Venezuela

A judge appeared sympathetic on Thursday to legal arguments that ex-Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cillia Flores should be allowed to use Venezuelan government money to fund their defence.

Maduro and Flores’s attorneys asked the judge to dismiss the narco-terrorism case against the pair because the US has denied them use of the funds due to sanctions in place against the Latin American country.

Prosecutors argued Maduro “plundered” Venezuela’s wealth and should not be able to use its money for legal fees.

As I’ve stated several times in recent weeks, the MSM isn’t bothering to keep up with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio’s wins in Venezuela, as we attempt to stabilize our important southern neighbor. When something goes wrong, they’ll happily report on it all day long and claim nothing is working, everything is moving slowly, etc. That’s a lie at worst, a semi-maybe-half-truth missing a lot of nuance at best.

From the very start, there was something weird about Operation Absolute Resolve. The official story went something like this: after a whirlwind air attack, which included the use of suicide drones for the first time, special operators from the US Army’s renowned but shadowy SFOD-D unit (“Delta Force”) were helicoptered into the Fuerte Tiuna military complex in the south of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. They defeated the local garrison, used “massive blowtorches” to breach heavy metal doors in a fortress-like residential site within the base, captured the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, then spirited them back to the helicopters and flew them out to face charges in the United States. Donald Trump said it had been “an assault like people have not seen since World War Two.”

Painfully real for Maduro I’m betting.

In the middle of the night on Jan. 3, my WhatsApp lit up with hundreds of messages, videos and reports describing unfolding events in Caracas and other cities throughout Venezuela. Confusion gave way to elation when the news finally broke: Nicolás Maduro was in U.S. custody.

President Trump suggested Wednesday that the US will oversee Venezuela for at least a year following the Jan. 3 arrest of the South American country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, on federal drug and weapons charges.

“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Trump told the New York Times in a lengthy 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.”