Phil Stewart

And then also this sort of, you know,

There are a lot of private discussions, we understand, between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the acting interim president.

And it remains to be seen whether the kind of goodwill that's been described to the media, the goodwill in private, will become something public that the Venezuelan government would talk about.

i would say that the venezuelan government would certainly say that and uh and i would say that the venezuelan government would you know is is is very concerned about being seen as as you know a u.s colony or or anything like that um you know sorry go ahead well no i was going to ask you when you say the venezuelan government it would be concerned i mean i know there are there are questions about whether the election last time was was legitimate

Well, I mean, if the international organizations that judged the last election are correct, there are a lot of people that do not support the government and voted a different way.

Do we know what the numbers of those were?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're deaf.

They're public.

And the international organizations had what they thought were the correct vote tallies, and they did not correspond with the official tallies.

And they were very public about that at the time of the election.

And so the question is today, you know, there is no real dissent in the streets.

The Maduro government still is very much in charge.

And as we discussed, you know, according to local media reports, they've arrested people who had social media criticized Maduro or celebrated his capture.

And so I would say that the Maduro government is still very much in charge, it would seem, from the outside.

So he is charged with different kinds of crimes related to narcotics trafficking.

Cocaine trafficking, yeah.

Well, I didn't see it in the charges, but we don't know the entirety of the case.

There was an interesting interview by a former CIA station chief that I watched recently where he was saying that the U.S.

public needs to be a little patient here because soon they'll have a lot of evidence introduced into court that will detail the U.S.