Eighteen Suspects in a Foreign President’s Assassination Just Landed in Miami in Shackles

Gunmen shot Haitian President Jovenel Moise about a dozen times inside his bedroom and wounded his wife in July 2021.

Federal investigators now say part of that assassination plot was bankrolled with stolen pandemic relief loans meant for struggling Florida businesses.

Eighteen of the suspects just landed in the United States in blue jumpsuits to face a federal jury for it.

The FBI Says This Is the Biggest Prisoner Transfer in Its History

The eighteen defendants, Joseph Felix Badio and seventeen former Colombian soldiers, were flown from Port-au-Prince to Miami on a U.S. military aircraft on September 20, 2026.

FBI and Department of Homeland Security personnel guarded them the entire way.

They made their first appearance in federal court in the Southern District of Florida on Monday.

FBI Director Kash Patel did not undersell the moment: "Today, the FBI and our interagency partners executed the largest foreign transfer of custody in FBI history."

The transfer is the product of a five-year federal investigation into thirty total suspects tied to the killing of Moise, who was shot to death at his private residence in Port-au-Prince on July 7, 2021.

Badio, a former Haitian government official, allegedly gave the Colombian operatives their signals, armed them, and pointed them toward the cash and firearms inside the residence.

Four South Florida men already convicted in the same Miami courthouse in May 2026 are facing life sentences.

The Motive Was Money, Not Ideology

Prosecutors say the plot's goal was to violently remove Moise and install a successor who would hand the plotters lucrative Haitian government contracts.

FBI Special Agent Brett Skiles said the men were "seeking to profit from illicit financial opportunities and business contracts."

This was not a coup dressed up in principle.

Investigators say it was a business deal that ended with a president shot to death in his home.

They Funded a Presidential Assassination With Your Tax Dollars

Here is the detail that should make every American who filed for a Paycheck Protection Program loan in good faith furious.

Prosecutors say Coral Springs financier Keegan Harricharan fraudulently obtained roughly $840,827 in PPP loans starting in June 2020.

He then moved the money through his company, TNR Holding Group, to co-conspirator Walter Veintemilla, who is now one of the eighteen men sitting in a Miami jail.

Court records show $175,000 in fraud proceeds hit TNR Holding's account in a single ten-day stretch in May 2021 before it was wired out to fund the plot, with another $80,000 following in June, weeks before the assassination.

Harricharan pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twenty years in July 2026.

A federal prosecutor did not mince words about what that money actually bought: "This defendant did not simply commit fraud. He exploited pandemic relief programs meant to keep small businesses alive and laundered stolen taxpayer funds to advance" an assassination conspiracy.

FBI Miami built the case on U.S. soil because prosecutors say the conspiracy was organized and financed primarily in South Florida, not in Haiti.

U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones called the extradition "the next major phase in our pursuit of accountability for the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse."

Congress built the Paycheck Protection Program to keep small businesses and their workers afloat during a national emergency.

Prosecutors now say a slice of that money helped pay mercenaries who murdered a sitting head of state.

Twelve more suspects out of the original thirty remain outstanding.

A separate defendant, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, is scheduled to stand trial in the same Miami courthouse in the coming months.

The four men already convicted are looking at life in prison, and eighteen more just landed in Miami to find out if they are next.

Haiti has been a wreck for ages.

The country ought to stand as a cautionary tale for the United States.

The mainstream media tried to make the late Pat Robertson their whipping boy for his comments following the devastating 2010 earthquake that ravaged the Caribbean nation.

As NPR reported at the time, “on the ‘700 Club’ he said Haitians made a pact with the devil to be freed from their French colonizers in the 18th Century.”

That part wasn’t a mischaracterization on NPR’s part – it’s an accurate paraphrase.

But the Devil is in the details as they say and Robertson went on to add “And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor.”

Haiti was and still is desperately poor because they agreed to buy their freedom from the French at a staggering monetary cost – debt payments that weren’t cleared until this century.

While debt slavery is likely preferential in most peoples’ eyes to chattel slavery, the 18th century Haitian independence leaders who signed the deal, nevertheless traded one kind of slavery for another.

And the burden of those debt payments left the country so impoverished, and with such failing infrastructure that a magnitude 7.0 earthquake – which is big but far from a society-destroying event in most modern countries – basically put Haiti back into the stoneages.  

Nations in such chaos are viewed as massive opportunities by the Bill and Hillary Clintons and the rest of Jeffrey Epstein elites.

Will an earthquake in America a few decades, or a few days, from now wreak the kind of havoc on your kids and grandkids as the 2010 earthquake did on Haiti?

With the U.S. now over $40 trillion dollars in debt, that’s something every American ought to really start considering possible.

Sources:

• "Suspects in Haitian president's assassination transferred to Miami, accused of funding plot with COVID fraud," Fox News, September 2026.
• "Key Haiti suspect, 17 Colombians in Moïse's killing extradited to Miami ahead of trial," The Spokesman-Review, September 20, 2026.
• "18 arrested in slaying of Haitian president Moise, extradited to U.S.," UPI, September 20, 2026.
• "Fundraiser Connected to Assassination of Haitian President Sentenced to 20 Years for Money Laundering Scheme," U.S. Department of Justice, Southern District of Florida, July 2026.
• "Florida financier tied to Moïse assassination plot sentenced to 20 years in US prison," The Haitian Times, July 27, 2026.