JD Vance Met With Oil Exec Before U.S. Kidnapped Venezuela’s Maduro

Vice President JD Vance secretly met with one of his top donors days before the Trump administration invaded Venezuela and cut a deal that would make his company millions from selling the country’s stolen crude oil.

A week before the U.S. military invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicolás Maduro, Vance travelled to Bozeman, Montana, where he secretly met with John Addison, a U.S. gasoline trader at Vitol, the world’s largest energy and commodity trading company, Reuters reported Wednesday.

In 2022, Addison poured $300,000 into Vance’s successful bid for one of Ohio’s U.S. Senate seats. He and his wife later gave a combined $7 million to groups supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024.

At the meeting, the two men spoke about Venezuela, and the vice president expressed a particular interest in how fast Venezuelan crude oil could be sold in the case that the U.S. gained control of the country’s energy supplies, a person who was given an account of the meeting from Addison told Reuters. Addison assured Vance that Vitol was more than able to get the job done.

Addison’s private Embraer jet and Vance’s government plane sat together on the tarmac at Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport on December 27, according to flight records reviewed by Reuters.

This meeting was previously unreported, but gives insight to the backroom deals to enrich allies of the Trump administration. Both Addison and Vance denied the meeting took place.

On January 5, just two days after the operation to kidnap Maduro, Addison got a call from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who asked whether Vitol would be interested in selling Venezuelan crude oil.

Addison wasn’t a natural choice to receive a call from Wright. He wasn’t a regional CEO, or an expert in Latin American gasoline, but rather, a senior trader involved in sales of U.S. oil. But Vance had told Wright that he was the right person for the job, Addison told Reuters.

The Department of Energy, however, claims that Vance and Wright never discussed the sales of Venezuelan oil, and Vitol was chosen solely because of the firm’s scale.

By January 9, Vitol and Trafigura, its direct competitor, had obtained special licenses to sell Venezuelan crude oil. Since then, the companies have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from selling stolen supplies.

Typically, large U.S. government contracts are awarded through a competitive bidding process—a standard that has seemingly gone out the window during Trump 2.0.

Representative Robert Garcia, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and its incoming chair, sent a letter to the heads of Vitol and Tafigura demanding answers about how exactly they received these licenses, and voicing concern that the companies may have been given advanced notice about U.S. military action in Venezuela. Both Vitol and Trafigura declined to answer Garcia’s letter, but the companies told Reuters that they did not receive any advanced knowledge.

Last month, right-wing conspiracy theorist and YouTuber Nick Shirley followed an old woman around Lam’s Seafood, a Vietnamese grocery store in Seattle. He observed her buying spring rolls and tuna, which he incorrectly called spam and sushi. Shirley claims in a video voiceover that the items were “magically $120.”

“How come you sold this spam and sushi for $120?” he says to the cashier, who gives him a confused look. He eventually demands to speak to the manager and asks any worker in sight why they’re “letting people commit food stamp fraud.”

“You all are committing fraud, this entire block is committing fraud,” he says in the video, which can still be seen on TikTok.

Lam’s denied Shirley’s allegations more than a month ago, with its operations manager saying that Lam’s had never participated in any EBT fraud. They pointed out that because Shirley does not speak Vietnamese, he missed the woman clearly asking for an entire case of tuna—which she was correctly charged.

A month later, Shirley fully retracted his story.

“I have an important correction to make,” Shirley said in a video posted Wednesday. “I stated [the woman at Lam’s] purchased one can of spam and one order of sushi for $120. That was incorrect, as Lam’s has later now clarified that the lady was attempting to purchase a case of spam, which is why the transaction was $120. I have not uncovered any evidence that Lam’s itself engaged in EBT fraud or that Lam’s colluded with the woman in the video who was attempting to use her EBT card.”

So Shirley harassed an old Vietnamese woman just trying to buy tuna for nothing. Many online noted that the GOP operative’s apology and retraction sounded like they had been written by a lawyer.

“Did he get a cease and desist letter? This sounds very lawyered,” The New York Times’s Ken Bensinger wrote.

Shirley has made a career out of harassing minority-owned businesses and baselessly accusing them of financial crimes. In April, more than a dozen federal agents showed up at the Mini Childcare Center in Minneapolis. It was one of the many daycares that Shirley harassed while attempting to prove that Somali Americans were running an elaborate fraud scheme. None of the daycares that Shirley targeted have been found to have committed fraud.

Donald Trump no longer seems concerned about brokering a deal with Iran after the midterms.

In a layered Truth Social post Thursday, the president declared that “we don’t need a deal with Iran.”

“Those days have long since passed,” Trump continued. “We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”

Hours earlier, Trump declared victory against Iran during a Veteran’s Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, even though he acknowledged the war is not yet over.

“Under this administration, and it was about time, somebody fought back,” Trump said. “All of us fought back. We fought back. And we seriously fought back. And we won. Just a question of when we want to end it.”

“We want to make sure we have a total victory, not a 93 percent victory,” he added. “It’s going to be total. It’ll take them 25 years to rebuild back what we have destroyed, and hopefully we won’t have to destroy any more of that country.”

For weeks, Trump teased a full-scale bombardment of Iran after the midterm elections. That has not yet happened. Instead, the Pentagon launched Task Force Iron Gate to choke off the country’s trade routes and limit its advanced weapons shipments, according to Reuters.

But Iran has not backed down. Instead, Iranian security chief Mohsen Rezaei escalated the country’s threats on Wednesday, pledging that Tehran would also attack European military bases if they were used by American forces for renewed warfaring purposes.

“If American aircraft take off from an American military base, even one located in a European country or some other distant region, to bomb Iran, we will strike those bases as well,” Rezaei told Lebanese broadcaster Al Mayadeen TV.

In another portion of the interview, Rezaei vaguely warned that Iran might also attack more distant U.S. military installations, as well as “certain islands that they assume are beyond the reach of our missiles.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement appears to be trying to cover its tracks after the agency was sued on Tuesday by a woman it violently arrested and detained. 

HuffPost reports that ICE deleted at least two posts from its X account defending the arrest of Minneapolis resident Aliya Rahman, who was heading to a medical appointment in January when agents smashed her car window and dragged her from the vehicle. Rahman sued the agency, accusing agents of false arrest and imprisonment, negligent supervision, negligence, assault, and battery.

The first deleted post, from February, included a video of the incident. ICE captioned the video: “Unfortunately, we have the receipts. As shown in our video, Aliya Rahman clearly had enough room to move herself and her vehicle out of the way. Officers even walked away from the vehicle, thinking that she was going to leave the scene. Instead, she remained at the location, continued to impede our officers, and found out the hard way.”  

The second deleted post criticized Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren, who brought up Rahman’s violent arrest at a congressional hearing in March with then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. 

“Rep. Lofgren is pushing a lie that’s already been debunked,” the post read. “As shown in our video, anti-ICE agitator Aliya Rahman clearly had enough room to move herself and her vehicle out of the way. Officers even walked away from her vehicle, thinking she was going to leave the scene. Instead, she remained at the location, continued to impede our officers, and found out the hard way.”

The agency didn’t respond to HuffPost’s questions as to why it deleted the posts. Federal agencies are required to preserve all records by law, including social media posts. At least one other post mentioning Rahman is still available on ICE’s X profile. 

“Agencies cannot delete records from a social media platform or from a recordkeeping system without a disposition provided by a NARA-approved records schedule,” the National Archives and Records Administration told government agency leaders in a November 2022 memo.  

A Homeland Security spokesperson told HuffPost, “We are aware of the lawsuit and look forward to vigorously defending ourselves in court.” 

Is Elon Musk messing with Ukraine’s Starlink access again?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy claimed Thursday that the country’s Starshield, the military-grade version of Starlink communication systems, had once again experienced “significant disruptions” over Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine for the past “several days.”

“The Ukrainian military have already investigated the circumstances, and these are not random errors but systematic speed restrictions,” Zelenskiy wrote in a statement on X.

News of these disruptions came as U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow Thursday morning to continue peace deal negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Last month, SpaceX also interrupted the country’s military-grade Starlink terminals, blinding the Ukrainian government. That disruption came just days after President Donald Trump publicly criticized Ukraine for continuing to attack Russian oil refineries in the wake of the U.S. lifting sanctions on the sale of Russian oil.

Initially, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed that it was Trump’s idea, while the president played dumb. The order to slow the service reportedly came directly from the White House, and later reporting suggested that Musk approached Trump about disrupting his own military communications service in Ukraine.

In a separate post on X Thursday, Zelenskiy said that the Starshield disruptions directly affected Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian jet-powered drones with drones of their own. “This means more Russian strikes get through, and more of our people are killed by Russia,” he wrote.

“We are trying to get the details from the American side, but so far, we know very little,” he wrote. “If someone in America is making decisions that basically treat Ukrainian territory as if it is not Ukrainian, then this tells us where things are going.”