The intelligence community’s top counterterrorism official said Tuesday he was stepping down over the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran — the first senior official to openly break ranks with the White House over a conflict stretching into its third week.
“After much reflection, I have decided to resign,” Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, posted on X in a letter to President Donald Trump. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.’’
Kent continued: “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.’’
A staunch supporter of Trump, Kent was confirmed as NCTC director in July.
Kent’s resignation lays bare the schism within the Trump coalition between those who are skeptical of U.S. military interventions overseas and those who believe in the exercise of U.S. military might to advance America’s interests around the world.
Asked by a reporter for his reaction on Tuesday, Trump said, “I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security — very weak on security.”
Thirteen months ago, Trump praised Kent as he nominated him to join the administration. Kent, Trump wrote then on social media, had “hunted down terrorists and criminals his entire adult life” and “will keep America safe by eradicating all terrorism, from jihadists around the World, to the cartels in our backyard.”
Kent, like his boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, has long been in the anti-intervention camp. Gabbard has campaigned against U.S. wars and involvement in conflicts abroad since her time as a Democratic congresswoman. She has not spoken about the Iran war in public or on her normally busy X feed since the conflict began Feb. 28.
In his letter, Kent lauded Trump for previously having used military power “without getting us drawn into never-ending wars.” He cited the U.S. killing of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani and the defeat of the Islamic State during the first Trump administration.
“Until June of 2025, you understood that the 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,” wrote Kent, a former Green Beret who deployed to combat 11 times. His wife, Shannon, a Navy cryptologist, was killed in 2019 with three other Americans when a suicide bomber detonated his vest outside a restaurant in northern Syria.
He accused, without mentioning names, “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” of deploying a “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined [Trump’s] America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday took issue with Kent’s assertion that Iran posed no imminent threat. “As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first,” she said in a social media post.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers before the United States launched the war that the administration believed that Iran would attack U.S. assets in retaliation for a first strike by Israel — and that Israel was planning to attack with or without the United States. At that point, Rubio told lawmakers, the president would be forced to strike back in response.
Kent did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reaction — both positive and critical — was swift, from both sides of the aisle. It also touched in part on Kent’s own background, which includes two unsuccessful runs for Congress as a Republican in Washington state following his Army service. He embraced for a time Trump’s false claims that he beat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election and called those detained by the U.S. government after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “political prisoners.” He later moderated those positions during a political debate.
Former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a onetime Trump ally who fell out with the president over foreign policy, health care and the controversy over releasing the Epstein files, posted on X: “Joe Kent is a GREAT AMERICAN HERO. God bless him and protect him!’’
Laura Loomer, a far-right political activist and media personality who has the president’s ear, has been a proponent online of striking Iran but denied in a phone interview that she had any role in persuading the president to go to war.
“I’ve been criticizing and exposing Joe Kent,” Loomer said. “The reality is, ODNI, under Tulsi Gabbard, has basically just been turned into a hotbed of anti-Israel sentiment full of Democrats, progressive leftists, and Trump haters.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), an Iran hawk and vocal Trump ally, said on X that Kent’s resignation “could not have come at a better time. … Hopefully, the person replacing Mr. Kent will have a better understanding of the threats presented by the Iranian regime.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) also defended the administration’s choice to go to war. “I don’t know where Joe Kent is getting his information,” he told reporters Tuesday. “There was clearly an imminent threat that Iran was very close to … [a] nuclear capability and they were building missiles at a pace nobody could keep up with.”
Johnson said that top administration officials had “exquisite intelligence” and that, “had the president waited … we would have had mass casualties of Americans.”
Fellow Republican Don Bacon, a congressman from Nebraska who is retiring, has been a frequent critic of Trump’s foreign policy but in this case took issue with Kent’s position. “Good riddance,” he said at the news of Kent’s resignation, in a post on X that alleged there were antisemitic overtones in Kent’s letter.
“Iran has murdered more than a thousand Americans,” said Bacon, an Air Force veteran. “Their … land mines were the deadliest in Iraq. Anti-Semitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government.’’
Kent’s move also drew praise, including from some critics of Trump’s foreign policy.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Connecticut), who has accused the administration of lacking a coherent rationale for the war, posted: “At least someone in this administration is willing to stand by their principles.’’
Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he disagrees with many of Kent’s views. “But on this point, he is right: There was no credible evidence of an imminent threat from Iran that would justify rushing the United States into another war of choice in the Middle East.”
Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest of the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza, applauded Kent’s move.
“In his resignation letter, Joe Kent echoes a warning on the danger of foreign entanglements that is as old as the Republic,” said Paul, co-founder of advocacy organization A New Policy. “Israel’s interests are not America’s — and its war with Iran should not be our war. It is well past time for our nation to question our unconditional support to Israel, and to put American interests first.”
An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, voiced admiration for Kent’s decision, saying he has been a consistent anti-war voice on the right for years. “Everybody is tired of this s—,” that official said of the Iran war. Kent, that official added, has been “treated like a second-class citizen” in the administration because of his strong association with Gabbard.
Kent had spent recent months focused on the U.S. military withdrawal from Syria, a move that has reduced the number of bases the Pentagon must defend as Iran and proxy forces now launch attacks across the region.
Kent’s resignation comes amid growing questions as to why the U.S. went to war with Iran. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, has laid out the military’s campaign objectives, but Trump’s explanation of the strategic rationale continues to shift.
Two people familiar with the decision-making, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity, said that Israel began a coordinated effort to pressure the U.S. into striking within the very first weeks after the new Trump administration took office.
Members of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s staff were getting briefed on options for a strike on Iran as early as January 2025 in what one of the people described as an extreme “pressure campaign” by Israel. Israeli officials argued that Iran was very close to having a nuclear weapon and that Israel was going in with or without the U.S. — but that either way, the U.S. would need to be ready.
Kent’s resignation followed news Monday night that Dan Caldwell, another adviser who has advised restraint in U.S. military action abroad, has rejoined the Trump administration at ODNI as a senior adviser. The move, first reported by the New York Times, came after Hegseth fired Caldwell and two other senior Pentagon appointees in April and accused them of leaking classified information to the media.
Gabbard is due to testify Wednesday and Thursday at annual worldwide threat briefings to Congress, along with other top U.S. intelligence officials.
Warren Strobel, John Hudson and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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