Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s own intelligence agencies found that Venezuela does not control the Tren de Aragua gang, directly contradicting Trump’s justification for invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants. But instead of admitting their mistake, they decided to lie.
“We need to do some rewriting … so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” said Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard’s chief of staff, according to leaked emails viewed by The New York Times. Kent, along with former acting National Intelligence Council head Michael Collins, largely rewrote the memo together.
The original memo stated 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,” according to the Times.
Trump has been claiming the exact opposite since he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March to detain and deport Venezuelan immigrants without basic due process.
To support Trump’s use of the wartime powers act, Kent began to piece a story together in the hope that it’d make Trump’s actions look more reasonable.
“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 gov of Venezuela isn’t specifically tasking or enabling TDA’s operations,” Kent wrote in an email obtained by the Times.
“Let’s just come out and say [Tren de Aragua] 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,” he continued. Kent even went so far as to say that Tren de Aragua didn’t need logistical support from the Venezuelan government because former President Joe Biden had given it to them in his first term, another lie.
This is clearly an administration that is making up justifications for their draconian policies as they go. Whether it’s habeas corpus or birthright citizenship, this administration will look Americans in the eye and lie over and over again until their version of events is taken as truth.
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