After granting the despot sanctions relief and indulging his risible promise of a fair election, the administration finds its Venezuela policy in tatters.
The Biden-Harris Justice Department announced on Monday that the government has seized an aircraft owned and operated for the benefit of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. The plane was taken in the Dominican Republic and flown to Florida.
Maduro is under pressure from Western governments after stealing the Venezuelan presidential election in late July, falsely claiming to have prevailed despite losing by a more than two-to-one margin. As past performance does indeed at times guarantee future results, the handpicked successor of fellow Marxist despot Hugo Chávez has maintained power by brutalizing his opposition and the public at large.
The seizure of Maduro’s plane is a cover-our-tracks gesture. As with Iran, border security, and other policy matters, the Biden-Harris administration foolishly rolled back Trump’s aggressive countering of Maduro, who also stole the 2018 Venezuelan election. Maduro’s regime is aligned with the anti-American axis of China, Russia, and Iran. In 2019, Trump severed relations with the regime and ratcheted up then-existing sanctions by barring Venezuela from access to U.S. financial markets.
Consistent with their appeasement approach, Biden and Harris have admitted hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans into the United States under their lawless “visa” scheme. Naturally, this has not stopped additional hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans from entering illegally anyway, exacerbating the border crisis that the Biden-Harris administration created (and, as I’ve explained here, enhancing opportunities for Iran to infiltrate its operatives into our homeland).
Amid the Biden-Harris inflation spike, gas prices soared as the administration stifled American energy production to satisfy its progressive base but encouraged more energy production from Iran and Venezuela as war in Europe pinched global supplies. In 2022, not long after the administration’s release of 200 million barrels of petroleum from the U.S. strategic reserve (i.e., not long after the Democratic administration diluted a national-security resource for the partisan objective of lowering consumer prices prior to the midterm elections), the administration issued a license to Chevron, allowing the company to resume oil production in Venezuela.
Subsequently, Maduro pretended that he would hold full and fair elections in 2024 (just like the ones he’d held in 2018!) in addition to promising humanitarian spending on education, public health, food security, and electricity. The Biden-Harris administration predictably responded to this risible gesture by easing the Trump-era sanctions on Venezuelan energy production, as well as on the regime’s sovereign bonds, and on trading in the debt and equity of its state-controlled oil and gold-mining companies.
Maduro has since stolen the 2024 election, as every sentient observer knew he would. Indeed, this past spring, Biden and Harris abruptly snapped back many of the sanctions they’d eased, as it had become embarrassingly obvious that Maduro just might not have been serious about that whole “free and fair elections” thing.
I must say I got a chuckle out of DOJ’s press release regarding the seizure of Maduro’s plane.
There is, of course, the obligatory narrative of aggressive steps the Biden-Harris administration is taking against Maduro. These culminate in the description of the plane that has been captured through the collaborative efforts of Dominican officials and the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security:
In late 2022 and early 2023, persons affiliated with Maduro allegedly used a Caribbean-based shell company to conceal their involvement in the illegal purchase of the Dassault Falcon 900EX aircraft (which at the time was valued at approximately $13 million) from a company based in the Southern District of Florida. The aircraft was then illegally exported from the United States to Venezuela through the Caribbean in April 2023. Since May 2023, the Dassault Falcon, bearing tail number T7-ESPRT, has flown almost exclusively to and from a military base in Venezuela and has been used for the benefit of Maduro and his representatives, including to transport Maduro on visits to other countries.
In a statement buried in the middle of the release, Attorney General Merrick Garland asserts:
In August 2019, the President issued Executive Order 13884, which prohibits U.S. persons from engaging in transactions with persons who have acted or purported to act directly or indirectly for or on behalf of, the Government of Venezuela, including as a member of the Maduro regime.
What Garland doesn’t say is that “the President” who issued EO 13884 was Donald Trump.