WASHINGTON — A highly confidential CIA assessment produced at the request of the White House warned President Trump of a wider conflict in Venezuela if he were to support the country’s democratic opposition once its president, Nicolás Maduro, was deposed, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.

The assessment was a tightly held CIA product commissioned at the request of senior policymakers before Trump decided whether to authorize Operation Absolute Resolve, the stunning U.S. mission that seized Maduro and his wife from their bedroom in Caracas over the weekend.

Announcing the results of the operation on Sunday, Trump surprised an anxious Venezuelan public when he was quick to dismiss the leadership of the democratic opposition — led by María Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate who won the 2024 presidential election that was ultimately stolen by Maduro.

Instead, Trump said his administration was working with Maduro’s handpicked vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has since been named the country’s interim president. The rest of Maduro’s government remains in place.

Endorsing the opposition would probably have required U.S. military backing, with the Venezuelan armed forces still under the control of loyalists to Maduro unwilling to relinquish power.

A second official said that the administration sought to avoid one of the cardinal mistakes of the invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration ordered party loyalists of the deposed Saddam Hussein to be excluded from the country’s interim government. That decision, known as de-Baathification, led those in charge of Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons to establish armed resistance to the U.S. campaign.

The CIA product was not an assessment that was shared across the 18 government agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, whose head, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, was largely absent from deliberations — and who has yet to comment on the operation, despite CIA operatives being deployed in harm’s way before and throughout the weekend mission.

The core team that worked on Absolute Resolve included Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who met routinely over several months, sometimes daily, the source added.

The existence of the CIA assessment was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Signs have emerged that Trump’s team was in communication with Rodríguez ahead of the operation, although the president has denied that his administration gave Rodríguez advance notice of Maduro’s ouster.

“There are a number of unanswered questions,” said Evan Ellis, who served in Trump’s first term planning State Department policy on Latin America, the Caribbean and international narcotics. “There may have been a cynical calculation that one can work with them.”

Rodríguez served as a point of contact with the Biden administration, experts note, and also was in touch with Richard Grenell, a top Trump aide who heads the Kennedy Center, early on in Trump’s second term, when he was testing engagement with Caracas.

While the federal indictment unsealed against Maduro after his seizure named several other senior officials in his government, Rodríguez’s name was notably absent.

Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president Monday in a ceremony attended by diplomats from Russia, China and Iran. Publicly, the leader has offered mixed messages, at once vowing to prevent Venezuela from becoming a colonial outpost of an American empire, while also offering to forge a newly collaborative relationship with Washington.

“Of course, for political reasons, Delcy Rodríguez can’t say, ‘I’ve cut a deal with Trump, and we’re going to stop the revolution now and start working with the U.S.,” Ellis said.

“It’s not about the democracy,” he said. “It’s about him not wanting to work with Maduro.”

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Machado said she had yet to speak with Trump since the U.S. operation over the weekend, but hoped to do so soon, offering to share her Nobel Peace Prize with him as a gesture of gratitude. Trump has repeatedly touted himself as a worthy recipient of the award.

“What he has done is historic,” Machado said, vowing to return to the country from hiding abroad since accepting the prize in Oslo last month.

“It’s a huge step,” she added, “towards a democratic transition.”

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More from the blog…

• Norway hit 95.9% EV share in 2025, almost achieving its goal of having no new gas cars on the road.
• Its EV tax break only includes cheaper models in 2026, and it could change what cars people buy this year.
• Tesla was still the market share leader with 19.1% for a fifth consecutive year, although Chinese carmakers are also gaining ground.

Norway is well ahead of the rest of the world in its transition to electric vehicles—it's almost complete. EVs accounted for just under 30% of all new cars bought in the country a decade ago, and in 2025, it almost achieved its goal of not adding any new gas cars to its roads.

Although Norway isn’t in the European Union, it has very close ties to the bloc, and in many ways it functions as a de facto member. Even though many EU countries pushed back against the Union’s plan to end sales of pure combustion by 2035 (and eventually got the ban postponed), Norway kept chasing this goal and achieved it almost a decade before the rest of Europe was supposed to.

The country published its car sales numbers for 2025, and they show pure electric vehicles made up 95.9% of the total. Just like the rest of Europe, Norway has been scaling back its EV incentives, but it didn’t seem to matter as most buyers still went electric last year. It used to offer VAT (value added tax) exemptions for all electric vehicles, but then it a price threshold which it’s been lowering periodically.

In 2026, only EVs costing under $30,000 still qualify for the exemption, which means most models on sale are no longer eligible. In 2025, Tesla was the country’s most popular car brand for the fifth consecutive year, with a 19.1% market share, followed by Volkswagen and Volvo. Chinese automakers increased their collective market share to 13.7%, up from 10.4% in 2024.

But it wasn’t just tax exemptions that spurred the popularity of EVs in Norway. It was also increasingly heavy taxes on combustion cars, which made them uneconomical to buy. The combination of high registration fees and high fuel taxes makes buying and running a gas car more expensive than going electric, so Norwegians are choosing the latter en masse.

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Its EV adoption rate of nearly 100% in 2025 far exceeds the European Union’s average of 17%. Nordic countries lead Europe for EV adoption, with Denmark coming second after Norway, with over 50% of its new cars being electric, followed by Sweden with around 37%. Plug-in hybrids vary in popularity widely across Europe, but they accounted for 24.7% and 20.7% of all new car sales in Sweden and Finland, respectively, according to the European Environment Agency.

Norway almost achieved its 2017 goal of fully transitioning to electric vehicles by 2025. Most of the combustion vehicles purchased in the country last year were specialized for specific roles for which no equivalent EV was available. It will be interesting to see if Norway’s upward EV sales trend continues through 2026, even with the all-important VAT exemption only applying to cheaper EVs and not including the most popular electric models that people are actually buying.

Reuters suggests that the exemption, which applies only up to the current level, may boost sales of smaller, more affordable cars that buyers may not have previously considered. There is also an increasing number of good small electric cars from European manufacturers to choose from, as well as very keenly priced Chinese models that qualify for the exemption, so 2026 could mark a shift in the size of vehicles bought in Norway.

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