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Posted on 01/08/2026 3:02:40 PM PST by Miami Rebel
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was reportedly in the dark about the Trump administration’s plan to invade Venezuela and depose President Nicolas Maduro.
Bloomberg reported on Thursday that the White House excluded the nation’s top intelligence from discussions about the planned ouster, which was carried out on Saturday. People familiar with the situation said that Gabbard had previously opposed U.S. intervention in the South American country.
“The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela,” Gabbard, then a Democratic member of Congress, tweeted in 2019. “Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders–so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”
Since that time, Gabbard became a Republican and endorsed President Donald Trump in 2024.
“The move to cut Gabbard out of the meetings was so well-known that some White House aides joked that the acronym of her title, DNI, stood for ‘Do Not Invite,’ according to three of the people,” Bloomberg reported. “They asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. A White House official denied there was any such joke.”
The Wall Street Journal also reported on the freezeout, stating that as Trump officials were finalizing plans for the invasion, Gabbard was on a beach in her native Hawai’i.
“As President Trump’s national-security team huddled last week to make final preparations for the operation to snatch Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Gabbard was posting social-media photos of herself on a beach in Hawaii, where she grew up, ignorant of the operation’s details,” the paper said. The Journal added that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was among those who wanted to keep Gabbard out of the loop.
When asked about the reporting during a White House press briefing on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance rejected it.
“That’s completely false,” he said. “We kept it very tight to the senior cabinet-level officials and related officials in our government.”
Gabbard irked Trump last year after the president ordered the bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran. Months prior, Gabbard testified before Congress that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.
“I don’t care what she said,” Trump said of Gabbard’s assessment. “I think they were very close to having one.”
“That’s completely false,” he said. “We kept it very tight to the senior cabinet-level officials and related officials in our government.”
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Vance plays the cheerleader frequently, but is absurd that the Director of National Intelligence should be vacationing 6 time zones away when the US is engaged in toppling a foreign regime.
It would be a big loss for MAGA if Tulsi left.
“People familiar with the situation”. Ok, a trusted source./s
I will take Vance’s word over them.
Sorry, as usual, you are a clueless cuck.
The left just loves to lie, don't they?
Deceit.
The Dems' middle name.
You can smell fake news from a mile.
Indeed.
I have been wondering what she has been up to lately.
Anyone from the Trump Administration needs to be careful about saying anything to any reporter. Even if they think its innocuous. It will be spun into an agenda-filled story like this. They take anything and twist it into whatever they can to generate controversy or “fighting within the administration”, etc. Just stop talking to reporters unless under the most controlled of situations.
[It would be a big loss for MAGA if Tulsi left.]
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George W Bush was criticized for not talking enough to the press. He said, approximately, there’s nothing I can say that won’t be ripped apart, misquoted or taken out context. My default is to say nothing and now I’m being criticized for not giving anyone the ammunition to use against me.
Trump assembled a Cabinet of Peers and obviously they’re not always going to see eye-to-eye on things. I’d rather have Tulsi contributing where she can and occasionally being excluded or over-ruled than to have a Cabinet made up of nothing but ass-kissing sycophants.
How did the NY Times and Washington Post know about the attack on Venezuela?
There is no need for the DNI in planning a strike. The job is to supply the intelligence and that’s it.
The planners can take it or leave it.
That said, if true it is a good thing in her case.
I like Tulsi Gabbard but don’t understand why she or anyone else in the White House, and that includes the Chief of Staff, would want to publicly offer up analysis of Trump’s stated policies when they disagree. Trump has to set the policies, and if they disagree, they can disagree with him in private. There are a lot of moving parts going on simultaneously in the Oval office and they can’t know much about any of them.
I assume that JD and Tulsi are isolationists while other advisors are hawks.
Her positions were well known long before Trump picked her. Looks like he just used her just for votes. "Do the dishes, Tulsi".
this was a DoJ and DoW operation, so i don’t see why many other agencies, except maybe State, needed to know until after the fact ... loose lips sink ships, and the more lips, the more ships that can be sunk ...
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