US counter-terrorism chief who resigned says he fears retaliation but has no regrets

The counter-terrorism official who resigned from Donald Trump’s administration over the US and Israel’s war against Iran has said he is bracing for political retribution – but would do it all again anyway.Asked by conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly if he was concerned about a pre-existing FBI search investigating him for leaking classified information, Joe Kent said he was ambivalent.Kent said he was “not concerned because I know I did nothing wrong”. But, alluding to the way the Trump administration has sought to criminally prosecute people the president considers enemies, he added: “Of course, I am concerned because we’ve all seen the full weight of the FBI and the government come down on individuals who speak out.”“That has me a little bit concerned,” he also told Kelly on her podcast on Friday. “But I know that the truth and the facts are on my side.“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.”A former US army special forces veteran, Kent resigned as national counter-terrorism center director on Tuesday and has since been on a conservative media tour, including with Kelly and Tucker Carlson, who were sympathetic to Trump but have broken with the president over the war in Iran and other issues.At his stops with Kelly, Carlson and on the UnHerd podcast with Freddie Sayers, Kent has maintained he could not continue in his role “in good conscience” due to the war in Iran that the president started without congressional authorization alongside Israel in late February.In a widely publicized resignation letter, he said Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.Kent was previously an ideological soldier for Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, defending the 6 January Capitol attack carried out by the president’s supporters, exalting disproven theories that the 2020 election won by Joe Biden was stolen, and interviewing the antisemitic far-right influencer Nick Fuentes. He paid a member of the far-right extremist Proud Boys group to work on an unsuccessful Kent bid for Congress in 2022.Kent has also been accused of peddling antisemitic tropes in blaming an “Israeli lobby” for the Iran conflict.Kelly on Friday asked Kent if it was worth becoming a Maga enemy now that he has joined an insurgency of Iran war skeptics on the fringes of Trump’s movement.“Most certainly,” Kent said in response to Kelly. “I think I have a mission, and I think it is to do everything I can to stop this war.”The White House dismissed Kent as “weak on security”, insisting that Iran represented “a tremendous threat” and suggesting that those who disagreed lacked judgment.“If somebody didn’t think it was a threat, we don’t want those people,” Trump has said.During a recent hearing of the House permanent select committee on intelligence, Kent’s former boss, Tulsi Gabbard, said she “cannot say how much” she disagreed with Kent’s letter.“He said a lot of things in that letter,” Gabbard, the national intelligence director, said. “Ultimately, we have provided the president with the intelligence assessments, and the president is elected by the American people and makes his own decisions based on the information that’s available to him.”In an interview with the right-leaning UnHerd published on Saturday, Kent continued with that assertion, saying that while Trump “is the guy who makes the decisions … the advice that [he] was getting was largely dominated by this ecosystem that I describe with Israeli officials”.He blamed outlets that he claimed echo “the same talking points”, naming Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the New York Post – all of which are part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.Kent claimed those outlets were “saying basically the same things, almost in coordination with what the Israeli officials were saying, in particular about no enrichment, saying that enrichment equals Iran having a nuclear weapon, which couldn’t be further from the truth”.Kent said that “by saying that”, it “basically short-circuited the negotiations” over the future of Iran’s nuclear program.He added that he had expected Israel to return after the “12-day war” between Israeli forces and Iran in June of last year and US missile strikes soon after that destroyed Iranian nuclear enrichment sites.“We knew they would, and when they did come back, that is when I saw, from my perspective, the robust debates kind of go away, and there was a much smaller group of advisers around President Trump,” Kent said.And again, he added: “It goes back to the official engagement from the Israelis then echoed by the pro-Israel media heads that were in Trump’s media diet”.