Rising This Week: 'Imperial Prerogative'
The Trump DOJ is investigating at least two other Latin American leaders as Maduro returns to federal court. Plus: No Kings 3.0 approaches.
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As Nicolás Maduro returns to court this week, multiple Latin American leaders appear to be in federal prosecutors’ sights.
Over in the Southern District of Florida, U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones has an open investigation into the Cuban government’s leadership, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The New York Times recently reported that federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn are investigating Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has been engaged in a protracted feud with Donald Trump. Petro has been one of the most outspoken critics of Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean, openly denouncing the targeting of the vessels as “murder.”
Welcome to the “imperial prerogative,” as scholar Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi describes the U.S. government’s invasion to topple Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in 1990.
New scholarship based on declassified documents shows how Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr wrote the legal rationale for the operation to “snatch” Noriega, providing the groundwork for the raid on Maduro — and perhaps, the White House’s next target.
‘The Barr Doctrine’
Decades before serving as Trump’s attorney general, Barr wrote “at least five legal opinions” justifying the raid on Noriega as Assistant Attorney General under George H.W. Bush, Professor Jimenez-Bacardi wrote. At least two of those opinions remain classified.
One of the pillars of the Barr doctrine holds that U.S. presidents have “inherent constitutional authority” to execute arrests abroad “even if those actions contravene customary international law,” according to the article. Noriega had declared war on the United States at the time of his capture.
The dusted off doctrine now meets a second-term Trump emboldened to use the Justice Department as an instrument of his personal interests, political agendas, and score settling.
With Trump openly angling for regime change in Cuba, the prosecutor investigating the country’s leadership is a reliable attack dog for the White House.
U.S. Attorney Quiñones has sent dozens of subpoenas to Trump’s critics like John Brennan, James Clapper, Lisa Page and most recently, James Comey. His “grand conspiracy” investigation hinges upon the fantasy that an anti-Trump deep state illegally engineered every probe that embarrassed him from Crossfire Hurricane to Jack Smith’s indictments.
If the Justice Department is preparing a criminal case against Petro, Trump has been busily poisoning the jury pool. Trump has called Petro a “lunatic,” a “sick man,” and an “illegal drug leader,” and Petro has called Trump a “fascist” and a “new Hitler.” Petro has denied Trump’s allegations of ties to drug trafficking, and it’s hard to take seriously the idea that Trump views the narcotics trade in Latin America as anything more than a useful fig leaf to go after his enemies and reward his friends.
After all, as The Wall Street Journal pointedly noted: “Cuba isn’t seen as a drug trafficking hub.” Cubans have been living under nationwide blackouts — plunging 10 million people into darkness and cutting off power at hospitals — after weeks of a U.S. blockade of Venezuelan oil led to a collapse of the power grid in service of Trump’s openly declared ambition to topple the government.
Last year, Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted by a New York jury of a sprawling cocaine trafficking conspiracy involving bribes from El Chapo. Hernández successfully appealed to Trump’s delusions and vanity to free himself from a life sentence, falsely claiming that he and Trump were prosecuted for “political reasons.” Prosecutors unsealed Hernández’s indictment after his term had ended, and a jury convicted him of the crimes charged.
‘Tainted money’
The Trump Justice Department’s recent actions also undermine the notion that prosecutors are stopping the Venezuelan government from funding Maduro’s defense in order to vigorously enforce U.S. sanctions.
On Thursday, Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores de Maduro will try to dismiss their cases on Sixth Amendment grounds, arguing that the sanctions have prevented them from having the counsel of their choice. Federal prosecutors argue that the Maduros can fund their defense from their personal accounts or retain a public defender, but the U.S. government has no obligation to let the sanctioned Venezuelan government fund their defense, especially considering that Maduro “illegitimately” usurped power after the internationally condemned 2018 and 2024 elections.
Defense attorneys for the Maduros portray it as a simple matter of upholding every criminal defendant’s rights.
“The government cannot assert ‘national security’ or ‘foreign policy’ and then run roughshod over an individual’s domestic trial rights,” their attorney Barry Pollack wrote.
This legal battle lands with uncanny timing.
Just this month, Trump lifted anti-Iran sanctions in the middle of a war against that country, and prosecutors moved to end a $20 billion case against a Turkish state-run bank that helped launder money to Iran, the biggest case of its kind in U.S. history.
Thursday’s hearing could determine whether the government’s hardline position about the payment of Maduro’s lawyers will compromise the case, but legal experts have their doubts that this will be a winning defense motion.
“This is a standard white collar criminal defense strategy,” University of Massachusetts at Amherst Professor Jamie Rowen told All Rise News. “The issue is what money is considered ‘tainted’ or not by criminal activity, tainted money not being allowed for defense expenditures. But the more interesting questions here are accessing Venezuela government funds, which presumably are not all tainted but not allowed by the U.S. sanction regime. I think this is a long shot by the defense but illustrates the power of the prosecution to weaken a defendant’s chances of success.”
Recent reporting suggests that Trump is eager to exercise his Barr-created prerogative again. If so, the upcoming court hearing could illustrate what the U.S. legal system looks like for the next foreign official on the dock.
All Rise News will cover the proceedings live in federal court.
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