The Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, announced his resignation Tuesday over opposition to the Iran war, becoming the highest-profile administration official to step down publicly over the conflict.
In a resignation letter posted publicly on social media, Kent said he could not “in good conscience” support the war, now in its third week.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent, who served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote.
President Donald Trump, in the several justifications he’s given for starting the war on Iran, has repeatedly said Tehran posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S. and that the U.S. was “very nearly under threat.”
Early on in the conflict, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. strikes were triggered in part because the U.S. knew Israel was going to attack Iran and that Iran would retaliate against the U.S., but that Israel didn’t force Trump’s hand. Trump also denied Israel pulled the U.S. into the war, saying, “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”
Trump on Tuesday reacted to Kent’s letter while taking questions at a bilateral meeting with Ireland’s Taoiseach Micheál Martin in the Oval Office.
“Well, I read his statement. I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security,” Trump said. “I didn’t know him well, but I thought he seemed like a pretty nice guy.”
“But when I read a statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out,” Trump added. “Because he said that Iran was not a threat. Iran was a threat. Every country realized what a threat Iran was. The question is whether or not they wanted to do something about it. And many people, many of the greatest military scholars, are saying for years that [the] president should have taken out Iran because they wanted a nuclear weapon.”
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