World
Gabbard Declassified the Memo, Then Fired Who Wrote It
A National Intelligence Council assessment released via FOIA on May 5, 2025 found Venezuela's Maduro was not directing Tren de Aragua operations in the US. The officials who produced it were fired, ODNI's reading room was emptied, and a DOJ criminal referral has sat untouched for a year.
On May 5, 2025, ODNI released a six-page intelligence memo that directly contradicted the factual basis for Trump's Alien Enemies Act deportations.
The document, a National Intelligence Council "Sense of the Community Memorandum" dated April 7, 2025, found that Maduro's government was not directing Tren de Aragua's operations in the United States. It concluded the regime "probably does not have a policy of cooperating" with the gang.
Gabbard's office had authorized the memo's partial declassification, Rolling Stone reported. That authorization set off the FOIA chain that delivered the document to the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
On May 14, Gabbard fired acting NIC chair Mike Collins and his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof. Her deputy chief of staff, Alexa Henning, said both were dismissed for "politicizing intelligence" and that releasing a NIC product outside authorized channels "is against the law." Gabbard referred Collins to DOJ for criminal prosecution.
Around the same time, ODNI took its website offline. When it returned, hundreds of previously released FOIA documents, inspector general reports, and case processing notes were gone, a figure Bloomberg traced through internal agency emails. Federal law has required agencies to maintain searchable FOIA libraries since the 1996 Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments. ODNI's FOIA regulations vanished from the site alongside the documents.
What the Courts Found
The Fifth Circuit's three-judge panel blocked AEA removals on September 2, 2025. The government won en banc reconsideration on September 30, vacating that ruling. As of May 2026, all 17 active Fifth Circuit judges have heard arguments but issued no final decision; conservative members signaled in January they may defer to the presidential proclamation.
A Year Later
The scrubbed documents have not been restored to ODNI's live site. Bloomberg's review of internal emails found an unnamed agency official attributed the purge to a Biden-era document that had caused a "fuss," without identifying it. The records remain accessible on the Internet Archive. The FOIA official who processed FPF's original request had also been fired, the foundation reported.
The DOJ referral against Collins was made May 14, 2025. A year on, no public charges have been filed and no declination has been reported.
A referral premised on assessment content rather than procedural misconduct rewrites the risk calculus for every future NIC drafter. For the next analyst assigned a politically contentious assessment, the first question becomes political exposure, not tradecraft accuracy.
The Fifth Circuit's 17-judge panel has heard argument but not ruled. A holding that gang activity does not constitute "invasion" under the 1798 statute would confirm the April 7 memo's conclusion in the very circuit the government chose to litigate in.