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The White House is pushing back hard after the nation’s top counterterrorism official abruptly resigned Tuesday, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declaring in a White House press briefing that President Trump possessed “strong and compelling evidence” that Iran was planning to attack the United States first. Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his departure on X with a blistering resignation letter, claiming he could not in “good conscience” support the ongoing military action against Tehran; according to that letter, Kent alleged that Iran posed no imminent threat and that the war was started due to pressure from Israel and its American lobby. Leavitt didn’t mince words in her response, calling out what she described as “false claims” that mirror the same talking points Democrats and liberal media outlets have been repeating ad nauseam since Operation Epic Fury began, as detailed in the White House’s official statement.
And she emphasized that the evidence of an impending Iranian attack was compiled from multiple sources and factors, stressing that this President does not deploy military assets against foreign adversaries on a whim. The press secretary reminded Americans that Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, a designation the House formally affirmed earlier this month, and detailed how the regime was aggressively expanding its short-range ballistic missile capabilities in conjunction with naval assets to effectively hold the United States and the world hostage. Kent’s resignation marks a rare public break from within the intelligence community over the Iran campaign, though his characterization of the threat assessment appears to conflict with both the administration’s stated justification and the President’s own explicit statements about the intelligence that prompted the strikes, as outlined in Trump’s public remarks.
Trump himself responded to Kent’s departure with characteristic bluntness, saying it was a “good thing that he’s out” in a post on Truth Social. The episode highlights the ongoing tension between career intelligence officials and a White House that has made clear it will act decisively when it believes American lives are at risk, regardless of whether bureaucratic consensus exists behind closed doors. Providence watches over the bold.
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