Saturday morning greeted many Americans with startling news: the U.S. military had executed a strike and raid on the residence of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, arresting both him and his wife, Cilia Flores. This decisive action aimed to bring them to face federal drug conspiracy charges in the United States, immediately sparking a debate over its legality and the broader implications for international law.

The response from the global community was swift, with countries like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran collectively denouncing the U.S. move. Legal experts, however, drew parallels to a historical precedent—the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama under President George H.W. Bush, which led to the capture of dictator Manuel Noriega on similar drug trafficking charges. Some analysts noted that an opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), authored by future Attorney General Bill Barr, could have provided the modern executive branch with a legal foundation to justify the actions taken against Maduro.

Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith, known for his tenure in the OLC during President George W. Bush’s administration and his subsequent resignation over the controversial “torture memos,” offered insights on his Substack blog, Executive Functions. In his post titled “On the Legality of the Venezuela Invasion,” Goldsmith analyzed the operation’s legal standing, referencing the 1989 legal frameworks and considering their application to the current administration under President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Goldsmith wrote candidly about the situation: “Congress has endowed the president with an extensive global military force and remains largely absent in overseeing its deployment. The judiciary refrains from intervening in unilateral presidential military actions, and no nation could feasibly halt the U.S. intervention in Venezuela.” He continued, “In effect, the legal norms governing presidential war powers are largely dictated by executive branch precedents and legal opinions. The Justice Department could easily have crafted an opinion using these precedents to rationalize the Venezuelan incursion.”

“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.”

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— ABC News (@ABC) January 5, 2026