Joe Kent, former National Counterterrorism Center Director and Gold Star husband, resigns over the Iran war, alleging he was misled by Israeli officials regarding an imminent nuclear threat that intelligence agencies denied. He faces an FBI leak investigation for disclosing "palace intrigue" while criticizing the administration's shift from preventing nuclear weapons to stopping enrichment. The discussion highlights stalled Charlie Kirk murder investigations, strategic divergences with Israel risking regional destabilization, and domestic Republican divisions that could benefit Democrats, ultimately warning against unnecessary conflicts diverting resources from critical border security needs. [Automatically generated summary]
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Joe Kent is an Army Special Forces veteran who spent two decades fighting for the United States.
And until this past Tuesday, he was the top advisor to President Trump on terrorism threats, helping to keep the nation safe.
His resignation over the war in Iran this week has touched off a fierce debate.
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He believes the United States went to war based on flawed reasoning, arguing there was no imminent threat, among other accusations he has leveled, which we will get into.
He's now reportedly under investigation by the FBI, accused of leaking classified information.
But is that true?
For the first time today, he's going to speak about that potential federal investigation and whether he is ready to face the wrath of the U.S. government, which he dared to criticize over this war.
The same government he sacrificed so much for.
Watch.
President, your director of national counterterrorism, Joe Kent, he just resigned today.
He said he can't support your conflict with Iran.
What's your reaction to that?
And did you read his statement?
I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security.
When I read his statement, I realized that it's a good thing that he's out.
Kent is a decorated former Green Beret and CIA operative.
My first or second day of special forces selection was September 11th.
And I'm like, man, this can't be actually real.
A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.
You know, you're going to do what you signed up for.
How did that hit?
Did that hit you at the time?
I was afraid I was going to miss it.
Mr. Kent has 20 years of military service and 11 combat deployments during the war on terror.
We are out broad daylight, Haifa Street, places where the Army had like literally still smoldering Bradley fighting vehicles that have gotten lit up.
We're out there and are dressed up like Iraqis trying to find guys.
Mr. Kent has dedicated his career to fighting terrorism and keeping Americans safe.
I met Joe at a place, it was a very sad day.
It was Dover.
Dover is the Air Force base where large planes come in, very, very sadly come in.
I said, so why are you here?
He said, I'm waiting for my wife to come in.
And that was a very sad thing.
I knew immediately what he was talking about.
My boys were one and three when my wife was killed serving in Syria.
I wasn't shocked when I heard.
But the one clear thought was, okay, I have to leave the service, move back home, and take care of my kids.
That incredible woman's looking down on him right now, and she's very proud.
I was in a room, and next thing you know, Trump walks around the corner.
And it was just us together for 10, 15 minutes.
And the questions he was asking me, and just the reaction that he was having to being there at Dover.
I really felt like he's a guy who did not like the fact that people died under his watch.
You have something very special.
Listen, you ought to run for politics someday.
This is about us, conservatives, Republicans, taking back our country.
It really represents sort of the MA portion who is anti-war.
Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more wars, no more wars.
Nobody knows why we're there, you know, the wars that never end.
The war in Iraq is a big, fat mistake.
After 9-11, the American people were like, Yeah, let's get it on.
Let's go to war.
Let's defend our country.
We took down the Taliban and Al-Qaeda pretty quick in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden escapes to Pakistan.
And all of a sudden, it's like, don't worry about that.
We're going to build a new government here in Afghanistan.
Oh, and by the way, now we need to go to Iraq.
It's the longest period of time our country's been at war, but we never stood up the draft.
It was all fought by volunteers.
And I think we deserve credit for that, but I also think overall that was a bad thing for the country.
Because you could send the country off to war for 20-plus years.
You could make a small group of people very, very wealthy based off that war, but only a very small fraction of the population is going to feel any effects whatsoever of war.
This is kind of a money-making scheme done on the backs of those who are, you know, true believers like us that volunteer to go over time and time again.
A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.
If we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked and by someone else, Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths.
CENCOM U.S. military officials confirming three U.S. service members have been killed, five others wounded as part of Operation Epic Fury.
And sadly, there will likely be more.
Before it ends, that's the way it is.
The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, has just announced he's resigning.
Quote, 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, 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 American lives.
It is unclear how much of an impact this letter will have, given the kind of conspiratorial nature of the letter, the fact that he blames Israel, Israeli officials, the American media, the Israel lobby.
I heard anti-Semitism.
I mean, this is a trope that repeats itself throughout history.
The Jews are in back of everything and maneuvered poor innocent Donald Trump into doing this.
What are you doing?
You're giving aid and comfort to a lie.
There was an imminent threat.
How much more evident could you be within two weeks, having enough material to make 10 bombs?
How close could you come?
Not much.
Joe Kent joins me now.
Let's talk about what's really happening right now.
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Joe, it's a pleasure to meet you, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Thank you for being with us.
Thank you so much for having me, Megan.
I really appreciate it.
So it's been a few days now since you issued that resignation.
You've been called weak by the President of the United States.
You've been basically called a traitor by Lindsey Graham.
You've been called an anti-Semite by Mitch McConnell, among others.
And now there are reports that you're under a leak investigation, potentially accusing you of a felony that could put you in jail, even though you now are raising your two boys.
You've remarried, but you're their sole biological parent still here.
And I ask you now whether this was worth it.
I think it most certainly was, Megan.
I mean, the attacks against me are to be expected.
The ad hominems from people like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham at this point are fairly laughable.
They don't want to discuss the issues.
I want to discuss the issues.
As for the leak allegations, I'm not concerned because I know I did nothing wrong.
Of course, I am concerned because we've all seen the FBI and the full way of the government come down on individuals who speak out.
So that has me a little bit concerned, but I know the truth and the facts are on my side.
So I think the important issues to address are what's at hand, why we're at war and how we get out of the state that we're in right now.
Your boys have already lost one parent.
I mean, the thought of this government for which you've been working and the government and the country for which you've sacrificed so much actually trying to put you in jail over an alleged leak after the number of leaks we've seen go unpunished over the past 10 years is truly outrageous, Joe.
I mean, does it anger you?
How does it make you feel?
You know, it does anger me, but it's all just to be expected.
I knew this was going to happen.
I know their playbook.
I think we're all very familiar with their playbook.
So actually, the fact that they're leaking these allegations, so they have to leak the allegations of an FBI investigation.
If there truly was an FBI investigation, and who knows, maybe there will be, then there would be a process and a procedure for that.
They would actually formally come to me.
And if they were still collecting information, they most certainly wouldn't leak it.
So the fact that the FBI, DOJ, or really probably just partisans are leaking this so-called investigation against me at a time when I'm going on and publicly speaking out against the course that the administration is on.
To me, that tells me everything that I need to know.
I feel very confident in what I'm doing right now.
I think I have a mission, and I think it is to do everything I can to stop this war.
So to me, I kind of view everything else as a sideshow.
And I just want to stay focused on the mission.
I definitely want to get into the letter and your reasons and everything around Iran, but the latest is this alleged leak.
And so I want to ask you a couple of questions about it, including, did they tell you prior to your resignation that you were under investigation for alleged leaking?
No, I had access to, you know, top secret, et cetera, up until the time that I chose to walk out the door.
So I was fully the director of the National Counterterrorism Center until I submitted my resignation to the White House, had a phone call conversation with President Trump, and then the next day officially announced with my resignation letter and went public.
Up until that point, I had full access.
I was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and I was not aware of any investigation that I was under.
The only two alleged leaks that we could figure out they may be pointing to, Joe, are one, Mark Levin.
I have a different name for him, but Mark Levin is alleging that you leaked to Tucker that Mark had a meeting with President Trump in June, shortly before we bombed Iran the first time.
And he accused you of leaking that to Tucker.
By the way, not for nothing, but literally days after Tucker reported it, Politico reported it based on two sources.
I'm wondering whether they're going to actually drag Politico in there in addition to Tucker and see who the leaker was.
But in any event, that's one.
Do you deny leaking to Tucker the Mark Levin meeting?
Yeah, I deny that.
And the second one is, I think, no one said this explicitly, but there's online speculation related to Charlie Kirk because there was a turning point employee named Andrew Colvett, who we know well.
He was on the program last week, who's the executive producer of Charlie's show.
And now he's co-hosting Charlie's show in the wake of his assassination.
And he provided to government employees is all he's ever revealed.
He never said the FBI.
He never said you.
He never said anybody specifically.
That group chat that Charlie was in, that 48 hours before he was killed, in which Charlie said he was done with the donors who are pressuring him.
Let me pull it up so I don't misstate it.
Charlie said, stand by.
Oh, boy.
And I don't have it in front of me, but he basically said he was done with the pressure that the Jewish donors were putting on him.
He had lost another $2 million donation from a Jewish donor.
He might have to invite Candace Owens, just as sort of a middle finger to these people to let them know that they couldn't pressure him and that he wasn't going to cancel Tucker Carlson.
So this is 48 hours before he was killed.
This group chat, which was in, I think a WhatsApp group, involved Charlie and Josh Hammer and some others.
And that was provided by Andrew Colvet to someone in government.
And some online are speculating that, well, we know it was leaked to Candace Owens and she reported on it.
And some are speculating that you were the leaker.
So did you leak that document to Candice?
No.
Did you leak it all to the media?
No.
And have you watched as other government employees have leaked multiple documents and information with absolutely no threat of prosecution?
I have the same access to the media that you do.
So I see it happening.
I don't know specifics of anyone specifically leaking themselves.
But yeah, the leaks are in the paper every single day.
And I think there's a big distinction between leaking actual top secret information and then leaking almost palace intrigue of who's meeting with who.
But yeah, no, so I'm not aware of any specific leakers.
But again, I see all the time in the media.
Well, that's the other thing.
I mean, I would say that, you know, let's just say that you were the leaker about Mark Levin visiting President Trump at the White House.
He's not some top national security advisor.
He's not some foreign leader.
That's not classified information.
And by the way, the Andrew Colvet group chat is not classified information either.
That's a group chat that many members, pundits and others of the chattering class were a part of and that multiple people had.
So I just like the if this is what the leak investigation is about, I can tell you as a lawyer, I don't think it's going anywhere.
Counter-Narratives and Oversight Functions00:02:26
But in any event, do you think they're trying to intimidate you out of being so public in your stance on the Iran war?
I think it's more of the media game.
I mean, they dropped the accusations about the investigation you're referring to right as we were airing or Tucker was airing the interview that he did with me.
So I really think it's just a counter narrative.
They're trying to say that, hey, obviously Kent's going on big platforms like yours, like Tucker's, et cetera.
So at the same time, they'll kind of tease out different, you know, salacious details of a leak or an investigation.
I think it's mostly a media game.
I think the second effect is they are trying to intimidate me.
But look, these people know me pretty well.
They've worked with me.
I think if you've been in MAGA circles for this long, you kind of understand what this is.
So really, this is just an effort for them to steal the narrative and to have us discussing things like the leaks, the investigation, et cetera, as opposed to the main issue, which is why we went to war with Iran.
11 combat tours, Joe?
Yes.
Yeah.
How many bronze stars do you have?
I have six bronze stars.
It just seems to me you don't intimidate that easily.
And it's probably going to take a little bit more than media reports about alleged leak investigations involving non-classified information to scare you, but we'll see.
Can I ask you one other question on this?
Did you, in your role, did you get along with Kash Patel?
Yeah, I actually had a good working relationship with Cash.
Look, there's institutional friction between organizations in the government, just like there was when I was in the military.
The National Counterterrorism Center is pretty unique in the fact that they can kind of see what the FBI is doing, what the CIA is doing.
It was created after 9-11 to help connect the dots.
So it's somewhat of an oversight function.
And anytime you have an oversight function in government, there's going to inherently be friction because we, in essence, we are kind of looking into their case files.
We're looking into their operations.
And so just, you know, a lot of times that does develop what I think is a pretty healthy tension.
And so if there were times where Cash and I disagreed on something, or usually it wasn't even Cash.
It was just people at different parts of the FBI.
If we had a disagreement, it was usually a professional disagreement.
And there's processes and procedures for, you know, kind of hashing all that out.
Because it would now be his organization that would be looking into you.
Moral Clarity on War Mistakes00:07:01
Of course, none of that will happen if the president tells him not to make it happen.
And so we'll see just how mad the president may be that you've been outspoken.
You're not criticizing him personally.
You're not criticizing his general policies.
It's the war in Iran that you're criticizing and suggesting the president was misled in the reasoning for doing it in the alleged justification.
But before we get to that, let's just talk about how you became a Trump supporter and wound up working in the Trump administration.
It goes back quite a ways to, I mean, you were obviously a combat veteran.
And I believe it was back in 2016 when he was running the first time.
You told Sean Ryan later that it was that moment on the stage with Jeb Bush that first, this is February 2016 that first got your attention.
We clipped some of it here in SOT 3.
Watch.
Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake.
All right.
Now, you can take it any way you want.
And it took Jeb Bush.
If you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, took him five days.
He went back.
It was a mistake.
It wasn't a mistake.
It took him five days before his people told him what to say.
And he ultimately said, it was a mistake.
The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives.
We don't even have it.
Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world.
Obviously, it was a mistake.
What did that mean to you?
It was a breath of fresh air.
I mean, I said finally, like someone, someone who has a major political platform, an actual shot at the White House, has been saying what the guys on the ground have been saying for years.
I was pretty disenfranchised after the Bush years with the Republican Party, became a Ron Paul supporter.
And it actually basically was, you know, cautiously optimistic.
I didn't vote for Obama when he came in and said that he wanted to end the wars.
But I saw in short order that Obama wasn't serious about that either.
And so I didn't think that we really had a choice in political party.
I thought there was actually no difference.
And then Trump came on in South Carolina, of all places, heavily, a lot of veterans there in the crowd.
And he said the thing.
He said that we never should have gone to war in Iraq.
He said it was based on lies.
And for me, I was just like, I knew who Trump was, like most Americans do.
I just knew he had like a reality TV show, essentially.
And I was like, man, the guy from the apprentice just laid out our problems with our foreign policy more succinctly than any of the so-called experts that I've ever heard.
So that made me a Trump supporter, like in that moment.
I mean, that moment with Jeb Bush was so crazy because I was the one who interviewed him when he couldn't spit out the answer about whether the Iraq war was a mistake.
And it was supposed to be one of those sort of puff piece interviews launching his presidential campaign.
It was such a basic question, like, you know, was the Iraq war a mistake?
It was his brother's war.
He couldn't answer it.
Meanwhile, there was this, you know, real estate guy with perfect moral clarity on it.
So I'm not surprised to you.
It stood out.
It stood out to me too at the time.
We noticed in that setup piece that you met President Trump in person at Dover when the remains of your wife were returned stateside after she was killed while in service for the country in Syria.
She was the mother of your two young boys.
She was deployed at a time right after they'd been born.
Both of you had real hesitations about it, but she felt it was her duty to go.
And she did go.
And then tragically, she was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber.
So, Joe, when you saw President Trump at Dover, my understanding is you had a private conversation with him.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, so my late wife was killed about a month after President Trump attempted to get our troops out of Syria the first time.
So the territorial ISIS Caliphate was defeated towards the end of 2018.
And that's when President Trump sent out a very famous tweet and started giving orders that, hey, we accomplished our military objectives.
We're not going to stay here forever.
We're not going to get further entrenched.
We're going to get our troops out.
And so she and her team, they were supposed to be pulled out of Syria on Christmas Eve in 2018.
And the rest is, I think, pretty well known history.
The administrative state, the bureaucrats, they drugged their feet.
They accused Trump.
They leaked to the media why this was a horrible idea.
And so they created this stall where our troops were still in Syria.
And she was killed about a month after in January of 2019.
And so I, being in the CIA at the time, I had a front row seat to seeing kind of the behind the scenes of how the bureaucrats were dragging their feet and thwarting President Trump.
And so by the time she was killed and we were waiting for her remains to return to Dover, I really wanted to actually just speak with the president.
I didn't think I'd get the opportunity.
I just figured he was going to be there essentially to see the coffins off the plane.
But before the plane arrived, his staffers came and said, hey, if you'd like to meet with the president, he'll meet with you.
And Shannon was killed with three other great Americans, John Farmer, Scotty Wertz, and Gadir Ta.
And so President Trump met with all the families individually.
When I got an opportunity to meet with President Trump, again, it was just us.
I thought there'd be a Secret Service detail or something like that, but it was him and I in the room.
And he was very gracious, very sympathetic, strong leader.
And I had been in combat most of my adult life at that time.
And I'd seen leaders react in different ways.
And President Trump, to me, seemed like he legitimately cared.
He did not take lightly the fact that these individuals died under his command.
And I just wanted to tell him a very simple message that, hey, your instincts, what you're trying to implement, you're correct, but you're actually being thwarted.
And I got an opportunity to kind of deliver that in a shorthand way.
And then later on, got an opportunity to sit down with Jerry Kushner and some others several months on, several months after that, and to kind of flesh out the way I viewed President Trump's foreign policy.
And that kind of started my relationship with the Trump administration.
But President Trump's, as you said, moral clarity on how and why we use force and whether or not it's in the American people's interest, I think it's something that he's always understood at a very instinctual level.
And I always really truly respected and appreciated that about him.
And I still do to this day.
Which is why it had to be pretty shocking to you when he launched the war in Iran.
It was, but I saw a lot of the lead up, especially in the lead up to the 12-day war, Operation Midnight Hammer, and then just seeing the way that a lot of key advisors to the President Trump, both informal and formal, and then the media, the media ecosystem created kind of around President Trump to put in different ideas that, you know, Iran couldn't have any enrichment and to make it seem imminent that we had to go to war with Iran.
Responsibility of the Commander in Chief00:09:36
So I kind of saw this happening.
I stayed in the fight as long as I could to try and influence that myself.
And I got to the point where the war had started once, the 12-day war, when Operation Midnight Hammer happened, we had a clear military objective there, which was to destroy the nuclear facilities.
So I was skeptical of it because I said, hey, look, even if we destroy the nuclear facilities, the Israelis, who have a completely different strategic objective than us, they're going to come back to us here in a couple months and they're going to tell us why we need to go take down the regime, knowing that taking down the regime was not in our vital national security interest and actually would make things far worse and start a larger war.
That was my major concern.
And so when I saw things heat back up this summer, this fall, in the lead up to where we are now, I had a feeling that it could end up this way.
So I wasn't shocked when it happened because I saw the bubble being created around President Trump.
And so that's why I felt like my only means of recourse, my only means of taking action was to do so from the outside.
There's so much I want to get to on what you said.
You mentioned that you were in the CIA, which we didn't really do your resume, but can you just tell us the branches of the military you were in and then ultimately the CIA?
Sure.
So I was in the Army for my entire 20 years.
I came in as an enlisted infantryman in 1998, went right to the selection process to become a Ranger, to be a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment.
I was there for about three years.
I was actually in special forces selection to become a Green Beret when the attacks of September 11th happened.
Once I finished the training, it takes about a year and a half to earn your Green Beret.
I went to 5th Special Forces Group.
And then the Iraq war had already kicked off.
And so for basically from 2003 until 2011, I would spend six to eight months a year in Iraq, various locations, primarily Baghdad, Mosul, fought in the Battle of Jaffa, fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah, fought in Tal Afar.
And then in 2010, I spent some time in Yemen.
2010 was the only year I didn't go to Iraq.
I was in Yemen for about eight months doing some other operations with special forces.
2011 was back in Iraq, where we actually withdrew the first time.
After that, I went to a selection process for a very unique special operations unit.
And that's where I met my late wife, Shannon, deployed back to Iraq for the counter-ISIS fight, deployed another time to Yemen, and then decided to do, and this is actually pretty typical for guys with my resume and background, decided at the 20-year mark to leave the military because basically if you hang out in the military for too long, they'll eventually put you behind a desk.
And I had no interest in that.
And so I transitioned over into being a CIA paramilitary operations officer for the CIA for about a year until my late wife was killed.
Wow.
How old were you when Shannon died?
I was 39.
Actually, I was 30.
even turned 39 yet so i'm still 38.
and how old were your boys they were uh uh 18 months and three oh my god that's awful joe i'm so sorry so sorry for your loss and so grateful for your service too um you've given a lot a lot more more than anyone should have to this country so going back uh just a bit you when you met with president trump at dover and it's now become known that you told your wife Shannon before she died,
quote, don't be the last person to die in a conflict in a war that our entire country's already forgotten about.
And it just occurs to me that you're sitting there running the counterterrorism center.
As I tried to explain to my kids when I was telling them you and I were going to sit together today, I'm like, he's like the Jack Bauer of our government.
He's running the counterterrorism, which they understood.
And you're really doing a lot to protect the country from some terrorist threats that linger as a result of earlier wars we've been in.
So you have a front row seat to the ongoing danger these wars can pose to the homeland.
You suffered the consequences of war firsthand in a very personal way.
You warned your wife in this very profound and prophetic way, and then she was indeed killed.
And so now we talked about just briefly your concerns about the Iran war and how the president was being misled.
And yet we do it.
We go ahead and we do it.
You know, it's all guns blazing.
And so for those two weeks before you resigned, what was going through your head?
In the two weeks, once the war kicked off, I was really concerned.
Obviously, they were going to get pulled further in.
And I was doing everything I could to attempt to influence the situation to find a potential off-ramp to give the president a victory that we could declare so that he could say, hey, just like in Midnight Hammer, we conducted this strike.
We took out their ballistic missile capability.
We killed X amount of IRGC officers.
And now was a good time for us to leave.
Those, unfortunately, I wasn't successful in that.
And I just saw the way that information was flowing.
And it was frustrating.
And then also just in terms of where I was with my morals, probably about two decades ago on my third deployment.
I just remember as I was realizing that we were lied to to get into Iraq, I just remember thinking, man, I really wish a lot of the Vietnam veterans, especially the ones who are still in government like Colin Powell, had spoken up and said, hey, you know what?
We've seen this before.
We have enough experience to know that this is not the right path for our country and to really speak up.
And I said to myself, you know, two plus decades ago, and this is a big reason why I kind of branched my military career the way I did with a heavy intelligence side so that at some point I could be the one that says like, actually, hey, I know what the ground truth is and we should not be here.
And so that was ringing heavily in my ears that I had made this promise to myself that, hey, if I ever could influence whether or not young Americans go off to fight and die in a war that's not in our vital national security interests, that I would speak up and I would do the right thing.
Because for me, I'm hardwired just to be in the position of constant duty and constant service.
So the easiest thing for me to have done would have been to stay at the National Counterterrorism Center and to soldier on.
And to me, I just, I thought to myself, and I truly felt called by God that God didn't put me in this position right now just to soldier on again.
I did 20 plus years of soldiering on and look what that got my family.
Look what that got so many other families and look what that got our country.
And so to me, it was challenging.
It was a tough two weeks.
But at the end of it, by, I guess, last weekend at this point, it was crystal clear to me.
And I felt the calm and I felt that I was exactly where I needed to be.
And I knew that I knew that I had to leave.
And I knew that I had to do so in a public way, but in a way that could still hopefully shape policy and take us off the trajectory that we're on now.
Yeah, let's talk about the publicness of it for a second, because there's been a lot of pushback on, you know, should you have written the letter?
Should you have been so public with your reasoning, critical of the president?
We could go with a number of different commentators, but there's a guy, former DOD, Ezra Cohen, online who put it pretty succinctly.
He writes as follows.
As a political appointee, if you disagree with the president, you have a duty to vigorously argue your point in private.
Once the commander-in-chief makes his decision, salute and move out.
If you cannot execute the decision, you must resign and do so silently.
Respect the weight of the president's responsibility, which was given to him by the people.
Do not undermine his ability to carry out his responsibility as commander-in-chief.
I've heard a lot of vets say that, you know, that you have an obligation not to undermine the commander-in-chief in the middle of a war that has now begun, and that that's what they, the problem they have with your letter, even if they do share your sentiments, sentiments about the actual war.
I totally understand where they're coming from.
And for many years, I felt the exact same way.
But again, look, 20 plus years of veterans knowing better and being quiet because we're good soldiers, that got us to this point.
And so to just repeat the same mistakes again, I might as well have just kept my nice position and my job and just kind of soldiered on that way.
But for me, if I was going to leave, I wanted to make it very clear why I was leaving.
Not just like, hey, from a moral standpoint, but also I think our country is being led down the wrong path.
I think our government was heavily influenced and our hand was forced by a foreign government.
I think it's really important when people are in positions of power and responsibility and authority to speak truth to power and to actually tell the American people what's going on.
And I totally understand.
That criticism, I understand completely.
And I really won't even argue with it to a point.
I just have to say where I'm at at my life experiences and what I feel morally called to do.
If I was still back in the military, that would very much be my sentiment.
If I was still just a normal regular CIA officer, that would be, I think, the right course to take.
But in my position, as a political appointee and understanding that our hand was indeed forced to get into this war, I felt it would be incomplete.
I'd be falling short of my duties if I had just quietly and silently resigned.
I mean, not to mention a gold star husband and dad.
Attacking Nuclear Defense Posture00:15:35
Like, I don't know.
I just feel like when you've sacrificed as much as you have for the country in war, you have every right to say how you feel.
I just feel like you've gotten the national conversation going around this war in a way that's been, I mean, pretty important and more serious and harder to disregard than it was the previous two weeks.
So personally, I'm very thankful to you for doing what you did.
I think it was actually yet another act of courage.
And I wish people would stop attacking you for it.
I mean, as you've seen, anybody who's opposing this war is getting attacked, getting threatened.
You know, Tucker came out saying the CIA is allegedly investigating him for criminal charges, maybe under the Foreign Registration Act.
It's ridiculous.
You know, the president was suggesting that Tucker and yours truly, we're not going to have any viewers now.
We're going to lose all of our influence.
You know, there's been nonstop sort of threatening and attacks against people who are outspoken against the war.
So the more people who do it, the tougher it's going to be for them.
They can't destroy everyone.
They can't put us all in jail or destroy all of our livelihoods.
So in any event, I'm grateful to you for it.
Let's talk about what was in the letter because you're talking about, you know, repeatedly on how we were manipulated into this, how President Trump was manipulated into this.
And that you mentioned in your resignation letter, you blame two sources, Israel and media figures.
So can you expand on that?
Certainly.
So early on in this administration, I believe President Trump was the situation that we were in with Iran.
In President Trump's first administration, I think his Iran policy, as I say later on in the letter, was exactly where we needed to be.
And it was something that only President Trump could implement.
When we were threatened, when we were attacked, President Trump took significant strikes.
He killed the Iranian proxy terror master, Qasim Solmani, somebody who literally walked all over Obama, walked all over George Bush, killed Americans.
Trump killed him, took him off the battlefield, but then restrained the military from getting sucked into a broader conflict with Iran, which in my opinion is exactly what Iran wanted, because that would create a rally around the flag phenomenon inside Iran, as we're seeing right now.
So President Trump got that right, and then he leveraged the weight of the American economic sanctions against Iran.
And just a few months, or I think two months ago, we saw protesters on the streets, basically because of the cost of living and the economic ramifications.
And those protesters were protesting against the regime that we would like to see go.
So President Trump's policy on Iran actually was working.
He had to correct the ship pretty heavily because Biden gave Iran a bunch of money back and that's why the proxies were so emboldened.
But at the beginning of the President Trump's second administration, especially in the lead up to the 12-day war, we saw a combination of things.
And I think the most significant thing that the Israelis and their advocates and their lobbyists here in America were able to do that got us to the point we're at right now is they wanted to move the goalpost.
They wanted to move President Trump's red line from saying Iran can't have a nuclear weapon to Iran can't have any nuclear enrichment.
And this kind of seems technical.
It seems like semantics.
No, this is President Trump.
It's very important.
President Trump and really the former Ayatollah, the former supreme leader, they were in agreement that Iran could not have a nuclear weapon.
President Trump always said Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
As a matter of fact, President Trump will consistently say it, I think, to some of his detractors in this war, well, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
And all of us agree with that.
And as a matter of fact, the Iranians, actually, their former Supreme Leader actually agreed with that.
And he had a fatwa, a religious ruling, and Iran is a clergy, essentially, a religious ruling against developing a nuclear weapon.
And this is a very, I think, pragmatic policy for the Iranians to have.
They saw what happened to Mumar Gaddafi in Libya when you say, hey, I won't have any nuclear material.
I won't pursue nuclear weapons at all.
Well, then you're vulnerable to a regime change war like the United States launched against Gaddafi and he was eventually killed in a very gruesome way by his own people.
Libya is now destabilized.
For a while, it was a breeding ground for ISIS and other terror.
But if you do what Saddam Hussein did and you kind of bluff and you say, well, maybe I have a nuclear weapon.
I have a nuclear weapon, et cetera, then you're going to get the Saddam Hussein treatment and then your country is going to be destabilized and you're going to be killed.
So what the Iranians had was they had a very pragmatic approach.
They said, we're not going to develop, we have a religious ruling against developing a nuclear weapon, yet we will have some degree of enrichment.
So we could develop a nuclear weapon if we wanted to.
And that fatwa, that state right there, had held since 2004.
And we had no indications, no intelligence that said that that fatwa would be lifted.
Now, the Iranians wanted to have some enrichment, again, so they had the capability.
Now, that puts President Trump and the Iranian leadership in a place where they can actually get to the negotiating table because they both agree on the fundamental premise that Iran's not going to have a nuclear weapon.
That concept right there is a major threat to the Israelis' stated goal.
The Israeli stated goal is to take down the Ayatollah's regime at all costs.
And I'm not saying that that's a good thing, that's a bad thing.
If the Israelis want to pursue that as their own foreign policy, fine, then let Israel do that on their own.
That is not the U.S. foreign policy.
That's not actually our stated goal.
So the Israelis then said they used their supporters in the media, you know, Mark Levin being one of them, the foundation for the defense of democracies, a think tank, and a lot of their media surrogates who write op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, et cetera, to say the U.S. policy actually is no nuclear enrichment.
And if you go back to the first Trump administration, the only person who said no enrichment, zero enrichment was Mike Pompeo.
But through the ecosystem of the media saying, no, no, the policy is no enrichment, because the second they can enrich, they can sprint to a bomb, which is patently false because the Iranians had the capability to enrich and they had not yet actually developed a nuclear weapon.
Because we look at two main things in intelligence, capability and intent.
Just because an adversary has a capability to do something doesn't mean they have the intent and vice versa.
You know, there's all kinds of crazies out there saying they're going to take down America, but they have no actual capability to do so.
So the Iranians had maybe some components of the capability, but they did not have the intent.
And so through the media ecosystem and then also through a lot of senior ranking Israeli officials who would come and have formal and informal engagements with members of President Trump's team and President Trump himself, they would all say no enrichment.
Meanwhile, Steve Wickoff, a very skilled and I think a very pure-hearted negotiator, was engaged in very, very serious negotiations prior to the 12-day war, where they were discussing enrichment levels.
They were discussing how there could be monitoring of the enrichment.
And so in my opinion, we were on a pathway to actually getting a deal with Iran, which actually would have been great for America.
It would have been great for the region.
This is what the GCC countries that are critical for energy exports in the world economy, this is what they wanted as well.
But this ran counter to what the Israelis wanted.
And so the Israelis were very successful.
Just to add to that, the former, the foreign minister of Oman, who was mediating the latest round of negotiations, said they were making serious progress.
The UK's national security advisor, Jonathan Powell, agreed.
He was there in the last round.
These are two outside objective observers of the negotiations saying actually they were doing quite well.
We were on our way toward an agreement when we declared them at an impasse and started to bomb Iran.
And obviously, the president's got a different story.
He's saying it's not true.
I felt like they were tapping us along and they were never going to give us what we wanted.
And of course, what we were wanting was zero enrichment, which was, I mean, it was an extreme demand, one that Iran was never going to agree to.
But in any event, they were trying to have a negotiation.
And the president now says, in my judgment, there was an imminent attack.
We were about to be attacked.
And now they've expanded it to they were within a couple of weeks of having 10 nuclear bombs.
I mean, now, Joe, just for the audience's sake, we went back and looked.
They were saying that Iran was within weeks of getting nine nuclear bombs right before we bombed them in June of this past summer.
And so then we eviscerated their nuclear facilities.
You know, we said that we eviscerated them.
And that was the end of that.
It was supposed to be this mission accomplished moment.
We had wiped out their nuclear facilities.
We were good to go.
And now Lindsey Graham wants us to believe that they were once again within two weeks of having 10 nuclear bombs.
And the president himself also says the threat was imminent.
People were going to die if we didn't do what we did.
I mean, just tell me flat out.
Do you believe that?
Well, in terms of the imminent threat, I mean, it's pretty key what the president says in the words that he uses.
And Marco Rumbio, I think in your opening statement or your opening clips there, he explained it very accurately.
He said it was imminent in the sense that the Israelis were going to attack.
And once the Israelis attacked, there was likely going to be an Iranian response against our bases and our troops in the region.
Well, the only imminent attack in that equation, as outlined, not by me, but by the Secretary of State, is the Israelis attacking the Iranians and the Iranians reacting.
So if we wanted to prevent that, the key part of that equation is stopping the Israelis from attacking so that we can continue to negotiate, or we've at least set the conditions favorable to us.
We could have gotten more troops out of the region.
We could have postured more forces.
But instead, we let this country, Israel, who has a different strategic objective than us, that we pay an exorbitant amount for their defense and for their military capabilities, dictate our timeline and force our hand.
And that's where I had a major issue with the trajectory of the war.
In terms of like, could they have developed 10 bombs?
I mean, I think for probably most of our adult lives, we've had Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, but primarily Netanyahu, tell us for the last 20 plus years that Iran is minutes away from getting a nuclear weapon.
And again, because of the self-imposed restraints that they have, they've proven over time that they were not on the pathway to getting a nuclear weapon.
So, I mean, look, at the end of the day, it's Lindsey Graham.
I just don't know who takes Lindsey Graham seriously at this point.
That's why he's out there trying to solve this problem.
The answer is President Trump.
I mean, that's the sad thing.
Unfortunately.
Yeah, I do want to say two things.
Telsey Gabbert testified this week before Congress that the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Iran was not rebuilding its nuclear enrichment capabilities following the June attack.
She stuck by the president's line that those facilities were obliterated.
Their capabilities were obliterated thanks to the June strike.
So she says Iran was not rebuilding its nuclear enrichment capabilities following that attack.
In 2025, the DIA issued a report saying Iran is at least 10 years away from producing an ICBM because now they switched to, well, we couldn't let them have an intercontinental ballistic missile that could have hit the United States.
Our own defense intelligence agency says they were at least 10 years away from doing that, something they reiterated in 2026.
However, I'll say this, the IAEA, that's the International Atomic Energy Association that keeps an eye on Iran, they said Iran was enriching to 60% and that no nation that just wants nuclear energy for just energy purposes or enrichment for energy purposes would enrich to that level.
So what do you make of that?
I trust the U.S. intelligence community.
I mean, look, the U.S. intelligence community assessments that were coming out on Iran, that's 18 different agencies that have to chop on this.
So getting the 18 intelligence agencies to agree on anything, it's very challenging.
It is a very laborious and sometimes a very intense process of coordination and having people argue their cases.
When you have the 18 intelligence agencies saying without a doubt that Iran is not working towards a nuclear weapon and the Defense Intelligence Agency doing battle damage assessment, which is what the DIA really specializes in, is having these military-based assessments.
That's what I'm going to go with.
Being influenced by the IAEA or by another government, Israel in this case, saying like, oh, no, even though you conducted Midnight Hammer and your 18 intelligence agencies say that their nuclear capability is gone, they're still somehow digging out from the rubble and they're going to be able to assemble 10 bombs in two weeks.
Again, sorry, I'm going with what the director of national intelligence said.
And she's saying that based on the research and the analysis and the rigorous debate of 18 intelligence agencies.
Joe, it seems like Netanyahu went to President Trump and said, you know, they'd been debating this for some time.
He'd been making his case seven times in his visits to the White House this past year.
Obviously, Iran, I mean, Israel wanted regime change and President Trump was kicking that around.
He felt like Iran had taken out a hit on him.
He believed that, whether it's in fact true, we're not entirely sure.
But he believed that.
President Trump did.
And it sounds to me like Netanyahu went in there and said, look, Mr. Trump, the Ayatollah is going to be sitting above ground this coming Saturday with a bunch of his top lieutenants.
You have the chance to take out the guy who tried to take you out, as Trump would say in the week after.
I got him before he got me.
And, you know, we can cut off the head of this evil snake and you'll be a hero because these people who protested in the street will praise you.
And kind of what would happen after that doesn't seem to necessarily have been well thought out because, you know, I don't know how many IRGCs there are, Iranian revolutionary guards, but it seems in the tens of thousands and they remain loyal to the regime and they aren't stepping aside and they're armed and those protesters aren't.
And to me, it just seemed too tempting to President Trump to take out the Ayatollah when Netanyahu had good intelligence that he would be gettable.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, I think that Netanyahu and a lot of his allies and then echoed in the media again.
So this is kind of the game that the Israelis run and they're very sophisticated and they're pretty effective at it.
At the same time, they will have official engagements such as with Netanyahu, Ron Dermer, other Israeli intelligence and defense officials have engagements with their American counterparts.
And they will say something to the effect of what you just said, or hey, Iran can't have any kind of enrichment.
They'll get their talking point out there.
President Trump will hear that in official engagements.
And then they will make sure that Mark Levin, you know, other pro-Israel figures in the media will say that.
John Tiessen of Fox News, General Jack of Fox News.
That's been documented by the journal that they were in there.
Exactly.
Same Lindsey Graham, keep going.
No, exactly.
And so, you know, President Trump will then be kind of put in this echo chamber where he is hearing the same thing over and over again.
Vice President Meetings and Health Concerns00:15:42
And there was a pretty concerted effort.
And I don't want to get any names.
I don't want this to turn into any kind of palace intrigue.
But after the 12-day war, there was a pretty concerted effort, I think, to cut out a lot of the dissenting voices from a discussion on what we're going to do next.
And so I very much felt that in terms of decision-making around Iran, the president was isolated.
And so he was just hearing that echo chamber.
And another key component of that, too, is to rush the timeline.
You have to rush him because if he has time to think about the decisions that he's making, then he's probably going to get, he's probably going to search for alternative opinions on it.
He's probably going to see what the status of the negotiations are.
And so the Israelis did an effective job of pressuring him and saying that you have to do it now.
And potentially it was what you laid out, that the Ayatollah would be above ground.
He doesn't think you're going to hit right now, et cetera.
I don't know if that's specifically the case, but whatever argument they used, the effect was that President Trump was then led to believe that if he took action now, it would be quick and easy.
This whole thing would just be quick and easy and we'd be done with it.
And none of us in the IC assessed that that would be the case at all.
We assessed for a very long time, and this is publicly available.
This is pretty much just common sense, that if you struck the Ayatollah, if you struck the IRGC, and there was a concerted effort by America and Israel to do a regime change inside of Iran, that actually would have the reverse effect, that even some of the dissidents and people who weren't happy with the current regime would rally around the flag, which to me, I think is just common sense.
Like I didn't support Biden, I didn't support Obama, but I was sent military under Obama.
And if you attacked my country, I would saddle up in a heartbeat to defend against a foreign invader.
So yes, I think that's very much what I believe happened, that his decision-making space was taken away.
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In your resignation letter, you mentioned those figures, Israeli figures and media figures, providing misinformation to the president.
And so what specifically do you mean?
Is that what you're talking about here?
Fundamentally, it was the enrichment red line.
And they did a very effective job of saying, no, Mr. President, it's not just the nuclear issue.
Take that off the table.
Iran can't have the ability to enrich, which essentially short-circuits any potential for negotiation.
And the negotiations went on for as long as they did because I think skilled negotiators like Steve Witkoff understood that we could talk about enrichment.
And enrichment wasn't going to be the major issue.
The major issue was the nuclear weapon capability.
And again, the Iranian regime at the time, when Supreme Leader Khamenei was still alive, agreed with that, which is why they were at the negotiating table.
So they effectively laundered that talking point that Iran can't have any nuclear enrichment capability into U.S. policy by just having it repeated enough by Israeli officials.
Then you had American officials repeating it, and then it was echoed again in the media.
So that's kind of the ecosystem that I'm talking about.
Which was marching us right into another Middle Eastern war.
Now, you mentioned that he was isolating himself after the June strike from dissenters.
And now, Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, in dismissing your criticisms, is saying basically Joe Kent didn't know anything.
He wasn't involved in the president's daily brief, which did jump out at me as the head of the National Counterterrorism Center.
You should have been involved in the information going into the presidential daily brief, which is about intel threats, I think.
And she said you were never in any of the meetings leading up to the decision on whether to attack Iran.
It sounds like certainly on that latter point, you agree and you think it's part of the problem.
But is it true that you'd been frozen out of participating in the PDB?
So how the there's some details here that are important.
So the National Counterterrorism Center can put essentially articles, but papers into the PDB.
And then there's a process to decide what actually goes in front of the president.
The president can request whatever information that he wants.
But then again, his daily briefs are usually with a smaller group.
And like I just physically did not work over at the White House.
There was times when we would go, when I would go over to the White House and be in those meetings with the president, or more frequently, it would be at the deputies level.
What I would say is in the lead up to the 12-day war, there was a good deal of deputies meetings about what we were going to do, the potential contingencies, giving the presidents options.
There was a huge National Security Council process that was taking place.
And there was a lot, again, there was a lot of dissenting voices.
There was a lot of what I viewed as very, very healthy and productive conversations to give the president a realistic look at what his options are and what the ramification for those options would be.
Post-Midnight Hammer, that process played out completely differently.
Now, obviously, they can say that I was cut out of the meetings and maybe I was cut out of the meetings, but I just didn't see a robust debate taking place at that deputies level, at that National Security Council level.
I think you really just had a lot of key policymakers at the cabinet level that were around President Trump.
And that's the president's prerogative, if that's what he truly wanted.
However, I think a lot of those key decision makers were also heavily influenced, not necessarily by the intelligence coming out of the 18 intelligence agencies, the U.S. intelligence agencies.
I think they were also heavily influenced by a lot of these Israeli officials who are coming directly to them.
And I think because they wanted to so tightly compartmentalize the president's circle that he didn't get a chance to hear any dissenting voices.
I understand, you know, I like Caroline.
I think she's very good at her job.
So she's got to come in and say this and refute what I'm saying.
But I think if you look at what's publicly available, if you just look at the night that the operation launched, you look at who was in the White House situation room and then who was down in Mar-a-Lago with the president.
They had an entire group, a small group that was down there just with the president while you had the DNI, the vice president, other key members of the cabinet, the intelligence community who were far away from those decisions that were being made.
And again, look, I know a lot of folks are going to come back out and say, no, you know what you're talking about, that they were separated for tactical reasons, strategic reason.
But I think the imagery that came out of that night kind of showed you what the president's tight circle was versus some other folks who may have had the ability to offer the president a different perspective.
Well, I mean, it's not a mystery to anybody that Tulsi is against starting new Middle East wars.
I mean, she said that repeatedly, mostly prior to becoming DNI, but that's no mystery.
And JD Vance is definitely more representative of the more isolationist, non-interventionalist wing of the Republican Party, but so far has been supportive of his boss, the president of the United States.
And he's been backing, yes, imminent threat.
And Tulsi, at her testimony this week, said only the president can determine whether there was an imminent threat.
But then, of course, went on to say, we assessed Iran was not rebuilding its nuclear enrichment capabilities following the June attack, that they'd been obliterated.
So, I mean, I know that you actually, before you resigned to the president, met with Tulsi and used to work for Tulsi.
I mean, you kind of work for her in a way because she's DNI, but used to was, I think you were her chief of staff for a time.
Am I wrong?
I was.
Yeah, while I was waiting for confirmation from the Senate, I was her chief of staff.
Okay, so you work for Tulsi.
And my understanding is you and she went in and you met with Vice President Vance prior to your resignation that you submitted to Trump directly.
And I know you spoke it to the president too, but can you tell us anything about that?
I don't want you to violate confidences, but can you tell us anything about that meeting with Tulsi and JD?
I think it's better if I don't get into the details.
I view both of them as very strong leaders.
And before I submitted my resignation with Tulsi as a Senate confirmed presidential appointee, you have to resign and you technically report directly to the president.
But I kind of had a dual track.
National Counterterrorism Center falls under ODNI.
So Tulsi was my boss day to day.
So obviously her and I discussed my resignation ahead of time.
I didn't want her to be blindsided.
And then the vice president as well, who's been just a personal friend prior to him being the vice president, once he became the vice president, obviously our relationship changed.
But I felt it was proper to at least say to my chain of command, hey, if you guys want me, if you'll give me the opportunity, I will deliver this letter directly to the president of the United States.
And so the vice president said, hey, let's sit down, let's chat, and you can deliver the letter to me.
And then I got a phone call from the president later on that evening before I resigned.
But I don't want to get too much into the details of what we discussed.
Do you think they've been put in a tough spot by all this?
Yes.
They've been put in a tough spot.
And I know that I put them in a tough spot.
And again, that's why I wanted to give them a heads up and just say, hey, I'm resigning.
I do plan on making it public.
I want to attempt to reach President Trump from the outside to let him know that he still has options and he can.
There is a pathway for him to get us off of this trajectory.
And also just to thank them for the opportunity to serve once again.
But yeah, they're in a hard spot.
I mean, they're doing everything I think they can to serve our country and to put it on a good trajectory and to support the president of the United States.
I was just in a different role and I didn't feel that I could do that any longer.
So I offered my resignation.
Of course, we're all looking forward a bit to 2028 already because that's what we do in this country.
We have three-year presidential elections now.
But do you think if JD were to run and if Tulsi were to run, you know, she ran for president the last time, do you think that we would be surprised that they've had some big shift in their foreign policy views?
Yeah, I can't speak for either one of them.
I just out of respect, you should probably ask those guys.
I look forward hopefully to either one of them running for president.
I think they're both very strong leaders.
So I think that's all I can say without saying too much that violates the confidentiality that I have.
And there are a lot of people who are wondering whether we're going to see a Joe Kent on a ticket.
Is that a possibility?
I've unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice.
So just to level set there, I think I'm where I need to be.
I think working in the national security realm is kind of where I belong.
I kind of have no desire to ever run for office again.
It was a good experience.
I'm glad I went through it, but it's not one I have any desire to do to do again right now.
Again, I.
I want to tell you that it was 2017 when a man named JD Vance said exactly that same thing to me.
So never say never.
I could see you potentially winding up on somebody's ticket in some way, or at least in an administration that is more in line with your sensibilities.
We'll see down the line.
That's for down the line.
So you did go then and spoke with the president directly to your credit.
And it sounds like he was really nice about it, right?
I mean, how did the meeting go?
Yeah, President Trump was nice enough to give me a phone call later on that evening.
And I think we talked for 10, 15 minutes.
I mean, look, it's President Trump.
You've talked with him.
He's always very respectful, you know, very gracious.
He sounded a little bit surprised and a little disappointed that I was attending my resignation, but he gave me an opportunity to explain what I thought.
And he said, hey, I disagree with you.
But it was a very respectful, I think it was a good, good conversation at the end.
So again, I feel like we departed on good terms.
Here, I'm going to play his soundbite about you, you know, being weak.
And I've got a thought on it, and I'd love to get your thoughts on it too.
Here's what he said.
I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security.
I didn't know him well, but when I read a statement, I realized that it's a good thing that he's out because he said that Iran was not a threat.
Iran was a threat.
Every country realized what a threat Iran was.
The question is whether or not they wanted to do something about it.
And many people, many of the greatest military scholars are saying for years that president should have taken out Iran because they wanted a nuclear weapon.
They were, if we didn't do the attack, or if I'll go a step further, if I didn't terminate the Iran nuclear deal given to us, one of the worst deals ever made by Barack Hussein Obama, if I didn't terminate Obama's horrible deal that he made, the Iran nuclear deal, you would have had a nuclear war four years ago.
So when somebody is working with us that says they didn't think Iran was a threat, we don't want those people.
Okay, my own take on that, Joe.
You tell me what you think is that's almost a love letter.
That President Trump can go a lot harder against somebody than that.
That was very mild, you know, like he's weak on security if he thinks that Iran wasn't posing an imminent threat.
That to me telegraphs he does like you.
He has to hit you back mildly because he feels like you hit him.
But I think net net, you're probably okay with him right now based on what I just heard there.
Your thoughts.
I feel the same way.
It's been my entire goal in this entire process to be respectful to the president because I'm very grateful for the president for what he's done for our country.
And I truly mean that.
And then also to you so that hopefully at some point in time, if not me, but people who are saying similar things to me can have a chance to talk with President Trump, especially, you know, as soon as possible so that we can figure a way to get out of this situation that we're in.
But again, I'm very grateful to President Trump, everything he's done for my family and also just for the United States in general.
And so, you know, I think in terms of having to depart early, it worked out as well as it could have.
Yeah.
So I was kind of encouraged by that because, yeah, he's got a few more gears and he's stayed in first gear when it comes to the brush back against you, which is promising to me, I think.
Let's get into the allegations of anti-Semitism because that's all the rage these days.
If you, you know, all along we were told you can criticize Israel, just, you know, don't be anti-Semitic and like promoting attacks on American Jewish people and so on.
Of course, you haven't been and I haven't been.
But as it turns out, if you criticize Israel, you will get called an anti-Semite by the same people who said you could call them.
Anti-Semitic Allegations and Ad Hominem Attacks00:14:32
You could criticize Israel and not be called an anti-Semite.
It was a lie, what they'd been saying.
And you are being called an anti-Semite by, I mean, of course, Mark Levin.
And Mitch McConnell, kind of out of nowhere, or somebody who works for him, puts out a tweet stating that your letter had, quote, virulent anti-Semitism and that anti-Semites have no place in either party and certainly do not deserve places of trust in our government.
He then went on to also claim that isolationists should also play no role whatsoever in politics.
So Mitch McConnell would like to get rid of all the isolationists who are in the Republican Party and I guess Democrat Party as well.
And he and others say that you're anti-Semitic.
And I think what they're seizing on is the multiple references to Israel in your resignation letter.
I'll just tell the audience what they are.
You say it's clear we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.
You say that high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined the president's America First platform, deploying a misinformation campaign.
Yeah.
You say that it was a lie that Iran posed an imminent threat.
And it's the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.
And then you say, 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, meaning the war in Syria, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that served no benefit to the American people.
So there are a few references in your letter to Israel and its policies and its warmongering.
And I believe your critics are using those to suggest you're an anti-Semite in response to which you say what?
Well, I'm not an anti-Semite.
That's why I talk about Israel for the nation and not the religion or anything like that.
And actually, I have a lot of respect for the Israelis.
I'm a professional military man and intelligence officer.
And the Israelis have a very capable intelligence service and military.
What I have an issue with is Israel driving our foreign policy.
So really, at the end of the day, my issue isn't with the Israelis.
I expect countries to lobby on their behalf, but I expect my government, especially when I'm in it, to lobby on behalf of our agenda.
And so look, the Israelis, the Israeli government, especially the Likud party, of which Benjamin Netanyahu has been the leader of for several decades now, they have largely been influencing and heavily driving American foreign policy in the Middle East, probably even before the lead up to the Iraq war.
But in the lead up to the Iraq war, the pro-regime change lobby here in America was heavily aided by Benjamin Netanyahu, by AIPAC, by a lot of influential pro-Israel figures in the media.
Now, was that the only reason we went into Iraq?
No, there was a lot of neoconservatives who probably felt like fairly neutral on Israel that really wanted us to get involved in this war.
There was the military-industrial complex, but a very influential factor was Israel and their lobby.
Benjamin Netanyahu publicly even testified that Saddam Hussein was about to get a weapon of mass, or actually already had a weapon of mass destruction and really laid out that case and supported all the other, what we found out to be manufactured intelligence about Saddam having a weapon of mass destruction.
He was the Israeli finance minister at the time, but the head of the Likud party, the other party in Israel was in power at the time, led by Erl Sharon, who initially said, no, we don't want to go into Iraq.
We want to focus on Iran, but eventually he got behind the strikes or the operations in Iraq because he said it could be a lily pad for operations in Iran, which was essentially Netanyahu's argument as well.
So the full weight of the Israeli lobby supported the neoconservative lobby to get us into the war in Iraq.
Now, once we got into Iraq, it was quite the saga.
We screwed things up so badly that we accidentally handed over the keys to the kingdom essentially to pro-Iranian Shias.
Shia is the majority inside of Iraq.
The pro-Iran wing of that took control through our own blundering over the course of several years.
So by the time we left Iraq in 2011, Iran basically had been the biggest victor.
And this was a major threat to Israel because now you had basically a land bridge between Tehran and Damascus running through Baghdad.
And this allowed the Syrian regime, which had always been kind of hostile to Israel and helped Iran funnel money, weapons, training, men, and equipment to Hezbollah and to Hamas through Syria into Lebanon.
So Syria was now a major issue.
And so the Israelis went back to lobbying us that, hey, we need to do a regime change against Bashir al-Assad in Syria because the balance of power in the region is so off in support of Iran.
Syria is like the opposite of Iraq.
It was a country ran by an Alawi, which is kind of a version of Shiism, but the majority is Sunni.
And so we and other parts, other governments, including the Israelis, turned to the Sunni majority there to have an uprising.
And we supported some of the most radical elements of that, Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda eventually splintered off into ISIS.
And ISIS got so out of control, focusing a lot of their operations on trying to inspire attacks and trying to plan attacks over against us here in the homeland that we had to redeploy and fight against ISIS.
That's where my late wife was killed.
But our support for elements affiliated with al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda eventually took over that entire government and are in charge to this day.
And so again, people will say, oh, your wife was killed by ISIS.
You're conflating things.
You're just making things up.
We launched our dirty war essentially in Syria, the proxy war that we ran in Syria, largely at behest of the Israeli lobby because again, we couldn't leave Iraq in control of Iranian-backed Shias and we couldn't leave Bashir al-Assad in power because that created the Shia crescent that was directly a threat to Israel.
So again, we are really conducting U.S. foreign policy on behalf of another government.
And our country paid dearly for that and he continues to do so.
We went back and actually just independently did a fact check on the Iraq war and Israel's role in it and confirmed virtually everything you just said that Israeli intelligence and politicians suggested in 2002 and 2003 that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
That in September 2002, then former Prime Minister Netanyahu appeared before a U.S. congressional committee and said, look, Saddam is pursuing all avenues of developing weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.
He says, my information is three years old.
I can only divulge it from my tenure as prime minister, which is three years old, but this is what I know.
And he says there's no question that Saddam has not given up on his nuclear program.
He was not satisfied with the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that he had.
He was trying to perfect them constantly and went on.
And then it's also been confirmed that AIPAC, which lobbies for Israeli interests here in America, that their executive director boasted in January 2003 of the organization's success in quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq and also wanted regime change very badly.
And then when things started to go badly in Iraq, started to disavow that they had been doing that.
But a whole bunch of members of Congress came out and said, that's bullshit.
I was personally lobbied by you, APAC, to support the war in Iraq.
So they were in favor of it and lobbied for it.
That's not to take agency away from George W. Bush and Colin Powell and the ones domestically who pushed for it, but you're saying they were definitely interfering in our own march to war, trying to push us.
And is that how you would characterize what happened here, right?
Because a lot of people have said, so are you suggesting that President Trump has no agency here?
He's been, you know, he's like, he's Israel's puppet.
And I don't think it's quite that simple, but you put it in your own words.
I agree with you.
It's not that simple.
But look, the Israeli playbook for this is pretty well established.
I mean, they have a plan and they ran it because it's effective.
So look, President Trump does have agency, but President Trump is a human.
He's a very busy human.
And I think just the way that his information environment was controlled through official channels that technically actually really weren't official because it wasn't coming from U.S. intelligence.
He still took a lot of U.S. intelligence in.
But the key influence that came from Israeli policymakers, Israeli politicians, probably even some pro-Israeli donors here in America on the official side in private conversations, but then also in the media environment, that effectively worked.
And that created, I think, a position that President Trump had to take where he felt like he had no other options when in fact he still had a good deal of options that were available to him.
So look, I think President Trump has a lot of personal agency, and I think he still does right now.
And this is why I'm actually hopeful.
I think by going on shows like yours, like Tucker's, and like other folks in the media kind of echoing generally what we're saying, my prayer is that he's going to see that it's not too late to kind of walk this back.
Because obviously the path that this pro-Israeli media ecosystem and unofficial advisors, official advisors, that has gotten us into the situation that we're in right now.
And if you just look back to 20 years ago, it's the same playbook they ran in Iraq, which President Trump called out before most people in politics could, that it was a disaster for our country.
So I really hope he reflects on kind of where we're at right now and where we've been before.
Well, and Tucker and I are in the same situation in that we oppose this war, but we care about the president and are still completely rooting for the president and are rooting for victory for the United States in this conflict, though we don't, we wish we weren't in it.
We're 100% behind the troops and hoping for an American victory.
So hopefully the president will give an ear.
I should point out on the Iraq war issue, Ariel Sharon.
People who say Israel had nothing to do with us getting into the Iraq war will say Ariel Sharon, then PM of Israel, was against it, but it was one of those things where he was against it before he was for it.
He later did get on board and said any postponement of an attack on Iraq will serve no purpose.
His senior advisor told the Associated Press and that they said Israel intelligence officials had new evidence that Iraq was speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons.
So they clearly had changed tactics when it was in the news that George W. Ush might be wavering on whether to attack.
And that was when Ariel Sharon wavered on his own position of opposing it and got very much on board with pushing for the war in Iraq.
So Israel did have a role in that.
And I don't know that it was the cheap role, but it was a meaningful role.
And it's fair to call him out on it.
It's not anti-Semitic to be honest about Israel's role.
It's like they want to say you're like a conspiracy theorist saying, oh, all the terrible Jews are behind.
That's not at all.
That is a method.
It's a tactic to undermine legitimate criticism of a foreign government.
And it's so transparent, Joe.
I don't know.
Have you ever been on the receiving end of these kind of allegations before?
Not to this ferocity.
I mean, I got running for Congress.
You know, if I said that I didn't think kids should, you know, be able to pick their own gender at age eight, I was called a bigot and a Nazi.
So I'm pretty used to the ad hominem attacks.
So I think I have a good immunity already built up to them.
It's interesting seeing just so many prominent people right now come out and say that the second you criticize Israel, especially when you have the president and the secretary of state saying that Israel is the reason we got into this war.
It's a bit surprising that their arguments are so weak, but also it's very telling.
Like if John Bolton, who was the former national security advisor to President Trump and Lindsey Graham, who's been on some of the most prominent intelligence and armed services committees probably for as long as I've been alive, because he's been in the Senate forever, if they had access to better information than me and they could actually prove their case, they'd be arguing it, but they can't.
So they just have to go back to like, well, that's anti-Semitic and Iran was 10 minutes away from 10 nuclear bombs.
They're not really even trying.
They're just trying to do the media barrage where they make it taboo from actually dissenting.
That's exactly right.
They're trying to show others this is, you're going to get the same treatment.
You're going to get the Joe Kent Tucker Carlson Megan Kelly treatment if you come out against this war.
And it's just, it's not going to work.
By the way, of course, Mark Levin is accusing you of being an anti-Semite, but I saw that online you agreed to go on his show, which is the greatest gift you could ever possibly give to that despicable man.
I mean, if for the first time ever, he'll have actual ratings on his show, which he doesn't.
Are you actually going to do that, Joe?
I mean, he hates you.
He's definitely not going to give you a fair shake.
No, I know he's not.
Look, he challenged me and I said, yeah, sure.
His initial offer was like, hey, Friday or sometime next week.
And I said, yeah, sure, let's go.
And that got a lot of traction on the internet.
And my DMs on Twitter are open.
I've been on his show before when I was running for Congress.
So they have my contact information.
But I think within like two or three hours, he was just like, I knew Kent was too big of a coward to come on my show.
So if it's theater, then I have no desire to participate in that.
But if he wants to have a conversation, I'll have a conversation.
Yeah, that's exactly.
It's theater.
I don't think you should do it.
I'm just going to say right now, I urge you not to do it because it will be ad hominem attack after ad hominem attack.
He has no interest in hearing you out.
He only wants to destroy you.
He's not an honest broker.
So many other places you can go and places that will give you a fair like if you want to have a good debate with a genuine Israeli supporter, go on with like Dan Senor.
You know, he's an honest broker who's like a great guy who's a big Israel supporter who won't be like that.
Anyway, that's whatever.
That's my two cents for whatever it's worth.
There's no reason to put yourself through that.
And probably it'll just be one big setup to try to like do a gotcha.
You're a leaker.
You need to be prosecuted.
Plus, why would you help him?
Why would you help him?
He's such a scoundrel, coward, bastard.
Don't do it.
Okay.
Sorry, that's my two cents.
Let's move on because you did say some things on Tucker that obviously caught my attention around Charlie Kirk.
And I'm very, very interested in your thoughts on this because you suggested that there are viable leads that might suggest government involvement somehow around his assassination.
You're not saying that there was proof, but that there were leads you would have liked to have pursued that were left dangling and that you were shut down from pursuing.
Investigating Leads Around Charlie Kirk00:08:15
And I wonder if you can expand on that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, look, I'm not saying that there was like smoking gun evidence of a government involvement.
NCTC's role was to look to see if there's any foreign involvement.
Now, that could be government or that just could be foreigners themselves.
And all I can really truly say is that there were additional leads that we needed to run down and fully investigate.
And that just simply was not done.
Basically, from the time that Tyler Robinson turned himself in and was arrested and his fingerprints were found on the rifle, they basically, they being the FBI, said, hey, this is now going to go over to the Utah law enforcement, and we are not investigating anything further.
And there was a lot of back and forth about that because there were still, and again, not just my opinion in the opinion of the NAFA Counterterrorism Center, there was other leads for us to run down.
And I even spoke with members of the FBI who are kind of at the ground level, and they agreed with me.
We wanted to continue to investigate.
And so all I can say with authority right now is that there were additional leads for us to run down.
And I think it's very, very simple.
Like right now, we're hearing that, hey, it's a slam dunk case.
And I don't doubt that it might be a slam dunk case against Robinson.
That's going to play out in the court of law.
However, we do know that there were people who were posting about, you know, Charlie Kirk being killed before Charlie Kirk was killed.
So we do know there are other people here who had some prior knowledge.
I find it hard to believe that multiple people predicted Charlie's death at UVU that day.
I mean, if it was just one or two, maybe that's a coincidence.
Maybe they're someone who always posts something similar to that.
But that to me is just one of the biggest gaps that remains.
And maybe the FBI is out looking at that right now.
It's been several months now, and we just don't see that happening.
I know that the scope that we had of foreign involvement, we did not get an opportunity to run down all of those potential leads.
And I think Charlie Kirk deserves justice.
I think people deserve the truth about what happened on that day.
And I'm not saying, I'm not alluding and saying I know what the truth is.
I'm not trying to be cryptic.
What I'm saying is that there were things that we still needed to investigate that were not investigated.
Can you say whether they involved Israel?
Not specifically.
I mean, but there is like you mentioned the text messages that Andrew Colvette was talking about.
There's pro-Israeli donors who were heavily pressuring Charlie to not platform anyone who was critical of Israel.
And Charlie was probably one of the most vocal advocates for not going to war with Iran.
He was lobbying the president and he was a very influential advisor to President Trump.
He had the ability to go into the Oval Office and have a candid and frank discussion with President Trump.
He had phone conversations with him.
I mean, Charlie was probably instrumental in getting President Trump elected in 2024.
And Charlie was very vocal against us going to war with Iran.
He eventually said, okay, fine, Midnight Hammer, limited strike, and then we're done.
We're not going to go back for regime change.
But he was continuing to speak out against the influence that the Israelis had on our foreign policy in the Middle East, in particular, this push to take us off to war with Iran.
So I think that has to be looked at, the amount of pressure that Charlie Kirk was under from the donors, but then also his influence.
with President Trump and the fact that the Israeli lobby really relied heavily on getting into that media ecosystem to influence President Trump.
I think that can't be overlooked.
Now, I'm not saying that that is a smoking gun.
I'm not saying that that means really anything.
I'm just saying that that needs to be considered into the Charlie Kirk investigation, but also to where we are right now as a country and what we're doing in the Middle East.
Would that have been your job, Joe, to consider that piece or Kash Patel's?
A combination, but if there is foreign involvement, that's where the National Counterterrorism Center comes in, because we have more robust and broad authorities to investigate the foreign angle.
The FBI has the more broad and robust authorities to investigate the domestic angle.
So who has the ability to shut you down from that?
So really, the way it happened was initially was just like, hey, the FBI says you guys can't look into the case file.
And when the case file is kind of where all the data is, and you're done.
You guys can't work here anymore.
You guys can't work on this case anymore.
We argued that we should still be involved in that case.
And we won the argument.
We got kind of put back on the case.
But then after a while, the government has a great way of making things just die in process.
And so essentially all of our requests, our ability to investigate, it was cut off.
Our requests to investigate were kind of taken away and sort of died in the process.
So I'm sure someone at some point in the government is going to come out and say, no, no, we're still looking into all leads in the Charlie Kirk case.
But this is how you kill things in the government.
You just let them die in this never-ending coordination process or requests that go unanswered.
That's kind of where we're at.
But the DOJ and the FBI was instrumental in saying that, hey, we're done investigating Charlie Kirk.
And they'll tell you, hey, everything's with Utah now because there's this ongoing trial against Tyler Robinson.
But what about, I mean, you mentioned putting a foreign government to the side, you mentioned the people who communicated about clearly Charlie's murder prior to the murder.
We pulled just a couple of those just to recap it for the audience, where we saw communications like, okay, pulling it, an online friend of Twiggs, that was the boyfriend of the shooter who goes by cherbum 75, wrote, Charlie Kirk deserved that shit.
Let it die, let it die with a photo of Kirk.
We fucking did it.
We fucking did it, he said.
Another account by someone who goes by Osama bin Tezuka five days before the shooting on 9-5, Charlie was killed on 9-10.
You guys, I have something big coming soon.
Just be sure to check the news.
You'll know it when you see an emoji giving a wink the day of the shooting at 4.52 p.m.
Well, that's another Chud Bites the Dust.
Execon called Mushy, but the first Kirk tweet by this guy was September 3rd.
It would be funny if someone like Charlie Kirk got shot on September 10th, L-M-A-O, followed up by another one on September 11th.
Did I, or did it?
So that's just a few, Joe, that we could keep going.
There were many, many, many.
And would that be now that Utah's in the lead, wouldn't that still be an FBI investigation to figure out whether those people had advanced notice and were part of, you know, the sort of trans TIFA?
That's the allegation that these people are sort of members of this trans community or trans furry community and that they knew and possibly participated and maybe helped.
So would that be FBI typically or would that be Utah?
By and large, it'd be the FBI, unless you can prove right away that those individuals were posting right from Utah.
But in order to do that, there's a whole process of subpoenaing the social media platform, et cetera.
But usually that's the FBI just because they have the most robust tools and they're used to doing it.
And again, Charlie Kirk was high-profile enough that there was a case to be made that this could be in the federal purview.
So, look, like I said, there's still lots of unanswered questions.
And from where I was in the investigation, especially looking at the foreign ties, we were stopped and there's still work that needs to be done there.
That's disturbing.
I know I've been told by Kash Patel directly that they are looking into that trans TIFA element, but it's been six months now, and there have been no additional arrests.
And it really wouldn't take six months to figure out who these people were and to interview them and to, you know, potentially establish a link if there were one.
It's an awfully great coincidence if they weren't involved.
I mean, these people have predictive powers that we should all be consulting them on the stock market daily because they had the exact date and they had the exact manner that he would be shot and killed with.
And there were multiple, multiple of them predicting that it would happen.
So extremely disturbing, to say the least.
It's time for a little spring cleaning.
Here's a place to start.
Go drag your old dated wireless contract out of the closet and beat it with a broom.
Spring Cleaning the Kelly Channel00:02:28
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It's me, Megan Kelly.
I've got some exciting news.
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It's called the Megan Kelly channel, and it is where you will hear the truth, unfiltered, with no agenda, and no apologies.
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Boots on the Ground in Hormuz00:06:49
Getting back to the Iran war, how do you think it's going?
I don't think it's going well at all.
I mean, the Iranians have essentially shut down the flow of energy in the Straits of Hormuz, which, you know, we've known for years that would be part of the Iranian playbook.
But they've been able to very effectively do that with a bare minimum of their military capabilities.
They've also been targeting our bases in the region.
We've lost Americans tragically.
But also the way that the energy infrastructure is being targeted in Qatar, being targeted inside Iran, this is going to set back world energy markets.
We've already seen a major spike in the price of the pump, but the trickle-down effects of that are going to influence the ability for the world market to produce fertilizer.
So there could be actual really drastic ramifications here.
But also, I think a major issue with the war in Iran is that we've really only stated very, very tactical objectives that we're going to take out their ballistic missile capabilities, we're going to take out their Navy, we're going to take out their military.
And these are big picture items, but at the end of the day, they are very tactical.
We haven't really stated exactly what our end state is.
And you should never get into a war unless you can state what your end state is.
And President Trump has said things like total surrender.
And, you know, I mean, total surrender historically has meant like we drop a nuclear weapon in Japan.
I'm not being hyperbolic.
That was basically our demands at Japan in World War II.
Or we fight out a bloody war and we make them totally surrender by a land occupation.
Both of which I think would be absolutely tragic, have major ramifications and make us less secure at the end of the day.
But now we're in a war where we don't have an objective.
However, our partner who we let drive the timeline for this conflict, they have a strategic objective that's very different than ours.
And again, that is back to regime change at any cost.
And the Israelis are completely fine, essentially, with just continuing to kill off the Iranian leadership until Iran just falls into a state of chaos, which would be catastrophic for our interests, for the interests of the GCC countries, for the flow of commerce in the Straits of Hormuz.
It'll potentially even trigger a migration crisis into Europe.
So again, we have to be sober and say like us and our key partner in this, who's been driving all of the military operations in the league, we have different strategic objectives than they do.
And so we've either, we've got to find a way to get them under control.
And as of right now, I see some indications that President Trump wants to do that.
In a truth he sent out yesterday or late last, late two nights ago, he did say Israel will stop hitting all energy targets.
And so I think it's important that President Trump stays firm on that.
And if they don't stop hitting energy targets, he's got to start reining the Israelis in.
Well, because there's a real question about whether they're doing that intentionally to keep the war going and to keep us involved and to get our allies involved and to make it a wider conflict that's more difficult for us to pull out of.
And that this isn't just some accident that they keep bombing targets President Trump has told them not to, that they're doing it intentionally to widen the conflict and make it tougher for us to get out because it's in their interest for it to go on and on.
They have no interest in our relationship with these other Arab countries being strong or these other Arab countries being strong on their own.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, we just have to be sober and say like Israel has different stated strategic objectives than we do.
If they continue to hit the energy infrastructure, then it's evident to us that that is part of, that's not them making mistakes.
Again, the Israelis have a very, very competent military.
They're not making mistakes.
They're doing this because they are pursuing their goals.
So we can't look at like every little tactical decision they make.
We have to look at what their broad objectives are.
And their broad objectives, their strategic goal is different than ours.
The Israelis have a very high tolerance for chaos as long as that chaos can't come back and directly affect them.
And so again, the Israelis are fine with chaos in Iran.
That's only a problem if we're shoulder to shoulder with them and if there's ramifications for our actual allies in the Gulf and also for the flow of energy and the effect that we'll have here in the homeland.
So again, they're talking about boots on the ground in Iran, American boots, not Israeli boots, American boots.
And we've just dispatched 5,000 troops over there.
I don't know exactly what they're doing yet, but 2,500 Marines and 2,500 sailors.
And now today we get a report out of Axios that President Trump wants the Strait of Hormuz open.
And he's looking at taking this Karg Island, which he's been tweeting about.
We attacked it in part, but he was saying I can go far worse and I can decimate the energy facility there.
But they're saying if he has to take Karg Island and make it happen, that's what will happen.
He's trying to raise his leverage point against the Iranians to make them open up the strait by hitting them in this energy center.
If he decides to have a coastal invasion, this is Axios reporting, then that's going to happen.
But that decision has not yet been made.
Then they go on, a senior official told Axios, we've always had boots on the ground in conflicts under every president, including Trump.
I know this is a fixation in the media and I get the politics, but the president's going to do what's right.
So we appear to be amping up our ability to put boots on the ground there.
And it's all American boots, Joe.
And you tell me if we use 5,000 American troops to try to secure the Straits of Hormuz, we're going to see the death toll, the American death toll, go up without question.
Without question.
I mean, when you put boots on the ground, it's inevitably going to be bloody and you're going to lose people.
And you're right.
Those would be all American boots.
The Israelis just don't have the, Israel is a small country.
They don't have the combat power to deploy boots on the ground in a meaningful way.
And this would be a disaster.
I would heavily advise against it.
I mean, just putting a small force on an island that's so close to all of Israel's ballistic missile and drone technology would make our guys essentially just sitting ducks.
I have no doubt they could take the island.
As a matter of fact, the Iranians would probably let them take the island because they would then have them essentially as hostages in that area.
If we want to reopen the Straits of Hormuz, it's very simple.
You get the Israelis to stop offensive operations and you get to the negotiating table as fast as possible.
President Trump did something very smart yesterday.
He signaled through Scott Bissant that we would lift sanctions on Iranian oil that's already on the water or in barges.
And I think that right there is a step towards coming up with a peaceful solution to reopening the straits and getting us back to the negotiating table.
All of that will be short-circuited if we put boots on the ground because the second we put boots on the ground, we inevitably will lose people.
Popular Vote vs Isolationist Wing00:05:45
And then once you lose people, all you're going to hear from the media and then even a lot from people inside is that, hey, we've lost people.
We can't withdraw now.
We have to keep fighting.
And that right there is the recipe for 20 years of quagmire.
And I mean, it's the ceremony that you participated in for your beloved wife at Dover, body after body after body coming home and the president standing there and saluting.
And, you know, after a while, that does, that takes its toll on the president's psyche, on the nation's psyche.
And, you know, not to be too crass about it, but we do have midterm elections coming up in which the balance of power is very much up for grabs.
Now there are serious discussions about whether the Republicans are likely to lose the Senate.
They seem almost certain to lose the House, but likely to lose the Senate.
So now you're talking about nonstop impeachment proceedings going on in the last two years of Trump's term and whether 2028 is seriously in danger.
I mean, let me ask your opinion on that as somebody who has run for Congress twice.
Right now, there's a division within the Republican Party.
The division that's more neoconnie, the division that's much more in support of the president no matter what he does, like the core core diehard MAGA, is on one camp.
And then there's the more isolationist wing of the party, which is smaller but real in the other camp.
And it's somewhere under 20% of the Republican Party, if you believe the polls.
The problem for the Republicans is a candidate cannot win without that 20%.
And if you would take a candidate from the 20%, he cannot win or she cannot win without support from the 80%.
So the civil war that's happening within the Republican Party right now is great news for the Democrats.
Absolutely great news.
Neither side seems likely to back down because these are deeply held beliefs by both sides.
I mean, I think Cora Maga is just loyal to Trump, but like the neocons really think that this war is the greatest thing ever.
And the isolationist wing really thinks it might be the worst thing ever, that we might be in the beginning of World War III here.
So how do you see this playing out electorally?
You know, it's hard to believe the polls.
I do think there still is a lot of traditional thinking amongst, especially like the baby boomer generation.
They're consuming mainstream Fox News, et cetera.
And they want to put their full faith behind President Trump.
They feel like that's the patriotic thing to do, especially when we're at war.
But I would just caution the people in Trump's orbit that are looking at those numbers, because right now those numbers probably look pretty good, but Bush's numbers look good after initial military operations too.
And we saw them quickly shift as you get further and further into the quagmire.
But I think the important thing here is that President Trump won the popular vote and he won the popular vote by really energizing these people who typically don't vote.
And they largely were able to do that effectively by having President Trump speak directly to the American people in long form on all these different podcasts, yours included.
And I think these polls miss a lot of that demographic.
So I think the more, when I would say, like, I don't know, America first, isolationists.
I don't think we're necessarily isolationists.
I think we're more restrained, but the people who don't want us getting involved in these wars, I think we're much more powerful because of social media platforms like you and I are speaking on right now, like Tucker's show, that I think the conventional wisdom really reveals.
And so I think this argument, it's going to be key in the midterms to a lesser extent, but in the lead up to 2028, this is going to be a very key issue, especially because this war will have played out even further by then.
I hope we end it soon.
I hope it's more of a theoretic debate than an actual practical debate.
Well, I mean, I do too, but given the role that you just held and resigned from, the biggest concern that I've had since day one of this thing is domestic terror resulting from another Middle East war.
I mean, you can go back to 9-11 and trace 9-11 to anger from these radical Islamists over our alignment with Israel and foreign policy and so on.
And certainly what we've seen since the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, you know, I mean, as a Fox News anchor for the past, you know, much of the past 20 years, I was there for 14 years, just night after night after night, we covered yet another domestic terror attack that had happened from angry Islamists pissed off about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's my biggest concern in this whole thing, Joe, and this is truly your area of expertise.
So how do you see that threat?
Yeah, I mean, prior to this war kicking off, we at the National Counterterrorism Center and in coordination with the rest of the intelligence community, we authored a paper kind of on this topic and just said, hey, the threat, there is somewhat of a threat of potential sleeper cells, like where there's actual like dedicated terrorists that came here specifically just to attack us at the right moment.
There's always a threat of that.
However, the true threat that's manifested itself recently, especially in this conflict and even before, is that you get individuals who are radicalized by what they see on social media, in the media, as a result of our foreign policy or as a result of very clever propaganda and individuals that are here that are Muslims.
Actually, even in the case of the Gaza conflict, we saw non-Muslims who were inspired to commit acts of terror and violence here in the homeland because of that.
So the potential of blowback terrorism or of the war in Iran becoming part of the anti-Trump, anti-ICE, et cetera, protest movement inspiring more violence.
I think at the time I said that that was the most likely course of action for what we would see.
And then immediately when the war started, we saw a series of terror attacks that were, you know, indirectly, and some of them more directly than others, linked to what's taking place overseas right now.
Border Security and Homeland Focus00:07:26
And so that is a major issue.
Our support for Israel does drive lots of blowback terrorism here at home.
But then the other issue, too, is that at the end of the day, the government has a finite amount of resources and attention that they can pay to any given topic.
Right now, the war in Iran is sucking up a lot of bandwidth, a lot of money, a lot of key decision-maker time.
And it's diverting away from the fact that we still have millions of illegals in our country.
That President Trump, again, he ran on this.
He said the border is wide open.
We've got to take care of that.
And he's worked very diligently to secure the border.
He did secure the border.
But I testified publicly as the NCTC director that we've identified over 18,000 known suspected terrorists who likely had access to America, many of whom had come here.
And the further we dug into the data as to who was in our country, the more it became clear to me that we had no idea.
The border was open for four years.
You get different confusing data sets.
And the only thing that was very clear to me was that for four years, we didn't have any border security.
So in my opinion, the more that we divert into these foreign adventures, especially one that's taking up so much time, money, and resources, that takes away the ability for us to focus here on the homeland and on our security, which again, this is a key thing that President Trump ran on.
And it affects our day-to-day security.
Well, I mean, it's also like psychological capital, both for the president and for the American people, because already his approval numbers on foreign policy are way underwater, way underwater.
And the economy times 10.
I mean, his economic approval numbers are nil.
The public does not approve of the job he's doing on that front.
And so, you know, you can only expend so much of your negative capital on one thing.
And already we were expending it on immigration.
And that whole thing in, you know, the middle of the country in Minneapolis didn't help.
It was a noble pursuit, but we've basically abandoned it.
You know, Tom Holman went in there and changed the policy to just the worst first, and it seems to be the worst only is really what now we're focusing on on the immigration front, which is not what the American people wanted.
They wanted everybody, everybody who was here illegally to go.
And there's plenty of possibility that there are Iranian dissidents here who are not of the college educated, I want the old democracy of Iran back, but are of the radical Islamic part who got in under Joe Biden, who would love to unleash hell on us in the way that you've been talking about on Tucker's show and others suggesting it may not be some terror cell.
It may just be individuals who are radicalized, like the guy who went into Austin and killed three people and shot another 15.
Exactly.
I mean, I think that's one of the biggest risks.
And again, even some of these people, just because of our broken immigration system, they have status in America legally.
So that to me is the biggest threat.
And again, at the end of the day, when you're in charge, when you're in any leadership position, you do have to make hard decisions about where you're going to commit your resources.
And right now, I can tell you that the folks that are charged with our domestic security, border security, they're doing the best that they can.
However, the focus of the administration right now, it's on this war with Iran.
Just look at the budget request the Pentagon put in the other day.
That's going to be not going to secure our border.
Yep.
I mean, the numbers are stunning.
what you could fund domestically for $200 billion.
And instead, we're going to be spending it on fighting a war that we didn't have to start.
I want to ask you whether, like, what's your advice?
Because you're obviously a very courageous person.
I mean, truly, like, I'm not trying to flatter you.
You just obviously are.
What's your advice to people who are out there who are in the Republican Party, maybe operatives, who are afraid?
They're afraid to speak out against this because they know they will get called an anti-Semite immediately.
I mean, you can just say, I'm opposed to the war.
I don't think it's a good idea.
You will get called an anti-Semite.
They don't want the president crossing them.
They have dollars on the line with the Republican Party and they're worried about losing them if they cross the president on this.
What's your advice to them?
Number one, I think it's time for them to really reflect on if they think we're on the proper trajectory for our country.
And I think if they have an honest assessment and they think why they supported President Trump in the first place and the foreign policy that he enacted in his first administration that he campaigned on, they'll see that we've veered off the path.
And I think if you truly care about the people that you love and that you're chartered to protect and to serve, when they go on the wrong path, you don't go on the wrong path with them.
You try to guide them back onto the right path.
That is the loving and caring thing to do.
And I think if you truly believe in President Trump and this administration, then the right thing for you to do is have that reflection.
If you disagree with me, fine.
You think things are going great?
Okay, that's fine.
However, I think any honest reflection will say that we are not on a good path right now.
And so the respectful thing to do of President Trump is to say, sir, we disagree.
We want you to change course here.
We have options.
There are people who can offer you options.
As a matter of fact, I think President Trump can come up with options on his own because he's a smart guy.
But he does need to hear from his supporters that this is not where we need to be as a country.
And people can do that either.
They can do it online.
They can do it by calling their congressmen, calling their senators.
There's ways to respectfully pressure President Trump to say, hey, sir, you have other options.
And that's a big part of what I'm attempting to do right now.
Do you think there are others in the Trump administration who feel the way you feel and the way I feel?
Because if you look at the polls, like there was one, NBC, they kind of got hit for this, but they just released a survey showing that President Trump allegedly has a 100% approval rating among Republicans who identify as MAGA, which had a lot of people saying, okay, the people who President Trump just said days ago, you're not MAGA if you don't support Mark Levin, which led to a lot of people saying, then I am not MAGA.
I'm America first and I'm a Trump supporter, but then I'm not MAGA.
So if you self-identify as MAGA, you know, they say, NBC in this survey, that Trump has a 100% approval rating.
So I wonder whether you believe that number or whether you think there are others, including in the administration, who feel as you do and as I do about this war.
Yeah, I don't have a strong math background, but I think the probability of anything being polled at 100% is just like pretty low.
And so, I mean, I don't know, even just the absurdity of believing a poll that comes in like that at 100%, I'd just be curious to see like how they weighed the poll, like who they surveyed.
I mean, look, there are others.
There's actually quite a few others in the administration who feel the way that I do.
They may disagree with the tactics that I took and that's fine.
But I think if you get out there and you look at just that weight X, you look at the social media platform that was largely responsible for President Trump's success, especially in the 2016 campaign, and you just see where a lot of people who are aligned with President Trump, what they're saying and how they're feeling right now about this war, I think it tells a much more accurate tale of where the base is at compared to some poll put up by whatever, ABC, NBC.
And look, ABC, NBC, if I were them and I wanted President Trump to fail, I'd tell them, yeah, sir, everybody loves what you're doing right now.
Your base, MAGA, they love it.
Look, we got this poll of, you know, however they wait.
Yeah, that is like, just to me, kind of blatant sabotage.
Feelings of Betrayal and Gut Instincts00:06:05
Can I ask you about your personal life?
So your wife died and you had these two little boys, three and 18 months.
And then you did manage to rebuild your life.
You took care of your kids.
You kept working and you did find love again.
So how did that happen?
God, it's a plan.
So about a year after Shannon was killed, I met my wife now, my current wife, Heather.
Heather's also a veteran.
We never knew each other in the military, had some mutual friends.
Heather got out of the military after she deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
She did a year in both, got out of the military and decided that she wanted to go to school for sculpture.
And so she started doing kind of anti-war pro-veteran sculptures.
She was going to do a piece on Section 60, where Shannon is interned in Arlington National Cemetery.
That's where most of the Global War on Terror veterans are in Section 60.
And so she contacted me and just said, hey, I want to do this piece on several veterans, your wife being one of them.
Is that okay with you?
And so we started talking.
I had moved back to the West Coast where I'm from at the time, and she had just gotten accepted into a master's of fine arts program out there and was planning on moving out there anyways, basically to two miles away from where I was living.
So she did.
And the boys had just lost their mother.
And so we introduced Heather slowly to the boys.
And from there, the boys fell in love with her.
I fell in love with her and just really blessed to have her in our lives.
And so we got married in 2023.
She adopted the boys formally.
Since then, they just left.
They're at their homeschool co-op right now.
So, you know, just God's blessed me twice with Shannon and then now with Heather.
How old are the boys now?
My oldest is 10 and then my youngest is eight.
They both got birthday, both summer birthdays.
So pretty soon to be a little older.
Wow.
I mean, do they understand what you've done this week and what's happening?
Vaguely.
Yeah, I think they understand that, you know, obviously I'm not running off the work at four in the morning right now, but they're kind of used to me being fairly busy.
So I don't know if it's set in yet.
They watched about as much as you can expect an eight and a 10 year old to watch of a two-hour podcast with Tucker.
They watched it the other night at our friend's house.
So they thought that was kind of cool.
But I don't think it's fully set in yet.
But we talk all the time about the sacrifice that Shannon made.
And so service, it's already very much a part of their lives.
I think most people that have been around them for their adult lives have served in one capacity or another.
Would you encourage them to sign up for the U.S. military?
This is honestly the toughest question that I get.
I'll talk about pretty much anything, but I'm very, very, very torn on this topic.
You couldn't have convinced me not to join the military, basically from the time I was my oldest son's age until I actually enlisted.
My oldest son is already saying he wants to join the military.
He wants to be a Marine.
That's what you do when your parents are in the Army or the Navy.
You got to go to the Marines.
And so I understand that, but I do have some apprehensions about the way that our all-volunteer force has been used to deploy to these wars that didn't benefit our country.
So I'm very, very worried about that.
And I'm worried about my friends that are still in.
I'm worried about the young men and women.
It breaks my heart to see more caskets coming back to back to Dover.
So again, I view it as my mission, hopefully, to get our foreign policy back to a place where we only deploy America's sons and daughters when there is a vital national security interest.
And so that the military can be a place where young men and women can go to serve our country, knowing and trusting our leaders have their best interests and our nation's best interests in heart.
That's a tough one.
You know, it's like to me, it's incredible that we had a surge in signups for the U.S. military once Trump got elected and Hegseth took over as Secretary of War.
And I think, in part, it was getting rid of wokeism in the military, but in part, it was a trust that he would not be sending troops off senselessly to fight pointless wars in the Middle East.
And that's why I think one of the reasons why Tucker said, and I agree, this feels like a betrayal.
It feels like more than just an error.
It feels like a betrayal.
It does.
And I understand why, I understand why people feel that way.
I truly do.
I would just encourage them as they're feeling betrayed that we still have an opportunity.
And let's communicate effectively and with love for the movement that gave us this opportunity to fix our country.
Don't throw out where Trump brought us to.
Let's communicate effectively with President Trump and say, hey, we love you, we respect you.
You, in essence, saved our country.
We need you to do the right thing now.
Continue the legacy that you built.
Don't listen to these people that are seeking to drive us into a war and to destroy your legacy.
Trust your gut instincts.
I mean, if he trusts his gut instincts and he does what he ran on, this country will be, I think, in a good place.
But he's going to have to make some very, very drastic and decisive decisions.
But again, that is President Trump's superpower in many ways.
So I am cautiously optimistic, and I hope and I pray that we can influence him to get back to his core agenda.
Yes, he has so many great things yet to do domestically, and we need him to be successful in doing them.
And we need to maintain control of at least the U.S. Senate, ideally both branches.
Joe Kent, you're a patriot.
You're a hero.
Thank you so much for telling your story and for what you did.
Megan, thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
I look forward to watching how your career evolves.
And I hope we have you on again soon.
Thank you anytime.
Wow.
Wow.
What a guy, you guys, right?
What a guy.
As you know, we were supposed to be off this week.
That did not work out that well.
But there was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity to speak with him.
I mean, what an interesting man.
I'd love to know your thoughts on Joe Kent and his messaging and the way he handled his principles here.
I just feel like 11 combat tours, six bronze stars, that guy has my undying respect and had every right to speak his mind.
The president can take it.
It's criticism.
Closing Thoughts and Career Evolution00:01:22
That's what it is.
Ultimately, it's criticism of the president's decision.
He's able to handle that and we're able to discuss it in a way that I think was pretty illuminating today.
Anyway, lots of love to all of you.
Have a great weekend.
I will tell you that tomorrow we will have a live program, not a live program, but a new program.
It'll be the final part of our Nancy Guthrie special series.
Ashley Banfield joins us for that.
And then we are back live, back from our home studio on Monday.