Left: Donald Trump and Bill Barr attend National Peace Officers” Memorial Service at the U.S. Capitol on May 15, 2019 (AP Photo/Evan Vucci). Right: Nicolas Maduro appears in an image on a wanted poster (DOJ).
After many Americans awoke to the news Saturday that the military carried out a strike and raided the residence of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to arrest him and his wife Cilia Flores, ensuring they would face federal drug conspiracy indictments in the U.S., questions about precedent, authority, and international law implications were immediately raised.
While China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran issued blanket condemnations, legal observers pointed to the U.S.’s late 1989 invasion under President George H.W. Bush to capture Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges as precedent. At least one prominent legal expert noted that a DOJ Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion from earlier that year authored by none other than eventual Trump administration Attorney General Bill Barr shows how the executive branch of the present day could have “easily” used the reasoning in that memo to “justify” the Maduro raid.
Jack Goldsmith is a Harvard Law professor remembered for his time in President George W. Bush’s administration heading the OLC in 2003, and in the wake of 9/11, only to resign after less than a year on the job immediately following his withdrawal of the “torture memos.”
Goldsmith, on his Substack blog Executive Functions, reacted to the Maduro operation with “preliminary” analysis “On the Legality of the Venezuela Invasion,” prominently citing then-OLC Assistant Attorney General Barr’s thoughts in 1989 and gaming out what it may have meant for President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s DOJ over the weekend.
“But here is the reality. Congress has given the president a gargantuan global military force with few constraints and is AWOL in overseeing what the president does with it. Courts won’t get involved in reviewing unilateral presidential uses of force. And no country plausibly could stop the U.S. action in Venezuela,” Goldsmith wrote. “That means that in practice the only normative legal framework for presidential war powers that matters derives from executive branch precedents and legal opinions. The Justice Department, if asked, easily could have drafted an opinion based on these precedents and opinions to justify the invasion of Venezuela.”
As proof that the DOJ’s OLC could create such an opinion, Goldsmith turned to Barr and the 1989 memo on the subject of the FBI’s authority to “Override International Law in Extraterritorial Law Enforcement Activities.”
In the opening lines, Barr noted that he was submitting the memo to the attorney general in response to a request to “reconsider” a 1980 opinion, one that stated the FBI had “no authority under 28 U.S.C. § 533(1) to apprehend and abduct a fugitive residing in a foreign state when those actions would be contrary to customary international law.”
Following a “comprehensive review of the applicable law,” Barr said, he reached the opposite conclusion.
“[W]e conclude that the 1980 Opinion erred in ruling that the FBI does not have legal authority to carry out extraterritorial law enforcement activities that contravene customary international law,” the opinion said, finding that such arrests could go forward regardless of inconsistencies with international law and Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter — and without violating the Fourth Amendment — due to the president’s “inherent constitutional authority” to order the FBI to take that action through the attorney general.
While Barr’s memo addressed “only whether the FBI has the legal authority to carry out law enforcement operations that contravene international law,” Goldsmith further noted that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth described Maduro’s capture as the result of a “joint military and law enforcement raid.”
That prompted Goldsmith to assess that the Barr memo “will likely be presented as the main domestic legal foundation” for the Maduro raid.
On Monday, Maduro and Flores appeared in federal court in Manhattan and entered not guilty pleas, with Maduro declaring “I am innocent” of narco-terrorism offenses and claiming he is still president of Venezuela.
BREAKING: Venezuela’s ousted leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have pleaded not guilty to federal drug charges following their capture by U.S. forces in Caracas, with Maduro claiming, “I am innocent.”
Follow live updates: https://t.co/Z9K2wDDnIR pic.twitter.com/9JLr7luthy
— ABC News (@ABC) January 5, 2026
