Tulsi Gabbard, who warned of war with Iran, now says it was up to Trump to decide if Iran was ‘an imminent threat’
Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, responded to the resignation of her deputy, Joe Kent, in a statement that does not refer to him directly, but takes issue with a central claim of his resignation letter: that “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” use misinformation to deceive Donald Trump “into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States”.
Gabbard wrote on social media that because Trump was “overwhelmingly elected by the American people to be our President and Commander in Chief… he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat”.
Her office, she added, “is responsible for helping coordinate and integrate all intelligence to provide the President and Commander in Chief with the best information available to inform his decisions.”
“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 concluded.
As soon as she posted her statement, observers noted that Gabbard did not say that she disagreed with Kent. Jonathan Karl, an ABC News correspondent who frequently speaks with Trump, pointed out that, “nowhere in this statement, does she say that she agrees that Iran posed an imminent threat — or that the intelligence supports such a conclusion.”
Gabbard’s reticence to make her own view of the war clear is a sharp departure from comments she made during her run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, when she made campaign ads claiming that Trump wanted to start a war with Iran and warned Fox News viewers that “War with Iran would make Iraq/Afghanistan wars seem like a picnic”.
During that campaign, Gabbard also told supporters Trump had set “a dangerous precedent” in Iran by designating “the military of another country a terrorist organization”, and boasted that, as a congresswoman, she had introduced legislation, the No More Presidential Wars Act, that “would make it an impeachable offense for any president to bypass Congress and to unilaterally go and start waging a war in another country.”
When Trump ordered the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, in 2020, Gabbard took to the floor of the House to denounce the killing as an act of war.
“President Trump has committed an illegal and unconstitutional act of war, pushing our Nation headlong into a war with Iran without any authorization from Congress, a war that would be so costly and devastating, it would make our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look like a picnic,” Gabbard said then. “In doing so, he has undermined our national security”.
Last year, after her confirmation as the national intelligence director, Gabbard posted a video clip on her personal YouTube channel headlined: “Tulsi Gabbard On Preventing Conflict With Iran”. In the video, an interview with the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, Gabbard said: “we have people who are working within the intelligence community… who are coopted by the military-industrial complex, abusing their position to feed or manipulate intelligence, as we saw with the Iraq war, to start a new war.”
“The work that gets done in places like this every single day has that power, to be the fodder, the fuel, the seed that can lead to yet another unnecessary war,” she added.
On Tuesday, as he dismissed Kent’s claim that Iran posed no imminent threat to the US, Trump said repeatedly, in a confusing, roundabout manner, that Iran was an imminent threat because its leaders were just “two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon” and “they would’ve used it” before he ordered B-2 bomber strikes last year on its uranium enrichment sites.
The day before, the president made the entirely unsourced claim that Iran was not only pursuing nuclear weapons but planned to use them to first destroy Israel and then attack the United States, an idea for which he has presented no evidence at all.
There is no public evidence that Iran was ever weeks away from obtaining nuclear weapons, and US intelligence agencies reported in 2007 that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The administration has presented no evidence that Iran ever restarted that weapons program or planned to attack the US.
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A top counter-terrorism official in the Trump administration resigned over the ongoing war on Iran. Joe Kent, who reported to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, said in his resignation letter that he “cannot in good conscience” support the conflict.
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Gabbard responded in a statement that did not refer to Kent directly, but argued that Trump “is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat”.
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The House oversight committee subpoenaed attorney general Pam Bondi to appear for a deposition on the Department of Justice’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.
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The Senate passed a measure to start debate on the legislation to restrict voting in US elections in a number of ways, by a vote of 51-48, along mainly partisan lines, with only Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican, crossing party lines.
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During the annual St Patrick’s Day Shamrock ceremony at the White House, Ireland’s prime minister, Micheál Martin, gently made the case for free trade and a rules-based order before presenting Trump with a bowl of shamrocks.
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While Trump and his aides spent much of Tuesday deriding Kent, critics of the administration pointed out that Kent’s ties to rightwing extremists meant that he was never fit for the role in the first place.
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While Donald Trump and his aides spent much of Tuesday deriding Joe Kent, after the military veteran Trump endorsed in both his failed runs for Congress resigned from his job as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over the war on Iran, critics of the administration pointed out that Kent’s ties to rightwing extremists meant that he was never fit for the role in the first place.
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“A top national security official resigns and confirms that Iran posed no imminent threat,” Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, posted in response to the resignation. “Good riddance to Joe Kent, a disgraceful white supremacist, but that’s a major public admission that there was NO justification for this war.”
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Murray was familiar with Kent from his two failed congressional campaigns to represent a district in the southwest of her home state, in which his ties to white supremacists and far-right extremists were documented by researchers and reporters.
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his first congressional campaign, Joe Kent spoke at a 2021 rally in support of defendants being prosecuted for storming the Capitol on January 6.”,”caption”:”During his first congressional campaign, Joe Kent spoke at a 2021 rally in support of defendants being prosecuted for storming the Capitol on January 6.”,”credit”:”Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters”}},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”
Those concerns were bolstered by the fact that Kent’s resignation letter to Trump seemed to blame Israel for not just tricking him into attacking Iran, but also the US invasion of Iraq and its battle against Islamic State in Syria.
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In the letter, Kent told Trump that high-ranking Israeli officials were behind a misinformation campaign “to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” which he called “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war”.
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Kent also wrote that his first wife Shannon, a naval intelligence officer who was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in 2019, while serving in a Special Operations task force fighting the Islamic State, died “in a war manufactured by Israel”.
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Seth Cotlar, a professor of history at Willamette University in Oregon, suggested on Bluesky that Kent’s resignation was “Another data point for the theory that the only significant pushback Trump will ever get from Republicans will come from the absolutely weirdest ideological extremists in his coalition, not from the so-called ‘moderate’ establishment types.”
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By way of example, Cotlar pointed to a 2022 tweet from Kent in which he falsely claimed that Ukraine’s elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “was installed via a US backed color [revolution]… so he virtue signals in woke ideology while using nazi battalions to crush his enemies.”
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As the Guardian’s Jason Wilson reported last year when Kent was nominated, the former Green Beret and CIA operative was “criticized for his proximity to white nationalist activists such as Nick Fuentes, and for the revolving cast of far-right activists his campaigns employed.”
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In 2022, after Kent was criticized for his association with Fuentes, the anti-semitic podcaster with a large following among young Republicans who said he advised the candidate on social media strategy, Kent publicly disavowed Fuentes. “I strongly condemn Nick Fuentes’s politics, especially in regards to our ally Israel,” Kent wrote. That led the influential podcaster to take a victory lap on social media on Tuesday, after Kent seemed to echo his own conspiratorial views of Israel.
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In a letter to the Senate majority and minority leaders opposing Kent’s confirmation last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Western States Center shared dozens of documented links tying Kent to extremists and called him entirely unfit for overseeing counter-terrorism in the US.
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Mr. Kent cannot be relied upon to appropriately assess and act on international far-right hate and extremism… given his associations with the movement here in the US. Mr. Kent participated in a call discussing campaign social media strategy with white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes. Kent also criticized Twitter’s move to de-platform Fuentes, tagging him in a Twitter post. In June 2022, Mr. Kent gave an interview to Greyson Arnold, a live streamer who once referred to Hitler as “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand.”
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In both cases, Mr. Kent disavowed the figures and claimed he did not know who they were prior to interaction with them. During his 2022 run for Congress, Kent invited far-right Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson to speak at a campaign rally and introduced him