DOJ tells Miami prosecutors to drop probe of Venezuela's acting president

The Trump administration quietly instructed federal prosecutors in Miami to stand down from criminal investigations targeting Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela's acting president, according to current and former U.S. law enforcement officials who spoke to the Associated Press. One former official confirmed the directive in plain terms: 'Everybody has been told to stand down.' A Justice Department spokesperson disputed the characterization, saying there was never 'an investigation into her to shut down.' But sources said the directive was real.

Rodríguez has served as Venezuela's acting president since January 5, 2026, when the U.S. military captured her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, in a clandestine operation in Caracas. Maduro and his wife were transported to New York, where they pleaded not guilty on January 6 to federal narco-terrorism and cocaine-importation charges.

The DEA had built a detailed intelligence file on Rodríguez dating to at least 2018 and in 2022 formally labeled her a priority target — a designation the agency reserves for suspects believed to have a 'significant impact' on the drug trade. Her name surfaced in nearly a dozen DEA investigations involving field offices from Paraguay and Ecuador to Phoenix and New York, several of which remained active as recently as May 2026.

Allegations in those files ranged from drug trafficking and gold smuggling to money laundering. One confidential informant told the DEA in early 2021 that Rodríguez was using hotels in the Caribbean resort of Isla Margarita 'as a front to launder money.' She had also been linked to Alex Saab, Maduro's alleged financial bag man, whom U.S. authorities first arrested in 2020 on money-laundering charges. Saab was charged again in May 2026 after Rodríguez deported him as part of a broader purge of Maduro-era insiders.

Rodríguez has never been criminally charged in the United States. Unlike more than a dozen other Venezuelan officials indicted alongside Maduro, she wasn't included in the narcotics indictment that the government used to justify the January 2026 operation. But DEA records obtained by the AP confirm she was a sustained focus of federal law enforcement for at least eight years before the stand-down directive.

Two former officials confirmed that Rodríguez's name also surfaced in meetings with Tampa investigators tasked by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi with probing Venezuelan financial crimes. Bondi is no longer attorney general; it's not clear whether her Tampa task force is still operating or who now oversees it.

The Treasury Department first placed Rodríguez on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list on September 25, 2018, when Trump's first-term OFAC sanctioned her alongside her brother Jorge Rodríguez, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, and First Lady Cilia Flores. Treasury's stated rationale was that Maduro had given her senior positions 'to help him maintain power and solidify his authoritarian rule.' She remained on that list for more than seven years — through Trump's first term, the entire Biden administration, and into Trump's second term — before OFAC removed her from the SDN list on April 1, 2026. The delisting restored her access to Western banks and let U.S. persons transact with her directly. Trump praised her publicly within days: 'She is doing a great job. The Oil is beginning to flow.'

The stand-down directive fits inside a broader U.S. diplomatic pivot to Venezuela that began the day Maduro was captured. President Trump praised Rodríguez as a 'terrific person' shortly after the operation. On April 2, 2026, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control lifted U.S. sanctions against her, allowing Rodríguez to restore ties with Western banks and work directly with American investors.

Rodríguez hosted ceremonies welcoming a parade of American oil executives, including high-profile delegations led by Energy Secretary Chris Wright in February and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in March. The administration issued general licenses authorizing U.S. oil and gas firms to negotiate contracts and invest in Venezuelan upstream production.

The administration is trying to unlock an estimated $100 billion in U.S. investment in Venezuelan oil and critical minerals — a deal whose scale traces directly to one of the most consequential acts of resource nationalization in Latin American history. In 2007, President Hugo Chávez seized the assets of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips after both companies refused to cede majority control of their Orinoco Belt joint ventures to the state oil company PDVSA. ConocoPhillips wrote off a $4.5 billion investment. ExxonMobil and Conoco spent years pursuing international arbitration claims. Chevron agreed to the new terms, retained a minority share, and stayed — making it the only U.S. company that never fully left. As of early 2026, Chevron produces roughly 200,000 to 240,000 barrels per day through joint ventures with PDVSA. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips are now in active discussions to return, carrying outstanding arbitration awards that the new U.S.-Venezuela relationship could settle or sideline.

The roughly 1 million Venezuelan immigrants living in the United States as of 2024 represent a 119% increase since 2019 — the fastest-growing Latino immigrant population in the country. More than 474,000 live in Florida. They fled a government that Rodríguez helped run: under Maduro, Venezuela's economy contracted by more than 70% over a decade, political opponents were jailed, and at least 7.7 million Venezuelans fled the country globally. By late 2025, more than 600,000 Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S. had been granted temporary protected status (TPS). Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revoked TPS for more than 500,000 of them in October 2025, stripping legal protection from a community that overwhelmingly fled the same regime the Trump administration is now partnering with. The stand-down on Rodríguez means the woman who spent years as Maduro's vice president and enforcer faces no U.S. criminal accountability — while the people who fled her government lost their immigration status.

Rick de la Torre, a former CIA chief of station in Caracas and now CEO of Tower Strategy — a firm advising companies seeking Venezuelan business deals — said the decision to halt criminal scrutiny of Rodríguez 'fits well with the Trump administration's foreign policy goals.' He called her 'a lifelong Marxist and a senior leader of one of the world's most corrupt regimes' but said the U.S. is providing her 'breathing space and carrots to lay the foundation for democracy and U.S. investment.'

De la Torre added a caveat: 'There's a shelf life to her utility, however. At some point she will face justice.' That framing positions criminal prosecution as a future diplomatic lever, not an independent law-enforcement function. Who decides when Rodríguez's 'shelf life' expires and why is a political question, not a legal one.

The Trump administration is running the same play with Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The DEA had designated Petro a priority target over alleged ties to drug traffickers and was actively probing him through federal prosecutors. But in early 2026, U.S. officials assured Bogotá that Petro doesn't face charges. The New York Times first reported the Petro assurance in March.

Taken together, the Rodríguez and Petro cases establish a pattern: the executive branch is using the threat of federal prosecution as a diplomatic bargaining chip, activating or pausing criminal investigations based on the foreign policy value of the target rather than the strength of the evidence.

This pattern has a direct historical precedent. By the early 1970s, U.S. law enforcement had reports that Panamanian intelligence chief Manuel Noriega was involved in narcotics trafficking. No indictment was brought — according to journalist John Dinges, because of the potential diplomatic consequences of charging a valued Cold War ally. When a Miami federal grand jury finally indicted Noriega in February 1988 on racketeering, drug smuggling, and money laundering charges, the Reagan administration offered to drop the charges if he agreed to leave Panama. He refused, and the U.S. invaded Panama in December 1989 to arrest him. The Rodríguez stand-down reprises the same structure: prosecutors have evidence, the White House has a deal in mind, and the criminal case waits in a drawer until the diplomacy resolves one way or the other.

Justice Department policy requires the attorney general to personally approve the indictment of any foreign head of state, normally shielded by head-of-state immunity under international and U.S. law. That procedural requirement means no Miami prosecutor could have charged Rodríguez unilaterally. But the stand-down directive went further: sources said it instructed prosecutors to avoid pursuing investigations, not just withhold charges.

The Watergate-era norm of DOJ independence from White House pressure on specific cases has eroded significantly under the second Trump administration. During the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan DOJ withheld classified information from independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's prosecution on national security grounds, causing Walsh to drop broader conspiracy charges against Oliver North and others. President George H.W. Bush then pardoned Caspar Weinberger and four others on Christmas Eve 1992, before their trials could implicate higher officials. A 2024 Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States held that the president wields 'exclusive authority' over DOJ's investigative and prosecutorial functions, giving legal cover to White House direction over enforcement decisions that would have been considered off-limits in prior administrations.

Former federal prosecutor Duncan Levin said it would be 'deeply troubling' for federal law enforcement to be 'told to stand down from a legitimate investigation for political or transactional reasons.' He told the AP: 'The White House cannot use criminal enforcement as a diplomatic light switch. DOJ decisions are supposed to be based on law, evidence, policy and public safety — not on whether a foreign official is useful to the administration at a given moment.'

Missing from the broader Venezuela picture is any progress on elections. Rodríguez in April blew past a 90-day deadline set by Venezuela's own high court to fill Maduro's position on a temporary basis. When a U.S. journalist asked about her timeline for holding elections in May, she responded in English: 'I don't know. Some time.' The Trump administration has not publicly pressed the question.