The First Big Administration Defection Over Iran
Joe Kent, the U.S. government’s top counterterrorism official and a self-identified “America First” Republican, is not the only Donald Trump ally to disagree with the president’s decision to attack Iran. But today he became the first senior government official to do so publicly, quitting his job and offering an explanation that undercut Trump’s rationale for starting the war.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter, an extraordinary statement from an official who has had access to some of the most highly classified intelligence in the U.S. government. Trump has said the exact opposite—that Iran was about to use a nuclear weapon, and that its missiles “could soon” reach the United States. These claims are not supported by earlier U.S. intelligence assessments, and Kent’s letter suggested that nothing has changed.
The resignation seemed to take many officials in Washington by surprise. Kent isn’t a particularly influential member of Trump’s national-security team, but he is closely allied with his boss, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who has long warned against open-ended wars. Since the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran on February 28, Gabbard has been conspicuously silent. What would she make of Kent’s decision to quit, and could she follow suit?
Gabbard is set to testify in the Senate tomorrow, at a previously scheduled hearing on global security threats. Clearly anticipating that appearance, she issued a measured statement this afternoon, which did not mention Kent by name. The president “is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat,” Gabbard said, referencing the language about Iran in Kent’s letter. The job of her office, she explained, is to ensure that the president gets all of the intelligence that he needs to make a decision. “After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion,” Gabbard said.
Notice what the statement omitted: Gabbard didn’t say whether she agreed with Trump’s conclusion. She didn’t say whether Kent was wrong. She neither contradicted the president’s assessment nor affirmed it. Not exactly a full-throated endorsement of his decision.
The White House moved earlier in the day to undermine Kent, who Trump once said would “help us keep America safe” when he nominated the combat veteran to lead the National Counterterrorism Center. “There are many false claims in this letter,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X, singling out Kent’s assessment that Iran didn’t pose an imminent threat. “As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first.” As if on cue, some of Kent’s adversaries in the MAGA movement excoriated him as a “leaker” and “egomaniac” who was on his way to getting fired.
Kent’s is a less-than-ideal voice for speaking truth to power. He has publicly said that the 2020 election was “rigged & stolen”; has claimed that federal agents instigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; and has called COVID-19 vaccines “experimental gene therapy.” In his letter, Kent invoked anti-Semitic tropes, blaming “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” and “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for all but tricking Trump into war.
[Read: Tulsi Gabbard chooses loyalty to Trump]
Still, Kent’s stand against the war made for some unusual alliances. The Democratic vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has said that Kent’s past statements risked politicizing the intelligence community, took his side when it came to the risk of an Iranian attack. “There was no credible evidence of an imminent threat from Iran that would justify rushing the United States into another war of choice in the Middle East,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said in a statement. Warner, a member of the so-called Gang of Eight in Congress, has access to highly classified information about Iran’s capabilities and intentions. One U.S. national-security official told me that Kent had been skeptical of intelligence shared by Israel and had felt that the country was hyping the threat that Iran posed to the United States. The Israeli assessments, though, were not as alarming as those from the U.S. intelligence community, this official added.
Intelligence is often open to interpretation. One of Kent’s supporters, Senator Tom Cotton, the Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that he disagreed with the now-former official’s “misguided assessment” of the available information. “Iran’s vast missile arsenal and support for terrorism posed a grave and growing threat to America. Indeed, the ayatollahs have maimed and killed thousands of Americans. President Trump recognized this threat and made the right call to eliminate it,” Cotton said in a statement on X, in which he also praised Kent’s public service.
Kent completed 11 combat tours in Iraq and the broader Middle East. After retiring from the Army in 2018, he joined the CIA as a paramilitary officer. His wife, Shannon, a Navy cryptologic technician, died the following year in an Islamic State suicide bombing in Syria, along with three other Americans. People who know Kent have told me that her killing was a shattering event and seemed to propel him into a more cynical, conspiratorial view of the world. (I was unable to reach him to talk about his resignation.)
The focus now turns to Gabbard, who, after her appearance tomorrow in the Senate, will testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Thursday. In 2019, before she pivoted to being a Trump supporter, she tweeted that the president’s “shortsighted foreign policy is bringing us to the brink of war with Iran and allowing Iran to accelerate nuclear program [sic]—just to please Saudis and Netanyahu. This is not America first.”
The entry of the United States into the very war that Gabbard has long opposed raises uncomfortable questions. How does Gabbard herself feel about the decision to go to war? Does she share Kent’s view that he could not “in good conscience” support a war that, by his account, was predicated on misleading information? These are narrow versions of the big question that has dogged Gabbard for weeks: Why is someone who built her political identity in opposition to “regime-change wars” still serving in this administration? Now that one of her deputies and ideological allies has resigned, perhaps Gabbard will have to answer.