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.