The Trump administration’s senior counterterrorism official Joe Kent has resigned, expressing opposition to the war in Iran and urging the president to “reverse course”.
In a letter posted on Tuesday to his X account, National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent stated that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US and that the Trump administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.
Kent, 45, is a former US special forces and CIA officer whose wife, Navy cryptologic technician Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide attack in Syria in 2019.
Kent’s departure makes him the most prominent official within the Trump administration to publicly condemn the US-Israeli operation in Iran.
In the letter, Kent stated that he had previously backed Trump’s foreign policy program and believed that he “had understood that the wars in the Middle East that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.”
Kent further claimed that “high-ranking Israeli officials” and important US journalists spread “misinformation” that drove Trump to compromise his “America First” policy. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” the letter read. “This was a lie.”
Kent, a long-time Trump fan who unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice, was nominated by the president early in his administration and narrowly confirmed, despite many Democrats condemning his links to radical groups such as the Proud Boys.
Kent also refused to back down from statements that federal agents incited the January 6 rioting at the US Capitol or that Trump won the 2020 election. At the National Counterterrorism Center, he reported to Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, and handled the analysis and detection of potential terrorist threats from throughout the world.
Kent had already deployed 11 times with the US military, including with the US Army’s special forces in Iraq. He then worked as a paramilitary officer for the CIA before leaving government service after his wife died.
Kent mentioned his military service and her death in his letter, stating that he “cannot 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.”
Several prominent officials in the Trump administration have resigned, including Security and Exchange Commission enforcement director Margaret Ryan and the Kennedy Center President Ric Grenell. However, the president’s second term has witnessed significantly less turnover than his last White House stint, which lasted from 2017 to 2021.
