On this week’s episode of “Trib Talk,” Tribune reporter Benjamin Wood chats with Tribune Washington Bureau Chief Thomas Burr and Jacob Olidort, foreign policy adviser to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, about last week’s release of Utahn Josh Holt by the Venezuelan government.
A lightly edited transcription of their conversation is included below.
Benjamin Wood: Two years ago, Josh Holt traveled to Venezuela to get married. Shortly after, he and his wife were arrested and imprisoned without trial.
The Holts arrived home last week, following the work of U.S. government officials to secure their release. Many details remain unknown, but the details we do have — involving prison riots, sham elections, police corruption and a Venezuelan liaison known as “Dracula” — create as many questions as they answer.
From The Salt Lake Tribune, this is Trib Talk.
I’m Benjamin Wood, joined today by Thomas Burr, the Tribune’s Washington Bureau chief. Tommy, tell us about the Saturday meeting at the White House and what you were able to witness.
Thomas Burr: This all was just very sudden and shocking, but welcome news, obviously, for a lot of people in Utah. The senator, Orrin Hatch, announced early on Saturday that Josh Holt, who had been imprisoned in Venezuela for nearly two years, was being released and was going to be flying to the White House.
This was a huge deal. They had been working on this for a very long time. The scene was, as you might expect, this is a guy and his wife who have been held in a foreign country in Latin America without much medical care and in a scary situation. There were riots in the prison just recently. And he’s tossed into the Oval Office with the president and wearing a suit that he borrowed from Hatch’s deputy chief of staff. The president of the United States, who by the way wasn’t president when Josh went to prison and now is the president of the United States, so that’s also one of those wow moments.
It was a joyous occasion, even if it is a little daunting for Josh and his entire family.
Wood: We should probably go back to the beginning a little bit. Tell us, who is Josh Holt and how did he find himself in this, somewhat bizarre set of circumstances.
Burr: It is a sad situation. I don’t think we know as much as we’d like about how this all came down. But Josh Holt is a Mormon Utahn from Riverton. He served a Mormon mission in Washington state. He came back and he wanted to marry somebody [with whom] he could use the Spanish skills that he’d learned on his mission. He went online and after some online dating, he met this woman Thamy who lived in Venezuela. They had a courtship, he flies down to Venezuela, they get married and while they’re waiting to get her visa so he could bring her to the United States for, like, the first time, police raid the apartment complex where she lives. Her family lives in a government-owned building in Venezuela. Most things are owned by the government in Venezuela.
And they find, apparently, an assault rifle and some grenades they say are connected to some espionage. They toss them into prison, they never got a court date. The United States said they were bogus charges, that this had nothing to do with Josh or his new bride. And we still don’t know. There’s some speculation that Josh was arrested with his new wife as sort of a bargaining chip in future negotiations with the United States.
He could then be, well, the United States maybe releases some sanction or something if they let Josh out of prison. We don’t know that for sure, it was seen definitely as a gesture to the United States to release him from prison. But the White House, Senator Orrin Hatch, other officials are telling me there were no conditions on his release. That he was released without the United States lifting any sanctions they had on the country.
Wood: You alluded to some of the things that the Holts experienced, the prison riots, the imprisonment. I’m hoping you can maybe elaborate a little more on the ordeal that this couple went through.
Burr: Yeah and again I think we’d like to hear more and I think Josh and his family are going to need some time before they can probably talk to us about this. I assume we will get some more information about what happened. But it sounded like a pretty dire situation. This is no clubby kind of medium-security prison, this is a prison in essentially a third-world country, a third-world country by the way where people are literally starving because inflation rates have gone up incredibly high. There’s a scarcity of food, there’s a concern about extra-judicial punishments from the government. Maduro, the president of Venezuela, just won reelection in what the United States said was a complete sham. They don’t even recognize the election.
So Josh and Thamy are sitting in a prison amid, you know, a pretty chaotic situation in this country. And the only hope they had was that U.S. officials would do something to get them out. They’re not rich people who could bribe their way out of prison or convince corrupt officials to let them out. They needed the United States to step in.
Wood: You mentioned how there was no confirmed conditions for the terms of this release. What do we know about the negotiation process, behind the scenes channels between negotiators. What do we know about how this came about?
Burr: There were a lot of efforts being made in the two years he’s been in prison. I think we’ve all seen Senator Orrin Hatch, Representative Mia Love, Senator Mike Lee and others have been trying to raise the attention of this.
I should note that actually Hatch’s office credited the news media, the local media in Utah, with helping to keep the story out there and not forgetting about Josh, too. I think the last-minute dealing had to do with the relationship that Senator Orrin Hatch had with Senator Bob Corker, who is a Tennessee Republican and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Corker had a staffer, Caleb McCarry, who had apparently known President Maduro from like 15 years ago. And he also had a relationship with a guy named Rafael Lacava, he’s the governor of a central state in Venezuela, and he’s referred to as “Dracula” by the way. I never thought, writing this story, the word “Dracula” would come out. The U.S. has sanctioned this guy before.
Wood: Sanctioned him personally, you mean?
Burr: Yes, sanctioned him personally. President Maduro and this guy referred to as Dracula had been sanctioned personally by the United States. But McCarry had a relationship with this guy and also had a relationship with the president of Venezuela and was working in the background. [He] had flown to Venezuela in like February, they had flown up this guy referred to as Dracula I think in March to meet with several senators to press the case for Josh’s release.
All that kind of diplomatic back-channeling that you see in these situations. They don’t want to publicize their talking, because that could end any negotiations they have. But it really had to do with these longstanding relationships that Caleb had in the country. And it really did come down to, Maduro gets reelected last week, the United States won’t recognize it. Most of Latin America doesn’t recognize his election. And this is pure speculation at the moment, but it sounds like McCarry is like, “Look, here’s a good time for you to release Josh Holt and show the world that you’re not, you know, some evil dictator, a Pol Pot kind of thing. Let’s get him out of prison.”
Corker flew down on Friday, met with Maduro, the president of Venezuela. And they got news Friday afternoon, Friday evening, that they were going to release Josh.
Wood: From Josh Holt’s background, I mean you mention how the general consensus is that these arrest charges were baseless. With what we know about Josh Holt, is there some possibility that he is some deep-cover operative for the U.S. Government?
Burr: We’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that he is some U.S. spy. At one point that’s what Venezuela said he was, that he was the CIA’s bureau chief in the area or something like that. There’s no evidence that we’ve seen at all that he had any connection to the CIA, to the State Department. He was literally, you know, flying down to marry his wife and bring her back to the United States. He’d only spent a very little time in the country. So the concern is, and this is what U.S. officials are telling is, is that they believe these weapons, this terroristic weapons they were arrested on were planted by the police, by a corrupt police system on purpose to arrest an American. And again, you create him as a bargaining chip in future negotiations.
I can talk from a little experience on this in another case, which is my friend Jason Rezaian, who was the Washington Post reporter that Iran arrested. His wife was arrested as well. And he was held in prison in Tehran for 18 months. It pretty much came out that Iran had arrested this American, with also Iranian citizenship, totally as a bargaining chip. That when it came down to the Iran nuclear negotiations, they had him to play with to release him as a gesture as part of those negotiations.
I’ve grown close to Jason over the last couple of years and he had done absolutely nothing wrong. They called him a spy, too. He was writing about news, he was writing about how Iranians love baseball. And they arrested him and said, “Oh, you’re a U.S. spy.” He wasn’t a U.S. spy, but he was in some ways just a cog in the diplomatic wheel of wrong-place-wrong-time and spent a lot of time in prison because of that.
Wood: You were in the room on Saturday when Josh Holt met with President Trump. What kind of a read did you get on Josh Holt’s state. Was he in high spirits? Did he seem to be doing well? What was your perception?
Burr: He’s happy, obviously. He’s not in a prison. But, you know, being whisked away from a jail cell where you’ve been there for nearly two years to meeting with the president of the United States in the Oval Office, I think, would be scary for anyone.
There are several Senators, there’s Representative Mia Love, there are his family and then there are about 25 members of the press corps in the room. I’m about five feet from Josh and he’s a little pale and he obviously needed some medical care. He was looked at by, I assume they were Navy doctors, on his way from the airport to the White House. And right after the White House they took him to the Walter Reed military hospital to get him some care. Because, you know, he had been injured. His wife had been injured while they were in prison and Venezuela is not known for the best health care, especially with prisoners. I think he definitely looked very daunted in the situation but he also looked excited for the future, that finally this horrible ordeal is over.
Wood: Again that’s Thomas Burr, our Washington Bureau Chief for The Tribune. Tommy thanks so much for joining us today.
Burr: Thanks Ben.
Wood: Joining me now is Jacob Olidort, foreign policy adviser to Senator Orrin Hatch. Jacob, thank you so much for being on ‘Trib Talk’ today.
Jacob Olidort: Thanks so much for having me on your program Ben. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Wood: We just got done talking to Tommy Burr about the arrest, imprisonment and release of Josh Holt. I’ll admit, it’s a little hard for me to even wrap my head around how a seemingly typical Utah man gets wrapped up in such an odd set of circumstances. I’m wondering, Jacob, if you can help us understand what’s happening in Venezuela that may or may not have contributed to this bizarre sequence of events.
Olidort: Absolutely, and you and I share that amazement and it’s been, frankly, really kind of disturbing to follow the story and to speak regularly with the whole family and to watch the developments unfold. I will say, however, that the outcome is shocking but it’s not a surprise, because it comes following a lot of hard work, laying the groundwork and maintaining for months. And all involved would admit that there were many factors at play, but without Senator Hatch’s personal consistent involvement in this case, I don’t think we would have had the kind of celebration that we’re seeing today.
Wood: How would you describe the role that Senator Hatch and your office played in these negotiations? We’re getting a lot of these details now and we’re sorting through them. What can you tell us about the negotiations for the release?
Olidort: Certainly, and I’ll avoid talking details of any of Senator Hatch’s engagement with either U.S. officials or Venezuelan ones. But I can certainly talk about the style and tone that he took in his conversations. He, first of all, kept it very focused on Josh’s case and second, was a principal that guided his engagement throughout, which is leaving no stone unturned in the process.
He has an op ed actually, it just came out today from Time magazine, where he outlined really that principal at work and trying to return and offering a hand whenever it came our way.
The circumstances geopolitically were bad. To say they were bad is an understatement of course. Just last week as your listeners no doubt know, Venezuela expelled two U.S. diplomats and we responded the same. And I think part of it is the fact that despite a difficult period in U.S.-Venezuelan relations, that here was somebody, there were actually two people on both sides, willing to look beyond the political context and have a frank conversation, a set of engagements with the other on this issue.
Wood: We’ve been told that there weren’t any conditions set for the Holts’ release. Any comment you can make to that point?
Olidort: Certainly, I will. I will say with full confidence that there were no trade-offs made at all. I say that as somebody who has been at every one of Senator Hatch’s conversations of the last seven months, which include being privy to all of his communications with the Venezuelan President Maduro as well. The only thing that characterized their engagement was a good-faith conversation to reach a common understanding between two parties.
Wood: Did anything change in the last two years? Why now? Obviously there’s been a lot of discussion about wanting Josh Holt’s release.
Olidort: Sure.
Wood: Were there any circumstances that may have led to this development in the last week?
Olidort: I wouldn’t be so quick to say that the result last week was inevitable. I think it might have been natural given the hard work that was put in to just Josh’s case alone, separate from U.S.-Venezuela policy engagement with which Senator Hatch was not involved. His engagement was thoroughly on Josh’s case. I think had it not been for that engagement we might not have had the same result.
Granted, we’re not privy to necessarily when it might take place but we were hoping that it would take place and working toward that end. What happened the last few months was because we pursued, was really because this was the first moment that we were able to begin engagement with Maduro directly through Senator Corker’s senior Latin America staffer Caleb McCarry. We developed a partnership, a team effort, on this case and Senator Corker’s office in particular which I think escalated our efforts in a positive direction.
Wood: The Holt family has maintained Josh’s innocence during this ordeal regarding the weapons and espionage charges the Venezuelan government levied against him. Is it the consensus on the American policy side that those charges were baseless?
Olidort: The official position of the State Department and the line that we took was that Josh must be released on humanitarian grounds. That’s the line that we used. We did not meddle. Obviously the accusations were trumped up, the charges, but our line in communication was that he must be released on humanitarian grounds.
Wood: So perhaps trumped up charges but that wasn’t the line of negotiation for his release?
Olidort: The humanitarian line was the one that we reasoned in describing things.
Wood: Anything you can tell us about, I mean, I would imagine Josh Holt was not the only American in Venezuela over the last two years. Is there anything that could help us understand how this situation befell him?
Olidort: That’s correct and there were two other cases, at least that I know of, of groups of Americans that have been imprisoned in Venezuela. They each were much shorter, much more recent, but I think Senator Hatch’s involvement was on his constituent and we’ve been trying to pursue that in isolation, not because of disregard for the other cases but because, as his constituent, Senator Hatch felt a personal obligation to be mindful of this and to work, to explore every possible channel to make sure he was reunited safe with his family.
Wood: You mention how the relationship between the United States and Venezuela is not ideal at the moment. And also that there were not conditions placed upon this release. That said, does the release of Josh Holt and his wife, does that play any role in improving relations between the two countries? Where do we stand currently?
Olidort: I think it’s certainly, and President Maduro is in a difficult position, and so he is a very calculating, deliberate thinker and planner and knows the situation very well. So I think a lot of the path going forward will really depend on a lot of the same factors, frankly, many things that are really out of our control, but how, going forward, Venezuela responds, the U.S. responds, so forth.
Wood: Again we’re talking with Jacob Olidart, foreign policy adviser to Senator Orrin Hatch. Jacob just as a last question, you commented how Josh Holt’s release was not inevitable. Perhaps this is one of the better outcomes that were possible. I’m wondering if there’s any comment you might make toward what seems to be a fairly positive resolution to what took place?
Olidort: We are all blessed with this news. We are still coming to terms with the fact that it actually happened and took place and we are just overjoyed celebrating with the Holt family that this moment finally came. There couldn’t be better news this Memorial Day weekend.
Wood: Jacob thanks so much for joining us today.
Olidort: Thank you
Wood: “Trib Talk” is produced by Sara Weber, with additional editing by Dan Harrie. Special thanks to Smangarang for the theme music to this week’s episode. We welcome your comments and feedback on sltrib.com, or you can send emails to tribtalk@sltrib.com. You can also tweet to me @BjaminWood or to the show @TribTalk on Twitter.
We’ll be back next week, thanks for listening.
