- 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.