update - US Supreme Court beats the shit out of Trump; blocks deportations under AEA
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US wants to withhold details in Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. Judge will hear arguments
A federal judge in Maryland will hear arguments Friday over whether the Trump administration can invoke the state secrets privilege to withhold information about bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador in April and has since directed the administration to provide documents and testimony showing what it has done, if anything, to comply.
Trump administration lawyers claim many of those details are protected, including sensitive diplomatic negotiations. Revealing the specifics would harm national security because foreign governments “would be less likely to work cooperatively with the United States,” they argued in a brief to the court.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers contend the administration hasn’t shown “the slightest effort” toward retrieving him after his mistaken deportation. And they point to President Donald Trump’s interview last month with ABC News, in which he said he could bring Abrego Garcia back but won’t.
FILE - President Donald Trump holds a document with notes about Kilmar Abrego Garcia as he speaks with reporters in the Oval Office of the White House, April 18, 2025, in Washington.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)© The Associated Press
“Even as the Government speaks freely about Abrego Garcia in public, in this litigation it insists on secrecy,” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers wrote to the court.
The focus of Friday’s hearing will be a legal doctrine that is more often used in cases involving the military and spy agencies. Xinis’s ruling could impact the central question looming over the case: Has the Trump administration followed her order to bring back Abrego Garcia?
The Trump administration deported the Maryland construction worker to El Salvador in March. The expulsion violated a U.S. immigration judge’s order in 2019 that shielded Abrego Garcia from deportation to his native country because he faced likely persecution by a local gang that had terrorized his family.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, speaks during a news conference at CASA's Multicultural Center in Hyattsville, Md., Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)© The Associated Press
Abrego Garcia’s American wife sued, and Xinis ordered his return on April 4. The Supreme Court ruled on April 10 that the administration must work to bring him back.
Xinis later lambasted the administration for failing to explain what it has done to retrieve him and instructed the government to prove it was following her order. The Trump administration appealed, but the appeals court backed Xinis in a blistering order.
The debate over state secrets privilege is the latest development in the case.
In a legal brief filed Monday, Trump administration attorneys said they provided extensive information, including 1,027 pages of documents, to show they’re following the judge’s order.
They argued that Abrego Garcia’s legal team is now “attempting to pry into the privileged inner workings of the U.S. government apparatus and its communications with a foreign government.”
“Nearly all the additional materials Plaintiffs demand are protected by the state secrets and deliberative process privileges and so cannot be produced,” U.S. attorneys wrote.
In their brief, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys urged the judge to be skeptical, writing that the state secrets privilege “is not for hiding governmental blunders or malfeasance.”
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers noted that U.S. attorneys claim in court to be following Xinis's order, while “senior officials from the President on down were saying precisely the opposite to the American public.”
For example, they cited an April 16 statement from Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said, “He is not coming back to our country.”
“Over and over again, official statements by the Government — in congressional testimony, television interviews, and social media — confirm that producing this information would not imperil national security,” Abrego Garcia’s attorneys wrote.
The hearing is scheduled to start at 1 p.m. in federal court in Greenbelt.
Trump administration officials have said Abrego Garcia was deported based on a 2019 accusation from Maryland police that he was an MS-13 gang member. Abrego Garcia denied the allegation and was never charged with a crime, his attorneys said.
The administration later acknowledged that Abrego Garcia's deportation to El Salvador was " an administrative error ” because of the immigration judge's 2019 order. But Trump and others have continued to insist that Abrego Garcia was in MS-13.
Ben Finley And Michael Kunzelman, The Associated Press
A federal judge in Maryland will hear arguments Friday over whether the Trump administration can invoke the state secrets privilege to withhold information about bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador in April and has since directed the administration to provide documents and testimony showing what it has done, if anything, to comply.
Trump administration lawyers claim many of those details are protected, including sensitive diplomatic negotiations. Revealing the specifics would harm national security because foreign governments “would be less likely to work cooperatively with the United States,” they argued in a brief to the court.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers contend the administration hasn’t shown “the slightest effort” toward retrieving him after his mistaken deportation. And they point to President Donald Trump’s interview last month with ABC News, in which he said he could bring Abrego Garcia back but won’t.
FILE - President Donald Trump holds a document with notes about Kilmar Abrego Garcia as he speaks with reporters in the Oval Office of the White House, April 18, 2025, in Washington.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)© The Associated Press
“Even as the Government speaks freely about Abrego Garcia in public, in this litigation it insists on secrecy,” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers wrote to the court.
The focus of Friday’s hearing will be a legal doctrine that is more often used in cases involving the military and spy agencies. Xinis’s ruling could impact the central question looming over the case: Has the Trump administration followed her order to bring back Abrego Garcia?
The Trump administration deported the Maryland construction worker to El Salvador in March. The expulsion violated a U.S. immigration judge’s order in 2019 that shielded Abrego Garcia from deportation to his native country because he faced likely persecution by a local gang that had terrorized his family.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, speaks during a news conference at CASA's Multicultural Center in Hyattsville, Md., Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)© The Associated Press
Abrego Garcia’s American wife sued, and Xinis ordered his return on April 4. The Supreme Court ruled on April 10 that the administration must work to bring him back.
Xinis later lambasted the administration for failing to explain what it has done to retrieve him and instructed the government to prove it was following her order. The Trump administration appealed, but the appeals court backed Xinis in a blistering order.
The debate over state secrets privilege is the latest development in the case.
In a legal brief filed Monday, Trump administration attorneys said they provided extensive information, including 1,027 pages of documents, to show they’re following the judge’s order.
They argued that Abrego Garcia’s legal team is now “attempting to pry into the privileged inner workings of the U.S. government apparatus and its communications with a foreign government.”
“Nearly all the additional materials Plaintiffs demand are protected by the state secrets and deliberative process privileges and so cannot be produced,” U.S. attorneys wrote.
In their brief, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys urged the judge to be skeptical, writing that the state secrets privilege “is not for hiding governmental blunders or malfeasance.”
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers noted that U.S. attorneys claim in court to be following Xinis's order, while “senior officials from the President on down were saying precisely the opposite to the American public.”
For example, they cited an April 16 statement from Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said, “He is not coming back to our country.”
“Over and over again, official statements by the Government — in congressional testimony, television interviews, and social media — confirm that producing this information would not imperil national security,” Abrego Garcia’s attorneys wrote.
The hearing is scheduled to start at 1 p.m. in federal court in Greenbelt.
Trump administration officials have said Abrego Garcia was deported based on a 2019 accusation from Maryland police that he was an MS-13 gang member. Abrego Garcia denied the allegation and was never charged with a crime, his attorneys said.
The administration later acknowledged that Abrego Garcia's deportation to El Salvador was " an administrative error ” because of the immigration judge's 2019 order. But Trump and others have continued to insist that Abrego Garcia was in MS-13.
Ben Finley And Michael Kunzelman, The Associated Press
Another strike for Donald Trump Friday as a federal judge blocked the administration from cutting nearly $11 billion in grants "for a wide range of public health programs," related to infectious diseases, mental health, substance abuse, and other concerns, according to The Boston Globe.
Last month, attorneys general in 24 states and the District of Columbia accused Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of moving to eliminate the funds "without warning and valid legal explanation."
U.S. District Court Judge Mary S. McElroy granted a preliminary injunction on Friday to block the cuts.
Want more breaking political news? Click for the latest headlines at Raw Story.
Judge McElroy wrote in a memorandum that cuts “would constrain the States’ infectious disease research, thwart treatment efforts to those struggling with mental health and addiction, and impact the availability of vaccines to children, the elderly, and those living in rural communities,” among other initiatives.
She continued, “There is ample evidence to support the States’ position that the Public Health Funding Decision is causing immediate damage to their healthcare programs and the safety of their residents,” McElroy wrote. “While the Court acknowledges HHS’ position that it may be unable to recover the grant funds if it later prevails, Congress’s direction that the funds remain intact and the States’ reliance on the continuation of the funding overshadows that argument.”
On Friday, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha decried the cuts as a “hacksaw approach to government reduction.”
“If we don’t have our health, we don’t have anything, and that’s why today’s preliminary injunction is such a critical win,” Neronha said.
A spokesperson for HHS told the Globe in an email that the agency does not comment on litigation.
Read the Boston Globe article here.
Bad day: Trump takes yet another hit in court over 'hacksaw approach'
Last month, attorneys general in 24 states and the District of Columbia accused Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of moving to eliminate the funds "without warning and valid legal explanation."
U.S. District Court Judge Mary S. McElroy granted a preliminary injunction on Friday to block the cuts.
Want more breaking political news? Click for the latest headlines at Raw Story.
Judge McElroy wrote in a memorandum that cuts “would constrain the States’ infectious disease research, thwart treatment efforts to those struggling with mental health and addiction, and impact the availability of vaccines to children, the elderly, and those living in rural communities,” among other initiatives.
She continued, “There is ample evidence to support the States’ position that the Public Health Funding Decision is causing immediate damage to their healthcare programs and the safety of their residents,” McElroy wrote. “While the Court acknowledges HHS’ position that it may be unable to recover the grant funds if it later prevails, Congress’s direction that the funds remain intact and the States’ reliance on the continuation of the funding overshadows that argument.”
On Friday, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha decried the cuts as a “hacksaw approach to government reduction.”
“If we don’t have our health, we don’t have anything, and that’s why today’s preliminary injunction is such a critical win,” Neronha said.
A spokesperson for HHS told the Globe in an email that the agency does not comment on litigation.
Read the Boston Globe article here.
Bad day: Trump takes yet another hit in court over 'hacksaw approach'
More than a month after the Supreme Court agreed that Donald Trump’s administration must be ordered to “facilitate” the release of a wrongfully deported Salvadoran immigrant, the government is refusing to do so — and arguing with a federal judge that they don’t have to.
The weeks-long court battle is leaving a judge’s head “spinning,” Maryland District Judge Paula Xinis told attorneys on Friday.
Last month, Supreme Court justices unanimously agreed that the government’s removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was “illegal.”
Now, government attorneys are sparring with Judge Xinis to try to conceal what, if anything, the administration is doing to return him, and why that information needs to be kept secret.
Meanwhile, administration officials are “shouting from the rooftops” in public about ensuring that Abrego Garcia never returns to the United States, according to his attorneys.
“He will never walk freely in the U.S.,” Department of Justice lawyer Jonathan Guynn told District Judge Paula Xinis in a Maryland courtroom on Friday.
“That sounds to me like an admission you will not take steps” to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return,” Xinis replied.
“That’s about as clear as it can get,” said Gyunn.
Despite government attorneys and the White House admitting that Abrego Garcia was deported from Maryland “due to an administrative error,” the Justice Department is now clashing with its own determination — and multiple court rulings from federal judges in the Supreme Court — about the legality of his removal.
“Abrego Garcia was removed without lawful authority — you conceded it,” Xinis told Justice Department lawyers on Friday.
“Not to split hairs with your honor, but he was removed lawfully,” Guynn said. “He shouldn’t be in the United States.”
“He was removed in error,” Xinis replied.
Guynn later conceded that he was reported in “error” but said it did not rise to government “misconduct.”
Government attorneys have produced more than 1,400 documents in the case, but Abrego Garcia’s legal team has only received 164, most of which are photocopies of their own filings.
“My head is spinning,” Xinis told the court at one point.
Lawyers for Abrego Garcia’s family asked the judge to keep the government on “as tight a leash as possible” to ensure the administration is responding to court-ordered questions.
Abrego Garcia’s wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura, center, speaks outside a Maryland courthouse on May 16 as demonstrators gather in support for her husband’s release from a Salvadoran prison (EPA)
Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador as a teenager in 2011 and was working as a sheet-metal apprentice in Maryland, where he has been living with his wife and 5-year-old child, both U.S. citizens. The couple is also raising two other children from a previous relationship.
After a traffic stop in March, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and then deported to El Salvador’s brutal Terrorism Confinement Center. He was later moved to another prison designed to imprison non-gang members.
Trump’s allies and administration officials have repeatedly sought to justify his detention over allegations of criminal activity and gang membership, which were raised only after he was summarily deported. Democrats and legal analysts argue the administration could return Abrego Garcia and then use that alleged evidence against him in normal immigration court removal hearings, but the government is refusing to do so.
Instead, Justice Department lawyers and Trump administration officials have raised a “state secrets” privilege to try to avoid answering questions about the government’s relationship with El Salvador and conversations about the arrangements among officials.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers argued that the government hasn’t shown even “the slightest effort” to fulfill court orders to retrieve him, and even cited Trump’s interview last month with ABC News in which he said he could bring Abrego Garcia back but won’t.
On Friday, Xinis described the government’s reasoning for withholding that information as “take my word for it.”
“There’s simply no details,” she said. “This is basically ‘take my word for it.’”
Judge spars with Trump administration over release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: ‘My head is spinning’
The weeks-long court battle is leaving a judge’s head “spinning,” Maryland District Judge Paula Xinis told attorneys on Friday.
Last month, Supreme Court justices unanimously agreed that the government’s removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was “illegal.”
Now, government attorneys are sparring with Judge Xinis to try to conceal what, if anything, the administration is doing to return him, and why that information needs to be kept secret.
Meanwhile, administration officials are “shouting from the rooftops” in public about ensuring that Abrego Garcia never returns to the United States, according to his attorneys.
“He will never walk freely in the U.S.,” Department of Justice lawyer Jonathan Guynn told District Judge Paula Xinis in a Maryland courtroom on Friday.
“That sounds to me like an admission you will not take steps” to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return,” Xinis replied.
“That’s about as clear as it can get,” said Gyunn.
Despite government attorneys and the White House admitting that Abrego Garcia was deported from Maryland “due to an administrative error,” the Justice Department is now clashing with its own determination — and multiple court rulings from federal judges in the Supreme Court — about the legality of his removal.
“Abrego Garcia was removed without lawful authority — you conceded it,” Xinis told Justice Department lawyers on Friday.
“Not to split hairs with your honor, but he was removed lawfully,” Guynn said. “He shouldn’t be in the United States.”
“He was removed in error,” Xinis replied.
Guynn later conceded that he was reported in “error” but said it did not rise to government “misconduct.”
Government attorneys have produced more than 1,400 documents in the case, but Abrego Garcia’s legal team has only received 164, most of which are photocopies of their own filings.
“My head is spinning,” Xinis told the court at one point.
Lawyers for Abrego Garcia’s family asked the judge to keep the government on “as tight a leash as possible” to ensure the administration is responding to court-ordered questions.
Abrego Garcia’s wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura, center, speaks outside a Maryland courthouse on May 16 as demonstrators gather in support for her husband’s release from a Salvadoran prison (EPA)
Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador as a teenager in 2011 and was working as a sheet-metal apprentice in Maryland, where he has been living with his wife and 5-year-old child, both U.S. citizens. The couple is also raising two other children from a previous relationship.
After a traffic stop in March, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and then deported to El Salvador’s brutal Terrorism Confinement Center. He was later moved to another prison designed to imprison non-gang members.
Trump’s allies and administration officials have repeatedly sought to justify his detention over allegations of criminal activity and gang membership, which were raised only after he was summarily deported. Democrats and legal analysts argue the administration could return Abrego Garcia and then use that alleged evidence against him in normal immigration court removal hearings, but the government is refusing to do so.
Instead, Justice Department lawyers and Trump administration officials have raised a “state secrets” privilege to try to avoid answering questions about the government’s relationship with El Salvador and conversations about the arrangements among officials.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers argued that the government hasn’t shown even “the slightest effort” to fulfill court orders to retrieve him, and even cited Trump’s interview last month with ABC News in which he said he could bring Abrego Garcia back but won’t.
On Friday, Xinis described the government’s reasoning for withholding that information as “take my word for it.”
“There’s simply no details,” she said. “This is basically ‘take my word for it.’”
Judge spars with Trump administration over release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: ‘My head is spinning’
A top adviser to the director of national intelligence ordered a senior analyst to redo an assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and a gang after intelligence findings undercut the White House’s justification for deporting migrants, according to officials.
President Trump’s use of a wartime law to send Venezuelan migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador without due process relies on a claim that U.S. intelligence agencies think is wrong. But behind the scenes, a political appointee told a career official to rework the assessment, a direction that allies of the intelligence analyst said amounted to pressure to change the findings.
Mr. Trump on March 15 invoked the law, the Alien Enemies Act, to summarily remove people accused of being members of the gang, Tren de Aragua. The rarely used act appears to require a link to a foreign state, and he claimed that Venezuela’s government had directed the gang to commit crimes inside the United States.
On March 20, The New York Times reported that an intelligence assessment in late February contradicted that claim. It detailed many reasons that the intelligence community as a whole concluded that the gang was not acting under the Venezuelan government’s control. The F.B.I. partly dissented, maintaining that the gang had some links to Venezuela’s government based on information all the other agencies did not find credible.
The administration was alarmed by the disclosure. The next day, a Friday, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, announced a criminal leak investigation, characterizing The Times’s detailed description of the intelligence assessment as “inaccurate” and “false” while insisting that Mr. Trump’s proclamation was “supported by fact, law, and common sense.”
The following Monday, Joe Kent, the acting chief of staff for Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, told a senior intelligence analyst to do a new assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang, the officials said. The analyst, Michael Collins, was serving as the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council at the time.
An official who has reviewed messages about the assessment said Mr. Kent made the request to Mr. Collins in an email, asking him to “rethink” the earlier analysis. The official said Mr. Kent was not politicizing the process, but giving his assessment and asking the intelligence officials to take into account the flows of migrants across the border during the Biden administration.
The National Intelligence Council is an elite internal think tank that reports to Ms. Gabbard and that policymakers can commission to undertake special analytical projects. The council canvasses spy agencies across the executive branch for its information.
While officials close to Ms. Gabbard said Mr. Kent’s request was entirely appropriate, other intelligence officials said they saw it as an effort to produce a torqued narrative that would support Mr. Trump’s agenda. But after re-examining the relevant evidence collected by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the council on April 7 reaffirmed the original findings.
Inside the administration, even some officials who do not think Mr. Kent injected politics into the intelligence report are angry for what they see as a blundering intervention. Little new information had been collected in the month after the original assessment and his request for a redo, so there was no reason to expect the council to come up with different findings.
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From the beginning, politics surrounded the request for an intelligence assessment.
The original assessment stemmed from a White House request, according to former American officials.
It is not clear who specifically inside the White House made the request.
Inside the administration, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, spearheads immigration policy. He has developed numerous ways to leverage existing laws — sometimes via aggressive interpretations — to better seal the border and accelerate deportations. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act to avoid time-consuming asylum and deportation hearings is one of those innovations.
In response to the White House request, Mr. Kent asked the National Intelligence Council to produce its initial analysis. The resulting report was dated Feb. 26, according to officials familiar with it.
Image
Stephen Miller, the homeland security adviser, has developed numerous ways to leverage existing laws, such as the Alien Enemies Act, to avoid time-consuming asylum and deportation hearings and accelerate deportations.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Details remain unclear of the White House deliberations that led to Mr. Trump, two weeks later, signing a proclamation that made purportedly factual findings that contradicted the executive branch intelligence community’s understanding of what was true.
After the assessment came to light and Mr. Kent asked Mr. Collins to rethink that analysis, Mr. Collins agreed to produce an updated assessment, according to people briefed on the events.
Some intelligence officials took Mr. Kent’s intervention as an attempt to politicize the findings and push them in line with the Justice Department arguments and the Trump administration policy. Mr. Collins, according to those officials, worked to navigate the politics and to protect the analytic integrity of the National Intelligence Council’s work as he began drafting a “sense of the community memo.”
The officials who described the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. Intelligence officials declined to make Mr. Collins available for an interview.
Olivia C. Coleman, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said requesting the intelligence assessment on the gang’s ties to the Venezuelan government was “common practice.” She also defended Mr. Kent, saying, without detail, that the timeline presented in this article was “false and fabricated.”
“It is the deep state’s latest effort to attack this administration from within with an orchestrated op detached from reality,” Ms. Coleman said.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump’s policy on deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador had made America safer. “President Trump rightfully designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization based on intelligence assessments and, frankly, common sense,” she said.
After Mr. Trump sent planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador, a complex series of court fights have erupted and courts have blocked, for now, further use of the act for deportations. On Friday, the Supreme Court extended the freeze.
As the National Intelligence Council drafted the second analysis, multiple officials said, Mr. Collins and his colleagues tried to describe how most of the spy agencies had reached their consensus conclusion doubting any direct connection between the Venezuelan government and Tren de Aragua, and why the F.B.I. saw things partly differently.
The memo, dated April 7, concluded that the Venezuelan government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with T.D.A. and is not directing T.D.A. movement to and operations in the United States.” It detailed why the intelligence community as a whole thought that, echoing accounts of the February assessment, like how the government treats Tren de Aragua as a threat and how the gang’s decentralized makeup would make it logistically challenging for it to carry out instructions.
The memo also went into greater detail about a partial dissent by the F.B.I. in a way that made clear why most of the intelligence community thought the bureau was wrong.
F.B.I. analysts largely agreed with the consensus assessment, the memo said, but they also thought that “some Venezuelan government officials” had helped gang members migrate to other countries, including the United States, and used them as proxies.
The basis of that conclusion came from law enforcement interviews of people who had been arrested in the United States — and “most” of the intelligence community judged those reports “not credible.”
The existence of the council’s memo and its bottom-line findings came to light in a Washington Post article on April 17. Publicly, the Trump administration and its supporters and influencers have reacted by vilifying Mr. Collins.
On April 20, Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who successfully lobbied the administration to fire other security officials, attacked the National Intelligence Council on social media as “career anti-Trump bureaucrats” who “need to be replaced if they want to promote open borders.” In the same post, she pasted images of Mr. Collins’s LinkedIn profile and of an Associated Press article about the council’s memo.
Three days later, Ms. Gabbard and her deputy chief of staff revealed on social media that they had made a criminal leak referral about the Post article. And, as reported by Fox News this week, Ms. Gabbard also removed Mr. Collins and his deputy from leading the council.
Image
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and her circle have amplified posts portraying the National Intelligence Council, an elite internal think tank, as a hive of biased, deep-state bureaucrats.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
As discussion of the removals circulated, Ms. Gabbard and her circle have amplified posts portraying the council as a hive of biased, deep-state bureaucrats.
An official briefed on the matter has denied that Mr. Collins’s removal was connected to the Venezuela assessment or to Ms. Loomer. But other officials have said they believe Mr. Collins has been made a scapegoat.
When the council produced a draft memo, Mr. Kent insisted on several edits to its final form. The details of his changes remain unclear.
But his reaction to the final memo was surprising, the officials said: Mr. Kent was happy about it, and pushed to have it declassified so that it could be discussed publicly, the officials said.
Mr. Kent’s request for declassification set in motion a chain of events that led to the agency’s release of the report this month in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Because the memo directly contradicts what Mr. Trump claimed — and is now public as an officially acknowledged document — it is generally seen as a legal and public relations fiasco for the administration.
The official who had reviewed the messages about the assessment said Mr. Kent’s reaction, recorded in emails to Mr. Collins, is clear evidence that he was not politicizing the process but merely wanted a fuller discussion of what intelligence agencies knew and the F.B.I.’s take on the issue. But other current and former officials questioned that narrative. Why, they asked, if Mr. Kent was pleased with the redone assessment, was Mr. Collins fired?
It is not entirely clear why Mr. Kent seemed to believe that the memo supported Mr. Trump’s claim. But he and other officials who shared his view were focused on the section exploring the F.B.I.’s partial dissent.
A line says that reports generated by U.S. law enforcement agencies have “the most focus on T.D.A. and its activities in the United States” because, unlike purely foreign intelligence agencies like the C.I.A., they can interrogate domestic prisoners.
But the memo also stressed multiple reasons to be skeptical. Among other things, because of their legal troubles, detainees had an incentive to fabricate “valuable” information, the memo said. And, it said, agencies had not observed the Venezuelan government directing the gang, which would likely require extensive communications, coordination and funding between government officials and gang leaders “that we would collect.”
Mr. Kent has a history of embracing alternative versions of reality that align with his political views but are not supported by evidence. For example, as recently as his confirmation hearing in April, he promoted the conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. secretly instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters trying to block Congress from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
See more on: Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller
