‘Patently Antisemitic’: US Counterterror Chief Quits, Under Fire for Claiming Israel Tricked Trump Into Iran War

Joe Kent, head of the US National Counterterrorism Center who had ties to white nationalist figures, stepped down on Tuesday in protest over the joint US-Israel strikes in Iran, claiming in a resignation letter which, according to critics, contained antisemitic tropes that President Donald Trump had been duped by Israel into entering the war.

In the letter, addressed to Trump and posted to the X social media platform, Kent said that 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.”

“Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” Kent wrote.

Responding to the claims, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren said the argument that Trump had been pushed into war by Israel ignored decades of Iranian hostility and repeated attacks on Americans.

“Every day since 1979, the Iranian regime swore to destroy the United States and, in pursuit of that pledge, sought to develop strategic weapons while committing hundreds of acts of war against Americans,” Oren told The Algemeiner. “President Trump did not need to be dragged into defending the American people from this looming threat and certainly not by a purportedly cunning Israeli leader.”

“Suggestions to the contrary made by Joe Kent and others on both the right and the left are deeply insulting to the president and patently antisemitic,” he added.

In his letter, Kent said Trump was deceived by Israelis and the media “into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory.”

“This was a lie and the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”

Kent said he could not endorse war with Iran 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.”

Shannon Kent, his first wife, was killed in a suicide bombing by the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria in 2019.

Trump responded by saying that while Kent, who was a top aide to intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard, was a “nice guy,” he was “very weak on security.”

“When I read the 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.”

The American Jewish Committee called Kent’s letter “deeply disturbing” and said that by “falsely blaming ‘Israel and its powerful American lobby,'” Kent had “invoked antisemitic tropes.”

“Such claims echo long-standing conspiratorial narratives about Jewish power and influence that have fueled hatred, discrimination, and violence for generations and should never be amplified by government leaders,” the organization said in a statement.

Gerard Filitti, a legal analyst at the New York-based think tank, The Lawfare Project, said Kent’s letter was “textbook antisemitic dog-whistling dressed up as patriotism,” with a darker agenda that aligned him with the anti-Israel wing of the Republican Party. 

Kent was charging that “American officials, American intelligence, and the American president himself were manipulated by Jewish power into a war that serves no American interest,” Filitti noted in an op-ed published in the Times of Israel. 

“That is not a foreign policy critique. That is a conspiracy theory with a body count of history behind it, and Americans deserve a full accounting of who Kent is.”

Filitti outlined the repeated scrutiny Kent faced during his US congressional runs in Washington state over links to far-right and white nationalist figures, including Nick Fuentes, who said Kent once told him, “I love what you’re doing.” Kent later distanced himself publicly but was also interviewed by a Fuentes-linked outlet and said American culture was “anti-white” and “anti-straight-white-male.”

The controversy extended beyond Fuentes. The Associated Press reported Kent’s campaign paid a Proud Boys member as a consultant, while critics also pointed to his ties to Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson and to Greyson Arnold, a Christian nationalist who called Hitler “misunderstood.” When the connections drew attention, Kent repeatedly said he was unaware of their views.

Kent’s resignation will bolster his standing with the isolationist wing of the Republican Party associated with Tucker Carlson, especially as the Trump administration reportedly braces for a Carlson interview with him, according to Axios.

In his letter, Kent wrote that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation,” framing that as a confident judgment despite having said something very different before taking office, Filitti noted, treating warnings about Iranian assassination plots as credible.

In a September 2024 post on X, he wrote that “Iran has been after Trump since January of 2020 after he ordered the targeted killing of the terrorist Qasem Soleimani. This isn’t a new threat.”

The timing of Kent’s abrupt reversal was too politically convenient, according to Filitti. 

“Either Kent was wrong then, or he is lying now,” he said.

“His [Kent’s] resignation letter doesn’t represent a whistleblower’s courage; it represents a fired official’s revisionism, dressed up in the language of patriotism and laced with the oldest smear in the canon,” Filitti said.

He added that the former counterterrorism chief should be questioned under oath about what he knew of Iran’s threat posture while advising the president, and why he later walked back his views.

Nevertheless, even if Kent is appealing to the Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens lane of the far-right, recent polls show that bloc is not representative of most MAGA voters. An NBC survey conducted about a week into the war found roughly 90 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans supported the strikes, compared with far lower backing among Republicans outside that camp.