Resigned Trump counterterror adviser Joe Kent says 'Israel drove the decision' to strike Iran
Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned over his opposition to the Iran war, told Tucker Carlson that "Israel drove the decision" to strike Iran and rejected that there was an "imminent" threat to the United States.
Kent, who announced his resignation on Tuesday, also said that he thinks President Donald Trump knows the war "is not going well."
"The Israelis drove the decision to take this action, which we knew would set off a series of events, meaning the Iranians would retaliate," Kent said in a nearly two-hour-long interview that aired Wednesday evening.
"The Israelis felt emboldened and that no matter what they did, no matter what situation they put us in, that they could go ahead and take this action and we would just have to react," he added.
Kent is a combat veteran who served more than 20 years in the U.S. Army and completed 11 combat deployments in the Middle East.
Kent oversaw the U.S. counterterrorism and counternarcotics enterprise and, according to his biography, he served as the principal counterterrorism adviser to the president. He was confirmed as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in a narrow 52-44 vote in the Senate last July.
During the interview with Carlson, Kent said there was no intel that Iran was planning a strike on the U.S. without the U.S. first launching an attack on them.
"There was no intelligence that said, 'Hey, on whatever day it was, March 1, the Iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack. They're going to do some kind of a 9/11, Pearl Harbor, etc. They're going to attack one of our bases. There was none of that intelligence," Kent claimed.
Trump, in the several justifications he's given for starting the war on Iran, has repeatedly said Tehran posed an "imminent threat" to the U.S. and that the U.S. was "very nearly under threat."
Trump on Tuesday reacted to Kent's letter while answering questions from reporters in the Oval Office, saying, "I always thought he was a nice guy."
"Well, I read his statement. I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security," Trump said. "I didn't know him well, but I thought he seemed like a pretty nice guy."
"But when I read a statement, I realized that it's a good thing that he's out," Trump added. "Because he said that Iran was not a threat. Iran was a threat. Every country realized what a threat Iran was. The question is whether or not they wanted to do something about it. And many people, many of the greatest military scholars, are saying for years that [the] president should have taken out Iran because they wanted a nuclear weapon."
In his interview with Carlson, Kent said that before he resigned, he had "not the best conversation" with Trump to explain his reason for resigning, but that the president was "respectful" and that he thinks they remain on "good terms."
"I think the president is someone who listens, and so I think he's listening not necessarily just to me and to you, but I think he is listening to a lot of different people, because I think he knows at a core level, this is not going well, and he needs to find a way for us to get out of this," Kent said.
The former top counterterrorism official said a "clear" endgame has not been presented to Americans.
"Americans want to know why we're going to war, what the end state is, and they can get on board in general, if that's clearly articulated. That's not the case with Iran," Kent said.
Kent said he made his decision to resign over the weekend because his dissenting opinions about the war weren't "getting through," adding that the rising American service member death toll was his "real breaking point."
"I know this path that we're on, it doesn't work. I've seen enough data. It's time to do something different," he said.
In his resignation letter, Kent accused Israel of mounting a "misinformation" campaign to "deceive" Trump into launching this war. He blamed Washington's decision to attack on "pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."
In the interview with Carlson, Kent offered unfounded conspiracies about Israel's efforts to pressure the U.S. -- including a suggestion Israel may have been behind the assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, known for his opposition to war with Iran, and even the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump.
Carlson is known to trade in conspiracies and has been outspoken about his objections to the war in Iran.
