Steve Benen is a producer for 'The Rachel Maddow Show,' the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of 'Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past.'
Donald Trump has spent months insisting that Venezuela’s government controls the Tren de Aragua gang, as part of a larger argument to justify removing immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison. The problem, of course, is that the assertion, like so many of the president’s claims, is completely untrue.
We know this for certain because the Trump administration has said so. As NBC News reported last week, a declassified memo drafted by the National Intelligence Council — the top entity for analyzing classified intelligence and providing secret assessments to policymakers — explained that Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan regime is not orchestrating Tren de Aragua’s operations in the United States. A week later, as The Washington Post reported, Trump’s highly controversial and wildly unqualified national intelligence director decided to fire the leaders of the National Intelligence Council — the office that dared to tell the White House what it didn’t want to hear. The official line from Gabbard is that she’s combatting the “politicization” of the intelligence community, a conspiratorial line embraced by partisans who disapprove of the extent to which intelligence agencies have presented evidence the president doesn’t like. Indeed, as the Post noted, Gabbard has actually “removed or sidelined officials perceived to not support Trump’s political agenda.” Or put another way, if anyone is “politicizing” U.S. intelligence, it’s Gabbard and her Team Trump colleagues. What’s more, the DNI’s latest purge sends a dangerous signal to intelligence officials throughout the government: Produce reports that make the president happy, regardless of the facts, or you might be next. Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told the Post, “Absent evidence to justify the firings, the workforce can only conclude that their jobs are contingent on producing analysis that is aligned with the president’s agenda, rather than truthful and apolitical.” The developments come against a backdrop of Trump ignoring intelligence briefings and reports, as he moves forward with a “major downsizing” at U.S. intelligence agencies. In case that weren’t quite enough, let’s also not forget that the president recently fired the leadership of the National Security Agency, a key intelligence gathering department, as well as the National Security Council’s director for intelligence. In Trump’s first term, he and his team were merely hostile toward the U.S. intelligence community. In his second term, the broader offensive against the U.S. intelligence community is far more aggressive and damaging.
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