DNI = 'Do Not Invite'? Trump officials excluded Tulsi Gabbard from months of planning to oust Nicolas Maduro

The White House excluded Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from months of planning to oust Nicolas Maduro because her previous opposition to military action in Venezuela cast doubt on her willingness to support the operation, people familiar with the matter said. 

The move to cut Gabbard out of the meetings was so well-known that some White House aides joked that the acronym of her title, DNI, stood for “Do Not Invite,” according to three of the people. They asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. A White House official denied there was any such joke.

As a Democratic congresswoman in 2019, Gabbard said the US needs to “stay out” of Venezuela, and as recently as last month she railed against “warmongers” pushing the US into conflict.

The exclusion was the latest evidence of long-running tension over Gabbard’s role in the Donald Trump administration, and has underscored how the president’s decision to oust Maduro — despite campaigning against starting new wars — has widened fissures not only among his MAGA supporters but also within his team.

Vice President JD Vance labeled as “false” the notion that he or Gabbard have been left out of the operation’s planning. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said Trump “has full confidence in DNI Gabbard and she’s doing a fantastic job.” 

“We’re all part of the same team,” Vance told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “One of the things that is really amazing about that operation is that we kept it very tight to the senior Cabinet level officials and related officials in our government and we kept this operation secret for a very long time.”

A senior intelligence official pushed back against the characterization that Gabbard had been excluded, saying she provided intelligence that helped the overall mission, even if it was less operational and more analytical. An ODNI spokeswoman referred Bloomberg to a social media post Gabbard wrote Tuesday lauding servicemembers for the operation’s “flawless execution” of the move to capture Maduro. 

“President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers,” she wrote. The post broke a days-long silence after other top national security officials cheered the operation in press conferences, TV interviews and on social media.

A previous post from her personal account on Jan. 1 included four pictures that showed her on a beach. “My heart is filled with gratitude, aloha and peace,” she wrote.

While Gabbard’s role isn’t operational, her exclusion from the planning — which picked up in late summer — is unorthodox, according to several former officials who worked in both Democratic and Republican administrations. As director of national intelligence, Gabbard is meant to be Trump’s principal intelligence adviser overseeing the US’s 18 intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency.

Photos disseminated by the White House after the Maduro operation show Trump and several close aides including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller huddled in a makeshift war room watching the events unfolding in real time. Gabbard wasn’t among them. 

It’s “highly unusual for the DNI not to be involved in any of these operations, especially something like Venezuela,” said Cedric Leighton, a retired US Air Force intelligence colonel. “The visuals from that picture are a perfect description of what’s going on to Tulsi Gabbard at this point.”

And it highlights the Trump team’s skepticism of the DNI role. Some have argued that the job, created after the 9/11 attacks to better coordinate the country’s many intelligence agencies, should be abolished. At the same time, the White House and Trump in particular have exhibited occasional unease with her since she became the top US spy. 

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Gabbard played little role in the planning and execution of the raid.

Last summer, Trump became irritated with Gabbard over a video she posted on social media in June warning that the world is closer to nuclear war than ever, according to people familiar with the matter. The video didn’t mention any countries but aired a little more than a week before Trump ordered a strike on Iran.

Marc Gustafson, director of analysis at Eurasia Group and a former head of the White House Situation Room, said it wasn’t unprecedented for directors to be left out of such planning. Past presidents — including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and even Trump in his first term — would sometimes lean on either the CIA director or the DNI for the planning of such an event, “then the other would be kind of left out temporarily,” he said.

Gabbard still has been regularly briefing the president and frequently attends meetings in the Oval Office, the senior intelligence official said. The official said it was unfair to focus on Gabbard’s past views, given other top Trump deputies — including Vance — also have previously voiced disagreement on policy or even slammed Trump directly.

Under Trump, Gabbard has given her role a more political focus. She’s prioritized declassifying documents on topics important to Trump’s base — including President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Russia’s meddling in US elections — and rooting out what she and the president have said was the Deep State lurking in the intelligence community.

Gabbard, 44, a veteran of the Iraq War who continues to serve as an officer in the Army Reserve, has been a vocal opponent of US engagement in enduring regime-change wars, including in her current role.

In the 2019 social media post, Gabbard said of Venezuela that “we don’t want other countries to choose our leaders — so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”

“When we look throughout history, every time the United States goes into another country and topples a dictator or topples a government, the outcome has been disastrous for the people in these countries,” she said on Fox News in May of that year.

Gabbard, who ran for president in 2020, said in a speech in late October that “for decades, our foreign policy has been trapped in a counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation-building.”

“The old Washington way of thinking is something we hope is in the rear-view mirror,” she said.