This little-known official may be the biggest beneficiary of Trump’s Venezuela attack

This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 5 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think I know the name of the person who is arguably the biggest beneficiary of Donald Trump’s inexplicable war in Venezuela.

There’s a good case to be made that the single biggest winner in this whole situation is a person named Karen Budd-Falen, the No. 3 official at the Interior Department, the same agency she served in during Trump’s first term. 

Her family owns a ranch in Nevada. Nearby, a company wanted to build a huge lithium mine. But it turns out lithium mines take a ton of water. So in 2018, Budd-Falen’s husband sold the water rights from their ranch to the mining company for $3.5 million.

The only catch of that agreement was that the full deal could only go ahead if the mine was approved by the Interior Department.

In 2019, Budd-Falen met with executives from that mining company in the cafeteria of the Interior Department. The mine later got approved — and on a fast track, so it could skip the pesky environmental reviews and all the rest. Budd-Falen’s family was paid millions.

That brings us to 2025. Right before Christmas, High Country News and the veteran reporters at Public Domain on Substack published a scoop about this top-ranking official with Trump’s Interior Department and what really does appear to be the simplest possible explanation of what corruption looks like. If there were a public-corruption children’s picture book, it would be this kind of story. 

Budd-Falen’s story hit these smaller publications before the holidays. Then, last weekend, The New York Times jumped on it, adding its own reporting, and the story blew up. “The Trump Administration Approved a Big Lithium Mine. A Top Official’s Husband Profited,” the Times headline read.

According to Budd-Falen’s husband, the meeting in Washington at the Interior Department cafeteria was purely a social occasion. He told the Times that the meeting had nothing to do with his wife’s agency doing something that would make millions of dollars for her family. The mining company said the same and claimed it did not meet with Budd-Falen in her “formal capacity.” It was so fun! How can it be a bad thing?!

That story was prepped for Saturday. This little-known Interior Department official was about to be very famous — like, at least as famous as Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, who MS NOW reported was recorded on tape taking $50,000 in cash stuffed into a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents who were working a bribery case.

So if you had to name the one person who benefited the most from the insane breaking news that the U.S. military had just invaded Venezuela and taken its president, I think Budd-Falen might be a good nominee. 

But that Trump Interior Department official is not the only contender in the cui bono sweepstakes. 

You would also have to consider Ghislaine Maxwell and everyone else who has a stake in the more than 5 million additional documents that the Justice Department has yet to release from the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files, even though they were required by law to have released everything by Dec. 19.

DOJ did release some things that day, then a little more in the following days. On Dec. 23, they released a prosecutor’s email that stated, in part:

For your situational awareness, wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case.

They released that shortly before Christmas, and they haven’t released anything since, except word that there are literally millions of additional documents they say they will eventually sort through.

Last weekend, there were protests outside the minimum-security federal prison in Bryan, Texas, where Maxwell was inexplicably moved by the Trump administration after new questions arose about the president’s involvement with Epstein and his administration’s efforts to keep information about him from the public. 

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So, as the Justice Department drags into its third week of not releasing the Epstein information it’s required by law to release, everyone with a personal stake in what’s in those files is also benefiting from this change of subject.

Frankly, hepatitis also benefited from this change of subject. On Monday, Trump’s crackpot Department of Health and Human Services announced it is gutting the vaccine schedule for kids, explicitly not on the basis of any data but on what they described, essentially, as vibes about vaccines. 

HHS has not been able to produce any data that backs up any of its conspiracy theories and fantasies about why vaccines are bad, but it’s removing them from the childhood vaccination schedule anyway. They did so in an anonymous call to reporters, in which no one was allowed to be quoted by name. 

Now, if I were going to take a sledgehammer to the most successful public health efforts in a millennium, I might try to do that on a busy news day as well.

This week also marks one year since the deadly, horrific Southern California firestorm, to which a newly inaugurated Trump responded by inexplicably dumping out more than a billion gallons of water from California reservoirs into flooded fields that did not need it and that weren’t prepared for it. He said that was his solution — and it wasted enough water to supply 7,000 households for a year. 

Everyone with a personal stake in what’s in those files that they’re not releasing is also benefiting from this change of subject.

And of course, Tuesday marked five years since rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an anniversary the administration probably did not relish the arrival of. 

On his first day in office, Trump pardoned all the rioters, including those who assaulted and tried to kill police officers. Many have since been rearrested on charges ranging from child rape to vehicular manslaughter to threatening to kill Democratic politicians.

By law, there is supposed to be a plaque displayed at the Capitol to honor the police officers who fought that day to defend the United States Congress from the mob. It’s not there. House Republicans refuse to put it up. 

But I’m sure the Trump administration would much rather talk about inexplicably invading Venezuela than the anniversary of the day a mob stormed Congress to try to physically force an overthrow of the election results so Trump could stay in power.

Allison Detzel contributed.

Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award-winning “The Rachel Maddow Show” Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on MS NOW. “The Rachel Maddow Show” features Maddow’s take on the biggest stories of the day, political and otherwise, including in-depth analysis and stories no other shows in cable news will cover.

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