Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) told Fox News’ Jesse Waters on Tuesday the Florida Attorney General’s office is “looking very seriously” at bringing state charges against deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
“I’ll also say that I know they indicted him in the Southern District of New York. We also have the right as a state to bring pertinent charges in state court, and we’re working on that,” Gov. DeSantis said.
“Our attorney general is leading that effort. And you may see charges filed in a place like Miami or Doral, which we’re entitled to do,” he continued.
Gov. DeSantis said that he has seen the celebrations of Maduro’s downfall that have taken place in Doral and Miami, and explained that “this has been a long time coming.”
“Both Hugo Chávez and Maduro, they tanked the country of Venezuela, massive oil reserves, gold reserves, affluent country, and basically the Marxist takeover destroyed it and destroyed their society so that people were left to eat trash,” he said.
“Millions and millions of people fled out of Venezuela. So this is being greeted very positively,” he continued.
Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores are presently detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, undergoing trial proceedings on multiple narco-terrorism charges associated with the now-deposed dictator’s role in a cocaine-trafficking syndicate run through the Venezuelan military.
“He [Maduro] was obviously very involved with bringing drugs, particularly to Florida,” DeSantis reportedly said during a Tuesday press conference in Clearwater, Florida.
“You know what he would also do? And this is not in the federal indictment in New York — he would empty his prisons and send them to America across the border, and we’d end up with some of these people in Florida,” he continued.
“Stay tuned…,” DeSantis wrote on a Monday social media post.
A recently unsealed indictment revealed that, in addition to Maduro and Flores, the dictator’s son Nicolás Maduro Guerra and other members of the Venezuelan socialist regime stand cast co-conspirators who benefited from Nicolás Maduro’s drug trafficking schemes.
The indictment explained that, around 2017, Maduro Guerra worked to ship “hundreds of kilograms” of cocaine from Venezuela to Miami and spoke to drug trafficking partners about “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.”
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