Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Monday shrugged off concerns about the legality of the arrests of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, saying the Trump administration “did everything within the law.”
The U.S. didn’t do “anything that violates international law,” Blanche said on NBC News NOW’s “Top Story with Tom Llamas” when he was asked whether the military attack and the subsequent arrests violated the United Nations charter, as some foreign governments have alleged.
“Absolutely, positively not,” Blanche said.
“The United States has an absolute legal right to go and arrest people charged with horrible crimes,” he said, later adding that “what we did was not only right and not only legal, but it’s what the American people expect us to do when we file charges against individuals like him.”
Watch the full interview tonight at 7:30 p.m. ET / 6:30 p.m. CT on NBC News NOW.
Maduro faces a narco-terrorism conspiracy charge. He and his wife, Cilia Flores, were both charged with cocaine importation conspiracy and weapons offenses. They pleaded not guilty at a court hearing in New York earlier Monday.
Asked by Llamas whether the Justice Department had received guidance from its Office of Legal Counsel about the legality of the attack on Venezuela and the two arrests, Blanche said he wasn’t “going to get into any discussions” that occurred but insisted that “there’s no doubt what we did was legal.”
Maduro and Flores both have attorneys and “will get their day in court,” said Blanche, a former federal prosecutor who later worked as Trump’s defense attorney.
Asked what he considered to be the key evidence in the case, Blanche instead spoke about the allegations in the indictment.
Maduro was “helping to orchestrate a major international infrastructure that brought tons and tons of cocaine to the United States,” he said.
“This was an infrastructure and a very organized group of individuals from all over the world, different gangs and different terrorist organizations that work together to bring drugs into this country. And that’s what I expect the evidence and trial will show,” he said.
“The government doesn’t bring charges that we don’t believe we can get a conviction on, full stop,” he said.
The Justice Department, however, has been accused of doing just that in recent months, including bringing cases against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey despite warnings from some prosecutors that there wasn’t enough evidence to secure convictions.
Both cases were dismissed when a judge disqualified the acting U.S. attorney who’d presented their cases to a grand jury. The Justice Department is appealing the ruling.
