Johnson: Iran threat was real, former NCTC Director Joe Kent “wasn’t in the briefings”… Leavitt: Claim that Iran posed no imminent threat is false and pushed by Democrats and liberal media.

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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.”

Karoline Leavitt

@PressSec
There are many false claims in this letter but let me address one specifically: that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

This is the same false claim that Democrats and some in the liberal media have been repeating over and over.

As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first.

This evidence was compiled from many sources and factors. President Trump would never make the decision to deploy military assets against a foreign adversary in a vacuum.

Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

The Iranian regime is evil. It proudly killed Americans, waged war against our country, and openly threatened us all the way up to the launch of Operation Epic Fury.

Iran was aggressively expanding their short-range ballistic missiles to combine with their naval assets to give themselves immunity – meaning they would have a degree of a capabilities that would give them immunity to hold us and the rest of the world hostage.

The regime aimed to use those ballistic missiles as a shield to continue achieving their ultimate goal – nuclear weapons.

The President, through his top negotiators, gave the regime every single possible opportunity to abandon this unacceptable course by permanently giving up their nuclear ambitions in exchange for sanctions relief, free nuclear fuel, and potential economic partnerships with our country.

But they would not say yes to peace because obtaining nuclear weapons was their fundamental goal.

President Trump ultimately made the determination that a joint attack with Israel would greatly reduce the risk to American lives that would come from a first strike by the terrorist Iranian regime and address this imminent threat to America’s national security interests.

All of this led to President Trump arriving at the determination that this military operation was necessary for U.S. national security, which is why he launched the massively successful Operation Epic Fury.

The Commander-in-Chief determines what does and does not constitute a threat, because he is the one constitutionally empowered to do so – and because the American people went to the ballot box and entrusted him and him alone to make such final judgments.

And finally, the absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable. President Trump has been remarkably consistent and has said for DECADES that Iran can NEVER possess a nuclear weapon.

As someone who actually witnesses President Trump’s decision-making process on a daily basis, I can attest to the fact that he is always looking to do what’s in the best interest of the United States of America — period.

America First.