Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
January 3, 2026
Today was the legal deadline for the Department of Justice to submit to Congress a written justification for any documents from the Epstein files that the department had redacted or withheld. But it seems unlikely the Justice Department met this deadline because it has missed the December 19 deadline for releasing the files themselves. Both of those deadlines were established by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed overwhelmingly by Congress on November 19, 2025.
Information from those files continues to trickle out. Those that have been released suggest the Department of Justice considered charging “co-conspirators” and that Trump traveled on Epstein’s private plane with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, along with alleged victims, on several occasions. Mar-a-Lago routinely sent employees to perform massages and other spa services at Epstein’s home, where he exposed himself to those employees. According to Daniel Ruetenik of CBS News, video released on December 23 and 24, 2025, contradicts previous statements about the surveillance system in the prison in which sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in August 2019.
Trump has taken a hit on his domestic policy lately, as well. After the Supreme Court on December 23, 2025, rejected the administration’s argument that it had the power to deploy federalized National Guard troops in and around Chicago, Trump announced on December 31 that the administration is removing National Guard troops from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. Then he claimed that the troops had “greatly reduced” crime in those cities and vowed to “come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again—Only a question of time!”
“Donald Trump’s lying again,” Democratic Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted on social media. “He lost in court when Illinois stood up against his attempt to militarize American cities with the National Guard. Now Trump is forced to stand down.” “If President Trump has finally chosen to follow court orders and demobilize our troops,” said Democratic Oregon governor Tina Kotek, “that’s a big win for Oregonians and for the rule of law.”
And then, on New Year’s Eve, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a 255-page transcript of former special counsel Jack Smith’s December 17 closed-door testimony before the committee. The fact they chose to release it at a time when most Americans are not paying attention to the news tells you all you need to know about what Smith said. Republicans have insisted that Smith’s indictments of Trump were a sign that former president Joe Biden’s Justice Department was “weaponized” against Trump and MAGA supporters, but in his testimony—under oath—Smith said Trump was guilty.
As Parker Molloy covered in The Present Age, Smith said that his office had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.” Smith told the committee that the evidence for the indictment came not from the president’s enemies, but from Republicans who had worked for Trump, campaigned for him, and wanted him to win in 2020.
It is against this backdrop that the Trump administration launched a strike against Venezuela in the early hours of Saturday, January 3. Without consulting Congress, officials ordered the military to seize president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, flying them to New York City to face federal charges newly announced by the Southern District of New York.
Trump insists that Maduro is working with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to attack the U.S. with illegal narcotics. This has been the justification for U.S. strikes on small boats, apparently from Venezuela, that the administration claims have been trafficking drugs to the U.S. The administration has implied the deadly drugs it claims the boats are trafficking are illicit fentanyl, although it has told Congress they were transporting cocaine, which it has now indicted Maduro for trafficking.
But aside from drugs, Trump and his cronies have also increasingly emphasized their conviction that Venezuela “stole” oil from the U.S. and must return it. This appears to be a reference to the loss of U.S. rigs, pipelines, and other facilities when Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the oil companies operating within its borders on January 1, 1976, although Trump might mean the expansion of those seizures under president Hugo Chávez starting in 2007.
This morning, Trump informed the American people of what had happened in Caracas by calling in to Fox & Friends on the Fox News Channel from Mar-a-Lago to describe the strikes and the extraction of Maduro and Flores. He praised the team and boasted that no other country could have done what the U.S. did. “I mean, I watched it literally like I was watching a television show. And, uh… if you would’ve seen the speed, the violence—you know they say that, ‘the speed, the violence,’ they use that term—it’s uh, just, it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did.”
In a midday press conference, members of the administration fleshed out the story of what they are calling “Operation Absolute Resolve.” Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to emphasize that the attack and extraction of Maduro and Flores were a law enforcement mission, Trump made it clear the goal was regime change in order to gain control of Venezuela’s oil. The administration acted unilaterally, without consulting Congress, and in apparent violation of international law.
Slurring his words and repeating himself as he read from a script and occasionally wandered off it, Trump called the operation “an assault like people have not seen since World War II” and said it was “one of the most stunning effective and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.”
Trump said the U.S. will “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” evidently not interested in supporting Edmundo González, the former diplomat who beat Maduro in the 2024 presidential election.
Trump turned immediately to Venezuela’s oil industry, saying that it had been “a total bust…pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping.” He explained that “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” “This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America,” he said, “will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe.”
If such a mission required U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela, he said, the administration was not afraid of such deployment.
The president launched into the language of his rally speeches—rote by now—before returning to oil. Although international law is clear that countries own the natural resources within their own territories, he claimed that Venezuela had “unilaterally seized, and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars…. They took all of our property. It was our property. We built it…and they stole it through force. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country, considered the largest theft of property in the history of our country.”
And then he hit on the larger foreign policy principle his attack on Venezuela is designed to establish. “America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people and drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere,” he said. He said that the U.S. has now replaced the 1823 Monroe Doctrine—which he called “a big deal” that we “forgot” without explaining that it warned foreign countries from colonizing South America—with the “Donroe Document”: American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
After World War II, the United States and its allies and partners put in place a rules-based international order to prevent future world conflicts. Under that order, the members of the United Nations agreed they would not threaten or attack another country. Russian president Vladimir Putin has sought to replace that rules-based order with the idea that powerful countries will create spheres of influence in their regions. That new world order would justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now the U.S. invasion of Venezuela with the promise that the U.S. is going to “run” the country from now on, as part of its quest to dominate the Western Hemisphere, means the U.S. has abandoned the post–World War II international order and is siding with Russia’s vision.
“By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors,” wrote the New York Times editorial board. That justification seems to be the point.
Trump warned Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro that he has to “watch his ass,” said “Cuba is going to be something we’ll end up talking about,” and warned that “something will have to be done about Mexico.” “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he said. Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, posted an image of Greenland covered with an American flag and the caption “SOON.”
When Maduro arrived in New York City tonight, official White House social media channels, including that of the president, showed him on his perp walk.
By afternoon, though, the triumphal story seemed to be sagging.
The New York Times reported that at least 40 civilians and military personnel were killed in the attack, which hit a three-story apartment building.
Although Trump told reporters that Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodríguez had been sworn into the presidency and that she seemed willing to work with the U.S. “to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Rodríguez insisted in a televised address to Venezuelans today that Maduro is the rightful president of Venezuela and must be released, and said the U.S. had “launched an unprecedented military aggression.” “If there is one thing that the Venezuelan people and this country are clear about,” she said, “it is that we will never again be slaves, that we will never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.”
Ben Lefebvre, Zack Colman, and James Bikales of Politico reported that oil companies are leery of Trump’s plan that they will invest billions of dollars in rebuilding Venezuela’s oil industry. Two sources told the journalists that while oil companies would like reimbursement for the equipment and infrastructure they left behind in Venezuela when its government nationalized the oil fields, they are unenthusiastic about Trump’s demand that they invest heavily in rebuilding Venezuela’s destroyed petroleum industry in order to recoup their losses.
They say they have no idea how badly the infrastructure has decayed, and little interest in investing when it is not clear who will be running the country in the future. The administration has failed to reach out to oil executives with a long-term plan, experts told the journalists. One source said “it feels very much a shoot-ready-aim exercise.”
That lack of preparation appears to be in keeping with the overall post-raid planning. Trump told reporters today that administration officials were “designating various people” to “run” Venezuela, “and we’re gonna let you know who those people are.” Tonight Robbie Gramer and Juan Forero of the Wall Street Journal said the administration is “racing to assemble an interim governing structure for Venezuela” but noted that “[t]he lack of details about what comes next led some U.S. officials to question why there was no detailed plan in place well before deposing Maduro.”
Gramer and Forero noted that Venezuela is twice the size of California and has 28 million people in it, millions of whom continue to support Maduro, whose government remains largely intact. Those supporters include armed cocaine-trafficking groups, some of whom fought as guerillas in Colombia, and an army of more than 100,000 soldiers.
Current and former U.S. officials told the reporter that the next phase of Trump’s operation in Venezuela is full of risks and the potential for blunders.
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
Excellent summation.