Mark Slapinski - March 18, 2026


Trump’s Counterterrorism Chief TURNED On Him


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

174.7281

Word count

814

Sentence count

28

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Trump s case for the Iran war just took a direct hit from his own administration. A top U.S. security official has resigned, and his resignation letter challenges one of the biggest claims made to sell the war to the American public: that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Trump's case for the Iran war just took a direct hit from his own administration.
00:00:04.660 A top U.S. security official has resigned, and his resignation letter challenges one
00:00:10.140 of the biggest claims made to sell the war to the American public, that Iran posed an
00:00:14.820 imminent threat to the United States.
00:00:16.620 This matters because criticism from outside the Trump administration, that's easy to dismiss.
00:00:22.040 But criticism from within the administration, that's not.
00:00:25.380 We just learned, get this, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, has just announced he's resigning.
00:00:33.860 CNN national security reporter Zachary Cohn is joining us right now.
00:00:37.400 Zachary, what more can you tell us about this dramatic development?
00:00:41.100 Yeah, Wolf, this appears to be a significant resignation at the senior-most levels of the Trump intelligence community.
00:00:48.520 This is Joe Kent. He was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
00:00:51.720 he um posting appearing to post on x a resignation letter that he submitted citing misgivings over
00:00:58.880 the trump administration's decision to launch its war with iran trump's own press secretary
00:01:03.440 carolyn levitt made the case that iran posed an imminent threat to the united states this is her
00:01:08.820 speaking earlier this month united states the secretary of state and now i am out here today
00:01:13.620 to explain to you exactly what led the president to make the decision to launch operation epic
00:01:19.320 fury. And President Trump does not make these decisions in a vacuum. This decision to launch
00:01:24.540 this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the
00:01:31.620 United States of America. And the president's feeling based on fact that Iran does pose an 0.94
00:01:37.480 imminent and direct threat to the United States of America, based on the fact that they are the 0.97
00:01:42.120 world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, based on the fact that they were rapidly and aggressively
00:01:47.740 building up their ballistic missile program to give themselves immunity within their country
00:01:55.600 alongside their navy so that inside their country they could continue to create nuclear weapons and 0.96
00:02:02.140 nuclear bombs which would of course pose a risk to americans in the region and even americans one
00:02:08.300 day here at home however kent is poking some serious holes in that narrative according to
00:02:13.480 resignation letter released today iran didn't pose an imminent threat to the united states
00:02:18.680 and the war was actually started due to pressure from israel let me read a little bit from this
00:02:23.160 letter that he wrote to president trump this is joseph kent that he works for the director
00:02:27.320 of national intelligence tulsi gabbard but he writes this he says i cannot in good conscious
00:02:32.840 support the ongoing war in iran iran posed no imminent threat to our nation and it is clear
00:02:38.600 that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. I support 0.99
00:02:44.900 the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you
00:02:51.780 enacted in your first term. Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East
00:02:56.980 were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and
00:03:03.760 prosperity of our nation. And he added this, in your first administration, you understood better
00:03:09.560 than any modern president how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn
00:03:15.480 into never-ending wars. You demonstrated this by killing Qasem Soleimani and by defeating ISIS.
00:03:23.300 Kent is the first high-ranking U.S. official to break ranks with Trump and question the narrative
00:03:28.280 on the Iran war. Now, this guy, he was a huge Trump supporter in the past, and he's definitely
00:03:33.660 not a left-winger or a democrat now this was a guy that fully supported donald trump on top of that
00:03:39.120 he used to work for the cia and he spent time in iraq so this is a guy that has knowledge and
00:03:44.540 experience in middle eastern conflicts this shows that even people within the trump administration
00:03:49.280 aren't buying the case that the president made to the american people this is a huge blow in
00:03:54.560 credibility to an administration that's already struggling to maintain credibility the claims
00:03:59.800 Ken made today aligned with previous reporting by Reuters, which stated that Iran did not pose
00:04:05.160 an imminent threat to the United States. Put it this way, when your own senior counterterrorism
00:04:10.100 official resigns and publicly challenges the narrative, the case that you made for a war
00:04:14.880 in a foreign country, people start to wonder whether or not they've been lied to. This is
00:04:19.880 what makes Joe Ken's resignation especially dangerous for Donald Trump. Donald Trump can
00:04:24.240 easily brush off criticism from outside of his administration, from Democrats, from leaders of
00:04:29.520 foreign countries, he can easily just push that away. But it's a lot harder to do that when the
00:04:34.500 criticism is coming from inside the house. This makes Trump look really bad.