Welcome back to Squawk Box. Of course, the biggest news: Venezuela's Maduro facing federal drug trafficking and weapons charges in a case now being handled by the Southern District of New York in Manhattan. Joining us right now, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton. He is a former SEC chair in the Trump administration. We're thrilled to have you on this morning to try to understand what comes next. Obviously, you're going to be down in Brooklyn, I imagine, or, I don't know, Brooklyn, but in downtown later today. When did you learn this was all happening?
Well, let me say Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year. Congratulations on the spin today.
You know, amazing that you've gotten it done this quickly. And good luck with it.
You had a lot to do with it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we're here. You're here. You're doing.
How long? How long were you working on this?
How long? Well, just, just, just, just, just to clear the air out. I, I was scheduled to be on.
And I'm happy to be on, and I'm happy to talk about this.
You don't look that tired. So were you working all weekend?
Yeah, I was working all weekend. But my, my people are working even harder than I am.
And when did you... But when did you learn this was all going down?
Like, I assume at some point somebody in Washington calls you and says, this is happening, and you are going to be the one who's going to prosecute this case.
Let's, let's separate the operation from, from the legal. This case has been in the Southern District since 2011. This case involving narco-terrorism, the importation of cocaine with the facilitation of the FARC, the use of government resources, has been there for that long. Nicolas Maduro was charged in 2020 as part of that conspiracy and a superseding indictment. We had another superseding indictment that was unsealed in connection with this operation, furthering those charges. What is fascinating here is that if you look at the... I would encourage the public to look at these publicly available documents as to what's going on. What's fascinating here is that there are already two people who, as part of this conspiracy, the former head of the equivalent of the CIA, the former head of intelligence, and a former high-ranking military leader, who, who have been convicted, pled guilty to these types of charges. Now, the other thing that I want to say, and I'm proud to say it, I'm very proud to say this as an American, is that these are allegations. Every person charged in the United States is entitled to the presumption of innocence and has their day in court. And that's exactly how we should be treating this.
Okay, so just take us through the weekend, though. So the president is down at Mar-a-Lago watching all of this. The helicopters are obviously down in Venezuela, literally extracting him. You learn about this when? How? Walk us through what happened in terms of how you... I mean, did you know this was happening before it happened?
We knew that, that he was indicted. And if you were reading the news, right, you knew that this was a focus of the administration. And it's not just a focus of the administration on Nicolas Maduro. If you ask... And we can bring this back to New York, and then I'll go back to it. If you ask every New Yorker, what are the biggest threats that you see to New York and your safety? It's gun-toting criminals and transnational drug trafficking into the United States. And those, those have been two focuses for a while. When I got to the office at the Southern District, put aside white-collar crime, something we talk about a lot in this program, there were three things that I focused on. One, this type of drug trafficking into the United States. We put additional resources on these types of matters. Second thing, you've heard me talk about it, and gun crime is way down in the city. I'd like to think that we have a small part to do with it, gun-toting criminals. The other is sex trafficking, particularly minor sex trafficking. So we, we had, we had ramped up our efforts in connection with this prosecution.
Let me ask you about this, then, because we're not going to get... Sounds like we're not going to get the full blow-by-blow over the weekend from you.
Well, operations are not my thing, right? Operations are a military thing.
The biggest question, I think, in the country, to some degree, is the constitutionality of us effectively going into another sovereign country and extracting the leader of that country. I imagine this is going to be the argument that his lawyers are going to make before you even get into the merits of the case itself.
And, Andrew, for, for... Thank you for saying that, because for those reasons, let's, let's, let's stick to, you know, facts on, facts on the ground as we know them. People have been making the analogy to Noriega. There are other precedents to look at, including, and I would encourage people to look at this, Libya, you know, Benghazi and the arrest of a number of people who were engaged in that. And then one that's close to my heart, that was most recent, Pan Am 103. Now, after years and years, they finally brought to justice through Libya. There's examples in Syria and combatants during those wars being brought back to the United States. So there is precedent. What I'll say from, from the perspective of, of where I sit, my people and I are completely comfortable with this prosecution.
I think his lawyers have already suggested that he, he's, as a leader of another country, he is immune from prosecution. Is our argument that he's not an officially elected...
Secretary Rubio, and you know, that press conference from Mar-a-Lago was pretty impressive. This, this, this is a president that will stand there and answer any question. The most accessible president in my lifetime. Secretary Rubio is somebody who I think doesn't waste a word. And he was very clear about this, not only in that press conference, but over the weekend. He said, you know, we never recognized the Biden administration, never recognized the EU, never recognized... And 60 countries, and this is all in the indictment, did not recognize Maduro as the duly elected leader of Venezuela.
At my direction.
Do you know who's going to be representing him?
You do not. So have you, have you had any communication with whoever would be representing his team?
I have not. My team may have.
There's a separate question, and maybe it's the, it's the sort of, again, a broader question, which is if we, meaning the U.S., is prepared to arrest somebody like Maduro in their home country, why aren't we? I mean, the critics of this, of the way this has been approached, beyond the questions about congressional authority and other things, would say, well, we should be going into Mexico. We should be going into all sorts of countries. They look at this and they say, well, what about the pardon of the ex-president of Honduras, who did very something that seemingly seems like exactly the same thing? How do you react to that?
My, my answer is where I started, which is the state. The biggest threats to the United States are our state-sponsored crimes against Americans and narco-trafficking into the United States, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. And let me... One thing that I heard, which I have to say, I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm hearing this. Most of this is cocaine, not fentanyl.
