Trump is doing his best to subvert his own DoJ’s case against Maduro.

 Jeffrey St. Clair >

 
+ It’s been nearly 2 weeks since Trump’s Venezuelan coup and his declaration that the US is running Venezuela. But the US still isn’t running Venezuela.

+ Trump is doing his best to subvert his own DoJ’s case against Maduro. First, in a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump accused Maduro of heading a drug cartel that his own DoJ now admits doesn’t exist. Second, in his social media post announcing Maduro’s kidnapping, he referred to Maduro as “President Nicolas Maduro,” which contradicts his DOJ’s position that Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela and shouldn’t be afforded sovereign immunity. (It was for the reason that the previous Trump administration stopped referring to him as president in 2019, when they were considering a similar operation.)

+ In his Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump claimed that Maduro was the head of “the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles, which flooded our nation with lethal poison.” In fact, the term Cartel de los Soles is slang for “drug corruption in the military.” When your case crumbles before you even present it to a judge…

+ One of the Department of Justice’s key witnesses in its case against Maduro is Hugo Carvajal, a former Venezuelan general, who pleaded guilty last year to drug trafficking charges and, in December, wrote a letter asking for leniency, in which he backed the farcical claim that Venezuela had helped rig the 2020 election for Biden.

+ The big question in Venezuela remains: who was the CIA’s source inside the Maduro government? Much of the focus has been on VP, Delcy Rodriguez, who, though she has publicly denounced the raid and kidnapping, seems to be maintaining a back-channel to Rubio. But her hold on power remains tenuous, with Chauvistas to the left of her, MUD to her right and the generals watching for any false step. Jon Lee Anderson: “I guess she’s expected to keep the heads of the military and the intelligence services from doing any power grabs or displacing her. But there may be mutual suspicions there. So it’s kind of a knife-edge situation.”