Subject: Re: Venezuelan Oil Investment
Somebody is lying. I wonder who?

We won't know for years.

My wild-ass guess would be Rubio and Miller. I think Trump very much believes that this will work, and I think part of why he believes that is Rubio and Miller oversold him on the prospect of the current regime being willing to turn around and comply. Because it was in their policy interests to do so.

Knocking out Maduro and parking the better part of the Navy off the coast puts them in a position to advance their portfolios. Rubio gets to neutralize Venezuela for a while and destabilize Cuba in a way they may not be able to recover from, simply by being in a position to prevent oil shipments for a few months.

And Miller has to solve Venezuela to meet his deportation goals. A huge chunk of the unauthorized immigrant population has some sort of protective status that bars them from being deported (about 40%), and the biggest chunk of that are the Temporary Protected Status grants that were given in past administrations, and the biggest population of TPS folks (like half) are from Venezuela. Going after people who were previously protected, but have had their protective status cancelled, is the low-hanging fruit of deportation. These are folks who are visible - they've registered with the government and they're out in the open, having obtained jobs and joined community groups and enrolled their kids in schools and whatnot. So they're the ones that are real easy to round up, because they haven't been hiding. But to do that, you need Venezuela to take them back and have a change in the circumstances that you can point to in court as being a justification for the revocation of the Temporary Protective Status.