Blog

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela’s legislature opened debate Thursday on a bill to loosen state control over the country’s vast oil sector in the first major overhaul since the late socialist leader Hugo Chávez nationalized parts of the industry in 2007.

The legislation would create new opportunities for private companies to invest in the oil industry and establish international arbitration for investment disputes.

Following the U.S. capture of former President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month, the Trump administration has ramped up pressure on acting President Delcy Rodríguez and other allies of the ousted leader to invite greater investment from U.S. energy companies in Venezuela’s flagging oil industry.

A draft of the proposed legislation, a copy of which was seen by The Associated Press, represents a sharp turn away from the resource nationalism of Chávez, who accused multinationals of colonial exploitation and considered the country’s oil wealth to be state property.

In apparent response to demands from U.S. oil executives, the proposed legislation would allow private companies to independently operate oil fields, market their own crude output and collect the cash revenues despite remaining, on paper, minority partners to the state oil company.

“The operating company shall assume the comprehensive management of the execution of the activities, at its sole cost, expense and risk,” the draft says, adding that portions of production volumes “may be directly commercialized by the operating company, once governmental obligations have been fulfilled.”

Crucially, the bill also would let companies settle legal disputes through arbitration in international courts rather than only local courts.

The legislation also would keep the current 30% royalty rate, but let the government cut royalties and taxes to as low as 15% for expensive or hard-to-develop oil projects, so that companies would be more willing to invest.

The president of Venezuela’s National Assembly and the acting president’s brother, Jorge Rodríguez, told lawmakers at the start of Thursday’s debate that the bill aims to “allow an accelerated increase in production” of oil in Venezuela.

“Oil under the ground is useless,” he said, referring to the need to boost oil production and open up new exploration opportunities.

Pushed by Delcy Rodríguez, the bill is expected to advance swiftly through the ruling party-dominated legislature. Lawmakers concluded the initial discussion of the bill on Thursday after around two hours and advanced the legislation to a second round of debate, yet to be scheduled.

During the session, Orlando Camacho, a lawmaker and head of Venezuela’s national Fedeindustria business association, told the assembly that the bill would ensure that Venezuela’s oil industry “remains the engine of the country.”

The proposed legal guarantees — ensuring that foreign companies can bring claims against Venezuela before international bodies — are necessary to attract private investment, he said.

Even as President Donald Trump looks to lure American companies to reboot Venezuela’s oil sector, many remain concerned about the financial and legal risks of pouring billions of dollars into the country.

Plenty of investors have been burned before, their assets seized as Chávez nationalized parts of Venezuela’s lucrative oil industry in 2007. Firms like Exxon have been trying to get the Venezuelan government to compensate them for their billions of dollars in losses ever since, to no avail.

The current political uncertainty also worries investors. There is no timeline for holding democratic elections in Venezuela after Maduro’s ouster as Rodríguez, long Maduro’s loyal second in command, seeks to consolidate control. The Trump administration also hasn’t said when it will lift the crippling sanctions imposed to weaken Maduro’s government, which further restrict foreign operations in the country’s oil sector.

WASHINGTON — Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday defended his investigations of Donald Trump at a public congressional hearing in which he insisted that he had acted without regard to politics and had no second thoughts about the criminal charges he brought.

“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account. So that is what I did,” Smith said of Trump.

Smith testified behind closed doors last month but returned to the House Judiciary Committee for a public hearing that provided the prosecutor with a forum to address Congress and the country more generally about the breadth of evidence he collected during investigations that shadowed Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign and resulted in indictments. The hourslong hearing immediately split along partisan lines as Republican lawmakers sought to undermine the former Justice Department official while Democrats tried to elicit damaging testimony about Trump’s conduct and accused their GOP counterparts of attempting to rewrite history.

“It was always about politics,” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the committee’s Republican chairman.

“Maybe for them,” retorted Rep. Jamie Raskin, the panel’s top Democrat, during his own opening statement. “But, for us, it’s all about the rule of law.”

The hearing was on the mind of Trump himself as he traveled back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with the president posting on his Truth Social account that Smith was being “DECIMATED before Congress” — presumably reference to the Republican attacks he faced. Trump said Smith had “destroyed many lives under the guise of legitimacy.”

Smith told lawmakers that he stood behind his decisions as special counsel to bring charges against Trump in separate cases that accused the Republican of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., after he left the White House.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” Smith said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

Republicans, Smith spar over phone records

Republicans from the outset sought to portray Smith as an overly aggressive, hard-charging prosecutor who had to be “reined in” by higher-ups and the courts as he investigated Trump. They also seized on revelations that the Smith team had collected and analyzed phone records of more than a half-dozen Republican lawmakers who were in contact with Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, as his supporters stormed the Capitol in a bid to halt the certification of his 2020 election loss.

The records revealed the length and time of the calls but not the content of the communications, but Rep. Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican, said the episode showed how Smith had “walked all over the Constitution.”

“My office didn’t spy on anyone,” Smith said, explaining that collecting phone records is a common prosecutorial tactic and necessary in this instance to help prosecutors understand the scope of the conspiracy.

Smith describes a wide-ranging conspiracy on 2020

Under questioning, Smith described what he said was a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the results of the election that Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden and alleged how the Republican refused to listen to advisers who told him that the contest had in fact not been stolen. After he was charged, Smith said, Trump tried to silence and intimidate witnesses.

Smith said one reason he felt confident in the strength of the case that prosecutors had prepared to take to trial was the extent to which it relied on Republican supporters of Trump.

“Some of the most powerful witnesses were witnesses who, in fact, were fellow Republicans who had voted for Donald Trump, who had campaigned for him and who wanted him to win the election,” Smith said.

The hearing unfolded against the backdrop of an ongoing Trump administration retribution campaign targeting the investigators who scrutinized the Republican president and amid mounting alarm that the Justice Department’s institutional independence is eroding under the sway of the president.

In a nod to those concerns, Smith said: “I believe that if we don’t call people to account when they commit crimes in this context, it can endanger our election process, it can endanger election workers and, ultimately, our democracy.”

Smith was appointed in 2022 by Biden’s Justice Department to oversee investigations into Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing. Both investigations produced indictments against Trump, but the cases were abandoned by Smith and his team after Trump won back the White House because of longstanding Justice Department legal opinions that say sitting presidents cannot be indicted.

GOP says Smith wanted to wreck Trump’s White House bid

Republicans for their part repeatedly denounced Smith, with California Rep. Kevin Kiley accusing him of seeking “maximum litigation advantage at every turn” and “circumventing constitutional limitations to the point that you had to be reined in again and again throughout the process.”

Another Republican lawmaker, Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia, challenged Smith on his efforts to bar Trump from making incendiary comments about witnesses. Smith said the order was necessary because of Trump’s efforts to intimidate witness, but Cline asserted that it was meant to silence Trump in the heat of the presidential campaign.

And Jordan, the committee chairman, advanced a frequent Trump talking point that the investigation was driven by a desire to derail Trump’s candidacy.

“We should never forget what took place, what they did to the guy we the people elected twice,” Jordan said.

Smith vigorously rejected those suggestions and said the evidence placed Trump’s actions squarely at the heart of a criminal conspiracy to undo the 2020 election.

“The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy,” Smith said. “These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit.”

BAGHDAD — The decision to move prisoners of the Islamic State group from northeast Syria to detention centers in Iraq came after a request by officials in Baghdad that was welcomed by the U.S.-led coalition and the Syrian government, officials said Thursday.

American and Iraqi officials told The Associated Press about the Iraqi request, a day after the U.S. military said that it started transferring some of the 9,000 IS detainees held in more than a dozen detention centers in northeast Syria controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, in northeast Syria.

The move to start transferring the detainees came after Syrian government forces took control of the sprawling al-Hol camp — which houses thousands of mostly women and children — from the SDF, which withdrew as part of a ceasefire. Troops on Monday seized a prison in the northeastern town of Shaddadeh, where some IS detainees escaped and many were recaptured, state media reported.

The SDF said on Thursday that government forces shelled al-Aqtan prison near the northern Syrian city of Raqqa with heavy weapons, while simultaneously imposing a siege around the prison using tanks and deploying fighters.

Al-Aqtan prison, where some IS prisoners are held, was surrounded by government forces earlier this week and negotiations were ongoing on the future of the detention facility.

Concerns about escapes

With the push by government forces into northeast Syria along the border with Iraq, Baghdad became concerned that some of the detainees might become a danger to Iraq’s security, if they managed to flee from the detention centers amid the chaos.

An Iraqi security official said that the decision to transfer the prisoners from Syria to Iraq was an Iraqi decision, welcomed by the U.S.-led coalition and the Syrian government. The official said that it was in Iraq’s security interest to detain them in Iraqi prisons rather than leaving them in Syria.

Also Thursday, a senior U.S. military official confirmed to the AP that Iraq “offered proactively” to take the IS prisoners rather than the U.S. requesting it of them.

A Syrian foreign ministry official said that the plan to transfer IS prisoners from Syria to Iraq had been under discussion for months before the recent clashes with the SDF.

All three officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to comment publicly.

Over the past several years, the SDF has handed over to Iraqi authorities foreign fighters, including French citizens, who were put on trial and received sentences.

The SDF still controls more than a dozen detention facilities holding around 9,000 IS members, but is slated to hand the prisons over to government control under a peace process that also is supposed to eventually merge the SDF with government forces.

U.S. Central Command said that the first transfer on Wednesday involved 150 IS members, who were taken from Syria’s northeastern province of Hassakeh to “secure locations” in Iraq. The statement said that up to 7,000 detainees could be transferred to Iraqi-controlled facilities.

Iraq has beefed up patrols along its border with Syria. On Thursday, tanks lined up along the frontier in the northern province of Sinjar.

Members of the Yazidi minority in Sinjar have been particularly fearful of a repeat of 2014 when IS militants overran the area and launched particularly brutal attacks on Yazidis, considered by the extremist group to be heretics. Militants killed Yazidi men and boys and sold women into sexual slavery or forced them to convert and marry militants.

Stark warning

IS declared a caliphate in 2014 in large parts of Syria and Iraq, attracting large numbers of fighters from around the world.

The militant group was defeated in Iraq in 2017, and in Syria two years later, but IS sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks in both countries. As a key U.S. ally in the region, the SDF played a major role in defeating IS.

Also Thursday, the SDF accused the government of violating a four-day truce declared on Tuesday. It said Syrian government forces pounded the southern outskirts of the northern town of Kobani, which recently became besieged after the government’s push in the northeast over the past two weeks.

A commander with the Kurdish women’s militia in Syria, speaking from inside Kobani, told reporters during an online news conference that living conditions there are deteriorating.

Nesrin Abdullah of the Women’s Protection Units, or YPJ, said that if the fighting around Kobani continues, thousands of people “will be massacred.”

She said that there was no electricity or running water in the town, which a decade ago became the symbol of resistance against IS. The militants at the time besieged it for months before being pushed back.

“The people here are facing a genocide,” she said. “We have many people in hospitals, and hospitals cannot continue if there is no electricity.”

U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Khaled Khiari told the U.N. Security Council Thursday that clashes were taking place in parts of Hassakeh province and also on the outskirts of Kobani, an enclave controlled by the SDF, and that the situation on the ground elsewhere was “very tense.”