This will be the second time that former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who was removed by the US military on January 3, will appear in a US court.
In the weeks since Mr. Maduro was abducted by the United States, Mr. Maduro’s defense lawyers offered only a preview Thursday of how they will approach the unusual case. In his first court appearance in January, President Maduro claimed he was not a traditional defendant but a “prisoner of war” and a “kidnapped” president.
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Many questions surrounding Maduro’s prosecution remain unanswered ahead of Thursday’s hearing. What evidence will prosecutors present to support their claims of “narcoterrorism” and drug trafficking? And ultimately, what happens if federal prosecutors prove unsuccessful.
Although the United States has a history of enforcing its domestic laws against foreign nationals, prosecutions of current or former heads of state are extremely rare.
The most recent examples include the indictment of then-Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega in 1989 and, more recently, the indictment of former Honduran leader Juan Orlando Hernandez in 2024, explained Renato Stabile, who served as Orlando Hernandez’s public defender.
“We are in largely uncharted territory,” Stabile told Al Jazeera.
Will the case be thrown away?
Legal experts have pointed to a variety of challenges that Maduro’s team could pose to have the case thrown out before the trial begins. Defense lawyers have already argued that the case should be invalidated, pointing to Maduro’s role in Venezuela at the time of the abduction and arguing that he was illegally detained.
The United States sent 150 military planes in a raid to kidnap President Maduro, causing a massive power outage across the capital Caracas and destroying the country’s air defenses. Both FBI units and the US military’s specialized Delta Force unit were deployed to raid Mr Maduro’s compound. Venezuela said at least 75 people were killed in the operation.
The Trump administration insists its purpose is purely domestic law enforcement and unrelated to its explicit demands for regime change or access to Venezuela’s state-run oil industry, which has been accompanied by a weeks-long military buildup and oil embargo.
But Trump has since vowed to continue “running” Venezuela and asserting influence over interim President Delcy Rodriguez’s government.
The U.S. executive branch has long held the position that the federal government can pursue arrests made overseas by domestic law enforcement agencies. But “Mr. Maduro will undoubtedly argue that such powers, if any, are limited and that his arrest goes beyond what is permissible,” the Federal Commission of Prosecution Experts wrote in January on the nonprofit website Lawfare.
Mr. Maduro could chart several paths forward with the case, including arguing that proceeding with the case would make the court itself complicit in the government’s actions, a clear violation of international law. Although one form of such an argument failed in the Noriega case, the committee noted that President Maduro will likely try to argue that the details of the 1989 U.S. military operation in Panama and the January attack in Venezuela are significantly different.
Mr. Maduro’s team could also argue that the government misused the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement, but experts noted that the government has argued for decades that it can use the military to “protect federal functions.”
The commission assessed that all options available to President Maduro are likely to face an “uphill battle.”
Finally, Maduro’s team could invoke the so-called “head of state” immunity doctrine, arguing that he remains Venezuela’s head of state and is therefore protected from prosecution under U.S. common law.
The U.S. government has maintained since 2019 that Maduro is not Venezuela’s legitimate head of state, most recently pointing to a series of contested elections in 2024.
How strong is the charge?
If challenges to Maduro’s status and method of arrest are unsuccessful, Orlando Hernandez’s lawyer Stabile argued that the current indictment presented by federal prosecutors is by no means complete.
Maduro has been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit “narco-terrorism,” and the indictment alleges he engaged in drug and arms trafficking in support of the FARC, ELN, and other groups designated by the United States as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
What is notable, however, is that the Justice Department has significantly retreated from the pillars of its initial 2020 indictment against Maduro. At the time, the Justice Department alleges he was the leader of the Cartel de los Soles, which the Justice Department described as a “drug-trafficking organization” that “used cocaine as a weapon against the United States and prioritized importing as much cocaine into the United States as possible.”
The new indictment, unsealed shortly after Maduro’s abduction, instead describes the Cartel de los Soles as a “sponsorship” system within the Venezuelan government, and removes any reference to a coordinated effort by the Cartel de los Soles to use drugs as a weapon against the United States. The original indictment mentioned the Cartel de los Soles 33 times, but the new version mentions it only twice.
The second charge focuses on drug trafficking, pointing to various instances in which President Maduro, his wife, and other officials allegedly used their positions and resources, including the use of private planes under diplomatic cover, to directly support and profit from drug trafficking. The third and fourth charges appear to revolve primarily around the first two: illegal possession and conspiracy to possess automatic machine guns.
Stabile said more evidence could be presented in the coming weeks, months and even years, but prosecutors appear to be building a case largely based on informants, referring to what he described as a “snitch prosecution.”
Notably, the indictment details former Venezuelan general Hugo Carvajal’s involvement in several alleged crimes. Carvajal has already pleaded guilty to “narcoterrorism,” drug trafficking and weapons charges in the United States.
In a letter to “the American people” last year, Carvajal, who has not yet been sentenced, promised to “provide additional details” that would shed more light on the Maduro regime’s alleged crimes.
Stabile argued that prosecutors would “look very weak” if the case relied on witnesses who already had cooperation agreements with the U.S. government.
That feeds the perception that “they’re going to say whatever they have to say to get out of prison.”
He also pointed to the difficulty prosecutors face in disciplining jurors who don’t understand the broader political climate of the case and contradictory messages from the Trump administration.
“Everyone on the jury will know the history of this. They will know how the United States entered Venezuela and took him out of Venezuela,” Stabile said.
“In a typical criminal case, you can’t really discuss the political aspects of the case. In other words, you usually can’t discuss the motivations of the prosecution team in bringing the charges…It’s in the interest of the (defense) here.”
“If you put the right jurors in holdouts, you can easily imagine a hung jury here,” he said, referring to situations in which juries are unable to reach a verdict and prosecutors are faced with having to retry the case, reach an agreement, or drop the charges.
There’s a long way to go
In the short term, the case against Mr. Maduro has stalled, largely due to ongoing funding battles.
In late February, Mr. Maduro’s lawyers said the U.S. government was blocking Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from receiving legal funding from the Venezuelan government.
Mr. Maduro’s lawyer, Barry Pollack, argued in a court filing that the move deprived Mr. Maduro of his “constitutional right to counsel of his own choosing.”
Earlier this month, federal prosecutors fired back: “Both defendants…certainly knew that the U.S. government did not consider them to have legitimate status,” arguing that the couple was still free to use personal funds for lawyers.
In response, lawyers for Mr. Maduro and Mr. Flores asked for the lawsuit to be thrown out. The issue is likely to come up at Thursday’s hearing.
It remains unclear what will happen if the case against Mr. Maduro is actually dismissed, or if he is ultimately acquitted.
Usually, in such situations, the individual is free. But Maduro is not a U.S. citizen, so he could theoretically be detained by immigration enforcement officers after his release.
Argentina is also demanding Maduro’s extradition from the United States, accusing him of crimes against humanity in the government’s crackdown on demonstrators and political dissidents. The lawsuit was brought by Venezuelans suffering from alleged abuses.
Mr. Stabile predicted that it would be a long process before Mr. Maduro’s case was revealed.
“We probably need six to nine months of motion just to resolve the legal issues surrounding his arrest and prosecution. Then discovery will occur,” he said, referring to the period during which both sides will gather and exchange evidence.
“I don’t expect this case to go to trial for at least a few years,” he said.
