The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

The more I thought about it, the more I realized the decision on political recognition was more important now than the oil sanctions. First, US recognition would have major implications for the Federal Reserve Board, and therefore banks worldwide. The Fed would automatically turn control over Venezuelan government assets it possessed to the Guaidó-led Administration. Unfortunately, as we were to find, Maduro’s regime had been so proficient at stealing or squandering those assets, there weren’t many left. But the international financial consequences of recognition were nonetheless significant, since other central banks and private bankers weren’t looking for reasons to be on the Fed’s bad side. Second, the logic of sanctioning the country’s oil monopoly, and other measures Mnuchin and Treasury were resisting, would become unanswerable once we endorsed Guaidó’s legitimacy. To that end, I scheduled an eight a.m. meeting on January 22 with Pompeo, Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, and Kudlow.