Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, warned that the U.S. should “stay out of Venezuela” in 2019 despite currently serving in an administration that captured the South American country’s president.
Gabbard’s remarks, which she made during Trump’s first administration, resurfaced shortly after U.S. forces took Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro into custody on January 3.
In the video, Gabbard, who was a member of the Democratic Party at the time, criticized the results of U.S. military action around the world.
“The United States has a disastrous history of military intervention and regime change around the world, which has brought suffering to millions of people, bankrupted our country, dishonored our troops, and its undermined our national security,” she said.
Then, she spoke specifically about Venezuela, which had just been slapped with tariffs by Donald Trump. At the time, Trump said “all options are on the table” to usurp Maduro.
“Venezuela poses no threat to the United States,” Gabbard continued in the video. “Congress has not authorized the United States to go to war in Venezuela, and there’s no justification for our country to violate the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.”
Gabbard even suggested that an attack on Venezuela would undermine U.S. efforts to achieve peace throughout the world, pointing to attempts to get North Korea to denuclearize as an example.
“North Korea is going to look at President Trump’s actions, not at empty problems,” she said, warning that the East Asian country was ramping up its nuclear program in response to U.S. intimidation.
“The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela and let the Venezuelan people determine their own future,” she concludes.
Despite her former opposition to strikes on Venezuela, Gabbard has remained silent on Trump’s overthrow of Maduro in 2025, as he had hoped to do in 2019.
Trump has justified U.S aggression towards Venezuela by suggesting that the country was flooding the United States with illegal drugs and fuelling an immigration crisis.
He has since expressed an interest in reviving the South American country’s oil industry, telling reporters that he expects “big investments by the oil companies” in Venezuela.
Gabbard is one of the more controversial figures in Trump’s inner circle, first drawing criticism from Democrats over her links to overthrown Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who worked as a translator during the country’s civil war, described her as a “devil.”
