What’s Normal—and What’s Not—About ODNI’s Request to Revise the NIC's Intelligence Assessment

Recently leaked emails suggest that senior staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) worked to change an intelligence assessment with implications for President Trump’s immigration policy. But the truth of the matter has yet to fully emerge. There are legitimate reasons and political reasons for requesting a new intelligence assessment, and both intent and effect matter greatly in determining whether the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) can provide critical strategic warning to policymakers.

According to several news reports about the leaks, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s acting chief of staff, Joe Kent, asked a group of highly respected intelligence analysts to “rethink” their assessment about the relationship between Venezuela’s government and a gang called Tren de Aragua (TDA). A new Trump administration policy of deporting Venezuelans linked to TDA rests on whether Caracas has been directing the group’s activities. If it has, the administration could deport gang members under the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the removal of citizens of a country that is in a declared war with the United States or is invading U.S. territory. However, if Caracas is not giving TDA direction, the Trump administration’s policy could be up for legal challenge and officials might seek another set of authorities to accomplish the same goal.

The IC assessed, twice, that the gang most likely was not operating at the orders of the Venezuelan government. The FBI dissented, saying that “some” Venezuelan government officials were giving instructions to the gang, based on interviews conducted inside the United States with detained Venezuelan migrants. The rest of the IC were aware of those interviews but discounted the information as not credible, given the migrants’ incentives to provide incriminating information.

Q1: How did the timeline of this debate unfold?

A1: The National Intelligence Council (NIC) wrote two Sense of Community Memoranda (SOCMs) over the course of about three months. Judging from press reporting, the timeline of events looks like this:

• Late January: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller asks for an IC-wide assessment on TDA. The NIC—a highly respected group of senior intelligence officers from across the IC—begins work on a comprehensive look at TDA.
• Late February: The NIC delivers the completed assessment. It is normal for the NIC to take about a month to complete an SOCM, particularly if they have not been given an urgent deadline and are taking pains to resolve analytical differences within the IC. Timelines can be longer if additional collection is necessary to answer the question or if the subject is controversial, requiring many quality checks on the strength of the analysis and careful wordsmithing.
• Saturday, March 15: President Trump invokes the Alien Enemies Act to remove from the United States people accused of being members of TDA.
• Thursday, March 20: The New York Times reports an apparent leak on the content of the assessment, claiming that Trump’s policy is illegal because the IC thinks TDA is not linked to Caracas.
• Friday, March 21: The Department of Justice opens a criminal leak investigation. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issues a statement saying the New York Times article is inaccurate.
• Monday, March 24: Joe Kent, the acting chief of staff for Gabbard, tells the chairman of the NIC to “rethink” the Venezuela assessment. In an email, Kent writes, “Flooding our nation with ‘migrants’ and especially ‘migrants’ who are part of a violent criminal gang is the action of a hostile nation, even if the [government] of Venezuela isn’t specifically tasking or enabling TDA’s operations.” He tasks the NIC with producing a new assessment that reflects “basic common sense” by the end of the week.
• Thursday, April 3: Kent, seemingly in a separate email to a group of intelligence officials, writes, “We need to do some rewriting” of the assessment “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS.” If this is true, the direct link between the assessment and the political interests of the president and the director of national intelligence (DNI) was likely a huge red flag for intelligence professionals. It is unclear to which version of the draft Kent was referring.
• Monday, April 7: The final NIC memo is published. It was later declassified and released under a Freedom of Information Act request. It generally reaffirms the original assessment, but Reuters reported it added more “context and nuance” over the original version.
• Tuesday, May 20: Another New York Times article details internal ODNI emails. Separately, Reuters reports that a spokesperson for ODNI has labeled the story “false and fabricated” and has called Kent “an American patriot who continues to honorably serve our country.”

Q2: What did the SOCMs say?

A2: Both SOCMs evaluated the Venezuelan government’s ties to TDA, concluding that the government does not control TDA and that TDA is not committing crimes inside the United States at the Venezuelan government’s direction. The second memo said that the “Maduro regime leadership probably sometimes tolerates TDA’s presence in Venezuela, and some government officials may cooperate with TDA for financial gain.” The phrase “probably sometimes tolerates” is an extraordinary phrase for an intelligence assessment—it communicates a high degree of uncertainty and a very limited scope of “toleration” for an overall very weak assessment. It goes on to say, “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.”

Any good intelligence product will provide robust support for analytical bottom lines, particularly for a controversial assessment. This NIC memo does just that, citing evidence such as previous Venezuelan law enforcement crackdowns on TDA, the regime’s view that TDA is a threat to its rule, an overall “uneasy mix of cooperation and confrontation” between Caracas and TDA, comparisons to other armed groups that Caracas does direct, and the decentralized makeup of TDA. The memo also addresses—and largely dismisses—contradictory evidence, saying “Most of the IC judges that intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling TDA migration to the United States is not credible.”

The IC outlier, prompting that “most of the IC” caveat, was the FBI. They included this dissent:

While FBI analysts agree with the above assessment, they assess some Venezuelan government officials facilitate TDA 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, based on DHS and FBI reporting as of February 2024.

In other words, the FBI sees information provided during interviews with intercepted migrants as credible, and that information shows that some Venezuelan government officials are in some ways cooperating with TDA. To fully explain this disconnect within the IC, the memo contains a half-page explanation of how analysts evaluated various law enforcement sources.

Finally, the memo reflects another intel best practice: explaining what indicators might change their analysis. The memo says the IC is tracking any sign of weapons transfers, Venezuelan government operations against TDA (or lack of operations), and additional indicators that remain redacted for classification.

Q3: What did ODNI officials want changed in the memo, and why?

A3: This is the crux of the issue. One interpretation of events is that Kent and Gabbard thought the original assessment was problematic for President Trump’s preferred policy because it contradicted the pivotal test of whether gang members were taking orders from a foreign government. As a result, they were exerting pressure on the NIC to change the assessment to support the president.

A far less nefarious interpretation is that more than a month had passed between the original assessment and Kent’s request for a reevaluation, and in that time, new information had emerged in the form of U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI interviews with detained migrants. Kent wanted a refresh to take into account the new information.

In this case, the why and the how those requests were made are quite important—the answers mean the difference between a process that maintains analytical integrity and independence and one that bends analysis to fit a policy perspective. The latter is the textbook meaning of politization.

It is quite normal for a policymaker to ask for a revisit of an old analytical line. Critically evaluating past analysis to see if something has changed is healthy and important, and an analyst must always be open-minded to new information proving them wrong. However, if that request for a revisit is accompanied by pressure for a certain outcome, the integrity of the system can break down. Pressure can be overt or implied. Overt pressure would look like instructing adherence to a particular analytical line or blatantly editing a piece to change its analysis. Implied pressure is more insidious and can take many forms. The latter can look like making fun of an analyst for missing something “obvious,” cutting someone out of a meeting to discuss changes, accusing someone of not being a team player, or even implying someone will get fired for sticking to their analytic guns.

The New York Times story said that Kent’s emails had been circulated in the IC, suggesting that at least some recipients were concerned about politicization and shared their concerns with colleagues. Further complicating matters, Trump has nominated Kent to be director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), where he would have near-final say on a range of terrorism-related assessments. If the staff of NCTC does not trust his judgement, that lack of trust will erode mission success.

According to Reuters, ODNI later reversed the allegations, publicly accusing the acting chair of the NIC and his deputy of politicizing intelligence. Both have served the IC faithfully for decades. Those allegations are extremely difficult to believe.

Q4: How common is a dissent, such as by the FBI?

A4: Dissents are fairly common in IC-wide assessments. One of the lessons learned from both 9/11 and the intelligence failure around Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was that dissent should be encouraged, as a way of facilitating healthy debate and combatting group think. Smart people looking at the same set of facts can disagree about what those facts mean, and transparently reflecting those disagreements to policymakers can only help inform smart policy.

In this case, an FBI dissent is somewhat logical. Agencies tend to overvalue the intelligence that they collect. For example, the National Security Agency tends to dissent when it thinks signals intelligence disagrees with the main analytic line. This memo clearly included a debate about how much weight to give to the testimony of arrested migrants. The FBI, being closer to the interviews, was more likely to take them at face value. Other intel agencies clearly assessed that those migrants might have had a reason to lie and discounted the interviews.

A leaked memo and portions of leaked emails only tell a small part of the story. Luckily, there are robust oversight mechanisms for the IC, including an analytic ombudsman, inspectors general, and two congressional committees created for the purpose of examining intelligence practices. Politics will gravely complicate this oversight challenge, as some will claim that analysts are intentionally manipulating the facts to counter the president, and others’ gut reactions will be that the political appointees in the IC were attempting to manipulate the analysis to fit a political agenda.

The truth is almost certainly somewhere in between, and as investigations progress, the overseers must keep front of mind the real goal: ensuring the integrity of intelligence analysis, so that the United States has unvarnished strategic warning to better defend its interests. When analysts are cowed into only saying what leadership wants to hear, true intelligence failures are not far behind.

Emily Harding is the director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program and vice president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.