Trump calls Venezuela's oil a 'gift to the American people,' names his unrivaled partner: an investigated businessman.

…(cont) Gifts, it turns out, come with paperwork. Days later the White House filled in what it had skipped on Friday: the new company controlling that oil is a joint venture with North American Blue Energy Partners, owned by a Venezuelan businessman named Alejandro Betancourt.

This week the New York Times filled in the rest. Betancourt has been targeted by multiple investigations. He is now the U.S. government's unrivaled partner in the president's bid to control Venezuela's oil.

Line the whole thing up and it stops sounding like an energy policy. A president announces control of another country's oil, calls it a gift so Congress never has to vote on it, and installs as his sole business partner a man federal investigators have separately been circling. Every step of that is sourced to the president's own words and several separate newsrooms — nobody has to speculate to see it.

The oil doesn't move because it's a gift. It moves because a private company owns the pipe, and the private company is owned by a man whose own paperwork the government has apparently decided not to read too closely. Call it what the receipts call it: an unrivaled partnership between a president who needed a headline and a businessman who needed a friend in Washington.

That's the deal. The barrels are Venezuela's, the reserve is America's, and the only name that shows up twice — in the joint venture filing and in the record of federal investigations — is Betancourt's.