Joe Kent no doubt served this country honorably during the Iraq war, but it is to America’s great benefit that he has now left his role as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. His worldview is a conspiracy-addled montage of easily debunked rage-bait hallucinations. I wish him the best of luck in all his future endeavors, so long as those endeavors are as far from government policymaking as is humanly possible.
Kent entered politics after the tragic death of his wife in an Islamic State suicide bombing in Syria in 2019. In his resignation letter—the classic Hail Mary play for media sympathy from a person who was probably going to be fired anyway—Kent blames Israel for the ISIS bombing. He also blames Israel for the Iraq war, which the Israeli government was famously opposed to.
Kent’s political journey is instructive. In 2022 he saw an opportunity when Washington state’s six-term Republican representative, Jaime Herrera Beutler, voted to impeach Donald Trump. Kent ousted Beutler in the primary and then lost the seat to the Democrats. His general election loss to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez came after revelations that he “courted prominent white nationalists and posed recently for a photograph with a media personality who has previously described Adolf Hitler as a ‘complicated historical figure’ who ‘many people misunderstand.’”
Kent took a second shot at Perez two years later and lost again. His loyalty to Trump at the expense of the Republican Party was rewarded with a federal job close to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. While Gabbard has been able to temper her isolationist leanings, Kent apparently had had enough.
His resignation letter is a remarkable document, perfect for the right-wing’s podcast-bro laziness and Jews-on-the-brain paranoia.
“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,” Kent writes. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to 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.”
It’s as if somebody wrote a resignation letter twenty years ago and then put it on ice for just the right moment.
Obviously Trump is untroubled by losing someone with Kent’s sparkling personality and airtight judgment. “I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security, very weak,” Trump told reporters, according to the Hill. “When I read his statement I realized it’s a good thing that he’s out, because he said Iran is not a threat. … Every country realized what a threat Iran was.”
This is, of course, not about whether Iran is a threat. Kent is applying for membership in the microphone muftis, the conservative podcasters obsessed with Israel.
But it is worth pointing out that while Trump is obviously on the right side of this argument with Kent, the whole affair is still a consequence of Trump’s own antics—his atrocious behavior on January 6, 2021; his rewarding of those who backed the Capitol riot, thereby incentivizing the GOP to run and nominate loons like Kent; and his decision to staff various national-security offices with loyalists whose suspicion of establishment agencies outweighed their analytical rigor.
The result is that you end up with an administration staffed by people like Joe Kent, who are wholly unqualified for national-security jobs and who may be undermining their policy shop during wartime. It’s to everyone’s benefit that Trump can clear the tinfoil hat brigade out of government when he wants to. Now he just needs to pick up that pace—and stop hiring such folks to begin with.
