President Donald Trump’s oil deal with the Venezuelan government has raised red flags among House Republicans who fear that talks with acting President Delcy Rodríguez could ruin the chances of democratic elections in the country.
“I’m looking for more information because I don’t trust [the Venezuelan government],” one House Republican, who was granted anonymity to speak about internal deliberations, told NOTUS. “I think that this is preservation on their part, which I understand, but I don’t like, and what I would love to see is a laid-out time frame of when elections are going to be.”
When Trump announced the framework, the lawmaker said, “I definitely had pause.”
Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, along with Democrats, are demanding a briefing from the Trump administration to break down how a U.S. majority stake in the oil reserves would work and to provide a timeline for when free elections would take place in Venezuela, NOTUS has learned.
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Lawmakers have asked the State Department to explain Trump’s deal, which would give the U.S. control of at least 65 billion barrels of oil, at the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s weekly so-called “hot spot briefings,” the House Republican told NOTUS. Administration officials regularly attend these sessions.
Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs’ Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, has also made inquiries to the State Department regarding the Venezuelan oil deal, his office told NOTUS.
The Trump administration is supportive of democratic elections in Venezuela, but has not offered a specific timeline when those would take place.
Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has led U.S. operations in Venezuela since Nicolás Maduro’s ouster in January, told reporters that “there’s a lot of work that has to happen to lay the groundwork for an election” and that such a process would take “not years, but certainly months and weeks.”
He added that in order for elections to take place, Venezuela must “have an economy and a country whose institutions are functioning, so that they’re not inheriting a disaster, they’re not inheriting a reconstruction process, they’re inheriting a functional state.”
The White House’s fact sheet on the oil deal states that this “investment in Venezuela’s energy sector is a key step in the Trump Administration’s three-part plan of stabilization, reconstruction and democratic transition.”
Still, some Republicans were skeptical about working with Rodríguez.
“I’ve always said that the rule of law needs to be implemented in Venezuela in order for those deals and in order for the big boys in the oil industry in the United States to come to Venezuela. They need to know that the person who is [president] was elected by the Venezuelans, and that’s not the case with Delcy, so we have a glitch there,” Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Florida), chair of the House Foreign Affairs’ Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, told NOTUS.
“I’m afraid that once Trump is not at the White House ... then Delcy may be still there, and this deal may not continue benefiting the American public,” Salazar said.
When asked if she was concerned that the agreement would eliminate any incentive the U.S. has to replace the current Venezuelan government, Salazar said, “The United States has to have the incentive of behaving according to our Constitution, because we’re not in the business of colonizing anybody.”
The U.S., Salazar added, has to give Venezuelans “the platform” to have “free and fair elections.”
“I call Delcy Rodríguez the interim dictator,” Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Florida) told NOTUS. “What I hear about the oil and the oil deal is actually very good for the United States and also good for Venezuela; I just don’t like too much that we’re dealing with that government. We need to move on from that government.”
Distrusting Rodríguez is one of the rare areas of bipartisan agreement in the House, according to Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-New York), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He told NOTUS that he “absolutely” wants the State Department to brief members of Congress about the oil deal.
“What [Trump] is doing there is kind of bringing some of us together who really believe and want to promote democracy,” Meeks joked.
Days after announcing the oil deal, the Trump administration received pushback for negotiating with the Venezuelan regime. When the president announced the deal, he said on Truth Social that his administration worked “closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez.”
Since then, other U.S. officials have been doing cleanup.
One U.S. official told NOTUS that the Venezuelan oil deal is “a private deal with a private company. It’s not a deal with the interim government of Venezuela and there was not a political process included in the negotiations.”
“I understand the initial reaction is that we’ve done a deal with the interim government. The deal is not with the interim government; the deal is with a private entity based abroad,” the official said in a statement. “So this in no way impedes a democratic transition, nor does it mean that it cements the interim government as the government.”
The same official pointed out that the administration has had to work with Rodríguez’s government before: “They are the same people we have to deal with now in order to bring in flights. When American Airlines decided to operate direct flights to Venezuela, we had to work with them. When our delegations visit to help facilitate this democratic transition, the interim authorities are the ones who run passport processing.”
“They are in charge right now of maintaining stability in that country as we work through this transition process,” they continued.
Some Democrats have vowed to investigate the deal if the party gains majorities in Congress in November, Semafor reported.The Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital would take a 35% equity stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, which received “100-year concessions for 17 oil fields with proven reserves of approximately 65 billion barrels” from the Venezuelan government, per the White House’s fact sheet on the deal.
A White House official defended the structure, telling NOTUS in a statement: “There can be no transition without a stable economy, and this deal will bring us to a place where elections are possible. This is a country that has been plagued for decades with hyperinflation and virtually zero investment. This privatization helps make a democratic transition possible.”
“It’s worth noting that none of the major opposition leaders in Venezuela have come out to attack this deal — because it’s a good deal for the people of Venezuela and will supercharge their economic recovery,” the White House official added.
Behind closed doors, Republicans have questioned the administration’s actions in Venezuela. In a classified briefing after Maduro’s ouster, Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-Washington), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asked administration officials for a specific time frame on when elections would happen, as NOTUS first reported.
Baumgartner told NOTUS that his first reaction to Trump’s Venezuelan oil announcement was “I want to learn more.” But, he added, the deal was “one of the most significant strategic moves that any president has made,” because it would remove Chinese and Russian influence from Venezuela’s oil business.
Four lawmakers — House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast (R-Florida) and Reps. Kat Cammack (R-Florida), Randy Fine (R-Florida) and Jonathan Jackson (D-Illinois) — traveled to Caracas in July to meet with Rodríguez and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, who is the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly. Based on their meetings, Mast, Fine and Cammack told NOTUS that the Venezuelan government is eager to have a good relationship with the U.S.
Mast told NOTUS that the Rodríguez siblings are “actively working to change the institutions of government that ran the previous elections. So if you want to trust a new election, you’re probably not going to trust that if the people that ran the Maduro elections are still there.” (The 2024 Venezuelan election results, in which Maduro declared himself the winner, are widely considered fraudulent.)
But the Venezuelan opposition is “very much concerned about the likelihood of elections,” Jackson told NOTUS. The Illinois Democrat was the only member of the congressional delegation to Caracas that met with members of the Venezuelan opposition.
Jackson said that Venezuelan opposition members told him they’re concerned that the Trump administration has distanced itself from opposition leader María Corina Machado, including not demanding that she be part of the reconciliation negotiations in the country.
Negotiations between Rodríguez’s government and the opposition are expected to resume in mid-September. The U.S. official said that the Trump administration is “sponsoring” these talks.
The Venezuelan oil deal comes as Americans are facing high oil prices because of the U.S. war in Iran, a major concern for Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.
While Cammack told NOTUS that the deal is “going to bring down gas prices for Americans,” oil industry experts say it will take years for Venezuela’s crude oil to flow into the U.S.
A second House Republican, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, said they trust that Venezuelan elections will happen as long as Rubio remains in charge of the operations in the country.
“If they were to remove Marco Rubio tomorrow, which could happen, because this president, he loves you today and he hates you tomorrow,” the lawmaker told NOTUS, “then I would be worried.”
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