Zionists Underwrite ‘Native Informants’ to Fuel America’s Wars
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.
To read the second half of this report, go to The Libertarian Institute.