Inside the Case Against Maduro

Hey, folks. Preet here. Joyce Vance and I are out with a new episode of the Insider podcast. We discuss a slew of legal issues stemming from The US capture and indictment of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro. If you're a member of Cafe Insider, head to the Insider feed or click the link in the show notes of this podcast to hear the full analysis. Stay tuned, listeners. Stick around for an excerpt from our conversation. Members of Insider help support our work and get access to full episodes and other subscriber benefits. We're living in unreasonable times, so join our community of reasonable voices. Head to cafe.com/insider or staytuned.substack.com. Now onto the show. So should we talk about the charges or the arrest? Well, let's start with the charges just so we know what we're looking at. So it's a speaking indictment, as they say, that at first blush seems to have a lot of detail. It talks about the conveyance of massive, massive amounts of drugs, cocaine into The United States. By the way, you know, the almost the only people who get talked about are Maduro and his wife because that's interesting to folks. But there are, you know, as I said, six defendants, and there have to be allegations with respect to all of them for an indictment to be satisfactory. So there are a lot of things about them. I don't know that there's a lot in the indictment that has been unsealed and that's publicly available and that we can all talk about and and vet and analyze and evaluate, there's a lot new in terms of what kind of evidence they have against Maduro. That is not required in the indictment. So when we get the question, which I guess we should ask ourselves, from the reading of the indictment, how strong do you think the case is? That's a little bit hard to answer. But I'm I'm guessing, unlike is often the case in recent weeks and months on this show, that the case is probably pretty strong. Yeah. I mean, let me just put an asterisk there and say, normally and as you say, this is this is a a traditional indictment. It does not have to lay out every piece of the government's evidence. We have a notice pleading system, so a defendant has to be on notice and capable of defending themselves against the charges, but nothing nothing more. And most indictments are bare bones, although we've become used to these large speaking indictments and conspiracy cases. But, you know, the the reality here is that, normally, I would just assume SDNY had the evidence or they wouldn't indict the case. In light of the ability of this White House to manipulate the justice department for political purposes, There's maybe, you know, a wee bit of a question in the back of my mind. But, I mean, can can you pre you're sort of uniquely capable, right, of laying out …