[Source: Reuters]

A top adviser to Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, acknowledged in a March 24 email that the Venezuelan government may not have specifically directed the activities of a gang that the Trump administration has used to justify fast-tracking deportation of immigrants, but argued that a link between Venezuela and the gang was “common sense.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has used a claim that Tren de Aragua is coordinating its U.S. activities with the Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to justify deportations of alleged gang members to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

Some legal scholars have argued that invoking the act requires a connection to a foreign government.

In the email, read to Reuters by a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by a second source, Gabbard’s acting chief of staff, Joe Kent asked for a “rethink” of an intelligence assessment contradicting the administration’s argument that Venezuela is responsible for the U.S. activities of Tren de Aragua gang members.

“I would like to understand how any IC (intelligence community) element arrived at the conclusion that the Venezuelan government doesn’t support and did not orchestrate TDA operating in the U.S.,” Kent said in the email, referring to Tren de Aragua.

“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 operations.”

He added that analysts needed to produce a new assessment on the gang that “reflects basic common sense.”

The New York Times was the first to report on Kent’s communications with the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community’s highest analytical body.

Reuters is the first to publish the contents of that email in detail.

The exchange underscores the extent to which Kent, a former CIA officer, pushed Michael Collins, the head of the National Intelligence Council, and other DNI officials to redo their assessment, taking into account points that had previously been articulated publicly by Trump.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence called the timeline presented in this story “false and fabricated,” and called Kent “an American patriot who continues to honorably serve our country.”

“President Trump rightfully designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization based on intelligence assessments and, frankly, common sense,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

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