- US
intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard excluded from Venezuela raid. - Report
reveals Gabbard’s omission from military operation details. - Intelligence
leader sidelined in key Venezuela mission strategy.
Caracas was hit by a series of missile strikes on Friday
night as part of Operation Absolute Resolve before Delta Force commandos
stormed a military complex to capture the country’s then-president, Nicolas
Maduro, and First Lady Cilia Flores, who were later taken to New York to face
narco-conspiracy charges.
The Washington Post claims that the expedition was organized
months in advance with “little role” for Gabbard by Secretary of
State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe,
and White House Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller.
Gabbard was not present when Trump spoke to reporters about
the operation on Saturday from his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate, but those guys
were with him.
“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.”
Simultaneously, she ridiculed John Bolton, the White House’s
national security adviser at the time, and denounced other foreign policy
blunders of the first Trump administration, including its 2018 threats against
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and the early 2020 assassination of Iranian
military official Qasem Soleimani.
“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
that struggles to balance their inherent “America First” isolationism
with the administration’s recent actions, which have also endangered Greenland,
Cuba, and Colombia.
In recent days, Vice President JD Vance has come under fire
for allegedly being hypocritical after declaring to a U.S. Naval Academy
graduating class said last year that there will be
“no more undefined
missions; no more open-ended conflicts.”
Who planned the
Venezuela operation instead of the DNI?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller led
the planning for Operation Absolute Resolve landing Nicolás Maduro, designedly
sidelining DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
Rubio steered strategic direction and Trump lobbying as the
operation’s mastermind, Hegseth oversaw Delta Force practices using a Caracas
safehouse replica, Ratcliffe handed CIA mortal intelligence via an inner-
circle agent tracking Maduro since August 2025, and Miller shaped the
narcoterrorism legal framing all hawkish patriots bypassing Gabbard’s 18-
agency oversight amid her intervention dubitation.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine coordinated political
strikes clearing air defenses for the January 3 raid’s 200 labor force, while
elite special drivers executed the breach; the platoon emphasized redundancy
through months of mock drills, enabling indefectible darkness birth without US
casualties despite heavy fire.
