The coming Venezuela quagmire may not be the one you expect
A prediction: some legal issues with the prosecution of Nicolas Maduro will soon create significant political problems for Donald Trump and Pam Bondi.
The fact that a grand jury in New York has already re-indicted Maduro, combined with the grand jury secrecy rules, means that the Trump administration has been planning this operation for several weeks. I’m impressed and surprised that the grand jury didn’t leak this and compromise the military operation. (Maduro was previously indicted by the first Trump administration in 2020, for drug trafficking.)
Trump and Bondi’s public statements about Maduro will invite a vindictive prosecution motion–and potentially a strong one, if the prosecution’s admissible evidence is weak. But these motions rarely work if there’s reasonably strong evidence for the prosecution. When the indictment is unsealed, I’ll be in a better position to judge that.
Of equal or greater concern to career prosecutors (and soon, to Trump and Bondi) is a potential selective prosecution motion, coming so soon after Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. Hernández had been convicted in the very same district–the Southern District of New York–for conspiracy to smuggle 185 tons of cocaine to the United States. Prosecutors claimed that Hernández used laundered drug proceeds to fund his political campaigns.
The judge looked at the sentencing guidelines and locked him up up for life.
The fact that Trump pardoned Hernández and prosecuted Maduro will soon draw more attention to Trump’s pardon of a convicted drug smuggler. You can be certain that Maduro’s lawyers will argue that, and just as certain that journalists will take an interest in it. The defense strategy will be to slow the prosecution down and create enough controversy that the next POTUS will want to wash his hands of Maduro and send him back to Venezuela to face whatever that country’s legal system decides to do with him.
In the short term, the isolationist and Jacksonian factions of the GOP will fight about whether Trump was right to do this, which might do him more political harm than good.
But the greater long-term political effect may be to amplify the embarrassment of Trump’s pardons of Hernández, crypto crook Changpeng Zhao, and a long list of other crooks who sucked up to him. And if, a week from today, the capture of Maduro hasn’t solved anything in Venezuela itself or done anything to reduce our own fentanyl problem, there will be nothing good for Trump’s supporters to add to his side of the scales.
This is also going to be a problem for Bondi, who oversees the Office of the Pardon Attorney. If (as I expect) the issue of the Hernández pardon becomes an embarrassment for Trump, he’ll claim (as he has previously) that he didn’t know anything about the pardon he signed, and MTA maintenance workers will soon be picking bits of her out of the treads of their bus tires.
This is to say nothing of the unpredictable-yet-almost-inevitable probability that the same simple incompetence we saw in the Comey and James prosecutions will dominate the headlines in the Maduro prosecution. Those are the headlines President Trump invited when he purged the Justice Department of competent career prosecutors and replaced them with cronies who’ve never prosecuted a criminal case in federal court.
So congratulations to Donald Trump for avoiding a quagmire in the jungles of Venezuela, so far. The quagmire at 500 Pearl Street is just starting.