OA1222 - Actual sane coverage of Trump's kidnapping of a foreign leader PART 1
OA NYC correspondent Liz Skeen joins Thomas and Matt for this emergency episode recorded the day after the US bombed Caracas in a truly unprecedented military operation to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife and transport them to Brooklyn to stand trial on federal narco-terrorism charges. We field dozens of patron questions as we try to understand how any of this could possibly be legal. How does this situation compare to the charges against former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, and how is Trump’s record on narcotrafficking these days anyway? What is in this indictment, and what kinds of defenses might Maduro have? Is the federal government going to let this defendant pay his lawyer? Should a federal court be able to consider that this defendant was illegally abducted from his country by the US military while acting as the head of state of a sovereign nation? What kinds of consequences could there be for Venezuelans in the U.S.? And what can we--and the world--do to stop Trump from doing anything like this again?
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2020 SDNY indictment of Nicolas Maduro et al
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2026 superseding indictment
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United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992)
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“Authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation To Override International Law In Extraterritorial Law Enforcement Activities,” Assistant Attorney General William P. Barr, Office of Legal Counsel (June 21, 1989)
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