00:00Well, International Affairs commentator Doug Herbert is with me here on set.
00:03Doug, Joe Kent going. Highly public defection.
00:06How significant do you think it is both for Donald Trump and indeed for his whole MAGA movement?
00:11Significant because of who he was and his position and what he had access to, i.e. very high quality
00:17real-time intelligence.
00:19He was in an office that you might not have even heard of.
00:21You've probably never heard his name, Stuart, if I were betting man here.
00:25Probably.
00:26Before yesterday.
00:26He was – his National Counterterrorism Center basically was under the aegis of the Office of National Intelligence, which is
00:33headed by his boss, Tulsi Gabbard, a MAGA diehard Trump loyalist if ever.
00:39There was one.
00:40And it basically gleans together specialists from a whole bunch of agencies, right, including the FBI, including the CIA, including
00:47the Department of Defense, including the Department of Homeland Security.
00:49They all come together and they give sort of an amalgam, if you will, of intelligence threads to try to
00:56get a good analysis.
00:57So he knew what was going on, presumably as best as anyone in the top ranks of the U.S.
01:02intelligence community.
01:03So when he says that there was no imminent threat on the eve of the war, that is something that
01:09Republicans and even his critics in the Democratic camp, and he had no shortage of those critics, are taking seriously.
01:15Look, this is a man, like I said, who did not exactly have a good reputation among Democrats.
01:20Shortly after he was confirmed, one Democrat said, you know, basically that this guy was a conspiracy-wielding white supremacist.
01:28This is a guy who believed that the 2020 elections were stolen.
01:31He believes that the FBI may have had a hand in orchestrating the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
01:36He's a guy who thinks that Joe Biden's COVID health chief, Anthony Fauci, should be tried for murder.
01:43All of these things.
01:44He's an arch-conspiracy guy.
01:46He is MAGA if ever there was MAGA, at the center of what's called the MAGA-verse.
01:50But this is what I'm saying.
01:51They all agree on one thing.
01:52Whether you're his harshest critic or a Republican who sort of, you know, respected what he did,
01:58you say that when he says that he saw no imminent threat of intelligence, that's something that is going to
02:03make you sit up and take notice.
02:05Like I said, he saw the real-time intelligence.
02:07He wrote in his resignation he could not with a clear conscience support this war with Iran.
02:11And he saw Donald Trump having taken that decision to go to war.
02:16Contrary to what Donald Trump's communications people and his inner circle have said,
02:20he sees that Donald Trump was brought to war under a lot of pressure by what he said were high
02:25-ranking Israeli officials
02:26and, quote, influential members of the American media.
02:29So he was also taking a swipe at journalists along the way.
02:32So that no imminent threat claim.
02:34Others, even outside as well, the U.S., certainly agreeing with that.
02:38Yeah.
02:38First off, the inside the U.S., Richard Blumenthal, who is a senator from Washington,
02:44a senator who sits on the Armed Services Committee, he's been to a lot of briefings,
02:48closed briefings that we don't know what's happening inside, about this intelligence on the Iran war.
02:53And he says he's come away from those briefings with more questions than answers.
02:56And he says that he sees, in his judgment, he has no evidence of an imminent threat.
03:02But what's more interesting is the Guardian newspaper in Britain has revealed that Britain's top national security advisor,
03:10the man with access, Jonathan Powell, actually attended the final talks between the U.S. and Iran on the eve
03:17of the February 28th strikes.
03:19And what he came away from those briefings, and he was there with a small clutch of technical nuclear experts
03:25that he brought along,
03:26British experts, what he came away with was a sense that there was a real significant offer from Tehran on
03:33the table,
03:34not perfect, still a lot of outstanding questions about access to nuclear sites by inspectors, so on and so forth.
03:40But saying that he believes that the offer put on the table by Iran was good enough, surprisingly good enough
03:46and significant enough,
03:47to prevent a rush to war.
03:49In other words, an intelligence expert, security advisor outside the U.S. who was in a party to those talks,
03:56and this reporting was confirmed by three high-level sources to the Guardian newspaper,
04:00he says there was no need to rush to war.
04:02There was – he's basically corroborating what Joe Kent said in his resignation letter, no imminent threat.
04:08What about Donald Trump, his reaction to all this?
04:10Lashing out, as he does.
04:12If someone dares to dissent from Donald Trump, dares to put a kink in his armor, dares to threaten his
04:20ego, his vanity, his ambitions,
04:22his transactional, brilliant, deal-making genius, anyone who dares to criticize that or puncture a hole in it
04:28or suggest that there's something a little off in his reasoning or his motives,
04:31you are privy to a full-on, full-frontal assault, not just from Donald Trump,
04:35but those in his inner orbit still who tend to circle the wagons.
04:39Remember, he has said that, you know, he seemed like a nice guy, thought he was a nice guy,
04:44but he's always been weak on security.
04:46So the first reaction has been to sort of chip away at his credibility, character assassination, reputational assassination.
04:53Others in the Republican ranks, full diehard MAGA supporters,
04:57because Joe Kent said that Donald Trump, in his view, was pressured by Israel, Israeli lobbies.
05:05They're trying to cast this as anti-Semitism.
05:07So saying you have an anti-Semite, basically.
05:10They're trying to basically do reputational damage and so much denigrate his credibility as to, you know, negate anything he
05:19says.
05:19But the fact of the matter, even the critics know that he saw the intelligence, he was there.
05:23There's only so much character assassination you can do.
05:25But the Donald Trump basic instinct, the default option is to someone criticizes you,
05:31someone questions your judgment or your reasoning or your motives, you destroy them, you destroy their reputation,
05:38you do a tag team effort among everyone in that MAGA orbit.
05:42The only problem is there are a lot of people now in that MAGAverse that are willing to talk back,
05:48including some big influencers such as Tucker Carlson, not a high-level intelligence official,
05:53someone outside there, but someone who has millions and millions of people who follow him loyally and listen to what
05:58he says.
05:59Thanks very much, Dr. Kerber, our international affairs commentator here on France 24.
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