He was trying to solve a problem that wasn't welcome near election time. Something about Putin and the Saudi monarch in a pissing war over production cuts.
"As the link you provided shows, there was a time when we weren’t importing oil and petroleum products from Russia."
You could read it that way, but no. The USA just exported more to Russia than it imported from them. The figures you looked at on the first link were "U.S. Net Imports".
The EIA stats show that oil imports from Russia increased in 2019 and 2020....
Try this one. It can be used to break down the petroleum products from different countries.
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