In the early hours of Saturday morning, U.S. forces descended on the Venezuelan capital of Caracas.

Hours later, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife were in U.S. custody.

Hello, and welcome to U.S. custody. Hello and welcome to USA Today is The Excerpt.

I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Tuesday, January 6th, 2025.

Well, President Donald Trump had been threatening to capture Maduro for weeks.

Many questions are swirling about the move. First among them, was this

even legal? And what happens now? Here to help us dig into all of the issues is USA Today White House

correspondent Bart Janssen. Bart, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me.

Bart, this was an extraordinary move by the Trump administration. Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, were arraigned Monday afternoon in Manhattan.

What were the charges?

There's four basic charges, narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, and two weapons charges.

Basically, the accusations are that for a period of about 25 years

that Maduro was part of and at the end sat atop a criminal conspiracy

of the Venezuelan government to send cocaine to the United States.

And what's the evidence to support those charges?

The indictment was pretty broad-brushed in describing the actions up to this point.

It made accusations such as 200 to 250 tons of cocaine being sent to the United States from Venezuela each year by 2020.

So a massive conspiracy, a massive amount of drugs.

But getting down into the nitty-gritty about what Maduro specifically did to contribute to that alleged conspiracy isn't spelled out in too much detail.

One of the items in the indictment is that he was an acting foreign minister in 2006 to 2008,

and that he was issuing diplomatic passports to drug traffickers so that they could more easily

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