By Raul Castillo
31 Jul 2024, 15:38 PM EDT
Former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump blamed Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden for Venezuela’s election last Sunday being neither “free nor fair.”
“Crazy Kamala Harris should never have lifted Trump’s oil sanctions on Maduro. She made one of the WORST DEALS OF ALL TIME!” wrote the former president in a post on his platform Truth Social, his first message on the Venezuelan presidential elections.
She added: “Crazy Kamala helped lead the effort to free Maduro’s top money launderer and his two convicted drug-dealing nephews in exchange for an obviously false promise of free and fair elections for the people of Venezuela. THEY WERE NOT FREE OR FAIR!”
Trump was apparently referring to Alex Saab, an alleged front man for Maduro who was released by the US justice system as part of an agreement with the Venezuelan government to free 10 Americans imprisoned in Venezuela.
Also mentioned were Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco (Franqui) Flores de Freitas, nephews of Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, who were imprisoned in the US for drug trafficking and who were released under a similar agreement with the Biden administration.
“Look what is happening now: Maduro sold his oil, met with his money laundering and drug dealing nephews, and the Venezuelan people got NOTHING. Venezuela is destroyed and its wonderful people are bankrupt and dying!” Trump added in his post on Wednesday.
The former president and Republican candidate said that “much” of the blood of those Venezuelans is “in the hands of dangerously liberal and failed American politicians like the crazy Kamala Harris and the corrupt Joe Biden.”
Maduro was declared the winner by the National Electoral Council with 51% of the votes, but the opposition claims to have 85% of the votes cast in the elections, which would give victory by a margin of almost 40 points to its candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, who stood in place of opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was disqualified from running.
Both President Biden and Vice President and Democratic candidate Harris called on the Venezuelan electoral body to immediately publish “complete, transparent, and detailed data on voting at polling stations.”
However, almost 72 hours after the elections, the CNE has still not provided detailed results.
Keep reading:
– G7 calls for transparent publication of election results in Venezuela
– Venezuela: US warns that it is running out of patience waiting for the electoral records
– Joe Biden demands transparent publication of election results in Venezuela