[Whitfield:] All right, welcome back. Live pictures as we continue to watch out of Anaheim, California. Momentarily President Barack Obama, former president, expected to take to the stage there. He is stumping for seven Congressional Democratic candidates, hoping to turn those seats from red to blue. We'll bring you Obama's comments when it happens. Meantime CNN is learning that the Trump administration held secret meetings with rebel Venezuelan military officers to discuss plans to overthrow the country's president Nicolas Maduro, that's according to current and former U.S. officials. The meetings took place several times over the last year, but Washington ultimately decided against supporting a coup. Joining me right now is CNN national security analyst Samantha Vinograd. She's also a former adviser to the national security adviser. Good to see you, Sam. So rebel military officials from Venezuela were apparently the ones who initiated the contact. What is the first thing that U.S. national security officials would do when approached like that?
[Samantha Vinograd, Cnn National Security Analyst:] The first thing that they would do in my experience, Fred, would be to identify the problem that we're trying to solve for. We're all very fixated on this word "coup" and the outreach that the administration did, but we have to take a step back and think about this like if we were in the Situation Room. We would try to assess what would these military officials bring us, why would we go speak with them? And the issue at hand is that Nicolas Maduro is a dictator at this point who is presiding over a gross humanitarian catastrophe. Millions of Venezuelans are fleeing, the economy is in shambles. And is one of the tools in the tool kit supporting regime change through a coup, that is certainly something that the administration would look at. They'd see if these were viable interlocutors. But in my experience, at least under President Obama, we ruled out supporting coups as one of the tools that we would actually implement.
[Whitfield:] So the "New York Times" is reporting that there was some suspicion that the initial contact might be a setup to make the us look like it was plotting against Maduro. How serious a concern would that be?
[Vinograd:] It's always a concern. We know he that Nicolas Maduro has spread these conspiracy theories as recently as a drone attack a few weeks ago that people living in Miami supported by the United States were trying to get him out of power. And the truth is, Fred, there are a lot of leaders that we would like to see leave power. Nicolas Maduro, the Iranian regime which has taken part and is currently waging at least an overt campaign against. And previously, as you know, members of the administration have called for a regime change in places like North Korea. So if anybody reached out from Venezuela, said that they were trying to help us in a goal of getting somebody else in, you'd really have to do sharp intelligence analysis about who they were, who they were working for, and how viable they were.
[Whitfield:] But what about the risk that the U.S. would have in unilaterally trying to lot or be part of any kind of overthrowing of another government? It is very different if there were a coalition type of effort, right?
[Vinograd:] Exactly. And we got out of the business of regime change, at least when I was there, for several reasons. You look at the history of Latin America and U.S. support for coups in places like Brazil or Chile or Cuba, and it is a slippery slope. As much as you want to get someone out of power and think that you may be instilling someone who at that moment is more attractive and more amenable to the policy issues that you work on, you can't control them. And so we look at a country like Brazil where the presidential candidate actually was just stabbed a few days ago, but after we supported a coup there, there was torture instituted by the military regime that, again, we couldn't control. And that's why when there is a coup in Turkey, you heard President Obama say he didn't support it, he supported the democratically elected government. Coups are a very, very slippery slope.
[Whitfield:] And Venezuela has its attributes as being strategically important. What might they be?
[Vinograd:] Well, Venezuela, it is interesting, has the largest oil reserves in the world and has been a net oil exporter for some time. Their production is way down because of mismanagement and other production technological declines. But Venezuela has been deteriorating for a long time, first under Chavez and now under Maduro. It has become a humanitarian disaster. And there's a real question about what the president is willing to do to address issues that he, President Trump, cares about. There are mass migrant flows coming out of Venezuela that will impact and are impacting immigration flows in South America and potentially Central America and up through the United States. So there's a lot of highway between, for example, putting more sanctions on Venezuela's oil sector and supporting something like regime change. But those are exactly the conversations you have in the Situation Room when you look at all these different tools.
[Whitfield:] Samantha Vinograd, thanks so much.
[Vinograd:] Thanks.
[Whitfield:] Still ahead, nearly two years after President Trump's inauguration, a government photographer is admitting he intentionally edited a picture to make the crowd look bigger than it was. Who asked him to do it, next.