The Isolation of Tulsi Gabbard: How Venezuela Coup Plotters Deliberately Shut Out Nation’s Top Intelligence Chief

As President Donald Trump’s top national security advisers huddled last week to finalize plans for the risky military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was posting social media photos of herself on a beach in Hawaii, ignorant of the operation’s details, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The exclusion wasn’t accidental. According to Bloomberg and multiple sources, the White House deliberately cut Gabbard out of months of planning to oust Maduro because her previous opposition to military action in Venezuela cast doubt on her willingness to support the operation. The move 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 people familiar with the matter who spoke to Bloomberg.

The revelations expose the increasing isolation of Gabbard—nominally the nation’s top intelligence official overseeing 18 agencies including the CIA—and raise fundamental questions about whether a Director of National Intelligence kept in the dark on major operations can effectively lead the intelligence community or serve the president she was appointed to advise.

Months in the Dark

According to The Washington Post, Gabbard “was conspicuously absent among Trump’s top national security advisers during the planning for the Maduro mission.” While CIA Director John Ratcliffe accompanied Trump at Mar-a-Lago throughout the night as the extraction unfolded and stood beside the president at the news conference announcing the results, Gabbard remained silent for days.

According to multiple sources, Gabbard did not publicly comment on the operation until four days after it occurred, when she finally posted on Tuesday: “President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers.”

The White House released an image of Trump administration officials involved in the raid, which included President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and CIA Director Ratcliffe. Gabbard, notably, was not among those pictured, according to The Daily Beast.

The reason for Gabbard’s exclusion traces directly to her previous statements opposing U.S. intervention in Venezuela.

Gabbard—then a Democratic member of Congress—tweeted: “The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela. Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders–so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”

Gabbard also wrote in 2019: “It’s about the oil … again.”

Gabbard had warned against U.S. intervention in Venezuela, noting the “disastrous” history of American involvement in Latin America that has “brought suffering to millions of people, bankrupted our country, dishonored our troops, and undermined our national security.” She argued that Venezuela “poses no threat to the United States” and there is “no justification to violate the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.”

 “Her exclusion from this operation is not the first time the president has shown disrespect for his intelligence chief.”

Gabbard had also criticized Trump’s then-national security adviser John Bolton, the administration’s threats against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2018, and the assassination of Iranian military official Qasem Soleimani in early 2020. According to The Wall Street Journal Secretary of State Marco Rubio was among those who wanted to keep Gabbard out of the loop.

The Joke

The extent of Gabbard’s exclusion became office humor within the White House. According to Bloomberg, “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” who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A White House official denied there was any such joke, according to Bloomberg.

Vance’s Denial

Vice President JD Vance publicly rejected reports of Gabbard’s exclusion during a White House press briefing on Thursday, January 8, 2026. According reports, Vance stated: “I’ve heard a couple of things. One, that I was kept out of the planning for the Venezuela operation—that’s false,” adding: “And another that Tulsi was kept out of the planning for the Venezuela operation. That’s completely false.”

“We’re all part of the same team,” Vance told reporters according to Yahoo. “We kept it very tight to the senior cabinet officials and related officials in our government, and we kept this operation secret for a very long time.”

However, Vance’s denial contradicts the Bloomberg report based on three sources, as well as The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, and Gabbard’s own conspicuous absence from photos, statements, and public appearances related to the operation.

A Broader Pattern

The Venezuela exclusion fits a broader pattern of Gabbard’s marginalization within the Trump administration. According to The Washington Post, one person familiar with the matter said Gabbard is no longer in Trump’s inner circle.

According to The Daily Beast, a former intelligence official stated: “It seems pretty obvious that she was not part of this [Maduro mission] and has not been part of the inner circle for some time, if ever. She is an isolationist, and Trump is some kind of weird imperialist.”

The Daily Beast noted: “Her exclusion from this operation is not the first time the president has shown disrespect for his intelligence chief.”

According to Mediaite, Gabbard “irked Trump last year after the president ordered the bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran. Months prior, Gabbard testified before Congress that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.”

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump said of Gabbard’s assessment according to Mediaite. “I think they were very close to having one.”

Anti-War Rhetoric

Gabbard’s exclusion from Venezuela planning comes amid her continued public criticism of “warmongers”—the very officials who planned the Maduro operation.

According to The Spokesman-Review, in a speech at Turning Point USA’s annual conference last month, Gabbard criticized “warmongers” in the “deep state” of the intelligence community she leads trying to thwart Trump’s efforts to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.

“Too often we, the American people, are told we must choose between liberty or security, and which side often wins out in that proposition,” she told the gathered crowd according to the source. “Liberty loses, and the warmongers claim that they are doing what they are doing for the sake of our security. It’s a lie.”

Last month Gabbard “similarly railed against ‘warmongers’ and the ‘military industrial complex’ in remarks to Turning Point USA, warning that ‘those who seek to keep us in a persistent state of war deny the heavy costs that it takes in human lives, in taxpayer dollars, and in the erosion of our liberties, wars that have nothing to do with ensuring our security or our liberty.'”

The Implications of Exclusion

The Gabbard situation raises profound questions about the functioning of the intelligence community and national security decision-making. As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard is supposed to serve as the president’s principal adviser on intelligence matters and coordinate the activities of the 18-member intelligence community. Yet if she’s excluded from major operations and planning, how can she effectively do either?

According to The Spokesman-Review, Gabbard’s “silence on the operation surprised some in the U.S. intelligence community, which laid the groundwork for the mission over several months, and which had assets in harm’s way on the ground in Venezuela as the operation unfolded.”

The intelligence community under Gabbard’s nominal leadership conducted the intelligence groundwork for an operation she wasn’t briefed on—a remarkable inversion of the normal chain of command and advisory relationships.

Gabbard finds herself in an increasingly untenable position: nominally the nation’s top intelligence official, but excluded from major operations by a president who doesn’t trust her judgment, mocked by White House aides who joke her title means and leading an intelligence community that operates without her knowledge on sensitive missions.

Whether she can continue in this role—or whether Trump will eventually seek her resignation—remains unclear. What is clear is that the current arrangement, where the Director of National Intelligence is kept in the dark about major intelligence-driven military operations, represents a fundamental dysfunction in how the U.S. national security apparatus is supposed to function.

As one former intelligence official told The Daily Beast, Gabbard “has not been part of the inner circle for some time, if ever.”

This story was aggregated by AI from several news reports and edited by American Kahani’s News Desk.