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Opening Arguments

The Dumbroe Doctrine, Part 2

Opening Arguments

Opening Arguments Media LLC

Atheist, Law, Politics, News, Harvard, Supremecourt, Legal, Opinion, Liberal

4.33.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

OA1222 and OA1223 - Actual sane coverage of Trump's kidnapping of a foreign leader

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? 

  1. 2020 SDNY indictment of Nicolas Maduro et al

  2. 2026 superseding indictment 

  3. United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992)

  4. “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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Transcript

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0:00.0

New Yorkers are perfectly able to get their machine guns from the southern U.S.

0:07.9

They didn't need to get them from Venezuela.

0:10.0

One thing that they're really hammering on in the new indictment is about the Cartel de la Solaes,

0:23.3

that very much like Antifa does not exist.

0:36.8

Hello and welcome to opening arguments.

0:38.4

We're possibly on another episode here.

0:40.0

We're on part two of the episode we're doing on the Don Row Doctrine, the kidnapping of Maduro.

0:47.7

And we had just left off on the indictment, some of the history.

0:52.6

We found out Liz sued Venezuela. Make sure to check out part one. You can't miss that history, some of the history. We found out Liz sued Venezuela.

0:54.9

Make sure to check out part one.

0:56.2

You can't miss that history, you know?

0:58.2

Yeah, I wanted to actually be clear as a programmatic note here that I did not want to start

1:01.5

with the indictment just because I think that if we did that, we might legitimize it.

1:04.6

I mean, it's, again, it is potentially a legitimate indictment.

1:07.2

I don't know enough about the circumstances.

1:09.0

Obviously, there's a lot of facts. We still have to come out and discovery and trial for us to know how legitimate this all is. Well, you'd assume the Biden one was, right? Or at least have a presumption of being somewhat legitimate. Are you saying the new... There wasn't a Biden one. Oh, I'm sorry. When was the first the original one? I thought there was. When was the original? That was a Trump. Oh, it was still under Trump. Oh, okay. I misremembered then.

1:28.4

So.

1:28.7

The original one is March 2020, right? At the very end of the Trump administration. Oh, okay. I had thought, in my mind, for some reason, it's always weird with the, I know a lot of people do this where they think, you know, Biden was president under the start of COVID. And I think I might have made a quick laugh mistake in my head.

1:44.3

But okay, so it was Trump 1.0 end of Trump 1.0 indictment. Was there any reason to be suspicious of that one other than just, you know, it's Trump people? Well, at the time, they were charging members of Venezuelan government, and they added in a superseding indictment that will get to Maduro and his wife and his son and his son within the last couple of days. I just wanted to make a differentiation. Everything is suspect about any indictment now. So the superseding indictment, but I just wasn't sure if that original one, I was under the impression that that was kind of legit and whatever they're doing now. Just be clear. The original one has Maduro in it. Oh, yes. It's the later one that adds his wife and son.

2:19.0

It's out of the way.

2:19.3

It says, you're right.

2:19.7

Yeah.

...

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