{"id":123443,"date":"2026-01-07T09:46:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T09:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/123443\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T09:46:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T09:46:12","slug":"cia-advised-trump-against-supporting-venezuelas-democratic-opposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/123443\/","title":{"rendered":"CIA advised Trump against supporting Venezuela’s democratic opposition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0A 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 country\u2019s democratic opposition once its president, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, was deposed<\/a>, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Announcing the results of the operation on Sunday, Trump surprised an anxious Venezuelan public when he was quick to dismiss the leadership of the democratic opposition \u2014 led by Mar\u00eda Corina Machado<\/a>, last year\u2019s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Edmundo Gonz\u00e1lez Urrutia<\/a>, the opposition candidate who won the 2024 presidential election that was ultimately stolen by Maduro.<\/p>\n

Instead, Trump said his administration was working with Maduro\u2019s handpicked vice president, Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, who has since been named the country\u2019s interim president. The rest of Maduro\u2019s government remains in place.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s interim government. That decision, known as de-Baathification<\/a>, led those in charge of Iraq\u2019s stockpiles of weapons to establish armed resistance to the U.S. campaign.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and who has yet to comment on the operation<\/a>, despite CIA operatives being deployed in harm\u2019s way before and throughout the weekend mission.<\/p>\n

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 John Ratcliffe, who met routinely over several months, sometimes daily, the source added.<\/p>\n

The existence of the CIA assessment was first reported by the Wall Street Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Signs have emerged that Trump\u2019s team was in communication with Rodr\u00edguez ahead of the operation, although the president has denied that his administration gave Rodr\u00edguez advance notice of Maduro\u2019s ouster.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a number of unanswered questions,\u201d said Evan Ellis, who served in Trump\u2019s first term planning State Department policy on Latin America, the Caribbean and international narcotics. \u201cThere may have been a cynical calculation that one can work with them.\u201d <\/p>\n

Rodr\u00edguez served as a point of contact with the Biden administration, experts note, and also was in touch with Richard Grenell, a top Trump aide who heads the Kennedy Center, early on in Trump\u2019s second term, when he was testing engagement with Caracas. <\/p>\n

While the federal indictment unsealed against Maduro after his seizure named several other senior officials in his government, Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s name was notably absent.<\/p>\n

Rodr\u00edguez was sworn in as Venezuela\u2019s interim president Monday in a ceremony attended by diplomats from Russia, China and Iran. Publicly, the leader has offered mixed messages, at once vowing to prevent Venezuela from becoming a colonial outpost of an American empire, while also offering to forge a newly collaborative relationship with Washington.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, for political reasons, Delcy Rodr\u00edguez can\u2019t say, \u2018I\u2019ve cut a deal with Trump, and we\u2019re going to stop the revolution now and start working with the U.S.,\u201d Ellis said. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not about the democracy,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about him not wanting to work with Maduro.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Machado said she had yet to speak with Trump since the U.S. operation over the weekend, but hoped to do so soon, offering to share her Nobel Peace Prize with him as a gesture of gratitude. Trump has repeatedly touted himself as a worthy recipient of the award.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat he has done is historic,\u201d Machado said, vowing to return to the country from hiding abroad since accepting the prize in Oslo last month. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a huge step,\u201d she added, \u201ctowards a democratic transition.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0A highly confidential CIA assessment produced at the request of the White House warned President Trump of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2672,61898,19009,7363,63375,64616,405,33595,48,52,51,47,50,49,9297,6843,3020,1519,64617,9298,2695],"class_list":["post-123443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-administration","tag-caracas","tag-cia","tag-country","tag-delcy-rodriguez","tag-democratic-opposition","tag-government","tag-iraq","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-nicolas-maduro","tag-operation","tag-president-trump","tag-trump","tag-u-s-campaign","tag-venezuela","tag-weekend"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}