A bombshell email leak has exposed how a top aide to Tulsi Gabbard quietly ordered officials to rewrite a damaging intelligence assessment so it couldn’t be “used against” Donald Trump.
The emails from Joe Kent, the chief of staff to the director of national intelligence, were published by The New York Times on Tuesday, days after the newspaper reported that he had pressured officials to scrap a Feb. 26 assessment that found the Trump administration had no legal basis to deport Venezuelan migrants without due process.
According to the Times, Kent pushed officials to edit the intelligence study about whether the administration could justify the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 18th-century wartime law, by linking the Tren de Aragua gang to the Venezuelan government.
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The original analysis reportedly contradicted the Trump administration’s claim that the Tren de Aragua gang is controlled by the Venezuelan government and has been ordered to commit crimes inside the United States.
To shield the administration from political blowback, Kent allegedly urged edits to the report.
“We need to do some rewriting” and more analytic work “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” Kent wrote in an email on April 3 to a group of intelligence officials, the newspaper reported.
“Let’s just come out and say TDA leaders are given sanctuary in Venezuela as their gang members commit horrendous crimes in America, then we can provide the context about our exact knowledge of relationship between TDA and the Venezuelan government,” Kent wrote to officials including Michael Collins, then the acting head of the National Intelligence Council.
Kent also slammed the intelligence assessment for failing to adequately portray the situation at the southern border and what he believed was the Biden administration’s role in creating a migrant crisis. He characterized the former president “as having announced that the border was open and having turned Customs and Border Protection into a ‘travel service for illegals’,” the Times reported.
“TDA didn’t need logistical support from the Venezuelan government because Biden provided it for them,” Kent wrote. “I understand some may view this as political, but it’s not.”
Kent demanded an edited version of the memo by the end of the week that could be declassified and handed over to the White House.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for comment.
The leaked emails have circulated within the intelligence community and have “raised internal alarms about politicizing intelligence analysis,” the Times reported.
Trump made headlines when he invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan citizens suspected to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang, bypassing court hearings.
Since returning to the White House for a second term on Jan. 20, the president has introduced hardline immigration policies, and has become obsessed with rooting out the Venezuelan gang, which was founded in 2014 in the Tocorón prison in the state of Aragua.
The Trump administration has designated the gang a “foreign terrorist organization,” alleging that thousands of members are “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”
