BREAKING: CounterTerrorism Official RESIGNS OVER IRAN WAR / Lt Col Daniel Davis
Joe Kent, former Deputy to Tulsi Gabbard at the ODNI, resigned after exposing that Joe Biden's Iran war was manufactured by Israeli pressure and American lobbying. Kent alleges a misinformation campaign deceived President Trump, mirroring pre-Iraq War tactics, while accusing figures like Mike Pompeo and Lindsey Graham of pushing pro-war narratives. The segment details the rapid depletion of U.S. interceptor missiles and predicts allied nations may refuse troop deployments, potentially forcing direct negotiations with Iran despite unconfirmed reports of Iranian leader Ali Larijani's assassination. Ultimately, this resignation signals severe damage to the administration's credibility and suggests the conflict lacks genuine strategic necessity. [Automatically generated summary]
U.S. counterterrorism director Joe Kent resigns over the war.
In part of his resignation letter, Iran posed no imminent threat.
This is an amazing, amazing development.
I can just tell you that the political courage that it took, the moral courage that it took to resign is in this position at this time, especially when the war has just started, is just almost unprecedented.
It may be unprecedented.
There may not have been anything like this.
Definitely hasn't been any kind of example of moral courage of this caliber in my lifetime.
It is absolutely amazing.
And I'm going to get to some of the details of what he said in this post in his resignation letter.
But just real quick, in case you're not aware of who Joe Kent is, he is the number two guy at the office of the director of national intelligence.
He is the deputy for Tulsi Gabbard.
And just so you know, you may recall, if you're new to this channel, you may not know, but I was almost the number three person at the ODNI at the beginning of the Trump administration.
I was tapped to do that, had been accepted, and was literally a few hours away, literally hours away from joining the staff.
And I would have been the number three.
So I'd have been working right alongside and maybe a little bit below Joe Kent.
And I had the opportunity to meet him in the process of getting ready for that job before I was supposed to start.
And I thought he was a fantastic guy.
And I've often wondered how difficult it was for him to do this job, especially with the Venezuela thing was bad enough.
But then, you know, now then with this war here, and I wondered how both he and Tulsi could continue on with this job, knowing how they felt, knowing what they thought behind the scenes and what their personal objectives were and what their philosophy was and what their understanding of the world was.
I was just, I just couldn't imagine having to work under those conditions.
And now we see that Joe was not able to do that in good conscience.
He could not continue on.
And listen, this is a guy who has got combat experience, has lost his own wife in combat as well.
More on that in just a second.
But listen, let's get right into the substance here, folks, because this letter here is absolutely political dynamite.
This is going to have ramifications that are going to ripple across the country here.
It's going to ripple all the way into the White House.
And just, by the way, we'll just put this out there right away.
You can count on the fact that President Trump will be demonizing this guy probably within hours.
I haven't looked at his truth social yet.
We'll see if he's put anything out of it, but you can count on it because that's what he does.
He demonizes anyone who says anything unflattering to him.
And believe me, folks, this is about as unflattering as it gets.
It is truthful, but it's really unflattering.
Let's take a look at this.
This is the actual letter that he signed.
He says, after much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as the director of National Counterterrorism Center effective today.
I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.
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.
Let that sink in for a second, folks, because here is the number two guy in the office of the director of national intelligence, somebody who loves this country and has worked hard for it, is saying this, what we've been telling you since before this thing ever started.
It's been self-evident, but now here we have an official at the highest levels confirming it, who was working in the intelligence directorate itself.
This guy knows what he's talking about.
This will not be easy to brush aside and say, oh, well, he was some liberal or whatever somebody is the president.
No.
In fact, he goes on to say in the very next part there, I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, and 2024, which you enacted in your first term 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 of our prosperity of our nation.
Then he goes on to talk about some of the things that he liked.
But then we get into the real political dynamite.
This is it right here, folks.
Let this sink into early in this administration, he writes, 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.
This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, that you should strike now.
There was a clear path to a swift victory.
This was a lie and is the same tactics the Israelis used to draw us into disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.
We cannot make this mistake again.
And then he kind of bolsters his credibility.
And folks, this is unimpeachable.
You may not like, if you're a President Trump fan, you may not like the embarrassment that this causes.
Don't care because this right here is the God's awful truth.
It is the gospel.
It is reality.
And he writes, as a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times, and as a gold star husband who lost my beloved wife, Shannon, in a war manufactured by Israel, he's even going back to the 2003 war.
We've always blamed it on President Bush.
But he's saying here, and again, this guy has, as a, I think his background is also in other intelligence in the past.
Obviously, his position was here.
This guy knows what he's talking about.
He lived it and he has access to everything.
And he says that it was manufactured by Israel, the 2003 Iraq war.
And now he says that's what cost his own wife.
And he said, I cannot 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 an American lives.
And then he adds, I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in a red and who we are doing it for.
The time for bold action is now.
You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further into decline and chaos.
You hold the cards.
It was an honor to serve your administration and our great nation, Joe Kent.
Folks, that is just unbelievable here.
But we have got to grasp the reality of this.
This is something we've been telling you throughout this whole process, going all the way back to the 2025, June 2025 war, going through the Venezuela operation this past fall, all the way leading up to this one.
In this war and today, we are reinforcing everything Joe Kent just said there.
This was a war that never needed to be fought.
It was fought expressly for one benefit.
And you can even say even more than just the country of Israel.
You can say the individual of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Nobody else.
It wasn't even for the Israeli people.
They never needed this war to be safe from Iran.
They never needed it.
Only because they're going out looking for dragons to slay and starting wars everywhere in the Middle East.
Only that's the reason why they have any insecurity at all.
if they had just stayed with the significant power they have even with the amount of money that we were sending them every year they never needed to worry the rest of their lives they could have continued on into peace indefinitely there was nobody that was going to come after them it had been tried in 1967 and 1973 by arabs they were crushed nobody was going to try it again and especially because the americans were so close with israel They never would have had to worry about their security.
None of the people who have died so far in Israel should have died.
None of these buildings that have been turned into something that looks like Gaza should ever have happened because of a war of choice.
First of all, that Benjamin Etanyahu made for his people.
And second, that he exploited President Trump into.
And equally alarming in there, he doesn't name any names here, but we can kind of imagine who he's talking about.
Members of the American media, the mainstream media, participated in this intentional deception.
They led President Trump into believing this.
They reinforced all these negative tropes.
They continued to say over and over how this is in America's interest.
No, friends, it was never in America's interest.
And all these people that we keep showing you, I did a show a month or so ago called the, I think the Merchants of Death.
And all these people I put on there that were emphatically going on American television over and over and over, telling you how this is a war that had to be fought, that the Iranians were coming to get us, and they were a week away from starting a war, from having a nuclear raid bomb material, all this stuff.
Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Jack Keene, Lindsey Graham Eval, several others that we could name later that have named in the past.
These people that keep going on relentlessly, going on the Fox News where President Trump watches and they know.
And so they put people on that would just relentlessly talk about how we needed this war.
And it's worked.
It worked on President Trump.
It's worked on many in the public.
I've talked to a number of people and they are convinced these things are true.
They believe what they're being told because it's relentlessly put into their heads.
Now, we on this channel are doing an honest analysis and evaluation.
We're looking at all sides of this.
Manipulated Into Conflict00:02:25
We're taking a look at the physical fundamentals.
We're listening to what the Iranian side says.
We're listening to what the Israeli side says.
We're listening to what these American people say.
We're putting all of it together so that you can see a comprehensive picture.
This is what all the sides are saying, and this is what's true on the ground.
And it is self-evident that this war never needed to be fought.
And now here we are.
We are in the middle of something that is going to be extremely difficult to get out of.
And so now then, President Trump is in a position to where either he accelerates this and escalates it into something bigger, puts our security even more at risk by getting into the, by diminishing our national security everywhere else in the world because of the dwindling supplies of the most important armaments that we need to defend ourselves, i.e. air defense missiles and offensive, especially standoff missiles,
but even the so-called stand-in missiles of our aircraft.
We're getting dangerously low on those.
There's been, I saw a report, I think, yesterday that said up to 15,000 strikes had gone in so far.
Some of these strikes have more than one missile, so it's unclear how many we have expended on that.
That's just the offensive side.
How many defensive missiles we fired?
I think that's all the number was 3,000 air interceptor missiles in the first two days.
How many has been fired since that time?
The amount of Iranian fire has reduced, so it's probably hasn't been increased that much.
It's not an easy mathematical equation across the board, but it's many thousands.
And it takes, by understanding, 650 air interceptor missiles we can produce in an entire year.
And that's an excel.
That's about 100 higher than it was at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war because we've expanded a little bit.
But it is really hard to expand these things.
So that means that we have probably easily gone through already a year's worth of interceptor missiles in two weeks.
And there's no, there's, we don't have any idea when this war is going to be over.
And we're trying to say we want to kill everybody.
We want to assassinate all these leaders.
We want to bring down the IRGC and bring down the police and kill all the other leaders and then force open the Strait of Hormuz.
But you see that not one other nation is standing behind us.
No One Standing Behind Us00:06:14
And it's anybody's guess what they're going to come after this, what's going to happen now.
Because believe me, this gives motivation to every other of our allied friends to say, okay, hang on.
We're not going to get into a war that you chose because you were manipulated into it by another country.
And we're not going to send our ships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf to defend a war that should never have been fought.
No, they're going to say, you make a negotiated settlement.
Figure this out.
But don't expect us to die because you chose poorly.
Just imagine, why would anyone say anything otherwise?
I can't even imagine.
Why would Germany?
Why would the UK?
Why would France say, yes, we'll send our boys to die?
We'll send our capital ships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
We'll risk that just to keep the oil open because you made a bad choice.
Why would they do that?
As a matter of fact, they're working right now, according to some reports, they're quietly talking to the Iranians already because there's an offer on the table that says, hey, if you're not with America or Israel, with permission, you can pass through.
So they're already making negotiations right now.
All of these things are working against us.
This is literally like a couple of hours old.
I have no idea how this is going to play out.
I can only imagine what the media is going to do with this, especially the pro-war media.
We can imagine what President Trump's going to say, but we don't know how this is going to react to everybody else.
But I'm just telling you, the lid is off.
And Joe Kent, who is a sterling American of tremendous political and moral courage, he showed it on the battlefields in his deployments, and now he's shown it here in a way nobody else has in Washington, D.C.
I hope Tulsi Gabbard follows him very soon.
That's exactly what she should do.
Because from the Tulsi that I knew prior to all of this stuff starting here, prior to the time that I would almost her number three, she's the same person that Joe Kent was.
But she's got a tough decision to make, too, because if she doesn't follow suit, if she doesn't follow in his footsteps and resign also, there's almost no conclusion you can reach other than that she's changed and that now she supports what the president does and she doesn't support what Joe Kent said.
I hope she does.
My sincerest encouragement is that she would, because that's the best way that she can preserve any of her own credibility, but she'll lose it all if she stays with it.
And believe me, this is not going to go well for anybody in the administration.
This is not going to go well for President Trump.
It's not going to go well for Secretary of War Hegseth.
It's not going to go well for Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Any of these people who keep pursuing these policies that were based on fraud and were based on the needs of another country and the lust for war from another country, as Lindsey Graham and some of these others who have been lusting for this war, it ain't going to go well for them over time.
I promise you that.
Whether that comes now in the medium time or long term, it's guaranteed.
It's not going to go well.
And we don't even know how this war is going to come out because if President Trump doesn't agree to some of their terms, they can keep fighting it here.
And you may have seen Ali Larijani was assassinated by Israel today.
One of the most capable leaders that were left.
That hasn't been confirmed by the Iranian side, but Israel has been pretty good about accurately putting out people that they have assassinated.
They usually do have, when they have said it in the past, it turned out to be true.
We'll see how it's going to work out.
That'll be a big blow to the Iranian side.
But listen, they have people to replace him.
There'll be a diminution and a reduction in capacity because that guy was as experienced as it gets.
Now they're going to have to put somebody else in there, but they have somebody else to put in there.
And the nation, the country, will survive this.
And even though we have significantly damaged their missile capacity, their primary Navy, what little Air Force they had, those have been damaged.
A lot of the missile launchers have been destroyed.
But you can't destroy everything.
You just can't.
And again, let me reinforce: all Iran has to do is remain politically viable and keep that straight closed.
That's it.
And they have so many ways to keep it closed.
It doesn't require that much.
Those two things.
All they've got to do is hang on.
Every day that passes is going to be another day that the Gulf, all these region countries in the region are losing revenue.
And they continue, even if it's at a slower pace, they still struggle from getting shots from whether it's drones or missiles or a combination from Iran.
And by all accounts, they have the capacity to go on a long time.
So we're in a difficult position right now.
No matter how much firepower we brought to bear, history says that you're not going to be able to destroy a nation of this size, of this culture, of this history within a few weeks just because you bomb the heck out of them or kill a lot of their people.
We've seen that that's what the Iranian people are responding so far by becoming more cohesive around the existing government.
It's unlikely that just because you kill a few of them, somehow they're going to turn later on.
And it's going to be something that you want.
Very unlikely.
We'll see how that's going to work out, folks.
But we've got a couple of other good shows for you here.
We've got another one coming up at 12 o'clock with Patrick Kenningson, who believe me, will have some things to say about this, but we've also got a lot of other things about the war to talk to you about.
And then later on, Jim Jatris is going to come out at 2 p.m.
So you've got a lot to cover here today, but I didn't want to wait for those.
I wanted to break in and give you this information right now because this is a big deal.
When the president of the United States has been exposed by a senior member of the intelligence community, that he was lied to about the war, he was fooled into it by our Middle Eastern ally, Israel, and that the American media was part of the attempt to misinformation, to give you misinformation to him to reinforce a lie and to fool the American people.
That is a big deal.
Let's see how this is going to work out.
Thanks, folks.
Really appreciate you.
And we'll look forward to seeing you here in about an hour on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.