April 21, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:56
JOE KENT - Fmr. Dir. National Counterterrorism Center : Why Iran Is No Threat to the US!
Joe Kent, former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, argues Iran posed no imminent threat to the U.S., asserting that Israeli lobbying by Benjamin Netanyahu and David Barnea manufactured an artificial crisis to justify regime change. He claims skewed intelligence drove this aggression, warning that striking Iran's leadership would empower hardliners like the IRGC. Additionally, Kent alleges the FBI obstructed his investigations into foreign ties regarding the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024 and the murder of Charlie Kirk in September 2025. Ultimately, he urges citizens to reject blind trust in government narratives and demand accountability on foreign policy and domestic security issues. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Preemptive War in Iran00:14:25
Undeclared wars are commonplace.
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes, to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026.
My special guest today is Joe Kent, former Army Ranger, former CIA officer, former congressional candidate, former Republican, former head of counterterrorism for the Director of National Intelligence of the United States government, proud father of two boys, defender of personal freedom.
Believer that the Constitution means what it says, an exemplar of intellectual honesty and personal courage.
Joe, welcome here and thank you very much for your time.
Let me get right to it.
How did you conclude, contrary to what President Trump has been saying for months, that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States of America?
Well, thanks for having me.
And I reached that conclusion really just by looking at the data at hand.
From the time that President Trump came back into the Oval Office, the Iranians observed a very, very close and tightly held escalation ladder.
And you can observe this just by looking at the events that took place in that time.
We also had intelligence that reflected this as well, but intelligence can be faulty.
So I would encourage folks to look at the way the Iranians behaved.
When President Trump came back into office, the Iranians withheld their proxies from attacking our forces under the Biden administration because The Iranians didn't respect Biden.
They had attacked our troops over 200 times in Iraq and Syria and in Jordan.
President Trump came in.
Those attacks stopped.
The Iranians got right to the negotiating table with President Trump.
And this is because President Trump had a red line that was that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
The Iranian, the former Supreme Leader, agreed under the former Supreme Leader's leadership and they had a fatwa, a religious decree that prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
Now, my critics will say you can't trust an Iranian fatwa.
However, that fatwa held.
Since 2004.
So, if the Iranians wanted to have a nuclear weapon, they could have purchased one or they could have developed one long before President Trump was ever in the Oval Office.
And so the Iranians engaged in negotiations with us, and we were discussing the level of enrichment that would be tolerable, how that enrichment would be monitored, et cetera.
And that's when the Israelis came in and they used an influence campaign through official engagements with the Trump administration, but then also using their echo chamber with the media, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, et cetera.
To basically say that President Trump's red line wasn't what he had always said and what he still says it is that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon, that it was zero enrichment, knowing that that was basically a poison pill for the Iranians.
The Iranians wanted to be able to continue to do some form of enrichment.
They viewed this as basically an insurance policy where they wouldn't go like Muammar Gaddafi did and say, hey, we're going to give up all capability because that would lead to the same results that Muammar Gaddafi got.
And they didn't want to go the route that Saddam Hussein in Iraq went and said, hey, maybe I have a nuclear weapon, maybe I'm going to develop a nuclear weapon because then they would get the same results.
So, they basically had a very pragmatic strategy of having the ability to enrich some enriched uranium, but not developing a nuclear weapon.
And this gave us lots of trade space in terms of a negotiation.
But that negotiation and that trade space, the potential for a deal was a direct threat to the Israelis.
So, I watched the Israelis come in, use this influence campaign to basically change U.S. policy, but then push the 12 day war.
And then, even after the 12 day war and Midnight Hammer, Midnight Hammer should have taken off the enrichment issue off the negotiating table because we took out the Iranian enrichment sites.
The Iranians immediately got right back to the negotiating table after Midnight Hammer.
But we saw the Israelis continue to want to push their goal of regime change.
And so for me, watching the Israelis be able to push our agenda, the Iranians observing a tight and closely observed escalation ladder, I knew that Israel didn't pose, I'm sorry, the Iranians didn't pose a direct threat to us.
Israel attacking Iran and going for regime change, that would have the Iranians strike us back.
Which is exactly what happened.
The Israelis basically came and said, We're going to do this attack.
And so the administration decided that we would do a preemptive attack, knowing that the Iranians would attack us, which is basically what Secretary Rubio came out and said that we had to attack Iran because the Israelis were going to attack Iran.
So, therefore, the only imminent threat actually was from Israel, not actually from Iran.
So, Iran forced President Trump's hand.
Let me make sure I understand you correctly.
First, by lobbying him, and you can tell us who did the lobbying.
I think it was probably the prime minister and David Barnea, the director of Mossad, and then by saying, We're going in anyway, so you better back us up.
If you don't back us up, they'll be held to pay.
Yeah, that's basically right.
I mean, the lobbying really took place on a broad spectrum.
The Israelis have great access to our government, both through official channels, through their intelligence services, through their diplomats, but then also, I would say, unofficial channels.
There's the donor network of sympathetic Americans who are sympathetic to the Israelis, but then also through the media, and that was very powerful.
So, what we would see on the official side was we would see the Israelis, their elected officials, come in and engage directly with our officials, members of the cabinet, and say, hey, Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
We wouldn't see that reflected necessarily in the intelligence.
Because that intelligence just didn't simply exist.
And so the Israelis really wouldn't even try to contaminate the intelligence necessarily.
They would just circumvent the intelligence agencies.
This is why, in public testimony, you would see DNI Gabbard speak for the 18 intelligence agencies in the U.S. intelligence community and say Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon, Iran did not pose an imminent threat.
And then you would see John Ratcliffe contradict her and say, no, he believed that Iran posed an imminent threat.
John Ratcliffe was mouthing the Israeli line.
Yes, essentially.
I don't know where he got that intelligence from because it didn't exist within his own intelligence channels.
The 18 intelligence agencies had and maintained that Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon.
And so Ratcliffe would then come in and others as well would come in and they would say what the Israelis would say.
And then we'd see that echoed essentially in the media.
And so President Trump was kind of caught in this echo chamber, this echo chamber, this ecosystem of information where he would hear one thing through official channels and then he would hear it echoed.
Through the media as well.
So, Benjamin Netanyahu and then a whole assortment of Israeli officials, but then also sympathetic Americans in the media sphere, the think tank sphere, really helped move that red line and make a poison pill for any negotiations that we could have with the Iranians.
And you see that to this day.
President Trump will continue to say, and I try to point it out as much as I can on my social media, when President Trump points out and says Iran can't have a nuclear weapon, that's when you start seeing the Foundation for Defensive Democracies, you start seeing Mark Levin get very nervous and they start screaming about zero enrichment, how we have to go get all the That the uranium dust that might be out there, because basically that creates a situation that always results in regime change.
Because it's almost impossible to go into a country like Iran and say that we've taken out all the highly enriched uranium, we've taken away any trace of uranium, because really then they can always come back and say, Oh no, you missed some more here or there.
You may have bombed all the nuclear facilities, but it's buried down underground.
So you actually have to go and control the ground to take it out.
So basically, all roads lead to regime change, which has always been the Israelis' goal.
And really, the Israelis are very upfront.
Like you mentioned, the Mossad director, the Mossad has always been very upfront that really.
All they want to do is take down the Iranian regime.
So they've actually been fairly upfront with us on what their goals were.
But then we had the Israeli officials and then their sympathetic folks here in the U.S.
They were the ones that really helped move that red line for President Trump.
I think if Trump keeps his eyes set on Iran not having a nuclear weapon and basically opening up the Straits of Hormuz, we could reach a deal whether it's written down actually on paper or not.
Or if we just simply were to quietly withdraw from the region, President Trump can message that he won.
And then we could quietly engage with the Iranians, ensure that they don't have.
A nuclear weapon.
I think we could find an end to this thing.
But if we stay on this escalation ladder of we have to go take all the highly enriched uranium, we're going to be stuck in this cycle where all paths lead to regime change.
And basically, that's going to lead to an ongoing quagmire, which is in the Israelis' interest, but it's just simply not in ours.
Let me take you back to the president deciding what to do.
Do you know if anybody in his inner circle made the arguments to him that you've just made to us?
In the lead up to Midnight Hammer, quite a few of us did.
There was a lot of debates in the National Security Council process, the Deputies Committee Council process, where we basically talked about, hey, all the Israelis want is regime change.
So a lot of the information we're getting from them, especially about, you know, enrichment, uranium, nuclear weapons, that's very, very skewed.
It's meant to influence as opposed to inform.
And then we also talked about how if we were to strike Iran, especially if we were to go after the leadership, that we would not see the regime crumble.
We would see the Iranian people who were not happy with the Iranian regime, but we would see them.
Rally around the flag, which is just kind of a natural tendency that people have.
And we're seeing that right now in real time.
And we also cautioned that if we took out the current leadership, we would see the IRGC, the hardliners, empowered, which is exactly what we're seeing right now.
After Midnight Hammer, because there was so much dissent in the lead up to Midnight Hammer, the circle around President Trump was narrowed and there was nowhere near as much debate and discussion in the lead up to this last iteration of the conflict.
How contrary to history and to reason is it for the president to accept?
Intel from a foreign government and reject intel from his own.
Yeah, this is a major problem.
And the intelligence community over the years didn't do itself any favors by discrediting itself so much in the eyes of President Trump.
So I understand his skepticism.
However, the Israelis, again, because we have just gotten, we, the U.S. government, have just gotten so comfortable with the Israelis.
A lot of times they were sending in information so quickly and so rapidly that it wasn't properly caveated.
So I think a lot of times the president was getting information and it was coming from someone like Ratcliffe, it was coming from Rubio.
It was coming from people that he trusted.
I don't think that they were taking the time to say, this is all coming from the Israelis, and here's the Israeli strategic goal.
I don't think he would have made the same decisions that he made in the lead up to this war had all that information been properly caveated.
Did Director Gabbard advise against the war?
Did she express to him the views that you've just articulated so nicely for us now?
She did when she had the opportunity.
And I think that's a big problem with this last iteration of the war that kicked off in.
In March, there just wasn't a robust debate and discussion.
So I don't know exactly if she got that opportunity.
I know in the lead up to Midnight Hammer, she did, but to the president's detriment, they shrunk that circle of decision makers around him in the lead up to this last iteration of the war.
Is this present war a war of aggression?
Oh, certainly.
I mean, look, we'd still be at the negotiating table right now with the Iranians.
Our bases in the region wouldn't have been attacked.
The 13 Americans who were killed would not be dead right now.
Again, we'd still be at the negotiating table.
We would have had plenty of time to work out a deal.
The economic sanctions, this is, I think, the tragedy of the whole saga, is that President Trump's initial strategy in the first Trump administration and in the lead up to the 12 day war was actually working.
President Trump showed the Iranians that he wasn't one to be toyed with, he wasn't Obama.
He wasn't Bush.
He killed Qasem Soleimani.
He killed Aboumani Mohandas, but he stopped short of falling into the trap of a regime change war inside of Iran.
He used maximum pressure sanctions, which had the Iranians economically on the ropes.
That's a big reason why we saw the protesters out in the streets in January.
The Iranian people were protesting the cost of living.
They were saying, hey, our government's not taking care of us, which ostensibly is what we wanted.
But we negated all that by jumping in on this disastrous regime change war by preemptively attacking Iran and immediately going after and killing.
The former Ayatollah.
Look, the former Ayatollah is not a great guy.
However, compared to what comes after him, he is relatively moderate.
And also, by us killing him, a lot of his detractors, they automatically now rally to the side of the regime.
So, this war of aggression that we've launched, it's actually worked against our long term interests in the region.
Does the United States government behind the scenes acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons and, at least under late Prime Minister Golda Meir, threaten to use them?
I mean, I think everyone in the US government knows Israel has nuclear weapons.
I mean, the Israelis even kind of like wink and nod about it.
So, in terms of like their threats, I mean, you don't have nuclear weapons unless you're at least, unless you at least want your adversaries to know that you could use them.
So, I think the soft threat is always there.
You were the director of counterintelligence, the United States government.
Uncovering FBI Secrets00:08:13
You had a full national security clearance, able to examine whatever documents or data.
You needed in order to fulfill your job.
Why did you resign?
So, for me, there were two main reasons why I resigned.
Number one, it's a promise that I made to myself over 20 years ago.
I spent over 20 years in special operations in the Army and then some time in the CIA.
But on my third deployment to Iraq about 20 years ago, I came to the realization that we had been lied to to get us into the Iraq war.
There was no weapons of mass destruction.
Al Qaeda in Iraq didn't exist until we came there and radicalized a lot of the population and gave Al Qaeda fertile recruiting grounds.
There was no link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.
It took me three deployments to figure that out, but I finally did on my third deployment.
And I was very frustrated that senior members of our government who had been through a quagmire before, a lot of the Vietnam vets, Colin Powell, and folks like him, that were, I felt mature enough at a rank and responsibility role that they could have actually stood in the way of this.
They could have prevented it from happening in the first place.
And then when they saw that it was going to be a quagmire, they could have publicly spoken out.
And I was frustrated that they didn't.
And so I said to myself 20 plus years ago, if I'm ever in.
If I'm ever in a position where I can influence the next generation getting sent off to go fight and die on foreign battlefields, that I would do something about it, not knowing what the future held for me.
So, when the casualties first started pouring in in this last iteration, and I saw there was no hope of an off ramp and the president was really kind of siloing himself off away from any dissenting voices, I knew that morally I had to leave.
I also lost my late wife.
She was killed fighting ISIS in Syria in 2019.
And so, for me, watching the body bags come back into Dover, that was just a, you know, it was like, Everything I had done in my life to that point, screaming in my face that I had to publicly speak out against this.
I had to resign.
I couldn't be a part of it.
But another big part for me was I feel that the American people need to understand that this war was foisted upon us by Israel and that Israel does have far too much say in our foreign policy in the Middle East, especially if you look back at all the wars post 9 11, the way that that has benefited the state of Israel, the Israeli lobby, the amount of influence they had on taking us off to war in Iraq.
The regime change war in Syria, everything that we've been doing basically in the Middle East since post 9 11.
I was aware of that before I was serving at this position.
You know, I had read about it, I had seen a little bit of it, but then being at this level and seeing the way the Israelis were able to come in, move the red line, influence the president, I felt and I still feel that that is something the American people need to be made aware of so that we can fix this and we can root out foreign influence from our government.
Can Donald Trump say no to Benjamin Netanyahu or stated differently?
Does Trump control Netanyahu or does Netanyahu and company control Trump?
Well, we're about to find out.
I still think that the President Trump has a lot of personal agency.
I think he just got a lot of bad advice.
And I think if he gets a chance to objectively assess and put on his businessman hat, he's going to see that he got very, very bad advice.
And the best thing that he can do, as I've said multiple times, is just walk away from this, channel some Reagan in 1984 and say, hey, this cost benefit analysis just doesn't check out for the American people.
We're going to leave.
If he can do that, that's going to show.
That he actually can tell Benjamin Netanyahu no, and he can tell the Israeli lobby no.
If he can't do that, and we're forced to stay in the Middle East and we're forced to stay in this war and to continue to escalate, and we just can't bring ourselves to walk away, that's going to show the full scope of Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby's tentacles, really, on American policy.
Because right now, for us to stay and to continue doubling and tripling down on this war, it's not in our interest.
That will be in Israel's interest.
So I still hold out some faith that President Trump, if he can kind of come to his senses, remember what he ran on.
And look at this from a businessman's optics that he will be able to see this is not our interest and pull us back out.
But this is going to be a great test going forward.
And I hope it's a test that we can get through rather quickly.
Because if we don't extract ourselves from this very, very quick, in a very quick way, I think this could lead to a greater quagmire.
Switching gears, do we know all we need to know about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July of 2024?
No, we don't.
We do not at all.
We've been told that the Iranians attempted to kill President Trump, and there's usually heavy innuendo, and people start to think that Butler had something to do with that.
The recent prosecution of Asif Merchant, who was hired by the Iranians, shed some light on some of that.
But then we didn't see any linkage between the Merchant case, who was arrested just two days before Butler, and Butler, Pennsylvania, Thomas Crooks, any of that.
We were told by the FBI that Crooks has.
You know, no online persona for about a year.
And then investigative journalists found online personas that were associated with crooks.
We see crooks interacting with people overseas as well.
And these are things we tried to look into at the National Counterterrorism Center, but were blocked by the FBI from doing so.
So I don't think anyone can say that there's been a true assessment, a true investigation on what took place in Butler and if there was any foreign involvement or just really that full story.
I think there's a lot more work that needs to be done there.
Do you know, Joe, if the president himself is aware that his own FBI blocked your investigation of an attempt to murder him?
I know that President Trump has been briefed and he said he wanted more information on the things that we uncovered, some of the gaps, and he said he wanted more information on them.
From there, we were blocked and I didn't get an opportunity to discuss this again with the president.
So I think he's aware because he even verbalized and said that he wasn't satisfied with the information that he got from Butler.
So the whole thing to me is just very, very odd.
And I think the American people deserve an answer and we should be looking into.
I mean, someone tried to kill the president.
I mean, that should be looked into.
The American people need to understand why and how that happened.
The story right now that it was just a lone, crazy kid who exploited a gap in the security, that just doesn't make sense at all.
Do we know all we need to know about the murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah in September of 2025?
I don't think we do.
I think there's still a lot more that needs to be uncovered.
The trial is ongoing right now.
So I'm hoping that some more of these gaps are filled in the trial.
We'll see.
I am skeptical that those gaps will be filled.
There was obviously people who had pre knowledge that were posting online about Charlie Kirk being killed.
I know from a foreign ties aspect, that was our job at the National Counterterrorism Center to look into the foreign ties.
There was a lot more leads that we needed to run down.
Now, I can't definitively say this country, this person, et cetera, likely had something to do with Charlie Kirk.
I just know there was a lot more work that we had to do before the FBI said, hey, there's nothing more to see here.
The FBI blocked you from investigating the Kirk assassination just as they blocked you from investigating.
The attempted assassination of President Trump?
Yes.
Yes.
There was a lot more work we needed to do on determining foreign ties and foreign nexus.
And the FBI told us to stop, that they had primacy.
And then they handed, according to them, everything over to Utah State.
And so we'll see what comes out in the actual trial of Tyler Robinson.
But from where I was, we still had a lot more work to do.
Do you think Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk?
I think we're going to see.
According to the FBI and according to the Utah state authorities, they say they have a rock solid case.
So far, I've seen what everybody else has that there's a gun with his fingerprints on it.
So I'll let that trial play out.
And yeah, that's really all I can say.
Why We Must Question Government00:01:15
Should the government be believed?
No, the government should not be believed.
And I would give you the same answer when I was in the government.
I think having an engaged citizenry that is always asking questions, that is not trusting the government, I think is absolutely essential, not just considering how much our government's lied to us, but just in general.
We live in a democratic republic.
We, the people, have a right to demand answers from our elected officials and from our government.
The government works for we, the people.
I think that the government needs to constantly be reminded of that.
And right now, we have no reason whatsoever to trust the government.
Trust but verify if the government's not going to present receipts and they say, just trust me on anything, whether it's going off to war, whether it's a high profile assassination, whether it's the COVID vaccine, et cetera, we need to ask those questions.
So do not trust the government.
Joe Kent, you're a great man.
Thank you very much for joining us, my dear friend.
And you're welcome back here whenever you want.
Uh, this appreciative audience, all the best to you.
Thank you very much, Judge.
I appreciate it.
Sure.
Coming up later today, what a great interview, and truly a great man.
Coming up later today at one this afternoon, Pepe Escobar at two this afternoon, Professor Glenn Deason at three this afternoon, the great Phil Giraldi.