Trump’s counterterrorism chief, whose own wife was killed by ISIS, quits over Iran War saying Tehran posed ‘no imminent threat’

Joe Kent, the former U.S. Army special forces soldier and CIA operator turned National Counterterrorism Center director, has resigned from his post over President Donald Trump’s decision to take the U.S. to war with Iran.

Kent announced the move in a post on X, writing he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” because Iran “no imminent threat to our nation.”

He added that it was “clear” that the U.S. war on Iran had been started “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

In an accompanying resignation letter addressed to Trump, Kent accused “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” of having “deployed a misinformation campaign” to undermine Trump’s policies and “ encourage a war with Iran.”

He told Trump that an “echo chamber” had been used to “deceive” him into believing Iran had been an “imminent threat” to the U.S. and that attacking would lead to 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,” he said.

Kent referenced his history as a combat veteran — and as a widower whose Navy cryptanalyst wife had been killed in an ISIS bombing in Syria — while stating that he could not 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,” though he did so with the use of further antisemitic tropes by suggesting that the U.S. and NATO campaign against ISIS had been “manufactured by Israel.”

Continuing to address Trump directly, Kent continued: “I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for. The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos.”

“You hold the cards,” he added.

The former Army warrant officer’s decision to quit his post comes less than a year after the Senate narrowly confirmed him after a bruising, six-month confirmation battle in which Democratic senators — including those from his home state of Washington — slammed him as “patently unqualified” and called him a “conspiracy theorist who espouses white supremacist views.”

While his confirmation was pending before the Senate, he joined the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as a senior aide to DNI Tulsi Gabbard.

He was one of the Trump administration officials who participated in a now-infamous March 2025 Signal chat started by then-White House National Security Adviser Mike Walz that inadvertently included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic while participants discussed classified war plans.

Two months later, Kent reportedly used his authority as a senior aide to Gabbard to pressure intelligence analysts to change an assessment of purported links between the Venezuelan government and the street gang Tren de Aragua so it better alined with the Trump administration’s policies.

His time in the administration followed a stint as a foreign policy adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign and a four-year span during which he ran two losing campaigns for a Washington congressional seat.

In 2022, he earned the GOP nomination for the Evergreen State’s third district after winning a primary challenge against then-Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler, one of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after he fomented a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol in a last-ditch effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

During that campaign, he was accused of spreading conspiracy theories after he called the Covid vaccine an “experimental gene therapy” and had to disavow past associations with known white nationalists such as “groyper” activist Nick Fuentez.

He narrowly lost the general election that year to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez by a margin of 2,629 votes. Two years later, she defeated him handily in a rematch.

More follows…