Lawfare Daily: The U.S. Plan for Venezuelan Oil Revenue

[Intro]

Scott R. Anderson: The Trump administration reasonably in my mind, or at least not patently, unreasonably, felt that even though it had set up this regime through Executive Order 14373, it decided to route the initial sale of oil that Venezuelan engaged with, that it helped broker for about $500 million through this Qatar mechanism, which is a separate mechanism, which is essentially just routing it through a bank account in Qatar.

Natalie Orpett: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Natalie Orpett, executive editor of Lawfare with my colleague, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson.

Scott R. Anderson: There's a real tension in U.S. recognition policy towards Venezuela, because the Trump administration is now coordinating with the Delcy Rodríguez regime in Venezuela. It's basically the Maduro regime, but just sans Maduro, with his deputy now in charge.

But that government hasn't been the U.S.-recognized government of Venezuela since at least 2019. I believe that's the year President Trump said, I am recognizing Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela.

Natalie Orpett: Today, we're talking about the recently announced U.S. plan to take possession of Venezuelan oil, sell it on the world market, and hold the revenue from those sales in accounts based in Qatar. Scott and Lawfare contributing editor Alex Zerden, recently published a piece in Lawfare digging into the complexities of the plan.

Scott and I talked through them all. What exactly is this plan? How is it supposed to work? Why is Qatar involved? And what are all of the many legal challenges in play?

[Main Episode]

 So Scott, you and Alex Zerden just published a really extraordinary piece in Lawfare that digs into this series of questions that is, I think, truly mind boggling to most of us, which relates to Venezuelan oil.

So first of all, I'm gonna really commend it to our listeners to go to our site and read it, because we will get into it as much as we can orally here. But it is, man, is it complicated

Scott R. Anderson: That it is, yes.

Natalie Orpett: So, the piece is called “Unpacking the Trump Administration's Plans for Venezuela's Oil Revenue.” Like I said, you can find it on our site.

So, Scott, to get us started, I wanted to just do a little bit of contextualizing before we get to the core of the question your piece is answering.

Why on earth are we talking about Venezuelan oil? You know, most people in the United States are aware of the fact that the United States conducted this operation to arrest and bring to the United States the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.

But what all does that have to do with oil? What are we talking about here?

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah it's an interesting and complicated historical story. Venezuela is a country, and I think probably to the greatest extent of any country in the Western hemisphere, except from perhaps like Canada or the United States, blessed with large scale hydrocarbon resources, a lot of oil, and particularly they have a kind of heavy sludgy sort of oil that's difficult to transport and get out of the ground, but is very good for converting into diesel fuel and other sorts of fuels and can be mixed with what are called diluents—I think I'm pronouncing that correctly—to kind of make it more of a conventional, lighter oil that you might be able to transport and move and sell on global markets.

For a long time, Venezuela was a major oil producer, including having a ton of external investment, particularly from the United States. In the 2000s, you saw the Chavez regime, the Hugo Chavez's predecessor to Nicolás Maduro, nationalized the oil industry in the country of Venezuela. That's where a lot of these claims President Trump keeps talking about oil companies having had their property stolen by the Venezuelan government, that's often, generally what he's referring to, which there is a credible argument that there is—was an unlawful appropriation under international law, so that's not totally made up by any stretch of the imagination.

And since then, the oil industry has primarily been dominated by the state run by PDVSA, the national oil company there. But it's fallen into disrepair for a variety of reasons, because they don't have external investment, because of mismanagement and corruption by the government, and for the last several years because of economic sanctions imposed by the United States that have prevented them from exporting oil.

And the most severe chapter of that, of course, is the oil embargo that the Trump administration has started imposing at the very end of last year, which over the course of a few months, pretty much completely shut down Venezuela’s oil experts, almost completely, to the point that Venezuela was, on January 3^rd when Maduro was removed from power, essentially overbrimming with oil. It had socked away as much oil as it could in its various storage capacities. It was actually at the point where it was bringing in tankers from offshore to anchor in its own waters, just to hold additional oil because it's—wanted to keep producing it so it could eventually get on the market, but didn't have anywhere they could sell it.

And this is all of course, coinciding with the fact that Venezuela has been under immense amount of economic duress for really the last several decades, but particularly the last few years, and particularly the last month or two that the United States have been ramping up economic sanctions.

And so, in the eyes of the Trump administration, now that Maduro has been removed, now that they appear to have, who they think is a fairly pliant replacement in the person of Delcy Rodríguez who was Maduro’s vice president, is now the interim president for Venezuela. She seems to be going along with a lot of plans that Trump administration has, and conditions they've put on alleviating the sanctions pressure, which primarily has to do with rehabilitating Venezuela's oil sector and then steering it in a particular direction that the Trump administration sees is strategically beneficial to the United States.

And so, a big part of what U.S. policy towards Venezuela now is, in the aftermath of Maduro's removal, is about getting the oil sector back up and running, in large part because that is expected to be what will fund any subsequent re-, sort of, alignment or rehabilitation or reconstruction that takes place in Venezuela across any other sector.

And at a minimum is necessary, even for keeping Venezuela stable and secure, because Venezuela is extremely reliant on these oil exports both for its domestic exports and most of its revenue generation. I think 70 to 80% of its economy is based on oil exports. And for in particular, foreign currency reserves. That's like where they get essentially, they don't export much else. It's where they get their foreign currency reserves, which they need to be able to facilitate imports by their own domestic producers and domestic consumers, and is essential to Venezuela's macroeconomic stability.

So, in other words, the oil industry is kind of the linchpin of all of the Trump administration's broader plans for Venezuela in the post-Maduro era.

And so, kind of getting that right has, understandably, in my view, been their main focus so far.

Natalie Orpett: Okay. That's really helpful. And I'll just preview for folks, because it will come up a little bit later when we're talking about some of the various legal regimes at place, that this is not purely a sort of humanitarian effort by the United States to rescue the economy of Venezuela and to ensure political stability and all of that, given the context that you were just describing in terms of the state that Venezuela is currently in, particularly after Maduro is no longer in place.

But before we get there, which will be a while from now, 'cause there are so many things to discuss.

Let's move on to the central question that your piece addresses, which is this mechanism that the United States has set up to essentially take the oil that, as you say, has been building up over time and to sell it on the world market, and then maintain the revenue from it in specific accounts for, as President Trump put it, the benefit of Venezuelans and Americans, and that this will happen, these accounts will be hosted in Qatar, which we'll come back to at the end, because why on earth does Qatar come into this at all?

But first, just describe for us the basics of this arrangement that I've only stated at a very, very high level. What exactly is this mechanism that has been set up?

Scott R. Anderson: Sure. So, it's basically actually two separate mechanisms. One, a more long-term arrangement, which is based in the United States, and the other, a more short-term kind of ad hoc arrangement that at least according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his testimony he gave before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee late last week on the 28th of January, was intended to be a kind of short-term, expedient solution to address what they saw as a time-sensitive crisis economically in Venezuela that required them to move some oil before they could get the domestic, meaning the U.S.-based legal regime, fully in place and stable.

So let's start with, I guess, the U.S.-based regime. You know, oil exports from Venezuela are limited by, and have been limited by U.S. sanctions, essentially. So in theory, the United States lifts the sanctions, Venezuela can start selling oil, and people out there who wanna buy oil from Venezuela can start doing that. That is itself a possibility and doesn't require an additional intervention by the United States. There's no special mechanism necessary to do that.

But if you were to just say, ‘Hey, Venezuela, hop back out on the global markets now sanctions are lifted, go do what you need to do to rehabilitate your oil sector,’ they would face at least one major category of challenges, and that is the fact that they have a massive, massive sovereign debt to the order of twice their GDP, almost close to $150 billion.

That amount is highly, highly diverse as well. Some of it is more conventional sovereign loans from Russia and China. China, in particular, has done a number of loans that essentially give them rights to Venezuelan oil at highly, highly discounted rates. You know, some have framed as exploitative, including the Trump administration, but a lot of these other claims are things that have accumulated kind of over the last 20 years, during which the Venezuelan government under both Chavez and Maduro have kind of thumbed their nose at the conventional legal and international system.

So, a lot of them are from bond holders. The bonds on which Venezuela has defaulted. They may be people have contracts or had contracts with the Venezuelan government to different regards that the Venezuelan government did not make good on. Many of them are people whose property was expropriated by Venezuela and have legal claims.

And then there are, as we'll get into some more detail as we dig into other parts of this regime, some terrorism-related claimants, because of course, Venezuela has been accused of, and to a substantial extent, credibly, engaging with various groups that are designated terrorists by the United States. That includes both recent groups that have been designated terrorists by the Trump administration, like Tren de Aragua being the most notorious in recent months, but also several that have been designated since the 1990s. That's like FARC and ELN, two Colombian rebel group slash terrorist groups that have long been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the United States.

All these claims are out there in the world and the people who are—believe they're entitled to compensation from Venezuela for the damages they suffered or for the debts owed to them. Many of them have, and many more could, pursue legal remedies, meaning they have secured judgments or arbital rewards in their favor. In part, as Venezuela has, as many countries that are in this kind of pariah status, like Israel has been for the last several years, has often failed to really represent itself very adequately in court.

So they end up with a lot of default judgements against them, meaning they are large scale and basically given the plaintiffs almost everything they want because they just have to present a kind of minimal credible case because it's unopposed in an adversarial legal system, all these judgements. Now, the job of the, those claims holders and their lawyers is to try and enforce them against specific assets through a process called attachment or generally called attachment—there are certain other mechanisms that can come into play as well.

That means they find assets of Venezuela or whatever Venezuelan entity owes the money, PDVSA itself, the state-owned oil company has a lot of debt and other sort of claims against it, and then makes an argument as to why legally they can attach those assets.

Normally, foreign government assets are pretty heavily protected by sovereign immunity against attachment, but there are a variety of carve outs, particularly where those assets are owned by an agency or instrumentality, not the government itself. So like PDVSA, the national oil company, or if the assets are used in commercial activities.

Those carve outs make a lot of assets that Venezuela may bring into the United States or other countries, potentially vulnerable to attachment. And that poses a real problem for Venezuela because Venezuela, to rehabilitate its oil sector, it needs to collect money from people. It needs to be able to sell oil overseas. And frankly, it also needs to buy a bunch of stuff. It needs to buy the diluents, that I mentioned before, to make its oil transportable and marketable internationally. It needs, frankly, just plain old equipment to rehabilitate its refinery capacity and its pumping and other oil industry capacity.

And if it wants to rebuild other parts of its, you know, government and state, if it wants to invest in public health sector or other sectors with whatever oil revenue may come in, it's gonna need to buy things overseas. And that's gonna be really hard for it, so long as it can't put money overseas without that money being at risk of attachment by these various claims holders.

And the scale is so huge. These claims, many of them genuinely are merited to some extent, or believed to be merited, that those barriers aren't easy to do away with. Because even if only a fraction of these people are actually able to make their claims and get the judgements in time before Venezuela moves assets in and out of the country, that's enough to potentially stop any flow of money out, in and out of the country, or goods, or the things they might buy and sell.

And notably, the parties don't usually have to win to hold up those assets, even if there's a dispute as to whether it's appropriate to attach these assets, those assets tend to get held in place because otherwise there's a concern, they would just move them out of the jurisdiction and not be able to get them.

And so even if there's an ongoing litigation about whether attachment is appropriate or not, those assets could be frozen in place. They wouldn't be available to Venezuela for use for a variety of economic purposes.

So, what the Trump administration has done is it is set up a mechanism that tries to extend certain extraordinary protections to those assets, so that at least when they're in the United States—and the United States is, if you had to pick one country, the country you would wanna be able to hold money in, 'cause it's a great place to buy and sell things from around the world, at least in the United States, and those extraordinary protections—it provides a safe harbor where Venezuela can hold their assets and collect assets, without them being subject to attachment.

And in particular, what we've seen the Trump administration do is, in a general license issue, just this past Friday on January 29th, they basically said, ‘Hey, all the sanctions we have on Venezuela's oil sector, they don't apply anymore. It's open for business. The rest of the world can do business on one condition. All of the money that you pay to Venezuela has to go into the special mechanism we're setting up that both provides those protections, but then also has a number of provisions that provide for U.S. supervision and control.’

Notably, all this is separate from the Qatar transaction. The Qatar transaction took place, while this mechanism was being stood up, was actually technically in place as a legal matter, but for various reasons. I can get into, there's reasons to think it wouldn't be suitable for addressing a short-term crisis like the Trump administration seemed to think Venezuela is facing, which is why they chose a separate route, a separate mechanism that went through Qatar.

That, in theory, is temporary, although I wouldn't be surprised if we see them turn to it again, at some point in the next couple of weeks or months.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, so before we get into that one, I wanna unpack some of what you said. And the first thing I wanna do is to just sort of, given all of the substance of that, just sort of, make sure we have a good sense of the sort of simple view of this, which, if I understand it correctly, is, say that Venezuela or its state owned oil company begins selling oil overseas. It gets paid for it. Before the state or the state-owned oil company can actually take possession of that money, it gets attached, through some of these judicial process mechanisms, through arbitrations as you were describing, you know, TBD which of those end up being meritorious, but it does seem like there are quite a few that would be relatively uncontroversial.

And so very large sums of money would be, would just never make it back to Venezuela because before it is possible for Venezuela to get its hands on it, it gets sort of intercepted by these creditors. And the quantity that we're talking about, given the level of debt and the number of creditors to which Venezuela or its various sub-entities owes money, the sale of oil would probably not even be sufficient to cover those.

So it would mean essentially, no money is going back to Venezuela for all of these investments that are necessary to rehabilitate the oil industry. And as you say, the other piece of it is, even if it takes a little while to adjudicate the question of whether these creditors have meritorious claims, those funds will be held up. 

So again, intercepted, maybe to be eventually delivered to Venezuela, but will be held for a long time, which at the very least seriously delays the possibility for Venezuela to make investments in, for example, building up its oil sector or whatever else it wanted to do, to essentially invest in what has been a really, really struggling economy with a lot of real humanitarian crises.

Does that all sound like a fair summary?

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah, that's the concern that Trump administration was addressing with these sorts of actions. But how it ties to go about it, again, is somewhat unique and we can dig into that a little bit more.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, great. So the one other thing that I just wanted to mention to make sure folks were following along with what you were saying about the U.S. regime, one of the main challenges there is the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, and you mentioned that there are carve outs, but the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, of course, limits the means by which, or the possibility by which plaintiffs can call into court states or state-owned enterprises because there is some immunity that is granted to them.

But as you mentioned, there are a couple of carve-outs that would mean that, to the extent there are claims that are jurisdictionally based in the United States, it would be possible, it is more likely than any other given state that plaintiffs would be able to bring claims and potentially meritorious claims.

Can you just talk about that a little bit more?

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah, I mean essentially the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act has two different baskets of immunities.

One set of immunities is about immunity from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts which means the ability to not be hauled into U.S. court if you're a foreign government or an agency or mentality of a foreign government.

And then they have actually even higher degree of immunities there that apply to attachment of foreign government assets, you may be able to bring a foreign government before a U.S. court and make a claim against it. And have a judgment that it's liable to you but still not be able to attach any of its assets because the exceptions are narrower for attaching assets than it is for actually exercising jurisdiction over foreign governments and their agency and instrumentalities.

The problem here is that the judgment holders have already surmounted, A, the jurisdiction bet where they already have judgments and arbital awards that for various reasons have penetrated whatever sovereign immunity may be extended, these are often foreign. Sometimes they're U.S.-based, but foreign countries usually have a, if anything, stronger sovereign immunity regime the United States does.

And then you have the question of attachment. That's where these exceptions about commercial activities and involvement become a bigger issue.

Now again, many of the claims may not be able to surmount those barriers, but the concern is 'cause of the sheer volume here, that enough will, of enough scale that it would essentially obstruct the flow of oil revenue and substantial amounts back to Venezuela, or at least could in a way that eventually maybe Venezuela could pay them all off and have them resolved, and that's fine, but in the meantime, it wouldn't have the money to reinvest in its oil sector or rebuild.

And notably that, that also means it's less likely to be able to repay them in the long run, or it will take longer because it will not be able to increase its oil production, which is, you know, a necessary precondition to be able to pay off such a large debt.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, so I—thank you. I think that's helpful since there is quite a lot happening here.

But that's a good segue into this other mechanism that you referenced, which relates to which is how the state of Qatar comes into all of this. So tell us about that mechanism and why Qatar is involved at all.

Scott R. Anderson: So to understand why Qatar is involved, it's worth looking at the technicalities of the mechanism that the Trump administration has set up in the United States, because the Qatar workaround is really meant to address deficiencies or existing risks that the Trump administration can't manage with that other mechanism.

The mechanism that goes through United States, it basically says oil revenue from Venezuela can come in, will be held in a particular treasury account, which is a little odd. That's a little different from a departure or a departure from similar regimes that United States has set up before. Regardless, it's gonna be held in a Treasury Department account on behalf of Venezuela, PDVSA, and other sorts of entities.

And it uses an authority called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the same one, IEEPA as it's called, same one, used to impose economic sanctions also being right now the they litigated before Supreme Court as it was being used to impose the tariffs President Trump has imposed around the world, or at least many of the tariffs, the reciprocal tariffs, I should say. That authority is used to say, these assets in this account cannot be attached, meaning they are not subject to legal process. And that is something that we have good reason to think IEEPA can be used for.

The United States set up a really similar regime for Iraq after invading in 2003, Iraq faced really similar problems to Venezuela of a similar, if maybe not quite as severe scale. And really, when the United States took over, there was this exact same concern saying we need oil revenue to start flowing to help fund the reconstruction of Iraq. But all these claimants are gonna make this very difficult.

So they used IEEPA to install extraordinary immunities for the Iraqi oil revenue and very similar languages used here in regards to Venezuelan oil revenue. The only thing that really changed is that the DFI was primarily held in—by the Iraqi Central Bank. The Development Fund for Iraq, I should say, is the main account around which the Iraqi regime was built that was held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York by Iraq’s own central bank.

Here the account is being held by the United States and the Treasury Department not touching the Federal Reserve system, at least by designation. Not clear why. Frankly, it'd be arguably advantageous if it did because Venezuela's central bank, if it was assets were held by Venezuela's Central Bank, they would be able to qualify for the highest tier of sovereign immunities under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. But regardless, that's not the mechanism that's being used here.

The Trump administration has decided to instead say, no, these accounts are gonna be held, the funds are gonna be held on Venezuela's behalf in the United States in a Treasury Department account, and the Treasury Department can establish that account in a variety of places domestically, overseas, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York if it wants to. But that's not the default, I guess, in this particular case.

Regardless, the only thing, the thing that it really adds on the Trump administration does to the kind of Iraq based regime is it has a number of mechanisms that say basically, ‘Hey, nothing can move out of this account except we're authorized by us.’

That is, again, not extraordinarily different from the Iraq regime, but notable, and we can get into why, I think it reflects some confusion about, or internal tensions and how the United States under Trump has approached recognition of the Venezuelan government who would otherwise control, be able to control those funds.

And then it also says a bunch of other provisions that seem clearly trying to bring in things like international comedy and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act by making a bunch of presidential findings about the assets. This is an odd thing to do a little bit in executive order. Not unprecedented, but a little odd because it's making very case specific, factual assertions about how these assets are being used, that there are no assets in this account yet, so it's hard to say with confidence that's actually how they are being used. I think it's intended to communicate, here's how they should be used or shouldn't be used.

Regardless, it's clearly administration trying to lay the groundwork for other potential legal defenses to these assets. But in a way that I find, I think it's a little clumsy. I think there's less operational happening there. IEEPA is still the main focus of the source of legal protections for these particular assets.

Natalie Orpett: So talk a little bit about the different layers here, because you've mentioned IEEPA and the executive order, which maybe start with just explaining what the executive order is, what it says, and then how it interacts with IEEPA in this case.

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah, the executive order, order 14373, which President Trump issued a couple of weeks ago, I think on January 9th.

If I recall correctly, invokes IEEPA. IEEPA is implemented when the president declares a national emergency and uses it to address a threat to the national security or economy of the United States that has, its origins at least partially overseas, I'm paraphrasing there, but that's basically what the elements of the requirement are.

When that happens, it says the president's supposed to declare a national emergency, and then when he does, he can use this extraordinary authority that IEEPA gives, which is basically to regulate however it sees fit for an economic transactions. Although we, as we're seeing litigated boards before the Supreme Court, there are some matter limits on that authority, particularly around revenue generation and the imposition of taxes, potentially, as at least the parties are arguing, in that case the plaintiffs, and there are limits that actually come into play here, traditionally understood to be limits about vesting, which is where the United States actually claims title to assets, basically saying ‘these are our assets.’

Now, that's something that IEEPA only expressly allows during wartime, or the event of an attack, although some have argued that it should, that more generally—specifically the context of the debates around Russian frozen assets and compensating Ukraine, which we've had debates about in Lawfare at length of folks to look back to. I'll say, I don't think those arguments are right. I think IEEPA pretty clearly doesn't allow vesting outside of, out of wartime. But people do make those arguments.

Regardless, that sort of broad authority is what's being used to basically say, ‘Hey, through our regulatory authority, we are making clear here these assets, they can't be attached, they can't be subject to a legal process. Doing so would be a violation of IEEPA,’ and that is the same tool that DFI used in the Iraq context, or used for the DFI in the Iraq context. And it proves successful there.

There is one important carve out and exception, which we should get into about terrorism-related claims, but other than that, those protections have proven fairly effective in the past and I expect them to do the same here. Although that doesn't mean they won't be subject to legal challenge at some point.

They almost certainly will be.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, that's helpful. And you know, I'll just note the use of IEEPA is sort of what I was previewing before, about the fact that the legal infrastructure at play here demonstrates this point that I think is important to keep in mind, which is that the United States's actions here are not exclusively, at least, for the purpose of humanitarian efforts to help rebuild Venezuela.

They are in the interest, at least as stated through the executive order and the use of IEEPA, determined to be in connection with the national security of the United States and the determination by the president that there is an emergency at issue here.

And I'll just make one other tangential note, but I can't resist the point about the carve out regarding vesting outside of war. I will just point out, again, the particular irony I find of the fact that the administration is justifying the boat strikes that you and I have written about on the basis of ‘We are at war,’ and then justifying the capture of Maduro by saying ‘We are not at war. This was a law enforcement operation,’ and I think the potential conflict you could see here about whether or not we are at war is something to keep an eye on.

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah, this is something that Secretary Rubio expressly addressed in his testimony. It was interesting, because he basically said, no, we're not at war with Venezuela. We may for Alien Enemies Act purposes, because in response to a question from a senator, which is a statute that the administration has invoked several months ago now at this point, alleging basically hostilities with Tren de Aragua and other sort of armed groups that it associates with Venezuela—

The secretary tried to parse that very carefully saying like, ‘well, we have said we're at war with Tren de Aragua in these other groups. We don't say we're at war with Venezuela as a state.’ It is interesting 'cause in some ways the administration's life would be easier as a legal matter if it said it was at war, because then may, perhaps it could use some of these IEEPA provisions to exercise more direct control over vesting and spending of some of these assets. And maybe they'll get there at a certain point, but they seem resistant to cross that line.

I suspect it has something to do with the degree of pushback they got after the Maduro strike, including from Senate Republicans about the potential for a second wave for further military action. Rubio also is very expressed that he does not anticipate does not expect there to be any further military action to, with a degree of clarity that frankly was a little bit of a departure from what we heard from the administration just a few weeks ago.

So, you know, it's not clear to me exactly what they're trying to square about—saying what, being so adamant that we are not in a state of war with Venezuela as that again would potentially open up new legal authorities to them in this case. But regardless that was clearly the secretary's position, and it does not seem like he was speaking off the cuff.

He seems he was clearly delivering deliberate point on that. So there's some logic back there.

Natalie Orpett: That's interesting 'cause there is definitely a bit of a tension across very different areas of law. But since Lawfare tends to cover all of them, it's maybe tension that only we see, and I, as I said, couldn't resist bringing it up.

But let's go back to another issue that you raised, which is the terrorism carve out. And this relates more to the U.S. mechanism that we were talking about first, but is an important contextual thing that we missed earlier. So tell us about that legal issue that presents itself, with regard to the Venezuelan oil assets.

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah, so this is one of two big reasons why the Trump administration reasonably in my mind, or at least not patently unreasonably, felt that even though it had set up this regime through Executive Order 14373, decided to route the initial sale of oil that Venezuelan engaged in, that it helped broker for about $500 million through this Qatar mechanism, which is a separate mechanism, which is essentially just routing it through a bank account in Qatar, under U.S. supervision, but held by the Venezuelan interim authorities, as they're called, the Delcy Rodríguez regime on Venezuela.

The main problem or at least the clearest litigation risk problem, stems from a provision of law called section 201 of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, or TRIA. This law was enacted in 2002 and basically was intended to give individual Americans with certain types of terrorism-related claims, but pretty broad category of them, the ability to attach assets that are frozen pursuant to sanctions authorities.

It is a law that basically is a notwithstanding provision, meaning it says it applies notwithstanding the provisions of other law, so it can cut through other statutory legal protections that might otherwise be provided those assets. So section 201 cuts through a Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act—FSIA is not a defense to attachment under section 201.

It also such cuts through most relevantly here, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, IEEPA. Not only that, it actually piggybacks on top of IEEPA and says it's when IEEPA freezes or a certain set of assets, that's when all of a sudden, even if the order says, the president uses IEEPA for says no, these can't be attached TRIA, the least can very plausibly be argued to say, no, actually we can attach them and bring them in.

There's some ambiguity, there's some technicality, a lot of which I didn't have time to get into in the piece about what exactly constitutes seized assets even under IEEPA, the types of relationships required. But the key point here is that, at least for these terrorism-related claims, even if you use an IEEPA-type mechanism to protect Venezuelan oil revenue, you could still face substantial claims from terrorism-related claimants, because they could at least have a legal argument that they could use to penetrate the protections provided by IEEPA.

This was an issue with the Iraq system that was set up in 2003, because TRIA was enacted in 2002. That law wasn’t on the books at the time. But in that case, the George W. Bush administration did one extra step the Trump administration hasn't pursued and doesn't seem intend to pursue. It went to Congress to get supplemental legislation and in that legislation was a provision, one that Congress later doubled down on after faced some litigation challenges that basically said, ‘Yes, Iraq is a state sponsor of terrorism. For that reason, normally TRIA would allow the pursuit of claims against it, against frozen assets of its even where it is would otherwise be protected like by the DFI executive order. But in this case, we are saying that the president has the authority to waive the consequences of state-sponsor of terrorism status.’

The Supreme Court actually ultimately upheld the fact that those statutes did, in fact, basically rescind the legal consequence of state sponsor of terrorism designation for Iraq in a case called Beaty v. the Republic of Iraq in 2009, if I recall correctly. And so that basically meant that Iraq, even though it was a state sponsor of terrorism, effectively had that status and the consequences rescinded.

And so it wasn't vulnerable to TRIA-based attachment, at least as they were understood at the time. Now notably, Venezuela has never been a state sponsor of terrorism. At least as official designated—it's officially designated, even though it's accused of doing stuff like that by the Trump administration.

It's a discretionary designation that's, frankly, only been used extremely sparingly 'cause it has such dramatic legal consequences and has never been applied to Venezuela.

Natalie Orpett: Sorry to interrupt. Is that a State Department determination that designation or where does that designation—

Scott R. Anderson: I believe it is a State determination.

It's scattered across a number of our statutory provisions. I believe all of them ultimately lie with State. I'm not a hundred percent confident in that, I can actually check on that, maybe while we're chatting, but I believe it is a State Department determination, certainly primarily a State determination.

Natalie Orpett: Okay.

Scott R. Anderson: The key point here is that while Venezuela's not a state sponsor of terrorism, it has been accused of having a variety of ties to all these other terrorist groups that I mentioned before, TDA designated most recently as a foreign terrorist organization, but also FARC and ELN, two groups that have been designated FTOs for 30 years.

And at least two federal courts, or federal appellate courts, I should say the Second Circuit, the Eleventh Circuit, have interpreted TRIA to basically say, when you have a judgment against a terrorism party in this case, an FTO qualifies, you can take that judgment and use section 201 to enforce it and seek to attach the assets of anybody who materially supported that sort of effort, acted as its agency and instrumentality, which it interpret these two courts interpreted very broadly to mean anybody who kind of acted its behest or as assisted or participated in its scheme in various regards.

Several courts have interpreted that to mean that people with claims against FARC, the terrorist group in Columbia, can try and attach them against the assets of PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, because there are lots of allegations that PDVSA and the broader Maduro regime were involved in helping loan money and otherwise facilitating the operations of FARC.

These judgments alone, in part because of default judgment, FARC does not come defend itself in U.S. courts, but there's no reason to doubt that it actually would be liable even if it did come defend itself, are the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. So if you were to route the initial $500 million secured in Venezuelan oil sales through the United States, even with these immunities in place under the Executive Order 14373, there is at least a significant risk that these particular sets of claimants with claims against FARC and some of these other terrorist groups will still come at these assets and try and attach them.

And in that case, this total volume of assets wasn't that big, that Venezuela could just eat the cost or accept that some of its funds are gonna be caught up in litigation. There wouldn't be enough left to pass back to Venezuela.

Natalie Orpett: That seems to me an example that you were mentioning before of where even if the assets were not ultimately taken by the claimants, they would certainly be held up in court, because I would imagine to prevail in being able to collect against Venezuela for claims against FARC, you would have to do a lot of work to actually prove the connection between Venezuela and FARC in order to make that a viable legal claim.

Given the sort of degree of separation, presumably you would need a lot of evidence and there would just be, I assume, quite lengthy litigation about whether Venezuelan assets or even available for that purpose to those claimants. But that would tie them up at the very least, even if they ultimately made their way back to Venezuela.

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah, there certainly is a lot of factual questions involved in this, but notably, like these facts have been litigated before, particularly in the Southern District of Florida, but a handful of other places around the country.

So you have a lot of district court judgements for very similarly situated assets, PDVSA-related kind of regime assets for the Maduro regime where, you know, courts felt the threshold was met, if nothing else. So there's a little bit more of a trail blazed here already that it wouldn't be completely novel but you're right. They would have to demonstrate some facts and build it out.

And notably, this is one of these awkward cases where the Trump administration from a policy perspective would rather probably prefer that these parties not be able to attach these assets. And notably, I would say, I'm not sure these courts interpretation of section 201 of TRIA is correct. And there may be factual reasons to doubt whether these courts are reading the situation right.

At least one of them I would note I think actually has U.S. recognition policy towards Venezuela wrong; it says that the Maduro regime was derecognized in 2017, and I'm almost positive that's wrong. I think it was in 2019. Regardless there, there may not be perfect factual records here, but it's very awkward for the United States under the Trump administration to step in and try and assist in arguing this, even if it would consider doing it because, A, American victims of terrorism are very understandably, incredibly sympathetic people and plaintiffs, and nobody wants to see victims of terrorism not get compensation that they're deserving.

But also, the Trump administration has been amongst the most vocal people about illustrating the ties between the Maduro regime and terrorist groups like FARC. So we, it would be contradicting its own prior determinations, including lots of official statements like the terrorism designation of groups like Tren de Aragua to begin to walk back some of these.

So my guess is it doesn't see that as a politically viable option, even if it might be a legally viable option, as a way to push back on these understandings of TRIA.

Natalie Orpett: So I did wanna ask you one thing you just mentioned there, which is the complexity you describe in the piece relating to the question of recognition, which I think is really not obvious as to why the question of whether and the extent to which the United States as a diplomatic matter recognizes the government of Venezuela, what that has to do with any of this.

So can you just talk through that?

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah, it is really integral to these arguments. This is something I've really, actually really been trying to flag for people since the intervention in media engagements and some other written work for Lawfare and for Brookings. And I haven't seen people glom onto it, but maybe people will begin to catch onto it now because Rubio did basically say this in his testimony.

There's a real tension in U.S. recognition policy towards Venezuela because the Trump administration is now coordinating with the Delcy Rodrīguez regime in Venezuela. It's basically the Maduro regime, but just sans Maduro, with his deputy now in charge. But that government hasn't been the U.S. recognized government of Venezuela since at least 2019. I believe that's the right date. Again, some courts have said 2017, that's the year President Trump said, I am recognizing Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela.

Juan Guaidó is an interesting figure. He was an opposition leader. He was the head of the National Assembly, a legislative body, the composition of which at that time and still currently I believe, was elected in 2015, kind of the last fair-ish elections that people see that has legitimacy in the country.

And what they said essentially is that, well, Maduro claimed to win an election in 2018, but we think that election was fraudulent under the Venezuelan constitution, the presidency is vacant and they said it basically was 'cause Maduro was fraudulent and was not adequately elected. Then the presidency should go in interim status to the head of the National Assembly.

And so this National Assembly voted, we're gonna put Juan Guaidó in the interim presidency. He had no control of the country, didn't control any institutions of government, but was recognized as the interim president by Donald Trump when he, during his first administration. And the Trump administration persuaded a wide swath of U.S. allies in most countries in Europe, lots of countries in Asia, lots of other countries of Western hemisphere to do the same, in hopes that this would give Guaidó the popular or the global support that he would need to eventually mobilize political forces to assume power in Venezuela, presumably.

That never came to the fore. Instead what happened is in 2023, early 2023, the National Assembly decided to end the interim presidency, something that appears to be within their rights. They basically said, this isn't really working for us. And there was some internal disagreement between different factions of the opposition as they prepared for elections the following year.

And instead at that point, the Biden administration shifted its U.S. recognition policy to say, well, the Juan Guaidó interim presidency doesn't exist anymore. We still recognize the 2015 National Assembly as the last legitimate institution of government in Venezuela, paraphrasing lightly, but basically something to that effect.

Now, what they, what that meant is that they allowed and some federal courts have essentially also allowed at the direction of the executive branch, the 2015 National Assembly to appoint people to exercise control over the state-owned assets are in the United States, including control over, for example, PDVSA litigation positions or assets PDVSA may have in the United States, or control of other Venezuelan assets and interests in the United States.

All those are in control now of the 2015 National Assembly and its delegates. That becomes a real problem when you start bringing in oil that Delcy Rodríguez has authorized the sale of, but the revenue is coming into the United States. Because in theory, the 2015 National Assembly could sue and I think probably would win to say we should control how these assets are spent and control what happens to them, not the Delcy Rodríguez regime.

And notably precisely 'cause of that vesting restriction. We already talked about the president can't actually use IEEPA clearly to contradict that. The president can stop the owner of assets from moving them anywhere. It can direct banks to consolidate assets in various places as a holder, as a, you know, agent of the actual owner of those assets.

But it can't divest the owner of title, can't vest them in the president himself or transfer it to a third party, or at least there's big legal doubt as to whether a president can do that under IEEPA. And so because of that, the president can't use IEEPA to just spend the money on Venezuela's behalf and get rid of it.

Instead, all this money is essentially going to pour into this account that is set up under 14373. It's gonna sit there until either U.S. recognition policy changes, something the president can do on his own to recognize the Delcy Rodríguez regime or the 2015 National Assembly somehow acquiesces or at least agrees not to actively challenge how those assets are being used and disposed of at the direction of whoever that might be, Delcy Rodríguez or somebody else.

How exactly you get to this point is really complicated. It's gonna require some sort of negotiated solution. My guess is it's gonna be part of a package that the Trump administration is gonna have to negotiate with the Rodríguez regime saying, Hey, we have to give the opposition something. You need to give us a timeline or a process at getting to Democratic elections in Venezuela or some other transition to power.

But whatever that arrangement is that gets the 2015 National Assembly on board with the Rodríguez government, or Rodríguez regime, I should say, that's gonna take time to negotiate.

And that's something that they, my guess is they just didn't feel they had for this initial transfer of $500 million or sale, I should say, of oil for $500 million. Because according to Rubio, they thought Venezuela was on the verge of an actual economic collapse and they needed to transfer at least most of that money, they ended up coming $300 million to Venezuela very quickly to stave off that collapse.

And there was concern, this recognition debate could complicate that further. Again, that's ano—a second consideration that led them to turn overseas to do that initial transfer. And ultimately to Qatar.

Natalie Orpett: I wanna turn to why Qatar, because I think you guys had some interesting things to say there, but I wanna first try out for you an analogy that is definitely not perfect, a little bit overly simplistic, but I think maybe an interesting way to conceptualize this, which is to bankruptcy.

So I think with regard to the recognition issue, it's sort of a question of, okay, if you imagine analogy to a company going bankrupt, it would be the question of what constituted the company, and if there is some dispute over the control within the company, that's sort of analogous to the recognition question—If there are, you know, two competing CEOs who say, no, the money is mine because company is mine. So that's on that side.

And then it seems to me that what the Trump administration is doing here in terms of taking control of the situation through all these mechanisms that we've described is part of this overall question of in what order, right? This is something that comes up in bankruptcy. It's—the point of bankruptcy litigation is there is some limited quantity of money and the court has to help work out the order in which different creditors can recover, the means by which they can do that, and how much, because there is such limited money.

And oftentimes, you know, the reason that they're going bankrupt is because there isn't enough money to cover all of the creditors. So it seems to me, you know, we talked upfront about all of the different creditors, including other nations, including a lot of judicial processes, not only within the United States, but elsewhere, all over the world.

And it seems, what is happening here is the United States is using these mechanisms to sort of skip to the front of the line and make sure that it is in control of—it sort of takes the place of the first creditor and is controlling all of the means by which the money is going to be distributed back to the creditors.

Does that work for you as an analogy?

Scott R. Anderson: I think up until that last bit about being the kind of first in place creditor because that's actually not what we see the Trump administration doing yet, although maybe they will get there. Right now, no creditors are getting paid, including lots of American creditors.

And that is going to become a point of contention, right? We heard President Trump say at various points, oh, I'm gonna get compensation for these oil companies that have their property expropriated. Hasn't happened yet. There aren't signs about how the Trump administration is prioritizing that or doing that.

Instead, what we really have right now is essentially, again, bankruptcy proceedings, I would say, I think that's a good parallel to say, okay, we're gonna freeze all the liabilities out there. People aren't gonna be collect on this entity, but they haven't sorted out how they're gonna restructure them or compensate or begin to repay them yet.

Natalie Orpett: So maybe the better analogy is the United States has deemed itself the bankruptcy judge.

Scott R. Anderson: I think that's a better way to do it. Exactly.

And what we saw happen in the Iraq context is that, A, the DFI protections were always understood to be temporary. That's something that they haven't actually expressly said about the Executive Order 14373, although it's, I think it's presumptively true, but who knows?

And even though they're understood to be temporary, the George W. Bush administration and subsequent administrations went to Iraq and said, ‘Hey, you guys are gonna have to deal with these sovereign debts. We are giving you protection on a temporary basis to help rebuild your government, rebuild your economy. But you need to renegotiate. You need to actually come to terms with all these different creditors and figure out a way to either pay them back over time or if you don't think they're valid claims, contest them in courts and fight them or figure out a way to repay everything.’

And that's what Iraq did over many years. The DFI arrangements stayed in place on the books until 2014. But, Iraq did do this very conscious effort of restructuring and was able to use the leverage of having the DFI protections and the support of the United States to essentially reduce a lot of its debt burden and contest certain claims that it felt were not ultimately valid against it.

That's something I fully expect Venezuela's going to have to do, and the Trump administration, frankly, in my view, would be well advised to start saying that more expressly, because if they don't, they're soon going to have lots of these claimants wery validly start saying, how are you privileging, what is essentially the Maduro regime, just sans Maduro, over people to whom you agree have been abused by it for the last 20 years?

It is, again, a sign that there are a big parts of the strategy that I don't think have been fully implemented yet, or maybe not even fully cognized by like the senior leadership who talks most about this in the Trump administration, but that are essential components of it. If that's not a part of this, if this really is an effort to indefinitely insulate Venezuela from these costs, I would be a little surprised by that, that would be a very different game.

And if there were, frankly, a genuine effort to say, Hey, American claimants get first in order, I suspect some of that will be tolerable, but, too, much of that will become an international issue for the lots of other governments that also have claims against Venezuela, and that includes Russia and China among many others.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, so let's talk about Qatar and why Qatar is the location of this account—because it's not accidental. There are plenty of other places where one can open bank accounts, but I, you know, it may be, I think it's meaningful in the first place, but it may be even more meaningful because as you know, in the case of DFI and the Iraq case, this so-called temporary mechanism lasted for 10 years.

And, you know, we've discussed a ton of complexities with this set of issues and this mechanism even beyond what happened in the Iraq case. So, it seems quite plausible to me that this temporary measure is not so temporary. So why Qatar in the first place, and what are sort of the longer term implications you think might exist for the fact that it is in Qatar?

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah, it's a really good question. You know, Qatar is one of these countries that is always viewed suspiciously by people across political spectrum for kind of different reasons. Like people on the political left right now are very skeptical of Qatar because, of course, it gifted President Trump a jet and is seen as being fairly obsequious and its flattery of him, to an extent that is seen as having led to the Trump administration making what many people criticize as poorly considered concessions on access to AI technology and a variety of other measures. That's true of a lot of the Gulf countries, but particularly Qatar as well.

On the right, a lot of people criticize Qatar because it's viewed as closer to the Muslim Brotherhood and closer to other sort of political Islamic components and ideologies and movements around the region, around the world that are seen by some as contrary to U.S. interests and therefore, you know, more hostile in that regard.

And Qatar has been accused of running massive influence campaigns in the United States. And so everyone who is critical of views of Qatar is also very quick to say, well, somebody, people are obviously in Qatar’s back pocket. And look, there sometimes is truth to some of those claims, potentially at least.

The key point here though is that Qatar is also, and long has been a strategic ally of the United States or strategic partner, facilitator, if not ally. Obviously the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East is located there, Al-Udeid Air Base. It also has played this role as a facilitator with lots of rivals of the United States, between the United States and with those rivals, including the Taliban, including different groups in Syria, including Iran, precisely because Qatar is kind of like modern day Casablanca.

It keeps ties with all these actors. It has credibility with them just as it does with the United States. And that lets us play this sometimes very valuable facilitator sort of role. And notably it did this in regards to Venezuela under the Biden administration. It did facilitate negotiation between the Maduro regime and Biden precisely 'cause it maintained ties with both of them.

But in this particular case, I think the reasons why it ended up playing this role are actually much more specific and kind of contextual. Notably, Qatar doesn't have the legal problems the United States does in a way that many other foreign just jurisdictions would for holding Venezuelan assets.

It's harder to enforce foreign judgments in arbital awards in Qatar than it is in places like Europe. It's getting better to some extent and easier, like Qatar has just recently overhauled its laws for doing this, but nonetheless it's a challenge. In particular, Qatar requires reciprocity for enforcing foreign judgments, a lot of the things that other countries don't give to Qatari judgments.

More fundamentally as well, Qatar still has a fairly strong view of sovereign immunity and sovereign involvement seems to be something that can kind of squash a lot of legal actions to some extent. And Qatar foreign policy kind of trumps like conventional legal process and more easily than in other jurisdictions.

And Qatar never recognized the Juan Guaidó government or the 2015 National Assembly. It appears to have always kind of adopted the de facto rule. That is the more traditional approach many countries take to recognition, which is to say, ‘look, whether we like it or not, the Maduro, now Rodríguez, regime is in control of Venezuela on the ground, and that's what matters. We're gonna treat it like the government.’

All this means that the Rodríguez regime should be able to open an account there and hold money there without the legal risks that people were worried about in the United States context. And many of those legal risks would also apply in a lot of other countries, not at least because a lot of them that are closest to the United States, followed the United States lead in recognizing Juan Guaidó and then the 2015 National Assembly in a way that Qatar did not.

But the real tiebreaker on this, I think the real thing that probably led, just from my experience in government working on related sets of issues that probably led people to settle on Qatar on this is really almost coincidental. It's just that Qatar almost did the exact same thing that the Trump administration needs just a few years ago for the Biden administration.

When the Biden administration reached a deal that basically exchanged the release of large tranches of sums that were owed to Iran by South Korea and Japan in exchange for the release of certain American hostages in 2022, 2023, the Biden administration basically said, okay, we are gonna let this money be transferred to two accounts in Qatar, with these relatively small kind of banks that didn't have major ties to the U.S. economy.

And then we're gonna allow vendors to directly petition them for payment, direct to vendors. They're not gonna give any money to the Iranian government, but we're gonna let the Iranian government say, we wanna pay this vendor for this humanitarian good. And there only allows you to spend the money humanitarian goods.

And it's up to the Qatari banks and the Qatari government with facilitation, cooperation with the United States, to ensure that those transfers are only taking place as approved. Whatever the arrangements were, the Biden administration always said it had utmost confidence that the Qataris were cooperating with it fully and not allowing any money to get to Iran that wasn't supposed to be there.

And notably, after the October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel, the Biden government basically said, ‘Hey, we don't wanna go with this deal anymore. We don't want any of this more money getting out of this account.’ And the Qatari appeared to have cooperated with that, despite substantial pressure from the Iranian government to release more of that money.

So, my guess is the folks in the Treasury Department, many of whom probably worked under Biden as well, saw what the Trump administration is trying to do and they're gonna say, ‘well, we're gonna need a reliable partner who can hold these money free of legal risks, and with whom we know we have an established track record of being able to monitor the funds, make sure they're being used for purposes that we approve of, and that is comfortable working with the U.S. government in that regard and will follow our directions.’

And the Qataris have a track record of that in relatively recent memory. You know, maybe other governments could have done that too. But if you take Rubio at his word in his testimony, the Trump administration thought it was acting very quickly in response to a very urgent economic crisis. And so in that situation, policymakers and folks aren't gonna try and reinvent the wheel.

They're gonna try and go to something that works in the way they need it to work. And my guess is that put Qatar pretty readily at the top of the pile.

Natalie Orpett: And just a quick question on that, which is what's in it for Qatar in this? It's a controversial issue. There are all these creditors out there. It's complicated.

Is it really as simple as Qatar has a lot of foreign policy interests in continuing to have this sort of special role in U.S. foreign policy of serving as an intermediary and such? Or is there something more in it for Qatar?

Scott R. Anderson: No I think that's the bulk of it. I mean, look, it's not bad for Qatar to have an extra $500 million in a bank account.

It's—this money is reportedly being held at Qatar National Bank, which is a partially state owned, major financial bank. Not perfect, but like, you know, but frankly a bigger, more sophisticated with more sanctions complies entity than was used in the Iran deal, it seems. So, you know, you are in this position where Qatar maybe gets a little economic benefit, but probably minimal for a country as rich as it is.

Instead its benefit really is political, but it's not just with the United States. This is activity that the Rodríguez regime in Venezuela probably values as well and to do many other countries.

And it's Qatar's ability to serve this sort of facilitator role between parties that might otherwise disagree that gives it a lot more influence than it probably would otherwise have on the international scene. And this just plays into that along with many other actions Qatar has pursued in recent years.

Natalie Orpett: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I wanna wrap by just zooming out a little bit to say, you know, we've laid out this incredibly complex set of mechanisms, legal issues layered on top of legal issues.

I wanna talk a little bit about what we're looking for next, right? We've talked about how this may play out. We've talked about the lawsuits that might come. What exactly are you looking for in the sort of short-, medium-, and long-term?

Scott R. Anderson: I mean, this was a big motivation for Alex and me, or I'll speak for myself. I dunno about Alex, but I think we're on the same page on this in writing this piece is that—

There was so much confusion and effort to understand the different pieces of the scheme that we knew about, that not as much time was being spent on the really big questions that we need answered moving forward that are actually more important to the execution of the scheme effectively.

Because if executed as the Trump administration says it wants to execute it, it is a, if nothing else, a fairly reasonable sort of policy to advance the stated goals of helping rehabilitate Venezuela's oil sector. And it looks a lot like things prior governments, prior U.S. administrations, I should say, have done that were reasonably successful if not perfect at doing that.

But there are big questions outstanding here. Right now, A, we have no sense of what sort of accountability or oversight is being done for the spending, the money either in Qatar or in the United States for that matter. The DFI arrangement set up for Iraq had massive oversight, had whole independent auditing bodies set up, in part 'cause part of the money was being sent back to the UN for compensation for claims arising from the first Gulf War.

It had lots of measures in place to ensure that money was spent appropriately, and it still had huge problems particularly in its first few years of operation before some of those mechanisms got fully stood up. Those have been widely reported on, Politico ran an article on this just last week or the week before.

So, it's not a very encouraging that you don't have to see the Trump administration apparently being at least very transparent about whatever mechanisms it has to monitor these funds. The only, now, the only funds that have we know of so far have gone into anywhere yet is the $500 million in the Qatari account.

And there, Rubio was asked about that in his testimony and he said essentially, well, we're gonna have to do a retrospective audit on that. We were moving too fast, we just had to get the money to Venezuela.

That might be right, but hopefully people will follow up and ask about the retrospective audit and ensure that if that mechanism is used in the future, and notably it could be, you do now have the 14373 mechanism in place, and in theory, that is what the general license allowing for economic transactions with Venezuela requires money to be channeled through,

but that doesn't prevent the Trump administration from doing case-specific licenses for a part transfer like the Qatari transfer again. And I think we may see more of those because there will be times where Venezuela may need a quick infusion of funds that would otherwise get held up by the legal challenges the U.S. mechanism might yet face. And so maybe we're gonna see some more of those. So you're gonna wanna have some transparency around how those things are being used.

And then the big question is the big chunks of this policy that. Seen to be on the horizon, but we haven't heard anything about yet. What is the plan for Venezuela, getting Venezuela to renegotiate its massive sovereign debt?

How much of that priority is that gonna be? What kind of timeframe is it gonna be? How is the United States gonna handle the recognition of the 2015 National Assembly versus the Rodríguez regime? And where does some sort of democratic election or something like that come into play in regards to bridging those two areas of concern?

What are we gonna do to get rid of these terrorism claims against Venezuela? Is there gonna be a claim settlement agreement? This is something the United States and presidents can do that kind of extinguish those claims and exchange for a lump sum the United States government then distributes. If so, what lump sum are they looking for?

Is that what the $200 million in Qatar is being held for? Is it being held for some other purpose? There's all these really big major policy questions just hovering out there that the Trump administration, to my knowledge, has not addressed. And even Rubio's testimony, which I'll say was very substantive and he was fairly forthcoming on January 28th.

You know, the questions weren't, I don't think people had quite delved deep enough into the structure to understand where to push on these. A few of them got hit on a few times or some really good lines of questioning from Senator Schatz, from Chairman Shaheen, a few other folks, but you know, there's a lot more we want to know and need to know about these parts of the plan that are still big blanks.

So my hope is that now that hopefully we've been able to shed some light on the broad contours of the what the Trump administration is doing and the ways in which it does and doesn't make sense, we can start spending a lot more energy and attention on the polls in that knowledge and the outstanding questions, which need to get answered.

Natalie Orpett: Okay, well I think we're gonna have to leave it there, but I do want to really thank you and your co-author, Alex Zerden, for delving into this morass of issues for us and really helping to clarify it. I think it was a really helpful piece and I think this has been a very helpful conversation. So, thank you very much.

Scott R. Anderson: Thank you for having me.

[Outro]

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