Counterterrorism Boss Joe Kent Resigns

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 “I personally think we should have crushed their ballistic & nuke capes (capabilities) , but Trump has a plan, he has definitely earned the confidence of any clear eyed observer,” Joe Kent wrote in 2020.

“After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as director of the National Counterrorism Center,” Joe Kent, a former registered Democrat who had once voted for Bernie Sanders, announced on Tuesday. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” which “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.”

What made Kent completely reverse his position?

While Kent mentioned his past deceased wife in his combative resignation letter attacking the very policies he had once championed, and claimed to believe in, he failed to mention his current wife, Heather Kaiser, a radical activist who wrote for the anti-American publication, Grayzone, and retweeted attacks on the Trump Administration by its leader Max Blumenthal, a supporter of Islamic terrorism, and the son of Sydney Blumenthal, a top ally of Hillary Clinton.

Reports are that Kent had been accused of leaking and  undermining the administration. If so, he would certainly not have been the first. There is a long ugly history of intelligence figures in the Trump Administration undermining the president, leaking to the media and corrupting the system.

For all but the willfully blind, Iran’s Islamic regime does pose an imminent threat to the USA. Kent’s departure is no cause for concern because the National Counterterrorism Center he headed does not counter terrorism in any meaningful way.

The NCTC was the creation of  President George W. Bush, who after 9/11 told the nation that “Islam is peace.” In the aftermath, Bush created the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) whose first director was CIA officer John Brennan. He believed that Islamic jihad was a moral quest for truth that had nothing to do with violence.

A voter for the Stalinist Gus Hall in 1976, Brennan served as President Clinton’s daily intelligence briefer. In 2003, Brennan led a multi-agency effort to establish the National Counterterrorism Center and served as the NCTC’s first director. Brennan left the CIA in 2005 and in 2013 the composite character president, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, tapped him to head the CIA, which failed to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attack.

In similar style, the NCTC failed to prevent terrorist attacks at Fort Hood (2009), the Boston Marathon (2013), San Bernardino (2015) and Orlando in 2016, all with massive loss of life. To be fair, the CIA and FBI also failed to prevent those attacks, and played no role in the takedown of the terrorists.

Joe Kent had served in the US Army and then moved on to the CIA, where he served as a paramilitary officer in the CIA’s Special Activities Center. Like many former CIA figures, Kent ran for Congress, moving from Oregon to Washington, where his conservative opponent accused him of being a carpetbagger and a liberal over his past support for Bernie Sanders. 

Joe Kent twice ran for Congress in Washington State, losing in 2022 and 2024 to Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

In 2025, President Trump gave Kent a consolation prize by tapping the former CIA figure to head the NCTC despite the concern of some Trump supporters. But Kent had some powerful supporters including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson who back then had not yet turned on Trump. 

The retreating Kent now sounds more like a politician. “High-ranking Israeli officials” and members of the media had deployed a “misinformation campaign,” to “deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was an clear path to swift victory.” And so on.

Kent’s wife Shannon, serving in the US Navy, was killed by an ISIS suicide bomb in Syria in 2019. Kent now claims that he lost his wife “in a war manufactured by Israel.” So the notion that Israel pulls America’s strings is not new for the CIA alum.

President Trump said it was a “good thing” that Kent resigned because he thought “Iran was not a threat” and was “very weak on security.” Kent’s colleagues in the CIA should take his resignation as an example.

Former CIA analyst John Gentry authored Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences. As the author explains, “the politicization of intelligence was aimed at Trump,” and “the political culture of some IC agencies remains intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.”

No word of any resignations from this partisan sleeper cell now awaiting reactivation. They need to be identified and prosecuted, before they do more harm to the nation. That especially applies during a conflict with a terrorist Islamic regime that has been chanting “death to America” for nearly 50 years.

“Every country realized what a threat Iran was,” said Trump in his response to the Kent resignation. “The question is whether or not they wanted to do something about it.”