Trump Appointee Pressed Analyst to Redo Intelligence on Venezuelan Gang
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.
President Trump’s use of a wartime law to send Venezuelan migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador without due process relies on a claim that
U.S. intelligence agencies think is wrong. But behind the scenes, a political appointee told a career official to rework the assessment, a direction that allies of the intelligence analyst said amounted to pressure to change the findings.
Mr. Trump on March 15
invoked the law, the Alien Enemies Act, to summarily remove people accused of being members of the gang, Tren de Aragua. The rarely used act appears to require a link to a foreign state, and he claimed that Venezuela’s government had directed the gang to commit crimes inside the United States.
On March 20, The New York Times
reported that an intelligence assessment in late February contradicted that claim. It detailed many reasons that the intelligence community as a whole concluded that the gang was not acting under the Venezuelan government’s control. The F.B.I. partly dissented, maintaining that the gang had some links to Venezuela’s government based on information all the other agencies did not find credible.
The administration was alarmed by the disclosure. The next day, a Friday, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche,
announced a criminal leak investigation, characterizing The Times’s detailed description of the intelligence assessment as “inaccurate” and “false” while insisting that Mr. Trump’s proclamation was “supported by fact, law, and common sense.”
The following Monday, Joe Kent, the acting chief of staff for Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, told a senior intelligence analyst to do a new assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang, the officials said. The analyst, Michael Collins, was serving as the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council at the time.
An official who has reviewed messages about the assessment said Mr. Kent made the request to Mr. Collins in an email, asking him to “rethink” the earlier analysis. The official said Mr. Kent was not politicizing the process, but giving his assessment and asking the intelligence officials to take into account the flows of migrants across the border during the Biden administration.
The National Intelligence Council is an elite internal think tank that reports to Ms. Gabbard and that policymakers can commission to undertake special analytical projects. The council canvasses spy agencies across the executive branch for its information.
While officials close to Ms. Gabbard said Mr. Kent’s request was entirely appropriate, other intelligence officials said they saw it as an effort to produce a torqued narrative that would support Mr. Trump’s agenda. But after re-examining the relevant evidence collected by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the council on April 7 reaffirmed the original findings.
Inside the administration, even some officials who do not think Mr. Kent injected politics into the intelligence report are angry for what they see as a blundering intervention. Little new information had been collected in the month after the original assessment and his request for a redo, so there was no reason to expect the council to come up with different findings.
From the beginning, politics surrounded the request for an intelligence assessment.
The original assessment stemmed from a White House request, according to former American officials.
It is not clear who specifically inside the White House made the request.
Inside the administration, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, spearheads immigration policy. He has
developed numerous ways to leverage existing laws — sometimes via aggressive interpretations — to better seal the border and accelerate deportations. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act to avoid time-consuming asylum and deportation hearings is one of those innovations.
In response to the White House request, Mr. Kent asked the National Intelligence Council to produce its initial analysis.
The resulting report was dated Feb. 26, according to officials familiar with it.
Details remain unclear of the White House deliberations that led to Mr. Trump, two weeks later, signing a proclamation that made purportedly factual findings that contradicted the executive branch intelligence community’s understanding of what was true.
After the assessment came to light and Mr. Kent asked Mr. Collins to rethink that analysis, Mr. Collins agreed to produce an updated assessment, according to people briefed on the events.
Some intelligence officials took Mr. Kent’s intervention as an attempt to politicize the findings and push them in line with the Justice Department arguments and the Trump administration policy. Mr. Collins, according to those officials, worked to navigate the politics and to protect the analytic integrity of the National Intelligence Council’s work as he began drafting a “sense of the community memo.”
The officials who described the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. Intelligence officials declined to make Mr. Collins available for an interview.
Olivia C. Coleman, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said requesting the intelligence assessment on the gang’s ties to the Venezuelan government was “common practice.” She also defended Mr. Kent, saying, without detail, that the timeline presented in this article was “false and fabricated.”
“It is the deep state’s latest effort to attack this administration from within with an orchestrated op detached from reality,” Ms. Coleman said.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump’s policy on deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador had made America safer. “President Trump rightfully designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization based on intelligence assessments and, frankly, common sense,” she said.
After Mr. Trump sent planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador, a complex series of court fights have erupted and courts have blocked, for now, further use of the act for deportations. On Friday, the Supreme Court
extended the freeze.
As the National Intelligence Council drafted the second analysis, multiple officials said, Mr. Collins and his colleagues tried to describe how most of the spy agencies had reached their consensus conclusion doubting any direct connection between the Venezuelan government and Tren de Aragua, and why the F.B.I. saw things partly differently.
The
memo, dated April 7, concluded that the Venezuelan government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with T.D.A. and is not directing T.D.A. movement to and operations in the United States.” It detailed why the intelligence community as a whole thought that, echoing accounts of the February assessment, like how the government treats Tren de Aragua as a threat and how the gang’s decentralized makeup would make it logistically challenging for it to carry out instructions.
The memo also went into greater detail about a partial dissent by the F.B.I. in a way that made clear why most of the intelligence community thought the bureau was wrong.
F.B.I. analysts largely agreed with the consensus assessment, the memo said, but they also thought that “
some Venezuelan government officials” had helped gang members migrate to other countries, including the United States, and used them as proxies.
The basis of that conclusion came from law enforcement interviews of people who had been arrested in the United States — and “most” of the intelligence community judged those reports “not credible.”
The existence of the council’s memo and its bottom-line findings came to light in a Washington Post
article on April 17. Publicly, the Trump administration and its supporters and influencers have reacted by vilifying Mr. Collins.
On April 20, Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who
successfully lobbied the administration to fire other security officials, attacked
the National Intelligence Council on social media as “career anti-Trump bureaucrats” who “need to be replaced if they want to promote open borders.” In the same post, she pasted images of Mr. Collins’s LinkedIn profile and of an Associated Press article about the council’s memo.
Three days later,
Ms. Gabbard and her
deputy chief of staff revealed on social media that they had made a criminal leak referral about the Post article. And, as
reported by Fox News this week, Ms. Gabbard also
removed Mr. Collins and his deputy from leading the council.
As discussion of the removals circulated, Ms. Gabbard and her circle have amplified posts portraying the council as a hive of biased, deep-state bureaucrats.
An official briefed on the matter has denied that Mr. Collins’s removal was connected to the Venezuela assessment or to Ms. Loomer. But other officials have said they believe Mr. Collins has been made a scapegoat.
When the council produced a draft memo, Mr. Kent insisted on several edits to its final form. The details of his changes remain unclear.
But his reaction to the final memo was surprising, the officials said: Mr. Kent was happy about it, and pushed to have it declassified so that it could be discussed publicly, the officials said.
Mr. Kent’s request for declassification set in motion a chain of events that led to the agency’s
release of the report this month in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Because the memo directly contradicts what Mr. Trump claimed — and is now public as an officially acknowledged document — it is generally seen as a legal and public relations fiasco for the administration.
The official who had reviewed the messages about the assessment said Mr. Kent’s reaction, recorded in emails to Mr. Collins, is clear evidence that he was not politicizing the process but merely wanted a fuller discussion of what intelligence agencies knew and the F.B.I.’s take on the issue. But other current and former officials questioned that narrative. Why, they asked, if Mr. Kent was pleased with the redone assessment, was Mr. Collins fired?
It is not entirely clear why Mr. Kent seemed to believe that the memo supported Mr. Trump’s claim. But he and other officials who shared his view were focused on the section exploring the F.B.I.’s partial dissent.
A line says that reports generated by U.S. law enforcement agencies have “the most focus on T.D.A. and its activities in the United States” because, unlike purely foreign intelligence agencies like the C.I.A., they can interrogate domestic prisoners.
But the memo also stressed multiple reasons to be skeptical. Among other things, because of their legal troubles, detainees had an incentive to fabricate “valuable” information, the memo said. And, it said, agencies had not observed the Venezuelan government directing the gang, which would likely require extensive communications, coordination and funding between government officials and gang leaders “that we would collect.”
Mr. Kent has a history of embracing alternative versions of reality that align with his political views but are not supported by evidence. For example, as recently as his confirmation hearing in April, he promoted the conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. secretly instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters trying to block Congress from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory.
) or any Chinese hired soldier, they are a literal third actor fighting for Russia. And that should be a problem, if he cares for peace.
