President Donald Trump's private comments to MS NOW's Joe Scarborough could blow up the prosecution of Venezuela's former president Nicolás Maduro.
The "Morning Joe" host revealed Tuesday morning that he'd spoken to the president the previous day, and he told viewers that Trump boasted that the U.S. was going to take over the South American nation's oil production.
"'Joe, the difference between Iraq and this is that [George W.] Bush didn't keep the oil – we're going to keep the oil,'" Scarborough said Trump told him, "and to underline his point, Trump said his comments were no longer on background and said, 'In 2016, I said we should have kept the oil, it caused a lot of controversy. Well, we should have kept the oil.'"
"The president said, 'and we're going to rebuild their broken-down oil facilities, and this time we're going to keep the oil,'" Scarborough added.
Those comments, along with similar statements Trump has publicly made, could strengthen Maduro's defense as he fights prosecution in New York on drug and weapons charges, according to MS NOW's legal analyst Lisa Rubin.
"Barry Pollack, who had represented Julian Assange and now represents Maduro, previewed that he is going to make motions to dismiss on the basis of not only head of state immunity, but about the legality of the abduction in the first place," Rubin said.
"And I think that Mr. Pollack would have been very interested in the conversation you had with the president yesterday. Had that conversation taken place before the court appearance, I expect that comments like that would have been addressed, and he would have told the judge this was pretextual."
"This was a military operation all along," Rubin said, anticipating Maduro's defense. "It was always about the oil that the president intends to keep, and not about an indictment or a superseding indictment of Nicolás Maduro, who has been under indictment in the United States already for five-plus years."
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