Transcript: Trump Case for War Undermined by Bombshell as MAGA Breaks

Source: The New Republic · Bias: Left

Summary

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is very unhappy with our NATO allies. On Tuesday, he angrily ranted that most of them won’t clean up his mess by helping to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump ridiculed them by saying they agree with the need to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, then praised himself for doing that without them. But this message was badly undermined by the sudden resignation of a senior Trump intelligence official who said explicitly that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. This is going to further roil MAGA, which is in a civil war over the Iran conflict. So how damaging is this resignation to Trump’s case for war? We’re discussing all this with Emily Horne, who served on Joe Biden’s National Security Council and worked for nearly a decade at the State Department. Emily, nice to have you on.Emily Horne: Thanks for having me, Greg.Sargent: So we just had the resignation of Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a letter to Trump, Kent said, “I cannot in good conscience support the war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. And it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel.” Emily, can you describe for us what the position of head of the National Counterterrorism Center entails?Horne: Sure. So the NCTC, as it’s often referred to, is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The NCTC was created out of the 9/11 Commission—one of the recommendations from that work was to bring together specialists from across the intelligence community and other federal agencies: the CIA, DOD, Homeland Security, the FBI, et cetera, to have a central clearinghouse for all information relating to potential terror attacks on the homeland. And so the NCTC is the hub for organizing the executive branch’s terrorism work. It assesses potential domestic threats. It monitors international and domestic communications for potential threats. It generates intelligence to support investigations by law enforcement. It coordinates across the executive branch and brings together all of those actors to try to prevent terrorist attacks on the homeland.Sargent: And importantly, Joe Kent reports to the director of national intelligence and is neck-deep in the kind of stream of information that’s swirling around in the intelligence world.Horne: That’s exactly right. And I think it’s important to note that Kent is something of an outlier among NCTC directors. Traditionally, the people who hold this role are career national security and intelligence professionals. They’ve come up in this system. They know how the bureaucracy works. They know how to get policymakers the information that they need to make informed decisions. Kent is something of an outlier—he’s former Army Special Forces, he’s a veteran, he’s a former congressional candidate. He’s a lot of things, but a career national security official is not one of them.Sargent: Right. I want to bear down on Joe Kent’s claim in the letter that Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. Obviously, Trump has said his attack on Iran was necessary because Iran was about to develop a nuke—but he varies how long it would have taken. Sometimes it’s a week, sometimes it’s two, sometimes it’s three. The New York Times reported that American officials don’t believe that about Iran. But the point is, Kent would have been in a position to see intelligence on this, correct?Horne: Absolutely. And look—to be generous—any former, now-former national security official cannot talk publicly about what they saw when they were inside, even if they’ve resigned their position. And so I’m sure there’s a lot he knows that he is constrained from saying, even as he has now left office. But it also, I think, really bears repeating that the administration has not presented a coherent case for Trump’s war on Iran from day one. And so it’s not surprising that three weeks in, the public is still confused about what success looks like, what our goals are, and why we’re there in the first place.Sargent: Can you talk a little bit more about where Kent is in this kind of information hierarchy? Would he be privy to the best information of all about this?Horne: So I think you need to break it into two categories. There’s what normally the NCTC director would have access to and would be doing in the run-up to the U.S. launching a war. And then there’s what’s happening in the second Trump administration.

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Transcript: Trump Case for War Undermined by Bombshell as MAGA Breaks
The New Republic

Transcript: Trump Case for War Undermined by Bombshell as MAGA Breaks

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is very unhappy with our NATO allies. On Tuesday, he angrily ranted that most of them won’t clean up his mess by helping to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump ridiculed them by saying they agree with the need to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, then praised himself for doing that without them. But this message was badly undermined by the sudden resignation of a senior Trump intelligence official who said explicitly that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. This is going to further roil MAGA, which is in a civil war over the Iran conflict. So how damaging is this resignation to Trump’s case for war? We’re discussing all this with Emily Horne, who served on Joe Biden’s National Security Council and worked for nearly a decade at the State Department. Emily, nice to have you on.Emily Horne: Thanks for having me, Greg.Sargent: So we just had the resignation of Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a letter to Trump, Kent said, “I cannot in good conscience support the war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. And it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel.” Emily, can you describe for us what the position of head of the National Counterterrorism Center entails?Horne: Sure. So the NCTC, as it’s often referred to, is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The NCTC was created out of the 9/11 Commission—one of the recommendations from that work was to bring together specialists from across the intelligence community and other federal agencies: the CIA, DOD, Homeland Security, the FBI, et cetera, to have a central clearinghouse for all information relating to potential terror attacks on the homeland. And so the NCTC is the hub for organizing the executive branch’s terrorism work. It assesses potential domestic threats. It monitors international and domestic communications for potential threats. It generates intelligence to support investigations by law enforcement. It coordinates across the executive branch and brings together all of those actors to try to prevent terrorist attacks on the homeland.Sargent: And importantly, Joe Kent reports to the director of national intelligence and is neck-deep in the kind of stream of information that’s swirling around in the intelligence world.Horne: That’s exactly right. And I think it’s important to note that Kent is something of an outlier among NCTC directors. Traditionally, the people who hold this role are career national security and intelligence professionals. They’ve come up in this system. They know how the bureaucracy works. They know how to get policymakers the information that they need to make informed decisions. Kent is something of an outlier—he’s former Army Special Forces, he’s a veteran, he’s a former congressional candidate. He’s a lot of things, but a career national security official is not one of them.Sargent: Right. I want to bear down on Joe Kent’s claim in the letter that Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. Obviously, Trump has said his attack on Iran was necessary because Iran was about to develop a nuke—but he varies how long it would have taken. Sometimes it’s a week, sometimes it’s two, sometimes it’s three. The New York Times reported that American officials don’t believe that about Iran. But the point is, Kent would have been in a position to see intelligence on this, correct?Horne: Absolutely. And look—to be generous—any former, now-former national security official cannot talk publicly about what they saw when they were inside, even if they’ve resigned their position. And so I’m sure there’s a lot he knows that he is constrained from saying, even as he has now left office. But it also, I think, really bears repeating that the administration has not presented a coherent case for Trump’s war on Iran from day one. And so it’s not surprising that three weeks in, the public is still confused about what success looks like, what our goals are, and why we’re there in the first place.Sargent: Can you talk a little bit more about where Kent is in this kind of information hierarchy? Would he be privy to the best information of all about this?Horne: So I think you need to break it into two categories. There’s what normally the NCTC director would have access to and would be doing in the run-up to the U.S. launching a war. And then there’s what’s happening in the second Trump administration.

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