Trump's DOJ Used a Fake 'Drug Cartel' to Justify Kidnapping Venezuelan President Maduro and Got Caught in the Lie
They Lied About the Cartel. They Lied About the Drugs. What Else Are They Lying About?
Caracas, Venezuela: American special forces breach the presidential residence in a predawn raid. Flashbangs. Gunfire. The First Lady is thrown to the ground and injured in the chaos. Within minutes, President Nicolas Maduro is in handcuffs, dragged from his own home by foreign soldiers. Simultaneously, American warplanes light up the capital city. Explosions rock the streets. By the time the sun rises, the president of a sovereign nation is on a plane to New York, his country is burning, and the President of the United States announces that America will now ârunâ Venezuela.
It sounds like the opening of a Tom Clancy novel. The kind of decisive military action that makes action movie fans cheer. We got the bad guy. The drug lord. The narco-terrorist who was flooding our streets with cocaine and arming rebels and trying to destroy America.
Except it was all bullshitâŠ
The drug cartel that justified this entire operation does not exist. It never existed. And two days after snatching Maduro from his home, the Department of Justice quietly admitted it.
In the 2020 indictment against Maduro, drafted during Trumpâs first term, the DOJ mentioned âCartel de los Solesâ thirty-two times. Thirty-two. They described it as a Venezuelan drug trafficking organization led by Maduro that was arming Colombian rebels and trying to âfloodâ the United States with cocaine âas a weapon.â They made it sound like the most dangerous criminal enterprise in the Western Hemisphere, a narco-terrorist state run by a dictator who wanted to destroy America with drugs.
In the 2026 indictment, released two days after we snatched Maduro from his home in Caracas, the term appears exactly twice. And instead of describing a drug cartel, the new indictment admits that âCartel de los Solesâ is actually just a âpatronage systemâ and a âculture of corruption.â It is slang. A figure of speech. A term invented by Venezuelan media in the 1990s to describe corrupt officials who wear sun insignias on their uniforms.
We kidnapped a president over a slang term.
Let that sink in for a minute. The most powerful nation on Earth conducted a military operation to abduct a foreign head of state, bombed his capital, and announced we would ârunâ his country, and the entire legal justification was based on something that experts in Latin American crime have been saying for years is not a real organization. The DEAâs own National Drug Threat Assessment, which details every major trafficking organization in the region, has never once mentioned Cartel de los Soles. The United Nations World Drug Report has never mentioned it. Nobody in the actual business of tracking drug cartels has ever treated this as a real thing because it is not a real thing.
But the DOJ put it in an indictment thirty-two times anyway. They designated it as a foreign terrorist organization. They used it to justify actions that would otherwise be considered acts of war against a sovereign nation.
And now they have quietly rewritten the indictment to remove the lie, hoping nobody would notice⊠but I noticed.
Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group, told the New York Times that the new indictmentâs description is âexactly accurate to realityâ unlike the 2020 version. Then she said something that should make every Americanâs blood boil:
âDesignations donât have to be proved in court, and thatâs the difference. Clearly, they knew they could not prove it in court.â
Read that again. They knew they could not prove it in court. They knew from the beginning that their justification was bullshit.
They designated a slang term as a terrorist organization because designations do not require evidence. They built an entire case for military action on something they knew was false because the lie only had to hold up long enough to get the bombs in the air and the president in handcuffs.
This is not how the rule of law works. This is not how a republic operates. This is what empires do. Empires manufacture pretexts. Empires lie to their citizens to justify conquest. Empires kidnap foreign leaders and rewrite the legal paperwork after the fact to cover their tracks.
The man who drafted the original 2020 indictment was Emil Bove III, a terrorism and narcotics prosecutor in New York. During the opening months of Trumpâs second term, Bove ran the Justice Department. He fired dozens of officials. He ordered the dismissal of bribery charges against Eric Adams. And then Trump rewarded him with a lifetime appointment to a federal appeals court. The guy who wrote the fake cartel indictment now has a lifetime position as a federal judge. Let that sink in.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on Meet the Press the day after the revised indictment was released and continued to refer to Cartel de los Soles as a real cartel. âWe will continue to reserve the right to take strikes against drug boats that are being operated by transnational criminal organizations, including the Cartel de los Soles,â he said. âOf course, their leader, the leader of that cartel, is now in U.S. custody.â
His own Justice Department just admitted it is not a real cartel. The indictment was rewritten to remove the lie. And Rubio is still out there repeating the false version on national television because the truth does not matter anymore.
The lie served its purpose. Maduro is in custody. Venezuela is under American control. Mission accomplished. Who cares if the pretext was fabricated?
Kat Timpf, a Fox News commentator, said something on air that perfectly captures the insanity of what we are watching: âLet me get this straight: We go to a country, we capture their leader, we bomb it, and then we say we run this country now â and thatâs not war. But when they send cocaine over here, that people are willingly snorting â that is war. That doesnât make any sense.â
It does not make sense because it is not supposed to make sense. It is supposed to be confusing enough that people stop asking questions. The administration changed the story from âhe leads a drug cartelâ to âhe participated in a culture of corruptionâ and they are betting that nobody will notice the difference, that nobody will ask why we kidnapped a foreign president over a âculture of corruptionâ that could describe half the governments on Earth, including, let us be honest, large portions of our own.
But wait, there is more. The new indictment also adds the head of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua as a co-defendant, claiming he was a co-conspirator with Maduro. The connection described in the indictment is laughably thin: some phone calls in 2019 where the gang leader offered to escort drug shipments. That is it. Trump has claimed that Maduro was directing the activities of Tren de Aragua, but US intelligence agencies believe the opposite is true. Jeremy McDermott from InSight Crime, a Latin America security think tank, said the inclusion âreflects President Trumpâs rhetoricâ but is misleading. His organizationâs analysis shows Tren de Aragua has no ownership of major cocaine shipments.
So we have a fake cartel, a prison gang that intelligence says Maduro does not actually control, and a completely rewritten indictment that quietly admits the original justification was false. This is the legal foundation for kidnapping a president and taking over a country.
I have covered a lot of dark things in my career. I have written about corruption and lies and the slow death of the republic we were all taught to believe in. But this might be the most brazen thing I have ever seen. They are not even trying to hide it anymore. They lie, they act on the lie, and then they quietly admit they lied while their spokespeople keep repeating the original lie on television because they know most Americans will never read the actual indictment.
This is not about whether Maduro is a good guy. He is probably not. Venezuela has serious problems with corruption and authoritarianism. But we do not get to kidnap foreign leaders based on fabricated charges. We do not get to designate slang terms as terrorist organizations to justify military action. We do not get to bomb sovereign nations and announce we are taking control because we made up a drug cartel that does not exist.
If we can do this to Venezuela, we can do it to anyone. If manufactured pretexts are enough to justify regime change, then no nation is safe. If the Justice Department can write thirty-two lies into an indictment and then quietly rewrite it after the operation is complete, then the rule of law is dead and we are living in an empire that will say whatever it needs to say to take whatever it wants to take.
The founders of this nation would be horrified. They created a republic specifically to prevent this kind of unchecked power. They knew that empires lie to their citizens.
The Founding Fathers knew that concentrated authority always becomes tyrannical.
They built checks and balances and separation of powers and a free press specifically so that the government could not fabricate pretexts for war and conquest.
Every single one of those safeguards has failed.
The lie is in the public record now. The original indictment says one thing. The new indictment says another. The experts have been saying for years that Cartel de los Soles is not real. The DEA has never mentioned it. The UN has never mentioned it. And yet we kidnapped a president over it, and half the country is cheering because they have been told he was a bad guy and bad guys deserve whatever happens to them.
That is not justice. That is not law. That is empire.
And if you think they will stop at Venezuela, you have not been paying attention.
Get ready for World War 3 America.
The Wise Wolf has no corporate sponsors. No political donors. No advertisers. We are not owned by Republicans or Democrats because both parties are bought and paid for by the same billionaires who are taking over the world right in front of our faces while most people are too scared or too blind or too apathetic to notice or care.
We expose the lies of both sides. That is what makes us dangerous to the algorithm and valuable to you.
I need to be honest with you. I gave up a good job to do this full time. I have health issues that need addressed but my insurance will not cover the tests I need. Lily, our junior reporter, needs college money and wants to work here full time after she graduates, but if we cannot grow this publication she is going to end up writing celebrity gossip slop for some corporate content mill. We are not rich people. We are just two journalists trying to do work that actually matters in a world that rewards garbage.
If you can afford to become a paid subscriber, please do. If you cannot, that is okay. Share this article. Restack it. Like it. We get algorithm blocked on a daily basis and the only reason anyone sees our work is because readers like you share it on social media. Without that, we disappear into a black hole of obscurity while the lies keep spreading.
A better question might be "What are they not lying about?"
This old fart has developed terminal skepticism. That is to say, I don't believe what most people say.
Dr. Gregory House (from the TV series House) used to say, "Everybody lies." And I think that bit of wisdom is in keeping with what the Bible teaches supported by 6000 years of human history.
Tribal warfare on a global scale produces more fiction than all Stephen King novels combined.
Thatâs ok. If it gets too hot in the kitchen, theyâll come up with a distraction. They always do. And this will become old news, buried & forgotten & onto the next âcrisisâ.