Claiming he was just trying to free Josh Holt, a devout young Mormon from Utah held hostage by Venezuela's Maduro regime on phony charges, left-wing Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin isn't exactly credible about his real mission in his secret visit to Caracas this past week.

Rep. Pete Sessions, a Dallas-based Republican, isn't exactly believable, either, given that he called his secret trip with Durbin "a peace mission" to Caracas last week.  Ralf.

Stranger still, Sessions should have good reason to despise Durbin, given that Durbin invented a phony story for the press about Sessions insulting President Obama in 2013, something even Obama's White House denied.  Durbin apparently does a lot of this.  It was Durbin who invented the story about President Trump calling migrant countries "s-hole countries," which the White House again denied.  What a guy.

So what could the two of them have actually been up to in the trip they took together to the socialist shambles of Venezuela last week that they didn't want anyone to know about?  Sessions wanted not even the State Department to know about it, keeping State out of his meeting with Maduro, probably because the people there are a leaky, partisan bunch.  And instead of using congressional funds for this trip, they paid for it themselves.

It just doesn't add up.

The country is a socialist hellhole.  It's run by the Castro crime family of Havana, not a one of whom intends to leave power any time soon, and the Castroites have a track record of clinging to power for decades.  They've cheated in elections to maintain their grip on power, they've co-opted Western useful idiots to sing their praises, they've hoodwinked Jimmy Carter to declare their elections free and fair, and they have used the absolute power they illegally seized to drive ten percent of their country into exile while making beggars of the rest.  Their currency is garbage.  They're out of money – to the point where even their consulates are being evicted for non-payment of rent abroad.  They've driven out their foreign investors – to the point that not even the Russians and Chinese want to touch them – and the meltdown has no end in sight.  Most top Venezuelan officials are under sanctions for things like dealing drugs and money-laundering, while neighboring Brazil and Colombia are trying to board the doors as a mass exodus builds.

Peace mission?  Freeing Holt?  In a spiraling vortex like that?  Where do you even start?

It's not the first time a political pilgrim has made his way to the Chavista socialist hellhole, even as the celebrity endorsers such as Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore go quiet.  About a year ago, Joe Kennedy, Jr., of Dial-Joe-4-Oil fame, went to Caracas to visit Maduro, too, and he, too, didn't want to talk about it.  His vaunted cheap heating oil for the poor program, based on Venezuelan fuel, had gone dark by then, and since Kennedy's trip, it hasn't restarted.  It's just strange that with the celebs out, the political pilgrimages are continuing.

The Dallas Morning News has done some useful research about the Sessions end of the trip, finding that Sessions represents a district of Dallas that includes a large Exxon presence.  The oil giant has been trying to get paid for the assets the Chavista socialists nationalized without paying for and then ruined.  Something there might be on the agenda, particularly since Venezuela has been defaulting on its debt and allowing its oil industry to go to seed.  The Associated Press has a bit more here.

Durbin, meanwhile, has no obvious reason to be there.  The State Department might know what he had in mind, but those guys aren't talking.

What's left now is for the press to start asking questions.