‘I always thought he was weak on security,’ President Donald Trump said of Joe Kent, the National Counterterrorism Center head who stepped down Tuesday
The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, resigned on Tuesday with a long-winded letter denouncing Operation Epic Fury and arguing that the president initiated military action against Iran “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” The same forces, he said, were responsible for his late wife’s 2019 death in “a war manufactured by Israel,” though records show she died in an ISIS attack during the Syrian civil war.
Kent, in a resignation letter to President Donald Trump that he then posted to social media, said he supported the America First foreign policy the president had campaigned on, citing the strike that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, though he said at the time the strike would lead to “endless war.”
“[H]igh-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,” Kent said Tuesday.
Trump said at a press conference Tuesday that, while Kent was a “nice guy,” it is a “good thing that he’s out.”
“I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security,” the president said.
Former Trump White House aide Taylor Budowich slammed Kent as a “crazed egomaniac who was often at the center of national security leaks, while rarely (never?) producing any actual work.”
Kent’s resignation comes three weeks after the United States and Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran that has destroyed the terror state’s navy and air force, destroyed its missile and drone programs, and killed Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei and most of his top leaders.
It also comes in the wake of several attacks in the United States in recent weeks. A terrorist gunman drove a truck full of explosives into a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Mich., on Thursday before engaging in a firefight with security guards and shooting himself, according to the FBI. The gunman, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, was the brother of a Hezbollah commander, according to the Israel Defense Forces. The attacker behind the deadly shooting at Old Dominion University last week pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support to ISIS. A suspected gunman who killed 2 and wounded 14 in a shooting in Austin, Texas, wore a sweatshirt that read “Property of Allah” and a shirt bearing the Iranian flag. Authorities found a Quran in the suspect’s car and photos of Islamic Republic leaders in his apartment. Days later, two ISIS-inspired terror suspects attempted to detonate explosives at an anti-Islam protest in New York City, with one of the suspects shouting “Allahu Akbar” during his arrest.
Kent’s resignation letter echoed statements from fringe figures who have sought to argue that Israel dragged the United States into war with Iran. Tucker Carlson, an isolationist podcaster, has said he has a close relationship with Kent and views him as one of the few non-interventionists who has “some ability to change the country’s orientation on foreign policy.”
Neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes said Kent, who mounted two failed congressional campaigns in 2022 and 2024, reached out privately seeking Fuentes’s support during his House race.
“I’m on the phone with Joe, and I said, ‘Look, we support you, and we want to do everything we can to help you. We want to have my followers knock on doors for you. We want to boost your social media. Anything that you need, we want to help you,'” Fuentes recounted to Tucker Carlson in an interview last year.
“I said, and we don’t even want to be publicly associated, I said, because we know that that might hurt you,” Fuentes added. “The only thing that we ask in return is you can’t disavow me if the media asks, and you can say whatever you need to say, but you can’t disavow.”
Kent acknowledged in 2022 that he had a phone meeting with Fuentes about the campaign. However, he said the two never entered into an agreement and said he wasn’t aware of Fuentes’s anti-Semitic and racist views.
The media highlighted Kent’s fondness for conspiracy theories and ties to extremists when he was nominated. Those views were downplayed when he broke with Trump on Tuesday. A New York Times article on Kent’s confirmation battle in July described him in the opening paragraph as a “contentious choice to be the nation’s top counterterrorism official” who “has embraced conspiracy theories and had links to extremist groups.” A report on his resignation casts him as a credible advocate for “a more restrained foreign policy inside the administration,” making a brief mention of his “penchant for conspiracy theories” in the 10th paragraph.
Kent says in his letter that his late wife Shannon, a Navy cryptologist who died in Syria in 2019, perished “in a war manufactured by Israel.” She was one of four Americans killed by a suicide bomber at a popular American restaurant in Aleppo. ISIS took credit for the attack.
While Kent claimed the Syrian civil war was “manufactured by Israel,” the United States, under President Barack Obama, intervened in the conflict years before Israel became involved. The conflict broke out in 2011 after mass public uprisings against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad spiraled into a civil war that eventually involved ISIS. Israel maintained a policy of strict neutrality in Syria until 2017, three years after the United States was embroiled in the conflict.
Kent’s current wife, Heather Kaiser, has written for the Grayzone, an anti-war publication that has a pro-Assad and pro-Russia editorial line. The website’s managing editor reportedly received payments from the Iranian state-run news network PressTV, according to the Washington Post.
In 2023, she wrote an article based on her own “independent audit” of U.S. aid to Kyiv during the Russia-Ukraine war. The report questioned a “series of wasteful, highly unusual expenditures.”
