By Idrees Ali and Jonathan Landay
(Reuters) -The head of the Pentagon’s intelligence agency has been fired, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Friday, a move the top Democratic lawmaker on the Senate intelligence committee slammed as the latest example of politicizing intelligence by President Donald Trump’s administration.
It was not immediately clear why Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency, was fired. But he is the latest senior military official to have been removed under U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The official, who confirmed Kruse’s removal on condition of anonymity, did not give a reason.
“The firing of yet another senior national security official underscores the Trump administration’s dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country,” said U.S. Senator Mark Warner, who is the vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The firing was first reported by the Washington Post.
LATEST FIRING
The move is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to penalize current and former military, intelligence and law enforcement officials whose views have been seen as at odds with Trump.
In April, Trump fired General Timothy Haugh as director of the National Security Agency, in a purge that included more than a dozen staff at the White House national security council.
Hegseth has also gone after uniformed military officials at the Pentagon. In February, he fired Air Force General C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was dismissed along with five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of U.S. military leadership.
The chief of the U.S. Air Force made a surprise announcement on Monday that he planned to retire only half way through his tenure.
While it was not clear exactly why Kruse was fired, it comes after a preliminary DIA assessment leaked to the news media that said the June 22 U.S. airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities had set Tehran’s program back only a few months, a finding contradicting Trump’s claim that the targets were “obliterated.”
The leaking of the assessment, which Reuters also reported, enraged Trump. The White House denounced the top-secret assessment as “flat out wrong,” and Trump attacked CNN, the New York Times and other outlets that obtained the report, calling them “scum” and “FAKE NEWS.”
The Trump administration has conducted a sweeping purge of U.S. military and intelligence officers and diplomats that it says is part of an effort to slash the size of the U.S. government, shrinking the federal budget and punishing what it describes as the “politicization or weaponization” of intelligence.
News of Kruse’s firing came two days after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that she was revoking on Trump’s orders the security clearances of 37 current and former U.S. intelligence professionals.
This week’s security clearance revocations were only the latest of scores of such revocations of Trump’s second term. They have included Biden, who defeated Trump in the 2020 election, and former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost last year’s vote.
Earlier this week Gabbard also announced the first major overhaul of her office since its creation, slashing personnel by more than 40% by October 1 and saving more than $700 million per year.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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