Joe Kent announced his resignation as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center on March 17, following disagreement with President Donald Trump’s decision to enter armed conflict with Iran.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent stated in his resignation letter to the president.
“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 appears to be the first high-profile member of the Trump administration to resign over the Iran conflict, which is now in its third week.
He previously served in U.S. Army special operations units and worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.
After his wife Shannon, a Navy cryptologist, was killed in an ISIS suicide bombing attack in 2019, Kent left the agency. Later that year, he praised Trump’s move to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria.
Kent ran for Congress as a Republican in 2022 and 2024, receiving Trump’s endorsement in both races, but lost both times. He joined the second Trump administration in 2025.
In his resignation letter, Kent said he supported the foreign policy views Trump campaigned on in 2016, 2020, and 2024, but indicated a fissure emerged around the time the president ordered a round of U.S. strikes on Iran in June of last year.
“Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation,” Kent wrote.
Kent claimed high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media led a misinformation campaign early on in the second Trump administration to sway the president toward entering an armed conflict with Iran.
“I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for,” he added. “The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to Kent’s resignation letter with a long statement in a March 17 post on X.
She disputed Kent’s assertion that “Iran posed no imminent threat” to the United States and said the president had “strong and compelling evidence” that Iran would attack first.
“This evidence was compiled from many sources and factors. President Trump would never make the decision to deploy military assets against a foreign adversary in a vacuum,” Leavitt said.
“President Trump ultimately made the determination that a joint attack with Israel would greatly reduce the risk to American lives that would come from a first strike by the terrorist Iranian regime and address this imminent threat to America’s national security interests.”
Trump, speaking from the White House on March 17, said he had read Kent’s statement.
“I didn’t know him well, but I thought he seemed like a pretty nice guy. But when I read his statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out, because he said that Iran was not a threat,” Trump said. “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.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said that Trump felt he had to strike Iran first to prevent “mass casualties” of Americans and U.S. service members.
“That’s a summary. I can’t tell you the classified part, but that’s the summary that’s made public, and it’s accurate,” Johnson told reporters on Tuesday.
The National Counterterrorism Center is a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, currently led by Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard, who ran for president, seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 2020, had made opposition to a war with Iran a feature of her campaign. She sold campaign merchandise emblazoned with the logo “No War With Iran.”
The 2025 ODNI National Threat Assessment stated Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon” and then-Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so.”
Kent’s resignation comes a day before Gabbard is due to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding the latest global threat assessment.
In response to Kent’s resignation, Gabbard said her office had briefed the president “with the best information available to inform his decisions.”
“After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion,” Gabbard said in a statement on March 17.
