Donald Trump’s national counterterrorism chief resigned Tuesday and publicly accused the president of being manipulated into a war with Iran by Israel and its American allies — the most direct internal challenge yet to the administration’s decision to launch strikes on Tehran.
Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, posted his resignation letter on X, telling Trump that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the United States and that the war had been started “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” He said an “echo chamber” of high-ranking Israeli officials and influential American journalists had fed the president misinformation that led him to abandon his America First platform. “This was a lie,” Kent wrote.
The White House rejected the letter within hours. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called Kent’s suggestion that Trump had been influenced by foreign governments “both insulting and laughable,” insisting the president had “strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first.” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Kent’s direct superior, backed Trump’s war decision in a statement posted on X, saying it was the commander-in-chief’s prerogative alone to determine what constitutes an imminent threat.
Trump, speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, was characteristically blunt. Kent was a “nice guy,” he said, but “weak on security.” Reading the resignation letter, he added, had convinced him it was “a good thing that he’s out.”
The Anti-Defamation League, a US antisemitism monitor, condemned Kent’s letter as trafficking in “age-old antisemitic tropes,” saying it was unsurprising that he would blame Israel and the media for pushing the president toward war. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee reposted the ADL statement. Ilan Goldenberg, a senior official at the liberal pro-Israel advocacy group J Street, called it “ugly stuff that plays on the worst antisemitic tropes.” Kent did not immediately respond to the accusations.
The political reaction elsewhere split along lines that do not map neatly onto conventional party divisions. Former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell declared that “isolationists and anti-Semites have no place in either party.” But former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a close Trump ally who has grown critical of the administration’s Iran policy, praised Kent as an American hero and warned his supporters not to believe what she called coming lies about him.
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Kent, 45, is a decorated special forces and CIA veteran whose opposition to the Iran war is rooted in personal as much as strategic conviction. His wife, navy cryptologic technician Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria in 2019. He deployed 11 times overseas with the US military, including multiple tours in Iraq with Army special forces, before leaving government service after her death. In his resignation letter, he invoked both his service record and his loss, writing that he “cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”
That biography complicates the effort to dismiss him as simply an ideological outlier. Kent is not a career bureaucrat or a liberal critic of the administration — he is a long-time Trump supporter who ran for Congress twice under the MAGA banner, was nominated to his post by Trump himself early in the current term, and was narrowly confirmed after contentious Senate hearings. During those hearings, he declined to renounce claims that federal agents had provoked the January 2021 Capitol riot or that Trump had not lost the 2020 election. Democrats had also raised objections to his hiring of a member of the far-right Proud Boys as a consultant during his 2022 congressional campaign.
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His break with the administration is therefore not that of an establishment figure uncomfortable with Trumpism. It is the break of someone from within the movement who believes the president has been steered away from the principles that defined it — a more awkward argument to dismiss than dissent from a known opponent.
At the National Counterterrorism Center, Kent oversaw the global analysis and detection of terrorist threats, reporting to Gabbard and operating at the intersection of intelligence and policy. His access to classified assessments of Iranian capabilities and intentions gives his public claim — that Iran posed no imminent threat — a weight that similar statements from outside government would not carry. The White House’s insistence that Trump had compelling evidence of an impending Iranian attack directly contradicts what his own counterterrorism director says the intelligence showed.
That contradiction will be difficult to resolve publicly, given the classified nature of the underlying material. But it will be hard to ignore.
Kent’s departure adds his name to a list of senior officials who have left the administration in its second term, though turnover has been substantially lower than during Trump’s first time in office between 2017 and 2021. Previous departures have included Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement director Margaret Ryan and Kennedy Center head Richard Grenell. None resigned with a public letter accusing the president of being deceived into a war.
Kent is the first to do that. He is unlikely to be the last voice from within the national security establishment to raise questions about how the decision to strike Iran was made — and whose interests it ultimately served.