U.S. counterterrorism director Joe Kent resigns over war: ‘Iran posed no imminent threat’

National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent on Tuesday announced he will resign in response to the Trump administration’s war against Iran.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war,” Kent said in a letter addressed to President Donald Trump, that was posted on Kent’s personal X account.

Kent, a promoter of far-right conspiracy theories whom the Senate narrowly confirmed for the director role last July, accused the president of being deceived by Israel into supporting 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 in his letter.

Trump disputed Kent’s claims later Tuesday.

“I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a bilateral meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin.

After reading Kent’s statement, “I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out,” Trump said, because “every country realized what a threat Iran was.”

The comments came shortly after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an X post that Kent was parroting “the same false claim that Democrats and some in the liberal media have been repeating over and over.”

Trump “had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first,” and he “would never make the decision to deploy military assets against a foreign adversary in a vacuum,” Leavitt said.

She also called Kent’s claims about Israel’s influence on Trump “both insulting and laughable.”

The National Counterterrorism Center did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

The director of the NCTC leads U.S. counterterrorism and counternarcotics efforts and advises the president directly. An hour after Kent announced his resignation, he was still listed as the center’s director on its official government website.

The NCTC is housed within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, led by Tulsi Gabbard, a once-vocal opponent of war with Iran who has kept quiet on the Trump administration’s latest military actions. Gabbard was scheduled to testify Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee, but the hearing was postponed until Thursday.

In an X post Tuesday afternoon, Gabbard did not directly comment on Kent, and she did not explicitly endorse the view that the U.S. faced an imminent threat from Iran.

Trump is “responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat” and whether to take action in response, Gabbard wrote. The ODNI’s job is to “coordinate and integrate all intelligence” to provide the president “with the best information available to inform his decisions,” she wrote.

“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 wrote.

Kent, 45, is a U.S. Army veteran and former CIA paramilitary officer who was deployed to the Middle East 11 times over 20 years, according to his official bio. His first wife, U.S. Navy officer Shannon Kent, was killed by a suicide bomber in 2019 while deployed to Syria.

Joe Kent ran for Congress in Washington as a Republican in 2022 and 2024, losing both races to Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. He later served as Gabbard’s acting chief of staff.

Trump nominated Kent to lead the NCTC in February 2025, saying he will “help us keep America safe by eradicating all terrorism, from the jihadists around the World, to the cartels in our backyard.”

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/joe-kent-resigns-trump-iran-war.html