US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard was excluded from planning the Venezuela military raid, according to a report.
Before Delta Force commandos stormed a military complex to apprehend the nation's then-president, Nicolas Maduro, and First Lady Cilia Flores, who were later transported to New York to face narco-conspiracy charges, Caracas was hit by a series of missile strikes on Friday night as part of Operation Absolute Resolve.
According to The Washington Post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and White House Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller planned the mission months in advance, with "little role" for Gabbard.
Gabbard was not present when Trump gave a press conference regarding the operation on Saturday from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, but he was accompanied by those men.
“President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers,”
the director finally wrote.
“Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order to deliver on his promise thru Operation Absolute Resolve.”
An unnamed former U.S. intelligence official told the Post:
“It seems pretty obvious that she was not part of this and has not been part of the inner circle for some time, if ever. She is an isolationist, and Trump is some kind of weird imperialist.”
The former Democrat did not react to Maduro's ouster until Tuesday. On January 2, she posted a series of pictures of herself doing yoga on the beach on X, suggesting that she spent the New Year in her home state of Hawaii.
Gabbard, a former Popular senator and stager of the Iraq War, has long opposed precious US involvement in transnational conflicts and appears to be an uncomfortable fit with the administration given its recent shift toward interventionism.
Before this week, a videotape of her warning the United States to" stay out of Venezuela" from January 2019 went viral on social media, reminding people of her previous aversion to snooping in South America.
“The United States has a disastrous history of military intervention and regime change around the world, which has brought suffering to millions of people, bankrupted our country, dishonored our troops, and it’s undermined our national security,”
she said in the clip.
“Venezuela poses no threat to the United States. Congress has not authorized the United States to go to war in Venezuela, and there’s no justification for our country to violate the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.”
Around the same time, she mocked John Bolton, the White House's national security adviser at the time, and criticized the first Trump administration's other foreign policy misadventures, such as its threats against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2018 and the assassination of Iranian military official Qasem Soleimani in early 2020.
"As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers,"
she said in a video she posted online after visiting Hiroshima in June of last year, infuriating Trump in her current position, which has so far mostly focused on domestic issues.
She is by no means the only member of his MAGA coalition who finds it difficult to reconcile the administration's recent moves, which have also put Greenland, Cuba, and Colombia at risk, with their innate "America First" isolationism.
Vice President JD Vance has been accused of hypocrisy in recent days because he told a graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy last year that there would be "no more undefined missions; no more open-ended conflicts," just as Gabbard said in October that there would be no more "toppling regimes [and] trying to impose our system of governance on others."
Why was Tulsi Gabbard excluded from the planning team?
Tulsi Gabbard was barred from the Venezuela raid planning platoon primarily due to pressures with President Trump and crucial counsels over her perceived divergence from their hawkish foreign policy station, echoing previous sidelining in Iran reflections.
Reports indicate mistrust stemming from Gabbard's history of caution on interventions like her once opposition to Venezuela governance change and recent nuclear warnings on Iran disaccorded with the aggressive approach favored by itineraries Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, and Stephen Miller, who viewed hernon-interventionist leanings as undermining decisive action.
Analogous to her absence from Camp David Iran meetings and Situation Room prints, Trump reportedly prioritized" seasoned" patriots aligned on maximalist pretensions like Maduro's prisoner, relegating Gabbard despite her DNI part over 18 agencies; her delayed praisepost-raid fueled allegations of political distancing amid MAGA dissension.