Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci knows the real reason Trump wrenched Nicolás Maduro out of Venezuela—and it has nothing to do with narcoterrorism.
“I think Trump looks at this and sees that there’s a possible self-enrichment angle for him. I think that’s pretty obvious,” the 62-year-old former White House Communications Director told Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast Podcast.
The second key reason for the strike, according to Scaramucci, is that Trump wanted oil money.
“Somebody went to [Trump], because he’s a great conspiratorialist, and said, ‘OK, listen, you’ve got 46 billion or so barrels of known reserves. They’ve got 300 plus. You take them, Canada, US, and we’re roughly 50 percent of the known reserves,’” Scaramucci said.
“‘You can put a herd on potentially people in the Soviet Union, now known as Russia… You could put another big herd on people in the Middle East,’” Scaramucci continued. “‘You might be able to change our geo-strategic footprint.’”
“Okay, so essentially we’re reducing our reliance on foreign actors and helping ourselves to Venezuela’s oil coffers?” asked Coles.
“It’s imperialism, is what it is, yeah,” Scaramucci replied. “That’s what he’s doing.”
After the U.S. military abducted the Venezuelan dictator and his wife in a stunning Jan. 3 smash-and-grab operation, top Trump administration officials have attempted to emphasize a story that Maduro was the head of a narcoterrorist cartel funneling drugs into the United States.
Trump, meanwhile, has barely mentioned Maduro’s alleged crimes as he’s gushed about the untapped oil at his fingertips.
At the Jan. 3 press conference about the Maduro operation, the president said, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, to go in, spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Scaramucci acknowledged Maduro’s dictatorial regime, but noted that his problems were also known by Trump’s predecessors, who declined to take such a drastic action in Venezuela. The difference between Trump and previous U.S. presidents is that Trump prioritized money over another nation’s “sovereign integrity,” according to the former communications director.
“There’s a tremendous amount of drug trafficking and terrorism and terrorist training that comes out of Venezuela,” said Scaramucci. “And so you would say to yourself, should we do something there or not?”
“I think past presidents have said, we don’t want to do anything there because of the rules-based society and the sovereign integrity and things like that, but we’re going to sanction them and players that don’t act in the interest of the United States,” he continued.
Scaramucci, who served in the first Trump administration for eleven days, said he would’ve counseled against the attack.
“I‘m a realist, but I will tell you that it was the wrong thing to do,” he said. “If I were in the position to make that decision, I would have never sanctioned that. I don’t think a Harris, a Biden, a George W. Bush would have sanctioned that.”
Trump’s naked play for foreign oil has divided the MAGA base so far, as Republicans have grumbled for the president to enact his promised “America First” agenda instead of busying himself with foreign military conflicts.
But Scaramucci warns that Venezuela is just another broken promise that core Trump supporters will convince themselves to accept.
“They don’t care. They’ll stay with him,” said Scaramucci of Trump’s voters. “He said, ‘No forever wars.’ He’s now prosecuting forever wars. No problem. They said, ‘You know, we want the Epstein files. There’s a lot of pedophilia out there, and there’s pizza rings and all this other nonsense, and they said, ‘Okay we’re going to give that all to you.’ Now, ‘We’re not going to give it to you. Elon Musk told you why, because he’s in the file, and they said, ‘Okay, all right, no problem.’”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Spokesman Kush Desai previously said of Scaramucci, “After getting caught up in the drug of relevance, Anthony Scaramucci is marveling at the fact that The Daily Beast still takes him seriously.”
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