By Aaron Blake, CNN
Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images / AFP
Analysis - In 2008, Donald Trump took to CNN to bemoan the dangers of a president lying the United States into war.
He said George W Bush was more worthy of impeachment than Bill Clinton. Why? Clinton's misdeeds were "totally unimportant," Trump told Wolf Blitzer. But with Iraq, he said, "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 frequently during his successful 2016 presidential campaign.
Given that, you might think he would be extra careful in making his own case for military intervention.
You'd think wrong.
Instead, the president and his administration treated building a case for ousting Nicolás Maduro and asserting control over Venezuela much like Trump treats everything else: with a facts-optional barrage of hyperbolic claims and questionable assertions. This despite the extremely high stakes involved.
And now that Trump has actually ousted Maduro and made clear he means business about US expansionism in the Western Hemisphere, those questionable claims have come into focus.
Cartel de los Soles
The newly released indictment of Maduro is a case in point.
In the run-up to ousting him, Trump and his administration repeatedly cast Maduro as the head of a drug-trafficking organisation called Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns.
The first Trump administration did so in its initial indictment of Maduro in 2020, and then again last year when the Treasury and State departments designated this supposed cartel as a terrorist organisation. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have also cast Maduro as the head of this cartel in recent days.
But all the while, the claim caused experts to scratch their heads. Even as it was widely believed that Maduro's government was involved in the drug trade, it was also understood that Cartel de los Soles was more of a name ascribed to a loosely connected confederation of corrupt officials, rather than an actual organisation.
"They're designating a non-thing that is not a terror organisation as a terrorist organisation," former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane told CNN in November.
And sure enough, now that the administration has Maduro in custody and it faces defending its public claims in court, what does it do? It waters them down - significantly.
As the New York Times' Charlie Savage wrote on Monday, the administration's new indictment of Maduro treats Cartel de los Soles as more of an abstraction than an actual organisation.
The indictment instead says the phrase is used to refer to a "patronage system" run by top Venezuelan officials.
The 2020 indictment mentioned the supposed cartel more than 30 times; the new one mentions it only twice.
And it's not just that the new indictment lacks detail. It goes into detail on a series of other organisations and even cartels - just not the one that the Trump administration publicly accused the then-Venezuelan president of running.
That's a rather curious exclusion - and one that lends credence to the idea that the administration oversold a key portion of its case for targeting Maduro.
The lack of Tren de Aragua ties and 'stolen' oil
The indictment also conspicuously fails to back up a couple of other pieces of the administration's case for ousting Maduro.
One is Maduro's supposed connection to the gang Tren de Aragua. As part of Trump's efforts to quickly deport immigrants last year, the administration claimed that the United States was at war with Tren de Aragua and that Maduro was directing it to invade the United States - claims that, if true, would have unlocked greater authorities for Trump.
But like the Cartel de los Soles claims, this one was suspect.
As CNN and others reported, US intelligence had concluded Maduro was not, in fact, directing the gang. And judges repeatedly cast doubt on such claims.
As with Cartel de los Soles, the indictment would seem to be a great place to seek to punish Maduro for his supposed alliance with Tren de Aragua.
But it does little to connect the gang to Maduro or to other top government officials. At one point, it cites a gang leader 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 recent weeks set about accusing the Venezuelan government of stealing oil that the United States had a right to.
But the issue is a lot more complicated than that, as CNN's David Goldman reported this week. And the indictment makes no mention of oil, much less Maduro's or anyone else's role in such purported theft.
The other claims
These are hardly the first such claims to be called into question.
Some of the big ones:
- In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed the administration's first strike on an alleged drug boat killed Venezuelan gang members who were "trying to poison our country with illicit drugs." Trump also claimed the drugs were headed for the United States. But since then, the military official who oversaw the operation told lawmakers the boat was actually headed to Suriname, which is usually a stop for drugs on their way to Europe, not the United States.
- Much of Trump's case for targeting Maduro revolves around drugs. Attorney General Pam Bondi has labeled Maduro "one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world." But Venezuela is generally viewed as a rather small player in the drug game, especially compared with neighboring countries like Colombia, a haven for cocaine, and Mexico, where the vast majority of fentanyl comes to the United States from.
- Trump and those around him have regularly used hyperbolic numbers when discussing how many American lives they've saved with their drug crackdown. Trump has said each boat strike saves 25,000 lives. Bondi last year claimed drug seizures of all kinds "saved - are you ready for this, media? - 258 million lives." These kinds of numbers are ridiculous, as CNN's Daniel Dale has written, given there were fewer than 100,000 US drug overdose deaths in 2024.
Hyperbole like that has been baked into Trump's public commentary for a long time.
But it certainly lands differently in this context. When you're asking Americans to weigh the legitimacy of extrajudicial killings and the ouster of a foreign leader, it's better to be careful about making factual assertions that can't be backed up.
A certain Donald Trump was once quite concerned about such things.
- CNN
