Joe Kent, a staunch Trumpist, has become the first senior official in the United States Government to leave office for not sharing the attack on Iran. The former director of the National Anti-Terrorist Center, indicating that he sees no objective justification for a war that he believes has been started by “pressure from Israel and its influential lobby in the US.”
Not even 48 hours later, new news arrives with an air of revenge: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has opened an investigation against Kent for a possible leak of confidential information. The North American press, citing official sources, maintain that this is a case that precedes his departure and the tensions with the president, who described him as disloyal and unreliable. Analysts, however, consider it “an attempt to discredit him after his public break with the Government,” says EFE.
In his resignation letter, Kent assured that Iran “did not represent an imminent threat” to the United States and attributed the decision to attack the country to pressure from Israel, which deepened divisions within the Republican Party over Middle East strategy.
The case has also revived the debate about the use of federal investigations in political contexts, amid criticism from sectors that accuse the Department of Justice of .
Kent, who has been a critical voice of the war, reiterated in recent public statements his support for previous policies of the Trump Administration, although he maintained his questions about the current strategy against Iran, in an episode that reflects internal tensions in the ruling party.
I will not be silent
But Kent has not opted for silence, he has once again directly blamed the government for the conflict and has insisted that Tehran was not even close to developing a nuclear weapon, which is the one used by both Washington and Tel Aviv to start the offensive. He did so in an interview with far-right agitator Tucker Carlson, one of the influencers of the MAGA universe and with Trump’s Epic Fury.
“The Israelis drove the decision to take this action, knowing that it would trigger a series of events and that the Iranians would retaliate,” Kent states in this conversation. The Israeli government “felt emboldened” to believe that it could start war and that the US “would simply have to react,” he adds.
“So the imminent threat that the Secretary of State describes is not coming from Iran. It is coming from Israel,” Carlson asks. Answers Kent: “Exactly. And I think this brings us to a broader question: who is in charge of our policy in ?”
“The Israelis drove the decision to take this action, knowing that it would trigger a series of events and that the Iranians would retaliate”
He explains to Carlson that access to President Trump was limited in the run-up to the war in Iran and that “many key decision-makers were not allowed to approach and express their opinion” to the president. In other words, it was a decision maintained along very faithful lines. That meant the intelligence community’s ability to provide a “sanity test” in briefing the president “was greatly undermined.” “They had that conversation, you know, behind closed doors, and there was no opportunity for dissenting voices to be expressed,” he says later in the .
Carlson, who has described the war as “absolutely disgusting and evil,” asks Kent whether or not the regime was on the verge of creating a nuclear bomb. The answer is clear: “No. They weren’t three weeks ago, when this started, nor in June,” he said, referring to the June 22 US military attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, which ultimately became the .
The resigned senior official emphasizes in the interview that the Islamic Republic has had a fatwa – or edict – in force since 2004 that prohibits it from developing nuclear weapons. “We had no intelligence indicating that that fatwa was being disobeyed,” he told Carlson, describing the Iranian strategy as “pretty pragmatic.”
The Iranian regime has always defended that its research had a purely civil, energy or medical objective, for example, but not a military one. In 2015, it made an agreement with Western countries such as the United States, but from which Trump left after three years, already in power, alluding to the fact that Tehran financed global terrorism; He pointed above all to the country’s allies in the Middle East, enemies of Israel, above all.
The interviewee adds that, beyond the supposed atomic threat, there was no alert for attacks of any other nature on North American interests. “There was no intelligence that said, ‘Hey, on March 1, the Iranians are going to launch a big surprise attack, they’re going to imitate 9/11, Pearl Harbor, etc. They’re going to attack one of our bases.’ There was no such information,” he says.
“There was no intelligence that said, ‘Hey, on March 1, the Iranians are going to launch a big surprise attack, they’re going to imitate 9/11, Pearl Harbor, etc. They’re going to attack one of our bases.'”
More: Kent claims the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah, only served to embolden his most radical supporters. “I don’t think the Ayatollah was afraid of dying. Not because he was completely crazy, but because he knew that if he was killed, the regime would survive,” he declares. Now it is his son, , who guarantees the continuity of the hard line, not the flexible one, not the negotiator.
Kent, who served 20 years in the US Army and made it one of his campaign claims, said he supported the policies with which the president campaigned in 2024, but that he now feels that the magnate was tricked into supporting a “disastrous” decision reminiscent of the Iraq war. “As an 11-time combat veteran and the husband of a fallen soldier who lost his beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation to fight and die in a war that does nothing to benefit the American people,” he said in his farewell statement.
Despite criticism that he is an anti-Semite and hence his opposition to Israel, the resigned man defends himself by saying that his motivation for speaking out against the war now is that he felt that his voice and his comments were being “silenced” before they reached the White House.
