'Do not invite': Trump's intel chief sidelined from Venezuela planning over trust issues
The White House sidelined Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from plans to oust Venezuela leader Nicolás Maduro due to her previous opposition to military action in the South American nation, which sources said led to mistrust among others involved in the discussions.
Her exclusion from meetings was so widely known in the White House that aides jokingly referred to her title's acronym as "Do Not Invite," three of the sources told Bloomberg.
Gabbard argued in 2019 as a Democratic congresswoman that the U.S. should "stay out" of Venezuela and as recently as last month fulminated against "warmongers" pushing the U.S. into conflict there, but a Gabbard spokeswoman referred Bloomberg to a supportive social media post praising service members' “flawless execution” of the plan to capture Maduro.
“President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers,” Gabbard posted Tuesday, days after the operation.
However, her apparent exclusion from the talks shows how the decision to oust Maduro had exposed cracks within Trump's team and was seen as unorthodox as intelligence service veterans.
It’s “highly unusual for the DNI not to be involved in any of these operations, especially something like Venezuela,” said Cedric Leighton, a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence colonel. “The visuals from that picture are a perfect description of what’s going on to Tulsi Gabbard at this point.”
The 44-year-old Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War and longtime critic of regime-change wars, spoke out multiple times in 2019 against U.S. involvement in Venezuela.
“When we look throughout history, every time the United States goes into another country and topples a dictator or topples a government, the outcome has been disastrous for the people in these countries,” she said on Fox News in May 2019.
She also spoke out against foreign entanglements during her failed 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.
"For decades, our foreign policy has been trapped in a counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation-building," Gabbard said in October 2020. “The old Washington way of thinking is something we hope is in the rear-view mirror."