Tulsi Gabbard Reportedly Kept In Dark On Venezuela Operation As Nation’s Intelligence Chief

Longtime Tulsi Gabbard supporters have wondered why she has seemed to be missing in action in terms of weighing in on Trump’s militarily invading Venezuela to oust longtime socialist leader Nicolás Maduro, given that as a prior member of Congress before taking up the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) position, she had been quite vocal against any move on Venezuela. 

While the DNI position – which is the top intelligence post in the US government (overseeing all the agencies and coordinating intelligence at the NSC and for the White House) – is not fundamentally an office weighing in on the policy side of things, many have still wondered just where her ‘non-interventionist’ voice has been – at least behind the scenes in internal administration deliberations.

The Wall Street Journal reports she was intentionally sidelined from any and all planning for the mission to oust Maduro. “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,” WSJ writes Thursday.

“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,” according to more details.

So she was not only sidelined as intelligence director from being let in on the single biggest foreign military and intelligence mission of the Trump administration thus far, but she was literally thousands of miles away from decision-making centers when it went down.

One anonymous US official did say that her office was involved in providing “intelligence analysis that assisted in the overall mission from the analytical side” – but clearly she was nowhere near the situation room, and essentially blocked from any foreknowledge.

“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,” according to more details.

This means that intel would have been primarily handled by the Central Intelligence Agency, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe – who is seen as increasingly having Trump’s ear.

However, the WSJ report has also noted there are contradictory sources, including one very significant voice which weighed in as follows:

“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.”

But Vance seems to be suggesting that Gabbard may have been among those top IC (intelligence community) officials who actually ‘didn’t need to know’ – though this is a bit strange and unexpected.

An example of her strident position against regime change in Venezuela and other places (like Iran)…

This is what Tulsi Gabbard said when she announced her presidential campaign in February 2019 — denouncing Trump’s pursuit of “regime change” in Venezuela and Iran. There is simply no way for her to wriggle out of this and retain bare-minimum credibility pic.twitter.com/42eNeEo28j

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 8, 2026

Prior reporting in the aftermath of the Friday night into early morning raid in Caracas underscored that even top Pentagon officials were kept in the dark as to the timeline and details of the operation, until the very last moments of execution, overseen by a tight crew of Trump admin officials, generals, and without doubt CIA Director Ratcliffe.