Legal Docket: Venezuela on trial

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 5th day of January, 2026. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST:

And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

We’ll tell you about the special year-end report by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and we have one oral argument for you, but before all that:

REICHARD: Let’s return to the biggest news of the day: Venezuela, and in particular the legal underpinning of the mission to capture former president Nicolas Maduro and his wife. The two will be turned over for prosecution in federal court in the Southern District of New York.

EICHER: At the press conference on Saturday in Florida, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine:

CAINE: This operation, known as Operation Absolute Resolve, was discrete, precise, and conducted during the darkest hours of January 2, and was the culmination of months of planning and rehearsal, an operation that, frankly, only the United States military could undertake.

President Trump said Maduro had become a dictator and kingpin of a vast drug-trafficking network.

TRUMP: He personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as cartel de los Solas, which flooded our nation with lethal poison, responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, the many, many Americans, hundreds of thousands over the years of Americans died because of him.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized it was not only this administration that saw Maduro in this light.

RUBIO: He is not the legitimate president of Venezuela. That's not just us saying it. The first Trump administration, the Biden administration, the second Trump administration. None of those three recognize them. He's not recognized by the European Union and multiple countries around the world. He is a fugitive of American justice with a $50 million reward, which I guess we saved $50 million…

The Grand Jury indictment filed in New York lays out the charges. We’ll include a link to that document in this transcript.

REICHARD: The indictment finds probable cause that Maduro, his wife, son, and three others ran a criminal enterprise responsible for bringing tons of cocaine into the U.S. and using their power to provide cover for traffickers. These charges build upon an earlier indictment from 2020, adding new charges of partnership with international drug cartels.

EICHER: What comes next is procedurally straightforward but politically complex. The defendants will face arraignment, discovery, and potentially a trial. They will be treated as ordinary criminal defendants under U.S. law. If convicted, sentencing could include decades in prison.

REICHARD: There is precedent in Trump’s favor: in the late 1980s, the U.S. indicted and captured Panama’s de facto ruler, Manuel Noriega, on drug-trafficking charges. American courts ruled that he had no immunity as head of state because the U.S. did not recognize him as a legitimate leader. They also ruled that U.S. courts retained jurisdiction over him despite legal questions about his capture.

That precedent underpins this case, though Venezuela’s size, regional influence, as well as modern legal scrutiny make the outcome far less predictable.

EICHER: Alright, next: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts used his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary, in large part to honor the semiquincentennial this year of the Declaration of Independence.

REICHARD: The audio you’re hearing and will hear comes from a celebration last summer at the National Archives kicking off the 250th anniversary remembrance, less than a mile from the Supreme Court building.

WASHINGTON: In Congress, July 4th, 1776

A historic reenactor portraying George Washington declared:

WASHINGTON: When in the course of Human Events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them.

A reenactor portraying Abigail Adams read aloud the famous preamble:

WASHINGTON: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

EICHER: The chief justice in his annual report traced America’s founding principles back to a booklet titled Common Sense by Thomas Paine. It was published early in 1776.

It then went viral (using today’s parlance) and galvanized the colonists to vote for independence from the Crown.

REICHARD: That’s when the Committee of Five set out to draft the Declaration of Independence. They were: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, John Adams, and Robert Livingston.

Jefferson, just 33 years old, was lead writer.

No less than 86 edits later, it was adopted at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, July 4, 1776.

EICHER: The writers and signers of the Declaration knew what they were in for; the British would see this as treason. That’s why Benjamin Franklin warned they’d have to hang together on this… or else they’d all hang separately.

REICHARD: The Declaration of Independence set the American mission statement down on paper for all to see. It was more aspiration than law; but it led to the Constitution that is law; protecting basic freedoms. That in turn led to the 13th amendment that abolished slavery, to the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote and to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

The Chief ended his report with a quote from President Calvin Coolidge during the nation’s 150th anniversary one hundred years ago:

EICHER: “Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.”

Chief Justice Roberts wrote it was true then and that it’s still true today.

REICHARD: Well, our final order of Legal Docket business: a case the court heard in December. It’s one with massive consequences for the Internet:

ROBERTS: We will hear argument first this morning in Case 24 171 Cox Communications versus Sony Music Entertainment.

Likely the most consequential copyright case in years, with billions of dollars at stake.

Here’s the background. Sony Music Entertainment and more than 50 labels (including Universal, Warner) sued Cox Communications.

Cox provides internet, phone, and TV service to six million homes and businesses in 18 states. The labels say Cox received notice of copyright infringement by its subscribers, but Cox did not cut off their service.

EICHER: A Virginia jury slapped Cox with a massive billion-dollar verdict that was later vacated as far as the damages go.

But the appeals court still said Cox may have some contributory liability. Liability is what the lawyers are battling over.

Sony wants the kind of liability called secondary: holding Cox liable for something it didn’t directly do, namely pirate music or movies.

REICHARD: But remember, Cox is not the pirate here. Cox didn’t copy songs or upload files or press download. Its subscribers did that.

So here’s the legal question: Can an internet service provider be held liable when its customers commit copyright infringement, knowing it’s happening but not cutting those people off?

Cox says absolutely not. Its lawyer, Joshua Rosenkranz:

ROSENKRANZ: No notion of tort or copyright law ever conceived can support that theory. No case has suggested that knowledge alone can create the necessary culpability to find someone liable for infringement. The consequences of plaintiff’s position are cataclysmic. There is no sure fire way for an ISP to avoid liability and the only way it can is to cut off the Internet not just for the accused infringer but for anyone else who happens to use the same connection. That could be entire towns, universities, or hospitals, turning internet providers into internet police.

Rosenkranz pointed to Supreme Court precedent in support, particularly a dispute involving Twitter. There, the court held that Twitter couldn’t be held liable for “aiding and abetting” terrorism by just hosting or recommending content made by users.

ROSENKRANZ: Twitter held several things that are fully applicable here. The first is that contributory liability requires malfeasance with the purpose of fostering the bad act… there’s no liability for passive non-feasance, and there’s no liability for sales to the general public on the same terms regardless of any eventual use…what our customers do is invisible to us in real time.

EICHER: But Justice Elena Kagan distinguished the cases, starting with the Twitter case:

KAGAN: Twitter….We spent a lot of time talking about the fact that the companies, Facebook and so forth, didn’t know of any particular conduct that had led to the attack. It wasn’t even clear that the terrorists in Twitter had used those companies to plan the attack. So we said that there was no real nexus between the companies and the actual communications that created the legal issue. Now, here, your client has received notice as to particular people doing particular infringements of copyright… I would think that’s a step further from Twitter.

Rosenkranz pushed back with an example:

ROSENKRANZ: There is literally not a single place in this record where a specific individual was identified… Let's take the smallest unit, a household. You still don’t know who the individual is.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor jumped in with this sharp exchange, which we have edited for time as we have for several other clips you’ll hear today:

SOTOMAYOR: But what I’m troubled by is that you got these reports, and it’s about 1% of your customer base who’s infringing. there are things you could have done to respond…You did nothing

ROSENKRANZ: The notion that Cox did nothing is absurd.

Rosenkranz brought plenty of data:

ROSENKRANZ: Cox sent out hundreds of warnings a day…contacting them, cutting them off, that is suspending their accounts which we did 67,000 times in the course of this time and the program stopped infringement by 98 percent of the people who were accused of infringement. That is not nothing, Your Honor.

REICHARD: Justice Amy Coney Barrett underscored another problem, that of incentives should Cox prevail:

BARRETT: What incentive would you have to do anything if you won? If you win and mere knowledge isn’t enough, why would you bother to send out any notices in the future?

ROSENKRANZ: Cox is a good corporate citizen that cares a lot about what happens on its system.

Cox had an ally in the federal government. Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart said secondary liability doesn’t apply to companies that provide a service on equal terms to everyone:

STEWART: This form of secondary liability is reserved for persons who act for the purpose of facilitating violations of law…. Because Cox simply provided the same generic Internet services to infringers and non-infringers alike, there is no basis for inferring such a purpose here…

Justice Barrett tested that standard against the ruling in the Twitter case.

BARRETT: So does that mean that your answer to the question I asked, Mr. Rosenkranz, is that, yes, Twitter would not be liable for facilitating child trafficking if it knew that a particular user was using its account for that purpose?

STEWART: --it wouldn't be secondarily liable ... .that is, perhaps a platform like YouTube or Twitter..the platform could be held directly liable on the theory that it was speaking the words as well as assisting the third party content provider….

EICHER: Then it was Sony’s turn, with former Solicitor General Paul Clement framing the argument this way:

CLEMENT: This Court’s cases recognize that liability for copyright infringement is not limited to direct infringers but extends to those who induce, cause, or materially contribute… and a classic form of material contribution is to provide the means of infringement to a specific known infringer, knowing that infringement is substantially certain to follow… Now on this record…it is beyond dispute that Cox provided the service to known infringers with substantial knowledge that what they themselves called habitual abusers would continue to infringe…

Justice Samuel Alito asked a practical question:

ALITO: Well, what's --what is an ISP supposed to do with a university account that has, let's say, 70,000 users? What is the university supposed to do in your view?

CLEMENT: The --the university is supposed to --under those circumstances, the ISP is supposed to sort of have a conversation with the --with the university.

That didn’t quite fly with Justice Alito.

ALITO: So, all right, the ISP tells the university: Look, you know, a lot of your --your 50,000 students are infringing my copyright, do something about it. Now the university then has to try to determine which particular students are engaging in this activity. And let's assume it can even do that. And so then it --it knocks out a thousand students, and then another thousand students are going to pop up doing the same thing. I just don't see how it's workable at all… (much later)..

CLEMENT: I don't think it would be the end of the world if universities provided service at a speed that was sufficient for most other purposes but didn't allow the students to take full advantage of BitTorrent. I could live in that world.

With both sides arguing what sounded like extremes, Justice Sotomayor laid out the dilemma the court faces:

SOTOMAYOR: We are being put to two extremes here. ….How do we announce a rule that deals with those two extremes?

REICHARD: During his rebuttal argument, Rosenkranz for Cox pointed to the fatal flaw in Sony’s case: collective punishment for the specific actions of its customers:

ROSENKRANZ: There is no proof of any specific known infringer that is a human being who actually did any of the things that some of these hypotheticals spun out. Even if you focus on households, there is no way to disaggregate… Plaintiffs tried a case in gross as to 57,000 subscribers, no individual circumstances. Plaintiffs never tried to disaggregate in any way as to the people who they see --who they claim can sustain this verdict

If Cox wins, then Sony argues it has no way to attack repeat offenders, because going after people one at a time is expensive and slow.

Other disputes are now on hold awaiting the ruling in this case; Optimum and Verizon are also fighting copyright infringement with tons of money at stake.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

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