type: timeline_event
The White House excluded Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from months of planning to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro because her previous opposition to military action in Venezuela cast doubt on her willingness to support the operation. The move to cut Gabbard out of meetings was so well-known that some White House aides joked that the acronym of her title, DNI, stood for "Do Not Invite."
Gabbard is on record arguing that the United States "needs to stay out of Venezuela." After Trump launched the military operation over the weekend of January 3-4, 2026, Gabbard suddenly vanished from public view. In June 2025, when the president was asked for his reaction to Gabbard's testimony on Iran's nuclear program, Trump explicitly said, more than once, that he didn't care what his own handpicked director of national intelligence said.
The White House told Bloomberg that Trump still has "full confidence" in Gabbard, despite her systematic exclusion from major foreign policy decisions. The incident illustrated the dysfunction within Trump's national security apparatus, where the nation's top intelligence official was sidelined from one of the administration's most significant military operations.