Discussion on Trump's Venezuela oil deal and related scandals

Audits from Democratic members of Congress and from others. Secretary Bessant, what is the total amount of money associated with the sale of Venezuelan assets that's flowed through treasury accounts or accounts managed by treasury since January have been refused. The administration has not wanted to give away information about where the money is going and what it's being used for. I'm asking for the total amount of money. President Trump said in July that it was more than 13 billion. Would you agree that it was more than 13 billion in July? Again, I'm not going to give out that amount. So you have a very strange, very opaque system to begin with. The second thing Americans need to know is that partly because of this strange system, there has been a lot of hesitancy on the part of U.S. oil companies. They haven't wanted to make a big play in Venezuela. They've been labeled. Everybody has sent envoys there to look at the situation. But the amount of money that is needed to do a major investment there, to drill new fields and to look in new places and to recover old wells that have been damaged through negotiations, is so large and would require so much time to bear fruit that they've been waiting. And so perhaps to speed up the process, perhaps to. As a way of making an impact on the midterms. Donald Trump, at the end of August, announced that he would be doing an oil deal in Venezuela. Truth Social the United States of America has just entered into an agreement with the country of Venezuela on the biggest oil deal in world history. And this would be a deal between actually the Pentagon, an office at the Pentagon, and a Venezuelan oil company. Well, I should say it's Venezuelan, although the corporate headquarters are in Barbados and includes some anonymous members. Sounds shady. So it's shady and strange. And the head of the oil company is a figure who's very well known in Venezuela. He's called Alejandro Betancourt, and he's a famous crony of the regime and somebody who is widely despised in Venezuela. He's been under investigation for money laundering in Switzerland, in the United States, in Spain. Some of his properties were raided in Spain not so long ago.