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We're from the US Gov and we're here to help take your stuff. You thought this was about "democracy?" LOLZ
Bessent told the committee Venezuela's oil money is "one of the largest assets ever to go on the US balance sheet."
The executive order the president signed on January 9 states that the money is "property of the Government of Venezuela," held by the United States "solely in a custodial and governmental capacity." You cannot hold another country's money in custody and call it your asset, because that is the difference between a bank and a thief.
Bessent said he "won't give out" the total. I found it in 15 minutes on Treasury's own daily cash statement, the one he wants to call a balance sheet when it flatters him. It is public record. So it is hard for me to believe he can't tell Congress how much.
So let me help him and Congress out. Attached is the Daily Treasury Statement for February 5, 2026, the month the Venezuelan money left Qatar. The State Department, which runs the fund, deposited $514 million in a single day. The prior two-year high for that line was $54 million. Since January it has taken in $14.5 billion against a normal year of $3.4 billion, roughly $11 billion more than it should have. About $3.5 billion has been documented going back to Venezuela. That leaves about $7.5 billion nobody has accounted for.
SO, we took a country's primary revenue stream at gunpoint, routed it through a bank in Qatar, then a Citibank account, handed the sales to two Swiss traders with federal bribery cases, put the Pentagon in business with a man the Justice Department once named in a $1.2 billion PDVSA laundering case, and declared the whole thing immune from American courts by decree. Okay....
A little more on the people we handed this to.
(1) Trafigura is the Swiss trading house that sells the oil and now carries Venezuela's gold to US refineries too. In March 2024 it pleaded guilty in a Miami federal court to bribing Brazilian officials and paid $126 million. That is a felony conviction less than two years old, and it was handed a no-bid contract to market another country's oil "at the request of the U.S. government."
(2) Vitol, the other trader, paid $135 million in 2020 under a deferred prosecution agreement for bribery in three countries. One of Vitol's senior traders gave $5 million to the president's super PAC, then stood in the White House on January 9 and told Trump that the "influence you have over the Venezuelans" would make sure he got what he wanted. Vitol had the first contract five days later.
(3) Alejandro Betancourt is the Venezuelan businessman the Pentagon just took a 35 percent stake alongside. His earlier company, Derwick Associates, won billions in no-bid power-plant contracts under Chávez. Federal prosecutors in Miami named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in a $1.2 billion scheme to launder PDVSA money. He hired Rudy Giuliani in 2019 to lobby the Justice Department about it. The AP reports that investigation was "paused earlier this year." Spain reopened its own case against him in June. He has never been charged and denies wrongdoing, and he now has the United States military as a business partner under a contract nobody outside the government has read.
(4) And David Rivera, a former congressman and Marco Rubio's old housemate, was convicted on May 1 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent after taking a $50 million contract from Citgo's parent company to lobby for normalizing relations with the Maduro government. Rubio testified at his trial. Rubio's State Department now signs off on every dollar that leaves the Venezuela account.
The president says we "paid for that war many times over" and that "to the victor belong the spoils." The executive order says it isn't our money. Bessent says it's our asset and won't say how big. Meanwhile Venezuela's acting president spent July writing to King Charles begging for gold in a London vault while we sat on eleven billion dollars of her country's oil revenue.
The written agreement Bessent promised Congress in February still has not been produced. When asked Tuesday when they'd get it: "I'll check with my staff."
Sure as heck looks like we are stealing from Venezuela and Congress doesn't have a clue, doesn't care, or both.
Calling Maduro "a crazy conspiracy theorist" for arguing the CIA was trying to overthrow its government shows is a long-standing CIA/media tactic. As CIA destabilizes and overthrows governments in every region, the US corporate media disparages anyone who says this as a "fringe conspiracy theorist."
When CIA helped engineer the overthrow of Brazil's elected government in 1964 (replaced by a pro-US military junta), the NYT maligned as anti-American crazies those (in Brazil and the US) who insisted the CIA was centrally involved. (Of course, such people objecting to the CIA role also got accused of "denying agency to the Brazilian people" (standard propaganda line still used now for those opposed to CIA regime-change efforts)).
Much of the CIA file on Brazil's 1964 coup was declassified and released a decade later. Almost all of it now is. The proof of key CIA involvement and directing of the coup under first JFK and then LBJ is overwhelming.
Indeed, even the US Govt admits it played a decisive role in Brazil's coup after spending a decade angrily denying it and having the NYT and TIME do so as well (this same cycle repeated itself, and still does, in multiple countries).
But it never matters: the next time someone says "the CIA is trying to regime-change country X," their friendly media call everyone "conspiracy theorists" until the full files are released the next decade.
So, unless I have missed something, I have heard no reports on the US bombing any Venezuelan drug boats since Maduroâs removal.
I guess the farce of taking out drug boats to protect US citizens has run itâs course since we seized the âprizeâ or maybe Venezuelan cartels just stopped manufacturing drugs altogether when they realized what a bad-ass Trump is.
