Rep. Sean Casten

There's going to be a lot of theatrics because that's his style.

And therefore, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to ask him because I'm working on some things that I don't want him to be prepared for because I want him to be engaged in this.

And this reporter came to me afterwards and he said, I understand why you didn't tell me now.

But what we were trying to do was to say, I had earlier...

written a letter to the oil majors pointing out to them that because the Trump White House has not outlined any legal authority for seizing Venezuelan oil, any investments they might make to refine, distribute that oil, they're going to be exposed to Venezuela's creditors, the largest of which is China, because this is a fraudulent conveyance.

I had wanted to go in with that, and we got the good fortune, the bad fortune that a day or two before, Marco Rubio had been before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had made some suggestions about things that we knew were legally not true.

And so it was just an opportunity to go and frame those conversations with Pesent to say, okay, you either have to –

You either have to agree with Rubio, in which case you're in a problem, or clarify him, which is going to put you in a pickle.

And I didn't want him to be prepared.

And we had to keep our tone down because if he got on the defensive of starting to throw out all of the, you know, the Pam Bondi burn book stuff, five minutes goes pretty quick in that situation.

Yeah.

I'm not sure he understood the question, to be honest.

And this was where we get into it, because Rubio had said that Treasury was managing these funds under their authority.

And we knew that Treasury didn't actually have authority.

Yeah.

And so, you know, at least framing the question that way, you can't say, well, this is just because, you know, you're some woke liberal.

You either have to point to the specific one of the, you know, Congress has given Treasury 91 separate authorities to manage 91 different types of trust accounts.

if the Treasury Department had done what Rubio said they had done, the Treasury Secretary would know which of those trust accounts applied.

And when you read those 91 trust accounts, none of them actually fit the bill.

So I think he was trying to, well, let me not speculate on what he was trying to do.