We must have been paying insufficient attention to the appointment of Joe Kent as head of the National Counterterrorism Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Yesterday Kent made himself a hero of the mainstream media when he resigned in protest over President Trump’s leadership in the Iran conflict. One has to read the fine print, however, to discover there is a little more to it. The guy is a barking dog of the Tucker Carlson school.
After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.
I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this… pic.twitter.com/prtu86DpEr
— Joe Kent (@joekent16jan19) March 17, 2026
According to Kent, Israel is leading Trump by the nose. But wait! There’s more, and worse. Trump has lost his way:
I support the values and the foreign policy that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, [and] 2024, which you enacted in your first term. Until June of 2025, you understood that wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.
In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars. You demonstrated this by killing Qassem Soleimani and by defeating ISIS.
At Tablet’s daily newsletter The Scroll, Park MacDougald cruelly wonders: if Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the United States, how was it justified to kill Qassem Soleimani? At the time of the strike, Kent wrote in an op-ed for Fox News that Iranian retaliation for the killing would “most likely escalate into a full-scale U.S.-Iran war.”
Kent has gone full Tucker. According to Kent, while Trump once understood the value of restraint, he has since been bamboozled by, well, the wily you know who:
Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that you should strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.
As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.
I pray that you will reflect on what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for…
Yes, of course, we know who that is. Park MacDougald observes:
It’s particularly notable that Kent says his first wife, Shannon, died in a war “manufactured by Israel.” Shannon Kent was killed in 2019 in Manbij, Syria, in a suicide bombing by the Islamic State—that is to say, as part of Trump’s first-term counter-ISIS mission, which Kent praised earlier in his letter as an example of Trump’s judicious use of military power. About the only people who claim that the counter-ISIS campaign was “manufactured by Israel” are those who buy the Kremlin-and-IRGC-confected narrative that it was cover for attempted “regime change” in Syria—which is obviously the crew that Kent is now running with.
Alana Goodman has more on Kent’s exit in her Washington Free Beacon story.
If it were so inclined, the mainstream press could make a scandal out of the fact that this raving anti-Semitic lunatic occupied high office in the national security lineup of the Trump administration. However, the mainstream press does not appear to be so inclined.
We would be derelict to omit Kent’s scheduled appearance today on the Tucker Carlson Show. You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to know that would be his next move. His letter of resignation is a preview of coming attractions.
How Kent went proves beyond a reasonable doubt that, much as we would like to ignore him, Tucker Carlson is not to be ignored. Perhaps Vice President Vance can be moved to comment on Kent’s departure, if not on his buddy Tucker. That would be asking too much.
