US allows Venezuelan government to pay for Maduro's legal fees

MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York federal judge on Monday afternoon accepted federal prosecutors’ resolution of a U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctions dispute over the funding of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s defense of narcotrafficking conspiracy charges.

Maduro, 63, and his wife Cilia Flores were arrested in January after U.S. forces captured him during a deadly military strike on the presidential palace in Caracas, and had been detained since then at a federal jail in Brooklyn.

In a motion to dismiss the United States’ case altogether, Maduro claims the Trump administration violated his constitutional right to retain counsel of his choice by prohibiting him from using Venezuelan government money to pay for defense lawyers in the United States.

Federal prosecutors filed a joint letter with Maduro’s attorneys late Friday evening advising U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein that the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control had adjusted the specific sanctions license to allow the Venezuelan government to pay for the legal defense of Maduro and his wife under certain conditions.

The amended licenses authorize Maduro’s defense counsel to receive payments from the government of Venezuela under the conditions that those payments are made with funds available to the Government of Venezuela after March 5, 2026 — the day that the U.S. Department of State and Venezuela’s interim government announced the re-establishment of diplomatic and consular relations.

The payments must also not be derived from foreign government deposit funds as defined in President Donald Trump’s “Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People” executive order.

The January 9, 2026, order declared a national emergency and designated certain Venezuelan oil‑related revenues held in specific Treasury Department accounts to be safeguarded from attachment and other judicial process.

In a letter docketed Monday afternoon, Hellerstein, the 92-year-old, Bill Clinton appointee presiding over the case**,** accepted the resolution of the motion to dismiss as now moot by the adjustments to Treasury licenses.

“The court accepts proceeding under OFAC’s modified licenses as described in the parties joint April 24, 2026 letter, and likely will accept the parties’ joint requests for an adjournment and exclusion of time if clearly made and signed by both defendants or their counsel, and sufficient justification is given for the quantum of delay requested,” he wrote in a one-sentence order.

During oral arguments in Manhattan federal court one month earlier, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyle Adam Wirshba previously argued that interests of “national security and foreign policy” supported keeping the sanctions blocking Maduro’s access to funds from the government of Venezuela.

Hellerstein inquired then if he could order the Treasury office to give a specific license to release the funds for Maduro, and signaled he was likely to find the right to counsel trumps the purported national security issues invoked by prosecutors.

Pursuant to the sanctions modification agreement, Maduro and his wife withdrew their motions as moot, without prejudice to refiling them should similar issues arise in the future.

Maduro pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in January, his first appearance in the Southern District of New York federal courthouse.

Shortly after the U.S. announced reestablished diplomatic relations with Venezuela in March 2026, the Treasury Department issued a broad authorization easing sanctions and allowing Petróleos de Venezuela S.A to directly sell Venezuelan oil to U.S. companies and on global markets — a massive shift after Washington for years had largely blocked dealings with Venezuela’s government and its oil sector.

Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest oil reserves and used them to power what was once Latin America’s strongest economy. But corruption, mismanagement and U.S. economic sanctions saw production steadily decline from the 3.5 million barrels per day pumped in 1999 — when Maduro’s mentor, Hugo Chávez, took power — to less than 400,000 barrels per day in 2020.

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