A resignation on principle that rocked the Beltway this week isn’t looking so principled after all.
When Joe Kent, the now-former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, very publicly announced on Tuesday that he’s quitting over the Iran war, he claimed he could not serve “in good conscience” when he believed Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation.”
That’s lunacy, just considering the murderous mullahs’ history alone, but a resurfaced social media post makes it look like a lie, too — and from a man accused of being a high-level leak.
In a 2020 post on the platform then known as Twitter, in fact, Kent made exactly the opposite argument.
Here’s a screen shot, in case it’s mysteriously disappeared at some point:
“I personally think we should have crushed their ballistic & nuke capes, but Trump has a plan, he has definitely earned the confidence of any clear eyed observer,” Kent wrote on Jan. 19, 2020, in response to a since-deleted post.
At the time, Kent was an Army Green Beret who’d served more than 20 years, including combat deployments to Iraq, according to a Forbes profile published on Tuesday.
He was also a Gold Star widower whose wife, Shannon, had been a linguist and cryptographer who served with the Navy SEALS. She was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Syria in 2019, Forbes reported.
So, to be clear, he’s paid his dues — and then some. He’s given far more to this country in terms of service than most Americans have, by far. He’s risked more. And he’s lost more.
That demands both admiration and respect. There’s no question about that.
What it does not merit, though, is a free pass for Kent’s slanderous going-out-the-door accusations against the Trump administration, or the undeniably anti-Semitic tone of the “arguments” he presented.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote.
“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.”
First of all, this war that the U.S. supposedly “started” at the behest of the Jews has been going on since Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979. Granted, that was a year before Kent was born, and long before he put on the uniform of the United States Army, but a man who’s lived the life he has should understand that.
Second, claiming Iran is not an “imminent threat” to the United States either employs a dishonestly flexible definition of “imminent” and “threat,” or simply disregards the meaning of words entirely.
The Islamic Republic has been a cancer on the global body politic for almost half a century — and a particular enemy of the United States, the country it calls “the Great Satan.” Its existence is a threat the way a malignant tumor is a threat.
The current military action by the United States and Israel is aimed at excising that cancer. It’s a surgery that’s long overdue.
Sane men and women can see that if they try just a little bit.
Kent is clearly not interested in trying — in fact, if reports are true, he’s more interested in seeking out companions who are as delusional as he is, to the point where he was allegedly funneling administration information to friendly ears in the alternative media.
Mark Levin — author, radio host and one of the great conservative voices of this or any other generation — took to the social media platform X on Wednesday to accuse Kent of leaking news of Levin’s meeting with Trump in June 2024 to the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a man whose anti-Israel positions become more pronounced by the day.
I know what my grandfather would say about what Kent wrote in his letter. He was a Marine. He fought on Iwo Jima. He was Jewish. He’d be furious.
I know for a fact Kent leaked to Tucker Carlson a meeting the President had with me, at the President’s request, which Carlson in…
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) March 18, 2026
(Yes, Carlson was a conservative star for years and a favorite of right-thinking writers at publications like The Western Journal. But when facts change, opinions change. Now, the guy who claims demanding an Iranian “unconditional surrender” means Americans raping Iranian women at will might want to look into the life of Charles Lindbergh to see how appeasing anti-Semitic foreign dictators works out for former American heroes.)
Of course, Levin’s word might not count for much with Kent, Carlson, and Co. — Levin being a Jew, and all, as well as one of those “influential members of the American media” Kent doesn’t think much of.
But he isn’t the only one claiming Kent was taking his discontent out by talking out of school.
Fox News’ Aishah Hasnie — a Pakistan-born Muslim, for what it’s worth — reported Tuesday that Kent was a “known leaker” who’d been “cut out of POTUS intelligence briefings months ago.”
He wasn’t, in short, trusted by his co-workers in the Trump administration to keep in-house talk in-house, per that report.
Considering he was a “counterterrorism director” who somehow concluded that the world’s undisputed champion of state-sponsored terror posed no “imminent threat” to the United States, he shouldn’t have been trusted by his co-workers, or the president, to do in-house work at all.
And considering that he supposedly reached that conclusion six years after publicly stating the need to have destroyed Tehran’s “ballistic & nuke capes” — presumably meaning ballistic missiles and nuclear capabilities — his word shouldn’t be trusted by the American people.
When a man is blinded by any ideology — very much including anti-Semitism — the truth can be the hardest thing to see.
This is one resignation the White House, Republicans, and sane Americans shouldn’t regret — just on principle.
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