The F.B.I. has opened an investigation into Joe Kent, who was pilloried by the White House after he quit as the top U.S. counterterrorism official over the Iran war, for possibly leaking sensitive intelligence, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
The investigation predated the resignation on Tuesday of Mr. Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, according to those people, who discussed a continuing investigation on the condition of anonymity.
Disclosure of the inquiry, which was reported earlier by Semafor, came after a coordinated Trump administration effort to discredit Mr. Kent as untrustworthy and disloyal.
The F.B.I. and Justice Department under Mr. Trump have frequently targeted the president’s critics and political enemies for criminal investigations, often without sufficient evidence to obtain or sustain a criminal indictment.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Mr. Kent wrote in his public resignation letter to President Trump, which landed as the president was grappling with the economic and geopolitical fallout from the Iran war.
Mr. Kent, the first senior member of the administration to quit over the war, claimed that the attack on Iran was “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
He was interviewed on Wednesday by Mr. Carlson, a close friend, on his popular online podcast. Mr. Carlson, who gained notoriety for a sympathetic interview with a white nationalist last year, has been one of the most visible conservative opponents of the war and a vocal critic of Israel.
Mr. Kent’s critics have long accused him of promoting an antisemitic and anti-Israel worldview.
Yet his resignation widened a rift among Republicans over the war and the U.S. relationship with Israel. Mr. Trump, who as president is sensitive to the right-wing media sphere, quickly rebuked Mr. Kent after his resignation, saying “it’s a good thing that he’s out because he said Iran was not a threat.”
In his appearance with Mr. Carlson, Mr. Kent effusively praised the president and his previous policies, including past acts of aggression toward Iran, like the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in 2020 and the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities last year.
But Mr. Kent also repeated his claims that there was no evidence of an imminent attack from Iran before the war began, and that the United States had been drawn into the conflict by Israel. He called on Mr. Trump to bar Israel from striking Iran, and to stop supplying Israel with defense systems if they refused.
“He has to address the main issue,” Mr. Kent said. “The main issue is what the Israelis are doing. And he needs to — very forcefully, and probably with a new team of diplomats — go to the Israelis and say: ‘You’re done. We will defend you. We will make sure that, you know, ballistic missiles aren’t rained down upon you. However, you are done going on the offense because this is our war.’”
Mr. Kent is not an ordinary war critic. He has long had a penchant for conspiracy theories, suggesting without evidence that F.B.I. agents could have been responsible for orchestrating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He has dismissed allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, saying that such accusations were part of the “Russia hoax.”
And in his appearance with Mr. Carlson, the two promoted unfounded claims that Israel may have been involved in an attempted assassination of Mr. Trump in 2024, as well as the killing of the right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk last year.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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