The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a retired Green Beret and longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, says he resigned over the war on Iran.
“I cannot in good conscience support an ongoing war on Iran. Iran poses no imminent threat to our nation,” Joe Kent said in a statement posted on Tuesday on X. “It is clear that we started this war because of pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
The National Counterterrorism Center monitors US government intelligence on terrorist threats and maintains a database of all known and suspected terrorists.
Kent worked under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the two were political allies. Gabbard has kept a low profile since the start of the war and has previously criticized US military interventions abroad.
Kent wrote in a letter to Trump posted on X that he supported the president’s values during his first term. But Trump has been wrongly wooed by the Israelis, and he “cannot support sending the next generation to fight and die in a war that does nothing to benefit the American people or justify the cost of American lives.”
Kent served in the Army Special Forces, undertaking 11 combat deployments in a 20-year career, and later worked for the CIA. Shannon Kent, the wife of a Navy cryptologist, was killed in a terrorist bombing in Syria in 2019.
Trump and his supporters say the intelligence community has tried to undermine the president in the past and a radical overhaul is needed.
Kent’s placement at the center is part of a broader effort by the administration to place trusted loyalists and partisan operatives in top government posts in intelligence, law enforcement and diplomacy. He called the rioters “political prisoners” and had ties to a man police say was a member of the far-right group Proud Boys.
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