Top intelligence officials will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, an opportunity for lawmakers to ask about the intelligence provided to the Trump administration before the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran.
On Tuesday, Joe Kent, a top counterterrorism official and a deputy to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, resigned, suggesting in a blistering letter criticizing the war that Iran did not “pose an imminent threat to the United States.”
Mr. Kent’s comments are likely to be a focus of questions from Democrats and criticism from Republicans in the Senate on Wednesday morning, then in the House on Thursday, where Mr. Kent will appear at a second hearing.
“I’ve seen absolutely no evidence that there was an imminent threat of attack by Iran,” said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “There is no evidence, at least that was provided to the committees or that I’m aware of produced by the intelligence community to suggest that they were close to producing a nuclear weapon, or had the intent to produce a nuclear weapon.”
The leaders of intelligence agencies customarily appear before congressional intelligence committees once a year to discuss assessments of various threats.
During President Trump’s two terms, the hearings and accompanying declassified intelligence assessments have been dangerous ground for spy chiefs — especially when facing questions about Iran. In 2019, Mr. Trump posted on social media that his own intelligence leaders should “go back to school,” after they made comments about Iran he considered “passive and naive.”
Last year, Ms. Gabbard read out an assessment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, only to have Mr. Trump criticize her comments in the run-up to U.S. military strikes on the country’s nuclear facilities last June.
Mr. Kent’s resignation and his comments about Israel’s influence on the Trump administration are likely to make this year’s hearings as fraught as ever.
Ms. Gabbard will be accompanied on Wednesday by John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director; Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director; and top officials from the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency.
The House Intelligence Committee was supposed to hold the first hearing on Tuesday, but the session was moved to Thursday after storms in the Washington area delayed lawmakers’ travel.
Mr. Himes said he planned to question the officials about an uptick in recent attempted terror attacks in the United States, Ms. Gabbard’s presence during an F.B.I. raid in Georgia to collect voting records, and the intelligence about Iran ahead of the U.S.-Israeli war.
Mr. Himes said that Iran has always been dangerous, but that the Trump administration chose to strike when the country was arguably the weakest it had been in a decade.
Mr. Trump’s shifting explanations of the war have put the intelligence chiefs in an awkward position, as they try to avoid angering the president.
But Mr. Himes said that the intelligence leaders had an obligation to testify.
“If you’re one of these intelligence chiefs, you’re in a terrible position,” Mr. Himes said. “Because you risk the absolute certainty that you’re going to contradict the president, because the president says so many different things.”
He added: “They have an obligation on this most serious of topics to be honest with the American people.”
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
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