CIA advised Trump against supporting Venezuela’s democratic opposition
WASHINGTON— A highly classified CIA assessment prepared at the request of the White House warned President Trump of a broader conflict in Venezuela if he backed the country’s democratic opposition after the impeachment of President Nicolás Maduro, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.
The assessment was a closely guarded CIA product commissioned at the request of top policymakers before Trump decided whether to authorize Operation Absolute Resolve, the dramatic U.S. mission that kidnapped Maduro and his wife from their bedroom in Caracas over the weekend.
Announcing the results of the operation on Sunday, Trump surprised an anxious Venezuelan public when he swiftly dismissed the leadership of the democratic opposition led by last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, who eventually won the 2024 presidential election stolen by Maduro.
Instead, Trump said his administration was working with Maduro’s hand-picked vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has since been elected the country’s interim president. The rest of Maduro’s government remains in place.
Supporting the opposition would likely require US military support; Venezuela’s armed forces were still under the control of Maduro loyalists who did not want to give up power.
The Bush administration was trying to prevent one of the most significant mistakes in the invasion of Iraq when it ordered the removal of party loyalists of the ousted Saddam Hussein from the country’s interim government, a second official said. This decision, known as de-Baathification, led those responsible for Iraq’s weapons stockpiles to launch armed resistance against the US operation.
The CIA product was not an assessment shared among the 18 government agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, whose head, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, was largely absent from the talks and has yet to comment on the operation, even though CIA officers were deployed to cause harm before and throughout the weekend mission.
The source added that the core team working on Absolute Resolve included Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chief of Staff Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who met routinely, sometimes daily, for several months.
Presence of CIA assessment First reported by Wall Street Journal.
Indications have emerged that the Trump team was in contact with Rodríguez ahead of the operation, but the president has denied that his administration gave Rodríguez advance notice of Maduro’s ouster.
“There are a number of unanswered questions,” said Evan Ellis, who helped plan Trump’s early State Department policy on Latin America, the Caribbean and international narcotics. “There may have been a cynical calculation that they could be worked with.”
Experts say Rodríguez served as a point of contact with the Biden administration and was also in contact with Richard Grenell, a senior Trump aide who headed the Kennedy Center as Trump tested relations with Caracas early in his second term.
While other senior officials in his government were named in the federal indictment following Maduro’s seizure, Rodríguez’s name was conspicuously absent.
Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president on Monday in a ceremony attended by diplomats from Russia, China and Iran. The leader gave mixed messages to the public; He both promised to prevent Venezuela from becoming a colonial outpost of the American empire and offered to establish a new cooperative relationship with Washington.
“Of course, for political reasons, Delcy Rodríguez cannot say, ‘I made a deal with Trump, and now we’re going to stop the revolution and start working with the United States,'” Ellis said.
“This has nothing to do with democracy,” he said. “This is about him not wanting to work with Maduro.”
In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Machado said he had not yet spoken to Trump since the US operation over the weekend, but hoped to do so soon and offered to share the Nobel Peace Prize with Trump as a sign of gratitude. Trump has repeatedly touted himself as a worthy recipient of the award.
“What he did is historic,” said Machado, vowing to return to the country from hiding abroad since accepting the award in Oslo last month.
“It’s a big step towards democratic transition,” he added.
