CIA Warned Trump Against Venezuela Opposition Support
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Trump Administration Navigates Post-Maduro Venezuela with Controversial Approach
WASHINGTON – A highly confidential CIA assessment produced at the request of the White House warned President Trump of a wider conflict in Venezuela if he were to support the contry’s democratic opposition once its president, Nicolás Maduro, was deposed a person familiar with the matter told The Times.
The assessment was a tightly held CIA product commissioned at the request of senior policymakers before Trump decided whether to authorize Operation Absolute Resolve, the stunning U.S. mission that seized 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 was swift to dismiss the leadership of the democratic opposition – led by Maria Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate who won the 2024 presidential election that was ultimately stolen by Maduro.
Rather, trump said his administration was working with Maduro’s handpicked vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has as been named the country’s interim president. The rest of maduro’s government remains in place.
Endorsing the opposition would probably have required U.S. military backing, with the Venezuelan armed forces still under the control of loyalists to Maduro unwilling to relinquish power.
A second official said that the administration sought to avoid one of the cardinal mistakes of the invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration ordered party loyalists of the deposed Saddam Hussein to be excluded from the country’s interim government. That decision, known as de-Baathification, led those in charge of Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons to establish armed resistance to the U.S.campaign.
The CIA product was not an assessment that was shared across the 18 government agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, whose head, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, was largely absent from deliberations – and who has yet to comment on the operation despite CIA operatives being deployed in harm’s way before and throughout the weekend mission.
The core team that worked on Absolute Resolve included Homeland security Advisor Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary pete Hegseth, Secretary of state Marco Rubio, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and CIA director.