and 2008, HECTOR RUSTHENFORD GUERRERO FLORES, a/k/a “Nifio Guerrero,” the defendant, worked with one of the largest drug traffickers in Venezuela, Walid Makled. Members of the Venezuelan regime helped protect Makled’s cocaine shipments that were transported from San Fernando de Apure, Venezuela, to Valencia, Venezuela, and were then sent by plane from the Valencia international airport to Mexico and other locations in Central America for eventual distribution to the United States. Between in or about 2008 and in or about 2009, GUERRERO FLORES also provided another major Venezuelan drug trafficker with protection for cocaine shipments moving through Venezuela, including by providing armed men who carried, among other automatic weapons, AK47s, MP5s, and AR-15s, as well as grenades. At times, GUERRERO FLORES personally accompanied large cocaine loads as they were guarded by the teams of armed men, en route to airports or airstrips for transport north and eventual distribution to the United States. GUERRERO FLORES was paid a fee per kilogram of cocaine transported or received and he sometimes received an interest in portions of these massive cocaine shipments in lieu of payment. The traffickers that GUERRERO FLORES worked with moved thousands of kilograms per shipment, multiple times per month, resulting in the distribution of hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States. In or about 2009, Makled was charged with narcotics offenses in this District and is a fugitive.

[snip]

o. In or about 2019, TdA’s leader, GUERRERO FLORES, discussed drug trafficking with an individual he understood to be working with the Venezuelan regime. Over multiple calls, GUERRERO FLORES offered to provide escort services for drug loads, explaining that GUERRERO FLORES and TdA had control of the coastlines of Venezuela’s Aragua State. GUERRERO FLORES, speaking from TdA’s base of operations in Tocor6n Prison, explained that TdA could handle the logistics of every aspect of the drug trade, including the use of storage compartments that GUERRERO FLORES called “cradles” located on a beach in Aragua State. In doing so, GUERRERO FLORES confirmed TdA’s ability to protect over one ton of cocaine.

That is, neither is TdA necessary to substantiate the narco-trafficking charges, which are well-substantiated based on protection of FARC, nor is the substance of TdA’s inclusion all that convincing.

At all.

But no doubt Stephen Miller will use this — a grand jury finding probable cause tying TdA to Maduro — to attempt to renew his Alien Enemies Act deportations.

Adding the family, leaving behind the key co-conspirator

On top of swapping FARC co-conspirators for a TdA one, the newly unsealed indictment adds Maduro’s wife and son as co-conspirators.

The inclusion of Maduro’s son is better substantiated. The indictment alleges that his plane was used to ship drugs, he shipped drugs to Miami, and he met with FARC (though neither he nor his mother are included in the narco-trafficking charge).

The inclusion of Cilia Maduro — who was shipped to SDNY along with her husband — rests on her allegedly accepting a bribe in 2007 to broker a meeting between a trafficker and Venezuela’s corrupt top anti-drug cop.

b. In approximately 2007, CILIA ADELA FLORES DE MADURO, the defendant, attended a meeting in which FLORES DE MADURO accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to broker a meeting between a large-scale drug trafficker and the director of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office, Nestor Reverol Torres. The drug trafficker later arranged to pay a monthly bribe to Reverol Torres, in addition to approximately $100,000 for each flight that was transporting cocaine to ensure the flight’s safe passage, a portion of which was then paid to FLORES DE MADURO. In or about 2015, Reverol Torres was charged with narcotics offenses in the Eastern District of New York and is a fugitive.

But prosecutors likely included Maduro’s family — and snatched Cilia along with her spouse — to acquire leverage against him.

One more point about alleged co-conspirators. In the wake of yesterday’s invasion, Diosdado Cabello Rondón, who is incorporated into the narco-trafficking charge and was already in 2020, was the first person to call for calm, calling the Americans terrorists.

At the crack of dawn, Diosdado Cabello, the regime’s second-in-command, appeared on state-run Venezolana de Televisión, clad in tactical vest and helmet and surrounded by members of the political police. Cabello called the U.S. attack “treacherous and vile” and urged his supporters “not to lose their composure, to avoid despair.” “Avoid situations that favor the invading enemy,” he said. Cabello questioned the role of “international organizations” in this crisis, accusing them of being “complicit in a massacre of civilians.” The leader addressed his men on camera with the two central slogans of the regime’s security forces: “Always loyal, never traitors” and “To doubt is treason.”

This analysis of the aftermath notes that you’d have to take out more of Maduro’s aides, including Cabello, to defeat his government.

For more than a decade, real power in Venezuela has been held by a small circle of senior officials. Analysts and officials say though that the system depends on a sprawling web of loyalists and security organs, fueled by corruption and surveillance.

Within the inner circle, a civilian-military balance reigns. Each member has their own interests and patronage networks. Currently Rodriguez and her brother represent the civilian side. Padrino and Cabello represent the military side.

This power structure makes dismantling Venezuela’s current government more complex than removing Maduro, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials, Venezuelan and U.S. military analysts and security consultants to Venezuela’s opposition.

“You can remove as many pieces of the Venezuelan government as you like, but it would have to be multiple actors at different levels to move the needle,” said a former U.S. official involved in criminal investigations in Venezuela.

A big question mark surrounds Cabello, who exerts influence over the country’s military and civilian counterintelligence agencies, which conduct widespread domestic espionage.

“The focus is now on Diosdado Cabello,” said Venezuelan military strategist Jose Garcia. “Because he is the most ideological, violent and unpredictable element of the Venezuelan regime.”

Donald Trump conducted a months-long operation to carry out an arrest, he claims. But somehow they left behind someone alleged to be just as culpable in the headline charges of the indictment, Cabello.

Disavowing democracy in attempting to negate Maduro’s immunity claim

Yesterday, Trump and Marco Rubio claimed that Maduro’s Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, would do as she was told. Then she went on TV and said Maduro was still the president and Venezuela would never again be the colony of an empire. It’s unclear whether she’s misleading Marco Rubio or the Venezuelan people, or simply trying to find middle ground.

But her claim to authority only comes through Maduro.

And that’s important because, as Oona Hathaway explained this in an interview with Isaac Chotiner, whether or not Maduro is and was a head of state is central to what will surely be an attempt to claim he is immune from all this.

What do you mean, exactly, about his “seizure and indictment”? Venezuela had an election. It was not a free election. He declared himself President, and he’s broadly recognized as the President of Venezuela, but, again, he was not freely elected by the people of Venezuela. That could justify his indictment in an American court?

I should back up. As part of this military operation, at least one of the key goals seems to have been the capture of Maduro and his wife, who have been indicted for criminal charges in the Southern District of New York. The only way they can do that is if they’re claiming that he’s not a head of state, because heads of state get immunity and heads of state are not subject to criminal prosecution in the domestic courts of other states. That’s just a basic rule of international law. The United States has long recognized it.

So you were not saying that the fact that he stole an election per se means you can grab him and try him in an American court but, rather, that if he were not a head of state, that would at least allow for trying him in an American court, which normally would not be the case?

Right. So if he’s not actually a head of state, then head-of-state immunity doesn’t apply. And it’s connected to this broader question of the use of military force in that it may be that they would make a claim—although I haven’t yet seen this—that because he’s not the legitimate head of state that somehow they have a legal authority to use force to grab him. But, again, the two don’t connect. So the problem is that merely saying that he’s not head of state doesn’t then justify the use of military force in Venezuela.

[snip]

So if Maduro goes to trial in an American court, is this going to be a contested legal issue about whether he can even be tried based on whether he is the head of state of Venezuela? Is that something that American courts are going to have to weigh in on?

Yes, it is something that the American courts are going to have to weigh in on. It definitely is the case that his lawyers will make the argument that he’s a sitting head of state at the time that he was seized and that he remains the sitting head of state and therefore, under international law and under U.S. law, he should be given immunity, which means that he’s not subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and can’t be criminally charged. This has come up once before with the criminal indictment of Manuel Noriega, the former leader of Panama, when the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989 and seized Noriega and then brought him back to the United States and indicted him for drug smuggling and money laundering.

Back then, Noriega argued that he enjoyed head-of-state immunity, and the executive branch argued that he didn’t because the United States had not recognized him as a legitimate leader of Panama. That gives us a hint as to what is likely to happen in this case. My guess is that the United States will argue that it’s never recognized Maduro as a legitimate leader of Venezuela and therefore he doesn’t receive immunity. And the courts are going to be in the position of having to decide whether they defer to the executive branch’s determination that he’s not head of state or whether they make an independent assessment of his legitimacy as a leader of Venezuela.

How did the Noriega case play out?

In the Noriega case, the courts deferred to the executive branch. They said they were going to accept that the executive branch said that he’s not a constitutional head of state, and therefore he can, in fact, be prosecuted.

Seems quite possible they will do so again now.

It seems likely they’re going to do the same thing. I mean, this is a weaker argument on the part of the executive branch.

Both indictments attempt to deal with this issue. The 2020 one does so by pointing to the US’ 2019 endorsement of Juan Guaidó.

In or about 2018, MADURO MOROS declared victory in a presidential election in Venezuela. In or about 2019, the National Assembly of Venezuela invoked the Venezuelan constitution and declared that MADURO MOROS had usurped power and was not the president of Venezuela. Since in or about 2019, more than 50 countries, including the United States, have refused to recognize MADURO MOROS as Venezuela’s head of state and instead recognized Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela. In or about January 2020, the United States Department of State certified the authority of Guaidó, as the interim president of Venezuela, to receive and control property in accounts at the United States Federal Reserve maintained by the Venezuelan government and the Central Bank of Venezuela.

The Trump Administration went all-in on declaring Guaidó interim president and … that went nowhere.

This equivalent paragraph in the newly unsealed indictment doesn’t say who runs Venezuela.

5. NICOLAS MADURO MOROS, the defendant, a Venezuelan citizen, was previously the President of Venezuela, and is now, having remained in power despite losses in recent elections, the de facto but illegitimate ruler of the country. MADURO MOROS also previously held a seat in Venezuela’s National Assembly between in or about 2000 and in or about 2006, acted as the Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs between in or about 2006 and in or about 2013, and acted as the Vice President of Venezuela in or about 2013. MADURO MOROS succeeded to the Venezuelan presidency after former President Hugo Chavez died in or about 2013 and, during MADURO MOROS’s own presidency, continued to participate in cocaine trafficking with drug dealers and narco-terrorist groups. In or about 2018, MADURO MOROS declared victory in a disputed and internationally condemned presidential election in Venezuela. In or about 2019, Venezuela’s National Assembly invoked the Venezuelan constitution and declared that MADURO MOROS had usurped power and was not the legitimate President of Venezuela. Nonetheless, MADURO MOROS continued to exercise the powers of the Venezuelan presidency, causing more than 50 countries, including the United States, to refuse to recognize MADURO MOROS as Venezuela’s head of state. In or about 2024, Venezuela held another presidential election that was again widely criticized by the international community, in which MADURO MOROS declared himself the winner despite widespread condemnation.

Most independent observers believe Edmundo González won last year’s election. María Corina Machado just won a Nobel Prize as the leader of the opposition (though she claims González is the rightly elected President).

Yet not only doesn’t this indictment name either of them, yesterday Trump said of Machado, “She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”

I’ll leave it to experts like Hathaway to unpack whether Trump’s explicit denial of those with a real democratic claim to power has any impact on an immunity claim that Maduro is sure to mount. Her observation that SCOTUS, especially this SCOTUS, will likely defer to the Administration.

I’m simply observing that this indictment was designed, from the start, to rely on illegitimate claims about the lawful president in Venezuela. It had puppet power built into it.

Again, none of this says that the guts of this indictment are suspect. They’re not.

But it’s the packaging of it — a shift that occurred since Trump last indicted Maduro in 2020 — that could have significantly broader repercussions.

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Trump’s Selective Drug Enforcement in Latin America

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Donald Trump conducted a military invasion of Venezuela purportedly in service of arresting Nicolás Maduro to stand trial in the US.

The indictment against him (I assume it has been superseded since he was added in March of 2020) alleges that he personally was involved in negotiating FARC-sourced cocaine shipments.

5. While pursuing these and other objectives, NICOLÁS MADURO MOROS, the defendant, negotiated multi-ton shipments of FARC-produced cocaine; directed that the Cártel the Los Soles provide military-grade weapons to the FARC; coordinated foreign affairs with Honduras and other countries to facilitate large-scale drug trafficking; and solicited assistance from FARC leadership in training an unsanctioned militia group that functioned, in essence, as an armed forces unit for the Cártel de Los Soles.

Maduro’s former military intelligence head, Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, pled guilty in June. There’s no sign, at least not public, that Carvajal Barrios is cooperating (they’re holding a hearing this month before Judge Alvin Hellerstein because he claims not to have pled to the individual elements of the offense from which SDNY crafted an onerous sentence).

Meanwhile, I have already pointed to this excellent Bloomberg piece on the similar efforts SDNY made to bring former. President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández to justice. It describes how JOH’s family pitched Trump on a pardon in part by promising that with his pardon (and the return of his party to power, as has happened), Honduras would return the autonomous zones Trump allies like Peter Thiel have championed.

By July, the family and their lawyers had written an 18-page draft outlining some of the ways they might appeal to Trump’s pardon czar, Alice Marie Johnson. From Trump, they’d learned the language of modern political grievance: “Just like President Trump, President Hernández is a victim of lawfare, waged by the Biden administration.” If pardoned, Hernández would return to Honduras and dedicate himself to building a political movement in Latin America aligned with Trump’s foreign policy ambitions. The memo noted that Hondurans would go to the polls on Nov. 30 to elect a new president, and it suggested a timely pardon could energize conservatives in a region threatened by “radical left” regimes, including China and Venezuela. (Johnson didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

But it wasn’t only Trump who could benefit from a pardon. Castro, Hernández’s successor, repealed the legal framework that had established the country’s semi-autonomous economic development zones, including Próspera. That led the Honduran supreme court to declare those zones unconstitutional, triggering still-unresolved lawsuits from their investors. (Próspera continues to operate.) The memo asserted that Castro’s administration “has effectively stolen billions” from the financial backers of Próspera. The memo named Peter Thiel (“a longtime collaborator of Vice President J.D. Vance”) and Marc Andreessen (“who also donated millions to ensure that Trump’s policy goals could be achieved”).

A timely pardon—especially one delivered before the election—might remedy all that. It could also give Trump one more regional ally against the “narco-dicatorship” in Venezuela, where the Trump administration in September would begin launching military strikes against boats suspected of carrying drugs.

This kidnapping of Maduro is not about drug trafficking, though the indictment against him is real.

It’s about getting a piece of the action.

Update: Here’s the final paragraphs of a 1989 OLC opinion that then OLC head and future AG when Maduro was first indicted Bill Barr signed to rationalize the Panama invasion, on which this was surely modeled.

IV. Conclusion This Office concludes that at the direction of the President or the Attorney General the FBI may use its statutory authority under 28 U.S.C. § 533(1) and 18 U.S.C. § 3052 to investigate and arrest individuals for violations of applicable United States law, even if those actions depart from customary international law or unexecuted treaties. Moreover, we conclude that the President, acting through the Attorney General, has inherent constitutional authority to deploy the FBI to investigate and arrest individuals for violations of United States law, even if those actions contravene international law. Finally, we conclude that an arrest that is inconsistent with international or foreign law does not violate the Fourth Amendment.

35 There is some doubt whether the Fourth Amendment standard includes a requirement o f domestic law authority to arrest. The 1980 Opinion concluded that it does 4B Op O L C at 553-54. That Opinion relied principally on United States v. D i Re, 332 U S 581, 589-92 (1948), a case involving exclusion o f evidence obtained incident to an unauthorized arrest by federal officials. But it is not clear that Di Re was a Fourth Amendment decision, and it is also unclear that the-Constitution requires statutory or other authonty to arrest. See 1 Wayne R. LaFave, Search- and Seizure § 1 5(b) at 107 (2d ed. 1987) (concluding that D i Re is not a Fourth Amendment case but “simply an instance of the court utilizing its supervisory power to exclude from a federal prosecution evidence obtained pursuant to an illegal but constitutional federal arrest”). Cf George E Dix, Fourth Amendment Federalism: The Potential Requirement of State Law Authorization for Law Enforcement Activity, 14 Am J. Crim L. 1, 10 (1987) ( “There is considerable doubt. as to whether the Court has . . committed itself to the position that the fourth amendment reasonableness o f an arrest depends upon the existence o f state Jaw and the arrest’s validity under that law.”). In any event, as we have previously stated, we believe that authority exists for the Executive to authorize the FBI to make arrests in foreign countnes 3r’As to an arrest in a non-public place, there are circumstances in which an arrest warrant is required. Payton v New York., 445 U S 573, 576 (1980). While presumably an arrest warrant often could be obtained, there are limitations to the extraterritonal junsdiction o f the magistrate’s writ See 18 U.S C §§ 3041-3042 Commentators have questioned, however, whether the warrant requirements o f Payton and other cases should apply overseas. See Saltzburg, supra, 20 Va J Int’l L. at 762; Stephan, supra, 20 Va. J Int’l L at 792 n.44 37 We note that fear that our agents will be extradited for violations of foreign law during an enforcement operation authonzed by the President or the Attorney General is not a warranted concern The Secretary o f State always has discretion to refuse to extradite, even if the offense is covered by an extradition treaty entered into with another country See 18 U S C. § 3186 (Secretary of State “may” extradite the person committed under section 3184); Stndona v Grant, 619 F.2d 167 (2d Cir 1980), Wacker v. Bisson, 348 F.2d 602, 606 (5th Cir 1965). 183

WILLIAM P. BARR

Assistant Attorney General

Office of Legal Counsel

Update: Here’s the superseding indictment.The machine gun allegations are far sillier than I imagined.

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“Border security is the primary element of national security.”

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That sentence — “Border security is the primary element of national security” — comes from page 11 of the National Security Strategy.

Border security is the primary element of national security. Not one important element. The primary one.

That’s an insane assertion, of course. The military, the economy, real terrorism (including far right terrorism), cybersecurity, sovereign democracy all take a back seat to whatever Stephen Miller flunky had final control over the edit of the NSS, who wrote down something insane, prioritizing the border over all else.

I’ve been obsessing about that comment ever since I read it, and kept thinking of it as I read this long NYT article that purports to explain Trump’s “policy” to target Venezuela. The article came out after I wrote this post attempting to understand Stephen Miller’s most prominent reversal over the last year, and in-between these two Tweets that make it very clear Miller’s entire conception about immigration to the US — even his own family’s immigration to the US — is based off his historically ignorant fantasies.

The story might be better staged as a Coen Brothers buddy movie featuring Stephen Miller, channeling Dr. Strangelove, looking for any opportunity to push harder against immigration, preferably in the form of bombing, even if it contributes to the root cause of drug trafficking and immigration, while Marco Rubio pursues the most stale kind of Cuban-American politics.

The story is so rambling, presumably because the subject and the insanity requires it, that I will attempt to map it.

NYT claims the current focus on Venezuela started when Marco Rubio signed a deal with Nayib Bukele to deport 300 people to his concentration camp.

The seeds of militarizing the approach to Mr. Maduro and Venezuelans were planted in February, when Mr. Rubio struck a deal with Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian leader of El Salvador, at his lakeside villa: The United States would pay nearly $5 million to send about 300 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

Soon after his visit with Mr. Bukele, Mr. Rubio designated eight Latin American criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, topped the list.

Mr. Miller had already landed on a legal tool to bypass due process: the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that permits immediate detention and deportations of citizens of a country that has invaded the United States or is at war with it.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order in March invoking the act, with a title warning of “the invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua.” In retrospect, the order was an important opening salvo against Mr. Maduro: It was the administration’s first formal framing of Mr. Maduro and the United States as being in a type of war. Contrary to a secret U.S. intelligence assessment, it said Tren de Aragua was an instrument of Mr. Maduro.

In this story, NYT is silent about Bukele’s goal with this deal — to obtain the return of MS-13 members who were testifying to his own ties to the gang (it is also silent about Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández). It nods to the multiple lies Trump’s Administration told to claim the men it was sending to CECOT were gang members or even criminals (something covered at more length in this story, which it links). But it doesn’t describe how by misrepresenting the men, the Trump Administration failed to fulfill the terms of the deal made with Bukele.

Stephen Miller’s lies were a problem even for Nayib Bukele.

But NYT also doesn’t explain a temporal problem with this story: As the next major section of the story explains, at the beginning of the Administration, Ric Grenell had gotten Nicolás Maduro to accept deportation flights.

It began when Cuban American lawmakers pressed Mr. Trump early this year to end Chevron’s Biden-era confidential license. After Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio announced in late February that they would do so, Mr. Maduro stopped accepting deportation flights of Venezuelans. Mr. Maduro had agreed to them on Jan. 31 with Richard Grenell, a special envoy for Mr. Trump.

One point of sending the men Stephen Miller falsely claimed were TdA members to CECOT was that Maduro was refusing to accept them. But Maduro had earlier agreed to accept them. So to understand the need to send planes full of men falsely claimed to be TdA members to Bukele’s concentration camp, you have to review Trump’s flip-flops on Chevron’s license to export Venezuelan oil.

That Chevron section goes like this:

  • January 31: Maduro makes a deal with Grenell.
  • February: Cuban-American Members of Congress (CAMC) pressure Trump to pull the Chevron license, which he does in late February (possibly between the time Rubio signs the deal with Bukele and the day 200 mostly-innocent men are loaded on planes?).
  • Chevron CEO Mike Wirth notes that if Chevron can’t export Venezuela’s oil, China will do so.
  • CAMC learn that Trump might reverse his decision, so threaten to vote against the Big Ugly Bill.
  • Stephen Miller pitches Trump on murderboats.
  • Trump lets Chevron license expire on May 27.
  • CAMC vote to pass Big Ugly.
  • Around the same time Trump considers a pardon for convicted drug kingpin Hernández, Marco Rubio sells Trump on a claim that Maduro is a drug kingpin.
  • July: Based in part on Wirth’s China argument, Trump reverses course, again, on Chevron license, Maduro accepts the CECOT prisoners and releases 10 Americans, including a triple murderer.

So while Trump was helping Nayib Bukele bury his ties with a dangerous gang and weighing a pitch to free convicted drug kingpin Juan Orlando Hernández, he began entertaining the idea of using the claim that Maduro is a drug kingpin so he can satisfy Stephen Miller’s need to bomb something and Marco Rubio’s Cuban-American fantasies.

Meanwhile, for reasons NYT doesn’t fully explain (though it suggests this was about SCOTUS’ decisions against the Alien Enemies Act), Stephen Miller was searching for things to bomb.

At the same time, Mr. Miller was exploring policies unrelated to Venezuela that, like the deportations, had their roots in the so-called U.S. war on terror. He looked at the idea of bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. But it became clear that Mexican leaders would not consent, and the administration feared losing their cooperation on drug and migrant issues. The Washington Post reported earlier on Mr. Miller’s discussions about striking cartels in Mexico.

By early May, Mr. Miller’s team began asking for further options for using force against drug cartels.

White House officials and others bandied around relatively more constrained ideas, including using the C.I.A. to carry out covert strikes on docked boats that did not have people in them. But Mr. Miller’s team wanted to publicize the strikes. Officials also discussed blowing up fake drug boats to instill fear in traffickers. But Mr. Miller’s aides wanted the real thing, officials said.

This passage adds to what The Atlantic reported — that Miller wanted to murderbomb people “to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace.” But Miller demanded that he get real dead people, not just fake drug boats (and to be fair, given the degree to which various nations are tracking the specific people being murderboated, Miller was right that he needed real dead people for whatever purpose he believes this serves, even if his claim it serves that purpose is probably baseless).

Then Trump or Miller or Marco came up with a list of drug gangs they wanted to target, some of which have little relation to the danger the gangs represent, some of which are (like many of the claims about Tren de Aragua beforehand) invented.

On July 25, [Trump] signed a secret order telling the Pentagon to take action against drug-trafficking groups, putting in motion the targeting of Venezuelans.

[snip]

The two-page order contained a previously unreported written proposal for boat strikes. It directed Mr. Hegseth to target vessels in international waters carrying drugs for any of 24 Latin American “narco-terrorist” groups. The attached list included ones from Venezuela.

[snip]

The secret list of 24 groups included major cartels and groups that the Trump administration had formally designated as terrorists, along with numerous relatively obscure Mexican gangs. The same day Mr. Trump signed the directive, the Treasury Department announced sanctions against “Cartel de los Soles,” a slang term for drug corruption in Venezuela’s military, declaring it a terrorist organization led by Mr. Maduro. The name was at the bottom of Mr. Trump’s secret list.

And that’s where Trump’s flunkies turned to cutting and pasting legal rulings from the war on terror to be used in Stephen Miller’s campaign to create dead bodies that he can spin as evidence of the danger of immigrants.

Only, in their rush to brainlessly cut-and-paste from a WOT policy that was unsuccessful in its original incarnation, these geniuses failed to consider that drone strikes on the sea are different, legally, from drone strikes on land.

Around the same time, a Trump appointee with little national security law experience was drafting a Justice Department memo saying boat strikes would be lawful based on Mr. Trump’s wartime powers. The legal blessing was already developed by late July, when the Senate confirmed the top two lawyers responsible for reviewing such an operation — T. Elliot Gaiser, head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and Earl G. Matthews, Pentagon general counsel. They were essentially presented with a done deal.

[snip]

Mr. Hegseth signed an execute order that created the operational framework for the attacks. Dated Aug. 5 and written without input from many career Pentagon officials, it lifted language from previous orders developed for drone strikes against Al Qaeda targets in places like rural Yemen.

It lacked elements crucial to maritime operations — including any mention of what to do with shipwrecked survivors of an attack, officials said.

[snip]

The Pentagon also bypassed a process called the Maritime Operational Threat Response, used to get input from various agencies when proposing a maritime action with international implications, said William D. Baumgartner, a retired Coast Guard rear admiral and lawyer who oversaw Caribbean operations.

Which is how Miller, Rubio, and Whiskey Pete Hegseth got themselves in trouble for even worse murder, that of survivors of the initial drone strike.

But that wasn’t yet good enough for Strangelove Miller. One of his top aides then loosened the standards from what they were in the WOT.

During the planning, an aide to Mr. Miller, Anthony Salisbury, pushed the Pentagon for ways to expand the scope of the operations, including loosening standards — like the level of confidence military officials would need that a target meets the criteria. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised that the military establish targeting criteria using lessons learned from the post-Sept. 11 wars. Ms. Kelly, the White House spokeswoman, said the account of Mr. Salisbury’s role was “made up.”

The NYT story ends with the unresolved problem posed by murderboats — what to do with survivors.

On the same day, WaPo described what happened when one of the only survivors — a known drug trafficker — was returned to Ecuador.

The police arrived at the airport prepared to arrest a drug trafficker — a mariner whose crewmates the U.S. military had just killed.

Andrés Fernando Tufiño Chila was one of only two people known to have survived a U.S. strike on a vessel that the Trump administration alleged was smuggling drugs from South America. President Donald Trump had described the Ecuadorian and a fellow survivor of the Oct. 16 strike in the Atlantic Ocean as “terrorists” who would be returned to their countries of origin “for detention and prosecution.”

[snip]

Tufiño, then 41, stepped off the U.S. military plane at the Quito airport on the morning of Oct. 18 in shackles, cut and bruised from the attack but walking on his own, according to Col. Carlos Ortega, then the director of anti-narcotics for Ecuador’s national police. He was already a known trafficker: He had pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to cocaine distribution conspiracy in 2021 and served more than three years in a U.S. prison before he was deported home to Ecuador last year. Now the U.S. military had picked him up amid the wreckage of a semisubmersible vessel — a “narco sub.”

In his gang-controlled hometown, Tufiño was known as Fresco Solo, neighbors said, a skilled navigator who they alleged was recruited by criminals to smuggle drugs north.

But in transferring him to Ecuadorian custody, three officials here said, U.S. forces didn’t provide any evidence that could be used to detain him — no seized drugs, no phone or GPS records, no videos, none of the intelligence that led them to target his vessel.

On landing in Quito, U.S. officials told the Ecuadorians that the transfer was a “humanitarian” repatriation, Ortega said.

Within hours, Tufiño was let go.

There’s very little discussion in the NYT about what happens if Marco and his Cuban-American cheerleaders get their wish, a collapse of the Maduro and Cuban Communist regimes. As noted, they ignore the degree to which this policy has led to three drug traffickers — Hernández, Bukele, and Tufiño — going free. There actually is an interesting question about what will happen to the drug trade if the US makes sea trafficking less lucrative after having shut down the US-Mexico border to illegal entries. Drug markets don’t disappear; they morph, and such shifts can bring really serious unintended consequences.

After all, one of Miller’s blind spots are the American citizens who play a key role in all this trafficking. And by treating drug trafficking as an immigrant problem, he surely makes it easier for citizens to go undetected — the kind of detail real drug criminals tend not to miss.

Meanwhile “China” is mentioned just twice in NYT’s 3,400-word article laying out how a rather senseless “policy” on Latin America has developed. But then these are the same geniuses who started a trade war with China that gave China a great deal of new leverage over the United States based, in part, on claims of fentanyl trafficking.

As noted, this NYT story really would be better as a humorous buddy flick, because it is so full of idiocy.

Update: Trump is murderboating off invented intelligence not just against Latin America; it appears he did the same in Nigeria.

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Four Shots at an Unarmed Boat in Uncontested Waters

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Twenty-eight paragraphs into the story that first focused attention on the murder Pete Hegseth ordered back in September (though as it notes, Nick Turse first revealed the second shot just days after the attack) is this revelation: it took four strikes to kill first the people then destroy any debris from the targeted boats.

The boat in the first strike was hit a total of four times, twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it, four people familiar with the operation said.

It took the most powerful military in the history of the world four shots the get the job done.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

That fact lies at the core of a whole bunch of other senselessness about Trump’s feckless rule. There’s Trump’s release of Juan Orlando Hernández, a proven high-level threat, even as forces that normally prevent turbulence in the Middle East gather off of Venezuela’s oil fields. There’s the many ways, starting with the destruction of USAID and definitely including Trump’s trade war, that has added to global instability. There’s the cost involved in drone-striking small boats. There’s the neutering of legal advisors who might have saved Admiral Frank Bradley from being underbussed by the guy who promoted him. There’s the pretend press corps filled with nutballs and cranks that ensures that Whiskey Pete will never be challenged with actual knowledge.

But at root, you’ve got Pete Hegseth sitting atop that most powerful military boom boom boom boom, treating it like a children’s game.

And he doesn’t realize that on this, his first attempt, and twice more after that, the most powerful military in the history of the world could not take out an unarmed boat in uncontested waters with one shot.

Donald Trump thinks murderboats make him look strong (though the video he released of this one hid that it took four shots to get the job done).

Pete Hegseth thinks murderboats make him look strong.

But holy hell, can we talk about how feckless the reality is?

Update: This timeline of the conflicting things Trump and his minions have said about the September 2 strike is useful.

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Trump Puts Drug Trafficker Who Allegedly Contracted Killings Back on the Street

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On Day One, Donald Trump freed hundreds of people accused or convicted of assaulting cops, some even treated as terrorists at sentencing.

On Day Two, Donald Trump freed a global drug trafficker accused of arranging murder-for-hire.

Here’s Andy Greenberg on the pardon for Ross Ulbricht.

A little over 11 years and three months ago, Ross Ulbricht was arrested in the science fiction section of a public library in San Francisco, caught with his laptop still logged in to the Silk Road, the world’s first dark-web drug market that he created and ran under the pseudonym the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Now, after being sentenced to life in prison and spending more than a decade behind bars, Ulbricht will walk free, thanks to Donald Trump—and to the president’s ever-closer ties to the American cryptocurrency world.

“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” president Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday evening, misspelling Ulbricht’s last name. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”

For close to two and a half years after Ulbricht created the Silk Road in 2011, the dark-web site facilitated the sale of vast amounts of narcotics, as well as counterfeit documents, money laundering services and, at times, guns, for hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin payments. After the FBI located the Silk Road’s server in Iceland in 2013 and arrested then 29-year-old Ulbricht in San Francisco, he was convicted on seven charges relating to the distribution of narcotics, money laundering, and computer hacking, as well as a “continuing criminal enterprise” statute—sometimes known as the “kingpin statute”—usually reserved for mob bosses and cartel leaders. In 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison, a punishment beyond even the 20-plus years that prosecutors in the case requested.

Since then, a Free Ross movement has steadily pressed for Ulbricht’s release, first in a failed appeal, then in petitions for clemency.

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Jim Jordan Dragged Martin Estrada Away from Fighting Fentanyl To Chase Hunter Biden’s Dick Pics

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Yesterday, Ohio Senator JD Vance gave a speech explaining that he is holding up the confirmation of a US Attorney candidate for his own state because Donald Trump is being prosecuted for stealing classified documents but — Vance claimed in an earlier version of this rant — “the President and his family [go] completely untouched.”

Meanwhile, yesterday’s version of Vance’s harangue claimed that “it is Joe Biden’s border policies that have invited this fentanyl into our country at record levels.”

It’s an interesting take, given that Republicans keep dragging law enforcement away from fighting the fentanyl crisis  so they can explain that the conspiracy theories right wingers believe about the investigation into Hunter Biden are false.

In a July hearing where both Jim Jordan and now-Speaker Mike Johnson complained — relying on Terry Doughty’s badly misinformed opinion — that (they claimed) the FBI had prevented millions of people from sniffing Hunter Biden’s dick pics before the 2020 election, Chris Wray pointed to the impact two drug busts had had in Marion, Ohio.

Just last month, for instance, the FBI charged 31 members of two drug trafficking organizations responsible for distributing dangerous drugs like fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine throughout the area around Marion, Ohio. In that one investigation, run out of the FBI’s 2-man office in Mansfield, we worked with partners in multiple local police departments and sheriff’s offices to take kilos of fentanyl off  Marion’s streets, enough lethal doses, I should add, to kill the entire population of Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, combined.

As I noted at the time, this was good staff work. Marion, Mansfield, and Lorrain are all in Jim Jordan’s district (and so all obviously constituents of Vance, as well).

Jim Jordan took time out of Chris Wray’s day so he could complain about Hunter Biden’s dick pics, while ignoring the drug problems facing his own constituents.

It’s not just Wray.

In testimony last week before Jordan’s committee, the US Attorney for Los Angeles, Martin Estrada, struggled to explain to Jordan’s staffers why his own top AUSAs didn’t think it smart to reallocate prosecutors to partner on the Hunter Biden investigation at a time his office was 40 prosecutors short of the number they’re supposed to have. As Estrada explained, instead, CDCA granted Special AUSA status to some prosecutors from Delaware and had done so even as Gary Shapley wailed that nothing was going on in LA.

Jordan’s top aide Steve Castor was incredulous that Estrada wouldn’t know specific details about what the Delaware prosecutors granted Special Assistant status to pursue a case against Hunter Biden in LA were doing.

I mean, this is a potential prosecution of the President’s son. If the lawyers from the District of Delaware were out in your district discussing the case, don’t you think you’d know about it?

When Estrada tried to get Castor to understand how different the priorities looked when you were running the country’s biggest US Attorney’s office, fentanyl was the first thing he raised.

I think a little context would be helpful. So, as I said, we have the largest district in the country. We have a Fentanyl epidemic which is one of the worst in the country’s. We’ve done more death-resulting cases than any other district in the country. We’re on pace to do more this year than we ever had before.

[snip]

There are a lot of high-profile cases, so I don’t meet with attorneys on every single high-profile case.

[snip]

We have a fentanyl epidemic. That includes not just death-resulting cases, it includes going after cartels which are distributing these pills, not just in powder form but in pill form. We routinely seize over a million pills at a time from vehicles, and we need to prosecute those cases. Each pill could be a death. And routinely now we’re finding cartels transporting fentanyl in liquid form, which is a new thing that they’re doing. So we have to do those cases.

Republicans claim to care about the fentanyl crisis. But in reality, they keep proving that they care more about Hunter Biden’s dick pics than they do about their troubled constituents in Marion, OH.

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Big Criminal Justice News — and Not So Big Criminal Justice Not News

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Joe Biden just pardoned everyone convicted at the federal level of simple marijuana possession, while encouraging Governors to follow suit.

Proud Boy Jeremy Bertino just pled guilty to seditious conspiracy and weapons possession. (Here’s the statement of offense.)

And … far less interestingly, but noting for the record, FBI agents trying to force David Weiss to indict Hunter Biden leaked to Devlin Barrett just like FBI agents trying to harm Hillary Clinton leaked to Devlin Barrett in 2016.

Back to the stuff that matters. Bertino will be a witness not just against Enrique Tarrio and Joe Biggs, but also against Roger Stone (this plea happened as yet more testimony implicating Stone was introduced into the Oath Keeper’s trial). DOJ now has both seditious conspiracy trials focused on the former reality TV show host’s rat-fucker.

And my goodness, the marijuana pardon will positive affect almost as many lives as the student loan forgiveness (But See Ravenclaw’s correction here).

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