National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent announced his resignation on Tuesday over opposition to the Iran war, becoming the highest-profile administration official to publicly step down over the ongoing conflict.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Joe Kent said Tuesday in a statement on X. “It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Kent, the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official, dismissed claims by President Donald Trump and other administration officials that there was an “imminent threat” from Iran as justification for the war.
“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.
The National Counterterrorism Center oversees U.S. government intelligence on terrorist threats and retains a database of all known and suspected terrorists.
Kent said Trump had been wrongly swayed by the Israelis and he could not 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.”
The White House rejected Kent’s criticisms.
“As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on social media.
Gabbard said in a statement on X that Trump was responsible for determining what is and isn’t an imminent threat.
“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,” she wrote.
Trump on Tuesday reacted to Kent’s letter while taking questions at a bilateral meeting with Ireland’s Taoiseach Micheál Martin in the Oval Office.
“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.”
Kent served in the Army Special Forces, undertaking 11 combat deployments during a 20-year career, and later worked at the CIA. His wife, Shannon Kent, a Navy cryptologist, died in a terrorist bombing in Syria in 2019.
