President Trump‘s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, announced his immediate resignation Tuesday, citing the decision to begin a war against Iran when “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”
Kent, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate last year, posted his resignation letter on X Tuesday morning, saying 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.”
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote. “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.”
He is the highest-ranking Trump administration official to announce his resignation over the Iran war.
The White House took issue with Kent’s assertion that “Iran posed no imminent threat.” Mr. Trump was also asked about Kent’s resignation during a meeting with the Irish prime minister Tuesday.
“I read his statement,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “I always thought he was a nice guy. But I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security.”
“When I read his statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out, because he said Iran was not a threat,” Mr. Trump continued. “Iran was a threat — every country realized what a threat Iran was.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement posted on X that there were “many false claims” in Kent’s letter to the president, and she took issue with his assertion that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S.
“This is the same false claim that Democrats and some in the liberal media have been repeating over and over,” she said. “As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first.”
Kent said that before last June, which is when the U.S. and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, the president “understood that wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.” Kent knows the cost of war personally — his wife, Shannon, was killed by suicide bomber in Syria in 2019, leaving behind two boys.
He went on to accuse Israeli officials and some in the media of orchestrating a deception that led Mr. Trump into the war:
Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactics the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost the nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.
“You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos,” he told the president. “You hold the cards.”
Vice President JD Vance, asked about Kent’s resignation on Wednesday in Michigan, said nobody likes war, and he also said he and the president both like Kent. Vance said the president is eager to listen to people who disagree.
“That said, whatever your view is, when the president of the United States makes a decision, it’s your job to help make that decision as effective and successful as possible,” Vance said. “And so the president said this yesterday, if you are on the team and you can’t help implement the decisions of his administration, he has the right to make those decisions, then it’s a good thing for you to resign.”
Kent, a retired Green Beret who served in 11 combat tours, was nominated to the counterterrorism post in February 2025 and confirmed in July 2025. His nomination faced some scrutiny when emails emerged showing that while he was chief of staff to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, he had pressed senior intelligence analysts to amend an assessment of links between the Venezuelan government and the criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. In the emails, Kent pressed the analysts to align the assessment more closely with Trump administration policies and to include references that criticized Biden-era immigration programs.
Kent has endorsed a number of conspiracy theories and taken controversial positions in the past. He’s claimed the COVID vaccine wasn’t a vaccine, but rather, “an experimental gene therapy” and has also said Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, should face murder charges. Kent also said he believes the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump and has referred to the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters as “political prisoners.”
In 2022, he ran for Congress in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District and won the GOP primary, unseating Republican incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, but he lost the general election to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Kent ran again in 2024, but lost to Gluesenkamp Perez.
Kent has been a close ally of Gabbard, who personally endorsed his congressional bids. In a statement Tuesday that did not mention Kent, Gabbard, who oversees the National Counterterrorism Center, said that the president “is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat.” She did not voice her views on the war or say the intelligence led her to any particular conclusions.
“Donald Trump was overwhelmingly elected by the American people to be our President and Commander in Chief,” she wrote on X. “As our Commander in Chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat, and whether or not to take action he deems necessary to protect the safety and security of our troops, the American people and our country.”
“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 said.
An administration official said Kent was not involved on briefings on Iran and that Gabbard has been in touch with the White House since Kent’s resignation earlier Tuesday. The official denied a Fox News report that Gabbard was asked by the White House to fire him and said that if she had been asked to do so, she would have.
As director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Kent led U.S. counterterrorism and counternarcotics efforts and was the president’s principal counterterrorism adviser.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci led.
