Gabbard fires top National Intelligence Council officials after Venezuela intel report

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has fired the National Intelligence Council's top two officials over what the Trump administration has called the "politicization of intelligence," Fox News Digital first reported on Wednesday.The big picture: The firing of acting NIC chair Mike Collins and his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof, comes after an intel report from the council last week contradicted an administration assertion linking Venezuela's Maduro regime to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua.The administration has used this to invoke the wartime authority of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport undocumented immigrants with what critics say is little or no due process.What they're saying: "These Biden holdovers were dismissed because they politicized intelligence," said Gabbard's deputy chief of staff, Alexa Henning, on X. She added that "the leak of classified info was a NIC product, which is against the law, that is the issue," as she pushed back on a Washington Post report saying Gabbard had "removed or sidelined officials perceived to not support Trump's political agenda."Between the lines: Experts say the Trump administration has made unsubstantiated claims about Tren de Aragua and the Mara Salvatrucha gang, commonly known as MS-13.Gang experts say the threat of Tren de Aragua in the U.S. is overblown and a lot smaller than Trump officials have claimed.The administration has repeatedly called MS-13, a gang started in Southern California by Central American refugees from the 1980s civil wars, a transnational gang and has compared it to terrorist groups and organized Mexican cartels.Lidia E. Nuño, a Texas State University criminology professor and MS-13 expert, told Axios that MS-13 is a street gang that shows little evidence of sophisticated transnational criminal operations like cartels or the mafia.Go deeper: Gabbard says she's referred intel leaks to the DOJ

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