On the evening of Tuesday, January 13, 2026, ten days after the Donald Trump administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, The Wall Street Journal ran an exclusive report asserting that “the support of the Venezuelan opposition led by Maria Corina Machado for U.S. action to oust Nicolás Maduro helped President Trump’s legal case to overthrow him.” The report cited “people familiar with the matter” who in turn cited redacted portions of a December 23, 2025 opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) which the Justice Department had released that Tuesday afternoon. According to these sources, who had read the redacted portions of the opinion, an unredacted footnote to “the last paragraph of Page 6…cites Machado’s comments stating that escalating U.S. pressure was the ‘only way’ to free Venezuela.” These comments allowed the Office of Legal Counsel to argue in the actual redacted text of the last paragraph of Page 6 that “the opposition’s lobbying ‘could be construed’ as a request by Venezuela’s legitimate government,” namely Machado’s opposition party, “to depose a usurper in Caracas.” It was this request that “the Justice Department memo…partly relie[d] on…as a legal justification” to kidnap Maduro in violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and international law.
What does this mean and why does it matter? From facts like these, it seems hard to say, and this is not by accident. A problem with foreign interventions since America became an empire is that the players are too myriad and our imperial complex too labyrinthine (not to mention too concealing) for information “from the inside” to be interpretable to the cursory reader without context. But when it comes to this particular intervention and the broader networks that pushed it via Machado, there is plenty of context at hand. Unearthing this context shows that Machado’s “slipped note” to the OLC was not just a one-off, a helpful hint picked up by government players to justify a particular course of action. It was part of a decades-long push from overlapping groups with the interlocked aim of using America’s resources to affect regime change in their home countries. All of these groups, what’s more, owe their influence to Zionists.
The reason this broader push is especially important to understand now is that it has been turbocharged in the second Trump administration. Foreign operators underwritten by Zionists are urging interventions not just in Venezuela but in Nigeria and Iran and Cuba to the ultimate benefit of Israel. Understanding their role may prove crucial in the coming months to understanding the trajectory of our government’s policies abroad—who they benefit, who they harm, why they’re happening, and what the blowback on the rest of us might be.
Among the groups who have prominent members operating in this way over the last quarter century and longer are Lebanese Americans, Nigerian Americans, Iranian Americans, Cuban Americans, and Venezuelan Americans. These groups emigrated relatively (or in Venezuelans’ case very) recently to America in small numbers. A disproportionate number of them are upper-middle class or elites who benefited from American-backed regimes then left their countries after Muslim or communist governments overthrew those regimes. They accessed America thanks to immigration and refugee policies meant to attract foreign elites to service America’s military corporate complex, and they have paid back their debt to our empire and benefited in the process. They are active in pushing America’s government into operations against their home countries’ governments based on their “specialized” and “inside” knowledge of these countries; and they are also all connected, directly or at some degree removed, to each other.
If many of these operators call themselves freedom fighters, there’s a less flattering phrase for them, one supplied most memorably by the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. That term is “native informant”: non-Western imperial operators cut off from their countrymen who gain status in western capitals via access to academic or media circles, then gain influence telling imperial operators what they want to hear about the countries they want to invade. In Said’s brutal rendering, they are people who speak of America as “an imperial collectivity which, along with Israel, never does anything wrong.” Said coined the term “native informant” in April 2003, a month after the W. Bush administration invaded Iraq. He was describing the Lebanese American academic and Iraq War booster Fouad Ajami, whom he called one of the few “accredited Middle East experts identified long ago as having the most influence over American Middle East policy”—and Ajami’s career in many ways sets the model for the native informant breed.
Like Maria Corina Machado in the autumn of 2025, Ajami’s career culminated in the autumn of 2002 when he supplied an American presidential administration with the native and expert justification to invade a sovereign nation. According to a much-cited speech that Vice President Richard B. Cheney gave seven months before the war:
“…the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ‘sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.’ Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.”
Ajami’s pick-up by Cheney did not come out of nowhere. It reflected briefings Cheney and his Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, along with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, had received from Ajami. Ajami’s availability for these briefings, in turn, came out of Zionist networks. Ajami was an institutional presence in Washington DC thanks mostly to Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he led the Middle East Studies program and overlapped with Paul Wolfowitz when Wolfowitz was dean of SAIS. He was a public presence in Washington thanks mostly to The New Republic magazine, where he was a favored contributor of Martin Peretz, the magazine’s publisher, and Leon Wieseltier, its literary editor. Ajami served the university and the magazine, which had been founded by members of powerful imperial networks run by WASPs, at a time when they were being put to the purpose of Zionism and its attendant priorities: expanding American empire by directing it against enemies of Israel and for Israel’s allies. These priorities were reflected by Ajami’s backers’ careers.
Peretz, an ardent Zionist, spent the late 1960s agitating to send American forces to help swing a civil war between Muslim Nigerians and Christian (Biafran) Nigerians for the Christian side for strategic reasons based on what he saw as shared group traits. (From Peretz’s memoir: “The majority of Biafrans were from the Igbo tribe and were well educated, westernized, and Catholic. They had been colonial Nigeria’s political and intellectual elite, favored by the British. They were also called ‘the Jews of Africa.’ Now they were being murdered by the new Muslim-dominated national government.”) Peretz then spent the early 1980s running cover in Washington for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in its campaign against Yasser Arafat’s PLO—a campaign that, like Biafra, inserted Zionists on behalf of Christians against Muslims in what had been an intra-country conflict. Along with Wieseltier, also a Zionist, Peretz spent the mid-1980s supporting elements of the Iran-Contra play to co-opt Israel’s main rival Iran.
Nine days after September 11, 2001 and five days after Wolfowitz, a Zionist, made good on a decade of advocacy and urged George W. Bush to attack Iraq—another play whose ultimate aim was to marginalize Iran and neuter the Palestinian resistance movement—Peretz and Wieseltier signed onto an open letter along with a number of Zionist veterans of Iran-Contra urging just such an invasion. Within a few months, preparations were underway for just such an invasion at the hands of Wolfowitz and “Scooter” Libby: the Chief of Staff to the Vice President, a Zionist, a longtime friend of Wolfowitz’s and a close friend of Wieseltier’s who had only recently helped secure a pardon for the Jewish Zionist financier Marc Rich, an ally of Jeffrey Epstein’s. (This pardon was facilitated by both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and by Peretz’s New Republic co-owner and hedge fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt, the founder of the pro-Israel think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies at which Libby later went to work.) Wolfowitz and Libby began pressuring the CIA to support the invasion and secured the help of John Yoo at the Office of Legal Counsel to justify it. By 2003, Peretz and Wieseltier were ardently pushing the invasion in the pages of The New Republic. And Ajami had entered the White House to consult with Wolfowitz and Libby and Cheney and Rice.
Ajami’s distinction in these circumstances, as Edward Said intimated at the time, was being a certified intellectual actually from the region America wanted to invade. He was born in 1945 in a Lebanese village called Arnoun which he described to friends as a “rocky hamlet that grew stunted tobacco plants” and a place where Arab intellectualism never penetrated. He became an American citizen in 1964, where he attended university. By this point, the fading British Empire and the rising American one were already actively recruiting Arab intellectuals to produce mass media justifying oil extraction in the Middle East. But, unlike Ajami, these earlier intellectual recruits were mature thinkers with ongoing acquaintance with their homelands who produced realistic material turned to the purpose of propaganda. Ajami, who was younger and left the Middle East, lacked the benefit of maturing or existing in the region he chose to write about; nor was his work directed to people who lived there. Instead, from his time at the Eastern Oregon College and the University of Washington to his time at Princeton and Johns Hopkins and The New Republic, this son of what he saw as the “stunted” landscape of Arnoun identified with America, which for him was imperial institutions, and increasingly wrote for audiences of Jewish Zionist elites who were fairly sure what they wanted to hear.
One result of this perfect circularity between performer and audience, where the intellectual becomes the kept pet of players of power and their mutually generated aims and “ideas” substitute for engagement with ground-level realities, was the embarrassment of 2003. Contrary to what Cheney via Wolfowitz and Libby called Ajami’s “expert” prediction, the streets of Basra and Baghdad did not “erupt in joy” after the invasion. The other result of this circular imperial influence was that these networks didn’t stop after their failure. They experienced a diminution of political influence from roughly 2003 to 2025: “Scooter” Libby, for one, was sentenced to prison for obstruction of justice related to his actions bolstering the case for the invasion of Iraq, receiving the sentence despite “impassioned” public pleas for clemency from Ajami and Wieseltier. But they also perpetuated themselves and expanded, incubating new generations of Zionist operators who in turn incubated a wider array of native informants to push regime change policies that advance Israel’s aims. This meant that, when the White House became occupied by a president interested in resource extraction abroad and staffed and funded by Zionists—namely, Donald Trump in his second term—these networks were ready to act.
The case in point when it comes to Zionist underwriting during the second Trump administration is Bari Weiss. Weiss’s family is tied into Zionist networks via her father Lou’s participation in a nonprofit incubated by the Zionist and Jeffrey Epstein patron Leslie Wexner, a close ally of Peretz’s New Republic co-owner Michael Steinhardt. Bari Weiss arrived at Columbia University at 18 and almost immediately became a Zionist activist, pushing for the firing of a Palestinian professor with anti-Israel views. After graduation, she incubated her career at the Zionist magazine Tablet, whose literary editor (and husband of its founder) David Samuels established his career (in dubious cultural supremacist fashion) at Peretz’s and Wieseltier’s New Republic. After an aborted stint at The New York Times, she used Zionist largesse to first secure the founding of The Free Press and then its sale to Larry and David Ellison, who also put her in the editor-in-chief’s chair at CBS News.
Like Peretz and Wieseltier had Wolfowitz and Libby as Bush White House connections, so too does Weiss have her connections to the Trump White House: via Larry Ellison, a close ally of Donald Trump’s; and Amy Chua, the law school mentor of J.D. and Usha Vance. She seems to make editorial policy for CBS based on deference to the White House, especially when it comes to foreign policy and to the Jewish Zionist Stephen Miller. Based on its roster of contributors and its stream of powerful guests, Weiss seems to have made The Free Press into “the” magazine of the Washington-New York elite; and CBS News still enjoys, for now, its reputation as the gold standard of investigative broadcast journalism. Against this backdrop of deep Zionist influence, widespread media clout, and clear White House ties, Weiss’s moves since Donald Trump’s June 2025 strikes on Iran are significant. They seem to amount to a gathering of the “native informant” clans to push policy through these powerful venues on Washington DC.
Since June, Weiss hired as an “expert” on CBS H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser and current Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, whose director is Condoleezza Rice, who had used Ajami to justify the invasion of Iraq. Weiss began regularly featuring in The Free Press and on CBS the “superstar” Iranian dissidents Masih Alinejad and Roya Hakakian, the latter of whom advocated for regime change in the Joe Biden White House and lent crucial support to lesser-known Iranian exiles’ campaigns to purge from American academia Iranian scholars who disagree with regime change in Iran. Weiss also began featuring in The Free Press the Nigerian scholar Ebenezer Obadare, supporting Donald Trump’s threats of American intervention on behalf of Christians against Muslims in Nigeria. Starting in October, Weiss featured Maria Corina Machado three times in two months in The Free Press making the case for regime change in Venezuela, and, in the aftermath of Maduro’s kidnapping, on CBS. And Weiss chose to fill Walter Cronkite’s old chair as CBS’s evening news anchor Tony Dokoupil. A native of the Cuban exile stronghold of Miami, Dokoupil, in in his first week as CBS anchor, raised eyebrows when he visited the city, “fought back tears” about it, and closed his broadcast with a paean to Marco Rubio. Rubio is the son of Cuban-Americans opposed to Havana’s government and the highest-ranking Cuban-American official in American history, who, the week Dokoupil made his homage, had along with Stephen Miller shepherded the deposition of Nicolas Maduro using justifications from his longtime contact Maria Corina Machado via the Office of Legal Counsel.
There is history for all of these players. Like Ajami in the 1980s and 1990s, these Weiss-supported players’ path to prominence in the 2010s and 2020s has been paved by Zionists. H.R. McMaster’s entrée to Stanford alongside assuming the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellowship came via an endower whose father was a founding director of Larry Ellison’s Oracle. Alinejad’s and Hakakian’s Zionist backers range from the American Jewish Committee to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to the Zionist magazine The American Purpose to the Ajami-founded Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. Ebenezer Obadare’s American career as a public intellectual was launched at the Council on Foreign Relations during the tenure of the Zionist Richard N. Haas. Maria Corina Machado has close ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and her longtime ally Marco Rubio is a longtime ally of American Zionists. And Tony Doukopil is a committed Jewish Zionist: an adult convert to Judaism before his first marriage to a Jewish Zionist (and, at his first wife’s request, an experiencer of adult circumcision, which he wrote about, wincingly, for The New Republic) who has been accused of bias in his past coverage of Israel.
The seemingly “mainstream” operators all frame their public arguments for regime changes in their respective nations much like Fouad Ajami framed the invasion of Iraq, on terms popularized by “liberal America” as it’s been arbitered since 1945 by WASPs and then Zionists: tolerance, secularism, human rights. Their institutional credentials seem to make them impartial arbiters, or “experts.” Their apparently impartial verdicts at The Free Press or CBS can easily be picked up, as Maria Corina Machado’s have actually been picked up, by the White House to legally or ideologically justify invasions. But nowhere in these framings do significant engagement with words like “sovereignty” or “constitutional republicanism” or “majoritarian democracy” appear: anything alluding to the will of actual people in an actual nation and their right to resolve their problems internally and collectively. Their framings, in other words, run on the logic of empire, which erases sovereignty in the name of resource extraction and, in practice, relies on supporters or beneficiaries of authoritarian government. Even more to the point, their success runs on access to empire: informal intersections between elite academic and media and nonprofit networks on one hand and America’s government on the other—Zionist-arbitered networks existing in plain sight that we cannot see because we don’t know where to look.
These networks’ longevity, and their informality, and their somewhat hidden character became clear to me from knowing native informants up close and personally in my years living in New York working with Zionists. This happened in part through a score of visits to an apartment near Riverside Park on the Upper West Side owned by Michelle Ajami: the widow of Fouad Ajami and the bearer, after his death in 2014, of both his ideological flame and, in retrospect more unsettlingly, of many of his political operations in America and abroad. I was in my twenties and respectful of the well-known guests, among them Masih Alinejad, whom Michelle Ajami invited for afternoon gatherings of six or seven people to discuss the state of the world, even as I was increasingly skeptical about the fact that none of their interests seemed actually American. What I missed, at the time and for a long time afterwards, was that these gatherings I eventually exited on social terms were not mainly social gatherings. They were strategic ones: circulation points, much as earlier New York addresses had been circulation points for earlier foreign networks, for native informants in America.
A few other locations I ended up frequenting were circulation points, too. One was a particular institute at Columbia University not far from Michelle Ajami’s address where I met Roya Hakakian via a mutual friend. Another was a townhouse in the West Village in Lower Manhattan owned by a Jewish Zionist supporter of interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, where denizens of Michelle Ajami’s would pass through after sedate afternoons off Morningside Park for raucous evenings off Sixth Avenue. The people who frequented these locations were fellows at and founders of foreign policy nonprofits and freelance or staff journalists for Zionist publications and businessmen en route from the Middle East attending to unstated interests in America. These New York gathering spaces were their secure stop-offs. There, they traded information with each other and shared their views with establishment players from The Washington Post and The New York Times and the Brookings Institution, before they fanned out the next day to Steve Bannon’s townhouse in Washington or to the Hoover Institution at Stanford or to the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado or to the United Nations in New York to advance their agenda.
Their advancement of their agenda has only become more aggressive in the years since I left the native informant beat. As I finished writing this piece I saw a Wall Street journal op-ed by an acquaintance of mine from gatherings at the West Village townhouse, an op-ed that began widely circulating online in the days that followed. Titled “A Fractured Iran Might Not Be So Bad,” it was a proposal to “help secession happen” in Iran, based on the argument that the borders of the territory holding one of the world’s ancient civilizations are “artificial” and that a U.S.-backed partition would help ward off incursions by Russia and China. If this proposal is taken up by the White House, my old acquaintance, a native of the Middle East, might suddenly assume the role Fouad Ajami occupied in 2002 and Maria Corina Machado in 2025: the native justifier for an imperial dream. All of which is to say, the operators of the native informant cohort are still among us, and more influential than ever before. They are hungry from their years in the wilderness. They are eager for tangible influence. And they are poised, if all goes as they hope these next three years of Donald Trump, to use their dubious “native” legitimacy and their Zionist-arranged access to power to help expand American and Israeli ethnic supremacist empire to the detriment of citizens in America and the world.
