CIA advised Trump against supporting Venezuela’s democratic opposition

WASHINGTON- A highly classified CIA assessment conducted at the request of the White House warned President Trump of a broader conflict in Venezuela if he were to support the country’s democratic opposition once its president, Nicolas Maduro, is removed from office, a person familiar with the matter told the Times.

The assessment was a closely watched product of the CIA, commissioned at the request of top policymakers before Trump decided whether to authorize Operation Absolute Resolve, the astonishing U.S. mission that captured Maduro and his wife in their bedroom in Caracas over the weekend.

Announcing the results of the operation on Sunday, Trump surprised a worried Venezuelan public by rushing to fire the leaders of the democratic opposition — led by María Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate who won the 2024 presidential election that was ultimately stolen by Maduro.

Instead, Trump said his administration was working with Maduro’s hand-picked vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has since been named the country’s interim president. The rest of Maduro’s government remains in place.

Supporting the opposition would likely have required U.S. military support, with Venezuela’s armed forces still under the control of Maduro loyalists unwilling to relinquish power.

A second official said the administration was seeking to avoid one of the momentous mistakes of the Iraq invasion, when the Bush administration ordered that supporters of deposed Saddam Hussein be excluded from the country’s interim government. The move, known as de-Baathification, led those responsible for Iraq’s weapons stockpiles to establish armed resistance to the American campaign.

The CIA product is not an assessment shared by the 18 government agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, whose head, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, was largely absent from the deliberations — and who has yet to comment on the operation, despite deploying CIA agents into harm’s way before and during 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 John Ratcliffe, who met regularly for several months, sometimes daily, the source added.

The existence of the CIA assessment was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Signs have emerged that Trump’s team was in communication with Rodríguez before the operation, although the president has denied that his administration informed Rodríguez in advance of Maduro’s ouster.

“There are a number of unanswered questions that remain,” said Evan Ellis, who worked during Trump’s first term planning State Department policy on Latin America, the Caribbean and international narcotics. “There may have been a cynical calculation that we could work with them.”

Rodríguez served as a point of contact with the Biden administration, experts note, and was also in touch with Richard Grenell, a top Trump aide who runs the Kennedy Center, early in Trump’s second term when he was testing engagement with Caracas.

While the federal indictment unsealed against Maduro after his arrest mentioned several other senior officials in his government, Rodríguez’s name was conspicuously absent.

Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president on Monday in a ceremony attended by diplomats from Russia, China and Iran. Publicly, the leader has delivered mixed messages, pledging both to prevent Venezuela from becoming a colonial outpost of a U.S. empire, while also proposing to forge a new collaborative relationship with Washington.

“Of course, for political reasons, Delcy Rodríguez can’t say, ‘I made a deal with Trump and we’re going to stop the revolution now and start working with the United States,’” Ellis said.

“This is not about democracy,” he said. “It’s about the fact that he doesn’t want to work with Maduro.”

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Machado said she had not yet spoken with Trump since the weekend’s U.S. operation but hoped to do so soon, offering to share her Nobel Peace Prize with him as a sign of gratitude. Trump has repeatedly presented himself as a worthy recipient of this award.

“What he did is historic,” Machado said, vowing to return to the country after hiding abroad since accepting the award in Oslo last month.

“It’s a big step,” she added, “towards a democratic transition.”