MxM News

President Trump revealed Wednesday afternoon that U.S. authorities intercepted a Cuba-bound oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast, a dramatic move aimed at tightening the squeeze on illicit oil networks operating throughout the region. Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump described the vessel as “a very large tanker — the largest one ever seized in action,” hinting that more developments are coming. He declined to get into specifics, saying only that the operation happened “for a very good reason.” When asked about the tanker’s crude, Trump didn’t overcomplicate it. “Well, we keep it, I guess,” he said.

According to a U.S. official familiar with the operation, the seizure was executed by the Coast Guard with support from the U.S. Navy after a federal judge green-lit the warrant roughly two weeks ago. Another official told the New York Times the ship — identified as the Skipper — had been sailing under a falsified flag and has a documented history of trafficking illicit Iranian oil. The vessel, although carrying Venezuelan crude at the time, was seized because of those Iranian smuggling ties, not because of any direct connection to Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. For multiple… pic.twitter.com/dNr0oAGl5x

— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) December 10, 2025

Vanguard, a UK-based maritime risk firm, confirmed Wednesday that the Skipper fits the profile of a tanker previously sanctioned by the United States for operating under the alias Adisa while moving banned Iranian oil. A source speaking to Politico said the ship was on its way to Cuba, where state-run Cubametales intended to flip the cargo to Asian brokers — an increasingly common workaround as U.S. sanctions isolate both Havana and Caracas from traditional buyers. With most Venezuelan product now flowing to China under the sanctions regime, oil traders began recalibrating almost immediately after the news broke. Prices ticked upward modestly as markets waited to learn whether any Venezuelan crude was on board and how much would be effectively taken off the table.

Maduro, for his part, avoided directly mentioning the seizure during a speech later Wednesday, instead railing against the United States and claiming Venezuela’s military stands ready “to break the teeth of the North American empire, if necessary.” His bluster did little to obscure the reality: the Trump administration just disrupted yet another shadowy oil operation linking Caracas, Havana, and Tehran — and sent a clear signal that these networks will be confronted, tanker by tanker.

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The Justice Department attorney did not mention the Trump FDA’s recent admission linking the COVID shots to at least 10 child deaths so far.

The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) is attempting to dismiss a whistleblower case against Pfizer over its COVID-19 shots, even as the Trump Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is beginning to admit their culpability in children’ s deaths.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in 2021 the BMJ published a report on insider information from a former regional director of the medical research company Ventavia, which Pfizer hired in 2020 to conduct research for the company’s mRNA-based COVID-19 shot.

The regional director, Brook Jackson, sent BMJ “dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails,” which “revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety […] We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.”

According to the report, Ventavia “falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.” Overwhelmed by numerous problems with the trial data, Jackson filed an official complaint with the FDA.

Jackson was fired the same day, and Ventavia later claimed that Jackson did not work on the Pfizer COVID-19 shot trial; but Jackson produced documents proving she had been invited to the Pfizer trial team and given access codes to software relating to the trial. Jackson filed a lawsuit against Pfizer for violating the federal False Claims Act and other regulations in January 2021, which was sealed until February 2022. That case has been ongoing ever since.

Last August, U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale dismissed most of Jackson’s claims with prejudice, meaning they could not be refiled. Jackson challenged the decision, but the Trump DOJ has argued in court to uphold it, Just the News reports, with DOJ attorney Nicole Smith arguing that the case concerns preserving the government’s unfettered power to dismiss whistleblower cases.

The rationale echoes a recurring trend in DOJ strategy that Politico described in May as “preserving executive power and preventing courts from second-guessing agency decisions,” even in cases that involve “backing policies favored by Democrats.”

Jackson’s attorney Warner Mendenhall responded that the administration “really sort of made our case for us” in effectively admitting that DOJ is taking the Fair Claims Act’s “good cause” standard for state intervention to mean “mere desire to dismiss,” which infringes on his client’s “First Amendment right to access the courts, to vindicate what she learned.”

Mendenhall added that in a refiled case, Jackson “may be able to bring a very different case along the same lines, but with the additional information” to prove fraud, whereas rejection would send the message that “if fraud involves government complicity, don’t bother reporting it.”

That additional information would presumably include the FDA’s recent admission that at least 10 children the agency has reviewed so far “died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination.”

“The truth is we do not know if we saved lives on balance,” admitted FDA Chief Medical Officer Vinay Prasad in a recent leaked email. “It is horrifying to consider that the U.S. vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved. This requires humility and introspection.”

The COVID shots have been highly controversial ever since the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative prepared and released them in a fraction of the time any previous vaccine had ever been developed and tested. As LifeSiteNews has extensively covered, a large body of evidence has steadily accumulated over the past five years indicating that the COVID jabs failed to prevent transmission and, more importantly, carried severe risks of their own.

Ever since, many have intently watched and hotly debated what President Donald Trump would do about the situation upon his return to office. Though he never backed mandates like former President Joe Biden did, for years Trump refused to disavow the shots to the chagrin of his base, seeing Operation Warp Speed as one of his crowning achievements. At the same time, during his latest run he embraced the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and its suspicion of the medical establishment more broadly.

So far, Trump’s second administration has rolled back several recommendations for the shots but not yet pulled them from the market, despite hiring several vocal critics of the COVID establishment and putting the Department of Health & Human Services under the leadership of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine advocate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most recently, the administration has settled on leaving the current jabs optional but not supporting work to develop successors.

In a July interview, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary asked for patience from those unsatisfied by the administration’s handling of the shots, insisting more time was needed for comprehensive trials to get more definitive data.