In 2008, Donald Trump took to NCS to bemoan the hazards of a president mendacity the United States into battle.
He mentioned George W. Bush was extra worthy of impeachment than Bill Clinton. Why? Clinton’s misdeeds have been “totally unimportant,” Trump told Wolf Blitzer. But with Iraq, he mentioned, “Bush got us into this horrible war with lies — by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.”
Trump would revisit this line incessantly throughout his profitable 2016 presidential marketing campaign.
Given that, you would possibly assume he can be further cautious in making his personal case for army intervention.
You’d assume fallacious.
Instead, the president and his administration handled constructing a case for ousting Nicolás Maduro and asserting management over Venezuela very like Trump treats every thing else: with a facts-optional barrage of hyperbolic claims and questionable assertions. This regardless of the extraordinarily excessive stakes concerned.
And now that Trump has really ousted Maduro and made clear he means enterprise about US expansionism in the Western Hemisphere, these questionable claims have come into focus.
The newly released indictment of Maduro is a working example.
In the run-up to ousting him, Trump and his administration repeatedly forged Maduro as the top of a drug-trafficking group referred to as Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns.
The first Trump administration did so in its preliminary indictment of Maduro in 2020, after which once more final yr when the Treasury and State departments designated this supposed cartel as a terrorist group. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have additionally forged Maduro as the top of this cartel in current days.
But all of the whereas, the declare brought about specialists to scratch their heads. Even because it was extensively believed that Maduro’s authorities was concerned within the drug commerce, it was additionally understood that Cartel de los Soles was extra of a reputation ascribed to a loosely linked confederation of corrupt officers, slightly than an precise group.
“They’re designating a non-thing that is not a terror organization as a terrorist organization,” former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane told NCS in November.
And positive sufficient, now that the administration has Maduro in custody and it faces defending its public claims in court docket, what does it do? It waters them down — considerably.
As the New York Times’ Charlie Savage wrote Monday, the administration’s new indictment of Maduro treats Cartel de los Soles as extra of an abstraction than an precise group.
The indictment as a substitute says the phrase is used to discuss with a “patronage system” run by prime Venezuelan officers.
The 2020 indictment talked about the supposed cartel greater than 30 occasions; the brand new one mentions it solely twice.
And it’s not simply that the brand new indictment lacks element. It goes into element on a collection of different organizations and even cartels — simply not the one which the Trump administration publicly accused the then-Venezuelan president of operating.
That’s a slightly curious exclusion — and one which lends credence to the concept the administration oversold a key portion of its case for focusing on Maduro.
The lack of Tren de Aragua ties and ‘stolen’ oil
The indictment additionally conspicuously fails to again up a few different items of the administration’s case for ousting Maduro.
One is Maduro’s supposed connection to the gang Tren de Aragua. As a part of Trump’s efforts to rapidly deport immigrants final yr, the administration claimed that the United States was at battle with Tren de Aragua and that Maduro was directing it to invade the United States — claims that, if true, would have unlocked larger authorities for Trump.
But just like the Cartel de los Soles claims, this one was suspect.
As NCS and others reported, US intelligence had concluded Maduro was not, in truth, directing the gang. And judges repeatedly cast doubt on such claims.
As with Cartel de los Soles, the indictment would appear to be an important place to hunt to punish Maduro for his supposed alliance with Tren de Aragua.
But it does little to attach the gang to Maduro or to different prime authorities officers. At one level, it cites a gang chief in 2019 having “discussed drug trafficking with an individual he understood to be working with the Venezuelan regime.” But that’s about it.
Similarly, Trump and his administration have in current weeks set about accusing the Venezuelan authorities of stealing oil that the United States had a right to.
But the problem is much more difficult than that, as NCS’s David Goldman reported this week. And the indictment makes no point out of oil, a lot much less Maduro’s or anybody else’s function in such purported theft.
These are hardly the primary such claims to be referred to as into query.
Some of the massive ones:
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In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed the administration’s first strike on an alleged drug boat killed Venezuelan gang members who have been “trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.” Trump additionally claimed the medication have been headed for the United States. But since then, the army official who oversaw the operation instructed lawmakers the boat was actually headed to Suriname, which is often a cease for medication on their technique to Europe, not the United States.
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Much of Trump’s case for focusing on Maduro revolves round medication. Attorney General Pam Bondi has labeled Maduro “one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world.” But Venezuela is mostly seen as a rather small player in the drug game, particularly in contrast with neighboring international locations like Colombia, a haven for cocaine, and Mexico, the place the overwhelming majority of fentanyl involves the United States from.
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Trump and people round him have often used hyperbolic numbers when discussing what number of American lives they’ve saved with their drug crackdown. Trump has mentioned every boat strike saves 25,000 lives. Bondi final yr claimed drug seizures of every kind “saved — are you ready for this, media? — 258 million lives.” These sorts of numbers are ridiculous, as NCS’s Daniel Dale has written, given there have been fewer than 100,000 US drug overdose deaths in 2024.
Hyperbole like that has been baked into Trump’s public commentary for a very long time.
But it actually lands in a different way on this context. When you’re asking Americans to weigh the legitimacy of extrajudicial killings and the ouster of a overseas chief, it’s higher to watch out about making factual assertions that may’t be backed up.
A sure Donald Trump was as soon as fairly involved about such issues.