In justifying U.S. escalations against Venezuela and describing its regime as “illegitimate,” a top Trump diplomat on Thursday—in the height of irony—cited a New York criminal case against the country’s president.
Mike Waltz, President Donald Trump’s U.N. ambassador, was asked Thursday on Fox News about the administration’s plans for Venezuela. Trump recently authorized covert CIA operations against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and has publicly considered conducting land strikes on the country.
Waltz told Fox News that Maduro is an “illegitimate leader, convicted in the Southern District of New York,” adding that the U.S. will “do whatever it takes” to dismantle Venezuelan “terrorist gangs.”
Notably, Maduro was not convicted, but rather charged with narcoterrorism and other offenses, in New York’s Southern District in 2020. He has not been apprehended nor stood trial, and the Trump administration has a $50 million bounty out on information leading to his arrest. (Venezuela’s foreign minister at the time called the charges against Maduro “miserable, vulgar, and unfounded,” and consistent with a U.S. “policy of forced regime change in Venezuela.”)
And of course, if a conviction in New York is such a stigma as Waltz suggests, then Trump is deep trouble. Trump became the first felonious president in May 2024, convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by a New York State Supreme Court jury—whose verdict he is appealing.
Waltz, a congressman at the time, cried election interference.
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