Inconvenient truths don’t go unpunished in the Trump administration.
It’s a lesson that Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse learned the hard way on Friday, as The Washington Post reported that he’s been fired from his position as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The DIA under Kruse was responsible for the classified preliminary report about the U.S.’s June strike on Iran, which gave President Donald Trump much grief once it leaked to the press, as it painted a starkly different picture of the attack than his administration had.
Though the report expressly acknowledged its preliminary nature, its findings—that the strike set Iran’s alleged nuclear program back by only a few months, at most—put a damper on Hegseth and Trump’s insistences that they had totally decimated their targets. The president had referred to the attack as “one of the most successful military strikes in history,” comparable to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hegseth axed Kruse for “loss of confidence” per the Post.
The ouster is just the latest example of the Trump administration shooting the messenger. After the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a troubling July jobs report, the president fired BLS chief Erika McEntarfer, appointing in her place a MAGA partisan who just so happened to have been at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
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