Former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores sought to get their drug trafficking and conspiracy charges thrown out, as they appeared in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday.
Lawyers for the pair said they could not personally afford to pay their legal bills and could not use Venezuelan government money because of US sanctions against the country. The two have been held in a Brooklyn jail since the US captured them in a Caracas raid and transported them to New York in January.
The US Office of Foreign Assets Control has not allowed a sanctions waiver that would enable the government to pay the fees. That “does have a consequence in this case”, Maduro’s lawyer Barry Pollack said in court. “What the court must do is dismiss the case.”