🚨 BREAKING: Speaker Johnson fires back at former NCTC Director Joe Kent — who just resigned — saying Iran was not an “imminent threat”
“I don’t know where Joe Kent is getting this information, but he wasn’t in those briefings, clearly!”
“Had the president waited, we would have… pic.twitter.com/rY3msqh3jc
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 17, 2026
BREAKING: Speaker Johnson fires back at former NCTC Director Joe Kent — who just resigned — saying Iran was not an “imminent threat”
“I don’t know where Joe Kent is getting this information, but he wasn’t in those briefings, clearly!”
“Had the president waited, we would have had mass casualties.”
“That proposition at the end is clearly wrong. I’m on the Gang of 8. I got all the briefings. We all understood there was clearly an imminent threat, that Iran was very close to the enrichment of nuclear capability and they were building missiles at a pace that no one in the region could keep up with.”
“They were far outpacing our allies and friends and us in our defense capability because we had personnel installations, members of the armed services, and civilians in the region.”
“Iran was building up ballistic missiles at such a rapid pace and we knew that their plan was to fire them upon Americans.”
“The Commander-in-Chief and his administration had a very difficult decision to make.”
“The Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and everyone, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Kane, they had exquisite intelligence and we understood that this was a serious moment for us.”
“We had to, the President felt that he had to strike first to prevent those mass casualties.”