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On Thursday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard faced a second round of intense questioning regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the potential threat it poses to the United States. This inquiry comes amid concerns about whether President Trump’s actions in the Middle East were justified by an imminent threat from Tehran.
Gabbard was accompanied by several high-ranking intelligence officials, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, Lt. Gen. William J. Hartman, acting director of the National Security Agency, and Lt. Gen. James H. Adams, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. This hearing, conducted by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, followed a similar session held with the Senate Intelligence Committee the day before.
During the session, Gabbard publicly diverged for the first time from her former aide, Joe Kent, who resigned in protest of the conflict with Iran. However, she remained reserved about her personal stance on the war. When pressed about the intelligence briefings President Trump received concerning the threat from Iran and potential repercussions from U.S. and Israeli actions, Gabbard gave evasive responses.
Here are five key points from the hearing:
Gabbard breaks with Kent
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) questioned Gabbard on her alignment with Kent’s position. Kent, a former counterterrorism director, had resigned earlier in the week, citing his belief that the U.S. had acted against Tehran under Israeli influence.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Stefanik said she “cannot say how much” she disagrees with Kent’s argument and asked Gabbard, who was critical of U.S. foreign interventions in the past, if she agreed with Kent.
“He said a lot of things in that letter. Ultimately, we have provided the president with the intelligence assessments, and the president is elected by the American people and makes his own decisions based on the information that’s available to him,” Gabbard said in response.
“But do you agree with — does that statement he made blaming Israel concern you?” Stefanik followed up.
“Yes,” Gabbard said.
Ratcliffe said during a Wednesday Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that he disagreed with Kent, who argued that Tehran did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S.
US, Israeli objectives diverge
Gabbard said during the hearing that the U.S. and Israel have “different” objectives in their war against Iran.
When asked by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) about how Israel’s goals in the conflict line up with Washington’s, the intelligence chief said the “objectives that have been laid out by the president are different from the objectives that have been laid out” by the Israeli government.
When Castro asked how they are different, Gabbard told lawmakers that Israel is focused on “disabling” the Iranian leadership, while pointing to Trump’s previous remarks that the U.S. goals are to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile launching capability, missile production capability, navy and mine-laying capability.
Castro then asked Gabbard if she knew whether Israel is supportive of Trump’s openness to reach a deal with Iran as the conflict rages on in its third week.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Gabbard said. “I don’t know Israel’s position on that.”
Gabbard doesn’t walk back past statements
Gabbard did not walk back her past comments warning against a war with Iran or her more recent assessments suggesting Iran had not restarted its nuclear program after the U.S. military struck key production facilities last summer.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) grilled Gabbard on her testimony last year that Tehran was not building a nuclear weapon, which at the time prompted the president to say that his intelligence chief was “wrong.”
“Do you stand by that statement?” Gomez asked. “Yes or no.”
“Context matters with that. … Iran had all of the,” Gabbard said, before being cut off.
“It’s an easy answer. You either stand by what you said last year or not,” Gomez said.
“It is a serious question that requires the totality of the information available,” she told Gomez.
Gabbard said during her opening comments at the House and Senate hearings that her testimony to lawmakers “does not represent my personal views or opinions, but rather the assessments of the intelligence community” of the threats against the “United States, our homeland, and our interests.”
Ratcliffe said that since the U.S. military’s strike on Iran’s three premier nuclear facilities in Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan, Tehran has not been able to enrich “a single kilogram” of uranium to 60 percent, but he noted that U.S. intelligence indicates that Iran did not give up on its ambitions to build a nuclear weapon.
Gabbard told lawmakers that the intelligence community has “high confidence” that they know where Iran’s enriched uranium is located.
Ratcliffe said Iran currently has at least 440 kilograms of 60 percent enriched, weapons-grade uranium that would be “capable of putting together” 10 nuclear weapons.
New supreme leader more hard-line than father
Gabbard concurred with Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) that Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is seen as more of a hard-liner than his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in Israeli airstrikes on Feb. 28.
“So hard-line that even some of Iran’s leaders thought he was too aggressive,” Crow, who also sits on the House Armed Services Committee, asked Gabbard. “Isn’t that correct?”
“That is the intelligence community assessment, yes,” Gabbard told Crow, before also confirming that the new supreme leader is close with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their most “hard-line” commanders.
Gabbard said that Mojtaba Khamenei was injured “very severely” in one of the Israeli strikes.
Crow then asked Gabbard if the U.S. intelligence community is less “certain of the positions of Iranian leadership and their intentions” than they were 60 days ago.
“That’s an accurate assessment,” Gabbard said.
Ratcliffe backs Rubio’s justification for strikes
When asked by Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) whether there was any evidence that Iran intended to conduct a preemptive strike against the U.S. prior to the war breaking out, Ratcliffe pointed to a “body of intelligence” suggesting the U.S. would be attacked if a conflict with Israel and Iran kicked off.
“There’s a body of intelligence that we’ll be able to cover in the classified portion of this hearing that does reflect that in the likely event of a conflict between Iran and Israel, that the U.S. would be immediately attacked, regardless of whether the United States stayed out of that conflict.”
Ratcliffe’s remarks support one of the reasons Secretary of State Marco Rubio has provided when discussing what led to the U.S. launching strikes against Iran.
“There absolutely was an imminent threat, and the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us,” Rubio told reporters earlier this month.
Rubio’s remarks drew criticism from figures on both sides of the political spectrum for suggesting Israel forced the U.S. into the war, a claim that both Trump and Rubio have rejected.