President Trump is downplaying concerns about a new oil reserve agreement with Venezuela that experts say could take years to get up and running. CBS News' Lilia Luciano has more.
Page F1From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 1 September 2026
US signs 'oil deal' with Venezuela; Trump says Washington now controls large slice of Venezuela's oil.
As it ran on the front
Filing the two releases together. One is styled 'new U.S. oil deal with Venezuela.' The other is the same week's quote from the President: the United States has control of a large slice of Venezuela's oil. Both describe the same arrangement. Only one of them uses the word control.
A deal, on the standard form, has two parties negotiating terms neither could have gotten alone. What's on this week's paperwork is a deal in name and a control claim in substance, and the gap between those two words is the whole finding. Nobody is disputing that the deal exists, or that it involves oil, or that the announcement came from the U.S. side. What's being reconciled here is which word describes it more accurately — and the accounting problem is that both words came from the same source, in the same week, describing the same barrels.…
…(cont) Control, in a filing sense, means somebody else's line item now runs through your books. If the reporting is accurate that the U.S. now controls a large slice of Venezuela's oil, the deal is not the newsworthy part — the newsworthy part is that a deal was the word chosen for it. That's not a dollar-figure gap, hon, it's a vocabulary gap, and vocabulary gaps this size tend to show up whenever the party making the claim also gets to name the arrangement.
Cross-referencing forward: whoever signs the next drilling permit, whoever books the next export manifest, whoever collects the next royalty check — that's the real signature page, and it hasn't been filed publicly yet. Until it is, we have two documents from the same week, one calling it a deal, one calling it control, and no explanation on file for why a country needs both words to describe cooperating with itself. The ledger doesn't require resolving whose oil it was. It only requires noting that only one side got to pick the noun.
“They keep calling it a deal, but a deal has two sides negotiating, not one side announcing it controls a large slice of the other country's oil. That is not diplomacy, that is an inventory update delivered with a press conference. Whoever files the next drilling permit is the real signature on this thing.”
“This is a mutually beneficial energy partnership, full stop — the administration secured access, not control, well, the President did say control, that's — that's a strong word for what is fundamentally cooperative resource management.”
The receipts
{beacon} Energy & Environment Energy & Environment The Big Story Trump: U.S. has control of large slice of Venezuela's oil President Trump said Friday evening that there will be “majority U.S. control” of a large swath of Venezuela’s oil…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.