By Sarah Kinosian and Matt Spetalnick
CARACAS/WASHINGTON, March 3 (Reuters) - The Trump administration is quietly building a legal case against Venezuelan interim president Delcy Rodriguez including readying a draft criminal indictment, one of several tools it is using to strengthen its leverage with Caracas, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Federal prosecutors have put together possible corruption and money laundering charges, and have communicated to Rodriguez that she is at risk of prosecution unless she continues to comply with Trump’s demands following the U.S. ouster of former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in January, the sources said.
Reuters has not seen the charges in written form being prepared against Rodriguez but spoke with four people briefed on the matter. The news agency is the first to report the effort to craft the draft indictment of Rodriguez for alleged money laundering and corruption, which the sources said Rodriguez had been made aware of verbally.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami is preparing the draft charges, the people said, adding that the document has been evolving over the past two months. The probe focuses on Rodriguez’s alleged involvement in laundering of funds from Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA, three of the sources said, and covers activities between 2021 and 2025, two of the sources said.
The Department of Justice declined to comment on the story. After a summary of the report was published on the Reuters World News morning podcast, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote on X, “completely FALSE from @reuters. Not sure how such fake news makes its way to publication.”
In a statement, Reuters said: “We stand by our reporting that the Department of Justice is preparing an indictment against Delcy Rodriguez, the new president of Venezuela.”
The White House and the U.S. State Department did not respond to Reuters’ questions for this story.
Separate from the draft indictment, U.S. officials have presented Rodriguez with a list of at least seven former high-level party officials, associates and their family members that it wants her to arrest or to keep in Venezuela’s custody for potential extradition, four sources said. This was first reported by Spain’s ABC newspaper.
Rodriguez is facing this threat just two months after taking power following a lightning raid by U.S. special forces who captured Maduro and whisked the longtime authoritarian leader away to New York for trial on charges of narcoterrorism and cocaine trafficking. Maduro pleaded not guilty and is being held in New York pending trial.
In public, Trump has heaped praise on Rodriguez for cooperating with the U.S. and hailed Venezuela as “our new friend and partner” in his annual State of the Union address.
But the draft indictment is yet another bargaining chip the United States has added as it attempts to compel members of the Venezuelan government, once loyal to Maduro, to carry out its wishes.
The Venezuelan communications ministry, which handles all press queries for the government, did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the potential charges being crafted against Rodriguez.
The drafting of an indictment does not necessarily indicate a case will be presented by a prosecutor to a grand jury, which would then have to find there is probable cause to believe Rodriguez committed a crime. Grand juries meet in secret, and Reuters was unable to determine whether prosecutors had begun presenting any evidence against Rodriguez to a grand jury.
Since the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on Jan. 3, Trump has relied on Rodriguez, Maduro’s 56-year-old former vice president, to guarantee stability in Venezuela while he prioritizes U.S. companies’ access to the OPEC nation’s oil reserves.
Flores has also pleaded not guilty to federal charges including drug trafficking.
Other members of Rodriguez’s administration who already have been indicted in the United States include her hard-line Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, who are, along with Rodriguez, longtime members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or PSUV, founded by the late Hugo Chávez. Cabello and Padrino, both still in power in post-Maduro Venezuela, have consistently denied wrongdoing.
Many of the individuals whom the U.S. wants Rodriguez to arrest or keep in detention already have indictments in the United States for money laundering, drug trafficking and other crimes, according to four sources familiar with the matter.
Laura Dogu, the newly appointed U.S. envoy to Venezuela, put the request to Rodriguez, the sources told Reuters.
Among the high-profile names given to Rodriguez is Alex Saab, 54, who rose to prominence as a close Maduro ally to become one of the most influential financial operators within the Chavista movement, according to four sources.
Following an Interpol notice requested by the United States, Saab was previously arrested by local authorities in Cabo Verde in 2020 while traveling to Iran on an official mission for the Maduro government. Extradited to the United States, he faced bribery and money laundering charges for allegedly routing $350 million from a corrupt Venezuelan housing construction scheme through the U.S. financial system, before he was released in 2023 by the Biden administration in a prisoner swap.
Reuters reported Saab was arrested in early February and two sources said he remains detained by Venezuelan intelligence service SEBIN. The U.S. has a new sealed money-laundering indictment against Saab, two of the sources said, but its status is not immediately known.
If extradited, Saab could provide information to U.S. authorities that could bolster their criminal case against Maduro, according to a source briefed on the case.
It is unclear whether Saab, a Colombian who was granted Venezuelan citizenship by Maduro, will be extradited to the United States. Venezuelan law prohibits the extradition of Venezuelan nationals, a barrier for several of the people Washington is seeking.
Saab’s U.S.-based lawyer Neil M. Schuster did not respond to detailed questions about whether Saab has been detained, any charges he may be facing or whether he had offered any testimony about Maduro during his previous U.S. detention.
Other names on the list include the media mogul Raul Gorrin, who has also been detained by SEBIN in Venezuela within the past month, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
Gorrin faces multiple federal charges in the U.S., primarily tied to bribery, money laundering, and corruption involving Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA.
Gorrin did not respond to emails and a text message seeking comment, nor did his media business Globovisión.
Howard Srebnick, a Miami attorney who has previously represented Gorrin, did not immediately return a request for comment.
(Reporting by Sarah Kinosian in Miami and Matt Spetalnik in Washington, DC. Additional reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb in Bogotá, Colombia. Editing by Michael Learmonth)
