The U.S. government’s delusional notion that it is the world’s sheriff has grown by leaps and bounds under the flailing, power-drunk, international-law-blind Trump administration.
On Aug. 7, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi hiked to $50 million the bounty that her Justice Department was offering “for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of [elected Venezuelan President] Nicolás Maduro for violating U.S. narcotics laws,” the State Department announced. (After Maduro was indicted in 2020 by a Manhattan federal court under the first Trump administration, the reward had been set at $15 million, then raised to $25 million by the Biden Administration.)
Five days after Bondi’s announcement, on Aug. 12, Jeanine Pirro, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, presided over a press conference announcing the release of a 30-page single-count indictment against Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, 48, the leader of the political party Viv Ansanm (Let’s Live Together) launched by a coalition of Port-au-Prince’s armed neighborhood groups, and Bazile “Fredo” Richardson, 48, Cherizier’s childhood friend, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen living in North Carolina. (Richardson, a trucking business owner, was arrested in Houston, TX on Jul. 23, 2025.)
The indictment alleges that Cherizier and Richardson pose an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security (!) by allegedly violating the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which authorizes the U.S. president to use “broad powers” to “protect” his country.
At the same time, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) announced “a reward offer under the Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program (TOCRP) of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction, in any country,” of Cherizier.
Pirro was from 2011 to 2022 a television judge (basically an entertainer like former-reality-show-star Donald Trump) who hosted the “Justice with Judge Jeanine” on the Fox News Channel. In March 2019, she was taken off the air almost two weeks following condemnation of her remark that U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar’s hijab may be “antithetical to the Constitution.”
What concretely are the violations alleged in the indictment?
1) The electronic sending of amounts, mostly as small as $25, $50, and $100, through unnamed money transfer companies to Cherizier.
2) Pirro also claims to have evidence of money transfers for $1,539 and $2,974 and $4,800 to unidentified “Haitian Persons”, which the indictment vaguely says are “for the benefit of Cherizier.”
3) The indictment goes on to cite several “messages” and “voice memos” in which Richardson tells Cherizier he knows of or has spoken to people who believe in Cherizier’s cause and are ready to contribute thousands of dollars. “CO-CONSPIRATOR 3 stated that ‘[w]e want to start a revolution in Haiti and are trying to collect funds,’” alleges the indictment. “‘There are two ways to do this. One is through Haitians living abroad and another is Haitians living inside Haiti. For Haitians living abroad, our proposition is to have 1,000 individuals each give $20 or having 1,000,000 Haitians abroad each give $1 dollar. For Haitians living inside Haiti, we propose to collect money from 1,000 people in each department. Each of these 1,000 people per department should give 5,000 Gourdes. With this money, they can buy pick-up trucks, weapons, ammunition, clothing to include t-shirts, boots, and hats. We want to change everything in Haiti.’”
“Ultimately, none of the contradictory reports provide concrete evidence of Jimmy Cherizier’s involvement, or that a massacre even took place.”
4) Other indictment points contain totally ambiguous accusations like the following: “In or around March 2024, at CHERIZIER’S direction, members of the Haitian diaspora in the United States made three wire transfers in the amount of $13,000, $6,000, and $9,000 to persons in Haiti, who then withdrew cash and provided the funds to CHERIZIER.”
All these examples are labeled “unusual and extraordinary threats” to the U.S. because the people sending the ridiculously small amounts of money to Haiti or spouting nebulous plans for “starting a revolution” had not filled out the required paperwork.
“At no time… did any person apply for or obtain the necessary licenses from OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control ]… to provide money or services to CHERIZIER, a sanctioned individual,” the indictment states. On Dec. 10, 2020, the U.S. Treasury Department’s OFAC had made Cherizier a “Specially Designated National” (SDN) thereby requiring any “U.S. individuals or entities” to not engage in financial transactions with him “absent approval from OFAC in the form of a license,” the indictment concludes.
Some Haitians, ignorant of the mechanics of the U.S. legal system, saw the indictment as some kind of proof of Cherizier’s guilt, when in fact it was merely a list of accusations which may well not be true. As Solomon Wachtler, Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals from 1985 to 1992, famously said, district attorneys can get grand juries to “indict a ham sandwich.” In other words, they don’t mean much.
In a short video statement, Cherizier immediately replied to the indictment. “If the FBI wants me, I’m here,” he said in English, a language he rarely uses. “I’m willing to collaborate with them on one condition. There can be no lies told. Bazile Richardson AKA Fredo is innocent. He has never sent any money to me to finance anything in Haiti. Stop with all those lies, and we can collaborate.”
The greatest irony is that Washington’s entire case against Cherizier hinges on the so-called “La Saline Massacre,” a dubious event concocted by notoriously deceitful “human rights” groups and for which no trial has ever been held.
“On Nov. 1, 2018, two armed groups began fighting in the Croix des Bossales market (Slaves Market) in the Port-au-Prince shanty town of La Saline,” explained journalist Dan Cohen in an exhaustive investigative article from October 2022. “The conflict culminated in a fierce gun battle on Nov. 13, 2018. By the time the fighting subsided, piles of dead bodies were strewn upon piles of garbage… This outbreak of violence, and the Nov. 13 battle, would become the central plank in the disinformation campaign targeting Cherizier. Yet there are few established facts regarding what exactly happened in La Saline, and several narratives, often contradictory, exist among various political sectors and currents of those who allege a massacre took place…. Ultimately, none of the contradictory reports provide concrete evidence of Jimmy Cherizier’s involvement, or that a massacre even took place.” Cherizier has repeatedly, consistently, and staunchly denied that he had anything to do with the fighting in La Saline in November 2018.
Journalist Travis Ross has also deeply researched the November 2018 violence in La Saline and concludes that the ensuing “human rights” reports, particularly those of Pierre Espérance’s National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH) and Marie-Yolène Gille’s Open Eyes Foundation (FJKL), “manufactured” a massacre and disingenuously pointed to Cherizier as its author. “Several locals believed the violence was strictly a result of gang warfare over control of the local market,” he wrote. “Jean Renaud Félix, the director of the Croix-des-Bossales market at the time of the attacks, also believes the La Saline attacks were not politically motivated,” but that the “human rights” reports about them were.
It is these sketchy “human rights” accounts, particularly that of the widely discredited and mistrusted RNDDH, that Pirro and other officials at the Aug. 12 press conference cited as fact.
“Barbecue was a police officer in Haiti, but he led many campaigns of violence against Haitians in Haiti, including the notorious La Saline attack in 2018,” Pirro stated. “Notorious because he both planned and participated in the killing of approximately 71 Haitians,” she said, using the RNDDH’s figure.
“Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising,” a three-episode documentary investigation by Haiti Liberté and Uncaptured Media, thoroughly investigates the so-called “La Saline Massacre” along with Cherizier’s supposed involvement in it and found both to be most likely the dishonest invention of “human rights” groups.
Pirro’s press conference also had statements from Darren Cox, the Acting Assistant Director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division; Ivan Arvelo, Assistant Director for Homeland Security Investigations; and Chris Lambert, Senior Bureau Official of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL).
Perhaps the most absurd aspect of Washington’s sanctions today on Cherizier and Richardson is its posturing as a defender of “human rights” while it is funding, enabling, and militarily participating with Israel in the on-going live-streamed genocide in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank. At the same time, the Trump administration is also muzzling, deporting, and terrorizing students in the U.S. who dare to protest and stand up to the greatest atrocity of the 21st century.
“I want to let the public know that anyone who was giving money to Cherizier… will be prosecuted,” Pirro concluded. “We will find them because they are supporting an individual who is committing human rights abuses, and we will not look the other way.”
