It was posted around the time Special Forces first planned to capture Maduro. According to Trump, they had to stand down because the weather wasn’t “perfect.” It is almost unthinkable that the Director of National Intelligence would not have known about the preparations—making her comment about “peace” all the more intriguing.
Two days later, with U.S. forces zeroing in on Caracas, Trump’s inner circle clustered in a makeshift “situation room” at Mar-a-Lago to watch events unfold, but Gabbard, the head of the entire U.S. intelligence community, was nowhere to be seen.
Nor did Gabbard appear in the aftermath when Trump fronted the press flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, whose agency she oversees.
Gabbard’s office didn’t respond to The Swamp in time for publication when asked where she’s been or what role she played in Maduro’s capture. But her absence and ensuing silence could have two reasons, say D.C. insiders. One is that the Iraq war veteran made her feelings public on the issue of intervention in 2019 when she said the U.S. “should stay out of Venezuela." In 2020, she was again warning against foreign interventions.
Then, last October, she told a conference in Bahrain that the “endless cycle of regime change or nation-building” was over thanks to Trump. To that end, she probably didn’t want to be involved. Or she wasn’t invited.
Either way, some wonder if Gabbard’s prospects going forward are bleak. For an administration that treats visibility as a loyalty test, the omission was glaring. The silence gets even louder given the documented friction between Trump and Gabbard.
While the military veteran has aligned herself with Trump politically in recent years, Venezuela wasn’t the first time she has broken with him on foreign policy. She publicly criticized Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, warning it could provoke a wider war. She also found herself at odds with the president last year over Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Those views earned her credibility with anti-interventionists, but may have cost her trust inside an administration now selling Maduro’s capture as both righteous and inevitable.
It’s also possible, of course, that the administration believes war is for manly men and having Gabbard in the photo would fly in the face of Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “No girls allowed” rule.
