Collin Anderson of the Washington Free Beacon highlights a key member of Nicolas Maduro’s legal team.
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.
