Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island told ABC News that President Donald Trump’s rebuke of his own intelligence chief is “shocking” and suggested Trump is disavowing his intelligence community for political reasons.
“It’s shocking to me that the president would dismiss his intelligence chief, who he picked,” Reed, a Democrat who is a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told ABC News.
“This might not be a question of intelligence. This might be a question of political positioning, regardless of the intelligence,” Reed said.
Weeks ago, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard testified that the intelligence community continues to assess “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
On Friday, Trump said both Gabbard and his intelligence community are flat out “wrong.”
Trump is “in a position now where he’s contemplating an attack against Iran, and he has to have the conclusion that they do in fact have a nuclear – or the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon very quickly and the intent to do so – so that I think is prompting him to reject the intelligence community’s conclusions,” Reed said.
Reed added that if Gabbard made a false statement in her testimony, “there would be an obligation to correct the record immediately, not just in the wake of this activity by the Israelis to suddenly conclude that she was totally wrong.”
-ABC News’ Selina Wang
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