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- Analyst Was Told To Redo Findings on Venezuelans
Analyst Was Told To Redo Findings on Venezuelans
Report Undercut Trump's Claims Tying Gang to Government
Matt Davis
May 18, 2025
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Today’s lead story by Julian E. Barnes, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage sounds like something out of Communist Russia. It’s rather detailed and confusing, I’m afraid, although I’ll make it as simple as I can for you because that’s my job. And the reporting really is first-class. Seriously. It’s incredible. I’m so proud to live in America with reporters this good and a newspaper that runs their reporting so prominently.
A top adviser to the director of national intelligence ordered a senior analyst to redo an assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and a gang after intelligence findings undercut the White House’s justification for deporting migrants, according to officials.
President Trump’s use of a wartime law to send Venezuelan migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador without due process relies on a claim that U.S. intelligence agencies think is wrong. But behind the scenes, a political appointee told a career official to rework the assessment, a direction that allies of the intelligence analyst said amounted to pressure to change the findings.
The law, the Alien Enemies act, is rarely used and appears to require a link to a foreign state. Mr. Trump claimed that Venezuela’s government had directed the gang to commit crimes inside the United States. On March 20, The New York Times reported that an intelligence assessment in late February contradicted that claim. It detailed many reasons that the intelligence community as a whole concluded that the gang was not acting under the Venezuelan government’s control. At the time the F.B.I. partly dissented, maintaining that the gang had some links to Venezuela’s government based on information all the other agencies did not find credible.
There’s a lot of detail in the story which I’m just going to quote, because it’s tricky, and nuanced. But it does matter.
The administration was alarmed by the disclosure. The next day, a Friday, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, announced a criminal leak investigation, characterizing The Times’s detailed description of the intelligence assessment as “inaccurate” and “false” while insisting that Mr. Trump’s proclamation was “supported by fact, law, and common sense.”
The following Monday, Joe Kent, the acting chief of staff for Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, told a senior intelligence analyst to do a new assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang, the officials said. The analyst, Michael Collins, was serving as the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council at the time.
An official who has reviewed messages about the assessment said Mr. Kent made the request to Mr. Collins in an email, asking him to “rethink” the earlier analysis. The official said Mr. Kent was not politicizing the process, but giving his assessment and asking the intelligence officials to take into account the flows of migrants across the border during the Biden administration.
The National Intelligence Council is an elite internal think tank that reports to Ms. Gabbard and that policymakers can commission to undertake special analytical projects. The council canvasses spy agencies across the executive branch for its information.
While officials close to Ms. Gabbard said Mr. Kent’s request was entirely appropriate, other intelligence officials said they saw it as an effort to produce a torqued narrative that would support Mr. Trump’s agenda. But after re-examining the relevant evidence collected by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the council on April 7 reaffirmed the original findings.
That’s a lot of high-level reporting relying on inside sources at the Trump administration. If I read this, this morning, and I were anybody mentioned, I’d realize I couldn’t trust anybody around me to keep their mouth shut if I did something unethical or illegal. I also wonder whether the Times gave the piece three bylines just to make it harder for the Trump administration to identify the leak. Of course:
The officials who described the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. Intelligence officials declined to make Mr. Collins available for an interview.
And inside the Trump administration, there’s anger about Mr. Kent’s “blundering intervention.” Since the original assessment was sound, no new information has been collected in the “redo,” and so there’s no reason to expect different new findings, although as the Times reports, “from the beginning, politics surrounded the request for an intelligence assessment.”
The original assessment also stemmed from a White House request, and it is not clear who specifically inside the White House made the request. That said, the paragraph right after that says:
Inside the administration, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, spearheads immigration policy. He has developed numerous ways to leverage existing laws — sometimes via aggressive interpretations — to better seal the border and accelerate deportations. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act to avoid time-consuming asylum and deportation hearings is one of those innovations.
So they probably think Stephen Miller made the request. That’s my reading-between-the-lines assessment. Details also “remain unclear of the White House deliberations” that led to Mr. Trump, two weeks later, “signing a proclamation that made purportedly factual findings that contradicted the executive branch intelligence community’s understanding of what was true.” Although again, my guess is that they probably think Stephen Miller was behind that, too.
The government has issued a blanket denial (“deny, deny, deny!"), refuting that there was anything wrong or unusual about asking for a redo on the analysis, and defending the man who asked for it.
Olivia C. Coleman, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said requesting the intelligence assessment on the gang’s ties to the Venezuelan government was “common practice.” She also defended Mr. Kent, saying, without detail, that the timeline presented in this article was “false and fabricated.”
“It is the deep state’s latest effort to attack this administration from within with an orchestrated op detached from reality,” Ms. Coleman said.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump’s policy on deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador had made America safer. “President Trump rightfully designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization based on intelligence assessments and, frankly, common sense,” she said.
A complex series of court fights have now blocked Mr. Trump from sending further planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador.
Ms. Gabbard this week removed Mr. Collins from the National Intelligence Council, a body she has amplified posts about on social media as “a hive of biased, deep-state bureaucrats,” the story reports.
Oddly, Ms. Gabbard’s chief of staff, Joe Kent, the guy who pushed for the re-do, is also the guy who pushed for the re-done memo to become public, maybe didn’t think through the consequences, “because the memo directly contradicts what Mr. Trump claimed — and is now public as an officially acknowledged document — it is generally seen as a legal and public relations fiasco for the administration.”
Mr. Kent, I think, is a dangerous nutcase, based on the reporting. The Times says as much, albeit in the way the New York Times does.
Mr. Kent has a history of embracing alternative versions of reality that align with his political views but are not supported by evidence. For example, as recently as his confirmation hearing in April, he promoted the conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. secretly instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters trying to block Congress from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory.
So there we have it. The Venezuelan government has nothing to do with a violent criminal gang operating inside its country. The Trump administration lied and said it did, as part of an effort to justify invoking a wartime law that meant it could claim an “emergency” and put Venezuelans on a plane to El Salvador. When the intelligence community said it was lying, a crazy person within the Trump administration’s “intelligence” arm asked the intelligence community to redo the report, all the while casting that community as stuffed with “deep state bureaucrats.” Stephen Miller was probably involved but is nasty and experienced enough to know not to leave his fingerprints around. When the redone report still said the Trump administration was full of 💩, the crazy person pushed to have the report released anyway, to everyone’s astonishment, because it made Trump look terrible. Nobody can figure out what’s going on, although they think perhaps the crazy person just didn’t read the redone report very carefully, and the upshot of all this is that the administration is stuffed to the brim with people who are not very bright and are very dangerous because they are very corrupt indeed. None of this is news, necessarily, but reading the details is a refreshing reminder that you should absolutely never have voted for these people if you did.
Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you don’t have to!
Say, is there a story that might cheer me up a bit?
Sure. Stephen A. Smith is running for president. 👇🏻 I said “a bit.” Right?
Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.
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