The Conservative Cave

It's always hilarious when they come to the "Trump is losing his mental abilities" angle.  After 4 years of Quid Pro Joe ... and they said he was "better than ever" up to his last day?

 

KC

To understand how what's happening right now came about, one has to realize this story starts years ago, in a galaxy far, far away - Venezuela.

In around 2008 or so, a Canadian mining company, Crystallex, owned by a hedge fund, had one of their gold mines in Venezuela stolen by the government - nationalized is the term - and they didn't much care for the idea.

They weren't going to take the loss of the Las Cristinas mine lying down and decided to sue. But about the only assets the Venezuelan government had which were anywhere they could lay claim to for the $1.4B in damages they wanted were the state-owned assets of the Venezuelan oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A (PDVSA - they pronounce it 'pedavesa') in the United States. We know them as CITGO.

So that's what they did. The Canadians filed a lawsuit in Delaware, and eventually, the judge ruled they had legal standing to sue for the theft of their gold mine. After nearly ten years of wrangling, by 2018, the judge had also ruled for the claimants, and given Venezuela the option to cough up the $1.4B to satisfy the judgment or have their entire US CITGO operations - three refineries and forty-eight terminals - seized and sold at auction to pay for the goldmine.
...
By 2021, there had been some movement, and the belief was that Crystallex was in the home stretch of receiving compensation, as the Delaware judge finally approved the sale of CITGO. Only US sanctions against Maduro were gumming up the punitive auction. A potential CITGO auction was going to have to first gain the approval of the US government.
...
Four years later, and one week ago, Judge Stark approved a winning auction bid for all of CITGO's assets, ostensibly wresting Maduro's most valuable commodity from his hands.