When Nicolás Maduro needed someone to represent him in an American courtroom, he turned to a lawyer with experience facing off against the federal government.
The Venezuelan political leader hired Barry Pollack, a criminal defense attorney who’s represented WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, as well as other high-profile defendants.
The Justice Department has accused Maduro, who was serving as Venezuela’s president when he was captured by US forces, of participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy, alleging he worked with illegal drug gangs. They also accused him and his wife, Cilia Flores, of conspiring to illegally import cocaine into the United States and of gun-related charges.
On Monday afternoon, US Marshals escorted the couple into a 26th-floor courtroom in lower Manhattan, where they entered not-guilty pleas and proclaimed their innocence. US military forces apprehended Maduro and Flores in a pre-dawn operation on Saturday in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and brought them to the United States.
At the hearing, Pollack told US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein that he would file “voluminous and complicated” motions on Maduro’s behalf, suggesting he would challenge the charges and the basis for his arrest.
“Mr. Maduro is the head of a sovereign state,” Pollack said in court. “He is entitled to the privileges and immunities that go with that office. In addition, there are issues about the legality of this military abduction.”
Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president on Monday afternoon.
Pollack, an attorney at the boutique law firm Harris St. Laurent & Wechsler LLP, is best known as one of the many lawyers who represented Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks.
Prosecutors had accused Assange of working with hackers to obtain government secrets from federal agencies and American companies, as well as conspiring with former US Army officer Chelsea Manning to leak documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Assange pleaded guilty to espionage charges in the summer of 2024, capping a six-year legal battle that involved complex negotiations with multiple governments.
Pollack’s experience with sensitive national security matters could be an asset for his representation of Maduro, which will likely involve classified information. The attorney has also represented Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer who was convicted of espionage charges after leaking information to a journalist.
Jane Rosenberg/Reuters
To be paid, Pollack will likely need a waiver from the US Treasury Department, which has sanctioned Maduro and the Venezuelan government.
It’s not clear when Pollack began representing Maduro. He formally entered an appearance on the court docket late Monday morning. Maduro was first indicted in 2020, and Hellerstein has overseen court proceedings against other Venezuelan nationals accused of conspiring with him. Pollack didn’t respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
A court-appointed lawyer for Maduro, David Wikstrom, told Business Insider he was informed at 8:40 a.m. on Monday that he would be representing the Venezuelan president in court. Shortly before the noon court hearing, he said he still hadn’t spoken to Pollack, who ultimately represented Maduro in the proceeding.
Flores is represented by Mark Donnelly, a Texas-based attorney who served as a federal prosecutor for 12 years, and one of his law partners, Andres Sanchez.
Pollack, a former public defender and president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, has a long track record of successful defense outcomes in criminal trials.
He represented former Enron accountant Michael W. Krautz, who a jury acquitted of fraud charges. And he successfully overturned the conviction of Martin Tankleff, a Long Island man who spent 17 years in prison after he was falsely accused of killing his parents as a teenager.
More recently, Pollack represented the executive of a poultry company accused of conspiring to fix the price of chickens. Jurors declined to find the executive guilty in two separate trials.
In a 2025 interview with Lawdragon, Pollack decried the Justice Department’s “extraordinary view” of its jurisdiction for criminal cases, using the Assange case as an example.
“You’ve got somebody who’s not a United States citizen who is publishing information not in the United States, had not set foot in the United States, with respect to any of the alleged offensive conduct,” Pollack said. “The information was leaked to him by somebody in Iraq. Yet the United States obviously felt that it could pursue that as a criminal offense in the United States.”
