A Florida congresswoman slammed Donald Trump’s newly announced Venezuelan oil deal, then changed tack and praised it in a sudden, neck-jerking turnaround.
When Trump announced this week that he had struck a deal to provide the U.S. with access to billions of gallons of Venezuela’s oil, Florida GOP Rep. María Salazar initially scoffed.
Writing on X, Salazar characterized the “deal” as a scheme by acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, whom she called the “acting dictator,” to “buy time” with Trump.
Any agreement with Venezuela’s “interim regime has an expiration date: the day President Trump leaves the White House,” Salazar wrote. “A lasting deal can only be made with a democratically elected government that respects the rule of law.”
Hours later, she completely changed her mind, hailing the U.S.-Venezuela oil agreement in a new post as a “great deal for the United States and the Venezuelan people.” She bashed China, which she said, “for years took advantage of Venezuela’s weakness to buy its oil at steep discounts.” Now the United States is ”taking the lead,” she added, with a presumably different strategy that will lead Venezuela to “peace, stability and security.”
Salazar cautioned, however, that Rodríguez is the “wrong person to make this deal.” Rodríguez assumed leadership of the country after U.S. Special Forces abducted then-President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in January. They are facing federal narco-terrorism and weapons charges in the Southern District of New York.
Salazar also cautioned that only a democratic government could “guarantee” an oil deal.
She deleted her earlier post.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the congresswoman to ask why she changed her mind and whether she is calling for Rodríguez’s removal before any deal is approved.
Trump claimed Friday that the U.S. had negotiated an agreement giving private American companies access to 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves “at no cost to the American taxpayer.”
The Venezuelan government said companies would be permitted to work on 17 oil fields that could bring an estimated $100 billion in investment to the country’s oil industry and some $209 billion in tax revenue.
But no text of the agreement has been released, and no details have been provided about how such an arrangement would be established, or who would be in charge.
Trump has yet to explain what happened to the administration’s estimated $13 billion in sales of Venezuelan oil since the U.S. grabbed Maduro, The Financial Times has reported.
The new deal has been slammed by critics who say that Trump is painting the U.S. incursion into Venezuela and the overthrow of Maduro as a human rights issue, and not a predatory, unconstitutional oil grab that transgresses national sovereignty.
