DLNews Breaking News:

Maduro enters not guilty plea as Trump threatens other countries after Venezuela strikes

A defiant Nicolás Maduro declared himself the “president of my country” as he protested his capture and pleaded not guilty on Monday to the federal drug trafficking charges that the Trump administration used to justify removing him from power.

“I was captured,” Maduro said in Spanish as translated by a courtroom reporter before being cut off by the judge. Asked later for his plea to the charges, he stated, "I’m innocent. I am not guilty. I am a decent man, the president of my country.”

The courtroom appearance, Maduro’s first since he and his wife were seized from their home in a stunning middle-of-the-night military operation, kick-starts the U.S. government’s most consequential prosecution in decades of a foreign head of state. The criminal case in Manhattan is unfolding against the diplomatic backdrop of an audacious U.S.-engineered regime change that President Donald Trump has said will enable his administration to “run” the South American country.

President Donald Trump declared the US is “in charge” of Venezuela, as he issued stark warnings to other countries that they could be next. Trump’s administration is working quickly to establish a pliant interim government that includes repairing the country’s oil infrastructure, according to US officials, as acting president Delcy Rodríguez called for “cooperation” with the US. Meanwhile, Venezuelans are hunkering down amid apprehension of what may come next.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump officials will give a classified briefing to bipartisan lawmakers on Venezuela tonight, according to sources, as questions continue about the raid, which Congress was not notified about ahead of time.