This is John Bachelor. Did the Biden administration make an offer to Nicholas Maduro for safe passage and sanctuary somewhere if he would turn over the government to Gonzales after the corrupt

election of July 28th. Did the Biden administration or did not? The Wall Street

journal said yes. The Biden administration says no.

Professor Aven Ellis of the US Army War College, my colleague sorts this out for us with experience.

Here is Aven Ellis on the offer not offer to Madura the

strong man who's in place in Caracas right now. More of this later tonight.

Sure John, having worked under Secretary Pompeo in 2019, 2020 with respect to similar issues,

there's always the consideration of what types of offers, whether it's amnesty or other outs do you give not only to

Maduro himself but to those around him to try to incentivize a transition out of power.

So it's entirely likely, and indeed, there's some language from the administration that seems

to confirm that they are suggesting that there might be good ways that Maduro could choose to leave

power to avoid the types of things including the Department of Justice warrants for his arrest that could be enforced at some point in the future.

However, the Biden wording saying that there was no specific offer of amnesty appears to reflect that pressure in

Washington that essentially he was negotiating things that many in Washington felt

that he you know shouldn't have been offering.

And so what I take from that is without having been a fly in the wall in those talks,

that they were trying to give Maduro and others some type of incentives,

but they wanted to clarify

that there were no specific offers on the table

that had actually been made.