Machado Maria
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GOT NOBEL FOR WHAT? fam huge slave holders; sabotage campaign?
ANTI-COMMIE?
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TRUMP CALLS DELSI BY 1ST NAME?!
AN 7 26
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has a deputy he can't seem to rein in, seven senior officials told Axios.
According to the report, Chris Landau, Rubio's second at the State Department, is secretly working to undermine President Donald Trump in Venezuela, where his father once served as the ambassador.
“There’s a widespread belief that Landau went rogue,” said one Axios source. “And the evidence supports that belief.” Another staffer added: “Marco isn’t happy” with the deputy over the move.
After two earthquakes hit the Venezuelan capital Caracas on June 24, killing over 3,500 people and injuring thousands, exiled opposition leader María Corina Machado tried to get back to Venezuela to help. The Trump administration stopped her both times, despite her loyalty to Trump.
Machado was once an ally of Trump world, but Axios described her relationship with the White House as strained. It could come from the fact that she won the Nobel Peace Prize last year instead of Trump. She donated the medal to him after he complained so relentlessly that Norway was fearful Trump would come after their country.
After he staged a kidnapping mission in Venezuela to seize President Nicolás Maduro, Trump handed the top spot to Maduro's VP, Delcy Rodriguez, instead of giving it to the opposition leader.
The Rubio aide has a close relationship with Machado’s team.
“He’s eerily incapable of saying anything positive” about Rodriguez's interim government and certainly there's nothing “negative about Machado.”
Machado called Landau and other officials in the administration after the earthquake, requesting help with getting her back to the country.
One person described it as “forum-shopped,” a reference to those who search for the perfect person to give them what they want. And "Landau was happy to help.”
Landau spoke with the Netherlands ambassador, who said he would help get her to Venezuela by going through the Dutch island of Curaçao. The ambassador then checked with other officials and found she hadn't been cleared to travel and lacked a Venezuelan passport. Her plane was forced to return on June 25, as she learned mid-flight that she couldn't enter the country.
Axios said that she eventually spoke to Rubio who mentioned the existing U.S. policy. Instead of that being the end, Landau also “then miscommunicated the same sentiment a second time to a second foreign official," the report said.
So, on June 26, Landau told Panama’s foreign minister that he was arranging Machado’s return through their country. Machado was able to land and a few days later tried to make her way to Curaçao, but she was blocked again. Her next option may be to fly into Colombia and cross the Venezuelan border via roads or trains.
Landau swore that at no point did he misrepresent U.S. policy on Venezuela in any of the conversations he had with international leaders.
The State Department gave a statement to Axios, saying they all remain “in lockstep behind President Trump and Secretary Rubio in advancing the president’s foreign policy agenda.”
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The Miami Trial Exposing Foreign Influence In Trumpland
Inside a $50 million Venezuelan lobbying deal and a court battle ensnaring White House power brokers — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and chief of staff Susie Wiles.
Luke GoldsteinShareFollow *The Lever* On Google
At every stage in Marco Rubio’s political ascent, David Rivera has been by his side.
Twenty years ago, the two Miami-raised Cuban-American Republicans earned the nicknames “Batman and Robin” as they rose to power in the Florida House of Representatives. When Rubio sought the speaker’s gavel, Rivera, known as Rubio’s “enforcer,” whipped the necessary votes. The young legislators even put down a mortgage together for a Tallahassee bachelor pad near the state Capitol.
Later, when Rubio was debating whether to launch a long-shot bid for the U.S. Senate, Rivera convinced him to run and campaigned for him across Florida. And when Rubio decided to propose to his now-wife, Rivera helped him pick out the engagement ring.
This month, the two will be by one another’s side once again — except this time on opposite sides of a courtroom.
Rivera is standing trial in Miami federal court for allegedly acting as a foreign agent on behalf of Venezuela, and Rubio, now secretary of state, is scheduled to testify as a government witness against him.
The blockbuster case hasn’t just ensnared Rubio, a central architect of President Donald Trump’s recent overthrow of the Venezuelan government. It provides a rare glimpse into a constellation of powerful figures in Trump’s orbit — including his White House chief of staff — who have profited from shaping U.S. policy on Venezuela, potentially without always disclosing the true nature of their work.
Now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, left, talks to reporters as David Rivera looks on. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)
Alongside Rubio, the cast of characters in the case includes a Florida oilman currently advising Trump on Venezuela policy; former Trump senior counselor Kellyanne Conway; a powerful Republican congressman code-named “Sombrero”; a notorious player in the Iran-Contra scandal; a convicted cocaine trafficker with cartel ties; the legal counsel for Jeffrey Epstein’s associate, Ghislaine Maxwell; and even Venezuela’s deposed president, Nicolás Maduro.
Filings in the case, alongside those in related lawsuits and countersuits, hint at hundreds of pages of unreleased documents detailing illicit business networks running from Caracas, Venezuela, to Miami and Washington, D.C. The limited records available describe clandestine operations, government bribes, multimillion-dollar kickbacks, drug smugglers, FBI informants, and secret deals involving Venezuela’s acting president.
The biggest bombshell of all? Documents presented by defense attorneys indicate that Rivera may not have been the only unregistered foreign agent working for Venezuela. According to a subpoena and a judicial decision, representatives of an ascendant lobbying firm in D.C. may also have been hired to promote the Venezuelan government’s interests without the proper disclosures. That includes one of Trump’s top officials: Susie Wiles, his chief of staff.
The trial — and its revelations about foreign influence — is poised to bedevil the White House, even as it tries to move on from its Venezuela ventures to its next regime-change operations in Iran. Under Trump’s increasingly hawkish second administration, the foreign lobbying industry has been booming, with new foreign-agent registrants reaching record highs over the past year.
Legal insiders in Miami interviewed by The Lever never expected the Justice Department’s case against Rivera, initiated in 2022 during the Biden administration, to reach trial under Rubio’s watch. Many still anticipate it will end in a sweetheart deal, given the Trump administration’s freewheeling approach toward pardoning allies.
“This Trump DOJ has been notorious for dropping cases and giving pardons, pointing the finger at the Biden administration, claiming this is some sort of witch hunt,” said Joseph DeMaria, a former prosecutor with the Justice Department’s organized crime strike force who is now a Miami-based defense attorney familiar with the Rivera case. “The question is, why wait until the eve of the trial for this one?”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on the case. But whichever route it chooses, the government is caught in a bind.
Dropping the case — and appearing to go soft on an alleged Venezuelan foreign agent just as government prosecutors build their narco-terrorism case against the country’s former leader and reportedly prepare corruption charges against his replacement — could spark a media firestorm.
Keeping the case alive, however, could expose the administration’s inner circle to scrutiny and potentially damning revelations.
A $50 Million Mystery
By the time Rubio and Rivera sold their Tallahassee home in 2015 after facing foreclosure over disputed bank payments, Rivera had become a political liability.
During their four terms together in the Florida state legislature, Rubio harnessed the flair and showmanship of political theater. Rivera was the workhorse.
A power broker with meticulous attention to detail, Rivera wielded political muscle behind the scenes to pass landmark legislation on projects ranging from the buildout of the Port of Miami tunnel to a free trade agreement with Colombia. An inveterate policy wonk, Rivera would fondly cite arcane provisions from these measures years later.
But alongside those accomplishments came accusations of graft. In Tallahassee, Rivera garnered a reputation as a “Nixonian” political operator for the lengths he would go to win. He once rear-ended a truck carrying incriminating campaign leaflets from his political opponent, according to a 2002 police report.
By the time Rivera lost his reelection for U.S. Congress in 2013 after serving one term, he had been plagued by so many scandals that colleagues described his behavior as “pathological.” And some of his schemes reportedly implicated Rubio.
In the 2000s, the FBI investigated Rivera for a variety of transgressions, although it never brought charges. Among other matters, agents examined whether the legislator accepted bribes from gambling industry executives seeking to block Native American tribes from expanding their casino operations.
In a separate incident, both Rivera and Rubio faced scrutiny for voting to exonerate a fraudulent investment company that wagered on life insurance policies held by elderly and infirm AIDS patients after the two lawmakers received thousands of dollars in donations from a political action committee cofounded by the head of the operation.
Soon after, federal authorities investigated the company for allegedly laundering drug cartel money, eventually shutting it down and sending its top executive to prison.
In 2017, the Federal Election Commission filed a lawsuit against Rivera, alleging that he financed a straw candidate to run against his Democratic opponent in the 2012 primary for Florida’s 25th district in an unsuccessful effort to damage his electoral prospects. After pursuing the matter for years, regulators dropped the case at the start of 2025.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment regarding Rubio and Rivera’s long-standing friendship and other matters. But for years, despite the slew of controversies, Rubio publicly defended his old roommate as he rose through the Republican ranks.
In 2022, however, Rivera faced charges that were far more difficult to overlook.
That year, federal prosecutors arrested Rivera and charged him — along with a fellow political consultant, Esther Nuhfer — with working for Venezuela in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires individuals and organizations to register with the Department of Justice when engaging in U.S. political activity on behalf of foreign governments.
A graphic illustrating Marco Rubio and David Rivera’s relationship. (Source: The Lever)
Enacted in 1938 in response to rising Nazi propaganda in the United States, the Foreign Agents Registration Act requires more stringent disclosures than ordinary lobbying, since foreign clients may have national interests that conflict with those of the United States.
“The question under the law is whether the benefit [of the lobbying] is purely private, divorced from a benefit or control by a foreign government or party,” said Joshua Rosenstein, a lawyer at the Washington firm Sandler Reiff, which advises clients on compliance with lobbying and ethics laws. “The greater the involvement of a foreign government or political party, the less likely it is that you can shoehorn your activities under an exemption.”
The statute also applies to “a person whose activities are directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed, or subsidized” by a foreign principal.
According to the Justice Department’s indictment of Rivera, the problems originated in 2017, when he began lobbying on behalf of Citgo, the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.
For his work, Citgo paid Rivera’s consulting firm $50 million, a massive sum of money for a single lobbying firm. For comparison, the entire U.S. oil and gas industry spent just over $120 million on federal lobbying in 2022.
A graphic illustrating the size of David Rivera’s Citgo lobbying contract. (Source: The Lever)
Federal prosecutors allege that Rivera’s lobbying contract was actually a front for a foreign-influence campaign designed to avoid registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to conceal the full scope of the operation.
According to the indictment, Rivera was operating as an unregistered foreign agent to normalize relations between Venezuela and the U.S. — two countries that have been adversaries since socialist leader Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999.
Rivera was allegedly working for representatives of the Maduro government, which took power after Chávez’s death in 2013. Among the officials involved, prosecutors say, was then-Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who now serves as Venezuela’s president.
“It was the purpose of the conspiracy for the defendants to unlawfully enrich themselves… in an effort to influence United States foreign policy towards Venezuela and to conceal these efforts by failing to register under FARA as agents of the Government of Venezuela,” the indictment reads.
Rivera allegedly used his political connections as a longtime Republican lawmaker to arrange meetings between Venezuelan power brokers and U.S. officials.
According to prosecutors, those meetings included a sit-down with Rubio as well as a meeting in Caracas between Maduro and Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who represents the oil-rich Lone Star State, which has financial interests in Venezuela’s mammoth oil reserves. At the time, Sessions chaired the House Rules Committee, which plays a pivotal role in deciding what legislation receives votes on the House floor.
Kellyanne Conway, a senior counselor to Trump during his first term, also participated in several of the meetings, according to text messages included in the indictment.
Sessions and Conway could not be reached for comment.
In text message exchanges cited by prosecutors, Rivera and his associates used pseudonyms to obscure the specifics of these meetings. The Texas congressman was referred to as “Sombrero,” while millions of dollars were called “melones.” Their code name for Maduro was “El Guaguero,” a reference to the president’s early career as a bus driver.
These 2017 and 2018 meetings— some reported at the time — came at a fraught moment in U.S.-Venezuela relations. Inside the Trump administration, officials were split over Venezuela policy, including proposals to tighten sanctions or normalize U.S. business ties.
Officials ultimately chose the former, ramping up sanctions in 2017 and again in 2020.
At the end of 2025, Rivera’s defense team subpoenaed Rubio to testify about those meetings. Federal prosecutors subsequently decided to call Rubio themselves, apparently concluding that his testimony would strengthen the government’s case.
Rivera, whose lawyers refused to make him available for an interview with The Lever, denies any wrongdoing. His attorneys have argued in court filings that Rivera, a longtime critic of Venezuela’s communist government, was working to undermine Maduro, not help him.
“We confidently believe that the evidence proves the opposite of what the government has alleged,” Rivera’s lawyers wrote in a December letter to the State Department requesting Rubio’s testimony.
“Specifically, then Senator Rubio and Mr. Rivera were focused only on their support for the Opposition [political leaders] in Venezuela, on sanctions against the Maduro government, and on removing Maduro as head of state in Venezuela.”
The Tycoon, The Trafficker, And The Trump Whisperer
As part of their defense, Rivera’s attorneys appear ready to suggest that the foreign-agent violations leveled against their client could just as easily be applied to another political operative: Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff.
To make their case, Rivera’s lawyers are zeroing in on two businessmen named in the indictment: a wealthy Venezuelan media mogul named Raúl Gorrín and a convicted cocaine trafficker named Hugo Perera.
Court documents claim that Gorrín, the politically connected head of a Caracas-based media company called Globovisión, helped orchestrate the alleged foreign-agent operation and served as a go-between for Rivera and the upper echelons of the Venezuelan government.
According to Rivera’s indictment, Gorrín took part in several of the meetings brokered by Rivera, including a sit-down with Rubio. Rivera also reportedly tried to use Gorrín’s private jet for the rendezvous with Conway.
An employee at Globovision works at the channel’s headquarters in Caracas, Venezuela. (AP Photo/Leslie Mazoch)
Gorrín, who was sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2019 for his purported involvement in foreign bribes and money laundering, was reportedly paid handsomely for his work.
In 2020, Citgo filed a lawsuit against Rivera for breach of contract. According to the suit, Rivera paid $4 million of his $50 million contract fee to Gorrín as a kickback for helping him land the arrangement. Rivera apparently funneled the money through Gorrín’s Miami-based yacht company.
The Lever did not receive a response from Globovisión for a request for comment from Gorrín.
The Citgo lawsuit also alleges Rivera paid $5 million to another subcontractor for help arranging the Citgo contract: Perera, a Miami real estate developer who was convicted in the 1990s for his role in a drug-smuggling operation run by the Cali Cartel in Colombia.
Perera’s name is notably absent in the government’s indictment, and he’s agreed to act as a cooperating witness against Rivera at trial. In retaliation, Rivera has countersued Perera for allegedly violating their confidentiality agreement. Rivera has also claimed in a court deposition that the FBI told him that Perera was an informant.
Perera, who now runs a Miami real estate company, did not respond to a request for comment.
At the same time that Gorrín and Perera were working with Rivera, court documents indicate that both men were engaged in related activities for Ballard Partners, a powerful U.S. lobbying firm that Wiles co-led at the time.
In 2017, the first year of the alleged foreign-agent scheme involving Rivera, Ballard Partners also registered to lobby on behalf of Gorrín’s Globovisión, seeking to expand the network’s presence on U.S. television platforms. Ballard earned $450,000 from the contract, making Globovisión the firm’s third-largest client that year.
Ballard’s work for Gorrín appears to have been extensive. In a subpoena letter sent to the White House requesting Wiles to testify in the upcoming trial, Rivera’s defense team describes roughly 400 pages of documents related to Wiles’ lobbying work gathered during the discovery phase of the case.
Court filings also reference numerous emails exchanged between Gorrín, Wiles, and other Ballard lobbyists. One of those lobbyists was Otto Reich, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela who previously ran the interagency office that helped coordinate the Iran-Contra weapons sales during the Ronald Reagan administration.
Other Ballard emails went to Harry Sargeant, an oil executive who is currently advising Trump on his post-regime-change efforts in Venezuela. (Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, began working at Ballard Partners in 2019 after serving as Florida’s attorney general, though she is not referenced in the correspondence described in the filings.)
Based on these email exchanges, Rivera’s lawyers also claim Perera was simultaneously working for Ballard while also serving as a subcontractor for Rivera.
“Discovery documents show that Hugo Perera, an important government witness in the case, was involved in these pro-Venezuelan activities through Ballard Partners at the same time the government has alleged that Mr. Rivera and Ms. Nuhfer were supporting pro-Maduro efforts on behalf of Venezuela,” the attorneys wrote.
A graphic showing how Venezuelan oil money moved through a network of Washington power brokers. (Source: The Lever)
“I Happen To Know That My Government Wants A Way Out”
Rivera’s lawyers do not accuse Wiles or her Ballard colleagues of illegal conduct. But their filings suggest the government’s legal standard for charging Rivera could potentially implicate a far wider circle of MAGA operatives — including the president’s chief of staff.
No federal records show that Wiles or Ballard Partners ever registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for any Venezuelan entity.
“We’re not taking a position on that [legal question] in the case,” said Ed Shohat, one of the defense attorneys representing Rivera.
Ballard Partners did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But the firm has publicly maintained that it complied with all foreign and domestic lobbying laws and that its work related only to Globovisión’s commercial interests in the U.S. The lobbying firm dropped Gorrín as a client in 2018, amid a federal investigation that would lead to U.S. sanctions against him the following year.
“Ballard Partners’ work for Globovisión involved Globovisión’s efforts to expand its TV network into the U.S. market,” Brian Ballard, the founder of Ballard Partners, said in a statement to the Miami Herald.
But a key document in the Rivera case obtained by the Miami Herald appears to suggest that Ballard’s work for Gorrín may have gone beyond strictly commercial interests.
In 2017, Ballard reportedly drafted a memo for Gorrín to provide to Trump, though he ultimately never delivered it. The letter apparently outlined a proposal to mend strained U.S.-Venezuela relations by offering Maduro a path out of the country in exchange for a transition in leadership. As described by the Miami Herald, the document did not directly relate to, or mention, Globovisión’s access to U.S. markets or other commercial interests.
“I happen to know that my government wants a way out, a way to save their skins and fortunes,” the draft letter from Gorrín read. “The opposition, on the other hand, wants a way in but is not unified in how to achieve its goals.”
Should Ballard Partners’ work on the Gorrín letter — or its other lobbying efforts — have required the firm to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? That’s likely impossible to determine without additional information about Globovisión’s relationship with the Venezuelan government.
“An exemption [to FARA] would be available, provided the client (Globo) isn’t directed/controlled by a foreign government or political party, and the principal beneficiary of the work wasn’t a government or political party,” said Rosenstein, the lobbying lawyer. “That’s a factual question.”
According to Rosenstein, foreign lobbying involves many legal gray areas, in part because the Justice Department has prosecuted relatively few cases, leaving the law with limited judicial precedent. Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Trump Justice Department has curtailed enforcement of foreign corruption and lobbying laws.
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A graphic illustrating where key figures connected to the alleged Venezuelan lobbying network are based. (Source: The Lever)
The hundreds of pages of Ballard records described by Rivera’s attorneys could shed light on the matter, but the documents may never become public. Last month, a federal magistrate judge in Florida’s Southern District Court granted a Justice Department petition allowing Wiles to avoid testifying at Rivera’s trial, thereby permitting related documents to remain under seal.
But in his ruling, the judge made a surprising admission.
“To be clear, no one disputes that Ballard Partners registered under FARA and dealt with Gorrín openly,” wrote Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres.
Torres’ office refused to comment. But if Torres is correct, it would mean that — despite no publicly available record of the filing — Trump’s chief of staff previously worked as a registered foreign agent for a government the U.S. recently moved to overthrow.
Under Pressure
Miami insiders say Rivera’s aggressive defense strategy isn’t just legal maneuvering ahead of trial; it’s also a political effort to pressure the Trump administration to drop the case.
That campaign includes issuing subpoenas to a striking list of high-profile witnesses, including not just Rubio, but also Conway and Sessions. Rivera’s attorneys even subpoenaed Maduro, Venezuela’s deposed president, who is currently awaiting his own trial on U.S. narco-terrorism charges. Maduro’s attorneys resisted the subpoena, saying their client would plead the Fifth.
Former U.S. Rep. David Rivera speaks with media outside Miami federal court in Miami, Dec. 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Joshua Goodman)
While Miami defense lawyer Joseph DeMaria believes some of these witnesses could provide crucial testimony for Rivera’s defense, he also notes the political optics of such subpoenas.
“A lot of this strategy is political — to try to put pressure on the Trump administration to leave Rivera alone,” said DeMaria. ”Depending on how the judge rules on [the defense’s requests for testimony], that could lead them to wanting to make a deal with Rivera.”
Rivera’s legal team has a track record of exploiting political leverage when evidence-based legal defenses don’t pan out in the courtroom. One of Rivera’s attorneys is David Markus, a renowned Miami defense lawyer who also represents Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s associate and convicted sex trafficker.
“A lot of this strategy is political — to try to put pressure on the Trump administration to leave Rivera alone.”
As Maxwell’s counsel, Markus has openly proposed a deal with the Trump administration in which his client would receive “clemency” in exchange for being allowed to speak “fully and honestly” about whether the president was involved in any potential sex crimes, or the crimes for which she was convicted.
In a *Vanity Fair*interview about his work, Markus embraced the ethos of a defense attorney: “I love representing the underdog.”
If David Rivera is an underdog, he’s an underdog with powerful friends in Washington — some of whom may soon be called to testify.
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AN 1 26
President Donald Trump met with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado this week, who election monitors said was the rightfully elected president in the 2024 election. But after arresting Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump allowed Vice President Delcy Rodríguez take over.
The Associated Press revealed that she has a history of investigations with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), topping nearly a dozen.
Documents obtained show that in 2022, Rodríguez was rated a “priority target,” a level that is typically reserved for suspects the DEA believes have a “significant impact” on the drug trade. Three current and former DEA agents spoke to the AP about the documents.
There is a considerable intelligence file on Rodríguez with details dating back to at least 2018 under Trump's first administration. It lists her "known associates and allegations ranging from drug trafficking to gold smuggling."
A confidential informant told the DEA in 2021 that the now-acting president was using "Caribbean resort of Isla Margarita 'as a front to launder money.'" The records also show that as recently as 2024, she was working with Maduro's accused "bag man" Alex Saab, who was arrested by the U.S. in 2020, also under the Trump administration.
Investigations into Rodríguez have popped up in field offices like Paraguay, Ecuador, Phoenix and New York, the AP reported. However, the documents did not deal the specifics or reasoning behind the probes.
“She was on the rise, so it’s not surprising that she might become a high-priority target with her role,” former federal prosecutor Kurt Lunkenheimer, out of Miami, told the AP. He's handled many cases involving Venezuela. “The issue is when people talk about you and you become a high-priority target, there’s a difference between that and evidence supporting an indictment.”
Trump has referred to Rodríguez as a “terrific person," and said that she's in "close contact" with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials.
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Norway seethes after Nobel laureate slammed for giving Trump her award
AN 1 26
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Economist Paul Krugman mocks Trump for blackmailing Nobel laureate into handing over medal
AN 1 26 DENMARK SAID SHE COULD NOT TRANSFER IT
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AN 1 26
After U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and transported him to a federal detention center in New York City, U.S. President Donald Trump gave his support to Vice President Delcy Rodríguez — not opposition leader María Corina Machado. Rodríguez, an ally of Maduro and the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, is now the South American country's acting president.
Supporters of Machado, a Nobel laureate, were hoping to see her give her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump — the goal, according to Daily Beast reporter Tom Latchem, being getting goal to endorse Machado as Venezuelan president.
Trump endorsed that idea during a Thursday night, January 8 appearance on Fox News. The U.S. president told longtime Fox News host Sean Hannity, "I've heard that she wants to do that. That would be a great honor…. I've stopped eight wars."
But according to the Norwegian Nobel Institute, rules forbid Machado to give someone else her prize.
A Nobel spokesperson told the Daily Beast, "A Nobel Prize can neither be revoked nor transferred to others. Once the announcement of the laureate(s) has been made, the decision stands for all time. As for the prize money, the laureate(s) are free to dispose of it as they see fit."
Latchem notes that Nobel's "organization’s refusal to bend its own rules" will "be a disappointment not just to Trump, but also, to some of his loyalists, who are reported to have lobbied for Machado to hand the president the prize he so covets."
Latchem reports, "Fox News presenter Rachel Campos-Duffy, the wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, both 54, is reported to have been working both publicly and privately to get Machado to offer the prize to Trump when they meet next week, according to political journalist Rachael Bade's Substack. Campos-Duffy is said to have worked hard to get Machado the Oval Office audience where she would 'give Trump her Nobel Peace Prize,' Bade writes, saying the push has come from Trump World insiders who know the president is fixated on the award."
*Read Tom Latchem's full article for the Daily Beast at this link (subscription required).
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am prospect
The $30 Billion Identity Theft of Venezuela
How Juan Guaidó sucked a weary nation dry, and primed it for the current U.S.-led assault
by Maureen TkacikNovember 26, 2025
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In 2018, Henri Falcón tried to save Venezuela. As governor of the populous western state of Lara, Falcón had drawn overwhelming electoral victories and admiring profiles in the Western press for his humble demeanor, military precision, and reputation for finishing infrastructure projects on time and under budget. (“Efficient Revolution” was one of his campaign slogans.) But as oil prices and U.S. economic sanctions plunged the country into a harrowing depression, his ambitions grew humbler. “The overriding priority of my administration will be to make sure that not one Venezuelan child goes to bed without having eaten,” he wrote in a somber New York Times op-ed announcing his presidential candidacy.
Just before the op-ed went to press, Falcón was called to a meeting at the U.S. embassy, at which officials expressed their displeasure with him. The hard-right political parties that had plotted the failed but violent 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez reacted to Nicolás Maduro’s first election with bloody riots, rolling blackouts, and a strategy of manufactured chaos. But the disgruntled aristocrats, living outside Venezuela while drawing generous salaries from USAID-funded NGOs, had decided to boycott the election, and believed everyone else should, too.
Falcón was incredulous: Replacing Maduro with a competent technocrat like himself was the rational way to save the economically ravaged country from the fate of Somalia or Haiti. But he was told that the White House saw the elections as by definition illegitimate, because the Supreme Court had banned the “most popular politicians” in the country from running. Participating in them was tantamount to collaboration with the Maduro regime. Should Falcón choose to go ahead with his candidacy anyway, they said, he should not be surprised to find himself and his immediate family members on an Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist, which would effectively lock him out of the global financial system, a cruel irony given that a pillar of his platform was establishing a strict currency peg to the dollar.
In short, the State Department was threatening to financially destroy him—for running against Maduro.
Falcón soon learned he wasn’t the only one who had been summoned to the embassy for such a “talk.” While most opposition politicians grudgingly acceded to the boycott, they did so out of fear more than solidarity. The “popular politicians” banned from running, like Leopoldo López, Henrique Capriles, and María Corina Machado, had been implicated in plotting violent riots, industrial sabotage efforts, and military coups, things normie Venezuelans opposed. The idea behind the boycott was that opposition needed to have solidarity, but Venezuela-based opposition politicians like himself knew all too well solidarity was a one-way street with the Miami right wing.
In his Times column, Falcón framed his decision in Washington consensus logic: “A comprehensive Brookings study of 171 cases of boycotting around the world found that 96 percent of the time, the movements promoting the boycotts did not see positive results,” he wrote. But not in a million years could he have imagined how uniquely catastrophic the results would be.
At the time, Falcón’s opposition coalition (MUD) had controlled the Venezuelan legislature after a shock landslide election in 2015. The elections were preceded by a two-year campaign of weapons-grade State Department–funded psychological warfare, outlined in an astonishing July 2013memo titled “Plan Estratégico Venezolano” (Venezuelan Strategic Plan) drafted under USAID supervision by a consortium of Colombian think tanks and a major American restructuring firm. The reality on the streets of Caracas reflected the memo’s orders to opposition coalition members to “maintain and increase acts of sabotage that affect services to the population, particularly the electrical system”; “increase problems with shortages of basic food items”; and “create crisis situations in the streets that facilitate U.S. and NATO intervention, with the support of the Colombian government. Whenever possible, the violence should result in deaths or injuries … [emphasis added]”
:{:{The victory was a turning point for Ricardo Hausmann, a pre-Chávez government economist who was at the time playing the part of a moderate, nonideological empiricist, working on growth projects in countries as diverse as Kazakhstan, Paraguay, South Africa, and Peru, and running an outfit called the Growth Lab for the Kennedy School’s Center for Economic Development. But he was married to an anti-Chávez hard-liner named Ana Julia Jatar, who worked for a Venezuelan nonprofit founded by Machado, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, currently making the rounds claiming that Maduro is harboring Hamas militants.}:
In 2006, Jatar even published a book,Apartheid in the 21st Century, depicting Venezuela’s public relations campaigns as a neo-segregationist system of oppression. (Notably, her father had written a book, Disabling the Extreme Left, about his experience “eliminating leftist groups” in Venezuela as an official in the ruling Acción Democrática party during the 1960s, according to the journalist Anya Parampil’s indispensable 2023 book Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of U.S. Empire.) The election win led Hausmann to, “Why can’t Venezuela be a day job?”}:
The 2018 presidential election came and went. Voter turnout was 45 percent, the lowest in recent memory. Although one of the most respected pollsters in the country had predicted a seven-point loss for the Chavistas just months earlier, Maduro won by 55 points, Falcón became Walter Mondale, and his chief adviser Francisco Rodríguez returned to New York, where he served as chief economist for a small investment bank that specialized in Latin American debt. The MUD opposition coalition began purging supporters of Falcón and other candidates who had broken the boycott, many of whom were also sanctioned by the United States for their supposed collusion with the Maduro regime. “Opposition politicians,” Rodríguez later wrote, had become “more adept at lobbying Washington than doing the hard work of mobilizing voters to oppose Maduro.”
Hausmann to an audience convened by the World Affairs Council of Greater Houston on November 1, 2018, what the real plan was for Venezuela. “The international community is now focused on the idea that … January 10 [2019] is the end of the presidential period of Nicolás Maduro.”
IAN BRODIE WAS A VANCOUVER PENNY STOCK PROMOTER who specialized in acquiring controlling stakes in obscure publicly traded companies, starting rumors of some major deal in the works, then dumping the stock after the inevitable share price run-up. At some point in the late 1980s, Brodie acquired control of Petroflame International, named himself CEO, and announced it had acquired mineral rights to the world’s largest untapped gold mine, near Venezuela’s border with Guyana. In fact, Petroflame had purchased something purporting to be the rights to mine gold from an unscrupulous miner who had in turn bought them from an unscrupulous lawyer who had expropriated them from a childless widow client who had proceeded to die without clearly willing the mine to anybody.
The stock went wild, only to fall back to Earth when the Vancouver mining giant Placer Dome announced it would be developing the same site in a joint venture with the Venezuelan government, and the Venezuela Supreme Court issued a judgment decreeing Petroflame’s ownership claim so dubious as to be unworthy of discovery—by which point, Brodie was long gone and Petroflame had changed its name to Crystallex.
:{:{Undeterred, Crystallex litigated its Hail Mary claim with Placer Dome and Venezuela for nearly two decades, while raining down extravagant compensation on far-flung executives with dubious résumés. In 1998, following a congressional investigation, bribery accusations, and a series of fascinating investigations in the National Post, Venezuela’s Supreme Court once again ordered Crystallex to cease and desist, with an influential congressman telling reporters: “This is the plain simple truth: Crystallex does not have the rights it is claiming and which it is telling investors it had.”}:
But following Hugo Chávez’s election, the passage of new mining legislation, and a slide in gold prices, Crystallex won a contract to develop the mine in 2002. It embarked on a series of feasibility studies, photo ops, and new litigation battles culminating in a bond issuance to finance the project—at which point the Chávez government unilaterally called the whole thing off, citing the company’s long history of delays and violations of worker rights and environmental laws, but most importantly for legal purposes, the necessity to preserve state ownership of vital resources during periods of financial turmoil, such as the unprecedented credit crunch that paralyzed global financial markets in 2008.}:
A shrewder team of lawyers would doubtless have handled Crystallex differently. Team Chávez might have made the case that Crystallex, in all its chicanery and glacial progress, had forced the government’s hand, and coughed up a substantial enough settlement to avoid the inevitable litigation. But the timing could not have been worse: The oil prices that determined Venezuela’s solvency went into free fall during the fall of 2008, collapsing to $35 a barrel from $150 earlier that year.
Crystallex filed for Chapter 15 protection in Delaware, after negotiating a bankruptcy loan with a newly founded “special situations” hedge fund called Tenor Capital Management. In exchange for paying the requisite battalion of top-shelf lawyers and consultants, Tenor negotiated a majority stake in Crystallex’s claim against the Venezuelan government and began to assemble a legal team to argue its case before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, a World Bank court based in Washington. Although Crystallex had only spent roughly $100 million developing the mine, Tenor sued Venezuela for $3.6 billion, and in 2016 a panel of three judges awarded Crystallex $1.2 billion, plus interest and fees.
That’s where Tenor got clever. Elliott Investment Management had rewritten the rules of international hedge fund assholery in 2012, when it convinced the Ghanaian government to seize an Argentine navy frigate that had docked in one of its ports—with more than 250 sailors aboard—to settle a decade-old dispute over defaulted bonds it had scooped up for pennies on the dollar. An international court ultimately deemed the seizure illegal, but four years later Argentina’s neoliberal president finally forked over $2.4 billion it didn’t have to settle the dispute.
Hoping a similar gambit would expedite Venezuela’s settlement, Tenor sued Citgo, the Texas refining giant Venezuela’s state-owned oil company had owned since 1991, quite famously to Americans in states where the company supplied free and subsidized heating oil to homeless shelters and low-income city dwellers during the Chávez years. It was a far bigger Hail Mary than the Argentine frigate, since Citgo wasn’t directly owned by the Venezuelan government, but by a holding company that was in turn owned by the Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA, which like dozens of other state-owned oil companies from Malaysia to Qatar was legally distinct from the Venezuelan government in innumerable ways codified under American law.
But an economist and lawyer named José Ignacio Hernández argued otherwise. The Caracas professor had carved out a niche for himself as an expert in the nuances and loopholes of Venezuelan administrative law. In 2017, Hernández was recruited by none other than Ricardo Hausmann to be a fellow at the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Together, they would preside over one of the most horrific periods of negative economic growth in world history.
IN A SWORN DECLARATION IN APRIL 2017, Hernández argued that PDVSA and any and all subsidiaries and offshoots were “alter egos” of the Venezuelan government itself. He cited the government connections of most PDVSA board members, the use of PDVSA’s surpluses to fund social spending programs, and the periodic purges of Citgo executives and workers who were disloyal to the government—though not the participation of said purged executives and workers in the 2002 coup that briefly replaced Chávez with the Chamber of Commerce president—to make his case. In another filing in November, he argued that the various ministries and institutions of the Venezuelan government did not have distinct “legal personalities” under the Venezuelan constitution, and should instead be seen as “subdivisions of Venezuela.”
Delaware federal judge Leonard Stark was persuaded: In an unusual 76-page opinion regurgitating many of Hernández’s arguments, he ordered the sale of Citgo to pay off Venezuela’s debt to Crystallex. Venezuela’s lawyers quickly appealed the ruling, wiring $500 million to Crystallex and another $950 million to PDVSA’s bondholders around the same time just to underline their seriousness. They had ample reason to believe they would ultimately prevail.
But then came the day Hausmann had teased his audience in Houston about: the January 10, 2019, meeting of the Organization of American States, at which the Permanent Council passed a resolution refusing to recognize Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela, on the premise that the 2018 election—which the opposition had boycotted and the OAS had declined multiple invitations to monitor—had been fraudulent. Earlier that week, a tall, youthful engineer named Juan Guaidó had been sworn in as the new leader of the National Assembly with a fiery speech about how he planned to rescue the country from Maduro. No one had heard of Guaidó; a former PDVSA engineer and opposition activist named Jorge Alejandro Rodríguez told the Prospect he was initially hopeful upon hearing the speech, then skeptical after his daughter asked how it could be that the new leader of the legislature had just 1,200 followers on Instagram.
But what Juan Guaidó lacked in social media friends he more than made up for in friends in high places. On January 23, 2019, when Guaidó proclaimed himself the “interim president” of an incredulous Venezuela, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the Trump administration would recognize Guaidó as the Bolivarian Republic’s genuine leader, and unveiled a suite of tough new sanctions on PDVSA, pitched as a bid to force Maduro to step down. The whole thing seemed like a joke, a throwback to the days when our foreign-policy establishment insisted a drug-trafficking warlord on an island of six million was the “real” leader of the world’s most populous country—though at least most Chinese knew who Chiang Kai-shek was when he fled to Taiwan in 1949 to preside over what the United Nations insisted on calling the “Republic of China.” Only the Miami Heraldnoted an unusual provision of the new arrangement, explained by then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who told the newspaper “that if Guaidó succeeds in forming a government, the money” from international sales of Venezuelan oil that he was freezing under the new sanctions regime “would go to him.” On Twitter, Guaidó promised this new arrangement would “prevent the looting from continuing.”
But Francisco Rodríguez began to feel a sinking sensation that the looting had just begun. As a self-taught expert on the nuances of “alter ego” law after years in the trenches of the Venezuelan bond market, he believed the country would ultimately prevail in its assertion that Venezuela, PDVSA, and Citgo were legally separate entities. But in mid-February, Guaidó named entirely new slates of board members to PDVSA, its U.S. holding company, and Citgo, a move Rodríguez knew would strengthen Crystallex’s case. That same week, the glass manufacturer Owens-Illinois, which had been awarded a half-billion-dollar arbitration judgment over two Coke bottle factories Chávez had expropriated in 2010, sued Citgo on the basis that it was an “alter ego” of the state. Owens-Illinois had expert witness assistance from none other than José Ignacio Hernández, whom Guaidó had just named the attorney general of the shadow government.
“I said to myself, this is a disaster,” Francisco Rodríguez remembers. “I called my friends in the opposition and said, ‘Look, you guys messed up, you shouldn’t have done this, my advice is you correct this as soon as possible because the country could lose billions of dollars because of this.’ And they said, ‘Thanks for letting us know, we knew nothing about this, we’re gonna do something about it.’ And then a few hours later they call me back and say, ‘We can’t do anything about it, this is coming from Guaidó, the whole legal strategy is being designed by Hernández and it’s a perfect legal strategy.’”
Jorge Alejandro Rodríguez, who belonged to the moderate opposition that had rallied in vain around Falcón’s presidential bid, separately tried to sound the alarm with some legislators from Guaidó’s party. During a June 5 meeting, he “told the lawmakers: ‘I don’t give this [case] more than a couple of months … once you see the case and the things that Hernández did … you can see that it was of such a benefit to Crystallex, that for the judges it became a clear case.”
But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Hernández issued a memorandum, co-authored with Hausmann and some other Guaidó appointees, containing preliminary guidelines for a planned restructuring of Venezuelan debt. In a section headed “Equal Treatment,” the memo stated: “[N]o different treatment shall be accorded to eligible foreign currency-denominated claims as a result of their origin (for example, whether arising pursuant to a debt instrument, an unpaid invoice, an expropriation, etc.), the nature or domicile of the holder of the claim, and/or the identity of the public sector obligor (the Republic, PDVSA or another public sector entity, whether the claim has been reduced to a court judgment or otherwise.”
This was unambiguous “proof” that Citgo, PDVSA, and Venezuela were one and the same, as a long list of international creditors well understood. (It was also some Banana Republic shit: equal treatment of all claims related to entities connected to the Venezuelan government, no matter which entity had incurred the debt? The bonds had paid different interest rates, and now that they were in default, traded at different prices.) Most surreally, Citgo had not been so thoroughly cut off from Venezuela since the 1980s, as Team Guaidó had blocked PDVSA’s oil tankers from entering its ports and terminated the company’s email contact with its parent in “compliance” with Trump’s sanctions. Citgo was forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars retrofitting its facilities to refine lighter oils than the Venezuelan heavy crude for which they had been designed, and Venezuela lost 1.34 million barrels per day in refining capacity overnight. After consulting with some Trump administration contacts, Jorge Rodríguez quickly tapped out the first of what would ultimately become a string of formal complaints piecing together Hernández’s scheme as he understood it, and submitted it to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement desk of the Justice Department.
By that time, Trump had taken to calling Juan Guaidó “the Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela” behind closed doors, having generally bored of the quest to unseat Maduro, for whom he had developed a grudging respect. While variously depicted as a bus driver with delusions of grandeur and “Stalin of the Caribbean” by the Western media, Maduro is understood by everyone who knows him as a pragmatic negotiator, always on the lookout for a deal. In 2017, he summoned the elusive billionaire Harry Sargeant III, a former fighter pilot with a family asphalt business that had sourced crude oil in Venezuela since the 1980s, to rehabilitate three oil fields that had been destroyed by years of abandonment and vandalism, in a last-ditch effort to ward off famine. Sargeant, a longtime Mar-a-Lago member who had bundled donations for the Florida Republican Party for decades and plays golf with the president on a near-weekly basis, began in turn to nudge Trump and administration insiders, from Lev Parnas during the first Trump administration to Laura Loomer today, to make deals, not war. The Pentagon convened a collection of insiders and consensus-friendly regime change wonks like Douglas Farah to conduct a “war game” that projected the overthrow of Maduro would result in chaos and civil war.
“We were always fearful that he would want to exercise [the] option” of meeting Maduro face-to-face, a former Trump aide told The New York Times in 2020; the president had first floated the idea himself back in 2017 during a meeting widely depicted in the media as the time Trump suggested invading Venezuela. But the regime change lobby was simply too entrenched, as former NSC official Fernando Cutz semi-intentionally conceded in the process of explaining that the administration’s Venezuela policy had been designed to appeal to “swing voters in Florida”—not a swing state. “Maduro filled a hole that had been missing in the lives of a lot of these Florida reactionaries,” explains a money manager who has lobbied the administration on Venezuela policy. “They needed a villain, and he became their new Castro.”
:{:{If the momentum around Guaidó liberating Venezuela had stalled, it was picking up in Judge Leonard Stark’s Delaware courtroom. The inevitable August ruling that Venezuela and Citgo were one and the same had touched off a race to shake down the oil refiner for cash, and new creditors were coming out of the woodwork. A long-divested subsidiary of Northrop Grumman showed up to collect on a 20-year-old ship refurbishment contract Chávez had terminated in the late 1990s. ConocoPhillips sued to collect on an oil project it had discovered in 1999 but abandoned in 2007 after deciding it didn’t like the government’s terms.}:
Koch Industries showed up demanding its equity interest in a fertilizer plant Chávez had nationalized in 2010, and whose bondholders made a 60 percent return on the deal. The arbitration claims against Citgo quickly ballooned to $24 billion, of which Judge Stark deemed about $21 billion to be legitimate, on top of a class of PDVSA bondholders whose bonds had been secured by Citgo shares, an agreement with Russia’s state-owned oil company that purported to be collateralized by the company’s equity, and a parade of former political prisoners who had begun lining up to sue Maduro in a long-shot effort to nab a piece of the action.}:
“The magnitude of what was lost here is almost inconceivable,” Francisco Rodríguez, the economist, told the Prospect. “I know everyone is mad at Scott Bessent because he gave $20 billion to Argentina to bail out his buddy. But for Venezuela, this is the equivalent of Bessent giving $20 trillion to Argentina.”
Called for questioning by opposition leaders in 2020, Hernández himself conceded that the Guaidó government had fucked up big-time, though he swore he’d had nothing to do with the shadow government’s handling of Citgo, for which he credited Guaidó’s appointed ambassador to the United States, Carlos Vecchio, a former Exxon executive whose central role led some to speculate that the oil giant had somehow masterminded the Citgo sell-off, though its former CEO Rex Tillerson took pains to distance himself from the regime change plot after Trump fired him as secretary of state.
“I hope that this meeting will be confidential because it is not good for our weaknesses to come to light,” Hernández said in response to a specific question he never got around to answering. “But I am going to tell you that I am surprised at how long these protective walls that it has built have lasted … If we add a possible political change in the United States, in Venezuela we can be six months at most from an even worse situation than it was in January 2019.”
OPERATION GIDEON IN THE SPRING OF 2020 was the Trump administration’s last-ditch attempt to oust Maduro. It began when a clique of Trump insiders, principally longtime personal bodyguard Keith Schiller, approached a Florida ex-Green Beret named Jordan Goudreau to organize a military coup. After meeting with a dizzying string of intermediaries in the professional Venezuelan exile community of South Florida along with Trump administration bigwigs (including Elliott Abrams and John Bolton), Goudreau secured a contract signed by Juan Guaidó himself, promising some $212.9 million to execute a coordinated defection of the top military brass alongside Cliver Alcalá, a Venezuelan general who had defected to Colombia in 2018.
But just a week before the operation was slated to launch, the DOJ indicted Alcalá on charges of conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism. The indictment contained no specifics other than a single mention of Alcalá’s supposed presence at a 2008 meeting of various alleged bosses in the alleged Cartel de los Soles, and one of the prosecutors working on it had informed his attorney two years earlier that the office had decided not to charge him for lack of evidence. Team Gideon should have taken the hint, but went ahead with the operation anyway, by which point the plot had reportedly been infiltrated by intelligence operatives on both poles of the ideological spectrum. The Biden administration indicted Goudreau on arms trafficking charges a few months before a documentary on him called Men of War premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In a recent interview with Max Blumenthal, Goudreau accused the CIA and its menagerie of assets in the Venezuelan perma-exile community of sabotage, but many of the amateurish details of Operation Gideon suggested that the sabotage call was coming from inside the house. Goudreau’s explanation for whythe intelligence community would pull the plug on its last hope of ousting Maduro before the 2020 elections, however, struck me as potentially … perceptive. “I just think … they were making a lot of money,” he told Blumenthal.
:{:{Without a doubt, many of “them” certainly were. The expatriate perma-opposition had long been flush with fellowships, stipends, and subcontracts supplied by USAID, which spent nearly $2.3 billion on democracy promotion and humanitarian assistance earmarked for Venezuela between 2017 and 2021; and corporate-funded think tanks like Hausmann’s Growth Lab, whose Venezuela research is endowed by a handful of Latin American oligarchs in the timber, banking, and petrochemical industries.}:
But by mid-2019, Guaidó, who reportedly received $98 million from USAID to sustain his shadow government, was facing an apparent liquidity crisis; in June, the Panama Postreported that his ambassador to Colombia had bounced a $7,000 check written to help settle a $20,000 outstanding tab at a hotel where the shadow government, USAID, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees were housing former Venezuelan military officials in advance of an anticipated coup. Even more lucratively, the Treasury Department’s increasing fondness for financial sanctions had spawned a $30 billion cottage industry of OFAC lobbyists and sanctions compliance specialists who charge retainers as high as a million dollars to help them navigate the Kafkaesque hell of excommunication from the global financial system—and whose livelihoods were threatened by the possibility of normalized relations.}:
A godfather of that industry happened to be a former Venezuelan embassy worker named Martin Rodil, who is currently wanted in Spain on charges of running a global extortion ring in cahoots with an Israeli special forces veteran and bot farmer accused of meddling in 33 elections. But in Washington, where he has been based for most of his career, Rodil is a classic policy entrepreneur: “consulting” rich Venezuelans hoping to “relocate” abroad by coughing up intel on the “illicit” financial activities of Venezuelan government linked companies, then “consulting” those same companies’ business partners on how to avoid running afoul of the punishing economic sanctions the Treasury Department imposes on countries it doesn’t like. Spanish law enforcement claims Rodil exploited the effective criminalization of Venezuelan commerce to extort no less than 20 million euros out of rich Venezuelans in recent years. Getting rid of Maduro and the sanctions regime that accompanied him would have shut down that gravy train.
For the Guaidó shadow government, the Maduro sanctions regime gave the opposition unfettered access not just to Citgo’s bank accounts, but a vast array of Venezuelan government assets, all without any practical means of sending those funds back to Venezuela. Those assets included bank accounts at the New York Federal Reserve containing some $400 million, according to former National Security Council official Juan Sebastian Gonzalez, who directed Venezuela policy during the Biden administration. That figure included a $342 million transfer from Citigroup Venezuela had posted as collateral for a swap agreement that was canceled when the country lost access to credit markets. According to an internal document Francisco Rodríguez posted on X, that number has since dwindled to just over $30 million; no wonder they had second thoughts about Goudreau’s $213 million.
Citgo’s billions of dollars in annual cash flow have bankrolled not only $4,750-per-month stipends for Guaidó’s handpicked board members, but money for a veritable army of lobbyists, publicists, social media influencers, and unspecified South Florida–based LLCs. In 2024, following the Biden Treasury’s decision not to block its forced sale to pay off creditors, Citgo retained the Daschle Group at a retainer of $100,000 a month to convince legislators like Debbie Wasserman Schultz to issue strongly worded statements condemning the usurpation of Venezuela’s oil refineries to pay off international vulture funds; around the same time, it employed Rodil’s former business partner José Cárdenas, to draft press releases on Citgo’s purported success under Guaidó’s leadership and brainstorm with ideological comrades like Elliott Abrams over how to convince the Biden administration to bail the oil company out.
And for years now, Citgo or some alter ego has been paying a long list of propagandists, lawyers, influencers, and obscure “civil society organizations,” nearly all based in South Florida, to promote a narrative of its impending sale that casts Maduro as its arsonist and Rodríguez, the whistleblower, as his mendacious collaborator. “They’re all the same: Maduro, Guaidó, Chavista, opposition. They are all just … thieves,” Jorge Rodríguez told the Prospectfrom his home in Switzerland. He has attempted on numerous occasions to sue Guaidó’s appointed ad hoc PDVSA board chairman, and a long list of his collaborators, for defamation and racketeering, alleging that critics of their grift fear for their lives, but the complaints are largely redacted and have so far been dismissed; he can’t afford to hire an attorney, so he writes his own complaints. “Experience and academic evidence show the extent into which criminal activities by well connected officers have found fertile ground in countries returning to democracy, leaving behind a tyranny, or without real control within a nation’s territory,” he noted in one brief. “The cases of former communist countries provide clear evidence on this.”
Roen Kraft, a shadowy natural resources financier who helped bankroll Operation Gideon as what Goudreau described as a “way to monetize the aftermath of a Maduro-free Venezuela,” reached the same conclusion, according to an account written by an FBI agent who interviewed him for its investigation into Goudreau. “He said that if the Venezuelans see something they will steal it,” he told the agent, leaving unacknowledged his own agenda for Venezuela’s untapped mineral wealth. “This is what he observed from the culture there.”
Others have observed that a similar culture inside the Delaware courtrooms and Zoom calls hosting the sale process helmed by Judge Stark and his appointed “special master” Bob Pincus, responsible for sifting through the granular details to determine the fate of Venezuela’s long-lost refineries, seems designed to add maximal insult to injury. Pincus’s team alone has thus far run up more than $100 million in fees overseeing a maddeningly opaque process that seems destined to gift Citgo to the notorious vulture fund (and former Rodil client) Elliott Investment Management, despite a bid of just $5.86 billion—“so low it shocks the conscience of the court,” Venezuela’s attorneys opined in one filing—more than $1.5 billion lower than a competing offer from the Vancouver mining firm Gold Reserve Ltd. at a valuation Venezuela’s experts estimate at between $32 billion and $40 billion.
But a creditor involved in the case says the bigger problem with Elliott’s offer is what it plans to do with Citgo: merge its refineries with those held by Philips 66, a smaller energy firm in which it owns about 20 million shares, whose board it partially controls following a proxy battle earlier this year. Merging the refining capacity would create the country’s third-biggest oil refiner after Valero and Marathon, but it would almost certainly come at the expense of both Venezuela and Citgo’s own competitive advantage, because Citgo’s refineries were built specifically to process Venezuelan heavy crude, and the company buys that at a substantial discount to light crude. “By not reintegrating into the Venezuela pipeline Citgo is leaving two billion dollars a year gross profit on the table, and at the same time condemning Venezuela to spend another five, ten years or more trying to resurrect its oil production,” the creditor says.
The fact that the Elliott entity that submitted is helmed by two recently departed Exxon board members has fueled speculation that the bid is partially motivated by the desire to hobble Exxon’s biggest domestic competitor Chevron, which operates what is left of Venezuela’s oil extraction in a joint venture with PDVSA. Meanwhile the Gold Reserve bidders have expressed their intention to reintegrate the company into Venezuela’s oil production pipeline as soon as possible, an agenda more favorable to Chevron and to Venezuela’s horrific hunger crisis. “Reintegrating is also so much better for the trade imbalance and American industry, because Venezuela has enormous demand for oil refining agents that it would otherwise source from Iran and China,” the creditor adds. “But that’s a public policy argument, not a legal argument, so it’s not even really admissible.”
Instead, Venezuela and Gold Reserve have argued that Elliott’s bid should be thrown out because the lawyers who advised Pincus to anoint the hedge fund the winning bidder were already working for Elliott on other deals and scheming to win more business for their firms Weil, Gotshal and Evercore, and until September, shamelessly lying about all of it, according to a motion filed by Venezuela’s lawyers. The motion notes that Weil disclosed just one monthlong September 2024 Elliott engagement to bidders and creditors when in reality its “ongoing commercial relationship” with the hedge fund had yielded more than $5 million in fees on over a dozen cases since 2023. As a result, Weil attorneys allowed Elliott to blow bid deadlines, view data that was inaccessible to its competitors, and sidestep various other formalities because, as one senior Weil attorney remarked to another in an email about the Citgo bid, “I hate for them to not want to work with us.” Gold Reserve recently sued another creditor, Rusoro Mining, for pretending to join its bid only to turn around and conspire with Eliott to sabotage Gold Reserve.
So far, none of these conflicts have convinced Stark the process is irrevocably corrupted, but some observers are still holding out hope that they might convince him to re-evaluate the bids, and others are fairly certain the U.S. will intervene to halt the sale altogether if and when Maduro is overthrown.
“The only good thing, potentially, is that everyone is incentivized for this to drag out another two years so they can rack up more hours,” a shareholder in one creditor told the Prospect. “When I started to get involved, everyone told me, watch out, the Maduro government is notoriously corrupt. But…the corruption of the American corporate lawyers working in Delaware courts has been pretty impressive, too.”
NOW THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ISback on regime change in Venezuela, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio again playing thechief agitator role he shared in 2018 with fellow Senate Foreign Relations Committee (and new jailed) hard-liner Bob Menendez. Many of the same ideologues (Mauricio Claver-Carone, Rodil, and his collaborator and Tren de Aragua “expert” former CIA agent Gary Berntsen) who helped “mastermind” the 2019 coup still call the shots on Proyecto 2025.
Then as now, Trump is wavering on invasion, seemingly more interested in having the country’s hard-right elitesoust Maduro themselves. But that’s an even taller order this time around, with Colombia’s current left-wing government far less hospitable than in 2019 to allowing Green Berets to temporarily annex their border provinces, and Trump’s approval rating throughout Latin America roughly on par with his approval rating in Chicago and L.A. “It will be hard to talk down María Corina [Machado], because she really wants it now,” says the money manager. “But like so many in the opposition, she’s gotten carried away, promised too many things to too many people, and if the government collapses it’ll just be anarchy … they already robbed, pawned, and gambled away the country’s biggest functioning asset.”
Rodríguez, the economist, would ultimately publish a great and depressing book, The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline: 2012–2020, placing the Citgo dumpster fire in the broader context of the normalization of economic sabotage as a political weapon. Neoliberal economists like to blame the Chavistas for Venezuela’s economic crisis by nationalizing industries, rewarding loyalty over expertise, and choosing to maintain state control over the means of production. But as Rodríguez points out, the data demonstrates unequivocally that it was only after the death of Chávez himself—and with it, the end of the expropriation sprees that had so enraged the Davos crowd—that the organized opposition began the multipronged campaigns of financial and industrial terrorism that pulled Venezuela into an economic black hole with virtually no equivalent in the modern era, dragging its own reputation among Venezuelans into the abyss along with it.
The hard-right opposition and its American backers cheered on deadly attacks on vital Venezuelan infrastructure, like the unprecedented failure at the massive Guri Dam hydroelectric power plant that caused a collective 200 hours of electrical blackouts in nearly every household in Venezuela in March 2019 alone. The Maduro regime never prosecuted anyone over the attacks, but Guaidó’s failed coup plotter Goudreau recently The Grayzone that an intelligence consultancy had “been doing infrastructure attacks or helping to facilitate infrastructure attacks for a decade or so” in the country. He provided the publication with a pitch deck obtained in discovery, which was produced for then-Vice President Mike Pence by a group called “Virtual Democracy.” It outlined a detailed 29-page regime change proposal consisting of sabotage plans including “contamination with hepatitis (A, B and C), influenza, measles and piglet to the social clubs where the top officials of the narco-regime meet” and “forced stoppage of public and private transport in all forms” that would culminate in the replacement of the Bolivaran constitution with a “simple federalist constitutional text that prohibits communism and socialism,” with training to commence on a North Carolina training camp operated by Constellis, formerly known as Blackwater.
That plan never got off the ground, perhaps because it required the Treasury Department to grant the plotters “a Swift clearance passport from the US government to transfer accounts of the US government an approximate amount of US $14,500,000,000 in assets expropriated from the narco-regime and make it available to Virtual Democracy.”
It’s perhaps little wonder that a community of expats that concocts such plots would almost universally cheer on the draconian economic sanctions that directly caused the vast majority of Venezuela’s suffering during Trump’s first term. The suffering was presaged during the Obama years by a campaign of agitation for the government to simultaneously default on, and the global financial community to boycott buying, its so-called “Hunger Bonds,” on the “theory” that every penny the government paid in interest to foreign creditors was a penny not being used to feed a starving child.
The campaign was logically ridiculous, since feeding its citizens required Venezuela to access international credit markets to sell oil and buy flour, and defaulting on its obligations would make that more expensive and difficult. But never mind reality: Starting in 2016, the “Hunger Bonds” crowd staged astroturf shaming operations to taunt institutions that purchased them or even included them in emerging market indexes. More recently, during the October IMF meetings someone hired a billboard truck to drive around a hotel that was hosting a cocktail party for the hedge fund Greylock Capital Management. “GREYLOCK CAPITAL FEAST: Enablers of Maduro’s Tyrannical Dictatorship,” one side blared. “Greylock: Where Ethics Default. Your activities enable the narco-terrorist regime. HAVE YOU NO SHAME?”
Guaidó is out of the picture, living in exile in Miami since 2023, but in 2024 the opposition once again got its chance. Machado was barred from running for president, and after one false start found an unknown surrogate, the grandfatherly Edmundo González. In one of the first truly organic political trends to sweep Venezuela in many years, a grassroots campaign emerged to get voters and poll workers to audit the results by submitting the results from their polling station, and González won in a landslide. Rodríguez was not surprised, as the population is truly desperate for change: 1 in 3 Venezuelan children have such severe chronic malnutrition that they cannot grow to their full height. But Maduro did not budge, blaming foreign hackers, inevitably dispatched by the CIA, for disabling the counting machines. González fled to Spain the week after the election after signing an agreement to not dispute the results.
Machado did not push the issue before U.S. elections; Trump had been so good to Miami anti-communists during his first term, after all. But perhaps Machado and her minions had finally realized the permanent opposition was their real comfort zone. The month she won the Nobel Peace Prize, a poll of 1,200 Venezuelans revealed that 91 percent of respondents disapprovedof her. As parodic and insane as it was to bestow such an award upon a woman who has asked numerous U.S. presidents and also Benjamin Netanyahu to invade her country, it’s impossible to visualize Machado, whose family was one of the biggest slaveholders in Venezuela during the 19th century, being feted as some kind of human rights champion if she had to actually govern.
“The question is, if the hard-right opposition takes power, what happens to the half of the country that still identifies as Chavista?” asks a bond investor. “That is the thing that truly terrifies me. Because I think you will see really scary human rights abuses.”
In his book, the economist Rodríguez proposes an algorithm for explaining how the ostensibly rational actions of competing political elites could lead to a death spiral bigger than three Great Depressions combined. “A party may decide that it prefers the rewards that it is able to reap from conflict to those that emerge even from winning an election,” he writes.
It’s an obvious enough observation, and we see it in our own politics every day, like when the Republicans nominated Bob Dole so they could continue to cynically dine out on the never-ending moral turpitude of the Clinton presidency, or the Democrats refused to renounce the ritual slaughter in Gaza because they would hate for ethno-supremacist billionaires to not want to work with them, or when either side chooses to run a sure loser because he’s good at raising money while ratfucking an obvious winner because she’s a little toogood at raising money. They’re all doing a variation on this same trade-off, and pawning your democracy in the process.
am pros The $30 Billion Identity Theft of Venezuela - The American Prospect
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AUS
The Nobel Peace Prize has long been celebrated as the pinnacle of international recognition for peace, democracy, and human rights advocacy. Yet, the authority of the Norwegian Nobel Committee relies fundamentally on political appointments by Norway’s parliament. Its five members, including Jørgen Watne Frydnes, Asle Toje, Anne Enger, Kristin Clemet, and Gry Larsen, bring perspectives shaped by domestic political contexts and broader geopolitical realities. This structure naturally situates the Prize within global political interests and national foreign policies, making claims of impartial global and moral authority increasingly untenable. The 2025 award to Venezuela’s María Corina Machado vividly illustrates this reality, profoundly compromising the Nobel Peace Prize’s moral credibility and revealing its transformation from a beacon of peace into an instrument of geopolitical legitimation.
The Paradox of a ‘War Peace Prize’
Upon her selection, Machado dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump, praising his “decisive support” and claiming on Fox News that he “deserves” the Prize for having ended “eight wars,” a false claim with fact-checking confirming many of these wars continued or were mischaracterised. This conflation of militarism with peace fundamentally challenges the Prize’s core ethos, undermining its foundational principles and moral credibility.
The celebration becomes particularly grotesque when examined against Trump’s escalating military threats against Venezuela. Machado’s praise for a president who has confirmed CIA covert operations in her own country and is openly considering strikes on Venezuelan territory reveals extraordinary political cynicism.
A Record Rooted in Militarism and Foreign Intervention
Machado’s political career has consistently reflected support for force and external interference, demonstrating her rejection of democratic sovereignty. She signed the Carmona Decree during the 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez, a document that dissolved Venezuela’s democratically approved constitution, the National Assembly, and the Supreme Court. The coup disrupted what the Organization of American States described as the “democratic and constitutional order” under Chávez’s unquestionable electoral mandate as Venezuela’s sitting constitutional president.
Her 2014 appeal to U.S. Congress for military intervention, stating “the only path left is the use of force,” represented escalation in her willingness to invite foreign aggression. More recently, she has supported U.S. military strikes in Caribbean waters, deploying over 10,000 troops, warships, nuclear submarines, and advanced aircraft. These operations have killed at least 32 civilians without due process, earning condemnation from the United Nations as extrajudicial killings violating international law. Machado’s open endorsement of these aggressive policies deepens humanitarian crisis and regional instability.
In a further demonstration of her interventionist stance, in 2018 Machado sent a letter to former Argentine President Mauricio Macri and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging them to use their “strength and influence to advance the dismantling of the criminal Venezuelan regime” purportedly linked to “drug trafficking and terrorism.” This appeal for external intervention disregards sovereignty and democratic principles, providing political cover for unprovoked aggression.
Venezuela’s Strategic Wealth and the Ignored Gaza Catastrophe
Escalating U.S. aggression against Venezuela stems directly from its extraordinary oil wealth. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, with over 303 billion barrels—exceeding even Saudi Arabia’s 267 billion barrels. This resource endowment has made Venezuela a consistent target of successive U.S. presidential administrations seeking to remove leadership that refuses to subordinate these resources to U.S. corporate interests.
Machado’s support for sanctions compounds this tragedy through devastating humanitarian cost. The Lancet Global Health study, encompassing over 152 nations, links unilateral sanctions to over 500,000 annual excess deaths worldwide, disproportionately harming children under five. U.S.-led sanctions have caused Venezuela to lose oil revenue equivalent to 213% of its GDP between 2017 and 2024, totalling approximately $226 billion in losses. Over 7 million Venezuelans have since left the country, creating one of the hemisphere’s largest refugee crises.
The Nobel Committee’s timing proves particularly damning when contrasted with ongoing crises they have chosen to ignore. The award comes during an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in Gaza, with more than 2.1 million residents suffering from famine conditions, tens of thousands of deaths including numerous children, and decimated healthcare. The Committee paradoxically awards Machado, a vocal promoter of U.S. military and sanction policies, while ignoring those actively struggling to stop this catastrophe.
Violation of International Norms and Historical Precedents
Machado’s advocacy to move Venezuela’s embassy to Jerusalem contravenes UN Security Council Resolution 478, which condemns such actions as violations of international law. Her alignment with aggressive U.S. policies suggests potential Venezuelan participation in broader Middle Eastern conflicts should she assume power.
Machado’s Prize, nominated by a group that included then-Senator Marco Rubio (now U.S. Secretary of State) and Mike Waltz (current U.S. Ambassador to the UN), along with other American politicians, who submitted a letter to the Nobel Committee, continues a troubling pattern exemplified by controversial laureates. These nomination advocates represent the hawkish wing of U.S. foreign policy establishment with long-standing interventionist positions toward Latin America. The pattern includes former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, awarded despite his orchestration of the Vietnam War’s expansion, clandestine bombings in Southeast Asia killing hundreds of thousands, and support for oppressive regimes across Latin America through Operation Condor. Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2009 Prize sparked similar criticism amid expanded drone warfare programs that resulted in thousands of civilian casualties. Former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, despite negotiating the FARC peace deal, served as Defence Minister under the authoritarian former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, during which the military’s “false positives” scandal resulted in the extrajudicial killing of over 6,400 innocent civilians.
The Threat of Regional War and International Law Violations
Current U.S. military deployments near Venezuela, involving thousands of troops and nuclear assets without UN authorisation, violate international law and represent the most serious threat to regional peace in decades. Trump’s confirmation of CIA covert operations and his consideration of strikes inside Venezuelan territory mark a “sharp escalation” beyond the series of recent lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean, which Democrats and United Nations experts have forcefully condemned as unlawful.
This escalates conflict risks across the entire Caribbean Basin and northern South America, threatening regional stability in unprecedented ways. Venezuela’s strategic location, bordering Colombia, Brazil, and Guyana while controlling key Caribbean shipping routes, means any military intervention could destabilize the broader region and trigger massive refugee flows into neighbouring countries. Machado’s support empowers these destabilising forces, potentially contributing to a broader regional war that could engulf multiple neighbouring states – from Colombia and Brazil to Caribbean nations – in a protracted conflict over Venezuela’s vast energy resources, with implications extending across Latin America and threatening established regional security frameworks.
Conclusion: From Peace Symbol to War Instrument
The Nobel Committee’s award to María Corina Machado represents a final, stark departure from its founding ideals. By endorsing a figure who champions sanctions, coercion, and foreign military intervention, the Prize does not merely make a political choice—it actively legitimizes a toolkit of statecraft that is antithetical to peace. The evidence is overwhelming: from the sanction-induced deaths documented in The Lancet to blatant violations of international law, Machado’s record contradicts every principle the Prize claims to uphold. In doing so, the Committee has completed the Prize’s transformation from a symbol of moral authority into an instrument of geopolitical power. As Venezuela faces the prospect of direct military intervention backed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner, the award risks becoming not a symbol of peace, but an instrument facilitating war and legitimizing the systematic destruction of international law in service of dominant geopolitical interests.
*Juan Zahir Naranjo :{Cáceres is a PhD candidate in Political Science, International Relations & Constitutional Law at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia), where he teaches International Justice and Human Rights. His research examines constitutional governance and democratic institutions in comparative perspective. He holds a Bachelor of Laws degree and postgraduate degrees in Constitutional Law, Australian Migration Law, International Relations, and Teaching.}:
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AI Overview
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have had recent contact following Machado's 2025 Nobel Peace Prize win
. In a phone call, Machado congratulated Netanyahu on the release of hostages and expressed appreciation for Israel's actions in the war, while he congratulated her on the Nobel Prize. Machado has a history of pro-Israel stances, including previously requesting support from Netanyahu and vowing to move Venezuela's embassy to Jerusalem if she comes to power.
Key interactions and statements
- Nobel Prize call: Following her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize win, Machado called Netanyahu to thank him for his congratulations.
- Support for Israel's actions: She reportedly told Netanyahu she appreciated his "actions during the war" and "Israel's achievements". She also welcomed the hostage release agreement.
- Shared opposition to Iran: Machado and Netanyahu both described a shared concern about what they termed the "Iranian axis of evil," which they view as a threat to both their countries.
- Future policy promise: Machado has previously pledged to move Venezuela's Israeli embassy to Jerusalem if her political movement takes power.
- Previous requests for support: In 2018, Machado sent a letter to Netanyahu and others requesting support to "dismantle the criminal Venezuelan regime".
- Netanyahu's response: Netanyahu's office stated that he commended Machado's efforts to promote democracy and peace.
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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday amplified an op-ed article calling for a Trump-backed regime change in Venezuela as administration continues to float the possibility of a ground war in the country.
The New York Post, a notably MAGA-friendly outlet often described as President Donald Trump's "favorite paper," published the piece Leavitt's official government X account shared on Wednesday. It was written María Corina Machado, an Venezuelan activist and leader of the country's opposition against President Nicolás Maduro. She was the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize, and has frequently praised Trump for his opposition to Maduro and attempted to court his help in removing the Venezuelan president from office.
Leavitt's account shared a link to the piece alongside its headline, "President Trump is a champion in the fight for ‘Venezuelan freedom.'"
"White House press secretary amplifies column calling for US-led regime change in Venezuela," Olivier Knox, a senior political reporter for U.S. News & World Report, wrote in comment responding to Leavitt's.
In the piece, Machado characterized the Maduro government as hijacking the country by way of a regime-backed drug cartel, Cartel de los Soles. The Trump administration recently designated the group as a terrorist organization, though critics have pointed out that the term "Cartel de los Soles" does not refer to a specific, distinct organization, but it rather used as a catch-all term for corrupt government officials involved in drug trafficking.
She further accuses the Maduro government of "crimes against humanity and other grave atrocities," and of running Venezuela "the way mobsters control territory: through fear, torture and the systematic destruction of the nation’s democratic pillars."
She also praises Trump's actions against Maduro as "decisive action" and dismisses criticisms that military intervention would destabilize Venezuela.
Critics have accused the Trump administration of seeking to gain access to Venezuelan oil fields by deposing Maduro, not pursuing regime change to support democracy. Machado has also been criticized overall for her enthusiastic support of Trump, raising concerns the country would become overly deferential to him with her in power.
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MMA
As Trump threatens regime change in Venezuela, right-wing media embrace opposition figure María Corina Machado
Conservative pundits have given Machado a platform to agitate in favor of Trump’s aggressive military campaign, while she’s given them fuel for discredited conspiracy theories
Written by John Knefel
Research contributions from Alex Kaplan, Sophie Lawton, Monica Rodriguez & Ben Van Bloem
Published 12/03/25
Right-wing media figures have spent the last year championing Venezuela opposition figure María Corina Machado, who has supported President Donald Trump’s threats of regime change in her home country.
The relationship between Machado and conservative media is mutually reinforcing: She provides right-wing outlets with inflammatory claims about President Nicolás Maduro — including exaggerated or false accusations of tampering in U.S. elections and running narcotics enterprises — and in return these outlets provide her with a platform to agitate for his ouster. As The New York Times reported, Machado recently endorsed the debunked conspiracy theory that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 U.S. election, further ingratiating herself to MAGA by adopting one of the movement’s core tenets. She has also claimed without evidence that Maduro is the leader of two drug cartels, one of which doesn't even exist as a discrete or coherent organization, according to many experts.
Since early September, President Donald Trump has ordered airstrikes on at least 21 boats, killing at least 83 people, in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean — part of a larger pressure campaign aimed at removing Maduro from office. In October, the administration ended diplomatic outreach to the country, though Trump and Maduro reportedly spoke over the phone in late November. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a key Machado-backer, has been pushing for Maduro’s ouster for months with what some believe is an eye toward eventually collapsing the government of Cuba as well.
Right-wing media responded to Trump’s escalation by defending the extrajudicial boat strikes and pushing for even greater incursions into Venezuela, including toppling Maduro’s government. Many in conservative media have told their audiences that regime change in Venezuela would be easy, despite all evidence to the contrary.
- ### Right-wing media celebrate Machado
Right-wing coverage of Machado often relies on a blurry distinction between supporting Machado and cheering the removal of Maduro on the one hand while misleadingly claiming to oppose U.S.-led regime change on the other — arguably a distinction without a difference. Sometimes Machado employs this sleight-of-hand rhetorical device herself, seemingly to assure her audience that attacking Maduro’s government would not result in a replay of George W. Bush’s unpopular forever wars.
Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy is perhaps Machado’s most significant ally in right-wing media, having interviewed her in both English- and Spanish-language media. Campos-Duffy’s colleagues at Fox have also praised Machado, as has Donald Trump Jr. on his Triggered podcast. Other conservative figures celebrated her even prior to Trump’s election in November 2024.
- In July 2024, Sebastian Gorka discussed Machado on hisAmerica Firstshow with a guest who said Machado “has been the real leader of Venezuela for years.” Guest Joseph Humire was, at the time, executive director of a think tank focused on national security issues and now serves as deputy assistant secretary of war for Western Hemisphere affairs, according to his LinkedIn page. A later analysis of Humire’s think tank found that it spread false information about Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization in Venezuela. Gorka, now a counterterrorism adviser to Trump, and Humire were discussing the recent election in Venezuela, in which Maduro claimed victory despite international observers determining the election did not meet democratic standards. Salem Media Group, *America First with Sebastian Gorka*, [7/29/24; LinkedIn, accessed 10/7/25; C-SPAN, 8/21/25; The Carter Center, 7/30/24; The Guardian, 8/13/25]
- In January, just days before Trump’s second inauguration, Campos-Duffy said Machado is “considered Venezuela’s liberator” and floated the possibility of regime change within the year. Campos-Duffy then paraphrased Trump’s approach to the Western Hemisphere, saying, “We will control our backyard, our neighborhood. And that is what you’re seeing play out right now.” She continued: “Venezuela couldn’t be happier that Donald Trump won, but it’s going to be difficult to take this dictator out of power. It’s going to be a very interesting year for Venezuela.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [1/10/25]
- In March, Donald Trump Jr. interviewed longtime U.S. mercenary and Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who said the Maduro government is “going to have to be pushed out. And it doesn’t require U.S. military — it can be covert action from the intelligence community or covert action from Venezuelan patriots helped by outsiders.” Earlier in the interview, Prince said: “María Corina Machado is a brave woman and deserving of our help and our support. And they did to her what they tried to do to your dad.” Prince added that “the Maduro regime” is “effectively a narco-state,” and accused it of “exporting leftist, communist money to all the other political parties all across the continent.” Earlier, in February, Trump Jr. gave Machado a friendly interview on his program as well. Rumble, *Triggered*, [3/17/25, 2/26/25; The Wall Street Journal, 8/16/25]
- Trump Jr. returned to the subject in April in an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during which Trump referred to Machado as “clearly the choice of the Venezuelan people.” Rubio added that Machado was “one of the bravest people in the world.” Rumble, *Triggered*, [4/8/25]
- :{:{In July, former GOP congressman and current One America News host Matt Gaetz interviewed right-wing activist Roderick Navarro, who has long supported the overthrow of Maduro and now said that “it is necessary that María Corina Machado, which is the leader of the opposition, the true opposition, can be aligned with the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to end this situation as soon as possible.” Navarro’s statement came in response to a question from Gaetz about how change could come to Venezuela following the disputed election the previous year. One America News,:(style="background-color:#ffff00ff"):}: *The Matt Gaetz Show*, [7/20/25; The Guardian, 12/14/18]}:
- In August, Trump Jr. interviewed Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau, who said Machado is “somebody that I admire tremendously, and clearly she won the election last year.” Landau continued: “I very much look forward to a day, very soon, when we have constitutional order restored in Venezuela.” Earlier in the interview, Landau cautioned against U.S.-led regime change. Rumble, *Triggered*, [8/11/25]
- The same month, Campos-Duffy interviewed Machado, giving her an opportunity to persuade Americans who support Trump “taking on Nicolás Maduro” but worry that “this kind of smells like regime change.” Machado responded: “This has nothing to do with regime change for two reasons. First, because the change of the regime was already mandated by the presidential election we won by a landslide. And secondly, because this is about dismantling a criminal terrorist enterprise that has taken the power of Venezuela by force.” She added: “We are ready to take power — the legitimate government, elected. Venezuela will move orderly and peacefully to the transition.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [8/13/25]
- Two days after Trump’s initial boat strike on September 2, Machado said in an interview with Campos-Duffy that Maduro “is understanding, finally, that the time of impunity is over and it is in his best interest to accept the will of the people that voted against him. It’s time to go.” Campos-Duffy replied, “The pressure is mounting and he is feeling more and more like a caged animal.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/4/25; The New York Times, 9/2/25]
- On September 6, Campos-Duffy argued that “Latin American social media” was proof of “cries from the entire hemisphere of, yes, do it, we need to get rid of these cartels, we need to have our countries back, liberate us President Trump” because “they know it can only happen with him.” During her appearance on Fox & Friends Weekend, which replayed her Machado interview, Fox’s Brian Brenberg added, “Machado is one of the most impressive leaders around the globe, and your interview with her was awesome. Following that story is like following the story of liberty, and I hope it has a very successful ending.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [9/6/25]
- On September 30, Campos-Duffy again interviewed Machado, who said outright that “Maduro is not the president.” Machado added, “Maduro is illegitimate, as the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has repeated so many times,” and said that “regime change was demanded last year with the vote of the Venezuelans.” Fox Deportes, *Fox Noticias*, [9/30/25]
- :{:{In October, Fox News host Sean Hannity said Machado “sounds like a pretty good leader to me for the people of Venezuela and the end of narco terrorism.” Fox News:(style="background-color:#ffbb16ff"):}:, *Hannity*, [10/20/25]}:
- A few days later, Campos-Duffy hinted that the Rubio-led campaign against Venezuela could expand to other Latin American countries. “A lot of people saying, we’ve heard María Corina Machado say it on our show as well, if Venezuela returns to the people who won the election last July, to the opposition party, and the Marxist, you know, socialist government of Maduro goes down, so will Cuba and so will Nicaragua. It will essentially get all of the communists out of our hemisphere,” Campos-Duffy said. Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [10/25/25]
- OnSunday Night In America with Trey Gowdy, after Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) mentioned that Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Machado is planning to “open the oil rigs” to U.S. companies, host Trey Gowdy mentioned that “she may be leading that country here in the not-too-distant future.” Fox News, *Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy*, [10/26/25]
- On November 19, Campos-Duffy teased an upcoming interview with Machado, arguing that “unlike other countries where you’ve seen regime change and the U.S. has been in some way involved, Brian, this is a country that doesn't need to be stood up economically.” Earlier in the segment, host Brian Kilmeade asked: “Rachel, it looks like she’s preparing to take over. Does she know something that we don’t?” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [11/19/25]
- The interview aired a few days later on November 22, with Machado predicting that Venezuela “will see an orderly and peaceful transition … that will happen very soon.” During a separate segment of the interview, Machado argued that “regime change was already mandated by the Venezuelan people by a landslide.” She said “Maduro started this war; President Trump is ending this war,” adding that “we are solving and dismantling a criminal structure that has produced great pain and turn our country, our nation, into the best ally of the United States — a security shield for the Americas and a huge opportunity for energy security.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [11/22/25, 11/22/25]
Machado’s rise has also given election deniers an opportunity to revive the long debunked conspiracy theory that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 U.S. election against Trump. Machado — who had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — repeated that false claim during an October 31 interview on a Bloomberg podcast. “I have no doubt that Nicolás Maduro, Jorge Rodríguez, and many others are, you know, the masterminds of a system that has rigged elections in many countries, including in the U.S.,” Machado said. “I have no doubt about that.”
Former Overstock CEO and "prominent election denier" Patrick Byrne mocked a post criticizing Machado’s interview on his Telegram channel, writing that people who say the 2020 U.S. was fair “doth protest too much.” In August, Byrne claimed that Smartmatic, which provides electronic voting systems, is “a spinoff of the Venezuelan government” and that the company “has been rigging elections for people around the world.” In October, Bryne said the United States had to “overthrow the governments of Venezuela and Cuba" because they “overthrew our republic.”
In November, Trump promoted a right-wing show on social media during which a guest said “there are at least a dozen people in Venezuela that have more money and power” than the CIA, adding: “This is the largest transnational criminal organization in the world that no one knew about, or no one wanted to talk about, until they stole our election in 2020."
- ### What comes next
For all of the right-wing media claims that Maduro interfered in the 2020 election, it’s worth underscoring that in 2002 the United States at least tacitly supported a failed coup against then-President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez. During Trump’s first term, his administration engineered an unsuccessful campaign to oust Maduro and install opposition figure Juan Guaidó.
:{:{Despite those failures, conservative media have embraced Machado in a way that’s reminiscent of earlier episodes in U.S. foreign policy, when media and government officials celebrated opposition figures in the early years of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.}:
As The New York Times notes, Machado has been a “darling” of Washington for decades, and her people are in constant contact with Secretary Rubio, the Trump administration figure leading the charge to topple Maduro. One possible reason Washington has been enthralled with her for so long is that, according to Bloomberg, she “favors privatizing all industries in Venezuela,” including the state-owned oil company, if the United States takes out Maduro. Ian Bremmer noted that U.S. action in Venezuela “in large part about the oil.”}:
Should Trump's plan move forward, Machado is the most likely candidate for his administration to rally behind. She’s already won over right-wing outlets — but as U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan showed, sometimes an opposition figure’s charm offensive is the easiest battle of the war.
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troll? an 10 25
Fox News host Sean Hannity that President Donald Trump should forget Canada and make Venezuela America's 51st state, according to The Daily Beast.
This suggestion comes after the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, dedicated it to Trump and “the suffering people of Venezuela." Trump and his supporters relentlessly campaigned for him to win the prize.
“I dedicated this award to the Venezuelan people and President Trump because I believe that’s absolutely fair,” Machado, a Trump supporter, said. “We, the Venezuelan people, are absolutely grateful to President Trump for the way he has supported democracy and freedom in the Americas.”
“This opposition leader in Venezuela that won the Nobel Prize, and said it really deserved to go to Donald Trump, sounds like a pretty good leader to me for the people of Venezuela, and the end of narcoterrorism, and a better relationship with the U.S.,” Hannity said to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “Or, if they choose, maybe the 51st state.”
“Sounds good to me!” Graham exclaimed.
While Trump may not 'get' Venezeula as the 51st state, he does think he still has a shot at the Nobel Peace Prize.
"So the person who actually got the Nobel prize called today, called me and said, I’m accepting this in honor of you because you really deserved it,” he said at a press conference. “I didn’t say, ‘Then give it to me,’ though. I could have. I think she might have.”
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