President Donald Trump said Tuesday that “it’s a good thing” that Joe Kent has resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center and that Kent was “very weak on security.”
Trump’s comments came during a bilateral meeting with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin in the Oval Office when a reporter asked him for his reaction to Kent’s resignation. Kent notably said that “Iran posed no imminent threat” in his letter to the president.
“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. I didn’t know him well,” Trump said.
“But when I read his statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out 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,” Trump added.
“And many people, many of the greatest military scholars, are saying for years that [a] president should have taken out Iran because they wanted a nuclear weapon,” Trump continued.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt noted a short time earlier that Kent’s resignation letter contained “many false claims,” chief among them being Kent’s claim that “Iran posed no imminent threat.”
“This is the same false claim that Democrats and some in the liberal media have been repeating over and over,” Leavitt wrote in a post on X. “As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first.”
“This evidence was compiled from many sources and factors. President Trump would never make the decision to deploy military assets against a foreign adversary in a vacuum,” she added.
Leavitt emphasized that Iran is the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism and its regime “proudly killed Americans, waged war against our country, and openly threatened us all the way up to the launch of Operation Epic Fury.”
“Iran was aggressively expanding their short-range ballistic missiles to combine with their naval assets to give themselves immunity – meaning they would have a degree of a capabilities that would give them immunity to hold us and the rest of the world hostage,” she wrote.
“The regime aimed to use those ballistic missiles as a shield to continue achieving their ultimate goal – nuclear weapons,” she added, noting that despite negotiations with the United States, Iran refused to agree to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
She also blasted Kent’s claim that Israel pressured the United States into the war.
“And finally, the absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable,”she wrote. “President Trump has been remarkably consistent and has said for DECADES that Iran can NEVER possess a nuclear weapon.”
“As someone who actually witnesses President Trump’s decision-making process on a daily basis, I can attest to the fact that he is always looking to do what’s in the best interest of the United States of America — period,” Leavitt concluded.
Other prominent members of Trump world, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Taylor Budowich, and Mark Levin, weighed in too.
“I don’t know where Joe Kent is getting his information, but he wasn’t in those briefings clearly…they had exquisite intelligence that we understood this was a serious moment for us,” Johnson said at a press conference Tuesday.
Budowich blasted Kent as “a crazed egomaniac.”
“He spent all of his time working to subvert the chain of command and undermine the President of the United States,” he wrote. “This isn’t some principled resignation—he just wanted to make a splash before getting canned. What a loser.”
Levin wondered whether Kent was facing termination before resigning and predicted that left-wing media would use Kent as a tool to attack Trump.
“I wonder if this guy Joe Kent was about to be fired but quickly resigned first. That’s how these things typically work. He’s part of that radical isolationist Woke Right cabal,” Levin wrote in a post on X.
“Watch how the leftwing media use him to attack the president and the military campaign against Iran. In part, that’s why he wrote that letter. I wonder if he was one of the leakers in the administration. Just asking questions,” he added.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also ripped Kent.
“The resignation of Joe Kent as the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center could not have come at a better time,” he said in a statement on X.
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