Search Results for "Venezuela"

Three days after he left his post as the Trump White House's top Latin America official, Michael Jensen was on a private jet with a crypto billionaire looking for oil deals in Venezuela – following others who've bailed out of government jobs to cash in overseas.

Jensen had been senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council before starting June 1 as an operations executive at Primavera, a new energy company founded by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, a company spokesman confirmed to the Washington Post.

Ehrsam sits on Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and last month Primavera signed production agreements with PDVSA, Venezuela's state oil company....

A major Trump donor helped his firm land one of the administration’s most lucrative Venezuela oil deals, even though his own company says he lacked the expertise to negotiate it, according to a new report.

Reuters reported that two days after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Energy Secretary Chris Wright called John Addison, then a senior trader at commodities giant Vitol, and asked whether the firm wanted to sell Venezuela’s crude to global buyers.

“I thought that he was just going to call to get an update on the market,” Addison told Reuters. “The phone call went a different way.”...

President Donald Trump's touted "biggest oil deal in world history" with Venezuela faces legal and logistical problems likely to sink it.

The Guardian reported Saturday that nearly every major claim the Trump administration has made about the arrangement falls apart under scrutiny, from how long it lasts to the Pentagon's role in it. Venezuelan law caps oil development agreements at 25 years, not the 100 Trump has boasted about, and Venezuela's own government has put the term at 25.

"This is all just propaganda," Venezuelan legal expert Jose Ignacio Hernandez told The Guardian. "It cannot be implemented as announced by the administration."...

President Donald Trump's Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, made an admission during congressional questioning that caused complete shock on social media.

The admission came when Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) was grilling him about the U.S. acquisition of assets in Venezuela following the capture of longtime strongman leader Nicolas Maduro — an arrangement which, Bessent conceded, involved a lot more than just oil, and in a way that the U.S. government isn't even fully tracking.

“President Trump said … we’re taking in a lot of money, billions of dollars from Venezuela," said Casten. "He seemed to imply that we, the U.S. people, are taking in money to offset those costs. That would suggest flows to U.S. persons.”...

Will Saletan from The Bulwark unloaded on Thursday about President Donald Trump's new oil deal with Venezuela — a turn of events that, he said, lays bare how "absolutely disgusting" Trump's plot has been all along.

Trump, said Saletan, "said it more than doubles American oil reserves ... and he wrote this: 'One of the things I'm going to do with the Venezuelan oil is fill up the strategic national reserves,'" which were depleted severely by Trump's war with Iran. He claims that this oil is a "gift from Venezuela to the people of the United States."

Right-wing outlets aren't even trying to hide what this is anymore, said Saletan. They aren't claiming that Trump's operation to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro was about liberating the people, he added, leading him to conclude that it was always about oil....

House Republicans walked out of a closed-door State Department briefing this week visibly frustrated, learning that President Trump's celebrated Venezuelan oil deal likely won't move the needle on gas prices before voters head to the polls in November.

Assistant Secretary of State Juan Pablo Segura and policy planning director Jeremy Lewin addressed the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Monday, just as lawmakers began their final stretch of work before breaking to campaign for the midterms, The Washington Sun reported.

Rep. Jim Baird (R-IN) pressed the officials on whether the deal would help farmers currently paying record diesel prices near $6.28 a gallon. According to a source in the room, both officials indicated Venezuelan crude wouldn't reach American markets anytime soon, directly contradicting the administration's public framing....