By Erin Banco
NEW YORK (Reuters) -A top adviser to Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, acknowledged in a March 24 email that the Venezuelan government may not have specifically directed the activities of a gang that the Trump administration has used to justify fast-tracking deportation of immigrants, but argued that a link between Venezuela and the gang was “common sense.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has used a claim that Tren de Aragua is coordinating its U.S. activities with the Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to justify deportations of alleged gang members to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Some legal scholars have argued invoking the act requires a connection to a foreign government.
In the email, read to Reuters by a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by a second source, Gabbard’s acting chief of staff Joe Kent asked for a “rethink” of an intelligence assessment contradicting the administration’s argument that Venezuela is responsible for the U.S. activities of Tren de Aragua gang members.
“I would like to understand how any IC (intelligence community) element arrived at the conclusion that the Venezuelan government doesn’t support and did not orchestrate TDA operating in the U.S.,” Kent said in the email, referring to Tren de Aragua.
“Flooding our nation with migrants and especially migrants who are part of a violent criminal gang is the action of a hostile nation even if the government of Venezuela isn’t specifically tasking or enabling TDA operations.”
He added that analysts needed to produce a new assessment on the gang that “reflects basic common sense.”
The New York Times was the first to report on Kent’s communications with the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community’s highest analytical body. Reuters is the first to publish the contents of that email in detail.
The exchange underscores the extent to which Kent, a former CIA officer, pushed Michael Collins, the head of the National Intelligence Council, and other DNI officials to redo their assessment, taking into account points that had previously been articulated publicly by Trump.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence called the timeline presented in this story “false and fabricated,” and called Kent “an American patriot who continues to honorably serve our country.”
“President Trump rightfully designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization based on intelligence assessments and, frankly, common sense,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
‘COMMON SENSE’
In his email, Kent argued that it would be logical for Venezuela, a U.S. adversary, to send gang members across the border, saying that any country seeking to harm the United States “would naturally take their bad actors and send them to our nation.”
“When Biden announced that the border was open I think we let a quest for … direct links between the Venezuelan government and TDA obstruct basic common sense,” he wrote, adding that the National Intelligence Council needed to start “looking at getting a new assessment written on TDA and their relationship with the government of Venezuela that reflects basic common sense.”
While Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden faced high levels of illegal immigration during his presidency, his administration also took steps to discourage illegal border crossings and encourage migrants to enter the U.S. legally.
In subsequent emails with ODNI officials, Kent also said that Gabbard needs to be “protected” in the rewriting process, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Kent’s emails were in response to a February National Intelligence Council assessment on the subject – one of at least two in recent months – that took into consideration analysis by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the National Security Agency.
The first was published internally Feb. 26 and made public via reporting by the New York Times in March. It said that the intelligence community did not find that the gang was controlled by the Venezuelan government.
The second, published April 7 and made public earlier this month via the Freedom of Information Act, added more context and nuance but confirmed the intelligence community’s original assessment, two people familiar with the situation said.
Collins, the NIC chief, was removed from his post as acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council last week along with his vice chair, Maria Langan-Riekhof.
It’s not clear who ordered the original intelligence assessment or why Trump later made statements that contradicted his own intelligence agencies’ findings.
It’s common for the White House – under any administration – to ask its intelligence community to draw up reports on various national security matters.
Traditionally, intelligence agencies are tasked with producing assessments without political interference or bias so the president and his top national security officials can make more informed decisions.
The removals have sparked consternation in the upper echelons of the intelligence community, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Both Collins and Langan-Riekhof have been accused publicly by ODNI for politicizing intelligence.
But two people familiar with the situation said Kent pressured Collins to redo the initial intelligence assessment to more closely align with the administration’s public rhetoric. Collins, despite that request, held firm and instead supported the spy agencies’ original findings.
“It’s clear that Collins got axed for just doing his job,” one former senior U.S. intelligence official said. “Collins is respected throughout the entire community and has a long history of working on tough problems with the highest of integrity.”
The people were granted anonymity so they could speak more freely about the internal deliberations surrounding the Tren de Aragua assessment.
(Reporting by Erin Banco; Editing by Don Durfee and Deepa Babington)
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