Nicolás Maduro greets thousands of supporters outside of MIraflores Palace on July 28, 2024. Photo: Zoe Alexandra
The reaction came after the US Attorney General increased the reward to USD 50 million for information leading to the arrest of the Venezuelan president.
The Venezuelan government has said that the increase in the reward for the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro by US Attorney General Pam Bondi is “ridiculous” and that it is part of a “propaganda operation” and a “desperate distraction” from the internal problems facing the United States.
Bondi published a video on August 7, announcing that the US Department of Justice and Department of State are offering USD 50 million for “information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro”.
This is not the first time the US government has tried to pressure the Bolivarian government in this way. In 2020, the US Department of Justice offered USD 15 million for Maduro’s arrest. The accusations were based on alleged acts of “narco-terrorism” by the Venezuelan government.
According to the US government, Maduro allegedly collaborated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) “to use cocaine as a weapon to ‘flood’ the United States”.
During the Biden administration, this figure was increased to USD 25 million (the same amount offered for the capture of Osama Bin Laden after the attacks of September 11, 2011).
This time, Washington is doubling the “bet” to USD 50 million. According to the Trump administration, Maduro is one of the world’s most prominent drug traffickers, as he allegedly works closely with the criminal gangs the Sinaloa Cartel, the Tren de Aragua, and the Cartel de Los Soles.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, Maduro will not escape justice, and he will be held accountable for his despicable crimes,” said US Attorney General Pamela Bondi in a video. Bondi accused Maduro of using Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) Tren de Aragua, Sinaloa Cartel, and the Cartel de Los Soles to “to bring deadly drugs and violence into our country”.
For his part, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil said the accusations are nothing more than a media show aimed at satisfying Trump’s most extremist supporters.
“Pamela Bondi’s pathetic ‘reward’ is the most ridiculous smokescreen we have ever seen. While we dismantle the terrorist plots orchestrated from your country, this lady comes out with a media circus to please Venezuela’s defeated far right,” Gil affirmed in response to Bondi’s statements.
According to Caracas, the accusations have no real basis and are part of a smear campaign against the Venezuelan government, in addition to the sanctions and economic and trade blockades imposed by the United States on Venezuela.
Maduro also reacted to Bondi’s accusations, describing them as part of a “fascist conspiracy” to destabilize his government: “Colombian drug trafficking linked to [ex-President Álvaro] Uribe, criminal gangs and recycled criminals that still exist in the country, and the fascist conspiracy financed by the United States, are a disastrous equation against Venezuela.”
The Cuban government also rejected the decision to increase the reward for Maduro’s “head”. The country’s Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, posted on X: “We condemn the fraudulent reward announced by the US government against the legitimate President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, which constitutes a new act of aggression against that sister nation. The US government lacks the legal and moral authority to take such a measure.”
Protesters renamed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the Environmental Pollution Agency at its Washington, D.C. headquarters on August 7, 2025. (Photo: Extinction Rebellion D.C.)
“The days of shackling America’s oil, gas, and coal companies are over,” said spokesperson Melinda McFossilShill.
A renaming ceremony for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was held at its Washington, D.C. headquarters on Thursday to give the EPA a name that reflects its priorities under Administrator Lee Zeldin and Republican President Donald Trump.
On the heels of Zeldin’s visit to New England that spotlighted a push for the Constitution gas pipeline, a small group gathered outside the EPA building on Thursday to reintroduce it as the Environmental Pollution Agency and unveil its new logo.
“The days of shackling America’s oil, gas, and coal companies are over,” said Environmental Pollution Agency spokesperson Melinda McFossilShill. “The Trump administration stands for freedom, and that includes the freedom to pollute.”
McFossilShill is not a real representative of the agency, but rather a critic of what it’s become. Thursday’s “Make Pollution Great Again!” event was a protest, led by groups including Shut Down D.C. and the local arm of Extinction Rebellion.
In addition to McFossilShill, protesters took on the personas of fossil fuel executives and backers, including Joe Gasfracker, vice president for corporate capture of government (a false name and position) at the (real) American Petroleum Institute.
“I want to extend my deepest gratitude to Administrator Zeldin and President Trump for finally ending the charade of so-called ‘environmental protection’ and making government work for our patriotic fossil fuel corporations again,” he said.
“There are hundreds of people dying in floods, thousands dying in hurricanes, and millions being sickened by particulate matter pollution, wildfire smoke, and extreme heat, but we must balance that against the billions of dollars in profit that our members make,” Gasfracker continued. “Billions are more than millions, so obviously our profits must take precedence.”
Another protester—dubbed Pete Pollution, executive director of Energy Villains for Increased Leakage (EVIL)—declared that “the American Dream has always been about the freedom to pour toxic chemicals into every community.”
“If we don’t pollute America’s environment, who will?” added Pollution. Other participants held signs that called for making rivers burn, causing more asthma, and destroying human health.
Protesters renamed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the Environmental Pollution Agency at its Washington, D.C. headquarters on August 7, 2025. (Photo: Extinction Rebellion D.C.)
During Trump’s second term, the EPA has faced intense criticism for a range of actions. Over the past month, the agency has put 144 employees on leave after they signed a letter criticizing the administration’s “harmful” policies, eliminated its scientific research arm in the “ultimate Friday night purge,” proposed reregistering a pesticide twice banned by federal courts, and moved to cancel $7 billion in solar grants for low- and middle-income households.
Perhaps most notably, the agency also unveiled a rule to rescind the 2009 “endangerment finding” that has enabled federal regulations aimed at the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency over the past 15 years.
Further, Trump last month signed a series of proclamations to provide what he called “regulatory relief” to over 100 coal, chemical manufacturing, iron ore processing, and sterile medical equipment facilities, with the White House claiming that rules imposed on them under former Democratic President Joe Biden’s EPA were “burdensome.”
At the time, John Walke, clean air director for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, accused Trump of signing a “literal free pass for polluters,” and warned that “if your family lives downwind of these plants, this is going to mean more toxic chemicals in the air you breathe.”
Elected Democrats—who have minorities in both chambers of Congress—have joined climate, environmental, and public health advocates in calling out Trump and Zeldin for various moves.
Jay Inslee: Trump and Zeldin have turned EPA into ‘Environmental Pollution Agency’ by revoking essential climate rule www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/w…
On Thursday, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Environment and Public Works Committee Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) led a letter to Zeldin about his proposal to gut power plant pollution standards.
“Climate change and toxic air pollution are serious issues,” dozens of Senate Democrats wrote to the EPA administrator. “We represent millions of constituents who risk poisoning from mercury and air toxics and who are facing the rising costs of the climate crisis.”
“Congress established the Clean Air Act to protect our constituents from these dangers. We urge EPA to follow its directive,” they added, urging Zeldin to withdraw two proposals on fossil fuel plant emissions.
In a Thursday statement, Schumer said that “the Trump administration is saying to hell with five decades worth of protection against deadly pollution and neurotoxins that has saved thousands of lives, made communities safer, and our economy stronger. Why? To appease Big Oil and fossil fuel billionaires.”
“The Trump administration’s obsession with gutting clean air protections and allowing more poison into the air is reckless, dangerous, and a clear reminder: Republicans care about their donors, not you,” he charged. “The EPA needs to stop ignoring the science and the facts and immediately reverse course and put the health and safety of Americans first.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
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Palestinians struggling with hunger in the Gaza Strip, under Israeli attacks and blockade, arrive at the aid distribution point near the Zikim Crossing in Gaza to access the limited supplies of flour, on August 2, 2025. [Khames Alrefi – Anadolu Agency]
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed the US provided $60 million in food aid to Gaza, but The Washington Post in a report published Saturday said only $3 million has been disbursed so far, Anadolu reports.
Citing State Department officials, the report said $30 million had been allocated from the US International Disaster Assistance fund to support food aid in Gaza through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial US- and Israeli-backed aid group. Of that total, just 10% – around $3 million – has been delivered.
Critics have described GHF aid sites in Gaza as “death traps,” with the UN reporting that Israeli forces have killed over 1,300 Palestinians seeking food at its distribution points since late May. As Gaza teeters on the brink of famine under the ongoing Israeli blockade, its Health Ministry said Saturday that the total death toll from hunger has risen to 169, including 93 children, since Oct. 7, 2023.
According to the WaPo report, State Department spokesperson confirmed that $30 million had been allocated from the department’s International Disaster Assistance fund but declined to address Trump’s comments, which he made during public appearances over the past week.
“We gave $60 million a couple of weeks ago,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “Nobody said anything about it. Nobody said thank you.”
The newspaper also cited a report on internal briefings by US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff’s aides to congressional committees, saying Israel had agreed to match $30 million from the US. The Israeli government has not confirmed this, and the State Department declined to comment.
Witkoff visited an aid center in southern Gaza on Friday operated by the GHF. He said the aim was to give President Donald Trump “a clear understanding of the humanitarian situation and help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza.”
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Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump,
Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner are called
evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
American financier Jeffrey Epstein (left) and then-real estate developer Donald Trump posed together at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida in 1997. (Photo: Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)
The names of other high-profile figures were also redacted, according to Bloomberg.
Bloombergreported on Friday that FBI officials earlier this year redacted the name of U.S. President Donald Trump from the agency’s files on late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Three unnamed sources confirmed to Bloomberg that the FBI had redacted the names of Trump and other prominent public figures even before the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced last month that “no further disclosure” of the Epstein files “would be appropriate or warranted.”
Bloomberg’s sources explained that “Trump’s name, along with other high-profile individuals, was blacked out because he was a private citizen when the federal investigation of Epstein was launched in 2006.”
The reviewers applied two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions to justify their redactions, according to the report: One that “protects individuals against ‘a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy'” and another that protects against disclosures that “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
Bloomberg noted that there is nothing particularly exceptional about this because these standards have long been employed by the FBI when it comes to redacting FOIA requests, even when it comes to high-profile public figures such as Trump.
The revelations about Trump’s name being redacted from the files came on the same day The New York Timesreported that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime accomplice who is serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking charges, was transferred from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security women’s prison in Texas.
The DOJ’s decision to not release the Epstein files ignited a firestorm last month that the president has struggled to contain. At times Trump, who was friends with Epstein for several years, has even chastised his own voters for continuing to ask questions about the files, while at the same time insisting that he had nothing to do with Epstein’s sex trafficking ring that involved the sexual abuse of multiple underage girls.
Donald Trump and his paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein.Donald Trump and his paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein.Donald Trump, his paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein and Trump’s daughter.Donald Trump picture with one of his wives, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.Donald Trump with his paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein’s associate Ghislane Maxwell.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announcing the plan to repeal the endangerment finding on July 29, 2025 at a truck plant in Indiana. Credit: EPA
DeSmog has been tracking the efforts of fossil fuel trade associations, policymakers, and industry backed-groups out to demolish U.S. climate policy for years.
In late July, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced at a trucking facility in Indiana that the Trump administration would be moving to rescind the “endangerment finding,” an agency declaration which provides the legal foundation for many major U.S. climate regulations.
Zeldin was joined at the press conference by U.S. Energy Secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright, as well as Republican policymakers and representatives of auto groups including the American Trucking Associations (ATA).
This was just a small sampling of a powerful anti-climate coalition that for over a decade has attempted to overturn the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific determination from the EPA that for the first time recognized carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases as “pollutants” that are “harmful” and therefore must be regulated.
It’s a finding that helps provide the legal justification for EPA regulations on greenhouse gases from power plants, methane pollution from oil and gas operations, and limits on tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. Now, the Trump administration will be seeking public comments and moving to officially repeal the finding by sometime next year.
DeSmog has been tracking and building databases on the anti-endangerment coalition for years. Below is our guide to the top fossil fuel groups, conservative policymakers, and climate deniers leading the effort to demolish the bedrock of American climate policy.
American Petroleum Institute
When the EPA first issued the endangerment finding in 2009, the American Petroleum Institute (API), the main lobby group for U.S. oil and gas producers, was immediately opposed. “[It] poses an endangerment to the American economy and to every American family,” the institute’s then-president Jack Gerardclaimed.
API joined with other fossil fuel and industrial lobby organizations, including the National Association of Manufacturers, to wage an unsuccessful legal challenge against the finding. It recently applauded Zeldin’s announcement of rescinding endangerment and rolling back auto emissions regulations, arguing that the Trump administration is “protecting the freedom of all Americans to decide what they drive.”
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Another early business opponent of the endangerment finding was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobby group representing millions of businesses whose membership has included oil and gas majors, fossil fuel utilities, and coal companies. Like API, it helped lead an unsuccessful legal action against the finding.
The Chamber of Commerce has a long record of climate obstruction, including being a member of an infamous climate denial organization known as the Global Climate Coalition. Yet its leadership is now trying to distance itself from Zeldin’s proposed repeal of endangerment, telling Reuters that, “While we did not call for this proposal, we are reviewing it and will consult with members so we can provide constructive feedback to the agency.”
Project 2025
The radical plan for dismantling the U.S. government published by the Heritage Foundation contains specific proposals for the EPA, calling for “a system, with an appropriate deadline, to update the 2009 endangerment finding.” One of the contributors to the EPA chapter is Aaron Szabo, now an assistant administrator at the agency.
Szabo was an advisor to a pro-Trump think tank known as the America First Policy Institute. He was also a former lobbyist “who pushed the interests of major polluters like members of the American Petroleum Institute,” according to Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who spoke against Szabo at his EPA confirmation hearing.
One of Project 2025’s top architects, Russ Vought, now leads the White House Office of Management and Budget. He has also called for the repeal of the endangerment finding. “It’s long overdue to look at the impacts on our people of the underlying Obama endangerment finding,” he said in an EPA press release in March.
Trump’s Climate Working Group
The EPA has justified its repeal of the endangerment finding — which states unequivocally that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health and the climate — by citing a recent Department of Energy report written by five prominent climate crisis deniers.
This so-called “Climate Working Group” includes Steve Koonin, John Christy, Ross McKitrick, Judith Curry, and Roy Spencer, all of whom have worked for years to publicly downplay the urgency of the climate crisis or deny that it exists. They argue in their report that carbon dioxide is good for humankind because it boosts “agricultural productivity,” an assessment that isn’t shared by actual climate scientists warning of dire threats to the global food supply from higher global temperatures.
Heartland Institute
One of the longest-running U.S. climate denial groups, the Heartland Institute was a partner of Project 2025, and for years has advocated against the endangerment finding. It applauded Zeldin’s announcement, saying in a statement that “President Trump is doing the right thing for the economy, the environment, and the American people.”
The Heartland Institute has a major UK ally in Nigel Farage, head of the right-wing political party Reform UK, who last year helped launch a European branch of the denial group. At the Jordan Peterson conference known as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) earlier this year, Farage invoked a frequent climate denier talking point about endangerment, claiming that it’s “absolutely nuts” that carbon dioxide is considered a pollutant.
Koch Network
Climate denial groups that have received funding from foundations linked to the oil and gas billionaires Charles and David Koch are some of the most stalwart opponents of the EPA’s greenhouse gas finding. They include the CO2 Coalition, whose co-founder William Happer was on the National Security Council in Trump’s first administration, as well as the American Energy Alliance and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Koch-backed groups have achieved key U.S. Supreme Court victories that have paved way to undo the endangerment finding, including the case West Virginia vs. EPA, which weakened the agency’s ability to address climate change.
Zeldin cited that legal precedent explicitly in his announcement on Tuesday, saying, “would you want the administrator of the EPA to be ignoring the Supreme Court decisions in West Virginia vs. EPA?” He also cited the court’s rejection of the Chevron Deference — a long-standing doctrine giving federal agencies power to interpret the law where vague — which was the result of legal efforts backed in part by Charles Koch.
Critics argue this powerful anti-climate coalition ultimately serves the interest of companies profiting from polluting and warming our atmosphere. Senator Whitehouse said in a statement that “the Trump Administration’s repeal [of the endangerment finding] has the fossil fuel industry’s oily fingerprints all over it.” He added that “Trump chose his fossil fuel megadonors over the American people.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
