The Senate on Wednesday narrowly confirmed Joe Kent, President Trump’s contentious choice to be the nation’s top counterterrorism official, installing a pick who has embraced conspiracy theories and had links to extremist groups.
Mr. Kent, a former Army Green Beret and C.IA. paramilitary officer, was approved as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center on a 52-to-44 party-line vote. His confirmation came despite his promotion of conspiracy theories, including that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Mr. Trump. He has said that the F.B.I. played a role in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and should be dismantled. He repeated the accusations at his confirmation hearing in April.
Mr. Kent has also attracted scrutiny over his associations to white supremacists and far-right extremist organizations. He later sought to distance himself from extremist groups as a congressional candidate, telling one news outlet ahead of Election Day in 2022 that he did not support them.
Earlier this year, Mr. Kent, serving as the acting chief of staff to the director of national intelligence, ordered a senior analyst to redo an assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and a gang after intelligence findings undercut the White House’s justification for deporting migrants, according to officials.
Mr. Trump’s use of an 18th-century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to send Venezuelan migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador without due process relied on a claim that U.S. intelligence agencies thought was wrong. But behind the scenes, Mr. Kent told a career official to rework the assessment, a direction that allies of the intelligence analyst said amounted to pressure to change the findings.
Democrats on Wednesday criticized Mr. Kent’s nomination to lead the counterterrorism center, which was created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and analyzes and shares counterterrorism information to address threats to the United States.
“At a time when domestic violent extremism is one of the fastest-growing threats to the homeland, we are being asked to put someone in charge of counterterrorism who has aligned himself with political violence, promoted falsehoods that undermine our democracy and tried to twist intelligence to serve a political agenda,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said on the Senate floor.
Mr. Kent has a compelling personal story. He enlisted in the Army shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks. He served 11 combat deployments as a Green Beret, then retired and joined the C.I.A.
His wife, Shannon, a Navy cryptologist, was killed in 2019 along with three other Americans when a suicide bomber detonated his vest outside a restaurant in Manbij, in northern Syria.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
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