Trump Energy Secretary Boasts About Billions in Stolen Oil

Energy Secretary Chris Wright is attempting to repackage America’s illegal efforts to seize and sell Venezuela’s oil as an act of “out-of-the-box” diplomacy. Some might just call it piracy. 

Speaking on Fox News Tuesday, Wright boasted that the United States had already sold an “enormous amount” of the oil it took from Venezuela after it mounted a deadly military strike to kidnap the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.  

“We’ve sold about a billion dollars of oil so far. We’ve recently signed agreements to sell about another $5 billion of oil in the next several months. So you’re talking well north of $10 billion a year,” Wright said.

“This is a win all around and a transformation of a country without any American soldiers on the ground, and without any American taxpayer dollars. This is way out-of-the-box, ground-breaking Trump diplomacy,” Wright said. 

To be clear, what President Donald Trump did in Venezuela was more akin to armed robbery than diplomacy. 

Wright didn’t fully explain where the money was actually going—or the oil. The secretary claimed that some of the money would go back to help “establish a free press and a representative government” in Venezuela. Meanwhile, the seized oil was a “specific kind of crude” American refineries were built to process, and could bring down the production cost of asphalt, he said. 

Speaking to NBC News last week, Wright claimed that the U.S. deposited $500 million from initial oil sales in an account in Qatar in order to keep the money away from Venezuela’s creditors—like China, Russia, and a slew of international oil bondholders and oil companies. “Now we have an account at the U.S. Treasury. The money won’t go to Qatar anymore,” the secretary said.

Wright also claimed that the oil had mostly gone to U.S. refineries and countries in Europe—but without oversight from Congress there is simply no way to know what deals are being made, or whether the money will actually make it back to Venezuelans in the throes of a widespread hunger crisis. 

Smashed windows, Tasers, and death: The warning signs were there, but officials at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement did not heed them.

Top officials at the deportation agency knew as early as March that their officers were using more force against civilians than ever before, Politico reported Tuesday.

The upward trend for both lethal and nonlethal force was documented in internal emails obtained by the liberal-leaning watchdog nonprofit American Oversight through Freedom of Information Act requests, revealing that top officials were well informed of the violence under their purview months before federal officers shot and killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

One March 20 email notified Caleb Vitello, the former acting director of ICE, that the agency had recorded 67 use-of-force incidents within the first two months of Trump’s term. That was nearly four times higher than the year before, when the agency reported just 17 incidents, according to Politico.

Vitello received a similar notice days earlier flagging near-identical rates for the first two weeks of March, which noted that use of force had quadrupled during that timespan compared to 2024.

Some of the reported violence included a March 10 instance in which officers smashed a woman’s car windows in order to grab an undocumented immigrant. In another instance, officers’ use of a Taser caused an individual to vomit and need medical assistance. At least one person was recorded dying from an encounter with immigration officers.

Yet the Trump administration has tried to frame the escalation as a nonissue or, worse still, completely nonexistent. The Department of Homeland Security has insisted that officers are demonstrating “incredible restraint” in their roles, and that their actions are still consistent with the expectations set in their training.

That’s in spite of the fact that AI-induced slip-ups have “sent many new recruits into field offices without proper training,” according to law enforcement officials who spoke with NBC News last month.

And the agency’s seemingly endemic violence will likely only be exacerbated by the Trump administration’s slapdash recruitment tactics, which involve a “wartime recruitment” hiring spree that aims to take on as many as 10,000 new officers in the coming year. Part of that strategy includes spending millions on social media advertisements targeted at gun rights advocates, UFC enthusiasts, and manosphere podcast audiences.

Loyal MAGA equivocator Tricia McLaughlin is leaving her post as Homeland Security spokesperson amid the widespread unpopularity of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

According to Politico, McLaughlin planned to depart in December but stayed on through the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Most recently, she was asked to explain her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, labeling Pretti as a domestic terrorist, but she refused to use the same words.

“Secretary Noem accused Alex Pretti of being a domestic terrorist. Is the administration standing by that language?” Fox News’s Dana Peroni asked McLaughlin last month.

“So, initial statements were made after reports from CBP on the ground. It was a very chaotic scene. We know that our ICE law enforcement are facing rampant threats of violence against them, a violent campaign, so that is why this investigation is so important, so that we can get accurate facts to the American people,” she replied, avoiding the question.

“Would you use that expression again?”

“I think we have to really have the investigation be leading the way on this, Stuart,” she said. “And again, the early statements that were released was based on a chaotic scene on the ground and we really need to have true, accurate information to come to light, and so, again, Homeland Security investigators are leading that with the FBI supporting.”

Otherwise, McLaughlin has eagerly spouted the Trump administration’s talking points. In December, she made headlines for defending President Trump’s racist attacks on Somali Americans. She is the second senior immigration official to jump ship after Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, following former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino’s reassignment last month.

Her deputy Lauren Bis, who previously worked at the Heritage Foundation and the Trump campaign before joining DHS, will be promoted in her place.

This story has been updated.

New Mexico’s state House is looking to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch in the state, unanimously passing a bill on Monday to establish an investigatory subcommittee to see what the convicted sex criminal was up to there.

One of the bill’s co-sponsors, state Representative Andrea Romero, called the committee a “Truth Commission” that will use testimony, subpoena powers, and public records to “put the whole story together.”

New Mexicans “deserve to know the truth about what went on at the Zorro Ranch and who knew about it. We have heard years of allegations and rumors about Epstein’s activities in New Mexico, but unfortunately, federal investigations have failed to put together an official record,” Romero said in a statement. “With this Truth Commission, we can finally fill in the gaps by investigating the failures that led to the horrific allegations of abuse and crime at Zorro Ranch, so we can learn from them and prevent such atrocities from taking place in our state going forward.”

Epstein’s Zorro Ranch was a sprawling 7,500 acres that he bought in 1993, which had its own helipad and airstrip. Court documents say that sex trafficking took place there with the help of Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, but the federal government has never conducted a full search of the property. In 2019, then–New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said his office conducted its own investigation and found “activity that occurred in New Mexico that was still viable for prosecution, including contact with multiple victims.”

Balderas added that federal prosecutors in New York asked his office to hold back on any investigations or prosecutions related to Epstein, as they had their own ongoing investigation of Epstein. In emails released earlier this month, Manhattan federal prosecutors said in 2019 that they had spoken with the New Mexico attorney general’s office, who they said had “agreed to cease any investigation into sex trafficking and share whatever they had gathered regarding sex trafficking activity with our office.”

Years later, New Mexico authorities are going to be taking a full look at what happened on the ranch. Several of Epstein’s victims have testified that they were abused there, but Epstein successfully managed to keep those activities hidden for many years, even from his neighbors. With this commission, the truth may finally come out.

After staving off major mark-ups during the holiday season, American companies are finally starting to hike prices in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs and other policies making business more expensive, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The initial tariff-driven price spike started to dull in October and fell before Black Friday—but it is back for a post-Christmas price reset, according to Alberto Cavallo, a professor at Harvard Business School who tracks online prices of U.S. retailers. Between the end of November and February 10, the prices of most affordable imported goods rose by 2.3 percent, according to Cavallo.

Driven by the rising price of appliances, bedding, computers, electronics, and furniture, online prices posted their largest monthly increase in a dozen years, according to the Adobe digital price index.

American companies aren’t shying away from blaming Trump’s tariffs for the suddenly soaring prices.

After delaying price increases on winter goods, Columbia Sportswear said it intended to up the price of spring and fall merchandise by, on average, a high single-digit percent. Speaking on an earnings call earlier this month, Columbia’s chief executive Tim Boyle said that raising prices, and other mitigation measures like renegotiating prices with its factories, was intended to “offset the dollar impact of high tariffs.”

Levi Strauss raised prices in January in response to Trump’s tariffs, and is continuing to mark up price tags in February. The company said it identified more opportunities to boost prices on new, high-end items, while only moderately increasing the price of entry-level products.

McCormick & Co said that tariff expenses added a whopping $70 million in gross costs last year, and will add $50 million in incremental costs this year. The spice maker initially raised prices in September, and plans to increase prices again this month.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on Trump’s disastrous tariff policy as early as Friday. But tariffs aren’t the only Trump administration policies making business more expensive.

Structural Systems Repair Group, a Cincinnati-based construction company, was forced to raise prices by 10 to 15 percent after tariffs and health care costs for its 115 employees both increased by 10 percent. In 2026, the absence of Affordable Care Act subsidies, which elapsed under the Trump administration, has caused health insurance premiums to spike even higher.

A 40-year-old man allegedly walked into a San Diego McDonald’s, asked for the manager, and violently put him in a headlock—all while claiming to be an ICE agent.

“Why do you think your 911 calls aren’t f—king working?” Joshua Cobb can be heard telling McDonald’s employees in a video of the incident last week. “Why do you think that? Why do you think I’m willing to take two punches in the fucking face from some illegal immigrant while I make an arrest for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement?”

“He grabbed me from, from the back, grabbed my neck like really hard,” general manager Daniel Martinez told ABC 10 News. “So when that happened, all my co-workers jumped on him, and he let go, but after that, he just punched me on the side.”

In this case, employees knew Cobb wasn’t an ICE agent because he frequented their McDonald’s. He showed no ICE identification and was wearing just a T-shirt and a backward hat. He was later arrested.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Police arrested a man in Galveston, Texas, in December for impersonating an ICE agent. Decked out in full (albeit cheap-looking) tactical gear, 44-year-old Joshua Warner allegedly tried to arrest two people, telling the civilians who confronted him that he didn’t need to give them his name or badge number.

“I’ve never seen police in a uniform like that, and his tool belt and all of his stuff … it looked like it had just came in from Temu or Amazon or something,” one witness told reporters.

It seems incredibly, alarmingly easy for any middle-aged loser to create chaos and fulfill whatever racist GI Joe fantasies they have under the guise of being a federal agent. And the aggressive, indiscriminate actions of the real ones aren’t helping.

The president’s total 180 on TikTok was, in no small part, due to the machinations of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Donald Trump had opposed the social media behemoth for years. Long before Democrats hopped on board with the idea, Trump challenged the app’s presence in the United States based on flimsy national security concerns, attempting to instate a total ban on the video-sharing app. But in the wake of Trump’s 2024 win, Kirk—whose efforts rallying young voters significantly aided the president’s cause—managed to change Trump’s mind.

That November 2024 meeting involved Kirk, Trump, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, and a slideshow with a swath of visual graphics that Kirk knew would sway the incumbent Republican. Kirk and Chew wanted to stall the impending congressional ban on the app, and they succeeded by appealing to the president’s vanity.

One slide, obtained by Axios, depicted the number of views Trump had accrued on the platform. It was staggering: a cumulative 3.8 billion eyes had watched content related to the president. Meanwhile, his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, was remarkably less popular, generating 1.3 billion views.

Their closest competition was, according to the slide, Kirk himself, Fox News, Tucker Carlson, and pop phenomenon Taylor Swift.

“I’m more popular than Taylor Swift,” Trump remarked, according to Axios.

Trump then rang his son, Barron, to crow over the stat, according to MAGA insiders who spoke with the digital publication.

The undertaking was almost too successful, so much so that it’s caused retrograde amnesia among Trump’s allies. In truth, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order before he left office in 2020, but that effort appears to be in the past. Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump during his campaign, told Axios that the president had always been a fond supporter of the app due to its ability to reach young voters.

“He’d say all the time: ‘You guys are missing it! These young people, they love TikTok. They’re on it all day long,’” Miller told Axios. “And he’d recount stories of Barron talking about it, and also younger people who work with him and for him.”
Last month, TikTok changed ownership in order to avoid the stalled U.S. ban, switching hands from ByteDance to a consortium of U.S.-led investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. Together, those three hold an 80.1 percent majority stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations, according to a company announcement. ByteDance still retains a 19.9 percent minority stake.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is under fire for using Coast Guard resources to aid in deportations.

The Coast Guard is the only military branch overseen by DHS, and Noem’s decisions have caused tension with some of the branch’s leaders. Under Noem, the Coast Guard’s aircraft have been used for deportations 10 times as much as under the previous administration, according to sources who spoke with NBC.

“It puts so much stress on the Wing,” a Coast Guard official told the outlet, referencing the branch’s air units. 

Noem’s prioritization of deportations has changed the way the military branch operates. One decision she made was to shift Coast Guard resources from a search and rescue mission to find a missing service member last year, shortly after Noem was confirmed as secretary. 

When a 23-year-old Coast Guard member went overboard in the Pacific Ocean while serving on cutter Waesche in February 2025, officials scrambled planes and ships to the ocean to find the service member, including a Coast Guard C-130 that was supposed to transport detained immigrants from California to Texas. When Noem learned of this, she personally told Admiral Kevin Lunday, the acting commandant of the Coast Guard, to pull the plane away from the search and rescue mission and back to deportation duty. 

A regional commander pulled two other C-27 planes to transport the detainees in order to keep the C-130 in the search mission for an additional hour. But ultimately, after a 190-hour search covering 19,000 square miles, the missing service member wasn’t found. 

Search and rescue operations, which used to be the branch’s core mission, now have a diminished priority in the Coast Guard. They are now below counternarcotics and training, as well as deportations, in priority, according to unnamed officials. The branch’s leadership has raised concerns in internal discussions and with people outside of the agency.  

Back in May, Noem’s top adviser and rumored boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski, berated Coast Guard flight staff for leaving behind Noem’s heated blanket when she had to switch planes due to a maintenance issue, even firing the pilot of the first plane before rehiring him because there weren’t any other pilots to take Noem home. One former Coast Guard official said that incidents like these contribute to “a general atmosphere of ‘keep your head down; you don’t want to be on the firing line.’”

The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert called out CBS on Monday for blocking his interview with a political candidate—and figured out a sneaky way around the Federal Communications Commission’s new rule targeting late-night talk shows, according to Deadline.

Colbert made the unprecedented move Monday to introduce his late-night talk show guest—who would not be joining him: James Talarico, a Democratic Senate primary candidate from Texas.

“He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert explained. “Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on.

“And because my network clearly does not want us to talk about this,” Colbert said, “let’s talk about this.”

In January, the FCC published new guidance stating daytime and late-night talk shows were not exempt from the rule requiring them to provide equal time for candidates across the political spectrum. They had previously been spared under an exemption for “bona fide news.”

The FCC claimed it had “not been presented with any evidence” that any television talk show currently on air would qualify for the bona fide news exemption, nor would any program “motivated by partisan purposes.”

Colbert referred to a clip of FCC Chair Brendan Carr—a helpful lackey for President Donald Trump’s crackdown on free speech—discussing Colbert and fellow late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. “If Kimmel or Colbert want to continue to do their programming, and they don’t want to have to comply with this requirement, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service, and that’s fine,” Carr said.

So Colbert took his advice and posted his interview with Talarico straight to YouTube.

“This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see,” Talarico wrote in a post on X Tuesday. “His FCC refused to air my interview with Stephen Colbert. Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas.”

ABC’s The View is currently under investigation by the FCC for speaking with Talarico.

President Trump used the death of civil right activist Jesse Jackson to take a cheap shot at former President Barack Obama—and to pat himself on the back for not being racist.

“The Reverend Jesse Jackson is Dead at 84. I knew him well, long before becoming President. He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts.’ He was very gregarious - Someone who truly loved people! Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a Racist by the Scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday morning.

“Jesse was a force of nature like few others before him,” he continued. “He had much to do with the Election, without acknowledgment or credit, of Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand. He loved his family greatly, and to them I send my deepest sympathies and condolences. Jesse will be missed! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Jackson, a Martin Luther King Jr. protege perhaps best known for his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition activism of the 80s and 90s, passed away early Tuesday morning at the age of 84. A cause of death was not given but his family said he died peacefully surrounded by loved ones.

And while the president is not exaggerating about his past relationship with Jackson, his family put out a much more thoughtful public eulogy.

“Our father was a servant leader—not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” their statement read. “We shared him with the world, and in return the world became part of our extended family.”

And for what it’s worth, Jackson and Obama did have a contentious relationship at times. While Jackson was an early supporter of Obama’s, he was very critical of his lack of emphasis on Black issues, accusing the then-senator in 2007 of “acting like he’s white” with his weak response to the overcharging of six Black teenagers in the Jena 6 case. (He later said his comments were taken out of context.) And in 2008, Jackson was overheard on a hot mic chastising Obama for his rightward shift, saying, “See, Barack’s been, ahh, talking down to black people on this faith-based ... I want to cut his nuts off.”

He endorsed Obama nonetheless, crying when he learned that he would become the first Black president. He then endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Bernie Sanders in 2020.

This story has been updated.