Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Emily Horne: Thanks for having me, Greg.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Traditionally, the NCTC director is going to be right in the thick of the assessments of the intelligence—surfacing policy options for the president to consider, making sure that everything that goes to the National Security Council and the White House is thoroughly vetted and stress-tested, that if there are any ambiguities, those are either being addressed or, if they can’t be resolved within the intelligence community, that they’re being presented as ambiguities to the president, so that the president has as clear as possible an understanding of what the intelligence says and can then make an informed decision about where to go. So that’s what normally would happen with the NCTC and the DNI.
Sargent: It strikes me that it’s still big news for such a senior intelligence official to come right out and directly undermine the entire rationale for war that the president offered, right?
So again, if those threats had been present, then you would have expected a lot more substantial planning for how to mitigate them in real time. You would not have seen this slapdash announcement in the middle of the night.
Sargent: Well, speaking of that, let’s switch here to Trump’s anger at NATO allies. He posted this on Truth Social: “The U.S. has been informed by most of our NATO allies that they don’t want to get involved with our military operation against the terrorist regime of Iran, despite the fact that almost every country strongly agreed that Iran cannot in any way, shape, or form be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump then added, “I always considered NATO to be a one-way street. We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us.”
Horne: Yeah. Look, normally, if you are thinking about taking military action, one of the first things that you do is coordinate with your allies and partners—whether that is acting in defense of your interests, giving people a heads-up if there’s going to be overflight, requesting base access, or even just letting people know, hey, we’re going to be doing this—no surprises.
So yeah, it’s quite something to see the administration so put out that—after not briefing any of our allies and partners about what the threat allegedly was or why we’re taking this action at this particular moment—these countries are understandably skeptical about the prospect of involving their own boots on the ground or other military assets in an open-ended conflict where we don’t have any clear definition of what success looks like.
This is striking because Kent isn’t just directly contesting Trump’s central rationale for the war—or one of them—that Iran posed an imminent threat. He’s also suggesting that Trump appears ready to support sending in troops, and that this has the makings of the sort of quagmire that Trump campaigned against. Emily, where would Kent be in that sort of information stream? Might he be in a position to know more about the likelihood of a quagmire as well?
Reading Kent’s resignation letter, I was reminded of that infamous Onion article that makes the rounds every once in a while—”Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point.” Look, the letter has some incredibly ugly antisemitic tropes. It evokes some really nasty rhetoric that I frankly recoiled at while reading it. There’s no denying, though, that it also evokes a particular strain within MAGA that, as you rightly note, is very anti-interventionist and very skeptical of open-ended foreign conflicts.
So again, there’s a lot there, and I want to be very clear here that this is not a person who we should hold up as a hero. This is someone who evoked conspiracy theories around government involvement in January 6th. This is someone who has close ties to white supremacists like Nick Fuentes. This is someone who I think, for a whole host of reasons, we should have a lot of skepticism towards.
Sargent: Right. And he’s forcefully saying that the intelligence simply does not support Trump’s main rationale of an imminent threat—and saying, you know what, Trump seems to be on the verge of sending in troops and you’re going to have a quagmire on your hands. That’s what I’m hearing.
Sargent: Absolutely. And to your point, Kent really is an ultra-MAGA figure himself. Now you have MAGA really at war with itself over this conflict. There are figures like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson arguing that the war is just doing Israel’s bidding—I think a lot of that stuff is very anti-Israel and borders on the antisemitic in some of these guys’ cases.
Horne: I am reminded that a lot of these folks are media figures first, and they are extremely adept at manipulating the information economy and even traditional media to advance their objectives—and frankly make a lot of money. This is a great gig that a lot of them have going, and the more outrage that they generate, the more clicks they get, the more they get people tuning in.
Sargent: Well, we have a piece on this up at NewRepublic.com—folks can check it out. But one really interesting dimension to this is that when you have figures like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson saying all this stuff, it’s got all the bad dog whistles in it and so forth. But on some level, they must have swaths of their constituencies who really do not want this war, right?
Horne: And not just MAGA. This war has been spectacularly unpopular from day one. You know, Trump ran on the idea of no more foreign wars, and his foreign policy since taking office has been one of constant aggression, one of constant use of military force where diplomacy might have prevailed. So far he’s been really lucky, frankly. He’s been able to avoid a major attack on the homeland, a major catastrophe. American soldiers have died on his watch, and Lord knows a lot of non-Americans have died as well.
Sargent: Right. And I think it’s important that we are seeing some segment—however big it is—of Trump voters starting to peel off, because it splits the Trump coalition and that has political importance.
Mike Johnson (voiceover): I got all the briefings. We all understood there was clearly an imminent threat—that Iran was very close to the enrichment of nuclear capability and they were building missiles at a pace that no one in the region could keep up with. I don’t know where Joe Kent is getting his information, but he wasn’t in those briefings clearly, because the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and everyone—the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine—they had exquisite intelligence that we understood that this was a serious moment for us. Had the president waited, I am personally convinced that we would have mass casualties of Americans.
Horne: I think Joe Kent is a relatively young figure in American politics—he’s only, I think, 45 years old. And he is one of many folks who, a year and change into the second Trump administration, are looking at how this is going and asking themselves whether this is what they really want to be tied to for the rest of their careers and public lives.
Sargent: 100 percent. And Kent is really at the forefront of this—he’s doing it pretty early, relatively, in the process, which is pretty striking. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack, Spin Class. Emily, wonderful to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Horne: Thanks, Greg.
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