Trump’s DOJ Quietly Changes Crucial Detail in Charges Against Maduro

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice quietly removed references to a fictional drug cartel led by Nicolás Maduro from its newest indictment of the kidnapped Venezuelan president.

The New York Times reported Monday that the new indictment of Maduro and others on charges related to drug trafficking omitted a crucial element of the original charges: the criminal organization that Maduro supposedly ran, Cartel de los Soles.

The original indictment filed against Maduro in March 2020 in the Southern District of New York described the Cartel de los Soles as a “drug trafficking organization comprised of high-ranking officials” that operated between 1999 and 2020.

“Under the leadership of Maduro Moros and others, the Cartel de Los Soles sought not only to enrich its members and enhance their power, but also to ‘flood’ the United States with cocaine,” the indictment said.

But apparently, Cartel de los Soles isn’t a real organization at all. It’s a slang term invented by the Venezuelan media to describe corruption, according to the Times. The supposed cartel’s inclusion in the original indictment would be as if someone tried Trump for leading “Trumpworld” as a criminal organization.

The original indictment mentions the cartel 32 times, while the new one only mentions it twice, this time describing Cartel de los Soles as a “patronage system run by those at the top.”

The fabrication of Cartel de los Soles must be a relatively new revelation for the Trump administration. In November, the U.S. State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization led by Maduro.

The new indictment adds to the original by including additional charges of “narco-terrorism,” conspiracy to import cocaine, and gun charges, as well as charges against Maduro’s wife for allegedly accepting bribes to broker trafficking meetings.

A woman was arrested live on camera in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while talking to a local newscast about protesting the U.S. government’s sudden takeover of Venezuela.

Jessica Plichta helped Grand Rapids Opponents of War organize the turnout Saturday, which inspired dozens of locals to march through snowy city streets. But in a bizarre turn of events, Plichta’s decision to exercise her First Amendment rights ended when local authorities handcuffed her on the sidewalk while she was live on air.

“We have to apply pressure at all points that we can, this is not just a foreign issue,” Plichta said before she was arrested. “It’s our tax dollars that are also being used to commit these war crimes.”

She was reportedly arrested for obstructing a roadway and failure to obey a lawful command from an officer, according to 13 ON YOUR SIDE.

Plichta had visited Venezuela just three weeks before the Trump administration kidnapped the Latin American nation’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. While there, she attended an international summit, the People’s Assembly for Peace and Sovereignty of Our America, during which she said she saw Maduro “in person.”

“People loved him,” Plichta told the ABC News affiliate before her arrest. “Maduro was elected by the people. He is for the people, and the people want to see his return. Free Maduro.”

U.S. forces invaded Venezuela early Saturday, bombing its capital Caracas as nearly 200 American troops infiltrated the city to capture Maduro. Trump failed to notify Congress before the invasion but didn’t forget to tip off his friends at America’s biggest oil companies, which stand to gain the most from the America’s newfound control over Venezuela’s oil supply—the largest in the world.

The invasion followed months of escalating rhetoric between the White House and Venezuela’s leadership, which saw the Trump administration repeatedly pin U.S. fentanyl deaths on Venezuelan drug cartels despite a resounding lack of evidence.

The Trump administration is cutting off $10 billion in funding for social services like childcare and aid for poor families in five deep blue states. 

The New York Post reported Monday that the Department of Health and Human Services will freeze funding for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. The freeze will affect $7.35 billion from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program, which gives cash assistance to very poor people. The administration is also blocking $2.4 billion in Child Care Development Funding and  another $869 million from the Social Services Block Grant for all five states, citing benefits going to immigrants. 

An official from the Office of Management and Budget later confirmed the news to Axios, though all states don’t appear to have yet been notified.

The move appears to be a reaction to Minnesota’s Somali day-care scandal, which the right has latched onto.  

Regardless of the justification, this is likely just another instance of Trump going out of his way to spite American citizens, many of whom voted for him, living in states that didn’t. 

President Trump’s recent imperialistic escalations and threats have neocons like Republican Senator Lindsey Graham practically drooling.

After the “America First” president kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, killing about 80 people in airstrikes in the process, he turned his ire to some of neocon America’s longtime targets: Cuba and Iran.

“One of the things that is happening … Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump said inside Air Force One on Sunday, standing snugly in a corner alongside Graham and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

“Yes!” Graham interjected, his eyes and smile lighting up as he became visibly excited.

Graham also put his own two cents in.

“You just wait for Cuba. Cuba is a Communist dictatorship that’s killed priests and nuns, they preyed on their own people,” Graham said. “Their days are numbered.”

“Having Trump stand on his plane threatening more regime-change operations, including one of the neocons’ decade-long crown jewel in Cuba, while Lindsey Graham stands next to him twitching in glee and ecstasy—is the perfect illustration of MAGA foreign policy,” journalist Glenn Greenwald chimed.

Graham tripled down later Monday on Fox News.

“Donald Trump will have done something that’s eluded America since the fifties: deal with the Communist dictatorship 90 miles off the coast of Florida. I can’t wait till that day comes. To our Cuban friends in Florida … the liberation of your homeland is close.”

“Trump used to mock @GrahamBlog for being a bloodthirsty neocon warmonger (and stupid!),” podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote on X. “Now he’s adopting Graham’s foreign policy.”

Graham also blew smoke at Iran during his Fox News appearance.

“Unlike Obama, President Trump has not turned his back on the people of Iran. So I pray and hope that 2026 will be the year that we make Iran great again,” he said, donning a black hat with that slogan on it.

The White House’s succession plan for Venezuela could see Stephen Miller deciding the country’s future.

Donald Trump is reportedly “weighing” whether to tap the notoriously anti-immigrant deputy chief of staff to oversee Venezuela in the coming months, according to at least one insider that spoke with The Washington Post.

Miller played a central role in U.S. efforts to oust Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro. That plan came to a head late Friday, when U.S. military forces successfully captured Maduro, hauling him back to Manhattan on narco-terrorism charges.

Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has since been recognized by Venezuela’s armed forces as its interim leader, taking control as acting president in Maduro’s absence. She swore in on Monday.

In the meantime, Trump has seized the country’s oil reserves—the largest in the world—and told reporters he intends to “run” Venezuela.

That decision, in turn, could hand Miller outsize influence regarding the future of the country. Miller might be tasked with the day-to-day, nitty-gritty responsibilities of supervising the regime change under the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Rubio, a longtime Venezuela hawk, would be the more obvious choice to oversee the regime change—but his schedule is, unfortunately, already backed up. The Trump administration has tapped Rubio to serve not only as secretary of state but also as its national security adviser since Trump’s last pick—Mike Waltz—accidentally admitted journalists into a classified Signal group chat discussing an imminent bombing in Yemen.

Miller would not come without his own policy experience, however. The 40-year-old Californian was an architect of both Project 2025 and the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies, pushing on seemingly impossible deportation goals (upward of 3,000 detentions per day), which have forced ICE agents to harass and harangue noncriminal immigrants and U.S. citizens.

Miller was deeply involved in efforts to spark a new war on drugs, fixating on Mexican cartels and Mexico’s alleged drug traffickers. But when that fell through, Miller shifted his gaze to Venezuela, leading the charge on a classified directive in July that would lay the groundwork for months of airstrikes against small watercraft in the Caribbean, inciting new tensions between the U.S. and its supposedly new puppet state.

President Donald Trump’s imperialist warpath may be about to destroy NATO. 

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned Monday that Trump was on course to uproot the 77-year-old defense alliance between the United States and its allies in Europe. 

“I believe one should take the American president seriously when he says that he wants Greenland,” Frederiksen said in an interview. “But I will also make it clear that if the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.”

Frederiksen’s attempt to raise the stakes of a potential invasion comes as the imperialist fanatics in the Trump administration—emboldened by its large-scale military operation over the weekend to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—have turned their attention back to Trump’s holy grail: Greenland. 

When asked by a reporter Sunday whether he had plans to take action on Greenland, Trump laughed. “We’ll worry about Greenland in two months,” he said. 

“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I’m telling you,” he added.  

Frederiksen released a statement that day urging the United States to “cease its threats against a historically close ally,” saying that it “makes absolutely no sense” for the U.S. to take over Greenland.

To be sure, Trump has rarely ever had anything nice to say about the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, calling them “decaying” nations led by “weak” people. Instead, Trump seems to take his security cues from the Kremlin. His latest effort to carve up the world how he sees fit only further exemplifies how little he cares about keeping U.S. allies.

After the United States kidnapped their president and bombed their capital, Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz swears that “there is no war in Venezuela.”

“As Secretary Rubio has said, there is no war against Venezuela or its people. We are not occupying a country. This was a law enforcement operation in furtherance of lawful indictments that have existed for decades. The United States arrested a narco-trafficker who is now going to stand trial in the United States,” Waltz said at an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council on Monday.

If this was just a simple “law enforcement operation,” then why the bombs? Why would the Trump administration consult U.S. oil companies prior to the kidnapping of Maduro? Why would Trump say outright that the U.S. will be running Venezuela?

The indictment Waltz refers to claims that Maduro allowed “cocaine-fueled corruption to flourish for his own benefit, for the benefit of members of his ruling regime, and for the benefit of his family members” and “provided Venezuelan diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and facilitated diplomatic cover for planes used by money launderers to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela.” Venezuela does not play a major role in trafficking drugs to the United States—and the indictment says nothing about fentanyl, the primary cause of U.S. deaths by overdose.

In his speech, Waltz also emphasized oil, likely the real priority of the Trump administration in this escalation of aggression against Venezuela—not fighting for democracy or stopping drug trafficking.

“You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States.”

Pete Hegseth has finally figured out how to extract his petty payback on Senator Mark Kelly: going after his pension.

The defense secretary announced Monday that he’d initiated a Grade Determination Review following Kelly’s appearance in a video alongside fellow Democratic lawmakers to urge members of the U.S. military and intelligence community not to follow illegal orders.

Hegseth said the so-called Department of War would take “administrative action” against Kelly by reducing his military retirement grade, “resulting in a corresponding reduction in retired pay.”

Kelly slammed the Trump administration’s latest tactic to go after its critics. “Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired service member that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn’t like, they will come after them the same way. It’s outrageous and it is wrong,” the Arizona Democrat said in a statement Monday. “There is nothing more un-American than that.”

A Grade Determination Review, or GDR, is the process by which the military assesses misconduct or poor performance to determine military retirement benefits, which are calculated based on the highest grade satisfactorily held.

A GDR typically occurs at the time of retirement and is a review of conduct during service—not after. Reviews are typically triggered by administrative disciplinary actions, poor performance evaluations, and criminal behavior or violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In response to Hegseth’s previous threats to court-martial Kelly, a former astronaut and U.S. naval officer, military experts have argued that Kelly was speaking in his role as a civilian senator and had not violated any law.

Hegseth seemed to think he could get around this by issuing a formal Letter of Censure documenting Kelly’s “reckless misconduct” to be “placed in Captain Kelly’s official and permanent military personnel file.”

Hegseth said he would personally oversee the GDR, which would be completed within 45 days.

“Captain Kelly’s status as a sitting United States Senator does not exempt him from accountability, and further violations could result in further action,” Hegseth wrote, claiming yet again that the Arizona lawmaker had violated the military’s rules and committed conduct that “was seditious in nature.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has condemned President Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his threat to take over her country next. 

“We categorically reject intervention in the internal matters of other countries,” Sheinbaum said at her press conference on Monday. “It is necessary to reaffirm that in Mexico the people rule, and that we are a free and sovereign country—cooperation, yes; subordination and intervention, no.” 

Trump has threatened to both bomb and/or invade Mexico multiple times in his first year back in office, and he reiterated those points this weekend.

“The cartels are running Mexico, [Sheinbaum’s] not running Mexico.…  We have to do something,” he said on Fox News. Trump also threatened the sovereignty of Greenland, Cuba, Columbia, and Iran, naming them as potential next targets in his press conference on Saturday. 

Even still, Sheinbaum seems confident that the United States will not escalate. 

“I don’t believe in an invasion; I don’t even think it’s something they’re taking very seriously,” she said. “On several occasions, he has insisted that the U.S. Army be allowed to enter Mexico. We have said no very firmly—first because we defend our sovereignty, and second because it is not necessary.”

It seems that attacking Venezuela was just the beginning for President Donald Trump.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One Sunday, Trump couldn’t stop musing about ordering more large-scale military strikes on various countries—including some U.S. allies—following America’s military operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

So how many countries are at risk of imminent attack from the power-mad U.S. president? At least five—but probably more. 

Trump began by turning his attention to Venezuela’s neighbor. “Colombia is very sick too. Run by a sick man, who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he’s not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you,” Trump said.

“What does that mean, ‘He’s not going to do it very long’?” one reporter asked.

“He’s not doing it very long. He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories; he’s not going to be doing it very long,” Trump replied.

“So there will be an operation by the U.S. in Colombia?” the reporter pressed.

“Sounds good to me,” the president replied. 

Trump has steadily increased tensions with Colombia, accusing President Gustavo Petro of being “an illegal drug leader,” targeting boats departing its shores, and cutting all U.S. aid to the country. Petro, for his part, has hit back, comparing Trump to Hitler.

Shortly afterward, Trump also floated a possible strike on Iran when a reporter mentioned the widespread protests there. “We’ll take a look, we’re watching it very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the U.S.,” the president said. 

Trump then laughed at a reporter who asked if the president had any plans to take action on Greenland. “We’ll worry about Greenland in two months. We’ll worry about Greenland in 20 days,” he said.

Trump noted that the massive island was “covered in” Russian and Chinese ships. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I’m telling you,” he said.  

Trump’s efforts to take over Venezuela have reignited right-wing fervor for the United States to claim Greenland, sparking Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to hit back once again at Trump’s repeated threats to annex the territory. 

Trump then turned his attention to his more immediate targets. “Cuba is ready to fall,” he said, claiming that the country had previously received “all of their income from Venezuela.”

“You have to do something with Mexico,” Trump continued. “Mexico has to get their act together, because they’re pouring through Mexico and we’re gonna have to do something. We’d love Mexico to do it, they’re capable of doing it, but unfortunately the cartels are very strong in Mexico.” 

But Trump wasn’t finished. He even went so far as to threaten a second strike against Venezuela “if they don’t behave,” and said that there could be U.S. troops on the ground depending on what the new administration—“if you want to call them that”—decided to do.