An F.B.I. intelligence memo unsealed on Wednesday offers new details on why the bureau concluded that some Venezuelan government officials were likely to have had some responsibility for a criminal gang’s actions in the United States, pitting it against other intelligence agencies in a heated dispute over President Trump’s use of a wartime law.
The memo, whose conclusions the remaining intelligence agencies have rejected, was submitted by the administration to a federal judge in Texas before a hearing on Thursday. It is part of a proliferating array of lawsuits over Mr. Trump’s use of the law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport people accused of being members of that gang, Tren de Aragua, to a notorious Salvadoran prison without due process.
“The F.B.I. assesses some Venezuelan government officials likely facilitate the migration of TdA members from Venezuela to the United States to advance the Maduro regime’s objective of undermining public safety in the United States,” the memo said, using an abbreviation for the gang.
It added that the bureau also thinks some officials in the administration of Venezeula’s president, Nicolas Maduro, “likely use TdA members as proxies.”
The submission of the memo opens the door to greater judicial scrutiny of a key basis for Mr. Trump’s assertion that he can invoke the rarely used law to summarily deport people accused of being members of the gang. It also offers a glimpse of the claims put forth by several detained migrants that formed the basis for the F.B.I.’s assessment.
In March, Mr. Trump proclaimed that Venezuela’s government controls the gang — a key premise for his use of the wartime deportation law — as he sent planeloads of men to El Salvador. Courts have since halted such transfers under the act, ruling that it is likely that it does not apply to the issue of undocumented migrants rather than a wartime situation.
Despite the F.B.I.’s assessment, the majority of the nation’s intelligence agencies, including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, believe Mr. Trump’s claim is inaccurate. The National Intelligence Council, an elite internal think tank that policymakers can commission for special projects, has written two assessments to that effect, while also noting that the F.B.I. partly dissented.
The F.B.I.’s minority views were known, in part because one of the council’s memos was declassified and released this month in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Among other things, it made it clear that the F.B.I. had based its view on the statements of several migrants arrested in the United States.
But it was not clear how many migrants the F.B.I. had relied on for its analysis; the memo said that the agency’s view was based on statements by seven sources.
The memo detailed what only one of them had said, however. “According to a human source with indirect access,” the memo stated, strategic decision-making regarding the Venezuelan government’s use of the gang went through President Nicolás Maduro, “who used confidants as go-betweens to insulate himself from public affiliation” with the gang.
At the same time, the memo said the F.B.I. had judged that high-ranking Venezuelan officials were not involved in the gang’s “daily activities.”
It also said that it had considered an alternative hypothesis that the gang members were migrating and committing crimes on their own to be “more or less equally plausible,” but said the bureau deemed its view to be “more likely.”
The F.B.I. put its assessment at “medium” confidence and said it was considering moving that to lower confidence “due to the primary sources, who were one-time contacts with indirect access and who may have been motivated by the perceived possibility of a favorable immigration decision.”
The National Intelligence Council, which conducted an analysis drawing on the available evidence from all intelligence agencies, put greater weight on that skepticism. “Most” of the intelligence community “judges that intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling TDA migration to the United States is not credible,” it wrote.
The legal troubles of the detainees, the council said, could “motivate them to make false allegations about their ties to the Venezuelan regime in an effort to deflect responsibility for their crimes and to lessen any punishment by providing exculpatory or otherwise ‘valuable’ information to U.S. prosecutors.”
But the council and the other agencies had other issues with the allegations as well. They scrutinized whether the detainees “could credibly have access to the information reported” and whether they had offered details that could be corroborated. Coordination of the sort that the migrants had claimed was almost certain to have required communications and financial transfers that the U.S. government would expect to collect but had not seen.
The intelligence community ultimately concluded that “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,” the council said in its memo.
The Justice Department does not appear to have submitted the council’s memo summarizing the broader analysis by all the other intelligence agencies.
The White House commissioned a systematic look at the evidence about Venezuela’s government and the gang in February, as Mr. Trump considered using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans.
The National Intelligence Council produced a memo on Feb. 26 that concluded that Venezuela’s government does not control the gang. The memo noted that the F.B.I. did believe there were some links based on information the rest of the intelligence community did not think was credible.
Still, on March 15, Mr. Trump signed a proclamation saying the opposite.
Days later, The New York Times reported on the Feb. 26 memo, prompting the Justice Department to announce a criminal leak investigation. Joe Kent, a top aide to the director of national intelligence, also asked the acting head of the council at the time, a career analyst named Michael Collins, to produce a new assessment.
In emails, Mr. Kent later demanded further “rewriting” of a draft of the new assessment so it could not be “used against” Mr. Trump. But the final version still concluded that Venezuela’s government does not control the gang and that the F.B.I.’s view that some officials were using it as a proxy were not credible.
Mr. Collins has since been fired.
Julian E. Barnes and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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