He has said that proceeds from future Venezuelan oil sales will go into accounts in private banks, not to the US Treasury.


Makes sense. He has to keep it off our books.

Not even necessarily because of grift and graft (though obviously that would be a concern). No, because if the oil revenues that Trump has used the resources of the U.S. government to obtain actually get paid to the U.S. government, then Congress has to appropriate it before it can be spent. It becomes taxpayer money, and therefore Congress decides what it's spent on.

That can't happen for his project to work. He knows that Congress doesn't want to appropriate tens of billions of dollars to rebuild Venezuela's oil infrastructure. He just went through the whole DOGE thing on America First to stop us spending money on foreign lands instead of to help Americans. And the domestic oil producers will go ballistic if we're using public money to rebuild Venezuela.

So Trump has a dilemma. Venezuela has to sell their oil, and the money from those sales has to go somewhere. If it goes to Venezuela, Trump loses control. If it goes into the Treasury, Trump loses control. So it has to go somewhere else that Trump controls outside of the government. I can't imagine how they can set that up legally, but I'm sure top lawyers are working on that as we speak....