There’s been some chatter about Joe Kent’s resignation letter:

Joe Kent, a top aide to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, took to X Tuesday morning to announce his resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), writing, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.”

Kent, an Army veteran who has two failed congressional runs on his resume, also posted his official resignation letter, and tweeted, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. 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.”

I don’t think the Kent letter means much to anyone who didn’t already agree with it – such as the left and the Tucker wing of the ex-right. In it, Kent parrots the Tucker line. The government and the military disagree, as does Trump:

Trump was more than happy to show Kent the exit. “When somebody is working with us that says they didn’t think Iran was a threat, we don’t want those people,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “There are some people, I guess, that would say that, but they’re not smart people or they’re not savvy people. Iran was a tremendous threat.”

Who is Kent, and why was he appointed in the first place?:

Joseph Clay Kent (born April 11, 1980) is an American politician, former United States Army warrant officer, and former Central Intelligence Agency paramilitary officer who served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2025 to 2026. …
Kent enlisted in the 75th Ranger Regiment and applied for the Special Forces before the September 11 attacks. He served eleven combat tours, primarily in Iraq, and retired in 2018, becoming a paramilitary officer with the CIA. In January 2019, Kent’s wife, Shannon, was killed in a suicide bombing in Manbij, Syria. He became involved in political advocacy after Shannon’s death.

In 2022, Kent was the Republican nominee for Washington’s third congressional district.

He wasn’t elected, but he supported Trump back then because Trump said he didn’t want to start wars. Later, Trump chose him for the intelligence job in February 2025, very early in his second term.

Kent claimed in his resignation note that Israel had pressured the US into starting the Iraq War, although Kent wasn’t in the government then and had no special knowledge of what happened. In addition, those who did have such knowledge say that the Israeli government at the time warned the US not to start the war because Iran should be the focus instead.

More about Kent’s run for office in 2021 [emphasis mine]:

In September, Trump endorsed Kent. His prominence was bolstered by Tucker Carlson, who had frequently had Kent as guest on the Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight (2016–2023).

So – surprise, surprise – Kent was a Tucker Carlson protege. I wonder whether Tucker recommended him for the government position in 2025.

Kent didn’t last long in the administration’s good graces. For months before his departure there were problems:

In October, The New York Times reported Kent had obtained access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s files on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, alarming the bureau’s director, Kash Patel. According to The Wall Street Journal, Kent had been sidelined from the team responsible for producing and delivering the President’s Daily Brief in the final months of his tenure.

Kent has been against military intervention in general after his Iraq deployment:

Kent is a non-interventionist, citing his military experience and the death of his wife. He began to question the management of the U.S. military during the Iraq War, when officials sought to eliminate members of Saddam Hussein’s government. According to Mother Jones, Kent read David Hackworth’s memoir About Face (1990), a book critical of the “clerks at the top” directing the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He defended Trump’s pardons of two Army officers convicted of Uniform Code of Military Justice offenses, Mathew L. Golsteyn and Clint Lorance, and his intervention in the case of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL involved in a high-profile war crimes case; in an interview with The New York Times in November 2019, Kent compared Gallagher’s case with that of Chelsea Manning.

During the early days of the Ukraine War Kent quickly aligned with the pro-Russia anti-Ukraine wing such as Carlson:

He stated Russian president Vladimir Putin’s demands for Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts were “very reasonable”. His comments on Tucker Carlson Tonight denouncing support for Ukraine as deterring a peace deal were repeated by TASS, a Russian state-owned news agency. In September 2023, Kent described the Biden administration’s strategy as immoral, arguing that the U.S. is fueling a prolonged war that is “unsustainable” for Ukraine. Kent has specifically stated that the policy uses the Ukrainian civilian population as “cannon fodder”, describing drafted Ukrainian soldiers—whom he characterizes as formerly everyday workers and students—as being sent to die in a “muddy ditch” in a war he believes they cannot win. He has argued that by providing continuous aid, the U.S. prevents a necessary, albeit likely painful, peace deal from being brokered.[

So he’s consistent on this. He doesn’t have any special or new information, nor has he experienced some sort of soul-searching political change. Au contraire.

The real question isn’t about Kent’s resignation – it’s about why he was appointed in the first place, and why he stayed in his position as long as he did.