In its report on Trump’s social media claim that the US,
through a partnership with private business, [has] secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer
The WaPo provides details about how fucking stupid this deal is.
But deal points reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with people who were close to negotiations as the deal came together suggest that for the plan to succeed in producing oil in the amounts the administration projects, the U.S. government may ultimately need to invest significant amounts.
A list shared with The Post before the deal was announced noted 17 oil fields in which the U.S. would take a stake. Several of the fields lack any infrastructure or access to transport hubs to treat and move the crude. Those where such infrastructure does exist have fallen victim to years of neglect and theft of machinery.
Pumping oil from the fields could require investments of many billions of dollars and costly security plans to protect oil workers and production facilities in lawless and violent regions. The deal points reviewed by The Post say the U.S. government stake in the newly formed oil company will be split between equity ownership and guarantees that it will purchase oil produced by it at cost to refill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The US:
And that’s before you consider how renewables will have replaced petroleum by the time any of this can be developed.
WaPo also links their story, from Thursday, that hinted all this was coming. It describes how the US (including Colin McDonald, who playacts as Trump’s Fraud Task Force head), has cajoled multiple countries to drop money laundering investigations into their primary partner to make this happen, Alejandro Betancourt, and catalogs the several US cases where Betancourt has been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in money laundering and bribery.
Senior U.S. officials intervened in an international criminal investigation into a Venezuelan businessman who was enlisted by the Trump administration to help assert control over Venezuela’s government and oil industries, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The officials lobbied to resolve the case in Switzerland in a way that would avoid criminal charges and end travel restrictions against the Britain-based businessman, Alejandro Betancourt, and they have not acted on a Swiss arrest warrant against him, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
Instead, the United States has allowed Betancourt to enter the country repeatedly for meetings with the Trump administration, other people familiar with his travel said.
Betancourt, 46, in the past decade has faced multiple investigations, in Switzerland, Spain and the United States, into alleged money laundering, including whether he had a role in a loan arrangement that U.S. prosecutors say embezzled more than $1 billion from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.
As good as WaPo’s background story is, it doesn’t mention a few salient facts laid out in an earlier WaPo story, from 2019: Betancourt was financially floating Rudy Giuliani during the period when Rudy was working with corrupt Ukrainians and Russian spies to frame Joe and Hunter Biden.
When Rudolph W. Giuliani went to Madrid in August to confer with a top aide to the Ukrainian president and press for political investigations sought by President Trump, he also met with a previously unidentified client with very different interests.
While in Spain, Giuliani stayed at a historic estate belonging to Venezuelan energy executive Alejandro Betancourt López, who had hired Trump’s personal attorney to help him contend with a Justice Department investigation of alleged money laundering and bribery, according to people familiar with the situation.
A month later, Giuliani was one of several lawyers representing Betancourt in Washington. The lawyers met with the chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division and other government attorneys to argue that the wealthy Venezuelan should not face criminal charges as part of a $1.2 billion money-laundering case filed in Florida last year, said the people, who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
The criminal complaint alleges that top officials of the Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, elite business leaders and bankers conspired to steal money from the company and then launder it through Miami real estate purchases and other investment schemes.
Betancourt is not one of the eight men charged in the case, a group that includes his cousin. But two people familiar with the matter said that he is referred to in the criminal complaint as a uncharged co-conspirator, as previously reported by the Miami Herald.
And since, unsurprisingly, Trump credits his Secretary of State (along with the Fox News host running the Pentagon, yikes!) with negotiating this deal, you should remember that Marco Rubio was the target of corrupt plans for a similar deal in 2017, a scheme for which his one-time best friend is going to prison.
This deal does nothing to help Americans.
Indeed, it sucks Americans deeper into the Venezuelan swamp, without doing anything to help your average Venezuelan.
Worse still, it continues to redefine what used to be a country that aspired to serve the common good into a kleptocracy serving a few cronies propped up by repression.
The post Shocked, Shocked! To Find that Corruption Is Going on in a Trump Casino! appeared first on emptywheel.