How to Remove a President Without Convicting Him

Call this a hypothesis, not a conclusion. But it is a hypothesis that explains the evidence more cleanly than the official narrative.

Assume, for a moment, that the objective is not conviction.

That single assumption makes the case suddenly coherent. The jurisdictional strain. The extraterritorial reach. The oddly assembled charge sheet. The military style seizure followed by the language of routine law enforcement. This does not look like a prosecution engineered to survive a hostile judge and a Manhattan jury. It looks like a mechanism designed to hold a person in place.

The gun charge is the giveaway.

Weapons possession in Venezuela is not a crime against the United States. No serious lawyer believes otherwise. The alleged conduct occurs entirely within a sovereign state, under that state’s own law, with no obvious US nexus. To include it anyway is not legal confidence. It is legal padding. The sort of charge you add when you need gravity, optics, and leverage, not when you expect it to carry a verdict.

In other words, the weakness is not hidden. It is tolerated.

On this reading, the charge sheet is not meant to be elegant. It is meant to be sufficient. Sufficient to justify detention. Sufficient to resist immediate release. Sufficient to keep the clock running while something else happens elsewhere.

Because once the man is removed, the rest becomes optional.

Motions can crawl. Counts can be narrowed. The gun charge can be dropped quietly later with no loss of face. The narcotics case can be trimmed to whatever survives appellate anxiety. None of this needs to end cleanly. It only needs to last long enough for political continuity to break.

That is the critical point. Power does not require conviction to neutralise. It requires absence at the moment decisions are made. Leaders who are detained, legally entangled, and physically elsewhere do not need to be disproved. They merely need to be unavailable while successors consolidate, recognition shifts, assets move, and alliances recalibrate.

Seen this way, even failure is survivable. A strong case would force a clean ending. This buys time instead. Acquittal years later is not restoration if the political landscape has already moved on. Release does not equal return. It equals irrelevance with paperwork.

The gun charge fits perfectly into that logic. It is not there to win. It is there to thicken the fog, to slow the process, to make bail harder, to justify continued detention. It is legal ballast, not legal substance.

This theory does not require brilliance or omnipotence. It does not assume a flawless plan. It assumes only that the actors involved understand one basic asymmetry. Courts move slowly. Politics does not. Once removal occurs, law is arguing uphill against time.

And if this theory is wrong, the alternative is worse. An improvised act of force, retrofitted with law, gambling that delay and narrative control will smother the consequences. Either way, this does not resemble justice pursuing guilt.

It looks like power exploiting procedure to manufacture irreversibility.

That is the theory. It remains a theory. But the inclusion of a charge so obviously strained that it cannot plausibly survive scrutiny is not a flaw in it. It is the tell.