For his first interview post-resignation as director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent sat down with former Fox News host and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson to share his view.
Since Tuesday, when Kent published his letter of resignation with a brief explanation for his departure from his federal position, social media has been rife with reactions.
“You’ve been spoken for quite a bit over the last 24 hours, so I think it would be really helpful to all of us if you would speak for yourself,” Carlson opened the interview by saying.
Here were the main takeaways from the two-hour interview:
Kent: Iran posed no threat to the United States
The podcast started with Kent doubling down on the opening statements in his letter to President Donald Trump that Iran was not an imminent threat to the U.S., but was thrown into the war, he said, “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” Kent said the pressure began at the beginning of Trump’s second administration last year.
He told Carlson that “imminent threat” was taken out of the equation when top Cabinet officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously said the U.S. had to strike Iran first because they were aware that Israel was going to take action against Iran, which would then put a target on the U.S.
“The Israelis drove the decision to take this action, which we knew would set off a series of events, meaning the Iranians would retaliate,” Kent told Carlson.
“I think that it’s fine that we offer defense to Israel,” he continued, “but when we’re providing the means for their defense, we get to dictate the terms of when they go on the offensive. Otherwise, they stand to lose that relationship. And the Israelis felt emboldened that no matter what they did, no matter what situation they put us in, that they could go ahead and take this action, and we would just have to react.”
To Kent, that was proof that there were lobbyists pushing for the U.S. to enter the war.
Kent: Iran was never close to attaining a nuke
Kent also said he believed Iranian leadership is actually hesitant to attack the U.S. because they fear Trump.
“When President Trump came back into office, they stopped their proxies who were attacking us under the Biden administration because they knew Biden was weak,” he said. “They knew President Trump was someone who wanted to negotiate, but more importantly, they knew that President Trump was not someone to mess with. ... He had defeated ISIS. They knew that President Trump was a man of action. He is militarily strong.”
Carlson then brought up Trump’s oft-stated stance that Iran cannot be in possession of a nuclear weapon. When asked if there’s any evidence Iran was close to obtaining a nuclear weapon, Kent said no.
He said the Islamic leadership has followed a religious ruling, a fatwa against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004," and that no intelligence information shows the ruling being violated or lifted.
When asked why Trump was so adamant on Iran not having nuclear weapons if there was no plausible threat, Kent referred to his resignation letter, where he claimed, “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.”
He called it an “echo chamber” that was created to convince the president 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 tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”
Kent: FBI blocked the foreign ties investigation of Charlie Kirk assassination
Aside from the “echo chamber” that he claimed influenced Trump’s decision-making, he said the other possible option is “much darker.”
“We still don’t know what happened in Butler (Pennsylvania). We don’t know what happened with Charlie Kirk, and by no means am I saying like, you know, the Israelis did this or any of that, but I’m saying there’s a lot of unanswered questions there. And there is enough data to at least say that there’s a good chance that President Trump feels like he is under threat.“
Kent’s said in both the assassination attempt on Trump’s life in 2024 and the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last September, the FBI barred his team from looking into potential international involvement.
“Charlie Kirk was one of President Trump’s closest advisers, and he also advocated heavily against a war with Iran,” Kent said, noting that the last time he spoke with Kirk was in June on the West Wing staircase of the White House.
Though Kent said he and Kirk weren’t close, Kirk told him that day, “Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.”
“So when one of President Trump’s closest advisers, who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink at least our relationship with the Israelis,” Kent told Carlson, “and then he’s suddenly publicly assassinated, and we’re not allowed to ask any questions about that.”
He continued, “The FBI will say that they stopped that because they wanted to turn every turn everything over to the Utah state authorities. Everything’s going to trial. It’s very, very sensitive. But there was still a lot for us to look into that I can’t really get into.”
The Utah County Attorney’s office is currently in active litigation against alleged Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson. The state is seeking the death penalty in the case
Kent: Trump is the only man qualified to get U.S. out of war
For Carlson, the fear is that the U.S. is in too deep in the war in the Middle East. Kent said there’s still time for Trump to change course, but it will take “drastic action.”
He said Trump needs to address Israel’s actions and understand that “they have a much different way of fighting than we do.”
“I can tell you as a guy who fought on the ground, Americans almost to a fault sometimes, we do everything that we can to prevent the loss of civilian life. I mean, almost to the point where sometimes we risk our own lives deliberately to not kill innocent civilians.”
But Kent said Israel is in this war for a much different reason than the U.S. “Israelis are in a hard spot.”
But, “If we’re going to be in a partnership with them, we have to be clear-eyed about that. Just because they speak English and a lot of them went to school over here, and we have dual citizens, doesn’t mean that they’re going to target the same way that we do.”
He said Trump is “uniquely qualified” because he has “the ability to understand things from multiple perspectives, at the same time, and then find our leverage, and then find out what’s best for our objectives, for America’s objectives.”