Jan. 7, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:36
Sheriff David Hathaway : The Real Latin American Drug Runners
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Undeclared wars are commonplace.
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, January 7th, 2026.
Sheriff David Hathaway joins us again.
Sheriff, a pleasure, my dear friend, such as it is.
Happy New Year to you.
Same to you, Judge.
Good afternoon.
Thank you.
Just to remind our viewers, you have a 30-year background in the drug enforcement administration, including supervisory positions in the DEA in Latin America.
All this is before you became the county sheriff where you are now.
Let's get right to the heart of this.
Does the CIA engage in drug trafficking in, around, and through Latin America?
Yeah, I have, I mentioned one of those incidents last time I was on, but there's multiple other ones that I was involved in.
Actually, captured CIA operatives smuggling drugs after we detected it when I was living and working and running a team of foreign military and police officers in Latin America using electronic assets.
But, you know, kind of an interesting thing, Judge, is the DEA is a direct outgrowth of the CIA.
A lot of people don't know this, but when the Congress shut down the military and covert actions in Southeast Asia, Kissinger and Nixon resisted it.
So there was a supermajority bill passed called the Case Church Amendment that ended all funding for covert and military operations in Southeast Asia, in Laos and Cambodia.
So Nixon was forced to sign this because it was a veto-proof piece of legislation, two-thirds majority.
What people don't know is on the exact day that he signed that bill, July 1st, 1973, he also signed an executive order creating the DEA.
So a lot of these displaced CIA agents that had been working on the Cold War in Southeast Asia and around the world migrated to the DEA.
My first supervisor at DEA was a CIA agent that now no longer had a job in Southeast Asia after Congress, because of an outpour from their constituents, decided they had to end this once and for all, because even though Nixon campaigned on ending that war, he didn't do it.
It lingered for years until Congress shut it down.
So his little revenge was to start another murky war, the murky war against drugs.
They had the Cold War, this murky war against communism.
So on the same day he was forced to sign that, he signed the executive order creating the DEA.
So, when I was working in South America and DEA agents working in Southeast Asia, they continued using the same Land-Lease Huey helicopters with the M60 machine guns, the same M16s, grenade launchers, the same C-130s.
A lot of people think all that stuff left, but no, it just transitioned to the drug war in South America.
How does the CIA sheriff morally and legally justify drug trafficking by itself?
Well, there's a divergent mission between CIA and DEA.
DEA also moves drugs, but they have the end game of prosecution, seizing the drugs and prosecuting either in a foreign venue or in the United States.
Like the CIA, there is no end game.
They claim that they're mapping out the trafficking routes for foreign regimes and foreign drug trafficking organizations, and then it results in drugs arriving in the U.S.
But there is no end game.
A CIA agent will not testify in court.
They will not seize evidence.
They will not arrest anybody.
So it's just kind of this ongoing supposed intelligence gathering operation to map out the drug trafficking organizations.
What becomes of the drugs that they move?
Do they sell it?
Do they acquire money and assets as a result of the sale of these drugs, which is a felony?
Yeah, they do sell it, like Operation with Colonel Oliver North.
You know, his Operation Nicaragua, there was legislation passed by Congress where no more federal funds could be used to fight the war with the Contras in Nicaragua.
So besides the arms trading that was done to raise money for that, because it was now illegal, drugs were sent through Mexico, through Rafael Caro Quintero's Rancho Veracruz, a staging area, on to the United States, where they were sold.
You know, Gary Webb documented this in his book, Dark Alliance.
And then the money was repatriated back to fund these operations that were now illegal in Central America and Latin America.
But, you know, another thing we could talk about is this whole shenanigan of the Southern District of New York.
Before we get to the Southern District, a little bit more about the relationship between the CIA and government officials in Latin America.
Does the CIA expect government officials in Latin America to look the other way when it is engaged in drug trafficking?
Well, yeah, they are paid informants, and I have actually seen this happening, cabinet ministers being paid off by the CIA.
And also, they have a very active press manipulation operation in Latin America, not just in the U.S. media, but in Latin America, where stories are planted that favor CIA operations and that go against opposing organizations that may be opposing them in what they're doing.
You know, I could tell you a story about when I was in South America, I ran this organization.
We used electronic means to track the biggest trafficker in Colombia in Bolivia.
I actually lived in Bolivia for five years doing this.
We detected the movements, the aircraft, and tracked this down with technical resources down to a specific location.
When we went to surveill that house, we saw the CIA going in and out of that residence.
We were supposed to notify the ambassador who was very close with the CIA.
I had a good boss at the time, and he allowed us to proceed with the operation without notifying the ambassador, which would have notified the CIA and shut down the whole operation.
So we arrested the individuals, and then the CIA hired a HIT team to break their agent out of jail in Bolivia.
But fortunately, we had an informant who was a pilot.
They hired our DEA informant to bring the HIIT team in with the RPGs, the machine guns, and we arrested the whole HIT team that came in to break him out of prison in Bolivia.
So that's one example that I was very specifically involved in.
The Maduro defense is the CIA was involved in drugs, and I had no choice but to look the other way as the president of Venezuela.
Would that be a credible defense from your understanding of the way these things come down in Latin America?
Not in Venezuela, because several years ago, it was actually the Chavez regime kicked the CIA out and the DEA out of Venezuela.
They declared them PNG, persona non grada, and they were kicked out, like our DEA attaché and the station chief.
They continued operations from outside, but they weren't as effective.
At that time, Hugo Chavez was also aligned closely with Evo Morales in Bolivia.
Bolivia did the same thing.
They kicked out the DEA attaché and the CIA station chief.
And then I actually absorbed the CIA groups into my, I was at that point stationed in Paraguay, and we did operations from outside of Bolivia that pertained to Bolivia, which is a big coca-growing region.
I had subordinate supervisors underneath me that were expelled from Bolivia.
So it would be kind of hard in this era for the CIA to be openly active in Venezuela under the Maduro regime because he has not allowed them to be in there.
They may go under unofficial cover as part of the political section or the economic section of the embassy, but not as openly able to function.
The indictment of Nicolas Maduro is very weak, very sloppy, almost looks like it was written in a hurry, perhaps by a person that didn't fully understand the facts on the ground.
But from your knowledge of the region, is it likely that he was the head of a cartel to distribute cocaine to the United States?
No, and I have read all 25 pages of that indictment, and it's shameful what's in there.
Like, it's an indictment for conspiracy, which is 21 U.S.C. 846.
So you have to have supposed to have overt acts in the conspiracy that are provable.
This means an occasion where the person touched drugs, transport drugs, paid for drugs.
But the things in there are laughable.
Max pointed out some of them about the machine guns and other things.
But there's other things in there that are supposedly the basis for the indictment, the overt acts in the conspiracy charge.
A conspiracy is two or more people operating together to further a crime.
But like one of the things in there was that Maduro gave diplomatic passports to all of his foreign diplomats.
So it's the same thing that U.S. presidents do.
And then it was alleged by a DEA informant that some low-level officers trafficked cocaine.
And then Maduro immediately fired those people.
And then the indictment also says the fact that he fired those low-level officials shows that he was trying to deflect blame for himself.
Like this, this would be tantamount to a DEA agent that had a diplomatic passport.
I have had multiple diplomatic passports, and I have known multiple DEA agents that were arrested and convicted for drug smuggling, for money laundering, for moving weapons, and they had diplomatic passports.
So that would be like charging and convicting Bill Clinton or George Bush for issuing those diplomatic passports.
But these are the kind of flimsy things that are in that indictment that are supposedly the overt acts in the conspiracy.
Now, in a typical federal district, they don't like to charge conspiracy.
They want a substantive charge like 21 U.S.C. 841, A1, which is possession with intent to distribute because prosecutors like to put drugs on the table.
They like to have video and audio and a witness, like an undercover agent that says, I bought these drugs that are on the table there to the jury for the jury to see on this date from this person.
And that's what a typical U.S. attorney's office wants, an assistant U.S. attorney.
But in New York, they kind of got this reputation after 9-11 of charging these murky conspiracy cases.
And another thing people don't realize, you can use hearsay testimony in a grand jury indictment.
I have testified to many grand juries and also in sentencing hearings, you can use hearsay.
So what they would like to see is a plea on any felony and then drag in via hearsay in the sentencing hearing all these murky things that saying, oh, generically, you know, he smuggled all these drugs, tons of drugs.
Like the same thing was done to Ross Ulbricht in the Silk Road case.
He wasn't charged or convicted of murder, but when he was sentenced to double life sentence plus 40 years, he was being sentenced on alleged murders that weren't even alleged in the trial.
So this is the type of thing that they do when they can have a DEA agent come on in a sentencing hearing and just sort of generally say secondhand, thirdhand information about what an informant told me that Maduro smuggled thousands of kilos of cocaine every month for X number of years and then sentence the individual on that.
So people think if you watch Perry Mason or CSI that hearsay evidence is not allowed in a courtroom.
Well, it is allowed in a grand jury and it is allowed in a sentencing hearing.
You don't have to prove these things.
I mean, some of the things that Max pointed out were crazy.
Like, how could he be indicted for possession of a machine gun in Caracas?
How could the United States of America have jurisdiction over that?
How could he be indicted, even if he did this, for shipping cocaine from Caracas to Paris?
What is the implication of the United States in either of these?
Why would these folks who wrote this messy indictment in the last minute so that it could be released Sunday morning before the president's press conference have put that in there knowing it's not going to wash?
Well, it does wash.
The Southern District of New York has this claim to fame.
And if you are an FBI agent or a DEA agent and you go to your academy in Quantico, Virginia, on the Marine Base in Quantico, Virginia, that's where DEA agents and FBI agents go to their academy.
You are told that if you are working in the foreign environment, you have a murky case where you don't have any evidence to put on the table, you go to the Southern District of New York, and they have this boilerplate language where they claim anything that could sort of remotely affect the U.S., like a corrupt foreign official, you know, avoiding sanctions, that you charge it in New York.
And you don't need specific aspects to your case.
Like the Southern District of New York has a unit that's called the International Narcotics Unit and National Security Unit.
And their claim to fame is just charging nebulous things in the Middle East or in Latin America or in Europe where some informant generically says that something happened.
And the Southern District of New York will charge you.
I many times went to the Southern District of New York from South America on cases that did not touch New York in any way.
There was no geographic venue to New York.
There had been no overt act in a conspiracy, no substantive charge, no drugs dealt by that individual in New York.
But they take that on.
Like here where I am in Arizona, where I was a DEA agent here too, the U.S. Attorney's Office here won't charge something like that.
They want to have the drugs to put on the table.
They want to have evidence to put on the witness stand that witnessed something.
They want to have video and audio recording, but the Southern District of New York doesn't require that.
And they think they can bully a defendant into confessing or admitting blame, culpability, admitting guilt.
And then they can bring in all this trash in a sentencing hearing.
So the best thing that Maduro can do is just fight this, demand his day in court, demand a jury trial, just drag it out, and don't confess to even a minor charge.
Because if he confesses even to any singular felony, they will drag in all of this, what's called relevant conduct in a sentencing hearing.
They'll compile all these things and sentence him on thousands of kilos of cocaine on a bunch of alleged murders that he wasn't even charged with.
Wow.
What do you know of the imprisoned former general, Venezuelan general, who is apparently the government's chief witness against him, obviously trading whatever dirt he says he has on President Maduro in order to induce the government to ask a trial judge to reduce his sentence?
Forgive me, the general's name is escaping me.
You may know who this is.
Yeah, I don't know anything specifically on his case, but I do know that that's the tactic with the federal government.
You squeeze somebody and then you get a conviction on them, and then you try to get them to roll over on somebody else.
And everybody knows how this game is played.
So you get them to just say, okay, how much drugs did this guy deal?
Tons.
What do you mean, tons?
Many tons.
With what frequency?
Every week.
And then a DEA agent writes that up in a report.
And there's no drugs.
Once again, to show the jury, to show the judge.
But if he pleads guilty to any felony, then in the sentencing hearing, an agent will take the stand and testify to hearsay of anything that informants have said.
And that is treated as valid for relevant conduct for sentencing, even if it goes beyond the individual felony that he was charged with.
And federal pretrial services is an entity that will compile all this relevant conduct and present it for sentencing.
So the best thing he can do is not plead guilty to anything, make them prove things in court, make them produce evidence, tangible evidence and witnesses, which they won't be able to do.
Why do you think juries believe bribed witnesses?
So here you have a former Venezuelan general.
I don't know how they got him to the United States.
He pleaded guilty in June in that very courthouse, not the same courtroom and not the same judge, to distribution of drugs.
His sentencing was held up because his lawyers began negotiating with the feds to say what he will say against President Maduro.
So the government's going to put a guy on the witness stand that they just spent two years prosecuting as to whom there is far more evidence of guilt against him than there is against the defendant, President Maduro.
Why would the jury believe this guy on the witness stand?
Well, hopefully the government is obviously hoping he wouldn't take the witness stand during a trial, that his testimony, quote unquote, could be brought in in a sentencing hearing.
But as you know, Your Honor, the juries are advised, given jury instructions, saying that you can weigh the credibility and the weight of what incentives people have to testify, and that you can weight the, you know, the testimony by, say, a law enforcement officer compared to somebody like a drug trafficker or a convicted criminal and give it the weight that you think is appropriate.
But what they're hoping is that would never come out in open court, and it usually never does.
These people take a plea.
They're hoping for some sort of a downward departure.
They're hoping the judge will be lenient.
But it is very unlikely that person would actually come in in open court and say, and if they do, the judge will admonish the jury to give the appropriate weight to the person to think about what their incentives are to testify truthfully or to fabricate testimony.
Wow.
Sheriff, thank you very much for this.
We may come back to you from time to time as this case develops or unravels, as the case may be.
The indictment is a piece of garbage.
The lawyer representing President Maduro has a stellar reputation, so the government has a lot of work on its hands.
The judge is, of course, 92 years old.
I don't know how soon this trial is going to be or how much longer he's going to be on the bench.
He's still in very, very good, good health.
And if I could mention one more thing, this is not unique to Maduro.
Like one of the biggest complaints that federal drug defendants have is they get sentenced on what they call ghost dope, ghost dope, dope, drugs that no one's ever seen.
It's never been proven that there's any kind of distribution or involvement of the defendant, but all this stuff comes in via hearsay at a sentencing hearing.
And defendants are continually shocked.
They take a plea and then they hear a summary during a sentencing hearing from a DEA agent that's saying all these things that you're going to get sentenced for, you're not convicted for them.
And then federal drug defendants have coined the word ghost dope because it's ghost dope.
It's like nobody's ever seen it.
It's phantom dope that no one's ever seen.
How am I getting sentenced on drug charges that I was never convicted of, that was never discussed in court?
So this is a common phenomena in drug cases.
So it's not just Maduro.
Sheriff, thank you very much.
Thanks for your expertise.
We'll look forward to seeing you again soon.
And again, a happy new year to you and your family.