Oklahoma Republican Rep. Markwayne Mullin pledged on Newsmax that if Republicans win the majority in both chambers of Congress, they will pump the brakes on President Joe Biden's executive orders.
The congressman, during his appearance on "The Chris Salcedo Show," claimed that the United States is still importing Russian oil despite Biden issuing an executive order in March. Speculating on a Republican majority after the midterms, Mullin argues that instead, the new Congress should enact restrictions on Biden's domestic energy production restrictions.
If Biden, Mullin contends, "would just allow Oklahoma and Texas alone to go back to work, fill our pipelines back up, and allow us to start drilling and allow those permits to go through, we would be 100% independent of foreign oil being pumped into this country.
"We would not have to be continuing [to] ship in Russian oil, because regardless of what they say, we are still bringing that in. I know they passed legislation to stop it, but they haven't found a market to replace it."
"That means we're still funding the war in Ukraine," and at the same time, the Oklahoma congressman adds, making Russian President Vladimir Putin "wealthy. Because we won't, we won't drill right here inside the United States."
In March, the United States officially cut its imports of Russian oil. But a report from The Wall Street Journal dated April 21 suggested that Russia, in anticipation of the sanction, may have employed a method of still sending its oil to the West.
During an April interview with "What's News," host Luke Vargas asked Anna Hirtenstein, the author of The Journal article, why "Russian oil is ending up mixed as a blend and not exactly marked as being from Russia. Why are they doing that, and how exactly does that work?"
"It's becoming a bit of a gray zone," Hirtenstein responds, "There's an opaque market that's emerging of companies that are blending Russian oil into other kinds of crude or refined products. And essentially, according to some companies, if it's less than 50% they're not considering this to be Russian anymore. This isn't necessarily to get around sanctions yet, but it's more about avoiding the reputational risk of trading oil that's financing a government that's accused of war crimes. And what's also happening a lot is that Russian oil is being shipped with its destination unknown. And this is a likely sign, according to analysts, that it's being taken to a bigger ship somewhere off the coast of certain countries, and unloaded there into the bigger ship. And that also really obscures the origin."
Newsmax could not at the time confirm if the practice of mixing Russian oil and marking destination unknown is still being performed.
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