To justify his administration’s plans to remove immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison, Donald Trump has spent months insisting that Venezuela’s government controls the Tren de Aragua gang. Among the problems with this is the simple fact that U.S. intelligence has come to the opposite conclusion.
In fact, the National Intelligence Council — the top entity for analyzing classified intelligence and providing secret assessments to policymakers — concluded months ago that Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan regime is not orchestrating Tren de Aragua’s operations in the United States.
This left the president with a choice: Trump could either listen to his own administration’s findings, or he could keep lying. Predictably, the Republican chose the latter.
But that wasn’t the only thing that happened. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s highly controversial and wildly unqualified national intelligence director, decided to fire the leaders of the National Intelligence Council, the office that dared to tell the White House what it didn’t want to hear.
In case this weren’t quite enough, The New York Times reported on some previously undisclosed behind-the-scenes details that appeared to take the controversy to a new direction.
A top adviser to the director of national intelligence ordered a senior analyst to redo an assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and a gang after intelligence findings undercut the White House’s justification for deporting migrants, according to officials.
The original intelligence assessment reportedly came together in late February. According to the Times’ new reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, it was in March when Joe Kent — Gabbard’s acting chief of staff and the president’s conspiratorial nominee to lead the National Counterterrorism Center — “told a senior intelligence analyst to do a new assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang.”
In other words, the council analyzed the classified intelligence and provided a reality-based assessment. Soon after, members of Trump’s team, unsatisfied with the available facts, effectively asked them to do it again.
A re-review came to the same conclusions, and Gabbard ousted the National Intelligence Council’s leadership.
The administration hasn’t made much of an effort to deny any of this, with a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence telling the Times that the administration’s handling of the matter was “common practice.” (The same spokesperson went on to complain about “the deep state.”)
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius explained in his latest column, “Telling inconvenient truths to presidents is what intelligence analysts are supposed to do. … Presidents never like to be told they’re wrong, and they often persist in misguided policies, regardless of the evidence. But in this administration, it seems, truth-telling is a cause for dismissal.”
Ignatius added, “Sometime in the future, Trump will ask his intelligence advisers about a policy initiative — Will this work? Does it make sense? — and there won’t be anyone left to give him an honest answer.”
The developments come against a backdrop of Trump ignoring intelligence briefings and reports, as he moves forward with a “major downsizing” at U.S. intelligence agencies. Let’s also not forget that the president recently fired the leadership of the National Security Agency, a key intelligence gathering department, as well as the National Security Council’s director for intelligence.
What we’re confronting, in other words, is the White House and presidential appointees aren’t just feuding with the U.S. intelligence community, they’re also potentially destabilizing the U.S. intelligence community.
There’s no shortage of scandals that have unfolded since Trump returned to power four months ago, but this absolutely belongs on the list.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
