The Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital, founded by the Biden administration to give loans to bolster the U.S. defense industry, is helping lead President Trump’s oil deal.
Page F2From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 September 2026
White House announces Venezuela oil deal, then discloses the Pentagon is running the oil company.
As it ran on the front
Let's run the numbers as filed. On the day the deal was announced, the public description was a barrel-purchase arrangement between the United States and Venezuela, brokered by the White House. Days later, the White House filled in some of the details, and the operating entity named in those details was North American Blue Energy Partners. That is one filing.
The second filing, reported separately, describes how the Pentagon — an agency whose statutory business is national defense, not petroleum extraction — is now getting into Venezuelan oil operations. That is a second filing. The two filings describe the same barrels.…
…(cont) Reconciling the two: an oil deal announced as a diplomatic and economic arrangement is, on the operating documents, a defense department project routed through a privately named partnership. The gap between 'oil deal' and 'Pentagon oil business' is not a rounding error. It is a full agency.
I want to be precise about what is and is not in the record. The record does not say the Pentagon owns the wells. The record says the Pentagon is 'getting into' the business, per reporting that ran under that exact description. Getting into a business and owning a business are different columns on the ledger, but they tend to end up in the same place a few quarters later, hon.
Who benefits from the gap? The filings name North American Blue Energy Partners as the operating partner. The filings do not, as of this reconciliation, name the ownership structure behind that partnership, the contract value, or the length of term. Three blanks, on a deal already announced as final.
What we can reconcile: an announcement came first. Details came second, on a delay. The details, when they came, moved the deal from a diplomatic story to a defense-department-adjacent commercial one. That is not an accusation. That is the order the filings were released in, and the order is on the record.
The taxpayer's exposure in this arrangement — the department whose budget she funds, now positioned inside a business she was told was a diplomatic deal — has not yet been itemized. When it is, this desk will run those numbers too.
“They announce an 'oil deal' with Venezuela like it's diplomacy, then a few days later you find out the Pentagon's the one running it. That's not foreign policy, that's a defense contractor with a flag pin, and the barrels get counted somewhere you'll never see the invoice.”
“This is simply the Department of Defense participating in a broader energy security initiative — nothing unusual about that. It's not that the Pentagon is 'in the oil business,' exactly, it's that the Pentagon is involved in the entity that's in the oil business. I'm not sure that sentence helped me.”
The receipts
The Trump administration's plan to take a stake in tens of billions of barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves will hinge on a private company called North American Blue Energy Partners, the White House announced Monday.
As part of the deal, the U.S. is creating a private company as a joint venture with North American Blue Energy Partners, owned by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.