Joe Kent, the director of President Donald Trump‘s National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation Tuesday.
Kent served 11 combat tours before joining the Central Intelligence Agency in 2018 and taking over the administration’s counterterrorism center last summer. He is the first high-ranking Trump administration official to leave his post based on the president’s war in Iran. Tuesday will be Kent’s last day leading the agency, which is nested under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, he announced in a statement.
“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.”
Kent’s statement specifically praised Trump’s actions during his first term in office “to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars,” as illustrated by military victories over the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria and the assassination of Qassem Soleimani.
Kent proceeded to accuse “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” of deploying a misinformation campaign surrounding Iran, which Kent claimed “wholly undermined [Trump’s] America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments.”
“This echo chamber was used to deceive [Trump] into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should [Trump] strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory,” he continued. “This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war. As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that seves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”
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Kent closed by pressing the president to “reverse course” in Iran, arguing that continuing the war would “allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos.”
Neither the White House nor the ODNI responded to requests for comment on Kent’s resignation.
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