English transcript

...been reported out there. I'm curious for

what you heard about the way that that went

down, many of those critical meetings in the

Situation Room. Yeah, you know, I think the

imagery that's been publicly released is very

telling, um, where you had one small group that

was down in Mar-a-Lago that night, and then

you had the rest up at the Situation Room at

the time. Um, look, in the lead-up to the 12-day

war, we, we were having very robust debates

that were part of the National Security Council,

uh, process. The, uh, the Principals Small Group,

we'd have the Deputies Committee meetings, we'd

have very robust debates with all 18 intelligence

agencies with the Joint Chiefs, uh, staff, uh,

etc. And that, that played out over the course

of, you know, about, about a month in the lead-up

to the 12-day war. And to include ahead of Midnight

Hammer, where a lot of us said, okay, fine,

if you, you bomb these sites, um, that's all

well and good, we take out Iran's ability to

enrich, that meets our strategic objective.

Problem is the Israelis are gonna come right

back to us in, you know, a couple months and

demand more because their, their goal is regime

change. Like, they're not beating around the

bush about this. Um, and so that was known.

And so from, from my optic, in the lead-up to

this last iteration, that process didn't play

out. And people can say, oh, Kent doesn't know

'cause he just, he just, he wasn't invited,

but I can tell you the robust debate with the

Deputies Committees, National Security Council,

that, that just, that simply wasn't happening.

So to non-nerd speak, I think this is important.

What you just laid out is a normal process.

Deputies Committee, Principals Committee, NSC,

all options and views are presented to the President.

Even the Iraq War, the most disastrous thing,

uh, in our, in our, at least in my lifetime,

that played out that way. That's how it did.

You can go and you can read about it. What you

are talking about is effectively a bespoke process,

which played out with some advisors down in

Mar-a-Lago, others in the Situation Room. I

guess you are confirming, by the way, the White

House told us that there was nothing to be seen