Joe Kent has quit. Will Tulsi Gabbard be next?
Joe Kent, the U.S. government’s top counterterrorism official and a self-identified “America First” Republican, is not the only Donald Trump ally to disagree with the president’s decision to attack Iran. But today he became the first senior government official to do so publicly, quitting his job and offering an explanation that undercut Trump’s rationale for starting the war.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter, an extraordinary statement from an official who has had access to some of the most highly classified intelligence in the U.S. government. Trump has said the exact opposite—that Iran was about to use a nuclear weapon, and that its missiles “could soon” reach the United States. These claims are not supported by earlier U.S. intelligence assessments, and Kent’s letter suggested that nothing has changed.
The resignation seemed to take many officials in Washington by surprise. Kent isn’t a particularly influential member of Trump’s national-security team, but he is closely allied with his boss, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who has long warned against open-ended wars. Since the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran on February 28, Gabbard has been conspicuously silent. What would she make of Kent’s decision to quit, and could she follow suit?
Gabbard is set to testify in the Senate tomorrow, at a previously scheduled hearing on global security threats. Clearly anticipating that appearance, she issued a measured statement this afternoon, which did not mention Kent by name. The president “is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat,” Gabbard said, referencing the language about Iran in Kent’s letter. The job of her office, she explained, is to ensure that the president gets all of the intelligence that he needs to make a decision. “After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion,” Gabbard said.
Notice what the statement omitted: Gabbard didn’t say whether she agreed with Trump’s conclusion. She didn’t say whether Kent was wrong. She neither contradicted the president’s assessment nor affirmed it. Not exactly a full-throated endorsement of his decision. [Continue reading…]