Trump appointee pressed analyst to redo intelligence on Venezuelan gang
May 17, 2025 at 4:27 pm
By Julian E. Barnes, CHARLIE SAVAGE and Maggie Haberman
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — 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 Donald 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, political appointee Joe Kent, a former Washington state congressional candidate and the acting chief of staff for Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, told a career official to rework the assessment, a direction that allies of the intelligence analyst said amounted to pressure to change the findings.
Trump on March 15 invoked the law, the Alien Enemies Act, to summarily remove people accused of being members of the gang, Tren de Aragua. The rarely used act appears to require a link to a foreign state, and he 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. The FBI partly dissented, maintaining that the gang had some links to Venezuela’s government based on information all the other agencies did not find credible.
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