Tulsi Gabbard sidelined from Venezuela planning

Story by Brett Forrest, Josh Dawsey, Alexander Ward
Jan 9, 2026

White House officials excluded the top U.S. intelligence officer, Tulsi Gabbard, from Venezuela planning since last summer, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

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.

Trump isn’t particularly close with Gabbard, a senior administration official said, and wanted to limit the number of people who knew about the Venezuela mission. She didn’t need to know about it, the official said.

Gabbard’s office provided “intelligence analysis that assisted in the overall mission from the analytical side,” a second administration official said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was among the top officials who preferred Gabbard remain sidelined from the discussions, according to two of the people with knowledge of the situation.

Gabbard, Rubio “and President Trump’s entire team have worked together in lockstep to deliver on his agenda,” said Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman. “This is a tired and false narrative attempting to promote a fake story of ‘division’ when there is none.”

The move highlights the increasing isolation and the turbulent tenure of Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, amid her struggle to penetrate the president’s inner circle and influence policies. She has fallen in and out of favor with Trump, who has grown increasingly reliant on Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe for key intelligence consultations.

“That’s completely false,” Vice President JD Vance said when asked about Gabbard’s exclusion from the Venezuela planning during a Thursday White House briefing. “We kept it very tight to the senior cabinet-level officials and related officials in our government.”

For years, Gabbard had been an outspoken critic of foreign interventions and had accused Trump during his first administration of bowing to neoconservatives who favored acting against Venezuela and coveted the country’s oil reserves.

“The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela,” Gabbard posted to X 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.”

The second administration official said that it was “unfair” to focus on Gabbard’s previous views, “given other Trump administration officials have also previously voiced disagreement on policy or even slammed the President directly.”

The official said that Gabbard leads routine intelligence briefings for the president and is often at the White House each week.

Gabbard’s exclusion from Venezuela planning began last year, when Trump grew impatient with Maduro, and White House officials began drawing up military options to remove him. Underpinning these were intelligence assessments of Venezuela’s military and political realities, communications intercepts and human intelligence collection and the August insertion of CIA personnel around Caracas.

“President Trump has full confidence in his entire exceptional national-security team,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said.

Gabbard had angered Trump in June as the U.S. was planning to strike Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. Earlier in the year, she had said during congressional testimony that the U.S. intelligence community had assessed that Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon.”

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One.

The public rebuke came on the heels of a video released on Gabbard’s social-media accounts in which she visited Hiroshima, one of two Japanese cities that were largely destroyed by U.S. atomic bombs in 1945. She said that the “political elite warmongers” have brought the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.”

The video, which appeared amid deliberations over Iran options, took administration officials by surprise.

Gabbard appeared to recover after declassifying documents related to the intelligence community’s probe into alleged links between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. She and other Trump officials said these documents offered proof of an anti-Trump conspiracy in the intelligence community, and the president praised her efforts in cabinet meetings.

In August, she surprised the CIA by including an undercover senior agency officer on a public list of 37 current and former officials stripped of their security clearances. The roster included people who had worked on issues related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or had signed a 2019 letter calling for President Trump’s impeachment.

A spokeswoman in Gabbard’s office said at the time that the revocations were meant to “ensure individuals who have violated the trust placed in them by weaponizing, politicizing, manipulating, or leaking classified intelligence are no longer allowed to do so.”

Throughout Gabbard’s ups and downs, Trump has come to depend on Ratcliffe, the CIA director, according to current and former intelligence officials and congressional staffers who are familiar with the dynamic.

While Ratcliffe and others in Trump’s close circle of advisers stood by the president in Florida Saturday when he announced the Venezuela operation, Gabbard was in Hawaii. Marking the New Year, she had posted to X a series of photos of herself in yoga poses on a beach, writing, “my heart is filled with gratitude, aloha and peace.”

Normally a voluble supporter of Trump’s policies, appearing on Fox News and writing on social media, Gabbard was initially silent on the Venezuela operation, before posting three days after it.

“President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers,” Gabbard posted Tuesday on X. “Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order to deliver on his promise thru Operation Absolute Resolve.”
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