US holds secret indictment of Delcy Rodriguez, top opposition journo claims

By Max Blumenthal

A US-funded opposition journalist revealed the Trump DOJ has crafted a secret indictment of Venezuela’s Acting President to “hold it over her head,” and will execute it if she “derails.”

The Trump administration is using a secret indictment to assert leverage over Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, according to the editor-in-chief of the US government-funded outlet, Armando.info.

“One of the information we manage is that the US is holding an indictment against [Rodriguez] to make it public, just in case she derails,” Valentina Lares Martiz revealed during a February 6, 2026 webinar hosted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an outlet also sponsored by the US government.

“Just to hold it over her head?” asked OCCRP deputy editor Julia Wallace.

“Yeah, so, I think she, she and her brother [Jorge Rodríguez], they are in this survival mode, and they will have the capacity to move the pieces, as long as the US backs her up,” Armando.info’s Lares Martiz affirmed.

A January 17, 2026 report by the Associated Press revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration classified Acting president Rodríguez as a “priority target” almost as soon as she was appointed as Vice President in 2018.

David Smilde, an academic who crusades for regime change in Venezuela at the US government and ExxonMobil-funded Atlantic Council, described the DEA investigation of Rodríguez as “logical.” Smilde explained to the AP that the investigation “gives the U.S. government leverage over her. She may fear that if she does not do as the Trump administration demands, she could end up with an indictment like Maduro.”

During the OCCRP webinar, Steven Dudley of the State Department-funded Insight Crime outlet remarked that “this isn’t without precedent, in terms of [the US government] hanging an indictment over somebody to cajole them into doing their bidding.”

Dudley added, “They don’t need an indictment to cajole people. They have a giant military, and they’ve shown that they’re willing to use that military. That is the biggest stick.”

Confronting “a military aggression unprecedented in our history”

Delcy Rodríguez stepped in as Acting President following a deadly US military raid on Caracas this January 3 which left over 100 dead, including 32 Cuban military officers, and resulted in the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. In an interview with The Atlantic the following day, US President Donald Trump recognized Rodríguez as the new leader, but warned, “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Since then, Rodríguez has presided over the passage of an Organic Law on Hydrocarbons which rolled back the socialist reforms the late President Hugo Chavez made to the country’s state oil company, PDVSA. In a January 16 speech to Venezuela’s National Council of Economic Productivity, Rodríguez explained the impetus for the new law:

“Enough time has passed, and Venezuela has been subjected to an unprecedented economic blockade. Well, recently, there has been a military aggression unprecedented in our history, and Venezuela must move forward…without compromising historical principles or compromising Venezuelan dignity. And in that direction, we have made the decision, seeing the successful results of the business models contemplated in the organic anti-blockade law, to take the models that are there and incorporate them into the Organic Law on Hydrocarbons.”

While the law allows Venezuela to draw new revenue streams from an oil sector that has withstood years of punishing sanctions, the Trump administration has assumed custody of Venezuela’s oil revenue at the point of a gun, holding the profits in a private account in Qatar which is not accountable to Congress.

Rodríguez and her older brother, Jorge, have both served in influential roles under Maduro, with Delcy Rodriguez operating as Vice President while overseeing hydrocarbon policy. In 2018, she initiated a project to survive Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy, successfully guiding an Organic Anti-Blockade law through the Constituent Assembly which reformed PDVSA. Since Maduro’s abduction, the Rodríguez siblings have been under mounting pressure to accommodate onerous demands from Washington in order to prevent a destabilizing process of regime change. Looming behind every move is the memory of their father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a leftist militant who was tortured to death in prison by CIA-trained interrogators under a pro-US government in 1976.

In the past, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has used sealed indictments to deny targets of its global lawfare regime the chance to pre-empt investigations. As The Grayzone revealed, Trump’s DOJ secretly indicted Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange on December 21, 2017, just one day after CIA spies learned that Assange was planning to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he had been given sanctuary. On April 11, 2019, British police stormed the embassy on US orders and arrested Assange in a blatant violation of diplomatic sovereignty.

Colombian-born Venezuelan official Alex Saab was also the target of a secret US indictment that was only publicized after he was abducted from an airport in Cape Verde while on an official diplomatic mission in 2020.

During the OCCRP webinar, Armando.info’s Lares Martiz noted that the US slapped sanctions on Delcy Rodríguez in 2017, however, “she doesn’t have an open and formal investigation against her.”

But that could all change, she insisted, if the Acting President defies the Trump administration’s paternalistic instructions.

Pro-transparency Armando.info: based at a Delaware mailbox, funded by Washington

Lares Martiz is in a prime position to know if the US is preparing a secret indictment of Rodriguez, as the publication she edits, Armando.info, functions at the center of a network of US government-funded journalistic outlets which exist to shop dirt on Latin American leaders targeted by Washington.

Though its staff operate from Bogota, Colombia, Armando.info is registered at a post office box in Newark, Delaware, where it is listed by Delaware’s Division of Corporations as “not in good standing.”

One of Armando.info’s top donors is the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA spin-off which channels US money into opposition parties and media promoting regime change. The outlet is also listed as a member of the “global network” of OCCRP, which has received most of its budget from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

A 2024-25 Frontline documentary series about Armando.info’s work in Venezuela, “A Dangerous Assignment,” made it clear the outlet’s staff were dedicated anti-Chavista operatives seemingly coordinating their work with the US government. The documentary chronicled the investigation by Lares Martiz and her colleague, Roberto Deniz, of the Colombian-born Venezuelan official Alex Saab, who had spearheaded a food importation program known as CLAP that aimed to prevent widespread hunger amid crushing American sanctions by providing food at below market value to the Venezuelan public. Published by the US government’s Public Broadcasting Service, “A Dangerous Assignment” received “investment support” from Luminate, an NGO founded by US intelligence-adjacent billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

In 2020, Saab was abducted under orders from US authorities following a series of Armando.info reports accusing him of using the CLAP program as an avenue for corruption. He was released from US federal prison through a December 2023 prisoner swap. By this point, Armando.info’s leadership had left Venezuela following lawsuits by Attorney General Tarek William Saab.

In the aftermath of Maduro’s abduction, the Armando.info team is homing in on Saab once again, and apparently working to whip up a dossier on the newly-inaugurated president.

But during the OCCRP webinar, Lares Martiz conceded that she lacks compromising information on Delcy Rodriguez and her brother, Jorge: “they are hardly [in any] cases of corruption that I have written [about], or in Armando.info, or even OCCRP has investigated.”

But she suggested that US intelligence is actively investigating Venezuela’s state oil company in search of dirt on Venezuela’s new president. “Everything is related to corruption in PDVSA,” she remarked. “I think it’s going to be looked up very carefully.”

On January 16, Rodriguez met in her office with CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Later that month, CNN reported that the CIA “is poised to help actively manage the Trump administration’s dealings with Venezuela’s new leadership.”