Donald Trump’s administration reportedly excluded intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard from months of planning to capture ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro because of her previous opposition to U.S. military involvement in the country.
White House aides even joked that her Director of National Intelligence title, or DNI, stood for “do not invite,” according to Bloomberg.
Vice President JD Vance said reports that Gabbard was kept out of the administration’s plans are “completely false.”
“We’re all part of the same team,” he told reporters at the White House Thursday. “We kept it very tight to the senior cabinet officials and related officials in our government, and we kept this operation secret for a very long time.”
Vance, who also denied reports that he was similarly blocked from discussions, said his role in the administration “is going to be whatever the president asks me to do.”
Gabbard, who briefly ran for president on an anti-interventionist platform in 2020 before she abandoned the Democratic Party and endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, spent years speaking out against costly American involvement in foreign conflicts and U.S. “regime change” wars.
The former Democratic congresswoman had previously warned against U.S. intervention in Venezuela in 2019, noting the “disastrous” history of American involvement in Latin America that has “brought suffering to millions of people, bankrupted our country, dishonored our troops, and undermined our national security.”
She argued that Venezuela “poses no threat to the United States” and there is “no justification to violate the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.”
Gabbard had also criticized Trump’s then-White House national security adviser John Bolton, the administration’s threats against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2018, and the assassination of Iranian military official Qasem Soleimani in early 2020.
In her current role, following a visit to Hiroshima, she said the world is “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before” while the “political elite” and “warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.”
Last month, Gabbard similarly railed against “warmongers” and the “military industrial complex” in remarks to Turning Point USA, warning that “those who seek to keep us in a persistent state of war deny the heavy costs that it takes in human lives, in taxpayer dollars, and in the erosion of our liberties, wars that have nothing to do with ensuring our security or our liberty.”
As the White House Cabinet-level director of national intelligence, Gabbard is the chief executive overseeing 18 divisions within the nation’s intelligence community, including the CIA and intelligence agencies within the military branches.
But she was not pictured among administration officials who were photographed by the White House as they monitored the Trump-directed invasion of Caracas and capture of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on January 3, including White House deputy policy director Stephen Miller, CIA director John Ratcliffe, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and she did not appear alongside those officials and Trump when the president announced the operation during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Gabbard did not publicly recognize the operation until four days later..
“President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers,” she wrote Tuesday.
The capture of the Venezuelan president follows Trump’s months-long military campaign against his regime, including a lethal series of attacks on boats off Venezuela’s coast and a massive buildup of U.S. naval vessels and other military assets in the region.
In a press conference after the attack, Trump said an interim “group” with top administration officials will “run” Venezuela for “a period of time” until the United States determines a “peaceful and just transition” can take place.
Trump did not rule out the possibility of American “boots on the ground,” though he suggested U.S. military assets would protect the country’s vast oil infrastructure in a nation with the largest proven oil reserves in the world.
Maduro and Flores pleaded not guilty this week to four charges stemming from allegations that the ousted president and top officials in his administration steered a massive cocaine trafficking operation.
Maduro identified himself in court as the president of Venezuela and a “prisoner of war” who was “captured” in Caracas, speaking in Spanish through a court translator.
“I’m innocent. I’m not guilty. I am a decent man,” Maduro said when asked for his plea. “I am not guilty of anything that is mentioned here.”
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