"The Biden administration made a deal with Maduro. No one talks about this," Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Sean Hannity during an interview on Fox News earlier this month.
He's right on both counts. Biden was notoriously weak on Venezuela's illegitimate president, Nicolás Maduro.
And no one talks much about it. Well, I've talked about it a few times over the last six months or so, but we'll let that slide.
So, in light of the Donald Trump administration's latest sanctions on Team Maduro, I thought I'd talk about it again, because it's always worth reminding ourselves of the bad things that happened when Joe Biden was president.
In 2015, Maduro's nephews, Efrain Antonio Campo Flores and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas, who are widely known throughout the entire Western Hemisphere as the narcosobrinos or narco-nephews, were arrested by our Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti for attempting to smuggle 800 kilos of cocaine into the U.S. They were extradited to New York, and Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, accused the United States of kidnapping the young men and imperialism.
A year later, they were convicted on narco-trafficking charges, and in 2017, they were each sentenced to 18 years in federal prison.
In 2022, however, the Biden administration agreed to release them back to Maduro in exchange for seven American citizens he'd been holding hostage for about five years, including five Citgo executives and a U.S. Marine.
Opposition leaders in Venezuela and people like Rubio in the U.S. were not amused, claiming that the Biden administration caved to Maduro's demands, which gave Maduro — and other anti-U.S. world leaders — the go-ahead to detain United States citizens and use them for leverage to get what he wanted.
Today Biden released two convicted drug dealer nephews of #Venezuela dictator Maduro in exchange for 7 innocent Americans being held hostage
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) October 1, 2022
Another Biden appeasement that will result in more anti-U.S. dictators taking more innocent Americans hostage in the future
In contrast, this past summer, the Trump administration, with the help of El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, managed to free all remaining U.S. hostages in Venezuela, along with some Venezuelan political prisoners who were held unjustly and without due process, and they did it without releasing any narco-terrorists from prison. As a matter of fact, Maduro agreed to take back hundreds of deported Tren de Aragua members as part of the exchange.
As if that wasn't enough, the Biden administration continued bending over and handing Maduro whatever else he wanted after that.
In 2023, Biden made some more deals with Maduro. First, he eased sanctions on the country's oil, gas, and gold industries, which essentially put money right into the regime's pockets. Maduro's people had just signed an agreement with Venezuelan opposition leaders, promising that the country would hold free and fair elections in 2024. The sanctions were something of a reward for that.
Later in 2023, the Biden administration also agreed to another one of Maduro's demands: release Alex Saab.
Rubio has called Saab Maduro's "chief money launderer, his money man, his bag man." In 2020, the Colombian-born businessman was arrested in Cape Verde when his plane stopped to refuel en route to Iran. In 2021, he was extradited to the United States and was held in Miami on money laundering charges. Before he even stood trial, Biden released him on several conditions, including that he leave the U.S., never come back, and never commit any crimes against our country. In exchange for Saab, Maduro freed more American hostages.
Saab currently serves in Maduro's illegitimate government as Minister of Industry and National Production.
Of course, Maduro didn't uphold his end of the bargain even a little bit. As Rubio put it on Hannity, "He got the nephews back, the drug dealers. He got the bag man back. And he never did the free and fair elections."
I want to stop here and say that many people — even some very smart people who we all know and love and who are often on our TV screens explaining politics to us — think that opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado is the actual president-elect of Venezuela. She is not. It's Edmundo González Urrutia.
Had Maduro upheld his end of the bargain, Machado would likely be the president of Venezuela right now. She's extremely popular in that country and won the opposition's primary with an overwhelming majority of the vote. But in January 2024, Maduro's Supreme Tribunal of Justice banned her from running, so she threw her support behind González as a surrogate for her candidacy and encouraged her supporters to do the same.
Anyway, the UN, the OAS, the United States, and countless other nations in Latin America and Europe condemned the action. Biden's Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it "deeply unfortunate," and the administration reinstated some sanctions but offered waivers to certain companies, allowing them to continue to operate. It was extremely weak and basically pointless.
And, of course, González won the July 2024 elections with at least 67% of the vote, probably more, but Maduro swooped in and stole it before anything could be finalized. Many say the Biden administration's actions are what gave Maduro the confidence to do it and repress the opposition afterward. He knew he could operate with impunity.
And that's a brief, simplified version of how the Biden administration is partially responsible for where we are today.
As Rubio said in that interview, "They suckered Joe Biden. They’re not going to sucker Donald Trump."
He added, "[Trump’s] willing to meet with anybody. But at the end of the day there has to be somebody that you can actually make a deal with... but Maduro has never kept a deal."
