by Jacob G. Hornberger

January 15, 2026

President Trump has justified his military attack on Venezuela and his kidnapping and rendition of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by saying that “they” stole “our” oil from us. Of course, this is simply false.

The oil in Venezuela was always owned by the Venezuelan government. At the turn of the 20th century, it entered into oil leases with private American oil companies that enabled the oil companies to extract oil in return for payment of royalties to the Venezuelan government. Those leases — or “concessions” — were essentially the same thing that happens when a private mineral owner here in the United States leases the right to extract oil to private oil companies in exchange for the payment of royalties to the mineral owner.

Every American oil company — and, for that matter, every gold-mining company and every other private company — knows that when it does business in a foreign country, nationalization is one of the risks it takes. If it happens, the company cannot legitimately run to the U.S. government, begin crying, and ask the federal government to be its daddy. If a company doesn’t want to take the risk of nationalization, then it shouldn’t do business in foreign countries.

When Venezuela nationalized the nation’s oil industry, it violated those leases. In arbitration proceedings, the oil companies were awarded judgments granting them hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for their financial losses. Owing to the horrific economic conditions wreaked on Venezuela by Chavista socialism and brutal U.S. sanctions, however, there was no practical way that those oil companies were able to collect those judgments.

But the point of all this is: None of this is the legitimate business of Trump or the U.S. government. This is entirely the business of U.S. oil companies. Certainly, Venezuela never “stole” any oil from Trump or the federal government. And no one stole “our” oil because “we” never owned any oil. The Venezuelan government always owned the oil. With nationalization, it violated oil leases that had been entered into with privately owned U.S. oil companies.

The situation is entirely different, however, with respect to the gold coins of the American people. Gold coin and silver coins were the official money of the United States for some 125 years.

The Constitution clearly established gold coins, not irredeemable paper bills and notes, as America’s official money. It also expressly prohibited the states from making anything but gold coins and silver coins legal tender.

In the 1930s, the federal government stole “our” gold by nationalizing it. Notwithstanding the fact that gold coins had been the official money established by the Constitution for more than a century, the federal government ordered the American people to surrender their gold coins to the federal government. Anyone failing or refusing to do so would be charged, prosecuted, and punished for a felony offense.

When Americans complied with such orders, they were given irredeemable paper money, which the feds quickly devalued in terms of the gold that the feds had stolen and that now sat in the coffers of the U.S. government.

The U.S. government’s nationalization of gold was done without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment. How does a U.S. regime permanently change the entire monetary system of a nation, one that has been established by the Constitution and has been operating for more than a century, without going through the process of a constitutional amendment? How does a U.S. regime nationalize privately owned gold coins when the Constitution doesn’t authorize nationalization?

The federal stealing of our gold was part of the the launching of omnipotent government, one that no longer would comply with the constraints of the Constitution. That was also reflected by the federal government’s establishment of Social Security, Medicare, and the rest of the welfare state even though the Constitution delegated no such power to the federal government. It was also how the federal government got converted to a national-security state,  a type of totalitarian form of governmental structure that was anathema to the Framers and our American ancestors, especially given its dark-side powers of assassination, torture, indefinite detention, kidnapping, and rendition. It’s also how presidents came to ignore the constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war.

The gold they stole from the American people is still sitting in Fort Knox. It would be too difficult to trace the identities of the Americans who surrendered their gold in compliance with federal orders. So, how about doing the next-best thing? How about returning all that stolen gold to Americans living today? How about emptying Fort Knox by sending every American citizen his pro-rata share of that stolen property? Wouldn’t that be better than coming up with false and hypocritical justifications for the U.S. government’s deadly military escapade against Venezuela?