Who is Joe Kent and why was he the director of the National Counterterrorism Center?

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been some chatter about Joe Kent’s resignation letter:

Joe Kent, a top aide to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, took to X Tuesday morning to announce his resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), writing, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.”

Kent, an Army veteran who has two failed congressional runs on his resume, also posted his official resignation letter, and tweeted, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. 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.”

I don’t think the Kent letter means much to anyone who didn’t already agree with it – such as the left and the Tucker wing of the ex-right. In it, Kent parrots the Tucker line. The government and the military disagree, as does Trump:

Trump was more than happy to show Kent the exit. “When somebody is working with us that says they didn’t think Iran was a threat, we don’t want those people,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “There are some people, I guess, that would say that, but they’re not smart people or they’re not savvy people. Iran was a tremendous threat.”

Who is Kent, and why was he appointed in the first place?:

Joseph Clay Kent (born April 11, 1980) is an American politician, former United States Army warrant officer, and former Central Intelligence Agency paramilitary officer who served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2025 to 2026. …
Kent enlisted in the 75th Ranger Regiment and applied for the Special Forces before the September 11 attacks. He served eleven combat tours, primarily in Iraq, and retired in 2018, becoming a paramilitary officer with the CIA. In January 2019, Kent’s wife, Shannon, was killed in a suicide bombing in Manbij, Syria. He became involved in political advocacy after Shannon’s death.

In 2022, Kent was the Republican nominee for Washington’s third congressional district.

He wasn’t elected, but he supported Trump back then because Trump said he didn’t want to start wars. Later, Trump chose him for the intelligence job in February 2025, very early in his second term.

Kent claimed in his resignation note that Israel had pressured the US into starting the Iraq War, although Kent wasn’t in the government then and had no special knowledge of what happened. In addition, those who did have such knowledge say that the Israeli government at the time warned the US not to start the war because Iran should be the focus instead.

More about Kent’s run for office in 2021 [emphasis mine]:

In September, Trump endorsed Kent. His prominence was bolstered by Tucker Carlson, who had frequently had Kent as guest on the Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight (2016–2023).

So – surprise, surprise – Kent was a Tucker Carlson protege. I wonder whether Tucker recommended him for the government position in 2025.

Kent didn’t last long in the administration’s good graces. For months before his departure there were problems:

In October, The New York Times reported Kent had obtained access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s files on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, alarming the bureau’s director, Kash Patel. According to The Wall Street Journal, Kent had been sidelined from the team responsible for producing and delivering the President’s Daily Brief in the final months of his tenure.

Kent has been against military intervention in general after his Iraq deployment:

Kent is a non-interventionist, citing his military experience and the death of his wife. He began to question the management of the U.S. military during the Iraq War, when officials sought to eliminate members of Saddam Hussein’s government. According to Mother Jones, Kent read David Hackworth’s memoir About Face (1990), a book critical of the “clerks at the top” directing the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He defended Trump’s pardons of two Army officers convicted of Uniform Code of Military Justice offenses, Mathew L. Golsteyn and Clint Lorance, and his intervention in the case of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL involved in a high-profile war crimes case; in an interview with The New York Times in November 2019, Kent compared Gallagher’s case with that of Chelsea Manning.

During the early days of the Ukraine War Kent quickly aligned with the pro-Russia anti-Ukraine wing such as Carlson:

He stated Russian president Vladimir Putin’s demands for Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts were “very reasonable”. His comments on Tucker Carlson Tonight denouncing support for Ukraine as deterring a peace deal were repeated by TASS, a Russian state-owned news agency. In September 2023, Kent described the Biden administration’s strategy as immoral, arguing that the U.S. is fueling a prolonged war that is “unsustainable” for Ukraine. Kent has specifically stated that the policy uses the Ukrainian civilian population as “cannon fodder”, describing drafted Ukrainian soldiers—whom he characterizes as formerly everyday workers and students—as being sent to die in a “muddy ditch” in a war he believes they cannot win. He has argued that by providing continuous aid, the U.S. prevents a necessary, albeit likely painful, peace deal from being brokered.[

So he’s consistent on this. He doesn’t have any special or new information, nor has he experienced some sort of soul-searching political change. Au contraire.

The real question isn’t about Kent’s resignation – it’s about why he was appointed in the first place, and why he stayed in his position as long as he did.

David Boies on the Iran War: the way we were

The New Neo Posted on by

Five days ago I read this piece. It was in support of Trump’s actions in Iran, and because it was published in The New York Post – which is a paper on the right – it didn’t seem surprising.

But when I noticed the author’s name – David Boies – I was very surprised indeed. I immediately recognized the name as that of a prominent Democrat attorney. But the content was so unlike what I would expect these days from any Democrat not named Fetterman that I looked Boies’ history up, just to make sure. Yes, he had represented Gore in Bush v. Gore, and represented the plaintiff’s side in the case that successfully invalidated California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage.

But now he’s written this:

Every past president since Bill Clinton, Republican and Democrat alike, has declared that Iran couldn’t be permitted to develop nuclear weapons. Not one acted to prevent it.

Every president since Ronald Reagan has condemned Iran’s role in terrorism against American citizens, interests and allies. Not one acted to stop it.

Instead each president left his successor with a more dangerous Iran and a more complicated threat to address. …

I understand some of the hostility to Trump’s action. The isolationist wing of the Republican Party and the pacifist wing of the Democratic Party each are wrapped in the fantasy that we can afford to ignore the capabilities and intentions of enemies because they are thousands of miles away. Two hundred years ago that view was credible. One hundred years ago it was plausible. Today it takes only one missile carrying a nuclear or dirty bomb to get through our defenses, or one such device smuggled into this country, to devastate a city.

I also understand — and deplore — the fringes of both parties that apparently hate Israel and Jews so much that they oppose any action to neutralize Israel’s enemies.

What is harder to understand, and particularly troubling for our country, is opposition rooted simply in antipathy toward Trump himself. We used to say that politics stops at the water’s edge. …

Those of us who generally oppose Trump but who recognize the threat Iran poses need to support the military action not because we owe anything to Trump but because we owe it to ourselves, our country and our children.

If we opposed the war and succeeded in pressuring Trump to curtail it before the mission is accomplished, we would have the satisfaction of defeating someone we generally oppose, which might help ourselves politically.

But America would be worse for it.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Boies is eighty-five years old, so I see him as a throwback to an earlier time when many Democrats would have been willing to support such a war despite a Republican president being in charge. Now there are few.

The New Yorker interviewed Boies on the subject; the text of the interview seems to be available although TNY is usually behind a paywall. To get the tenor of some of the questions asked of Boies, take a look at this one, which seems designed to tell the reader just how wrong Boies is:

This war was started by a President who frequently seems unstable, who can’t lay out a clear reason for the war, and who makes vague threats against our allies. We have a Secretary of War who seems to delight in death and destruction. The White House X feed is putting out fascistic video edits of military attacks that delight in violence. How do you synthesize all that with the point you’re trying to make?

The questioner assumes the New Yorker readership is naturally in agreement with such propositions as that Trump is “unstable,” has not laid out a clear reason (although he’s laid out many, actually), that Hegseth “delights” in death and destruction, and that videos of the war are “fascistic” ones that also “delight” in violence.

Boies answers that question by basically ignoring all that editorializing and sticking with logic:

I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, Do you believe that this war is necessary or not? And I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, first, Do you believe it’s acceptable for the Iranian regime to have nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them? If you believe that, then the next question you have to ask yourself is: Could we have achieved that goal of eliminating the threat that Iran poses by some other means?

Ah, but that’s absolutely not where most people on the left begin. They begin by hating Trump and Hegseth and automatically opposing everything the administration does; their “logic” is retrofitted to conform with that conviction.

A bit later in the interview Boies reveals he was not a fan of Obama’s Iran deal when it was negotiated because he doesn’t trust the Iranian leaders. So this goes back quite a ways with him; he is consistent. He also says the following when the interviewer tries to point out inconsistencies in what Trump has said:

But see — my view is I don’t support [Trump] in this conflict because he says it’s the right thing to do. I support him because I think it’s the right thing to do.

The interviewer cites the girls’ school bombing as though it’s been proven the US did it, although it has not been, and then asks another question more to guide the reader than for Boies:

Sir, you’re a very, very smart guy. You don’t think Donald Trump actually cares about casualties, do you?

He simply can’t believe the answer can be “yes.” That disbelief is astounding and shows the strength of TDS, considering the war’s focus on the Iranian leadership rather than civilians, the inevitability of collateral damage in any war, and Trump’s longstanding opposition to most wars.

Boies’ answer:

Look, I actually do, O.K.? In his first Administration, in 2019, when he turned back the bombers from hitting Iran, I think he did that because I do think he genuinely cares about human life. Now that doesn’t mean that he respects human life the way I would.

He had to add that last sentence, but I forgive him, considering the “Look, I actually do, O.K.?”

And he adds, for good measure:

I do understand that in wartime people say a lot of things that are untrue to support their side. We’ve done that repeatedly in every war we fought. Now, with respect to civilian casualties, it is a terrible cost of war, and it is an inevitable cost of war. And, by my count, the civilian casualties that have been incurred are far less than the civilian casualties that this Iranian regime caused in suppressing the protests.

Later in the interview Boies gives another hint at why he’s willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt – in other words, why he seems relatively free of TDS [emphasis mine]:

Well, I don’t know. I do know Donald Trump some. I’ve known him for decades. And I think that he would be better served by being willing to recognize some of the costs here, but I believe he respects human life. And I think this is a President who, despite renaming the Department of Defense, really doesn’t like war.

Boies is to be lauded for refusing to demonize someone he knows is not a demon. It takes some courage these days for a Democrat to take such a position. Yes, he’s old, and that may help. But probably many of his friends and associates will now shun him.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Nobody wants to get this kind of call from the Mossad. Is the story for real? I don’t know. But I do know the Mossad seems to have some extraordinary intelligence capabilities, especially in Iran. That’s probably based on many things, but one of them could be that many Iranian Jews fled to Israel around the time the mullahs came to power 47 years ago. They, and perhaps their children, would be native Farsi speakers.

(2) Citizenship of fraudster revoked:

A Haitian-born fraudster has been stripped of his U.S. citizenship after defrauding COVID-19 relief programs of millions of dollars and concealing his criminal conduct during the naturalization process.

U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith entered an order revoking the citizenship of Joff Stenn Wroy Philossaint, 25, of Fort Lauderdale, after determining that Philossaint illegally procured his citizenship by making false statements to immigration officials.

Note that his citizenship wasn’t revoked because of the crimes he committed. It was revoked because he’d already started the criminal conduct before his citizenship hearing but concealed it from authorities during a sworn naturalization interview.

In addition, I’m wondering what happens now. Does he get deported back to Haiti?

(3) Iran’s intelligence minister Esmail Khatib has been killed by a targeted Israeli strike.

“Khatib played a significant role during the recent protests throughout Iran, including the arrest & killing of protestors and led terrorist activities against Israelis & Americans around the world,” the IDF said in a post on social media.

“Similarly, he operated against Iranian citizens during the Mahsa Amini protests (2022–2023),” they added.

The Iranian president – (rumored to be trying to resign and asking that he not be killed, since he has no control of anything anyone) announced the death.

(4) Chinagate – not. There are allegations that Trump was not told by US intelligence that there was evidence China had interfered in the 2020 election on behalf of Biden:

A nalysts inside the U.S. intelligence community sought to conceal evidence of Chinese influence efforts from President Donald Trump during the 2020 election, with analysts saying they didn’t want their intel used by “that vulgarian in the Oval Office” to pursue policies toward China they personally disagreed with.

The revelation is found within a January 2021 report written by — and never before reported upon comments by — analytic ombudsman Barry Zulauf, who conducted a review of the spy community’s handling of Russian versus Chinese meddling efforts during the 2020 election. Among his conclusions was that intelligence analysts downplayed China’s actions because they had disdain for the “vulgarian” Trump and did not want to support the policies and priorities of the Trump administration toward China with which they “personally disagree.”

It’s a sad thing that at this point most of us are so cynical that – if true – it doesn’t surprise us, and we doubt there will be any significant negative consequences for those who did this.

(5) An elderly Israeli couple were killed by an Iranian cluster bomb. Cluster bombs are banned by international treaty. Amnesty International actually noted back in July that Iran had been using these banned weapons. But it’s not as though the international community cares very much.

(6) Perhaps Trump’s pressure is working? I certainly hope so:

Nick Shirley visits California

The New Neo Posted on by

And it’s been a working vacation:

You remember Nick Shirley, the brave young investigative journalist who reported on the Minneapolis Quality “Learing” Center and exposed widespread fraud in Gov. Tim Walz’s Gopher State. …

He next set his sights on California, and on Wednesday, he released a 40-minute video showing what he’s found so far:

“Here is the full 40 minutes of my crew and I exposing California fraud, Minnesota was big but California is even bigger… We uncovered over $170,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters live in luxury with no consequences. Like it and share it, the fraud must STOP.

“We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for this to be happening. These fraudsters have been able to defraud American taxpayers for years without any pushback from the public and politicians.

“It is time to EXPOSE IT ALL and end America’s fraud crisis.”

Apparently Governor Newsom was not especially pleased, because his press office countered with an AI-generated image that implied Shirley’s motive was some sort of unhealthy interest in children. I kid you not:

Newsom’s clever little witticism didn’t get a whole lot of favorable responses, however.

Is Iran approaching a tipping point?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t want to be counting too many unhatched chickens, but there are some promising signs in Iran.

A few days ago Ali Larijani was trash-talking Trump and Netanyahu. No more:

A senior Iranian leader who warned President Trump last week to “watch out for yourself — lest you be eliminated” was killed in an overnight strike, Israel’s defense minister said Tuesday.

Ali Larijani, head of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, was hit days after joining Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in the streets of Tehran at a Friday rally marking the pro-Palestinian Quds Day holiday.

“It’s clear they’re running out of steam,” Larijani told a TV interviewer in reference to Operation Epic Fury. “Trump’s problem is that he doesn’t understand that the Iranian nation is mature and determined.”

He was one of the most powerful men in the Iranian government, widely thought to be the current head – if the Iranian government can be said to have one.

He’s not the only Iranian higher-up to have met his death recently:

In a separate statement, the Israel Defense Forces announced it had killed Gen. Gholam Reza Soleimani, head of the Revolutionary Guard’s all-volunteer Basij force, in a “targeted strike” on Tehran.

This Soleimani was unrelated to Qasem Soleimani, killed by the US in 2020. But no doubt a lot of people in Iran have had reason to rejoice at his death. He was the one giving the orders to shoot demonstrators.

When I read that both men had been killed, I wondered why the recent public appearance and bravado statements from Larijani. Saving face right up to the end? Or have the leaders come to believe in their own invincibility over the years? I don’t know whether we can take the following at face value, either:

A regular user of social media, Larijani responded Sunday to the $10 million reward offer by the US by quoting Hussein Ibn Ali, an early Shia Islam leader: “I do not see death as anything but happiness, nor life with the oppressors as anything but torment.”

Well, he got his wish. Iran has officially confirmed his death.

Now it comes down to how many in the Iranian government and enforcement police are true believers and how many are pragmatists who will abandon the cause. I don’t know the answer, but I hear rumors of more defections. For example, the president of the country is said to be considering resignation – although I think his power wasn’t all that great to begin with. Meanwhile, titular Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is nowhere to be seen and is still unheard, although he keeps “issuing statements” read by others; Iran keeps pounding the Gulf States; and the IDF intelligence chief says Iran is “in distress” but the prospect of regime change is uncertain.

Well, we already knew that.

NOTE: The intelligence on these guys’ whereabouts is truly impressive. I would love to know how the Mossad – I think it’s mainly them, although US intelligence may have some role as well – does it.

Power out. Internet out.

The New Neo Posted on by

Not sure why, but it’s down in a pretty wide area. I’m posting this from my phone, outside, but won’t be able to write a regular post till the internet is restored. That should happen in an hour or two – they say.

Pundits unbound

The New Neo Posted on by

Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, among others, are spiraling off into new dimensions of awful. Ace has the details of the Carlson story well-covered, in this post and in this one. The title of the former, just to give you a taste of what he’s talking about: “Taqiyya Qatarlson: The CIA Is Preparing a Criminal Referral Against Me Just Because I Was Acting as a Foreign Agent for Iran.” The title of the latter: “Axios ‘Journalist:’ The White House Says That Everything Tucker Carlson Is Saying Is B******t.”

As for Megyn, she’s in a feud with Mark Levin in which she said he has a micropenis. I am not making that up; that’s the level at whcih she’s operating these days. Well you might ask, how would you know, Megyn?

But rather than get any deeper into the weedy details, I’ll just say that I think part of what’s happening is this (a quote from a response to Megyn on X):

Often happens to those who experience a very long and successful run. Something snaps and their ego’s invincibility trait goes haywire.

In other words, in the fight for clicks and without anyone setting external limits on them anymore, they get very full of themselves. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. For Carlson and Kelly, their previous employer Fox News used to act as the falconer and was a check on their wilder tendencies. Released from those constraints and wildly successful on their own terms, things fall apart, and those things are Carlson and Kelly. They’re not the only ones, either.

Over twenty(!) years ago I wrote about a similar phenomenon in connection with bloggers but also pundits in general:

But I think they (we) do need to be careful not to get carried away with the sheer brilliance of their (our) rapier wit and trenchant opinions.

Alone in front of the computer (or, increasingly less often, a pad of paper), the pundit/blogger sits. Inspiration strikes, and the need to be wittier, sharper (there’s that word again!), more opinionated–to be noticed–rises up in folks who tend to be pretty witty and sharp to begin with. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a cliche because it has some truth to it–and the sharper the words the mightier they sometimes sound, especially in the solitude of the act of composition. And once put down and published, they can’t be recalled.

Then there’s the group aspect. Bloggers and pundits write in isolation, but they’re not really in isolation at all, except physically. Mentally and emotionally they are part of one huge mass shouting out at each other and at everybody else, the sounds of the exchange echoing and ricocheting and reverberating all over the country–and in some cases the world. As such, we influence each other greatly. It’s not even a case of following the herd, it’s more a case of being influenced by the opinions of others, a process we are all susceptible to no matter how independent we may think we are. We influence each other directly by our words, and also indirectly by the sense of competition that’s inherent in this pundit/blogger game–the need, for some at least, to try to outdo each other.

So what’s the result? Sometimes it’s wonderful–in fact, since I’m a fan of blogs, I’d say it’s often wonderful–a liveliness of writing and thinking and interacting that you just can’t get in the staid old MSM. There’s an energy here, and part of it is the energy that comes with a bunch of sharp (in several senses of the word) and verbal people mixing it up and trying to say intelligent things in a way that’s interesting to read. Sometimes it segues into a group of people trying to say outrageous things, either to amuse or to stir up or out of anger or the desire to call attention to themselves, or some of the above or all of the above.

When is the line crossed and it becomes a feeding frenzy? I don’t have the answer; each person has to decide that for him/herself. But when there’s a lot of blood in the water and people find that their own entrails, and those of their allies, are hanging out–that could be a sign.

The only thing that’s changed is that the ascendance of social media has made it worse.

ADDENDUM:

Still another update on the SAVE Act

The New Neo Posted on by

Is there still hope of its passing? Mike Lee says maybe:

“Okay, important update on the Save America Act and the effort to get it passed,” Lee said in the video. “Look, I am guardedly optimistic. We’ve turned kind of a corner. Over the last few days, there’s been some uncertainty about exactly what procedure we will be and will not be using. In the end, we’ve been working closely with Leader Thune and his staff, and they’ve been great to work with. What we’re coming up with is something that I think is best described as a hybrid version of the talking filibuster.”

I’ll believe it when I see it.

I think it’s important to pass the bill. Even if it’s tied up in the court system afterward, it needs to be passed. And even if SCOTUS rules against it, that could set a precedent to indicate that, if the Democrats come to power and pass their own beloved “For the People Act” to force states to relax their own voting rules for federal elections, that bill might be found unconstitutional as well.

I actually watched the Oscars last night

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t exactly know why I watched it; first time in years. I suppose I did it out of curiosity, mainly to see if the abominable One Battle After Another would really win tons of awards. Which it did – although apparently its competition wasn’t much better.

I say I watched the show, but most of the time I was also reading and I would look up periodically when something interested me. So my attention was admittedly spotty. Nevertheless, I saw enough to take in the self-satisfied self-congratulatory virtue-signaling, the almost entirely unfunny jokes and bits, the “we women are soooo strong!” message, the occasional hackneyed leftist political remark, and of course the dresses.

Most of the political stuff was very well-covered in this post, if you care to read about it.

A guy named Javier Bardem caught my attention with “No to war – Free Palestine!” Quite the oxymoron. This mental and moral giant has been accusing Israel of genocide since at least 2014, according to his Wiki entry. He’s Spanish, by the way, and here’s another of his brilliant quotes from this year’s Oscar festivities:

“I’m wearing a pin that I used in 2003 with the Iraq war, which was an illegal war,” Bardem told reporters on the red carpet, “and we are here, 23 years after, with another illegal war, created by Trump and Netanyahu with another lie.”

The only film I’ve seen this year – other than a half-hour of the execrable aforementioned One Battle After Another – is the animated musical movie K-Pop Demon Hunters, which I saw twice because my grandchildren love it. It’s kind of cute and that made it tolerable, by the way, but maybe I’m biased because of them. They know all the songs by heart and periodically sing them, especially the one that was nominated for the Oscar, which it won. After a big production number, a group of people – most or all of whom were Korean, because the song is K-pop genre – came onstage for their thank-yous. The occasion was apparently “historic” because this is the very first K-pop song to win.

So what did the “diversity is our strength – and our requirement” Oscars do? Cut them off prematurely, after having let others drone on and on, and after some seemingly endless “comedy” bits such as a tribute to the 15-year anniversary of the movie Bridesmaids. They had time for all of that, but cut off the Korean guy who stepped up with a little piece of paper after the comely female singer-songwriter had said her not-so-very-long acceptance speech. The group was left standing there, confused, while the orchestral bye-bye music played and the mic power dimmed.

I guess Koreans don’t stand very high in the intersectional hierarchy.

As for fashion, I’ll just comment on Demi Moore’s get-up, shown here:

I am puzzled by the fact that many people are saying this was a peacock dress. Are they at all familiar with peacocks? Different color, different feather type as well. No, this was a rooster dress:

And lest you think I’m picking on Demi Moore, I’m not. I suppose over the years I may have seen a few of her movies, but the only one I remember is Ghost. It’s one of my favorite films, and although Moore’s role was less attention-getting than that or Swayze or of Whoopi – she was basically the grieving woman who lost her man and was being stalked by a killer – Moore did a remarkable job. Dewy-eyed and vulnerable, she was impressive in scenes like this one. If you haven’t seen the movie, it may look over-the-top, but in context it’s extremely moving, and a goodly part of that emotional wallop is due to Demi: