00:00Joe Kent, the director of the American National Counter-Terrorism Center, has announced his resignation.
00:06He cited his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran, saying he cannot in good conscience back the
00:14Trump's administration's war.
00:16Now, joining me now is Katavan Gorjastani from the International Affairs desk.
00:21The big question is, how significant is this resignation, Katavan?
00:25It's extremely significant for three main reasons.
00:28The first one is that this is the first top Trump administration officials in the second term to resign and
00:37to resign citing policy differences.
00:41So that is pretty significant on its own.
00:44The second thing is because of who he is.
00:47This is not some carryover from a previous administration.
00:51This person cannot be dismissed as a woke general by some of Trump's supporters.
00:57This is a former Green Beret, two decades in the Army Special Forces, paramilitary officer for the CIA.
01:04And he's not an old-school Republican.
01:07He's a super Trump supporter.
01:09And he says it in his letter.
01:11I supported the values and the foreign policies you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024.
01:17He was handpicked by Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate just last summer to come in.
01:25And it was part of a broader effort by the Trump administration 2.0 to put people, loyalists, people who
01:32were partisan and who would be loyal to Donald Trump in these official positions,
01:39especially in the intelligence community that Joe Kent was part of.
01:44And finally, of course, the main reason why this is significant is for the justification that Joe Kent gives to
01:52his resignation.
01:53And I'll just read two very important lines from his letter.
01:57The first one is the major explanation.
02:00He says, Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, which is the justification that the U.S. has put
02:06forward for going to strike Iran.
02:08And it is clear that we started this war due to the pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.
02:16The second important line, until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap.
02:23These two things really show a new rift among Donald Trump's base, among MAGA, Make America Great Again supporters,
02:33those who are following Donald Trump and those who are a little bit more ideological and who believed Donald Trump
02:39when he was saying,
02:40no more wars in the Middle East, no forever wars, isolationism, America first.
02:48And Joe Kent really is the first major public consequence of this growing rift,
02:56a rift that is based on the foreign wars, on intervening abroad, but also on support for Israel,
03:03which is something that the old Republican Party was very much staunchly in favor of.
03:08This fringe or this wing of the MAGA movement is very much not that pro-Israel.
03:15And this letter by Joe Kent really puts all of this into the spotlight.
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