Three days after he left his post as the Trump White House’s top Latin America official, Michael Jensen was on a private jet with a crypto billionaire looking for oil deals in Venezuela – following others who’ve bailed out of government jobs to cash in overseas.
Jensen had been senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council before starting June 1 as an operations executive at Primavera, a new energy company founded by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, a company spokesman confirmed to the Washington Post.
Ehrsam sits on Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and last month Primavera signed production agreements with PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company.
Jensen is one of several former officials heading to Caracas since a U.S. military raid in January removed Nicolás Maduro and left Venezuela’s oil industry largely under American control. Investors and former officials told the Post that recent White House experience is now one of the most valuable things a person can bring to a deal there.
“Everybody is in Venezuela,” Mauricio Claver-Carone, who held Jensen’s NSC job during Trump’s first term, told the Post. “It’s no secret that Venezuela is the hottest market right now, and everybody’s looking for opportunities down there.”
Brittany Kelm left the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council in August to join Sable Offshore, which is reportedly negotiating to develop Venezuelan oil fields. While at the White House, she worked on reopening Venezuela’s energy sector and traveled there three times.
On Wednesday, Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla and Rep. Salud Carbajal, all California Democrats, sent her a letter asking about her contacts with Sable while she was in government.
Micah Ketchel, a former senior State Department adviser, joined the lobbying firm Ballard Partners’ Venezuela working group two weeks after Maduro was captured. Carlos Trujillo, Trump’s first-term ambassador to the Organization of American States, now has at least a dozen Venezuela clients, all of whom signed on after the raid.
All of the officials say they followed the law and consulted ethics counsel before taking their new jobs.
The rules they had to follow are weaker than the ones Trump himself once set. In his first term, Trump added ethics restrictions that included a five-year ban on lobbying a former agency. Those rules were rescinded at the end of that term, and since returning to office he has not issued new ones, and only the basic federal restrictions still apply.
Richard Painter, who was chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said he doubts the Justice Department will pursue possible violations.
“I am concerned about the next two years through the end of this administration, with people going into the private sector and cashing in on their connections,” Painter said.
Lukas Shakar-Ross of Friends of the Earth compared the situation to plunder. “We’ve never had the tools of K Street grafted onto gunboat diplomacy in exactly this way before,” he said.
The White House dismissed the concerns, and spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said “the media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible.”
Meanwhile, the administration took a 35 percent stake in August in North American Blue Energy Partners, Venezuela’s second-largest private oil company.
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