TdA Is the New WMD

Trump is lying the U.S. into another war, this time against Tren de Aragua, and this time waging it here

This guest column originally appeared at The Fucking News, the Substack of journalist Jonathan Larsen, a veteran of ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, who served as executive producer of Up with Chris Hayes. You can subscribe to TFN here.

Alleged members of Tren de Aragua in an El Salvador prison in an undated photo distributed by the El Salvadoran government. (Uncredited photo / El Salvadoran president’s office.)

Much of the focus on Pres. Donald Trump’s campaign to remove alleged Venezuelan gang members from the U.S. has been on the mistakes: The innocents affected and the risible, amateur methodology behind it. All of which is concerning and damning, of course.

But there’s virtual silence about the threat that this is Iraq all over again. On American soil this time.

And while journalists are doing great work pushing back on Trump’s dubious claims, there’s little scrutiny of just how closely his case against Tren de Aragua mirrors the dynamics that got us into Iraq.

In the early 2000s, the Bush administration did just what al Qaeda wanted and used the fear from 9/11 to increase U.S. militarization here and abroad. Most Democrats were in lockstep.

Then the Bush administration spotlighted bogus intelligence of Iraqi complicity and/or future threats of (non-existent) WMDs, punished dissenting voices, and ignored real intelligence in order to sell a traumatized American people on waging war against Iraq.

Today, the Trump administration is doing virtually the same thing: Ignoring real intelligence, elevating bogus intelligence, ginning up a casus belli. Except this time the war has been declared here.

This week, the Supreme Court said that Trump can use the Alien Enemies Act to remove accused members of Tren de Aragua (TdA) if the detainees get a chance to dispute their membership. Trump first claimed that right in a March 15 proclamation.

It’s an extraordinary power rarely claimed, and never in peacetime. Its current use expands the predicates for it beyond precedent and the original intent.

Trump’s assertions in that proclamation were based on, yes, faulty intelligence. But also, faulty intelligence that very well may have been ginned up and/or cherry-picked to stoke fear and the false sense of emergency used to justify expanded presidential/dictatorial powers.

In a story posted March 20 and updated March 22, Charlie Savage and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times revealed that most U.S. intelligence agencies disagreed with the claims Trump made, and had “moderate” confidence that they were false.

Specifically, Trump claimed that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is running criminal gangs which he is sending to the U.S. to wage war on us:

“Maduro leads the regime-sponsored enterprise Cártel de los Soles, which coordinates with and relies on TdA…

“TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime…”

As Savage and Barnes revealed, the U.S. intelligence community — prior to Trump’s proclamation — had produced and circulated a document reporting “moderate” confidence that Tren de Aragua was neither run by the Venezuelan government nor committing crimes at the regime’s behest.

Trump ignored the document’s findings.

And the FBI was the only agency to dissent from the document, partially, arguing that TdA has connections to the Maduro government. That FBI finding¹ was based on information the other agencies found not credible.

As one official told the Times, the existence of individual corrupt officials with ties to TdA doesn’t prove a formal connection. (To give an analogy, it’s like claiming the U.S. government was mob-run because some FBI agents took Mafia payoffs².)

In fact, just as Iraq was found to be at odds with al Qaeda, Trump’s own intelligence community reported that Tren de Aragua has had gunfights with Venezuelan government security forces.

Trump’s intelligence officials concluded that Tren de Aragua lack the resources and organization to carry out Venezuelan government orders. A Maduro minister applauded when the State Department in February designated Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization³.

The most specific evidence Trump could muster was a Maduro government official from the Aragua area — and, as the Times noted, Trump omitted the fact that the official is no longer in Maduro’s government and is now facing corruption charges.

The intelligence community that produced this assessment was now being run by Trump appointees.

The best the White House could do for a response was to tell the Times, “Multiple intelligence assessments are prepared on issues for a variety of reasons.” Which is, of course, entirely non-responsive to the substance and point of the Times’s revelations.

But the credibility of the link to Maduro is vital to Trump’s claim to power. As the Times notes, the Alien Enemies Act bestows its extraordinary deportation powers — or renditions, when detainees are sent elsewhere, such as El Salvador — only in cases where a foreign government is involved.

No Maduro link means no Alien Enemies Act which means no extraordinary renditions.

So where did Trump get the intel to make the Maduro link?

The day after the Times story was published, the Miami Herald ran a wholly unskeptical story about the origins of Trump’s intel. As far as I can tell, no one’s yet connected the dots between the Herald’s revelations of Trump’s intel sources and what the Times exposed about Trump’s shoddy, Iraq-quality intel.

Although I dinged the Herald for being unskeptical, there’s no evidence they got any of their details wrong — they just reported solely on one aspect of the intel picture. Not every article can include the full scope of the subject matter.

And the Herald story — which was largely if not entirely ignored by corporate media — revealed some extremely important information.

According to the Herald, prior to Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration, unnamed members of his transition got a presentation from an investigative team of former Venezuelan and U.S. officials about Tren de Aragua. This investigative team has continued to meet with “high-ranking” Trump officials, the Herald reported.

This team has also provided the Trump administration with supposed evidence of Maduro ties to Tren de Aragua, along with hundreds of names and photographs, which federal officials have been using in their hunt.

The team claims that the Maduro regime plans to send a total of 5,000 gang members here. Those already here include 300 who received paramilitary training in Venezuela, the team says.

“They put these 300 guys through that course and … were deploying them into the United States to 20 locations, to 20 separate states,” Gary Berntsen, the only team member identified by name, told the Herald.

But NPR reports that Tren de Aragua activity has occurred mostly in just five states: Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas. Aurora, CO, the city supposedly run by Tren de Aragua, has about a dozen members there, say the local police — who presumably aren’t (yet) working for Tren de Aragua.

Even beyond official pushback to the investigative team’s findings, there are questions about the team itself.

For one thing, the former Venezuelan government officials on the team sound a lot like the Iraqi intel sources; former office-holders now on the outs who hope to regain power with the ouster of the new regime. Prior to the Iraq war, those sources had every motive for getting the U.S. to oust Saddam Hussein.

And the former American officials on this investigative team? The Herald describes them as having “deep connections to police and intelligence” in Venezuela. Without more info, we can’t know whether these sources — or their sources — might be motivated by ambition or rivalries within the Maduro regime.

In fairness, any source worth having is likely to have a potential conflict of interest, but the point here is that we don’t know. And, again, even the Trump intelligence community rejects their findings.

But let’s look at the team member whose identity we do know. That’d be Gary Berntsen.

The Herald describes him as “a decorated former CIA station chief who headed the agency’s unit searching for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.”

Which is true, but doesn’t tell us much about what Berntsen’s done in the two decades since Tora Bora. His company’s website, active at least through early 2023, says,

The Berntsen Group offers, on a global basis, timely, accurate and reliable investigative and security services. Our U.S. domestic staff consist of highly trained former senior U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement personnel. Former foreign law enforcement, military officers and justice ministry personnel augment our services in offshore operations.

There’s more. In 2013, Berntsen ran for Senate in New York, failing to win the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Berntsen was a Tea Party candidate. He campaigned on the threat of illegal immigration.

Nevertheless, it was the deficit, Berntsen said in 2013, that constituted “the gravest danger we have been in since World War II.”

None of which tells us whether Berntsen’s intel now is credible. But it doesn’t have to be to help the cause by providing enough fodder to defend Trump’s stance or at least muddy the waters, giving cover for proclamations and judicial rulings.

Sure enough, last month a right-wing site published an in-your-face-NYT piece citing the Herald’s reporting as proof of Maduro ties to TdA. The site is literally sponsored by the John Birch Society.

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1 Trump loyalist Kash Patel was sworn in as FBI director on Feb. 21, 2025.

2 TFN acknowledges pre-emptively that some Newsfuckers may object that, “The U.S. government is mob-run! Wake up, sheeple!” We hear you. We’re just making an analogy!

3 The Times notes that this was unprecedented, as previous designations only targeted groups motivated by specific ideologies.