to launch a war under the \u200cinternational law of war<\/a>.<\/p>\nKent’s letter \u200cto Trump included “false claims,” said White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement.<\/p>\n
“As President Trump has clearly \u2060and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going \u2060to attack the United States first,” said Leavitt. “This evidence was compiled from many sources and factors.”<\/p>\n
Kent did not respond to requests for comment, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the counterterrorism center, also did not immediately respond.<\/p>\n
Kent known for opposing military interventions<\/p>\n
Kent has long been known for his “America First” beliefs and has said he opposes U.S. military interventions abroad.<\/p>\n
Still, the announcement came as a surprise, one U.S. official said.<\/p>\n
Kent is close \u200cwith Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has kept a low profile since \u200bthe Iran war began.<\/p>\n
Gabbard has not issued any public statements since the war started with Iran and has only appeared in public during the dignified transfer of American soldiers killed during the conflict.<\/p>\n
The National Intelligence Council, which is overseen by Gabbard’s office, issued several assessments both before and after the U.S. strikes began that highlighted the risks of U.S. intervention.<\/p>\n
Those reports indicated the Iranian government was unlikely to collapse and Iran would likely retaliate against U.S. outposts in the region and Gulf allies, as Reuters previously reported.<\/p>\n
Kent has been criticized by Democrats for his associations with far-right \u200bfigures. Media reports have linked Kent to self-avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Kent has since denounced Fuentes’ views.<\/p>\n
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat \u200con the Intelligence \u200cCommittee, has said he \u2060should never have been confirmed to head the counterterrorism office.<\/p>\n
“But on this point, he is right. There was no credible evidence of an imminent threat from Iran that would justify rushing the United States into another war of choice,” Warner said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Last year, Kent pushed intelligence analysts to rework an assessment on Tren De Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, that did not \u200csupport the White House’s argument that \u200bVenezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was directing its operations. The administration had portrayed \u200cthe gang as a security threat \u2060to justify its immigration \u200bcrackdown.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 A top security official in President Donald Trump’s administration resigned over the war in Iran on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,1302,3811,3812,2091,134,9746,3729,4379,3,111,3813,3814,99,1505,2987,21,19,22,20,25,24,3324,2986],"class_list":["post-529826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-law","tag-local","tag-military","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}