Tulsi Gabbard, who warned of war with Iran, now defends Trump’s decision to attack – as it happened

Tulsi Gabbard, who warned of war with Iran, now says it was up to Trump to decide if Iran was 'an imminent threat'
Tulsi Gabbard , the Director of National Intelligence, responded to the resignation of her deputy, Joe Kent , in a statement that does not refer to him directly, but takes issue with a central claim of his resignation letter: that “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” use misinformation to deceive Donald Trump “into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States”.

Gabbard wrote on social media that because Trump was “overwhelmingly elected by the American people to be our President and Commander in Chief… he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat”.

Her office, she added, “is responsible for helping coordinate and integrate all intelligence to provide the President and Commander in Chief with the best information available to inform his decisions.”
“After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion,” Gabbard concluded.

As soon as she posted her statement, observers noted that Gabbard did not say that she disagreed with Kent.

Jonathan Karl , an ABC News correspondent who frequently speaks with Trump, pointed out that, “nowhere in this statement, does she say that she agrees that Iran posed an imminent threat — or that the intelligence supports such a conclusion.”
Gabbard’s reticence to make her own view of the war clear is a sharp departure from comments she made during her run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, when she made campaign ads claiming that Trump wanted to start a war with Iran and warned Fox News viewers that “War with Iran would make Iraq/Afghanistan wars seem like a picnic”.

During that campaign, Gabbard also told supporters Trump had set “a dangerous precedent” in Iran by designating “the military of another country a terrorist organization”, and boasted that, as a congresswoman, she had introduced legislation, the No More Presidential Wars Act, that “would make it an impeachable offense for any president to bypass Congress and to unilaterally go and start waging a war in another country.”
When Trump ordered the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, in 2020, Gabbard took to the floor of the House to denounce the killing as an act of war.

“President Trump has committed an illegal and unconstitutional act of war, pushing our Nation headlong into a war with Iran without any authorization from Congress, a war that would be so costly and devastating, it would make our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look like a picnic,” Gabbard said then .

“In doing so, he has undermined our national security”.

Last year, after her confirmation as the national intelligence director, Gabbard posted a video clip on her personal YouTube channel headlined: “ Tulsi Gabbard On Preventing Conflict With Iran ”.

In the video, an interview with the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, Gabbard said: “we have people who are working within the intelligence community… who are coopted by the military-industrial complex, abusing their position to feed or manipulate intelligence, as we saw with the Iraq war, to start a new war.”
“The work that gets done in places like this every single day has that power, to be the fodder, the fuel, the seed that can lead to yet another unnecessary war,” she added.

On Tuesday, as he dismissed Kent’s claim that Iran posed no imminent threat to the US, Trump said repeatedly, in a confusing, roundabout manner, that Iran was an imminent threat because its leaders were just “two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon” and “they would’ve used it” before he ordered B-2 bomber strikes last year on its uranium enrichment sites.

The day before, the president made the entirely unsourced claim that Iran was not only pursuing nuclear weapons but planned to use them to first destroy Israel and then attack the United States, an idea for which he has presented no evidence at all.

There is no public evidence that Iran was ever weeks away from obtaining nuclear weapons, and US intelligence agencies reported in 2007 that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 .

The administration has presented no evidence that Iran ever restarted that weapons program or planned to attack the US.