Administration calls Venezuela oil deal a gift, keeps the contract secret.

…(cont) Those were the public's numbers through Labor Day: 65 billion barrels, 35 percent of it marked for the Pentagon, a military operation clocked at 30 minutes, and a record $4.15 a gallon at the pump while drivers waited for the savings a deal struck in their name was supposed to bring. Every one of those numbers came from someone announcing the deal, not from the deal itself. None of them came from a contract.

On September 20, the public got a preview of what that gap looks like when someone forces it shut. Public Citizen, a consumer group, filed a federal records request and obtained the actual text of the Big Pharma pricing deals Warren had been asking the health secretary to release since August. The documents carried perks for drug makers the administration had not announced: room to raise prices overseas, and limits on the savings promised to American patients at home.

On October 21, ProPublica filed its own story on the oil deal, under one headline: "The Secret Terms of Trump's Venezuelan Oil Deal." The headline is the finding. Nine months after the operation, fifty-three days after the 65-billion-barrel announcement, the count of contract pages the public has been shown stands at zero. Sixty-five billion barrels announced. Thirty-five percent assigned. Zero pages published. That is the gap, hon — not a feeling, a number. The administration's other secret deal this year stayed secret until a nonprofit filed a records request and found terms the administration had not volunteered. The oil contract has not reached that stage. As of today, it is still the deal the public has only been told about.