Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, warned that the U.S. should “stay out of Venezuela” in 2019 despite currently serving in an administration that captured the South American country’s president.
Gabbard’s remarks, which she made during Trump’s first administration, resurfaced shortly after U.S. forces took Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro into custody on January 3.
In the video, Gabbard, who was a member of the Democratic Party at the time, criticized the results of U.S. military action around the world.
“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 its undermined our national security,” she said.
Then, she spoke specifically about Venezuela, which had just been slapped with tariffs by Donald Trump. At the time, Trump said “all options are on the table” to usurp Maduro.
“Venezuela poses no threat to the United States,” Gabbard continued in the video. “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.”
Gabbard even suggested that an attack on Venezuela would undermine U.S. efforts to achieve peace throughout the world, pointing to attempts to get North Korea to denuclearize as an example.
“North Korea is going to look at President Trump’s actions, not at empty problems,” she said, warning that the East Asian country was ramping up its nuclear program in response to U.S. intimidation.
“The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela and let the Venezuelan people determine their own future,” she concludes.
Despite her former opposition to strikes on Venezuela, Gabbard has remained silent on Trump's overthrow of Maduro in 2025, as he had hoped to do in 2019.
Trump has justified U.S aggression towards Venezuela by suggesting that the country was flooding the United States with illegal drugs and fuelling an immigration crisis.
He has since expressed an interest in reviving the South American country’s oil industry, telling reporters that he expects “big investments by the oil companies” in Venezuela.
Gabbard is one of the more controversial figures in Trump’s inner circle, first drawing criticism from Democrats over her links to overthrown Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who worked as a translator during the country’s civil war, described her as a “devil.”
She claimed that the entire conflict was simply a “regime change war” and seemingly appeared to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin on X (then-Twitter), despite Russia’s attacks in Syria.
“Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated,” she wrote. “Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911.”
Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, slammed Trump's appointment of her as Director of National Intelligence.
“Her consistent denial of the Syrian regime’s crimes is so wildly fringe that her potential appointment as DNI is genuinely alarming,” he told The Independent.
However, reports have suggested that her opinions in Trump’s own inner circle have soured, too.
Her decision to withdraw security clearances from potential witnesses in the DOJ’s investigation into former CIA director John Brennan may have derailed the entire probe, sources told Axios.
Gabbard launched the investigation into Brennan in relation to his 2017 probe into Russian hacking in the 2016 presidential election. She claimed that Brennan’s inquiry was a “years-long coup” to undermine Trump.
Her choice to pull security clearances from witnesses reportedly led David Metcalf, who was prosecuting Brennan, to claim she had made it “really difficult” to win the case.
Another official described Gabbard’s actions as an “own goal” for the Trump administration and a “self-inflicted wound.”
Also, during her tenure as director of national intelligence, Gabbard was criticized for trying to access large volumes of internal emails and chat logs to root out Trump’s opponents in federal agencies.
Insiders told The Washington Post that her actions would compile a “treasure trove of a target for any foreign intelligence service to go after.”
She allegedly planned to funnel the tranche of messages to an AI tool as part of her effort to uncover federal workers who may hold views critical of Trump’s controversial policies.
A spokesperson for Gabbard, however, disputed the claims.
“The truth is, under the leadership of President Trump, DNI Gabbard and her team at [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] are daring to do what no other has done before — expose the truth and end the politicization and weaponization of intelligence against Americans,” the spokesperson said at the time.
The Independent has contacted Tulsi Gabbard for comment.
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