Oil, Lies, and Videotape

Inside the administration’s phantom war on “drug traffickers,” the media blackout around Epstein’s finances, and the steady unmaking of democracy, one OLC memo at a time.

Good morning! Each dawn brings a new entry in the Trump administration’s dystopian fanfiction, except now it’s not speculative; it’s classified. Yesterday, we learned that the Office of Legal Counsel, the same fine legal minds who once thought waterboarding was just “enhanced spa therapy”, has decided that war doesn’t count as war anymore. According to T. Elliot Gaiser, the administration’s latest law-whisperer at Justice, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 doesn’t apply to the current military campaign against “alleged drug traffickers” in Latin America because, and I quote, no U.S. personnel are in danger.

“The operation comprises precise strikes conducted largely by unmanned aerial vehicles launched from naval vessels in international waters at distances too far away for the crews of the targeted vessels to endanger American personnel,” the official said in an email.

The official is reported to have said, “the kinetic operations underway do not rise to the level of ‘hostilities.’” In other words, if the people we’re killing can’t shoot back, it’s not hostilities, it’s just sport.

This breathtaking new interpretation of international law comes at the exact moment when Navy destroyers, amphibious carriers, and a small air force are circling the Caribbean under the pretense of stopping “fentanyl boats.” The only problem is that fentanyl doesn’t come from Venezuela, cocaine does. The administration’s logic seems to be that fentanyl is somehow smuggled by ghost ships captained by cocaine pirates, best destroyed with a carrier group. As usual, the official story makes less sense than a Mar-a-Lago wine list.

If you listen closely to the brass, the retired generals who still have a conscience left, you’ll hear the real story. The operation, they say, has nothing to do with narcotics and everything to do with oil. Venezuela’s oil. It’s déjà vu for anyone old enough to remember the weapons of mass distraction era, when a White House cried “WMDs” as cover for liberating all that oil conveniently trapped under Iraqi sand. This time, it’s “cartel boats” instead of chemical weapons, but the plot twist is the same: seize the resources, wave the flag, and call it freedom. Because when you threaten to sanction half the planet’s petroleum, you’d better have a backup source ready, and lo and behold, Venezuela, poor, corrupt, and sitting atop the largest oil reserves on Earth, fits the bill. Why buy it when you can just “liberate” it?

Retired Major General William Enyart put it bluntly in a transatlantic interview: “This has far less to do with drugs than with oil.” The carrier strike group parked off the Venezuelan coast is not there to chase smugglers. You don’t deploy F-35s and an aircraft carrier to shoot up a few skiffs full of Colombian coke. You do it to make a show of force, to threaten a government, maybe topple one, and to make sure the next oil field comes with an American flag already installed.

Back home, the War Powers clock hit zero this week, sixty days since the first strike, and the administration’s response has been a shrug and a smirk. “Hostilities?” they scoff. “What hostilities?” Apparently, drone strikes and missile launches no longer qualify if you’re firing from far enough away. By that logic, Hiroshima was a zoning dispute.

And what’s more, the press isn’t even allowed to ask about it. The Pentagon’s press office, now rebranded as the Department for War’s Ministry of Narrative, has been quietly cutting off access to journalists deemed “unhelpful.” Reporters are herded into selective briefings like wayward cattle, told nothing, shown less, and then blamed for “misreporting” classified fiction. The new rule is simple: if you want access, repeat the talking points. If you want the truth, enjoy unemployment.

This would all be merely tragicomic if it weren’t so tightly entwined with the administration’s other project, its ongoing demolition of accountability around Jeffrey Epstein’s financial empire. You’d think the president might have his hands full with drone strikes, but no: his Justice Department has been just as busy dismantling the parts of the system that could expose how Epstein’s billions flowed through offshore accounts, Ponzi fronts, and political war chests. The same Office of Legal Counsel that redefined “war” out of existence also drafted the memos that declared the Epstein grand jury transcripts too sensitive for public release. Consistency is the new corruption.

Then there’s the surveillance state. ICE, not content to terrorize immigrants the old-fashioned way, has been caught activating a spyware program called Graphite, a zero-click phone hack from an Israeli vendor, under the Trump DHS. Civil liberties, they assure us, will be respected, which is a little like promising you’ll respect the sanctity of a wedding after sleeping with the entire bridal party. Congressional Democrats called it “deeply alarming.” The White House called it “standard protocol.” And somewhere in a dark server room, the algorithm nodded approvingly.

This, dear reader, is what executive power looks like when it stops pretending to wear clothes. A president who believes he can declare war without Congress, spy on citizens without warrants, and suppress journalists without consequence. A DOJ that treats oversight as optional. A Pentagon press shop that treats the First Amendment like a draft notice. And an economy whose engines, oil, surveillance, and corruption, are all being fine-tuned by the same greasy hands that protected Epstein’s financiers.

Attempting to keep up with the Trump regime’s shenanigans is almost all-encompassing and leaves little time to write about my favorite topic, sustainability. As a bit of a palate cleanser, I’m working on a long-form essay about just that. But first, Marz is taking me out on this beautiful coastal day for a romp and some fresh air, a small reminder that the world is still worth saving, even if the headlines insist otherwise.