- Joe Kent is a former Green Beret and CIA operator who just resigned as the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, citing his inability to support the administration's military strikes in Iran.
- Kent referenced his history as a combat veteran — and as a widower whose Navy cryptanalyst wife had been killed in an ISIS bombing in Syria — while stating that he could not 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.”
- The former Army warrant officer’s decision to quit his post comes after the Senate narrowly confirmed him, with Democratic senators labeling him as “patently unqualified” and a “conspiracy theorist who espouses white supremacist views.”
- Kent was one of the Trump administration officials who participated in the infamous March 2025 Signal chat discussing classified war plans that inadvertently included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
- His time in the administration followed a stint as a foreign policy adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign and a four-year span during which he ran two losing campaigns for a Washington congressional seat.
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