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National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent says Trump "started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby".
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In a letter posted on Tuesday to his X account, National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent said that Iran posed "no imminent threat" to the US and claimed that the Trump administration "started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby".
Kent, 45, is a US special forces and CIA veteran whose wife, navy cryptologic technician Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria in 2019.
The White House has dismissed the letter as having "many false claims" about Iran.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said that he thought Kent was a "nice guy" but "weak on security".
Trump said that Kent's resignation letter made him realise "it was a good thing that he's out" and that he disagreed with Kent's assessment of the Iranian threat.
With his departure, Kent becomes the most high-profile figure from within the Trump administration to publicly criticise the US-Israeli operation in Iran.
In the letter, Kent said that had previously supported Trump's foreign policy platform and until last year believed that he had "had understood that the wars in the Middle East that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation."
Additionally, Kent alleged that "high-ranking Israeli officials" and influential US journalists had sowed "misinformation" that caused Trump to undermine his "America First" platform.
"This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States," the letter continued. "This was a lie."
Kent, a long-time supporter of Trump's who unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice, was nominated by the president early in his administration and narro
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