The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) delivered the “read and return” intelligence report to congress that sits at the background of an anonymous whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence, DNI Tulsi Gabbard. [CBS Story] In addition to delivering the report, the ICIG also delivered a declassified letter outlining the framework of the backstory [SEE HERE].
I strongly urge people to take a few minutes and read both links above, particularly the pdf of the ICIG report that frames the complaint. In essence, the same playbook the IC tried to create the impeachment narrative against President Trump (2019), they repeated against DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
Now, the story gets a little weedy, so at the risk of yet another subpoena for outlining highly classified intelligence information simply by using public sourcing information and strategic brain mapping to put dots together, the easiest way to explain what has happened is to tell the big picture story of it.
People opposed to President Trump inside the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which in 2025 was a sub-silo inside the CIA, wrote an analysis saying the Venezuela gang ‘Tren de Aragua” (TdA) was not officially affiliated with the Venezuela government. Therefore, when President Trump and Secretary Rubio defined TdA as an officially recognized terrorist group, the analysis was intended to separate the TdA violence from the official U.S. policy toward Venezuela.
[The NIC is the “federal agency” being described in the media reports. I suspect the report’s authors were Mike Collins and Maria Langan-Riekhof or close associates therein.]
The “highly classified” component to the analysis, the part that intentionally skewers the telling of the story, is almost certainly the sourcing for the NIC analysis.
Here I would estimate with 90%+ confidence, that a CIA asset within the Venezuela government was the source of the intelligence saying TdA is not officially aligned with the Venezuelan govt. That CIA asset could be someone very close to former dictator Nicholas Maduro, or someone currently inside the transitional government. That source makes the component to the NIC analysis “highly classified.” [However, it also fulfills the goals and operational agenda of the people who want to weaponize the “whistleblower angle.]
Now, I want to break out a component here because it is directly related to the reason for anti-Trump IC to manufacture this official CIA-NIC analysis. Remember, Judge James Boasberg’s argument against deporting TdA members was based on his refusal to accept the deportees were designated terrorists. Venezuela would not take them back, so President Trump sent them to the maximum-security prison in El Salvador.