Here is the full transcript of investigative journalist Max Blumenthal’s interview on Judging Freedom Podcast with host Judge Andrew Napolitano, January 6, 2026.
Brief Notes: Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal joins Judge Andrew Napolitano to unpack how a network of Trump- and Rubio-aligned operatives and corporate creditors are poised to cash in on Venezuela’s deepest crisis. They trace the years-long campaign of sanctions, lawfare, and asset seizures—from the auction of Venezuelan oil giant CITGO in U.S. courts to the empowerment of opposition figures in Washington’s good graces—that Blumenthal argues amount to a “multi-billion dollar heist” of Venezuela’s resources. The conversation digs into the legal maneuvers, lobbyists, and foreign policy hawks behind this push, the bipartisan consensus enabling it, and what it all means for ordinary Venezuelans facing economic strangulation and the threat of deeper conflict.
Introduction
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, January 6, 2026. Max Blumenthal joins us now.
You know, I don’t think the introduction was hyperbolic at all. This is a dangerous time for domestic freedom when the government can get away with what we just witnessed over the weekend, followed by an indictment, which you have eviscerated in your brilliant and gifted analysis in your Substack column, which I’d basically like to go through today.
I mean, the indictment against Maduro was filled with such gross exaggerations, accusing him of things that he couldn’t possibly have committed because even if he did some of this stuff, he wasn’t in New York at the time.
A Dangerous Precedent for Domestic and International Freedom
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Exactly. And we’re in a dangerous time where we could start seeing U.S. assassinations of heads of state as Israel does. That’s the precedent that’s being set right now. That’s what Trump is threatening. And domestic freedom will be rolled back very rapidly.
As we saw in Grand Rapids, Michigan, yesterday, a protester giving an interview to local news was just whisked away by local police as she was delivering an interview on a public sidewalk, accused of obstructing the space.
So we now head to New York, to the Southern District, where Nicolas Maduro is put on trial in the same courtroom where Honduran former president and convicted narco trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez was prosecuted and convicted and then pardoned by Donald Trump.
Nicolas Maduro walked in confidently with a badly bruised and battered wife, battered by the U.S. regime and its Delta Force. She possibly had a bruised rib. And Maduro was arraigned and was given a brief moment to speak, where he declared he’s the president of Venezuela, he is innocent and a decent man, before being interrupted by the lawyer assigned to him.
And we will soon learn that the charges that have been assembled by the Department of Justice—by the way, by the same prosecutors that prosecuted Juan Orlando Hernandez—are basically phony from top to bottom and will not stick in a real courtroom with a real judge. A kangaroo court might make it stick, but this court won’t. And that’s what I explain in my piece, which is at thegrayzone.com and as you said at our Substack site. I can go through it really quickly.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, I’d like to go through it because it is filled with gross sloppiness, gross exaggerations, and as I alluded to and you confirmed, the allegation of criminal behavior which couldn’t possibly be criminal.
Like a flight that doesn’t implicate American airspace can’t possibly violate American law. The possession of a weapon in Caracas, even though it might be illegal in Manhattan, can’t possibly violate American law. I just don’t know why they threw that stuff in there. It’s almost as if this was written at the last minute, like the Lindsey Halligan indictment of Jim Comey.
The Flawed Drug Trafficking Allegations
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, there was no there there. Nicolas Maduro is not a narco trafficker. He hasn’t institutionalized narco trafficking in Venezuela the way Juan Orlando did.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Let me just stop you for a second. The interesting footnote on Juan Orlando—who was the chief prosecutor of the president of Honduras? It was Emile Beauvais.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Who wrote this indictment of Maduro, at least the first indictment of Maduro in 2020.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Emile Beauvais, if the name does not ring a bell to our viewers, is the lawyer who was the defense lawyer for Donald Trump in his criminal prosecution, rewarded with a seat on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals by a vote of 51 to 50 in the United States Senate. That’s the court right below the Supreme Court of the United States.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yep. So this is the guy Trump says persecuted Juan Orlando, but it’s his guy. So it actually doesn’t stand to reason. That indictment is much more detailed than this one.
Let’s go through the flights. These are flights where Maduro or his associates—he’s not the only one indicted here—are said to have shipped drugs toward the United States. They don’t say two. They don’t say how many. It says tons of drugs, and it says thousands of tons, which could be $400 billion in revenue, which is astronomical.
But Venezuela is not a major transshipment point for drugs. The flights were mostly in this indictment going to Mexico between the period of 2002 and 2011, when Maduro was not president. And yet they implicate him through linguistic sleights of hand.
Mexico is outside U.S. jurisdiction. The U.S. has no capacity to prosecute flights from Venezuela to Mexico. And they have no proof that even if these flights took place and even if Maduro was personally presiding over them, that the cocaine was going to the United States.
In one instance, there was a flight in 2013 that they mentioned that went international. It flew internationally from Venezuela. And it is a fact that in 2013 a large amount of cocaine in about 30 suitcases passed through airport security and airport security knew this was taking place.
So yeah, this was public in Venezuela at the time.
The Venezuelan government took swift action to punish low-level military and airport officials. They arrested 25 people. And then in the UK, five international criminal figures who were British citizens were put on trial and convicted in 2018—not of conspiring with Venezuelan gangs, but of conspiring with Colombian and Italian gangsters.
So no Venezuelan was actually implicated here. And the DOJ’s proof that Maduro was involved was simply that he was elected president several months before this took place. That was their entire piece of proof.
There’s another flight in 2006 from Venezuela to Campeche, Mexico in Yucatan that did contain cocaine. However, if you do a deep dive on this flight—I actually did a deep dive—there’s been a lot of intrigue around this particular flight. It looks like it stopped in Colombia possibly to pick up the cocaine, then dropped it off in Mexico.
And the flight, the plane was registered to one U.S. company which had been previously owned by a close associate of Jeb Bush. And it looks like both of these U.S. companies were shells being used by U.S. intelligence, by the CIA. It looks like it was a CIA operation.
So there’s so much intrigue here about these flights, but they have no proof even in a conventional drug case that any of these flights were going to the United States. And they have no proof that Nicolas Maduro was ever involved.
In fact, the conspiracy laid out in the DOJ indictment of Maduro begins in 1999. And I want to get into this and the chronology a little bit, but in 1999, Maduro had just been elected to the National Constituent Assembly which at that time was a body lower than the National Assembly. He was practically unknown and had no influence over the instruments of the Venezuelan state to be able to engineer drug deals.
It’s just a phony number they came up with because that was the year Hugo Chavez was elected. But the reality is that when Venezuela was sending drugs directly to the United States, it was taking place before 1999, starting in the Reagan era. And it was doing so under the direct watch and at the behest of the CIA. And this is a well-established fact.
Jurisdictional Questions and Judicial Concerns
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: One would think that an indictment as flawed as this, as filled with exaggeration, as bereft of detail, as filled with crimes that were legally impossible to commit because none of them implicated the United States, would be dismissed before trial.
The judge is 92 years old. He’s an orthodox Jew. He has been known to be very resistant to the government in the past. He’s also been known to be very pliant to the government in the past in drug cases. It’s hard to predict how this is going to go.
Justice should not be determined by the personality of the judges. Unfortunately, in federal courts in the United States, it is.
I wonder why they indicted him in the Southern District of New York. I’m familiar with the constitutional principle that if a crime is committed outside the United States and the person is brought into the United States, the Constitution requires that they be tried at the place where they first entered the U.S., which is why all those flights, people being arrested overseas used to be brought to Dulles so they could be tried in the rocket docket near where you live, the Eastern District of Virginia, which has a 99% conviction rate.
I don’t know why they brought him to New York instead of to Dulles. Do you?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I don’t. And that’s a great question. The terror trials, the phony terror trials where Muslim terror suspects were put on trial, that was all Eastern District, Northern Virginia. I witnessed some of those trials.
All these Latin American drug conspiracy cases are being tried in the Southern District. And I know that the former Venezuelan general who has been cultivated to be the star witness against Maduro for years through a series of legal tricks as well as intelligence intrigues—Hugo Pollo Carvajal, El Pollo Carvajal—was just convicted in the Southern District of New York in June, and he pled guilty and signed a secret plea agreement to supply dirt on Nicolas Maduro in exchange for a severe reduction in what could be a 50-year sentence.
And he had been compromised by the U.S. going back to that very suspicious 2006 flight that I mentioned, where he was linked to it. But the flight was registered to a plane that may have been a CIA plane. So I’m getting too into the weeds here.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: No, this is fascinating to me and I know that our viewers love it, and your analysis is the best I’ve seen of this.
This particular general is, of course, himself a convicted drug dealer. You just mentioned that he’s going to be the principal witness against Maduro. The question will be if there is a trial. I don’t think there should be a trial for jurisdictional reasons because I believe he was the head of state and does enjoy immunity.
And his kidnapping and seizure violates the U.S. Constitution, the UN Charter and other international legal principles like the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit these things.
International Law and Political Context
MAX BLUMENTHAL: And an ICJ ruling, Democratic Republic of Congo vs. Belgium, which forbids the prosecution of heads of state in national courts, which is why, for example, Netanyahu would have to go to the ICC.
This case is a test of whether the Trump administration can simply invalidate international law, which is why they cooked up all these foreign terrorist organization designations on all of these various cartels they accused Maduro of being involved with in 2025, even though they accuse him of being involved with them going back to 2002. The chronology—it’s all retroactive.
But they want to basically undermine or destroy international law here to put him on trial and there is no legal precedent at this point.
I should mention Alvin Hellerstein, the judge. He’s 92, so I hope he can keep his eyes open in court. I don’t know if I’d still be working at 92. I’ve heard good things about him from lefty legal friends in New York.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, he is a civil libertarian. He is a defender of the Bill of Rights. I don’t know where he’s going to be on Maduro because of the Venezuela-Iran connection and because he’s an orthodox Jew. But he has defied the Trump administration, defied every administration, including the administration that appointed him, on civil liberties issues.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, you know, there are a lot of civil liberties issues here, but I think it’s the political context that matters most, as well as discovery.
And having witnessed a very politically charged case on Venezuela in Washington presided over by an Obama appointee who was a terrible judge—Beryl Howell of the Venezuelan Embassy Defenders, four Americans who refused to leave the Venezuelan Embassy when the Trump administration in its first term stole it and they were arrested in a military-style raid—the judge refused to allow the jury to hear that Nicolas Maduro was president of Venezuela and insisted that Juan Guaido was president because she was so submissive to U.S. government orders.
So there’s a political context here that will allow Maduro to make a very strong case. And you can see the Department of Justice in this new indictment that I analyzed try to prevent Maduro from introducing very salient political context.
In the first indictment, he is referred to 32 times as the head of the Cartel of the Suns, which they refer to as a cohesive transnational criminal syndicate in the first indictment. In this indictment, Cartel of the Suns is referred to only twice. And it’s referred to as kind of a loose criminal network.
And that’s because it doesn’t exist, number one. And number two, as I stated before, it was created by the CIA before Hugo Chavez during the Reagan era to ship tons of drugs, pure cocaine, from Venezuela to the United States, supposedly to learn more about drug trafficking networks in the U.S. But I think to raise money for CIA black ops.
This would be a case where the defense could actually bring out discovery and embarrass the CIA. I think there’s a lot the defense can do. So the Department of Justice is already taking preemptive action.
The CIA’s Vulnerability in Discovery
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Should the CIA be terrified of information that can come out in the defense? I mean, Barry Pollock knows what he’s doing. He’s probably out hiring investigators, ex-FBI, ex-DEA, ex-CIA to dig up dirt on the government’s case. Shouldn’t the government be terrified about what would come out about the CIA?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, absolutely. And I just explained two areas where the defense can exploit. I mean, if the Cartel of the Suns is still even mentioned here, there should be discovery with classified documents pouring out in this court about the CIA and its own drug running operations, specifically the 2006 flight. I want to know more about that because that is where Pollo Carvajal was first compromised and he’s accused of being involved in it with another defendant here, Diosdado Cabello, who is still a power player in Caracas that the U.S. may seek to target.
Going back to Carvajal, this guy’s going to be the key witness. It’s going to be dramatic. They’re going to say that he has all of the secrets of the Venezuelan deep state and he’s obviously pandering to Trump and has signed a plea deal. In a letter in 2005 in June to Trump, he actually claimed that he has evidence that Venezuela’s Smartmatic voting machines played a role in rigging the 2020 election in favor of Biden.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Is he the originator of that nonsense?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: No, he just knows that Trump wants that evidence and that that’s Trump’s favorite conspiracy theory and that if he supplies it, that he’ll get off. All he cares about is saving his own skin. This is a guy going back to 1992 who was one of the original generals with Hugo Chavez that tried to overthrow the Venezuelan Fourth Republic. He was as close as you could be to Hugo Chavez. He was an original Chavista. He was Chavez’s head of military intelligence.
And then when the U.S. starts hunting him, almost the very moment he gets slapped with two indictments inside the U.S. from Venezuela, he begins to denounce Nicolas Maduro. In 2017, he already said he decided, “I’m going to fashion myself as an informant, and that will be my way to avoid hard time in a U.S. federal pen.”
He gets extradited in 2019. That day, Senator Marco Rubio says Hugo Carvajal is coming to the United States to supply us with all the information we need on Maduro. Because Rubio is already preparing for this moment. Carvajal was not the target. They just needed to finagle some kind of case about him in order to get him to the United States and then imprison him as a kind of hostage until he told them everything they wanted to hear about Maduro.
So his day will come. He is a compromised witness. He is a coerced witness who delivers testimony under duress, and he’s making up anything Trump wants to hear. And that’s the prosecution’s star witness.
The CITGO Conspiracy: Rubio, Singer, and Corporate Plunder
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Are you—I’m going to guess you are—but are you familiar enough with the Paul Singer, Marco Rubio, Chevron involvement here to give us a brief description of how corrupt Rubio is?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, I would direct everyone to a piece Anya Parampil wrote for us at the Gray Zone called “The CITGO Conspiracy.” She just tweeted it out on her Twitter X account and it explains how CITGO was seized through a series of corrupt, conniving legal maneuvers from the Venezuelan state after Juan Guaido was declared interim president. CITGO being the most profitable foreign asset for the Venezuelan state. And it not only includes gas stations, but oil pipelines and a corporate structure.
So it was seized and placed in the hands of—who would take control of it? We weren’t sure. Well, Paul Singer’s Elliott Capital Management has taken control of CITGO and its financial shares. Who is Paul Singer? He funded the career of Marco Rubio. He is an arch Likudnik, an arch Zionist, close to Benjamin Netanyahu, who has supported every neocon think tank and journal in Washington and New York.
And Marco Rubio owes Paul Singer. Obviously, Marco Rubio has his own personal, cultural and ideological passion for doing this. But as the newly sworn-in Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez said, this assault on Venezuela has undeniably Zionist overtones. And Paul Singer embodies those overtones.
The Threat to Civil Liberties at Home
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, I don’t know how any of this is going to end up. I’m sure Rubio hopes it ends up with himself in the White House. We’d be in as bad a shape as we are now. I’m writing my column this week condemning, of course, what happened over the weekend and arguing that we need to be fearful of civil liberties in this country. That you can draw a direct line between an administration that is such an authoritarian machine that it can pull something like this off to an administration that will stifle speech and even harm people in the U.S. who speak out against it.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: We’re already seeing that take place. I mean, it’s just a demonstration globally of a complete lack of regard for not just international law, but any law and any value other than the law of the jungle. And naturally, this is going to flow back on us.
And I think a good metaphor for it is like a husband who just decides to lean into beating and cheating on his wife because that’s the natural nature of man. That’s Donald Trump on the world stage. So the United States is stripped of any values and any meaning other than crude exploitation and raw capitalist plunder.
Where is the Smedley Butler of today to rise from the ranks of the U.S. military and realize that they are just the muscle for a bankers cartel and that they are actually not defending anything or anyone except the global militant Zionist 1%?
Closing Remarks
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Max, you’re brilliant, my dear man. Thank you very much for this. Where can people go to read your analysis, which I read at the crack of dawn this morning of this indictment?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, you can go to thegrayzone.com—that’s gray with an A—or our Substack. Just search The Gray Zone on Substack. Follow us. Follow us on Twitter and any other social media platform, but I think most people watching this know where to find us. And thank you, Judge, for letting me break down the indictment.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Max, it’s as if you’re an experienced lawyer. That’s how brilliant your legal analysis was. I’m telling you, I’m tempted to email this over to Barry Pollock, but I don’t want to get involved. He’s going to tell the feds that I was involved and I don’t want that. It’s a gifted and brilliant legal analysis. Nearly all of the arguments you made in that piece will be aired in a public courtroom in New York coming soon. Thank you, Max. All the best. God bless you, your beautiful family, your wonderful wife. Thanks for being here. We’ll look forward to seeing you again soon.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thank you, Judge.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you. Great, brilliant, gifted analysis and a wonderful friend. Two o’clock on these same topics, Matt Hoh. Three o’clock on these same topics, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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