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 reportedly employing a confidential indictment as a means to control Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, according to Armando.info’s editor-in-chief, an outlet backed by the US government.
“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 disclosed during a February 6, 2026 webinar organized by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), another US-funded outlet.
“Just to hold it over her head?” OCCRP deputy editor Julia Wallace inquired.
“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,” affirmed Armando.info’s Lares Martiz.
A January 17, 2026 Associated Press report revealed the Drug Enforcement Administration designated Acting President Rodríguez as a “priority target” nearly from the moment she assumed the Vice Presidency in 2018.
David Smilde, a scholar advocating regime change in Venezuela at the US government and ExxonMobil-backed Atlantic Council, called the DEA’s investigation of Rodríguez “logical.” He told the AP the probe “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 from the State Department-funded Insight Crime commented, “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 took over as Acting President after a lethal US military operation in Caracas on January 3, which resulted in over 100 fatalities, including 32 Cuban military personnel, as well as the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The day after, US President Donald Trump acknowledged 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 overseen the enactment of the Organic Law on Hydrocarbons, which reversed socialist reforms instituted by the late President Hugo Chavez on the state oil company PDVSA. In a January 16 address to Venezuela’s National Council of Economic Productivity, Rodríguez clarified the motivation for the legislation:
“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.”
Although the law permits Venezuela to generate fresh income from its oil industry, which has endured years of harsh sanctions, the Trump administration has seized control of Venezuela’s oil revenues by force, holding the funds in a private account in Qatar that remains unaccountable to Congress.
Delcy Rodríguez and her elder brother, Jorge, have both held key positions under Maduro; Delcy served as Vice President while managing hydrocarbon policies. In 2018, she undertook efforts to resist Trump’s “maximum pressure” tactics, successfully pushing an Organic Anti-Blockade law via the Constituent Assembly to reform PDVSA. After Maduro’s kidnapping, the Rodríguez siblings face growing demands from Washington, which exert pressure to prevent regime destabilization. Their actions are shadowed by the legacy of their father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a leftist activist who was tortured to death in prison by CIA-trained interrogators under a pro-US regime in 1976.
The US Department of Justice has historically employed sealed indictments to prevent targets from countering investigations within its global lawfare strategy. As The Grayzone exposed, the Trump DOJ secretly indicted Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange on December 21, 2017, just after CIA agents discovered he planned to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was sheltered. Subsequently, on April 11, 2019, British police raided the embassy on US orders and arrested Assange, infringing diplomatic sovereignty.
Similarly, Colombian-born Venezuelan official Alex Saab was subject to a secret US indictment that only became known publicly after his 2020 capture at an airport in Cape Verde while on a diplomatic mission.
During the OCCRP webinar, Lares Martiz mentioned that although sanctions were imposed on Delcy Rodríguez in 2017, “she doesn’t have an open and formal investigation against her.”
However, she warned this could shift if Rodríguez defies the Trump administration’s directive.
Pro-transparency Armando.info: based at a Delaware mailbox, funded by Washington
As editor of Armando.info, Lares Martiz is well-placed to confirm the existence of a secret indictment. This outlet is embedded within a network of US government-funded media designed to expose damaging material on Latin American leaders targeted by Washington.
Although staffed in Bogotá, Colombia, Armando.info is registered at a post office box in Newark, Delaware, where Delaware’s Division of Corporations lists it as “not in good standing.”
Among Armando.info’s principal backers is the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA offshoot that streams US funds into opposition political forces and media pushing regime change. The outlet is also a member of OCCRP’s “global network,” which receives the majority of its financing from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
The 2024-25 PBS Frontline series “A Dangerous Assignment,” which chronicles Armando.info’s work in Venezuela, portrays the staff as determined anti-Chavista operatives seemingly coordinating with the US government. The documentary follows Lares Martiz and colleague Roberto Deniz as they investigate Alex Saab, the Colombian-born Venezuelan official who led the food import program known as CLAP, intended to mitigate hunger caused by US sanctions by supplying subsidized food to Venezuelans. The PBS series was funded in part by Luminate, an NGO founded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, a figure linked to US intelligence.
In 2020, Saab was detained under US orders following Armando.info’s reports accusing him of corruption tied to CLAP. He was later freed from US federal custody in a prisoner exchange in December 2023. Meanwhile, Armando.info’s leadership had exited Venezuela amid legal actions by Attorney General Tarek William Saab.
After Maduro’s abduction, the Armando.info collective has renewed its focus on Saab and appears to be compiling material on the newly installed president.
Still, during the OCCRP webinar, Lares Martiz acknowledged she lacks incriminating evidence against Delcy Rodríguez and Jorge Rodríguez: “they are hardly [in any] cases of corruption that I have written [about], or in Armando.info, or even OCCRP has investigated.”
She suggested, however, that US intelligence is intensively probing PDVSA for any compromising information on Venezuela’s current president. “Everything is related to corruption in PDVSA,” she said. “I think it’s going to be looked up very carefully.”
On January 16, Rodríguez met with CIA Director John Ratcliffe in her office. Later that month, CNN reported that the CIA “is poised to help actively manage the Trump administration’s dealings with Venezuela’s new leadership.”
Original article: thegrayzone.com
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