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nicolas maduro
'They Just Made Sh*t Up': Declassified Spy Memo Undercuts Trump Pretext for Deportations to El Salvador
"Sunlight remains the best disinfectant for falsehoods," said one open government advocate.
May 06, 2025
A memo released Monday by the Trump administration in response to a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed that U.S. intelligence agencies never agreed with President Donald Trump's claim in March that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controls the criminal gang Tren de Aragua—an assertion that was used to justify sending hundreds of migrants to a notorious Salvadoran prison.
The document said that "while Venezuela's permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States."
Trump's claim about Maduro's connection to the group had been called into question by The New York Times in March, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for only the fourth time in U.S. history. The law empowers the federal government to summarily expel citizens of a country that is at war with or invading the United States.
The Times reported at the time, based on interviews with officials, that the intelligence community's findings about Tren de Aragua were "starkly at odds" with Trump's claims. The anonymous officials said the gang was not taking orders from Maduro's government.
That reporting prompted the U.S. Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into the "selective leak of inaccurate" information to the Times, with the Trump administration criticizing the Times for its "misleading" report.
Attorney General Pam Bondi also said in an April memo that the department would roll back press freedom protections in leak investigations after The Washington Postreported on the memo that was declassified Monday. The Post reported on the document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in mid-April when it was still classified.
"The declassification proves that the material should have been public from the start—not used as an excuse to suppress sharing information with the press," Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told the Times. The group filed the FOIA request for the memo, dated April 7, to be released.
A declassified ODNI memo disclosed in response to a @Freedom.Press FOIA request confirms a @nytimes.com report from March: U.S. intel agencies rejected the claim Trump made to justify deporting Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/u...
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— Alexander Howard (@digiphile.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 10:27 PM
The memo noted that the FBI partially dissented with the intelligence community's findings about Tren de Aragua.
Analysts at the FBI agreed with the agencies' overall assessment but believed "some Venezuelan government officials facilitate [Tren de Aragua] members' migration from Venezuela to the United States and use members as proxies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States to advance what they see as the Maduro regime's goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in these countries."
"Most" of the intelligence community "judges that intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling [Tren de Aragua] migration to the United States is not credible," the memo reads.
Intelligence agencies also noted in the memo that detainees accused of being members of the gang could have been motivated "to make false allegations about their ties to the Venezuelan regime in an effort to deflect responsibility for their crimes and to lessen any punishment by providing exculpatory or otherwise 'valuable' information to U.S. prosecutors."
Analysts said they had not collected information about communications or funding exchanges between Venezuelan officials and leaders of Tren de Aragua.
"So you mean kidnapping folks off the streets and sending them to a foreign gulag was not justified by our own intelligence?" said the Arkansas Justice Project. "They just made shit up to dog whistle their base. The AEA argument was never legitimate and they knew it all along."
After the memo was released, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said it was "outrageous that as President Trump and his administration work hard every day to make America safe by deporting these violent criminals, some in the media remain intent on twisting and manipulating intelligence assessments to undermine the president's agenda to keep the American people safe."
Courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have blocked the Trump administration from sending more migrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, and the ACLU last month asked a federal judge to facilitate the return of all Venezuelans sent to the country's Terrorism Confinement Center to ensure they have due process via immigration hearings.
But judges hearing cases regarding Trump's mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act have not yet questioned the administration's debunked claims about Tren de Aragua and the Maduro government.
Writer and open government advocate Alexander B. Howard said the release of the memo proves that "sunlight remains the best disinfectant for falsehoods."
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The US Should Focus on Democracy at Home, Not in Venezuela
This is not to say the Venezuelan government is perfect nor to endorse the fairness of last month's election. But let's be clear: Venezuelan political disputes should be settled by Venezuelans, not by the United States.
Aug 18, 2024
There is now widespread controversy surrounding the Venezuelan presidential election on July 28th. The National Electoral Council says that current President Nicolás Maduro was reelected with a 51% majority. The opposition, led by Maria Corina Machado, claims that its candidate, Edmundo González, won with an overwhelming majority of the votes cast. The primary questions being asked in the media are “who really won?” and even “how can Maduro be made to step aside?”
Instead the question US observers should be asking is, “what business is this of ours?”
The United States government constantly criticizes elections around the world that it deems to be undemocratic. It claims to support an “international rules based order” and maintain a foreign policy with human rights at its center. But the United States of America isn’t exactly a fair arbiter. It is without question the most hyper-interventionist country in the history of the world. It has repeatedly intervened in the internal affairs of governments it doesn’t like, often invading and overthrowing them, ostensibly, for the cause of democracy. It does not, however, criticize the antidemocratic behavior of its allies, like apartheid Israel or the absolute monarchy that rules Saudi Arabia. As in Orwell’s famous novel, America may claim that all animals are equal. But it’s clear that it believes some animals are more equal than others.
On July 27th, a day before the Venezuelan election, the People’s Forum, a New York City movement incubator, released a letter warning that, “a Western media narrative is already being spun to present the election as inevitably fraudulent – and pave the way for a new regime change operation if the right-wing opposition does not prevail at the ballot box.”
That letter has come under criticism for asserting that, “the campaign has seen energetic participation all across the country and vigorous, democratic debate,” and that since 2002, “Venezuela has held over 30 elections that have been conducted professionally and impartially.” In the days after the most recent election international organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a fact-finding mission from the United Nations have disagreed, citing reports of politically motivated arrests, assaults, intimidation, and even deaths. The governments of Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil are calling for more transparency.
But the credibility of Venezuela’s elections should not be the main issue in question. The main issue is that criticism is used as an excuse to promote US intervention and regime change or to justify more deadly sanctions that kill Venezuelan people. True to form, on Thursday August 1st the U.S. State Department announced that it recognized González as the winner.
In one egregious example of media promoting intervention, a July 31st editorial in the Boston Globe called on the Biden Administration to intervene, saying, “It’s in U.S. interests for the Biden Administration to help deliver the regime change Venezuelans have voted for.” It endorsed the policy of former President Donald Trump, suggesting that President Biden should revive the office of special representative to Venezuela and later quoted the man who held that office under Trump, Elliott Abrams.
But it failed to provide extremely important context about Mr. Abrams. In 1991 Elliott Abrams, who still serves in government, pled guilty to two counts of lying to the US Congress about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair, a secret deal to illegally sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to fund right-wing militias trying to overthrow the left wing government of Nicaragua. Congress had explicitly forbidden military assistance for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. A man who was deeply involved in the attempted overthrow of a Central American government is not a credible voice on Venezuelan democracy.
The United States has a terrible record when it comes to supporting self determination, globally, in Latin America, and in Venezuela specifically. The U.S. has interfered with the affairs of Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Venezuela, and more. Focusing on Venezuela alone there are multiple instances of interference just in the 21st century.
In 2002 the Bush Administration sanctioned a coup attempt against Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. In March of 2015 the Obama Administration unilaterally levied harsh economic sanctions on Venezuela. President Obama declared that Venezuela posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” The effects of such sanctions, and even more punitive ones imposed by the Trump Administration, were studied by the Government Accountability Office in 2021. They found that the sanctions have already killed tens of thousands of people in Venezuela, due to restricted access to food and medicine.
In 2019 the Trump Administration recognized 35 year old opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, despite the fact that he never ran for the office. They then handed over control on Venezuela’s assets in the United States to Guaidó, a move that the New York Times called, “one of Washington’s most overt attempts in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America.”
Given the exhaustive record of U.S. interference and intervention in the politics of Latin American countries, it’s just common sense to be skeptical about pronouncements from Washington regarding Venezuela’s election. That’s asking the fox's opinion on the management of the henhouse. To be clear, this is not to say that the Venezuelan government is perfect or to endorse the fairness of the July 28th election. It is to say that Venezuelan political disputes should be settled by Venezuelans, not by the United States.
With its own presidential election less than three months away, the U.S. has enough on its plate. The recent history of presidential elections in the United States is less than stellar. Two of the last six presidential elections were won by the candidate who received less votes (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016). In 2000 Bush had a co-chair of his campaign purge 173,000 voters from voting rolls as Florida Secretary of State, in a key election decided by 500 votes. Trump tried to stay in power after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. His followers famously stormed the Capitol Building in an effort to stop the certification of that election on January 6th 2021.
The bottom line? We have authoritarianism at home. When it comes to taking action abroad to “defend democracy” America would do well to adhere to the motto recommended by Founding Grandfather Benjamin Franklin: “Mind your business.”
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'Very Unpleasant Regime': Fellow Leftist Lula Criticizes Maduro Amid Election Dispute
The words of Brazil's president, a potential mediator in Venezuela, signal that leftist leaders may be withdrawing support for Maduro.
Aug 16, 2024
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a potential mediator in the ongoing electoral dispute in Venezuela, spoke harshly on Friday about the government of President Nicolas Maduro, calling it a "very unpleasant regime" with an "authoritarian slant"—perhaps the first time he has been so publicly critical of his fellow leftist.
Venezuala has been in turmoil since its presidential election on July 28, pitting Maduro against opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, came to a disputed result. The electoral council controlled by Maduro's government announced that he'd won reelection with 51.95% of the vote, but provided no evidence. However, the opposition also claimed victory, and did have some evidence: copies of vote tallies from more than 83% of precincts.
The international response has been broadly anti-Maduro, whose government has been widely accused of human rights violations and is often characterized as autocratic. Many countries—even Chile, led by a left-leaning government—declared fraud on the part of the Venezuelan government, and some, such as the United States, recognized González as the winner. Only a handful of small Latin American countries did so for Maduro.
Lula hasn't take sides in the electoral dispute but, like other international actors, called for Maduro to release the full tallies. Lula and Colombia President Gustavo Petro, another leftist, have indicated they could be intermediaries between the two Venezuelan sides. The U.S. came out in support of the Brazil- and Colombia-led dialogue. But Lula's role as interlocutor didn't stop him from making the critical remarks on Friday.
"I think Venezuela is living under a very unpleasant regime," Lula said on Rádio Gaúcha.
The Brazilian president said that Maduro was not a dictator but had authoritarian leanings:
"It's different to a dictatorship—it is a government with an authoritarian slant but it isn't a dictatorship the likes of which we know so many in this world."
Brazilian president, Lula da Silva, condemns “very unpleasant regime” Maduro regime in Venezuela
He says it has “authoritarian slant” & refuses to accept that Maduro won the election. Lula demands publication of suppressed local election tallies. YES!
https://t.co/YLWuddKhcL
— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) August 16, 2024
Lula and Petro had earlier this week suggested that Venezuela might redo the election—and U.S. President Joe Biden appeared to support the idea, though the administration later walked back the comment—but both Maduro and the opposition dismissed the idea.
Maduro's government has cracked down on dissent since the election, arresting more than 2,000 people, in what experts have called an unprecedented level of repression, The New York Times reported Saturday. Maduro is "bent on punishing those he considers disloyal," according to the Times.
A panel of four U.N. experts who were in Venezuela during the election issued an interim report last week that found that "the announcement of an election outcome without the publication of its details or the release of tabulated results to candidates has no precedent in contemporary democratic elections."
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a left-leaning, U.S.-based think tank, released a report on Tuesday arguing that the Brazil and Columbia-led mediation was the best way forward, and that more U.S. sanctions would only deepen the political crisis in Venezuela.
The report says that sanctions "have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Venezuelans and fueled the migration of millions more," and argues that failed U.S. policies and U.S.-supported coup attempts in 2002 and 2019, per CEPR's characterization, contributed to the current crisis in Venezuela.
Maduro has held power since 2013, when his predecessor and former boss, the socialist Hugo Chávez, died after ruling the country for 13 years. Chávez, buoyed by fossil fuel reserves, helped lift the standard of living for working-class Venezuelans, but the country has faced a combination of political and economic challenges in the past decade, and Maduro appears to have lost working-class support.
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