The Trump administration has quietly instructed federal prosecutors in Miami to avoid pursuing criminal investigations into Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez, a longtime target of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, according to current and former US law enforcement officials, in the latest sign of warming relations between the White House and the oil-rich nation.
It remains unclear whether prosecutors had implicated Rodríguez in any crimes or whether investigators were moving toward an indictment. A Justice Department spokesperson said in an email that “there was never an investigation into her to shut down.”
However, DEA records obtained by The Associated Press earlier this year show she consistently surfaced on the radar of federal law enforcement dating to at least 2018, though she has never been criminally charged in the US like several other senior Venezuelan officials.
The directive to pause scrutiny into Rodríguez was meant to avoid upsetting the administration’s efforts to stabilise Venezuela after the capture of her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, among other reasons, an official said. It was not clear whether the White House, which deferred comment to the Justice Department, was involved in the decision.
“Everybody has been told to stand down,” one of the former officials said.
The former officials, who had been briefed on the development, as well as the current official all spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to publicly discuss internal deliberations.
Removing the threat of potential indictment, even temporarily, eases pressure on Rodríguez as the Trump administration seeks to work with the acting leader to stabilise Venezuela after Maduro’s ouster and open the country to US investment.
President Donald Trump praised Rodríguez as a “terrific person” shortly after the US military took Maduro and his wife to New York to face federal narcotics charges. Both have pleaded not guilty.
In recent months, the US has lifted sanctions against Rodríguez and recognised her as Venezuela’s sole head of state, allowing her to re-establish ties with western banks and more freely work with US investors seeking to tap into the world’s largest petroleum reserves.
Rodríguez “is doing a great job,” Trump wrote on social media in early March. “The Oil is beginning to flow, and the professionalism and dedication between both Countries is a very nice thing to see!”
Missing in all the mutual backslapping is any talk of elections, even as Rodríguez last month blew through a 90-day limit set by Venezuela’s high court to fill Maduro’s position on a temporary basis.
“I don’t know,” she responded in English when a visiting US journalist shouted out a question about her timeframe for holding elections. “Some time.”
Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has demanded the administration explain its favourable treatment of Rodríguez, calling her a “central figure in Nicolás Maduro’s repressive regime.”
“Sanctions have been lifted on Ms Rodríguez without any indication that she has taken concrete and meaningful actions to restore democratic order,” Shaheen, joined by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent last week.
The DEA had amassed a detailed intelligence file on Rodríguez dating to at least 2018 and has received allegations about her ranging from drug trafficking to gold smuggling, the AP reported earlier this year. One confidential informant told DEA in early 2021 that Rodríguez was using hotels in the Caribbean resort of Isla Margarita “as a front to launder money,” the records show.
Her name has surfaced in nearly a dozen DEA investigations — several of which remained ongoing as recently as this year — involving field offices from Paraguay and Ecuador to Phoenix and New York. She had even been linked to Maduro’s alleged bag man, Alex Saab, whom US authorities first arrested in 2020 on money-laundering charges.
Duncan Levin, a former prosecutor who worked for the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn, said it would be “deeply troubling” for law enforcement to be “told to stand down from a legitimate investigation for political or transactional reasons.”
“The White House cannot use criminal enforcement as a diplomatic light switch,” Levin told AP. “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.”
