Trump suggests US taxpayers could reimburse oil companies for repairing Venezuelan infrastructure
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Donald Trump suggested that US taxpayers could fund the rebuilding of Venezuela’s infrastructure for extracting and shipping oil.
Trump acknowledged that “a lot of money” will need to be spent to increase oil production in Venezuela, but suggested the US government could pay American oil companies to do the work.
“A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue”, the president said.
The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, reportedly plans to meet representatives of Chevron, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil at the Goldman Sachs Energy, Clean Tech & Utilities Conference in Miami later this week.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the major oil companies might be much more reluctant than Trump says to invest in Venezuela, despite its large reserve of oil, in part because there’s so much uncertainty about who will be running the country.
“The oil industry is saying that they don’t know what Venezuela’s government is going to look like tomorrow,” the Journal’s Collin Eaton said in a podcast interview on Monday. “They need sort of a long, stable environment to invest in. So while President Trump has sort of come out and said that these oil companies are going to invest a lot of money in Venezuela, the details are unclear, and we may hear some answers this week as the administration continues to talk about this with oil companies.”
Venezuela produces on average about 1.1 million barrels of oil a day, down from the 3.5 million barrels a day produced in 1999 before a government takeover of the domestic industry.
Key events
Gunfire reported near Venezuelan presidential palace
Shots were fired near the Venezuelan presidential palace in Caracas on Monday night, witnesses and a source close to presidency told Agence France-Presse, the French news service. The news agency reported that a source said the situation was “under control”.
Multiple video clips posted on social media, which appeared to capture the sound of heavy gunfire and images of tracer fire in the sky, were geolocated to an area just north of the presidential compound by Blake Spendley, an open-source investigator for Hunterbrook Media who previously led investigations for the US Navy and Marine Corps.
Trump suggests US taxpayers could reimburse oil companies for repairing Venezuelan infrastructure
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Donald Trump suggested that US taxpayers could fund the rebuilding of Venezuela’s infrastructure for extracting and shipping oil.
Trump acknowledged that “a lot of money” will need to be spent to increase oil production in Venezuela, but suggested the US government could pay American oil companies to do the work.
“A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue”, the president said.
The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, reportedly plans to meet representatives of Chevron, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil at the Goldman Sachs Energy, Clean Tech & Utilities Conference in Miami later this week.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the major oil companies might be much more reluctant than Trump says to invest in Venezuela, despite its large reserve of oil, in part because there’s so much uncertainty about who will be running the country.
“The oil industry is saying that they don’t know what Venezuela’s government is going to look like tomorrow,” the Journal’s Collin Eaton said in a podcast interview on Monday. “They need sort of a long, stable environment to invest in. So while President Trump has sort of come out and said that these oil companies are going to invest a lot of money in Venezuela, the details are unclear, and we may hear some answers this week as the administration continues to talk about this with oil companies.”
Venezuela produces on average about 1.1 million barrels of oil a day, down from the 3.5 million barrels a day produced in 1999 before a government takeover of the domestic industry.
In an interview with Jake Tapper, White house advisor Stephen Miller reaffirmed the Trump administration’s position on Greenland becoming a part of the US, but didn’t offer any specifics about the role of the US military in seizing the territory.
The United States is the power of NATO, for the united stares to secure the arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and national interest, obviously Greenland should be a part of the United States…Nobody is gonna fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland, it doesn’t make any sense,” Miller told Tapper.
This interview came after Miller’s wife, Katie Miller posted an image of the Greenland with the American flag superimposed onto it to X. The image was captioned, “SOON”. Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen and the country’s ambassador to the US
Jesper Møller Sørensen has pushed back, arguing that the US has no right to Greenland.
I would therefore strongly urge that the United States stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people who have said very clearly that they are not for sale,” Fredriksen said in a statement on Sunday.
Senate judiciary committee leaders issue bipartisan statement on being excluded from Maduro briefing
Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate judiciary committee, and Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat, released a joint statement protesting the Trump administration’s decision to exclude them from the classified briefing on the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, despite the fact that the justification offered by the White House for the raid was the deposed Venezuelan leader’s indictment on drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges.
The statement reads:
“President Trump and Secretary Rubio have stated that this was a law enforcement operation that was made at the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) request, with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The Senate Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over DOJ, FBI and DEA, and all three agencies are led by individuals who our Committee vetted and processed. The Attorney General herself will be present at today’s briefing.
“There is no legitimate basis for excluding the Senate Judiciary Committee from this briefing. The administration’s refusal to acknowledge our Committee’s indisputable jurisdiction in this matter is unacceptable and we are following up to ensure the Committee receives warranted information regarding Maduro’s arrest.”
92-year-old judge overseeing Maduro trial in New York previously ruled against Trump on deportations
The federal judge overseeing the trial of Nicolás Maduro, the deposed Venezuelan president, and his wife, Cilia Flores, is a 92-year-old Clinton appointee who has previously ruled against the Trump administration, blocking its attempt to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador last year.
The US district court judge, Alvin Hellerstein, ruled last April that alleged Venezuelan gang members facing deportation under the Alien Enemies Act had to get an opportunity to challenge their deportations before being removed from the southern district of New York, where he has served since 1998.
Hellerstein, who was going into his freshman year at the Bronx high school of science when Donald Trump was born in Queens in 1946, also denied Trump’s effort to have his New York state fraud trial, over illegal payments to an adult film actor, moved to federal court.
The Forward, a newspaper that has tracked the fortunes of New York’s Jewish community since 1897, reports that Hellerstein has spoken about “the role his Jewish identity has played in his life and career”. In a 2023 video interview, Hellerstein described his work advocating for Soviet Jews. In 2016, his weekly tennis matches with three rabbis his age was the subject of a New York Times story.
In one case, the Forward noted, Hellerstein “declined to accept a guilty plea from Alejandro Orozco, a Mexican national who had unknowingly transported drugs hidden in a truck he was hired to drive. Hellerstein helped connect Orozco with an immigration lawyer, and the man later obtained US citizenship.”
Miranda Bryant
An attack by the United States on a Nato ally would mean the end of both the military alliance and “post-second world war security”, Denmark’s leader has warned, after Donald Trump threatened again to take over Greenland.
Fresh from his military operation in Venezuela, the US president said on Sunday the US needed Greenland “very badly” – renewing fears of a US invasion of the largely autonomous island, which is a former Danish colony and remains part of the Danish kingdom. Greenland’s foreign and security policy continues to be controlled by Copenhagen.
Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, warned on Monday that any US attack on a Nato ally would be the end of “everything”.
“If the United States decides to militarily attack another Nato country, then everything would stop – that includes Nato and therefore post-second world war security,” Frederiksen told Danish television network TV2.
Her comments came after Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, made a bracingly direct statement in which he urged Trump to give up his “fantasies about annexation” and accused the US of “completely and utterly unacceptable” rhetoric, declaring: “Enough is enough.”
Jeffries denounces Trump’s ‘outrageous’ claim that Congress would have leaked plan to attack Venezuela
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House, just told reporters in Washington that it was “outrageous” for Donald Trump to claim that his administration was justified in failing to notify Congress of the planned attack on Venezuela to prevent leaks to the media.
The administration had “a responsibility to notify Congress”, Jeffries said, “and in the context of the United States Constitution, it’s the Congress that has the sole power to declare war. So the Constitution isn’t a matter of inconvenience; it is a requirement.”
“There is no Trump exception to the United States constitution,” said the New York congressman, who hopes to be House speaker after the November elections. “And there’s no evidence that the Trump administration has ever presented of congressional leaders being briefed in a classified setting and that information then being leaked in a way that undermined America’s national security interests.”
Schumer attacks Trump for having ‘no plan’ for what comes next in Venezuela
Speaking on the Senate floor on Monday, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, attacked the Trump administration for having “no plan” for what comes next in Venezuela, and called Donald Trump’s vague statements that the United States will “run” the country a recipe for “chaos”.
“Maduro is a tyrant, nobody mourns what has happened to him,” Schumer said, in reference to that country’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, who was captured by US forces on Saturday. “But now the crucial question is what comes next for Venezuela and, more importantly, for the United States. Nobody really seems to know. The administration’s story keeps changing by the hour.”
There was, Schumer said, “no plan, no clarity: only chaos.”
“The danger in Venezuela is only beginning,” Schumer added. “Donald Trump has opened a Pandora’s box, and things will get out of hand very quickly. And if Donald Trump tries to do to Colombia and Greenland what he did in Venezuela, the disasters and consequences could compound exponentially.”
Reading from prepared remarks, the Democratic senator from New York tripped over his words several times, at one point referring to “the war in Viet-” before correcting himself to say “the war in Venezuela”.
“The next step for Congress is clear: we must stop Trump’s folly by invoking the War Powers Act,” Schumer said, before pledging to join a push later this week on a war powers resolution that could constrain Trump.
‘Maduro didn’t just tolerate the drug traffickers … he was one of them’: Senate Republicans celebrate arrest and detention of Maduro
Senate Republicans celebrated the arrest and detention of Nicolás Maduro. Calling the deposed Venezuelan leader a “known, indicted, narcoterrorist in league with drug traffickers killing Americans for profit”.
In a post on social media, GOP lawmakers in Congress’s upper chamber said that “Maduro didn’t just tolerate the drug traffickers or lose control of his territory—he was one of them.”
“Republicans are glad he’s gone – but Democrats are furious,” they added.
Trump administration to meet with top US oil executives – report
Following the capture, arrest and detention of Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration is set to meet with top US oil executives, according to a report from Reuters – citing a source familiar with the matter.
The aim to revitalize oil production comes after nearly two decades of control by Venezuela over US energy operations in the country.
According to Reuters, the three biggest US oil companies – Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron – have not yet had any conversations with the administration about Maduro’s ouster, per four oil industry executives familiar with the matter. This contradicts Trump’s statements over the weekend that he had already held meetings with “all” the US oil companies, both before and after the Venezuelan leader was seized.
Justo Robles
Reporting from outside the courthouse in Manhattan:
At a playground across the street from where Nicolás Maduro just pleaded not guilty for drug and weapon charges, Pedro Reyes said that the leader’s capture was welcome news.
Reyes claimed he was kidnapped and shot by Venezuelan military officers in 2014 in Táchira, a mountainous state near the border with Colombia. The Guardian was not able immediately and independently to verify details of Reyes’s account.
“He deserves to be detained and to pay for what his regime did to me, my family and my friends,” said Reyes in Spanish.
After the incident, Reyes said, he migrated along with his wife and first child to Argentina. In 2021, they crossed the US-Mexico border and asked for asylum. They are still awaiting a resolution for their case, Reyes added.
“Let’s be honest, we are happy that Maduro was detained, but this happiness is momentary. There are people still associated with Maduro in Venezuela and as long as they stay, the country will not be free. I already lost family members at the hands of this dictatorship, what guarantees that we will be safe, that my children will be safe if we go back? Nobody,” said Reyes.
The Swiss Federal Government has announced that Switzerland has frozen any “Swiss-based assets linked to Nicolás Maduro”.
In a statement, Swiss authorities said that the Swiss Federal Council had decided to freeze the assets held in Switzerland by Maduro and “other persons associated with him with immediate effect”.
“In doing so, the Federal Council aims to prevent an outflow of assets,” they said. “The asset freeze does not affect members of the current Venezuelan government.”
“Should future legal proceedings reveal that the funds were illicitly acquired, Switzerland will endeavour to ensure that they benefit the Venezuelan people,” the statement continued.
