From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Anthony Iafrate

Ousted socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was the mastermind of a pervasive drug-fueled “culture of corruption” which extended all the way to the U.S.’s backyard, according to the scathing indictment against him, his wife, his son, and others, released Saturday.

Hours after President Donald Trump announced Maduro’s capture and removal from power, Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the deposed despot and his wife, Cilia Flores, were indicted in the Southern District of New York on four charges, including narco-terrorism conspiracy, and “will soon face the full wrath of American justice” on U.S. soil. A grand jury found Maduro “and corrupt members of his regime enabled corruption fueled by drug trafficking throughout” the Latin American region, including in Mexico and Central America, and empowered notorious crime syndicates such as Tren de Aragua (TdA), according to the unsealed indictment.

Signed by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, the 25-page indictment names six defendants, including the deposed Maduro, Flores, and Maduro’s 35-year-old son from his first marriage, Nicolás “Nicolasito” Maduro Guerra. It also names as defendants TdA leader Niño Guerrero and two high-profile members of Maduro’s United Socialist Party, Diosdado Cabello Rondón and Ramón Rodríguez Chacín.

Maduro, “like former President [Hugo] Chávez before him[,] participates in, perpetuates, and protects a culture of corruption in which powerful Venezuelan elites enrich themselves through drug trafficking and the protection of their partner drug traffickers,” the indictment alleges. “The profits of that illegal activity flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military, and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top-referred to as the Cartel de Los Soles or Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials.”

The Trump administration’s State Department announced it was designating the Cartel de Los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in November 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a statement at the time the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”

The indictment also notes the South American nation “sits in a geographically valuable location for drug traffickers” and that, around the time Chávez came to power in 1999, “Venezuela became a safe haven” for them.

“In that environment, cocaine trafficking flourished,” the indictment continues, citing State Department estimates from arund 2020, with between 200 and 250 tons of the drug being trafficked through the country each year.

The charging document goes on to allege Maduro, his wife, son, and political allies had “partnered with narcotics traffickers and narco-terrorist groups, who dispatched processed cocaine from Venezuela to the United States via transshipment points in the Caribbean and Central America, such as Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.”

“Through this drug trafficking, [Maduro] and corrupt members of his regime enabled corruption fueled by drug trafficking throughout the region,” the indictment continues. “The transshipment points in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico similarly relied on a culture of corruption, in which cocaine traffickers operating in those countries paid a portion of their own profits to politicians who protected and aided them. In turn, these politicians used the cocaine-fueled payments to maintain and augment their political power.”

Maduro and his regime also “facilitated the empowerment and growth of violent narco-terrorist groups fueling their organizations with cocaine profits,” according to the indictment.

The charging document notably identifies organizations which collaborated with the Maduro regime: Colombian communist militant groups Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN); Mexican syndicates the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas; and Guerrero’s TdA.

The indictment also alleges Maduro Guerra, the captured dictator’s son, personally “worked to ship hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Venezuela to Miami, Florida” around the year 2017. Maduro Guerra is a member of his father’s political party and served as a Deputy to the Venezuelan National Assembly since 2021.

“During this time, MADURO GUERRA spoke with his drug trafficking partners about, among other things, shipping low-quality cocaine to New York because it could not be sold in Miami, arranging a 500-kilogram shipment of cocaine to be unloaded from a cargo container near Miami, and using scrap metal containers to smuggle cocaine into the ports of New York,” the document reads.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum leveled the Trump administration’s latest broadside at the struggling U.S. offshore wind industry on Monday, ordering an immediate suspension of activities at the five big wind projects currently in development.

“Today we’re sending notifications to the five large offshore wind projects that are under construction that their leases will be suspended due to national security concerns,” Burgum told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “During this time of suspension, we’ll work with the companies to try to find a mitigation. But we completed the work that President Trump has asked us to do. The Department of War has come back conclusively that the issues related to these large offshore wind programs have created radar interference that creates a genuine risk for the U.S.”

Predictably, reaction to Burgum’s order was immediate, with opponents of offshore wind praising the move, and industry supporters slamming it. In Semafor’s energy-related newsletter on Tuesday, energy and climate editor Tim McDowell quotes an unnamed ex-Energy Department official as claiming, “the Pentagon and intelligence services, which are normally sensitive to even extremely low-probability risks, never flagged this as a concern previously.” (RELATED: Trump Admin Orders Offshore Wind Farm Pauses Over ‘National Security Risks’)

Yet, a simple 30-second Google search finds a wealth of articles going back to as early as October 2014 discussing ways to mitigate the long-ago identified issue of interference with air defense radars by these enormous windmills, some of which are taller than the Eiffel Tower. It is a simple fact that the issue was repeatedly raised during the Biden Administration’s mad rush to speed these giant windmill operations into the construction phase by cutting corners in the permitting process.

In May, 2024, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) own analysis related to the Atlantic Shores South project contains a detailed discussion of the potential impacts and suggests multiple ways to mitigate for them. An Oct. 29, 2024 memo of understanding between BOEM and the Biden Department of Defense calls for increased collaboration between the two departments as a response to concerns from members of Congress and others related to these very long-known potential impacts.

The Georgia Tech Research Institute published a study dated June 6, 2022 detailing “Radar Impacts, Potential Mitigation, from Offshore Wind Turbines.” That study was in fact commissioned by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), a private non-profit that functions as an advisory group to the federal government.

Oh.

A report published in February 2024 by International Defense Security & Technology, Inc. describes the known issues thusly:

“Wind turbines can create clutter on radar screens in a number of ways. First, the metal towers and blades of wind turbines can reflect radar signals. This can create false returns on radar screens, which can make it difficult to detect and track real targets.

“Second, the rotating blades of wind turbines can create a Doppler effect on radar signals. This can cause real targets to appear to be moving at different speeds than they actually are. This can also make it difficult to track real targets.”

The simple Google search I conducted returns hundreds of articles dating all the way back to 2006 related to this long-known yet unresolved issue that could present a very real threat to national security. The fact that the Biden administration, in its religious zeal to speed these enormous offshore industrial projects into the construction phase, chose to downplay and ignore this threat in no way obligates his successor in office to commit the same dereliction of duty.

Some wind proponents are cynically raising concerns that a future Democratic administration could use this example as justification for cancelling oil and gas projects. It’s as if they’ve all forgotten about the previous four years of the Autopen presidency, which featured Joe Biden’s Day 1 order cancelling the 80% completed Keystone XL pipeline, a year-long moratorium on LNG export permitting, an attempt to set aside more than 200 million acres of the U.S. offshore from future leasing, and too many other destructive moves to detail here.

Again, a simple web search reveals that experts all over the world believe this is a real problem. If so, it needs to be addressed as a matter of national security. Burgum is intent on doing that. All half-baked talking points aside, this really isn’t complicated.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.