Maduro’s ‘Pit Bull’ Defense Attorney Is Prolific Democratic Donor
Ousted Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s defense attorney is a prolific political donor who has contributed exclusively to Democratic congressional and presidential campaigns over a 20-year period, a Washington Free Beacon review of campaign finance disclosures found.
Maduro’s lead attorney is Harris St. Laurent & Wechsler partner Barry Pollack, who represented the dictator in federal court last week. Though Pollack is a “pit bull” known for his “relatively low public profile,” as the Wall Street Journal put it in a recent profile of the attorney, he has contributed to a wide array of Democrats while working in Washington, D.C., from 1999 to 2020.
Pollack backed John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who fathered a child with a former campaign staffer while his wife was dying of cancer, in the 2008 presidential primaries, sending his campaign $250, records show. He began contributing to the race’s winner, then-Illinois senator Barack Obama, after Obama won the Iowa caucuses.
Pollack, a Georgetown Law alum, went on to contribute $600 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2012, $500 to New Jersey senator Cory Booker’s campaign in 2013, and $350 to Maryland congressman Glenn Ivey’s campaign in 2015. He donated to six Democratic Senate hopefuls in 2020: Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Steve Bullock of Montana, Sara Gideon of Maine, Cal Cunningham of North Carolina, Al Gross of Alaska, and Theresa Greenfield of Iowa. Only Ossoff won. Cunningham’s campaign was also derailed by an extramarital affair: The Democrat’s polling lead over GOP incumbent Thom Tillis evaporated after leaked text messages showed Cunningham sending risqué remarks—including “You are historically sexy”—to a married public relations strategist.
Some of Pollack’s beneficiaries, like Booker, have condemned President Donald Trump’s arrest of Maduro as “unlawful” and “unjust.” It’s the same argument Pollack will make in his attempt to free Maduro from U.S. custody.
At Maduro’s Manhattan arraignment, Pollack referred to Maduro’s arrest as a “military abduction” and told the judge he intends to argue that Maduro is entitled to immunity as the head of Venezuela. Precedent does not appear to be on his side.
When the United States invaded Panama to capture Manuel Noriega, the drug trafficking dictator made similar claims. A federal appeals court sided against him after U.S. prosecutors argued that, because the United States hadn’t recognized Noriega as Panama’s legitimate leader, his arrest was legal. The United States has considered Maduro an illegitimate dictator since he stole Venezuela’s presidential election in 2018.
Maduro is far from Pollack’s only high-profile client. Last year, Pollack negotiated the plea deal that led to the release of Julian Assange, the anti-American hacker who published hundreds of thousands of classified documents provided by the U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
Most of the active elected officials Pollack has backed have blasted Trump’s Venezuela operation. Booker called the raid “wrong” and an “extrajudicial assault on another nation’s sovereignty,” while Ivey said Trump had “no credible justification for taking over a sovereign country.” Ossoff is the outlier: The Georgia Democrat has not weighed in on the operation, telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he needs more information on “what the president meant when he said the United States would run Venezuela.”
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