Venezuela Accuses Trump of Piracy as He Says We’re Keeping Oil Tanker

Venezuela has condemned the Trump administration’s Wednesday seizure of an oil tanker, calling it an “act of piracy.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi accused the tanker of illegally sending oil to terrorist groups, justifying the administration’s hostile takeover.

“For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations,” she wrote Wednesday on X, along with a video of the seizure. “This seizure, completed off the coast of Venezuela, was conducted safely and securely—and our investigation alongside the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the transport of sanctioned oil continues.”

The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry offered a very different read of the situation.

“The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela denounces and energetically repudiates what constitutes a brazen robbery and an act of international piracy, publicly announced by the President of the United States … making clear that the policy of aggression against our country responds to a deliberate plan to plunder our energy resources,” they wrote. “Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been exposed. It is not migration. It is not drug trafficking. It is not democracy. It is not human rights. It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”

President Trump seems to have fully embraced the piracy angle.

“What happens to the oil on the ship?” a reporter asked Trump Wednesday afternoon.

“Well we keep it, I guess,” Trump replied, before failing to answer where exactly the oil was originally going.

This is yet another ratcheting up of aggression against the Maduro government—and yet another example of the absolute disregard the Trump administration has for anyone else’s sovereignty but their own.

Andrew Tate, the self-avowed misogynist and accused sex trafficker with a massive online following, has a powerful ally in the White House: Barron Trump.

The college-aged Trump has been building a steady bromance with the woman-beating influencer since at least 2024, the pair’s mutual friend Justin Waller told The New York Times.

Tate and his brother Tristan are under criminal investigation in several countries related to their web cam business, facing accusations of sex abuse and human trafficking. The pair allegedly trafficked more than 30 women in Romania and Britain. Andrew Tate, who has amassed a following of millions of teenage boys and young men while calling himself the “king of toxic masculinity,” also stands accused of raping and beating a minor in Romania.

But those sordid details weren’t enough to keep the young Trump at bay. Waller, who proudly described himself to the Times as the “third [Tate] brother,” claimed that Barron had grown his relationship with Tate while nudging his father’s social media-based presidential campaigning efforts towards the podcasting manosphere.

As part of that, Waller was invited to a dinner Barron hosted at Mar-a-Lago in the spring of 2024. The two called “each other degenerate names,” discussed Trump’s potential running mates, and mutually agreed to join another guest’s podcast together, reported the Times.

Waller commented to the publication that the teenager was “not a bad ally to have—let’s be frank.”

In the months since, Waller said he’s tried to fill a “big brother” role for Barron (ignoring the fact that the 19-year-old already has two of those), claiming to have offered dating advice and personal connections to the freshman, including Tate himself.

“He and Barron spoke to Andrew over Zoom last year, Mr. Waller said, while the teenager was having a suit fitted by Mr. Waller’s tailor,” reported the Times. “Although they discussed the Romanian case, Barron did not say anything about helping the Tates, Mr. Waller said. They also talked about supporting Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign on their online platforms.”

In the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, Tate commented to reporters that he was “very close to the Trump family.”

Post-election, the White House assisted Tate, presumably due to his expanding influence over the president’s youngest child. Paul Ingrassia, the Tate brothers’ former lawyer-turned-DHS liaison, intervened in the process of a federal investigation on the Tates’ behalf, claiming that the order to do so had come directly from the White House.

House Republicans have voted to punish Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for not releasing footage of the Pentagon’s extrajudicial executions of alleged drug traffickers.

The GOP-led House on Wednesday passed an enormous annual defense policy bill that included a measure to withhold a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon turns over unedited footage of its strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

It’s not clear how much money is in Hegseth’s travel budget, but the bill’s language states that “no more than” 75 percent of that amount will be available until he provides videos to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

The Defense Department has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, as it has presented conflicting information about a September incident in which the Pentagon ordered a second strike on the survivors of an initial attack—a war crime that experts say likely violated federal and international law.

The legislation passed the House 312–112, with 197 Republicans supporting the measure. The Senate will likely also approve the National Defense Authorization Act, which will then be sent to President Donald Trump, who has previously voiced his support for the legislation.

The $900 billion budget bill includes measures to repeal sanctions on Syria, provide some military aid to Ukraine, restrict U.S. investment in China, and prevent the Trump administration from significantly reducing the number of troops in Europe. It also includes a controversial provision allowing military contractors to be reimbursed for interest payments.

Even the Justice Department lawyer who defended the George W. Bush administration’s decisions to waterboard, bind, and sleep-deprive prisoners in the infamous 9/11 “Torture Memos” of 2002 thinks the Trump administration’s drug boat strikes are going too far.

“I don’t think there’s an armed attack” against the United States by the drug cartels, law professor John Yoo, the former Bush DOJ deputy assistant attorney general, told Politico in a Thursday article.

“They’re not attacking us because of our foreign policy and our political system,” Yoo continued. “They’re just selling us something that people in America want. We’re just trying to stop them from selling it. That’s traditionally, to me, crime. It’s something that we could never eradicate or end.”

Yoo’s criticism is significant given the widespread condemnation he received for his own support of unilateral, extrajudicial violence. He’s one of the “Bush Six” who was investigated internationally for war crimes, and his Torture Memo has been described as a “one-sided effort to eliminate any hurdles posed by the torture law,” making his rebuke of Trump’s bombings all the more alarming.

“The only way the strikes have any legal plausibility … is if we’re at war with Venezuela and the drug cartels are something like what we saw in Afghanistan after 2001 with the Taliban and Al Qaeda being so intertwined together that the drug cartels are essentially acting as an auxiliary of the armed forces or intelligence services of Venezuela,” Yoo continued, recalling his own experiences. “For some reason … the administration doesn’t want to say that’s what they’re doing, and they won’t legally justify it.”

It’s a bleak situation when someone who defended human torture and should probably be in some international prison is calling the current administration out for potential war crimes.

“This is the thing I think conservatives should worry about,” Yoo said. “Could a future President AOC say, ‘Oh my gosh, we are at war with the fossil fuel companies. They are inflicting masses of harm on the United States. It might be cumulative, but they’re doing it on purpose.’ … You just make the same exact arguments,” he said.

“That’s the danger you have once you start saying anything that hurts Americans could be an act of war.”

Nevertheless, the Trump administration continues its aggression in the Caribbean Sea, dropping bombs on boats without any kind of due process. On Wednesday, the administration even seized a Venezuelan oil rig.

And while Yoo’s input is worthwhile, it also paints a bleak picture regarding the prospects of anyone involved in the deadly boat strikes actually being held accountable. Yoo has never been tried for his actions and has had a cushy law professor job for years, even as he’s been internationally condemned for his very specific role in “enhanced” interrogation techniques. That doesn’t raise much confidence in the same standards being applied to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump.

Read the full column here.

Senate Democrats, along with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, want an independent review of Epstein case files released by the government to ensure that the records haven’t been tampered with or concealed.

Senators Adam Schiff and Dick Durbin wrote a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general Thursday asking for a formal review of the files to check for chain of custody issues. Some Epstein survivors, through representatives, are also asking for an independent review to see if any of the documents have been “scrubbed, softened, or quietly removed before the public sees it,” according to CBS News.

“To reassure the American public that any files released have not been tampered with or concealed, the chain of custody forms associated with records and evidence in the Epstein files must be accounted for, analyzed, and released,” wrote Durbin and Schiff, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in their letter.

Last month, Congress and President Trump passed a law requiring all of the Epstein files in government hands to be released by December 19, with as few redactions as possible. Three federal judges have also ruled this month to unseal grand jury records from the criminal investigations into Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

As several batches of files on Epstein are now due to be released for the first time, the Trump administration’s past actions do not lend much confidence into whether these documents will be released untouched. FBI Director Kash Patel has said that it may not be “lawful” to release certain files, and the bureau has already spent nearly $1 million dollars redacting sensitive information from the files.