Trump refuses to say.
Thom Hartmann in Common Dreams
Bessent agreed with Trump, saying
the oil and oil money we’ve seized from that country is “one of the largest
assets to ever go on the U.S. balance sheet.” Billions and billions of dollars.
So Casten asked him a simple question: Can you tell us who
controls that money and where it is? Can you confirm “whether or not
those [funds] are flowing to U.S. persons?”
Bessent’s answer
was a shocking single word: “No.” He ain’t talkin…
Did Trump take the oil and the money from the oil? Bessent
refuses to say. Trump refuses to say. Nobody, in fact, in the Trump regime will
tell us where that money is or who controls it or even who’s making the money
accrued on its interest.
Here’s what we do know:
Three days after Trump kidnapped President Maduro and his
wife, he went on his Nazi-infested social media site and wrote that Venezuela’s oil revenues would be controlled by
him personally “as President of the United States.”
Three days after that, he signed an executive order
declaring a “national emergency” involving that oil so no court or
creditor could touch the money, screwing the bondholders and oil companies to
which Venezuela owed
roughly $150 billion.
Then Trump started selling the oil we’d seized from
Venezuela. The first load, according to Reuters and Semafor, went to commodity
trading companies Vitol and Trafigura for about $500 million, groups that the Washington Post
said both carry histories of bribery schemes tied to oil sales.
And that money didn’t go to the Treasury account that was
described in Trump’s own executive order. Instead, it went to a bank account in Qatar, right after that country’s leaders
gave him a $400 million jet. A senior official explained to Semafor that Qatar was chosen as a
“neutral location” where money “can flow freely” without risk of seizure.
Senator Elizabeth Warren
was outraged, and told the world what most of us were thinking at the time:
“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an
offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the
American military. That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be
attracted to.”
In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified
to the Senate that $300 million had been sent to Venezuela to cover government
payroll needs and another $200 million was “still sitting” in Doha. He referred
to the entire operation as “novel” and “a short-term mechanism.”
But a month later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on CNBC that the account had been closed and no more
money would be flowing to or through Qatar…and nobody has identified where it
went, or where it is, since then.
Where’s the money?
House Foreign Affairs committee ranking member Gregory Meeks called it “an offshore slush fund.” Bessent, questioned by Casten back in February refused to say which accounts the Treasury Department was even using, even though Trump’s executive order had named him/Treasury as the custodian for the funds. Casten and Senator Chris Van Hollen again demanded to know where the money was in March, and were again stonewalled. And then again this week.
Meanwhile, the pile of money is growing, particularly given
the oil crisis provoked by Trump’s idiotic war against Iran. Using Bloomberg
tanker-tracking data, the Council on Foreign Relations published an April estimate that:
“In the first four months of the United States exerting
control over Venezuela’s oil exports, almost one hundred million barrels of oil
worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no
transparency and minimal oversight.”
A State Department official testified to Congress back in
April that around $3 billion had gone back to Venezuela, but Trump boasted in July that the US had sold more than $13 billion
in stolen Venezuelan oil and suggested he could divert those funds to the
American military or anywhere else he wanted.
Back in June, Marco Rubio tried to assuage Congress’
concerns by saying that accounting firm KPMG “audits every disbursement.” But
when the libertarian Reason Magazine dug into it in August they found that neither the agreements nor the audits have been published.
And the so-called “Transparent Sovereignty” website the
Venezuelan government set up to show the world its oil transactions only lists
one single sale. Apparently, Trump is not even telling them what he’s done with
their oil, or where their money went.
And it’s not just oil. In March, Interior Secretary Doug
Burgum flew a planeload of American mining executives to Caracas
and came home bragging about having made off with over $100 million in gold. He set up a deal to sell it to
reportedly bribe-friendly Trafigura with the proceeds going into, well, nobody
knows where.
This is an old script that Trump appears to be following
here, one many corrupt petrostates pioneered long ago.
For example, in 2014 Nigeria’s central bank governor, Lamido
Sanusi, accidentally revealed to his Senate that roughly $20 billion in oil
revenue had never made it into the national treasury. President Goodluck
Jonathan’s response was to fire him and call the money a “phantom.” When
PriceWaterhouseCoopers finally audited the books, it found at least $1.48 billion was simply gone.
I’ve done international relief work in some of the most
corrupt nations in the world, been offered bribes and threatened for not taking
them, and the pattern I’m seeing here is eerily familiar. They never announce
the looting; they just stop letting you know where anything went or who ended
up with it. Most people figure that it must be okay since it’s not being
reported or discussed, and the conversation dies away.
So, here we are. Trump:
— announced that he’d taken the oil,
— then that he’d taken the money from the sale of the oil and put it in a bank
with the country that had given him a free 747 jet,
— hired traders with bribery records,
— refused to publish the contracts,
— put his own hand-picked cabinet members in charge of both the disbursements
and oversight, and
— then sent Bessent to Congress to say, “No” when asked if we could please,
please know where it’s all gone.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress
seem to have developed a sudden case of lockjaw.
Congressmen Casten and Joaquin Castro have introduced into
the House the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act to force the GAO
to audit the Qatar account and whatever’s followed it. Republicans refuse to
let it out of committee, and Mike Johnson won’t
give it a chance on the floor.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
