WASHINGTON — The U.S. attorney in South Florida has ordered a broad-ranging inquiry into Cuba’s leaders and Communist Party officials for drug, immigration, economic and violent crimes with a goal of bringing fast indictments, according to three people with knowledge of his actions.

The move comes as President Donald Trump is ratcheting up his rhetorical assault on Cuba’s leadership, and has gone so far as to recently suggest that he might attack the island nation 90 miles off the Florida coast after he is finished with the Iran war.

Bringing criminal cases against Cuban leaders could provide a legal and political pretext for such action, just as the Justice Department’s indictment against Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, was used to justify his capture and extradition.

Leading the new effort in Florida is Jason A. Reding Quiñones, a relatively inexperienced federal prosecutor and Trump loyalist who is also overseeing a federal investigation into the fantastical “grand conspiracy” by Democrats that Trump has claimed, without evidence, was waged to destroy him.

Quiñones has convened a new working group, which includes prosecutors in his office, FBI agents, and officials with the Treasury Department, State Department, Health and Human Services Department, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Quiñones and his top deputy have visited headquarters in recent weeks to discuss their various investigations with top department brass, according to a senior administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Another Snatch-and-Grab?

If the administration does in fact seek charges against Cuba’s leaders to facilitate a snatch-and-grab operation inside Cuba like that against Maduro, it would be an extraordinary use of the criminal justice system to advance the White House’s geopolitical agenda. Federal indictments are not typically meant to be a pretext to remove foreign leaders from office, but rather to bring them to justice inside American courts.

While highly unusual, Maduro’s abduction from Venezuela by U.S. military forces took place only after he had been charged five years ago in a case in New York. Administration officials were able to point to the preexisting indictment as a rationale for going after Maduro as a fugitive from U.S. justice.

Last month, several Republican members of Congress pressed the department to renew its investigation into a 30-year-old incident involving the shooting down by Cuban security forces of planes operated by Cuban exiles in Miami.

Trump, speaking to reporters on Thursday, said it was “just a question of time” of when Cuba’s Communist leadership was either ousted or pressured to leave — despite the mounting challenges of an uncertain war against Iran that seems to be drifting beyond Trump’s stated aim of regime change.

“We want to finish this one first,” Trump said Thursday, referring to the Iran conflict.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer/Jefferson Siegel
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