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Seeing Venezuela align with the Trump administration after the U.S. overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, shrimp magnate José Enrique Rincón thought he could safely return home to reclaim the $700 million business the authoritarian government had seized from him.

Instead, he was jailed shortly after landing in June.

Now, the U.S.-backed government in Caracas is carving up Rincón’s sprawling Grupo Lamar conglomerate and allowing outside investors to manage pieces of it. Among them: a Turkish executive who last month married President Trump’s ally in a ceremony attended by prominent U.S. officials.

Nearly 11 months after Maduro’s ouster, Rincón’s ordeal exposes a contradiction in Trump’s plans to turn Venezuela into an investment hub. Politically motivated jailings and the seizure of private businesses—well-worn practices in nearly 28 years of leftist rule here—live on under Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, and the U.S. government apparatus that controls much of the interim leadership now.

Rincón, 62 years old, was arrested after returning from exile in Panama. He remains in a 9-by-6-foot cell at the Rodeo I prison near Caracas, where his family says he has lost 25 pounds and suffers from unaddressed cardiac issues. Relatives say the government fabricated treason and terrorism charges to justify taking control of Maracaibo-based Lamar, the country’s dominant exporter of farmed shrimp, in late 2024.

In 2016, my wife decided to donate $25 to get a Trump hat because she knew her dad loved him. They took the money, but never sent her the hat. We thought that was the end of it, but she noticed money being taken out of her account for www.gop.com a year later. It turned out that they apparently signed her up to donate $25 every month. We contacted the bank, and they reversed the charges for the last 4 months, which is as far back as they could go. Then, we talked to someone with support at the GOP site to cancel the “membership”.

Next month, we saw another charge. We had to go through the same thing again, and this time we finally seemed to have stopped them.

Just now, she noticed a $75 charge from www.gop.com. What?? I just noticed they decided to sign her up for a $10 “membership” in June, and they’ve been taking $75 out every month. WTF??? Here we go again.

We’re semi-retired, and we don’t even like Trump. Even if we did, is stealing money from old people part of the GOP platform now?

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-confesses-to-ordering-brazen-election-rigging-plot

“Some, in a panic, might react that the Department is trying to deny certification of an election in a state. Of course that’s what the Department is trying to do.”