Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, 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 posed “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,” said Kent, the former U.S. Army special forces soldier and CIA operator.
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 where 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 Director of National Intelligence 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 aligned 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.
During one campaign, Kent 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 Fuentes.
Kent’s resignation from his position atop the terrorism center comes as the joint U.S.-Israeli aerial war against Tehran continues into its third consecutive week with no apparent end in sight.
His resignation letter claimed that Israeli officials had “deceived” Trump into attacking Iran, though it echoes longstanding antisemitic tropes, and is likely to bring fresh scrutiny to the Trump administration’s shifting justifications for the war.
Initially, the strikes were framed as necessary to prevent Iranian efforts to rebuild a nuclear weapons program Trump has claimed to have “obliterated” with bunker-busting munitions last June.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on March 5 that the decision to attack was made to preemptively degrade Tehran’s ability to retaliate against American bases after an attack by Israel.
Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser, said at the time that the administration “knew there was going to be an Israeli action” that would “precipitate an attack against American forces” that would have been far more deadly if the U.S. did not “preemptively go after them.”
But that same day, Trump contradicted Rubio’s statements during a media availability at the White House after he was asked if Israel had “forced his hand” with their own attack plans.
“Based on the way that the negotiations was going, I think that they were going to attack first. And I didn't want that to happen,” Trump said. “So if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready.”
He also told reporters it was his “opinion that they were going to attack first.”
“They were going to attack if we didn't do it. They were going to attack first, I felt strongly about that,” he said.
The now-former Trump loyalist’s decision also highlights tensions within Trump’s Make America Great Again movement over his decision to launch what could be a costly and long foreign entanglement after years of campaigning against involving America in new foreign wars.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt savaged her ex-administration colleague in a long post on X in which she alleged that his resignation letter contained “many false claims” and scoffed at his allegation that Tehran had not been an “imminent threat” to the U.S.
She claimed Trump “had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first ... compiled from many sources and factors” and stressed that the president “would never make the decision to deploy military assets against a foreign adversary in a vacuum.”
“The Commander-in-Chief determines what does and does not constitute a threat, because he is the one constitutionally empowered to do so - and because the American people went to the ballot box and entrusted him and him alone to make such final judgments,” Leavitt wrote.
She also mocked Kent’s “absurd allegation” that Trump had been misled by Israel or lobbied on Israel’s behalf as “insulting and laughable.”
Asked about Kent’s decision to exit the administration during an appearance in the Oval Office alongside Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Trump called his former employee “a nice guy” who was “very weak on security” despite having nominated him to lead a key institution in America’s counterterrorism infrastructure.
“It's a good thing that he's out, because he said that Iran was not a threat,” he said.
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