A shady company taking over the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?!
Unfortunately, the reality is much more boring.
While scrolling on X this evening I saw a post quickly gaining traction, claiming that the Trump admin had turned over control and management of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve from the Department of Energy to a shady LLC.
The post was gaining steam, with quote tweets from huge accounts. The claims associated grew more outlandish, claiming a “Trump-connected shell company” had taken control of the reserve. Not helping matters, a fairly popular account shared a video of a “citizen-journalist” type confidently asserting he had tracked down the company.
The problem? It was all bullshit, and now hundreds of BlueAnon accounts were doxxing the address of the owner of a Denver self-storage company that happened to share the name of the LLC.
The reality is of course much more dull, and in about 5 minutes I verified the true identity of the company and its owners. I’ll go through that process below.
First, I ran the LLC, “Strategic Storage Partners,” through USASpending.gov, a fairly user friendly database of federal government spending. No results. Next, I headed to SAM.gov, the System for Awards Management. This website is used by contractors and contract officers to keep track of contract solicitations and awards.
I searched for our LLC and it immediately popped up, revealing our beneficial owner, massive DOD contractor APTIM Federal Services, owned by Veritas Capital a behemoth private equity firm. It’s not uncommon for large contractors to set up shell corporations to handle large contacts.
APTIM does billions of dollars of work for the government, and its really not unusual at all that they’d bid on a contract like this.
As to the circumstances of the award, the process was all pretty standard and relatively transparent, with public documents available going all the way back to January of 2023, when the contract was put out to bid. Under the Biden administration.
As to the claim that the Trump admin “handed over control” of the reserve to private corporations? Well it turns out it’s been contracted out since at least 2014, when Fluor corporation took control of the facility.
As I write this, the outlandish claim continues to spread among the BlueAnon crowd, as big verified accounts (lol Malcolm Nance) farm RT’s from stressed out and eager news consumers. Let’s all try to take a deep breath and think about the claims being made before going on witch hunts over Colorado self storage business owners.