Joe Kent Reveals All in First Interview Since Resigning as Trump’s Counterterrorism Director | Tucker Carlson Transcript

Joe Kent speaks publicly for the first time since resigning as Trump's Director of the National Counterterrorism Center

Tucker Carlson interviews Joe Kent, who resigned the previous day as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in his first public appearance since leaving the administration.

Summary

Tucker Carlson opens with an extended monologue contextualizing Joe Kent's resignation, replaying a January 2024 clip in which Kent predicted the consequences of war with Iran with striking accuracy. Carlson argues that Kent's prescience is precisely why he is being attacked — a pattern he traces through American foreign policy from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Kent then speaks at length about why he resigned, arguing that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, that Israeli officials and a pro-Israel media ecosystem systematically deceived the president into war, and that a robust intelligence debate never took place before the second round of strikes. Kent also reveals that his office was blocked by the FBI and DOJ from investigating potential foreign ties to the murder of Charlie Kirk, and raises a series of unresolved questions about the assassination attempts on President Trump. He closes by outlining what he believes is a still-viable path to ending the conflict, centered on restraining Israel and opening direct negotiations with Iran.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Tucker Carlson's opening monologue: Joe Kent was right, and that is why he is being attacked

Tucker Carlson: We want to start tonight with a clip from January of 2024. This is from this show, and this is Joe Kent, who later went on to become, until yesterday, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Here it is.

Joe Kent: What do you think the immediate and then longer-term effects of a war with Iran would be on the United States? Immediately it would be very bloody. I have no doubt that we could probably defeat some of their air defenses and go in there and have another shock and awe campaign. But again, like we saw how the shock and awe campaign in Iraq really didn't actually work in the long run. So I have no doubt that we'd have some immediate results that people would cheer about here in the United States. But Iran — Persia — has always been an empire. It's been around longer than any of the other players in the modern Middle East right now, and they are not going anywhere. If we get deeply involved and deeply entangled with Iran, we are playing right into China's hands, because China would like nothing more than for us to be committing our military industrial base to a war in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, and then to be committing our conventional military power, our blood and our treasure back in the Middle East. That will make the Pacific — our actual border — extremely vulnerable to Chinese aggression. Or China will simply just watch us bleed out economically as we bleed out on the battlefield in these couple of different theaters. It's absolute insanity. It's opening up Pandora's box. And again, for what gain to the American people?

Tucker Carlson: So the very first thing you notice about that clip, which was shot almost exactly a year before the current president was inaugurated, is that it was right. It was prescient. He called it, he called the general outline. Not that it was hard to call, but Joe Kent knows what he's talking about. He spent a lot of his life in that region. And he said, a year before this current presidency began, this is a big, serious country. It's the oldest civilization in the region. And if we went to war with Iran, there would be a momentary sugar high — Americans would support it because they support their own country and they certainly support their military — and people would approve of it. But very quickly, you could see a process by which we got caught there, trapped there, bear trap. Hard to extricate yourself from that. And sitting on the sidelines would be our chief global competitor, China, who would be silently nodding along with a slowly spreading grin, knowing that they were the main beneficiary of what they were seeing — our waste of American lives and treasure, as Joe Kent said.

So we haven't reached that stage, thankfully. We're moving toward it, and everyone who's watching carefully knows that. And if you're honest, you know that. So this is a very serious moment we're in, and we're watching not just a war in Iran, but potentially a total realignment of the world and the loss, in some sense, of what the United States has globally. This could be the beginning of the end of our influence in a lot of the world, and that's just the beginning. So again, that's a big deal. It's starting to dawn on people, and that leaves Joe Kent as one of the relatively few people connected to this administration who said it in public.

Is that good or bad? Well, it may seem good. Of course, you want to be around people who have clarity about what's going to happen next. But in practical terms, it's bad. In fact, it's always bad. Whenever you have somebody who stands up and says, don't do this, here's what could happen, and then you do it anyway, and it turns out that person was right, your first instinct is not to apologize and correct your behavior. Your first instinct is to crush the person who called it correctly. And that's your instinct because — and it's the lowest of all instincts, but it's a human instinct — his correct prediction is an indictment of you, of course, and it's a way to deflect attacks on you and your own culpability by blaming the guy who told you it was going to happen before you did it.

This is a longstanding fact of human life, and in the last 60 years in this country, it has been the iron law of foreign policy, which is to say: when things go wrong, the only people who get punished are the people who criticized the adventure in the first place. You can imagine General Westmoreland attacking Walter Cronkite of CBS News — whatever you think of Walter Cronkite, in my case, not much. But fundamentally, it was Walter Cronkite sitting very much on the sidelines saying, hey, this war's not going well, and there was General Westmoreland prosecuting the war. But General Westmoreland argued till the end of his life, in some ways successfully, that he lost the war because Walter Cronkite criticized it. How many troops did Walter Cronkite command? Was he in charge of strategy? Don't think so. He was a newsreader in New York. But you can see why Westmoreland did that, and why a lot of people believed it.

You saw the same thing happen in the days after the tragic and incredibly stupid Afghan withdrawal under Joe Biden. That didn't help the United States. Of course, we had to get out of Afghanistan. But the way we did it — who would argue that was a good thing? It was a terrible thing and resulted in the deaths of a lot of Americans. So who was punished for that? As far as we can tell, and we've checked, only one person. And that would be Colonel Stu Scheller of the United States Marine Corps. What was his crime? Planning the withdrawal from Afghanistan? Oh, no. Stu Scheller's crime was saying out loud, boy, that didn't work very well. Why did we do this? And for that, he went to jail. The people who actually did it, who gave the orders, or who carried them out without asking questions about them — they're fine. You don't even know their names, and they certainly haven't been penalized.

So there is a long history, because this is a standing feature of how people are, that you criticize those who told the truth and who were right, who called it ahead of time. Now, in a functioning society, you get a hold of yourself, and you understand that people are like this, but if you want to be successful as a society, you have to restrain that impulse because it's low and it's counterproductive. And if you silence people who tell the truth, you end up making the same mistakes again and again and again. And maybe that's why we're here at this pivotal point in our war with Iran.

So that's the first thing you notice. Joe Kent was right, therefore Joe Kent must be destroyed. And there is, of course, this ongoing effort to do that — to dismiss Joe Kent as a tool of the Islamists or a leaker, or say he's married to someone who works for Hezbollah — lie after lie after lie, but they're all aimed at Joe Kent the man, at his motives, at his character, at his personality, at his wife. And that's by design, because none of them touch on his reason for resigning as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Because if you focused on that, you would have to answer his questions. You'd have to answer: is this true? Is what Joe Kent — who possessed the highest level intelligence clearances, who was barred from knowing no secret in the U.S. government, since he was one of our top intelligence officials until yesterday — is what he's saying true? That's the last conversation anyone in Washington wants to have, so just attack him. And you're going to see a lot more of that. The people who said this war was a bad idea will be punished. And the more it turns out they were right — which is to say, the worse this project goes, the more it becomes obviously counterproductive to American interests — the more vigorously they will be punished, unto and including jail. Stu Scheller went to jail. Probably not the only one who will going forward. So you should just know that and understand what you're seeing in those terms.

The second thing that comes immediately to mind when you watch Joe Kent from January of 2024 talk about what would happen if we went to war with Iran is that what he said that day, a year before Donald Trump's inauguration, could have been said by Donald Trump, maybe with a different style. He was making Donald Trump's case — the case that Donald Trump has made for a very long time. Donald Trump, as everybody knows, became the Republican nominee in 2016 in part because he was the only Republican running for president that year out of a field of nearly 20 people who was willing to say what everyone else knew but was afraid to say, which is the Iraq War didn't help us. It hurt us. It was a dumb idea. And it went on way too long. And it became the quagmire that people like Donald Trump predicted it would be. And the American public, so relieved to hear the truth about something they already knew, made him the Republican nominee.

And Donald Trump made varieties of that case for the next 10 years, and in many cases specifically about Iran. Because Trump has seen, long before most people in Washington, the big picture: this is a contest between the United States in the West and China in the East, a rising power that matches or maybe exceeds our economic power globally, and we have to figure out how to apportion power. And we don't want to get sidetracked with engagements like another endless Middle Eastern war, because in the end, the only winner of that conflict is China.

Whoever, in the end, settles this conflict — whether it's the United States or some other power, whoever comes in at whatever the end of it is and says, enough, this is hurting the world, each side has made its point, but the global economy has a critical interest in the Persian Gulf, that's energy, and we're going to stop this now — whoever that person is will become more powerful than ever and everyone else will become less powerful. The person who settles disputes is in charge. Not the person who starts them, not the person who wins them, the person who stops them. When dad comes home and stops the fighting between brother and sister, who's in charge? Dad. Because he stopped the conflict.

All of which is to say, if at the end of this conflict it's China that comes in — China which has a vested interest in what happens in the region since they're a major consumer of Gulf energy — if it's China that comes in and restores the energy flows out of the Persian Gulf and restores some version of peace, gets the fighting to stop, then China is in charge of the Persian Gulf. That's just a fact of nature.

So the question is: how did Donald Trump, after 10 years of saying one thing, do in the pivotal act of his presidency exactly the opposite? That's not just an academic question. It's not the beginning of a conspiracy theory about some shadowy lobby. It's the most important question we face, because this is not the first time the United States has entered into this kind of war against the wishes of its own population and in clear contravention of its own interests. This isn't good for us. No one has made the case that it's good for us. And increasingly as the days pass, it becomes obvious to everyone why it's not good for us. And if you don't believe that, check the prices of food and fuel and everything you buy, because everything you buy is dependent on the price of energy and the production of fertilizer, both of which are affected almost immediately by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz.

So we did this again. It's not exactly how or why we did this, but we need to find out. And there is great resistance to finding out. You've noticed that in the last 36 hours since Joe Kent resigned as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, one of our top intel officials, because the attacks on him have prevented an honest conversation about what he's actually saying. And what he's saying is — and he says it clearly, and we're going to ask him about it directly in just a moment — Israel got us into this war. Its lobby in the United States pressured the president, and its prime minister in Israel told the president: we're going without you. Join us because if you don't, your troops in the region, your interests in the region, your citizens in the region will all be at risk. You have no choice. They led the way. That's Joe Kent's position. And rather than push back against that and say, no, actually he's wrong, they're telling you to shut up. And why are they doing that? Well, there's only one reason people ever become hysterical and slanderous, start screaming at you rather than answering you — it's because they're lying.

The truth is this has been going on a long time, and lies give way to a whole bunch of bad things. More lies — once you tell one, you bolster it with further lying. Hysteria — the fear of being caught lying, the rage and slander. You go on the attack to cover your lies and bad judgment. You can't make wise decisions on the basis of lies, because they're not true. They're not based in reality. So a country based on lies, like a family based on lies, like an individual life based on lies, cannot succeed. In fact, it's hellish, as all of us have experienced. And so the only way out of this is to tell the truth — probably 63 years after we should have started telling the truth, but it's never too late. Telling the truth sets you free because the truth itself sets you free. That is always and everywhere a fact. And the longer you delay doing that, the more horrible the consequences of your lies.

So let's hope that tonight, with this conversation with Joe Kent, is the beginning of the long-overdue truth-telling, which is the only thing that will save this country.

One final note about Joe Kent, whom I spent the last 24 hours with. Joe Kent's résumé hardly needs explanation because everyone is aware this is a man who deployed on 11 combat missions in the global war on terror. This is sort of the perfect representation of the GWOT generation. This is one of those guys we often celebrate but too rarely hear from, who we sent out to fight the so-called war on terror that began on 9/11. And it's an entire generation of men who look and sound, for the most part, very much like Joe Kent. So the implication — of course he doesn't care about security, or he's soft on Iran — Joe Kent spent the majority of his 20s and 30s fighting Iranian proxies and watching his friends get killed by them. So this is someone who has actually earned the right to speak about Iran and the war on terror. And of course, he was the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. So he's thought a lot about terrorism in this country and the blowback from events like this.

But the other thing to notice about Joe Kent, and it may be his defining factor, is that he doesn't slander anyone. His resignation letter was not an attack on Donald Trump. It wasn't a promised tell-all memoir about what he saw on the inside, or an attempt to aggrandize himself or get a job on a TV show or sell something. I asked him at dinner last night, what are your plans? None. He did this purely because he believes, as he'll explain in a second, this is the only way to save the United States from certain disaster: tell the truth, air the secrets, be honest for once in decades about what is actually happening — things that everybody who lives here suspects are happening.

And as you listen to him speak, ask yourself: is this a man who's working for Hezbollah, or is an egomaniac, or a leaker? Or is this a man who says very little when he has nothing to say, who speaks straightforwardly and with self-evident honesty? Is this a man of dignity and decency? Is this a man that America once had a lot of? Whether you agree with him or not, as you listen to him speak, ask yourself: is this the kind of person who makes me proud to be a fellow American? Because it's really a referendum on us. Here's Joe Kent.

Why Kent resigned: no imminent threat and the question of who drives U.S. policy

Tucker Carlson: Joe, thanks a lot for joining us. I want to go through the letter that you sent yesterday as you resigned as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center and through the big points, and give you a chance to explain them. You've been spoken for quite a bit over the last 24 hours, so I think it'd be really helpful if you would speak for yourself and flesh out some of these points. I'm just going to read the first one: "I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation." How did you reach that conclusion?

Joe Kent: I think this is key. This would be more challenging to explain had the Secretary of State, the President, and the Speaker of the House not come out and said that we conducted this attack at this time because the Israelis were about to do so. So that takes away the argument that there was an imminent threat — as in Iran was planning to attack us immediately. That just simply did not exist.

Tucker Carlson: May I ask you to pause? History has a way of getting rewritten in real time, and then you look back 10, 15, 20 years later and no one seems to understand the things that you saw because they've been eliminated. So I think it's important to stop and say, here's what we actually know. I'd like now to play one of the statements that you alluded to — that's from Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State. This was shortly after this war commenced, and he was explaining, in a thoughtful and precise way, why. Here's what Secretary of State Marco Rubio said:

Marco Rubio: "The president made the very wise decision — we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed, and then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and did nothing."

Tucker Carlson: That is his almost contemporaneous explanation, and it's not offhand — he reasons it out, he explains there's a logic chain there. And he says: we knew not that Iran was going to attack. He did not say that. He said, we knew that Israel was going to attack Iran. And in retaliation for those attacks by Israel against Iran, Iran might attack American forces. So the imminent threat that the Secretary of State is describing is not from Iran — it's from Israel.

Joe Kent: Exactly. And I think this speaks to the broader issue: who is in charge of our policy in the Middle East, who's in charge of when we decide to go to war or not. In this case, with what the Secretary described — and later the President, later the Speaker of the House — and the way the events played out, the Israelis drove the decision to take this action, which we knew would set off a series of events, meaning the Iranians would retaliate.

Now, I think there was a potential where we could have done several different things. We could have simply said to the Israelis, no, you will not. And if you do, then we will take something away from you. I think it's fine that we offer defense to Israel, but when we're providing the means for their defense, we get to dictate the terms of when they go on the offensive — otherwise they stand to lose that relationship. And the Israelis felt emboldened that no matter what they did, no matter what situation they put us in, they could go ahead and take this action and we would just have to react.

And so that speaks to that relationship. But also it just shows that there was a lobby pushing for us to go to war. I know we'll get into that later in the statement. But we had a real potential, knowing what we know of the Iranians and how they react — and in particular how they react to President Trump's leadership. The Iranians under President Trump's leadership, especially in his second term, have shown that they take a very calculated approach to the escalation ladder. In the lead up to the 12-day war, before Midnight Hammer, the Iranians didn't attack us. They were engaged in negotiations with us. When President Trump came back into office, they stopped their proxies who were attacking us under the Biden administration, because they knew Biden was weak. They stopped their proxies from attacking us as well. So they knew President Trump was someone who wanted to negotiate. But more importantly, they knew that President Trump was not someone to mess with, because he killed Qasem Soleimani. He killed Abu Mahdi Mohandas. He had defeated ISIS. They knew that President Trump was a man of action and militarily strong. So they said, before we take an action, we need to make sure that it's calculated.

So I think in this scenario, even if the Israelis told us we're going to strike on this date at this time, and we didn't try to negotiate with the Israelis and say, hey, we'll take something away from them — I think we still could have back-channeled to the Iranians and said, hey, if something happens here in the next couple of days, it's not us. We're still serious about negotiations and we don't want to escalate. Because it was well known what the Iranian plans were. We knew that they were going to potentially hit our bases in the region, potentially our allies. We knew about the Straits of Hormuz. All of these things were fairly well known. And the Houthis' ability to close the Red Sea — which is not yet done, but which would be catastrophic to the world.

No intelligence showed an imminent nuclear threat

Tucker Carlson: For the purpose of explaining your position more fully — because this is your most high-profile resignation in a long time, and there's a lot of commentary on it — one of the consistent themes of the substantive attack on you is: Joe Kent was totally for using military action. He supported the Soleimani killing, for example. He seemed fine with the 12-day war. So he doesn't have a problem on principle with an engagement with Iran. What's your response to that?

Joe Kent: I have no compunction about really fighting anybody who threatens our country, and the Iranians have posed a threat in the past. They have the capability. And we always talk in intelligence circles about capability and intent — what your enemy is capable of doing and what they actually want to do. And again, back to the data we have on the Iranians, they use the escalation ladder. We saw that deliberately during the 12-day war. When they struck back after Midnight Hammer, it was very deliberate. They fired an equal amount of missiles as we dropped bombs on the nuclear facilities, and they basically hit a part of a base in Qatar that they knew we didn't have any troops on. They didn't want to escalate any further than we were willing to go.

But also, the Iranians, when they pose a threat to us, they usually do it with their proxies. And if their proxies stick their heads up and come after us — this is basically the Trump doctrine — we hammer them and we hammer their high-profile leaders. Qasem Soleimani was highly effective and highly revered in Iran because the previous presidents, Obama and Bush, let Qasem Soleimani run around, raise proxy armies, kill Americans, and no one ever did anything to him. President Trump rightfully killed Qasem Soleimani. We got his deputy, Abu Mahdi Mohandas, who had American blood on his hands. But then President Trump stopped. He took those two key players off the battlefield and said, I'm not going to further escalate with Iran unless you escalate with us — knowing that if we struck Iran and truly struck the regime, that would only strengthen the regime.

So President Trump did something incredibly smart — he used that decisive military action, but then coupled it with maximum pressure sanctions. He pressured the Iranians economically after punching them in the mouth and showing: I'm not Obama. If you cross a line, I will come after you. And if you look at the effect of those economic sanctions, that's what got the Iranian people on the streets actually protesting against the Ayatollahs' government — which is ostensibly what we would like. We would like to see a bottom-up regime change where we get rid of the Ayatollah, but it's the will of the people.

The one way to throw that all out the window — and this isn't just my opinion, many many scholars and I think a lot of intelligence assessments have been written about this — is that if we struck the regime, it would only strengthen it. I think of myself, and probably you're in this camp as well: we didn't like Joe Biden. We didn't like Barack Obama. But if an outside force were to come in and try and topple them while they were president, I would 100 percent rally around the flag. That's just common sense.

Tucker Carlson: You joined the military under Bill Clinton, whom I assume you didn't vote for. You joined in 1998. You've gone the whole cycle of the war on terror. And served out as an NCO —

Joe Kent: NCO and warrant officer.

Tucker Carlson: Twenty years. And I should say, I hate ever to refer to a man's résumé as a data point because your ideas exist separately. But in this specific case — you spent most of your time fighting Iranian proxies.

Joe Kent: A good deal of it, yeah.

Tucker Carlson: So you're aware of the threat from Iran. You have personally used violence against that threat. And you supported the president's policy up until fairly recently, and went to work for him. But here's what I can tell is the central question: imminent threat. The president has said many times to many people, including the public, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. Is that fair?

Joe Kent: That's fair, yeah. They can't have a nuke.

Tucker Carlson: Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon?

Joe Kent: No, they weren't — three weeks ago when this started, and they weren't in June either. The Iranians have had a religious ruling, a fatwa, against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That's been in place since 2004, and that's available in the public sphere. But we also had no intelligence to indicate that that fatwa was being disobeyed or was on the cusp of being lifted.

The Iranian strategy is actually pretty pragmatic. The Iranians were obviously aware of what's taking place in their region. Their strategy was to not completely abandon their nuclear program because they saw what happened to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya — when he said, hey, I've got no more nukes, I'll give them up, we gave him the Nobel Peace Prize, then regime-changed him and he was executed by his own people in the most horrific way.

Tucker Carlson: Sodomized by a bayonet.

Joe Kent: Right. So that's the lesson the entire region took from that. And then conversely, the Iranians also knew that if they came out and said, okay, we've got a nuke — Saddam Hussein, right next door —

Tucker Carlson: He was hung.

Joe Kent: He was hung after a bloody war that's still essentially going on inside of Iraq. So the Iranians' position, when viewed from the lens of the region, was actually fairly pragmatic. They were preventing themselves from developing a bomb, but they still wanted the ability — the ability to enrich, the ability to have some components. And we always assessed that they were either several months or a year or two away from actually being able to develop a nuclear weapon. Not because the Iranians are stupid people — they clearly aren't — but they had the brainpower to develop one, or they could have simply traded a ton of oil with Pakistan or someone else to get a nuclear weapon. They were not doing that. We had no intelligence to indicate that they were.

Tucker Carlson: Why was the president saying, at the beginning of every conversation about Iran, I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon? Why was that the central question when you would know, since you were Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, that there was no intelligence or evidence they were actually developing a nuke?

Joe Kent: A couple of things. This is what I talk about in the letter — this ecosystem of information that's laundered through a lot of prominent neoconservative types who are very sympathetic to the Israeli cause, and then also Israeli government officials who give us things in semi-official channels. What they did was they created basically a shifting red line — a new red line. So if the president's red line was Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, we actually had a lot of trade space in there for a deal to be made, because of what I just described with the Iranian policy — the Iranians essentially saying, okay, we don't want a nuclear weapon. That means we're basically at a point where we can start negotiating and we can come up with a deal. And the president is a fantastic dealmaker.

So if your goal is to move us away from any kind of deal and to move us into a conflict, you have to shift that red line. And that's where a lot of this — what became de facto U.S. policy of Iran can have no nuclear enrichment — was laundered through a lot of different talking heads: Mark Levin, Mark Dubowitz, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, you name it. Washington DC has plenty of pro-Israeli lobbyists who will come and say those things, publish think pieces on it, go on the media, run op-eds in the Wall Street Journal. And then we have a high degree of engagement with Israeli government officials who will come in and say, well, they're enriching, and they could enrich more, and that will get them closer to a nuclear weapon. So enrichment basically became the new U.S. policy.

The only official I've heard — and folks are welcome to look for this — that actually said this explicitly in the first Trump administration was Mike Pompeo. He said it. The president didn't say it. The president has been very consistent: he said they can't have a nuclear weapon. But again, that puts us in a place where we actually could have negotiations. And only President Trump, I think, could successfully negotiate with Iran because he actually punched them in the face. The folks who wanted to push an actual regime change war in Iran knew there was potential for a deal or for President Trump to continue the policy of maximum pressure sanctions — and that's what the regime feared the most. I don't think the Ayatollah feared dying. Somewhere in his assessment, if he was killed, the regime would survive because the people would rally around it.

How the Israeli intelligence pipeline bypassed U.S. agencies

Tucker Carlson: Can you say just clearly: you're a senior U.S. intelligence official, not hostile to President Trump, not going to write a tell-all book. There was no intelligence showing an imminent threat. There was no intelligence showing they were on the cusp of building a nuclear weapon — indeed, no intelligence showing they were trying to build one. And nobody told you there was intelligence you just hadn't seen?

Joe Kent: I did not hear that, no. But I know how this works. I know that Israeli officials — some in intelligence, some in government — will come to U.S. government officials and say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence simply isn't true. And they'll say, hey, I'm giving you a preview — it's not in an intelligence channel yet, but here's what's going to happen.

Tucker Carlson: Wait. I thought that U.S. policymakers made their decisions on the basis of intelligence collected and vetted by our own intelligence agencies — that's why we have intelligence agencies that soak up hundreds of billions a year. But you're saying that Israeli officials short-circuited the entire U.S. government and went right to American policymakers?

Joe Kent: Usually they're pretty slick about it. They'll say, hey, this isn't in intelligence channels yet because it's going to take some time to get there. And here — they're on the cusp of building a bomb. They'll sample different things until they find what sticks. But in general, the narrative about they're going to do a preemptive attack, or really just they're going to build a nuclear weapon and if we don't stop them now they will — enrichment became the narrative. And so that hung up and that short-circuited and really sabotaged the entire negotiations, because the Iranians basically said we're not going to negotiate if the whole starting point is no enrichment. And again, that had nothing to do with a nuclear weapon, and the Iranians essentially agreed to that.

So the Israelis came in, they moved that red line. And the way the ecosystem would work is that the talking heads on TV — your Mark Levins, Sean Hannitys, et cetera — they would say basically the exact same thing that night on TV, or there would be a piece written in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times that would say something very, very similar. Yet, if you looked at classified intelligence, we didn't see any of that.

Tucker Carlson: I mean, that must have been such a weird experience for you.

Joe Kent: Bizarre.

Tucker Carlson: Since you have access to the biggest and most powerful and presumably the best intel agencies in the world, and you're seeing people say things as fact when you know they're not facts. What was that like?

Joe Kent: Infuriating. And I think that's why, in the lead-up to this last iteration, a good deal of key decision-makers were not allowed to come express their opinion to the president.

Tucker Carlson: Not allowed by whom?

Joe Kent: I think it's important for me right now to just stay on the facts. I don't want to point names. I don't want this to become a name-calling exercise. But any leader has gatekeepers. And so you're saying that you were prevented from bringing this information directly to the president by gatekeepers.

Well, there wasn't a robust debate. Because our assessment really hadn't changed, we would send those up through intelligence channels. Everybody's kind of reading the same intelligence. But then what actually gets briefed to the president can be very, very different, depending on who and how it's delivered. And without a level set from the intelligence community — someone like DNI Gabbard coming in and saying, Mr. President, here's the full scope of the intelligence and what it means — you're kind of lacking that sanity check. Or at least a good sampling to gauge how accurate what the Israelis are saying is. And that process, in my view, was largely stifled.

In the second iteration — the first round, there was robust debate and discussion leading up to the 12-day war and into Midnight Hammer. But this second round, to me — and I'm sure others will refute this and disagree with me — was conducted by just a handful of small advisors around the president.

Tucker Carlson: My sense, and you would know more than I, is there weren't a lot of people directly around the president who were making an aggressive case for this war. Was there a majority of his top advisors saying, we must do this now?

Joe Kent: I think the circle around him was very, very tight and very small. And I think they were all on the same sheet of music. And I think a lot of them were getting their information from the ecosystem that I described. And I think we'd be in a different place if we would have talked about the actual intelligence picture and what our interests are.

Tucker Carlson: So Israeli government talking points laundered through Fox News and the Wall Street Journal — is that the ecosystem you're talking about?

Joe Kent: Yeah, and then the Israeli officials coming in and basically saying the same thing — either ahead of time or after the fact — like, the enrichment is going to get them a nuclear bomb in a set amount of time. Do you believe that you and the DNI, for whom you worked until yesterday, had as much face time with the president as Israeli officials did?

I don't know that for sure, because I don't know exactly how frequently the Israelis were engaging directly with the president. It did seem like Benjamin Netanyahu was obviously in the White House quite a bit — all public.

Tucker Carlson: Seven times.

Joe Kent: Quite a bit. And then his other officials as well — Dermer, et cetera — those guys were in. They were making phone calls. Just a lot of engagement from them. And again, when we would hear what they were saying — it didn't reflect what was in intelligence channels. Even intelligence that we shared with the Israelis, that the Israelis were giving us back, in many cases didn't match. So there was a clear gap between the intelligence and the information the president was given and the decisions he was making.

Tucker Carlson: I don't want to put you in an uncomfortable position. Obviously you're not going to divulge anything classified, and you shouldn't. Without encouraging you to do that — it's understood in Washington, I've heard from many people who work in your business — that a substantial portion of our information touches Israel at some point. Either it's collected by them, it's shaped by them, it's not purely American. Is that fair, especially in the Middle East?

Joe Kent: I would say — look, the Israelis are tactically very proficient. They have a very competent intelligence service, and there's a lot we can learn from them in the craft of intelligence. However, whenever we get information from a liaison service, it's incredibly important to realize that it could be given to us to influence us as well as to inform us. And the way that I would see Israeli information, in particular coming from senior officials directly to our senior officials — that caveat just wasn't given frequently enough.

A lot of it is just bureaucratic practice, but a lot of it is also that we feel very comfortable with the Israelis. A lot of them are dual citizens. They sound like us, they don't feel foreign. We kind of go into a more complacent mode where we trust a lot of what they have to say, not keeping in the back of our mind that they have their own agenda and we have our own agenda at the end of the day. A lot of times our agendas are the same tactically — when it comes to fighting Hezbollah, when it comes to fighting terrorism. But when it comes to our strategic goal in a war that's going to have ramifications for our nation, for the region, for global energy supplies — most folks right now at the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies would say us and the Israelis actually have a different objective here.

I don't believe that our objective has been clearly defined because we're shying away from regime change. The Israelis are not shying away from regime change. They want to knock out, lock, stock, and barrel, the current government. They don't seem to have a plan for what comes next.

Tucker Carlson: I think you would have heard tell of such a plan. So if you're going to take out a government, it's fair to ask what replaces it. I have asked a bunch of people this question, and never gotten any answer other than there's no plan — the Israelis don't have a plan because they don't care. Do you think that's fair?

Joe Kent: I think that's completely fair. As Americans, rightfully, we want a clear stated objective and end state for war. That's something that was born out of the GWOT, born out of the Vietnam era. Americans want to know why we're going to war, what the end state is. That's not the case with Iran. The Israelis are different. A lot of times, again, because a lot of them speak English and culturally feel the same, we forget that. But the Israelis have a much different tolerance for how and why they're going to war and for their endurance for war. The Israelis are completely fine with Iran slipping into chaos. That means the Ayatollah and the IRGC can't really threaten them anymore. Hezbollah's money might be cut off. Complete chaos in Iran — it's not necessarily a bad thing for the Israelis. For us, for global energy, Straits of Hormuz, our partners in the GCC, mass migration problems in Europe — this is a major problem. It's a catastrophe for the world.

Tucker Carlson: And it's a little galling that I was treated to lectures for a couple of weeks about the valiant people of Iran and how we needed to save them. And then a lot of the exile communities here in the United States, a lot of them really nice people, jumped on board: we've got to save our people. But by your telling, and by the facts — this is not really an opinion — there's no plan for what happens after regime change. The people pushing that line would just be happy to see a permanent civil war there, which is insanity. So if you do want real regime change and you want the people to rise up and want it to happen fairly organically, going aggressively after the Ayatollah was the last thing we ever should have done.

Joe Kent: I'm no fan of the former Supreme Leader, Khamenei. However, he was moderating their nuclear program. He was preventing them from getting a nuclear weapon. If you take him out, if you kill him aggressively, people are going to rally around that regime. And the next Ayatollah that you get — and I think this is supported by all data we have, as concerns his son — the next Ayatollah will be more radical because he has to show the people that he's going to push back.

And there's always a tension inside of Iran between the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the clerics who run the country — a healthy rivalry. The IRGC's leadership — these are Qasem Soleimani's troops. These are the guys that Soleimani trained. Most of them cut their teeth in the Iran-Iraq War. A lot of them cut their teeth fighting us in Iraq. They cut their teeth fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. They created Hezbollah, they trained and armed Hezbollah. So these guys are serious and hard-line, and they're willing to fight and they want to fight. By killing the Ayatollah, we've given them more power, because internally they can now say: hey, all you guys who thought we could negotiate with the Americans — you're chumps. We have to fight them.

So the longer this goes on, the more moderates and negotiators get killed off. We just killed Ali Larijani, who was a negotiator, who was eager to get us a deal. I've got no love for the IRGC. But you've got to realize —

Tucker Carlson: Just to be clear, in case anyone's wondering — you fought their proxies.

Joe Kent: I fought their proxies. I put countless of them in flex cuffs or much worse. I've gone after the Iranians and their proxies. These are very serious people. And if you give the IRGC a reason to take more control, and they get support from the people — because you kill off the Ayatollah, they can say, hey, the last guy was too moderate, look what it got us, give us more control — the Iranian people are going to say, well, actually, I don't like getting bombed by the Americans and the Israelis. Maybe we do need to listen to the IRGC.

Israel's goals diverge from America's — and Israel is acting on it

Tucker Carlson: A lot of these points you're making are insightful, but they're also pretty obvious if you kind of game it out for 10 seconds. So it seems like you've got two different goals. You've described Israel's goal as just regime change — permanent chaos, take Iran off the map as a coherent nation state, just tie them up with internal chaos, whatever the effects on the rest of the world, all of them disastrous. Then on the American side, you have the president's stated goal, which is we can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon, which they didn't have and weren't trying to build in any imminent way. If you join those two together in a common mission in a war, you create all kinds of very bad incentives. And now Larijani was killed by the Israelis. You saw the Israelis blow up Qatar's natural gas facilities today in the Qatari natural gas field, which feeds the rest of the world LNG. Those seem like very obvious steps not to minimize the threat from Iran, but to lock down the United States in permawar. We can't get out after we do that. You kill the negotiator, you attack our closest ally in the region.

Joe Kent: And there are no reins on the Israelis, unfortunately. We continue to refer to them as our partners, our equals, our best partners we've ever had. But at the end of the day, the Israelis couldn't do any of this without us. And so we have to be —

Tucker Carlson: But they're acting against our interests in a very obvious and very serious way.

Joe Kent: And again, it's obvious. If we've stated that our goal is just to take away their ability to ever enrich, to take away their ballistics, to take away their Navy — all these tactical objectives — and that's when we can exit, then it's in the Israelis' interest to get us more and more entrenched. And that's exactly what they're doing right now. When the Israelis killed Larijani — I should clarify, the Israelis struck him, not us — but I do believe Iran at this point views it as, whether we like it or not, us and the Israelis kind of as the same thing. Because the Israelis couldn't do any of this without us. And that's where the relationship is just way off kilter. If they have different objectives than us, then what are we doing letting them drive the war?

Tucker Carlson: You just said something that's been disputed by advocates for Israel. You said they couldn't do any of this without us. You often hear from its promoters that Israel just wants to fight its own wars — back off and let us do it. What would happen if we tried that?

Joe Kent: I'd love just to run the experiment. The Israelis have the ability to collect great intelligence. They have a very capable military, but they're a very small country. I think Israel would be able to defend itself. I think it could conduct limited strikes on its borders. I think it could continue carrying out pretty impressive targeted assassinations against its adversaries. So you would see it relatively contained. What it couldn't do is go topple entire governments. It couldn't do something like the Iran war, the Iraq war. It couldn't aggressively destabilize Syria — these big heavy lifts of regime change. Israel could not do on their own. Which is where you get back to the Israeli lobby being so potent and so powerful and so aggressive.

Tucker Carlson: I want to ask you about that because that's the line you're being attacked for. But before I do, one last question. Was any of this debated, that you know of, before this war commenced three weeks ago? Did anyone say, well, wait a second — if we do this and kill the Ayatollah, what are the effects after? Did these debates ever emerge?

Joe Kent: I know they happened heavily before the 12-day war. I think when the Israelis came back around and said they wanted to do this, I just don't think there was any debate. Just based on the ecosystem and the amount of influence that was exerted. Because in some ways this is a little humiliating — we were told, I was told, the whole country was told, that after the 12-day war there was no Iranian nuclear threat. We got rid of it. Operation Midnight Hammer destroyed their nuclear capability. So how was it that six months later, we wound up getting another lecture about their nuclear capability and imminent threat to the United States and nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles aimed at Miami — and nobody organized any pushback? Like in a normal country, you'd think people would rise up and say, whoa, whoa, whoa — you just told us six months ago the exact opposite. Did internally in the intel world people say, what the hell is going on?

I just think the planning for this was so compartmentalized that there was no debate — it was a foregone conclusion. Maybe the exact timing had to be debated. But it seemed to be a foregone conclusion. And I'm sure others will say, no, that's not the case at all. But there was no robust debate like there was going into the 12-day war.

Because a big question that a lot of us had who were skeptical of Operation Midnight Hammer was: okay, so we do this — we know the Israelis' whole goal is regime change. What makes us think they'll stop? And if they do stop for a period of time, why won't we just be back in the same place in six months where they're saying we have to go back in? And that's essentially exactly what happened.

So this was raised in June — hey, what happens next? So you take out the ability for them to enrich and to potentially develop a nuclear weapon. That's done. But we knew the Israelis had a completely different goal. Part of the Midnight Hammer strike was also to get the Israelis to wrap up the 12-day war. But we knew because of what the Israelis told us that they wanted this to be the time to take down the regime. They want regime change. They want a new government there. So we said, okay — knowing that this limited strike isn't going to be enough, and knowing that the Israelis had said it — at some point they're going to come back to us and say, hey, we have to go again. And with that knowledge, and because so many of us had pointed that out, there wasn't a big debate this last time. I think they had that discussion behind closed doors and there wasn't a chance for any dissenting voices.

But you would think — when a question like this arises, the people making the decision go immediately to their own intel agencies and say: all available intel on the question of the Iranian nuclear program, on the ballistic missile program, on what might happen if we topple the regime. This has all been gamed out for a long time. This time, no.

Tucker Carlson: But this time, no.

Joe Kent: Not to my knowledge. And I'm sure the administration will come out and say, no, you just weren't invited. But I've got a pretty good idea of how those meetings look. And even if I wasn't invited, I at least would have known that they took place. It just seemed to be a foregone conclusion that this was happening.

The blowback risk: terrorism in the homeland

Tucker Carlson: I almost don't want to bring this up because it's so distressing, but I have to ask about blowback — the downstream effects of military action — because I have the feeling we're going to see some of it. Since you are an acknowledged expert on that question, and since you spent your adult life fighting Iranian proxies, and because we're always hearing some of them are in the United States — did anyone come to you and say, if we do this, what are the odds that we will have terror attacks in the homeland?

Joe Kent: That was an intelligence product that we worked up on our own — and coordinated throughout the intelligence community. We talked about the Iranians' ability to conduct sleeper cell-like attacks, which is actually pretty limited. The whole idea of sleeper cells operating is challenging in today's environment because cells have to communicate with each other, and we're pretty good at picking up on that.

The real threat — and most major terrorist organizations have kind of moved to this model — is lone actors. It's inspiring people that are already in place by using the media. There was already a ton of blowback because of the Gaza war. Hamas used propaganda very, very effectively to curry a lot of favor with younger people here in the United States and abroad. There were multiple terrorist attacks in America in the last year where Gaza was cited as the motivation, and these people weren't infiltrated Iranian agents — they were homegrown folks who consumed propaganda coming out of Gaza.

So we said: the biggest threat right now isn't that the Iranians are going to sneak some Quds Force operatives over who've been waiting here for years. That's always possible — the Iranians are very competent, and they have tried something like that before, back under the Obama administration when they tried to kill the Saudi ambassador in Georgetown. So we were worried about that. But what we were more worried about was the fact that Biden had the border open for four-plus years. I testified publicly in Congress laying out the 18,000 known suspected terrorists that potentially could be in the country. Since then, we've discovered potentially more. The bookkeeping under the Biden administration was kind of like the border — wide open. So we don't know how many folks are actually in the country that shouldn't be here. And how many of them have ties to countries adjacent to Iran or to Iran itself — as I left, we were still working on some of those numbers.

We've already seen several terrorist attacks since these operations began in America, and they all fit that lone-actor-inspired model. The blowback is — the longer this goes on and the more the propaganda gets weaponized — we are going to see more people here who are radicalized. And frankly, none of these people should be in the country. We should have tighter immigration policies. We should be focused right now on finding everyone who shouldn't be in our country and getting them out as soon as possible, not on another foreign adventure.

Tucker Carlson: I wonder — so you've already seen, in the wake of a recent terror attack, neocons use that attack as a way to try to censor, shut down, maybe even imprison critics of the decision to go to war with Iran. So it's almost like you control both sides. You advocate for a war which inevitably stokes religious hatred because you advocate for the killing of a religious leader — you're helping create permanent generational religious war. And then when your country feels the effects, when Americans are killed as a result, you use their deaths to justify silencing people who criticize you. Does that make sense?

Joe Kent: Oh, exactly. Yeah.

Tucker Carlson: How much are you concerned we're going to see more of that?

Joe Kent: I'm very concerned. I pray we won't, but the odds are not in our favor, just considering how open our borders have been. This type of propaganda radicalizes people. We've already seen attacks inspired by the conflict in Gaza. So I think we're going to see more of this. And there's people calling for dissenting voices to be charged, to be locked up. The erosion of civil rights during a time of conflict is nothing new. We've seen it before. It's the rule.

Tucker Carlson: Did anyone, in the lead-up to this war — now a regional war, potentially a global war, the biggest war of our lives — come to you and say, what's your projection for what the effects on the United States will be? How many Americans could die at the shopping mall or at school because of this?

Joe Kent: We proactively wrote an assessment, which is what we tend to do anyway. But again, there just wasn't a huge process and debate about this last iteration.

Tucker Carlson: But you're worried about it.

Joe Kent: I'm very concerned about it.

Tucker Carlson: I am too. Yeah, I am too.

The resignation letter: Israel's lobbying campaign and the Iraq War parallel

Tucker Carlson: Let me read you the most controversial part of your letter, and I'd like you to flesh it out. You say: "I support the values of the foreign policies that you campaigned on during three campaigns and that you enacted. You understood up until June of 2025 that the wars of 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. 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. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States and that you should strike now. There was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie, and is 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. We cannot make this mistake again."

You've explained how the echo chamber and lobbying campaign worked — on TV, in the press, by telephone, text message, in person, and relentlessly. And then you allude at the end to the Iraq War. I think you told me at dinner last night you had 11 combat deployments — and about five years total in Iraq?

Joe Kent: Nine of those deployments were to Iraq, for six to eight months each, so yeah.

Tucker Carlson: You've had some time to think about the Iraq War.

Joe Kent: More time than is healthy, yeah.

Tucker Carlson: You join the army at 18, you spend your whole young life there, 11 deployments, five years in Iraq over seven deployments, you fight and you're shot at by Iranian proxies. And now you say, I don't think this war is good for America — and you're being slandered as a bad, unpatriotic quitter who secretly sympathizes with the Ayatollah. I just have to ask you how that feels.

Joe Kent: I mean, they love you when you're just saluting and moving out. But then the second you say, I don't think we should be doing this, and you have an opinion, all the attacks come. But I truly believe that God put me where I am right now — having put me through everything I've been through in my life — to bring me to this point. I don't believe that God said, you're here now in this moment to just sit back and be a good soldier for this iteration.

I've had lots of friends who have said, hey, I think you would have been more value staying in the administration with your experiences. And I understand that, and I'm flattered by it. But considering all that I've seen and the conclusions I've reached, I feel like I'm here for a reason. Something — I think probably on my third or fourth deployment, as I was realizing that we were lied to to get us into Iraq and that we had a whole mess that we now had to clean up and how much it mirrored and echoed Vietnam — I remember as a guy in my mid to late 20s being very frustrated with a lot of the Vietnam veterans who did not speak up against it. Especially Vietnam veterans who stayed in service, as I had intended to do, who stayed in service and who advocated for the Iraq War.

Colin Powell is someone who I have a lot of respect for — the way he fought in Vietnam, his leadership in Desert Storm. But then the way that he was part of lying to get us into the Iraq War, and then staying on and continuing those lies, knowing full well, having all the experiences of being a guy on the ground in a feudal war that was deployed under false pretenses — he had all that knowledge, and because he wanted to be loyal to the president, and because he wanted to be loyal to what he felt was a government that would eventually get it right, he didn't step out and say, we shouldn't be doing this. And I remember reflecting on that and saying to myself at the time — and this might seem silly and idealistic — if it's ever my turn, if it's ever my generation's turn, I'm going to do everything that I can to make sure this doesn't happen to the next generation.

So a real breaking point for me: I did the best I could for a couple of weeks as this war started, from the inside, to try and find off-ramps, to provide information, to see what I could do. But watching the casualties roll in — and I don't want to use anyone's loss as a political talking point — for me personally, watching more casualties come in, I just couldn't stand by, both as a veteran and as a Gold Star husband, and say I'm just going to continue to soldier on in this. It's time to try something different. I know this path. It doesn't work. I've seen enough data. It's time to do something different.

Tucker Carlson: How hard a decision was it?

Joe Kent: It became really clear to me over this past weekend that our message just wasn't getting through. And I was like, I know what happens if I stay. If I stay and go along with this, I'm going to be knee-deep in it trying to just chip away and make a difference. But my ability to have my voice heard, to present data that runs contrary to the trajectory the administration is on, that's going to be squashed before it even really reaches the White House. And so I knew I had kind of hit my limit of effectiveness in that capacity. So really it should have been a hard decision. But for me, it was crystal clear. Number one, I can't be a part of this in good conscience. And I need to do everything I can to speak out in a way that I hope resonates with the president and with some of my former colleagues.

I understand they might be mad at me — they're getting hard questions from the media. But I really want them, as we descend even further into this war, to take the time to reflect and to realize that we still have time to get out of this.

And then also for the 77 million people who voted for President Trump, who voted for no new wars, who voted for the foreign policy that President Trump enacted in his first administration — a foreign policy that was incredibly pragmatic. We're not saying you have to be some kind of pacifist. But you have to be very, very deliberate and judicious in how you use force, and you have to use the full scope of the American toolbox: diplomacy, economic leverage. And again, this isn't something that I came up with. President Trump came up with this. President Trump enacted this. And this is why 77 million people voted for him — the no new wars, put America first, don't let us bleed out in the Middle East. That's what people voted for. And that's what I think he campaigned for. And that's something he could get us back to if he just takes a look and assesses how we got to where we are right now.

Tucker Carlson: I want to get to your solution in a minute. I just want to be transparent about my motives. I'm not in this to attack anybody. I'm concerned to the point of agitation about where this is going and its effects on the United States. I think — I hope I'm wrong — but I believe this is the most serious thing that's happened in my lifetime. So I want to fix it, and I don't want it to happen again. And I don't want history to be written in real time by liars in such a way that no one understands what we're going through and then we make the same mistakes.

I just want to pause on your personal experience. I know you hate talking about this, and I'm not going to push too much. But I feel, as an observer, such sadness for the men who've been used, including you. And I wonder — given everything you've done and everything you've just said — how you don't feel bitter at the response you've gotten from some people. How do you keep the bitterness out?

Joe Kent: Faith. I've got a great wife. God's blessed me twice — my late wife, Shannon, and my wife, Heather, our two boys, Colt and Josh, who I think are watching this. So faith, staying grounded on what's important. But then also — look, the people who are coming after me, I believe the internet is about 25% real. There are a lot of bots. There are a lot of people who got delivered a talking point and they're going to get a paycheck for it. Or they just want the adoration. So I just don't take most of it seriously.

And I know there are some of my former colleagues, people who I do like, who have had to come after me. I understand that. They're still there. They've got to discredit everything I'm saying. They're watching, taking notes. I'm not bitter about that. I literally just want to focus on the task at hand, and the task at hand is stopping us from getting deeper into this quagmire. Because looking back on my experiences in Iraq, there wasn't this platform, there wasn't free independent media that existed in a real way that could reach people. And so to me, we have this opportunity. So I'll be bitter and angry later when I read Twitter and somebody who I used to like says Joe Kent's a traitor. We don't have time for that. Major things are happening right now in this war and the president is facing very challenging decisions. I personally just hope that he and his closest advisors listen and think — that's the main priority.

Syria, Iraq, and the pattern of Israeli influence on American foreign policy

Tucker Carlson: I want to get into the history portion, because I think it's important to establish why you said, first, the war in Iraq, second, the conflict in Syria, which took the life of your wife — why both of those were driven by Israel.

Joe Kent: The war in Syria never would have happened without the war in Iraq. Had we not invaded Iraq, we wouldn't have had the conflict in Syria. But Syria was always a major problem under Assad for the Israelis — both under his father and under Bashar al-Assad — because of their support for the Iranians and their support for Hezbollah. And so they wanted to get rid of Assad as well. They saw Iraq as a vehicle for not just taking down Saddam Hussein, who posed a threat to them as well, but also as a lily pad to get rid of Syria.

Tucker Carlson: "Assad must go," which is a slogan that all of a sudden emerged out of nowhere. That was not an organic American desire. It wasn't like Americans woke up and said, the problem really is this ophthalmologist from Syria, he must go. That reflected the priorities of Israel.

Joe Kent: Israel — and then you had the echo chamber as well. You had FDD, all these different organizations saying, now's the time to break off the shackles. And the next thing you know, there'll be a Syrian Thomas Jefferson that'll take over, and instead we got the former leader of al-Qaeda.

A big reason Syria became next after Iraq: we screwed the whole thing up so badly in Iraq — we toppled Saddam, destabilized the country, fought a bitter insurgency. The Sunnis eventually aligned with Al-Qaeda, but then we beat them down so heavily that the Shias, the majority of the country, took over. And the Shias we installed — the Dawa Party, Badr, Sciri, et cetera — were heavily aligned with Iran. So at the end of the Iraq War under Obama, we had basically just handed the keys to Baghdad to the Iranians. Qasem Soleimani was running all over the place, funding proxies. We spent trillions, lost nearly 5,000 Americans, and now we have this Shia superstate.

And then there was a ton of pressure from not just the Israelis but also a lot of the Gulf states to say, hey, we've got to get rid of Assad as well, because now you have this Iranian land bridge that goes basically from Damascus all the way to Tehran, and then hooks down into the Lebanese area where Hezbollah is. So next thing you know, we're on the side of ISIS and Al-Qaeda. ISIS gets out of control, and we have to deploy back to Iraq, back to Syria, to put out essentially the brush fire that we created.

And so I put all of those together. Because without Israel's influence, would the Iraq War have happened? Maybe. But they heavily lobbied for it. Benjamin Netanyahu — you can pull up tapes on YouTube — the guy was lobbying heavily back in 2002 for us to do regime change in Iraq. Ariel Sharon, who was PM at the time, was initially against it because he wanted us to focus on Iran. But towards the end, he got on board. The Likud party that's in power and has been driving Israeli politics for most of my adult life was heavily in favor of the regime change war in Iraq, which led to Shia domination, led to the rise of ISIS, led to the rise of Al-Qaeda, and heavily fueled the Syrian civil war.

So this country — Israel — can be a good partner in some regards. I'm not anti-Israeli. I've worked with the Israelis. Very competent intelligence service, wonderful people. But they have different objectives than we do. So to put them in the driver's seat of our foreign policy and to let them dictate our foreign policy is a disservice to the American people.

Tucker Carlson: I think you're understating the effect. Disservice suggests an inconvenience. It's dangerous.

Joe Kent: Yeah. Now we're looking at bankruptcy and death and collapse of the dollar and lots of —

Tucker Carlson: And I'm not blaming Israel for any of it. I'm blaming supine American leadership that takes this. I don't understand it at all. And that kind of leads to the most uncomfortable question of all. Since all of these dynamics are very well known to everyone in Washington — everyone who pretends this is not real, the Tom Cottons of the world, the Lindsey Grahams — everybody knows. Pro-Israel people know, anti-Israel people know that what you're saying is true. I don't think there's any debate about any of it. So since it was clear that we were being pushed by the Netanyahu government into this war — they chose the timing, right?

Joe Kent: Yeah.

Tucker Carlson: I'll take Marco Rubio's word for it. Was it ever discussed — the option you mentioned at the beginning — just, how about no?

Joe Kent: Not that I know of.

Tucker Carlson: Okay. Then you have to ask — I'm just following the logic train here — what kind of pressure does it require to get a president who campaigned against exactly this thing for 10 years to do exactly this thing?

Joe Kent: I wish I knew definitively. I think there are two schools of thought. One is the media echo chamber, the donors, the way the Israelis come in and launder information like I described. And then the other option is much darker. We still don't know what happened in Butler. We don't know what happened with Charlie Kirk. And by no means am I saying the Israelis did this or anything like that. But I'm saying there's a lot of unanswered questions there. And there is enough data to at least say that there's a good chance that President Trump feels like he is under threat.

We're not really allowed to ask whether there was any linkage between what took place with the Iranian operative who was recruited to come to America to recruit proxies to kill President Trump — all of this is public. The FBI put a confidential human source on him. He's arrested. And then two days later, a sniper takes a shot at President Trump. We think the confidential source was talking about the possibility of killing the president with a sniper rifle, but then he gets arrested two days later, and Butler happens. And Crooks, according to the official narrative, is an enigma. We don't know anything about him. No more questions are allowed to be asked about Thomas Crooks. The DHS IG is currently being blocked from investigating Butler as well. That's out in the media. Your investigative journalists found that Crooks did indeed have an online persona and was talking to people. So why aren't we investigating this?

If there's an attempted murder of a presidential candidate — and then there's another assassination attempt, and there have been multiple public breaches of President Trump's security — and then Charlie Kirk is killed publicly in a very horrific way, and we're not really even allowed to look into that at all. And Charlie Kirk was one of President Trump's closest advisors. And he also advocated heavily against a war with Iran. He was in the Oval Office in the lead up to the 12-day war.

The last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June in the West Wing, in the stairway. I said hi to him, and he looked me in the eye, and he said very loudly — and it's a small, tight space, the West Wing — he said, "Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran." Very loudly. He was single-minded. And he walked off and went, I believe, into the Oval. So when one of President Trump's closest advisors is vocally advocating for us not to go to war with Iran and for us to rethink our relationship with the Israelis — and then he's suddenly publicly assassinated and we're not allowed to ask any questions about that — it's a data point. It's a data point that we need to look into.

The blocked investigation into Charlie Kirk's murder

Tucker Carlson: What do you mean when you say we're not allowed to ask any questions about that?

Joe Kent: We've been told that this individual Robinson is a lone gunman — and maybe he is. But the investigation that the National Counterterrorism Center was a part of, we were stopped from continuing to investigate. The FBI will say they stopped that because they wanted to turn everything over to the Utah state authorities. Everything is going to trial, it's very sensitive. But there was still a lot for us to look into that I can't really get into. There was still linkage for us to investigate that we needed to run down.

I'm not making conclusions. I'm not saying because of this, this happened. I'm just saying there are unanswered questions. We know from the text messages that have been made public that Charlie was under a lot of pressure from a lot of pro-Israel donors. And again, we know Charlie was advocating to President Trump against this war with Iran. And we knew at the end of the 12-day war, at the end of Midnight Hammer, that the Israelis were going to come back and ask us to go back to war again. So we have a lot of data points — between Butler, the assassination attempts against President Trump, the breaches of his security, what happened to Charlie Kirk.

Tucker Carlson: Can I ask you to pause on the Charlie Kirk question, because it upsets me to hear what you're saying — to be reminded that he was murdered, but also to hear you confirm what was reported in the media several months ago, that your office had been blocked from investigating his murder. That does not make sense to me. I don't understand why you would ever turn down help in an investigation from a U.S. agency with a lot of experience in gathering intelligence. That's your job. Can you flesh that out?

Joe Kent: The FBI will say, and the DOJ will say, that because it's an ongoing case, it's a Utah state case — back off, they've got it. They've got the fingerprints on the gun. They've got the case. But the FBI was involved in the case. They basically said that they're deferring to Utah because it's now a state case. But they've established a precedent for federal investigation of this crime. And the National Counterterrorism Center's mandate is to investigate any foreign ties — if we find some, we continue; if we don't, we back off.

What I'm saying without getting into too much detail is there was more for us to investigate. Do I believe there was reason to investigate foreign ties to Charlie Kirk's murder, and was I told by the FBI and DOJ to stop?

FBI and DOJ, yeah. We were told: you're not allowed to investigate that. Stop. They basically cut off our access to be able to get into that information. And look, I didn't necessarily say I believe there are 100% foreign ties. There were data points that we needed to investigate. You get 100 leads, you run them down, and 99 don't mean anything. We still had more leads to run down that pertained to some kind of foreign nexus — leads we were stopped from investigating.

Tucker Carlson: That just strikes me as inconceivable. What were you told was the reason to prevent you, as a federal intelligence official running the National Counterterrorism Center, from looking into the murder when you had reason to look into it?

Joe Kent: Well, the way the bureaucracy works is they can just kill things in process. Initially, we were cut off pretty early on from being able to access the files and to send people out there. We sent people out initially to work in the task force. After the crisis period — the first week or so — that dispersed. And we were basically told, hey, we'll get back to you if we find any kind of foreign ties that we want you guys to look into. Meanwhile, we had already dug up a decent amount of leads.

We were then told, hey, you guys need to stop. You can't work on this anymore. I had a bureaucratic dispute about it. Eventually we were allowed to continue to investigate. But then in very short order, all the requests that we would make — requests that normally different parts of the interagency with the FBI being on point would facilitate — those data-sharing requests were just never met or, in my opinion, not an honest effort was given to fulfill them. Just basic information that any competent police service would have access to, to help us run down the leads to either confirm or deny some kind of foreign activity. We were cut off from that. They didn't ever officially come back and say, you can't look at this anymore. All the requests just continued to die on the vine.

Tucker Carlson: I just can't imagine a legitimate justification for that. Something horrible has happened. The U.S. government's core function is to investigate crime, particularly murder. Here you have an agency whose job it is to run down the rabbit trails you've described, and you're stopped from doing that. We don't want the information. Why would any engaged legitimate pursuit say, I don't want more information?

Joe Kent: A lot of the justification for stopping us from investigating hung on — hey, we've got the guy, his fingerprints are on the gun, we've got a video of him jumping off the roof. This is a slam dunk case. Okay, even if it is a slam dunk case that he took the shot, what about all the people who had prior knowledge? All the basic investigative questions. How do you get there? You map it out. But basically, once they caught him and his fingerprints were on the gun, it was pencils down. Utah has the rest of it. There's nothing else to see here. And I'm over there thinking I'm in crazy town saying, no, we have all these leads that we need to run down.

The people who had prior knowledge, I think most of them were American citizens, so that would be on the FBI. But again, not without saying anything specific — there was more work for us to do on the potential of a foreign nexus. Not saying there is one, but we had more work to do, and we were blocked from doing that.

Tucker Carlson: I want people listening to this to assess two things. One, are you over your skis? Are you making claims you can't prove? Two, is there any conceivable dark motive you would have for wanting to know more about this murder? And I don't think any rational person could construct a bad motive for wanting to know. It's your job. It's the government's job. So the onus is on people who are preventing the collection of information to describe why they're doing that. Of the people who demonstrated prior knowledge of Charlie Kirk's murder online — and there were a number of them — are you satisfied that all of them were interviewed by the FBI in person?

Joe Kent: I have no idea. I just think — considering they knew Charlie was going to be assassinated, and there was enough of them that it wasn't just some random account — there's something there. I don't know what that something is. But we haven't seen any arrests. So there's more work to be done. I personally did not see any effort being taken to continue to run that down.

Tucker Carlson: Are you bothered by it?

Joe Kent: I'm very bothered by it. Charlie Kirk is a generational figure. He led a movement. He was speaking to millions of young Americans who came out and voted for President Trump. And he was just a genuine great man, husband, father. The fact that he was murdered so publicly — actual curiosity about getting to justice, to figuring out what happened, that makes me furious that we're being blocked from that and that we're not allowed to ask the question anymore.

And I think there are entities out there that don't want us looking into this. And I'm sure they're preparing the response right now — they're saying, that's because we don't want to screw up the Robinson trial. Like, okay, if the Robinson trial is so slam dunk, then don't worry about it. He's got his fingerprints on the rifle. But there were people publicly posting prior knowledge of this. And I'm here telling you, as someone involved in the investigation, there were more stones for us to overturn. And every time we asked, we were blocked.

And then they leaked it to the New York Times. We had a blowup. But it's incredibly frustrating that, especially considering how pivotal Charlie was to the MAGA movement and to President Trump, there hasn't been a more concerted effort to find the truth and to find justice.

Tucker Carlson: Do you think there will be?

Joe Kent: I pray there is. I hope this helps.

The assassination attempts and security breaches around President Trump

Tucker Carlson: You mentioned the breaches of the president's security. One that's been reported — and I can't say whether it's true — is that Prime Minister Netanyahu's security detail was caught twice attaching some kind of device to the president's emergency Secret Service vehicle. Have you heard that?

Joe Kent: I've read it in the media. I don't know if that's true. What I think about is the president and the vice president and several members of the cabinet going out to dinner in DC, and the Code Pink protesters having a heads-up about that — to rent the table, to get the restaurant on board to a certain extent. To me, that's almost like counting coup. It's a soft flex. It's an "I can touch you whenever I want." They weren't going to do anything. But what does that mean? It means you've got real problems with your security detail.

And then a few weeks later, you have an armed officer who's off-duty, not part of the president's detail, come right up and shake the president's hand. The guy's probably a patriotic American who just wanted to shake the president's hand. But that got a lot of publicity. And what does that mean?

And the president — President Trump is very smart. I think he has a gift for interpreting large sets of data and making very key strategic decisions. So when the president sees that he's got issues with his own security detail, when he sees what happened in Butler, the other assassination attempts, what happened to Charlie — I think it's reasonable to believe that somewhere in his head, he thinks maybe I don't have a choice. Maybe they could harm me or they could harm my family. And if they can't keep me safe, I believe the president deeply cares. I think if it was just a matter of his own physical safety, I don't think he cares — we saw that in Butler. But he does love his family, and he's got a big family. Somewhere in his head, if they can't keep me safe, what about my family?

So maybe the president was simply deceived by the echo chamber we described, and that's how we got to this place. But it's also possible that there's an element of coercion, intimidation — whatever words you want to use — that is also influencing his decision-making.

Tucker Carlson: If you were assessing a similar situation in another country — not your own — and I gave you the same data set you've just presented to me, would you say it's crazy even to bring that up as a possibility?

Joe Kent: Not at all. When you map out those data points, I would say this moves from being a possibility to potentially — depending on how you look at it and interpret it — a likelihood. It would be something that I'm sure we would debate rigorously, but nobody would dismiss it altogether. With all this data, it's not nothing. It's something that has to be looked into.

Tucker Carlson: Is it being looked into?

Joe Kent: I don't think it is. And with Butler, your investigative journalists found more about Crooks than the entire government. The response I received from the FBI was so hostile that it confused me — it still does confuse me.

Tucker Carlson: We put this documentary out, we got information — the information you described, his online activity, which we were told didn't exist. And this was not an attack on the FBI; this was during the last administration with a different director. So this was hardly a partisan hit job. This is the president of the United States who I campaigned for and voted for. And the response I got was hysterical. That's not an overstatement. And it confuses me. Have you had experiences like that?

Joe Kent: There was a level of hostility coming from really the FBI. Some of it, I think, is just: why are you looking over my shoulder? I got this. I'm very familiar with that — we were the same way in the military. They treated you like you were in the Air Force.

Tucker Carlson: Exactly.

Joe Kent: But we had a role to play. And the way we were aggressively blocked from it — I found the hostility to be above and beyond what you'd find with typical bureaucratic rivalry or turf wars. The level of "you cannot look at this," and then for them to escalate it, to attempt to get us kicked out of the case — that was very surprising.

Same thing with Butler. When we first started asking questions about Butler, I thought — especially since that happened under the Biden administration — that we would come in and get the truth because the previous administration really screwed it up. And there just wasn't curiosity there. There wasn't a tolerance whatsoever for us going after the key questions, like: hey, was the informant that you had interacting with this guy Merchant in communication with anybody in Butler? I mean, basic questions. Just those basic questions — no, no, the two aren't related, you can't talk about it, you can't ask any of those questions. Even when we found data that needed to be looked into, they would say, well, the Merchant case is ongoing, we can't interfere.

Tucker Carlson: I think that's a new rule — a fake rule — that you're not allowed to gather information about anything that might potentially intersect with an ongoing case that's not directly related. Who made that up? Because you would not be able to investigate anything.

Joe Kent: Exactly. And I asked this question, and I was told cases have been overturned on this basis. And I said, cases have been overturned on many bases — that's not a standard. And how is that the new standard? You would not be able to investigate anything.

The current president was the subject of a near-successful assassination attempt. And we're just not going to look into very obvious leads or divulge information that everyone knows exists. For example, the surveillance tape from the shooting range at which Thomas Crooks trained — because it would answer the question: was he training with somebody? And if so, who? They have that footage and they won't release it. And then people come to their own conclusions, and those conclusions usually sound crazy. And then the actual question never gets answered.

Tucker Carlson: Can you say that for people who haven't lived in Washington? Because I try to explain this to people all the time. It's been ongoing since at least the Kennedy assassination. But this is a very serious and recurring thing. It's a tactic. You just explained it better than anyone I've heard. Can you do that again?

Joe Kent: Basically, you give no information whatsoever on something that obviously should have information available — like you outlined: there's potentially footage of Crooks at the shooting range. Police 101: go get the tapes. If you don't want to address that question, you go silent and say, you can't ask that question. Which then creates people who come out of nowhere and start drawing their own conclusions. Half of them, if not more, are going to be so far off in left field and made by legitimate kooks or bots — and then you can just say, oh, these people asking questions about that tape at the shooting range, it's space aliens, crazy conspiracy theorists. And then you've diverted all attention away from the thing you're trying to conceal, and now everyone's focused on the crazies. And then the second someone asks a legitimate question, they're also labeled crazy.

Tucker Carlson: I hope everyone watching will just clip that and keep it on their phone and replay it every day, because that is one of the primary ways that the intel agencies and federal law enforcement influence public opinion, influence elections, and above all, hide their own behavior from the public.

The JFK documents and the deeper problem of bureaucratic secrecy

Tucker Carlson: At the beginning of the administration — January 23rd, right after the inauguration — the president issued an executive order calling for the total declassification and release of all documents relevant to the assassination of President Kennedy in November of 1963, all of them, and also documents relevant to the assassination investigations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. I don't think all the Kennedy documents have been released. The president said it, and it's in the executive order. Maybe you can't go there because of —

Joe Kent: So yeah —

Tucker Carlson: I've been told conclusively that has not happened. Without divulging anything classified — like anything from 1963 should be classified, the whole thing is insane and an insult to citizens — what could possibly be the justification for keeping classified a document that must under law be released and that was produced generations ago?

Joe Kent: I think more of this goes to the deep state, the system, the machine, whatever you want to call it. They're not hiding something in the Kennedy files, in my opinion, because it's not like the assassins wrote down on this day, we're going to kill JFK, and put it in a file at CIA or FBI. That didn't happen. So I don't really think there's anything inside those files that would be particularly earth-shattering. The system doesn't want to get us used to things being rapidly declassified. They don't want a president to be able to come in and say, here's an executive order, declassify it, because the people demand it — and it happens just like that. They want to condition us that: okay, the president may have come in and lawfully given us an order, but there's a process. There's an interagency process. Everyone gets to check to make sure there's nothing still classified or still ongoing, even if it was from 1963. Because they don't want us conditioned to the idea that we can just have access to this information.

There are probably times where that would be appropriate — like declassifying something that happened last week. There are going to be equities there, and I think the American people would understand that. But a lot of this is power. The bureaucracy, when the president says declassify this — regardless of what it is, from decades ago — can't just let him have it. They all want to have their cuts on it. They want to be able to control it. This is how the bureaucracy and career bureaucrats exert their role. They just tell the new political appointees, hey, we really can't do that, but we'll get you to a place that mostly gets you what you want eventually. And then it all just gets killed off in process. Limited transparency at the end of the day. They don't want to condition us that you can elect a president and he can automatically change the bureaucracy.

Tucker Carlson: The fact that the government doesn't have to tell you what it's doing, even though you pay for it, just invalidates the whole concept of consent of the governed. How can you give consent to something you know nothing about? But more than that, it creates a moral poison at the center of the society. Lying is a sin. It's the core sin. And lies beget lies, and they — like cancer — destroy the body in which they live. And if you care about the body, this country, if you're from here and you hope to live here and have grandchildren here, you have to fix that. And I really think that telling the truth, radically telling the truth, is the only thing that gets you there. The pain that entails — and it does entail pain, there's no doubt — is much smaller a price to pay than the price we will pay inevitably, and maybe soon, if we don't do it.

Joe Kent: I don't think this is sustainable, this level of lying in any society. And if people don't think that their vote matters, that they can actually elect someone and change can be enacted — I think things go to a very, very dark place. People lose faith in our system. And our system is based on that faith — that we get to have elections, hopefully free and fair, and when you finally get your person in office, they're going to be able to control the government that the people pay for, that's supposed to be run by the folks they voted for. And that's just not the case right now.

Tucker Carlson: No, it's not.

The path out: restraining Israel, opening negotiations, saving the dollar

Tucker Carlson: So I want to end with a hopeful note. We've been talking about this for 24 hours, because anyone who's followed it carefully and is thinking clearly can see that the war with Iran is potentially like the end of a lot for the United States. I've actually had 10 years to think about it, because that's how long they've been pushing for it. At this point, it feels like there's no way out. But you were saying to me this morning, in a really thoughtful way that gave me hope, that you think there is a way out. I'm going to stand back and let you explain how you think the United States can exit with a lot of its interests intact, and its honor intact, and the president's administration intact.

Joe Kent: It's going to take drastic action. And the good news is I believe this is something that President Trump is uniquely qualified to fix on his own through his sheer willpower. President Trump has an amazing ability — it's almost his superpower — to breathe life into ideas and to capture large data sets and find leverage. Right now it's clear that this conflict will just continue the way it is and get exponentially worse, especially if we go down the path of demanding a total surrender with boots on the ground — or maybe even something far, far worse.

Tucker Carlson: And that is the path we're on.

Joe Kent: That inevitably, if we say it's total surrender — and again, this is where President Trump is uniquely suited, because President Trump can define his own total surrender. He's in charge. I ended my letter with "hold the cards," because President Trump truly does hold the cards. He's a very powerful, very respected leader.

What I think President Trump must do is: number one, address the main issue. The main issue is what the Israelis are doing. And he needs to very forcefully — probably with a new team of diplomats — go to the Israelis and say, you're done. We will defend you. We will make sure that ballistic missiles aren't rained down upon you. However, you are done going on the offense, because this is our war. We're paying for it, we're bleeding for it. This is not your war. If you choose to continue this offensive operation, we're out. And as a matter of fact, if you choose to continue, we will start withdrawing features of your defense system so that you will be on your own.

We have to say that to them. We have to be very blunt and very forceful. And I know a lot of people who like the Israelis are going to say, we can't do that, that's wrong, they're under fire, et cetera. But if we don't do that, if we don't address our relationship with the Israelis, even if we come up with a temporary ceasefire, we'll be right back in the same situation in very short order.

Tucker Carlson: How hard will that be, realistically?

Joe Kent: It will be hard, but again, President Trump can do it. President Trump can call the Prime Minister of Israel and get him to the table. President Trump can force it. I believe that. I truly believe that he can. So I think it's doable — and it's only doable with President Trump.

And then from there, once we get the Israelis to stop — we still have strong allies in the Gulf: the Emirates, the Qataris, the Saudis, the Bahrainis, all these actors. They may not always agree with each other, but they're all pretty good partners with us. I think we need to use them, bring in some new diplomats, and aggressively engage with the Iranians while we can to get to a ceasefire — to find a way to stop the killing, stop the destruction, not just the loss of more life, but basically the collapse of the energy system we have right now. So that we can open the Straits of Hormuz back up again and make sure the petrodollar is being used.

Because right now, we didn't stop the flow of oil going to the Chinese. The Chinese are still getting their oil out. And they're settling those transactions in yuan, not the petrodollar. So once we get the Israelis to stop, we have to aggressively pursue our economic interests.

The good thing in here is that our economic interests are in line with not just the GCC countries but also with the Iranians, because the Iranians want this war to stop. They want to be able to rebuild and revitalize their energy sector. On this mutual cooperation to open up the Straits of Hormuz and build back the energy sector, I think we could come up with a peace.

We'd have to lift some sanctions.

Tucker Carlson: Some sanctions. Yeah. Why wouldn't we? We've had sanctions for decades, and according to the neocons, they had no effect on the nuclear program, which posed an imminent threat. So what's the argument? We didn't benefit from decades of sanctions at all.

Joe Kent: We just lifted sanctions on Syria because the regime changed there — but we lifted sanctions on a guy who used to be the former leader of Al-Qaeda. So I'm pretty sure we can go ahead and lift some sanctions on Iran. It would be in our benefit. Not only would it help us in the war, but also a condition of lifting the sanctions would be: you will settle all transactions from your new oil industry — reintroduced to the world economy — in dollars. And we need the dollar to survive if we want our country in its current state to survive as well. So the lifting of sanctions in this case very much works out in our national interest.

That to me — and I'm sure there are lots of different variations of this plan — but President Trump aggressively enacting this and addressing the Israelis first and foremost. Otherwise, any kind of negotiation we try to have with the Iranians, or pretty much anybody else — if we don't address the Israeli factor, they're simply not going to take us seriously.

Tucker Carlson: Precisely. And every day that this goes on — and I have no love for anybody in power in Iran right now — but the more leaders we kill in Iran, you're not getting Thomas Jefferson next. It's not like if we kill 15 or 20 of them the 16th or 21st guy is Thomas Jefferson or a moderate. It's very obvious to me that some of these strikes — not all, but some — were conducted with the intent of making a negotiated settlement impossible.

And that leads me to the saddest cluster of things — the bombing of the girl's school attached to the Iranian naval base. The U.S. has admitted we did it. But I'm wondering about the targeting coordinates and where those came from. Is it possible those came from Israel?

Joe Kent: That I don't know. Is it entirely possible that the coordinates were given to us by Israel? Yes. And why wouldn't it be? Because once you start doing things like that, intentionally or not, it's very hard to get out of it. And obviously from the way the Israelis have conducted themselves in the Gaza war and other places, they have a much different way of fighting than we do. America makes mistakes, but Americans — I can tell you as a guy who fought on the ground — almost to a fault, we do everything that we can to prevent the loss of civilian life. Almost to the point where sometimes we risk our own lives deliberately to not kill innocent civilians.

So this is where being in partnership with a partner that has a very different agenda than you, a stated different outcome — and just a different standard for how they fight — it's very dangerous for us.

Tucker Carlson: To be in partnership with a country that has different goals and different standards of behavior on the battlefield.

Joe Kent: They just have a whole different way of looking at it. And I think I can get into their heads pretty easily as somebody who fought for most of my life. If I was an Israeli, I think I would have the same view. I would say, well, we're going to fight them at some point anyway. If there are civilians in that area that's militarily important to us, like I have a job to do. I understand that. But it's important for us to understand our partners. Just because they speak English, and a lot of them went to school over here and we have dual citizens, doesn't mean that they're going to target the same way that we do. We have to be clear-eyed about it.

And now we're going to be viewed as being not just complicit but partners in that. And again, that's a very dangerous place for us to be, because our objective — at least our tactical objectives — have been pretty clear: take down the ballistic missiles, the nuclear program, the Navy, the Army, et cetera — military targets. But we're in partnership right now with the Israelis, who are going after some military targets, but going after a heck of a lot more that are not military targets.

Tucker Carlson: And look, in the Middle East — and in the world — you're going to do business with some unsavory characters. So if you're going to be doing business there, just get comfortable with the fact that some of these guys are unsavory. The classic, I think, President Trump line really early on — when he was asked if he thought Putin was a killer, and he said, well, yeah, I mean, we're killers too. You know what I mean? He was just very logical about that and very clear-eyed. And this is why President Trump is uniquely qualified to solve this problem — because he has the ability to understand things from multiple perspectives at the same time, and then find our leverage and find out what's best for America's objectives, with clear eyes.

Joe Kent: That's the way we have to be.

Tucker Carlson: Do you anticipate you'll be speaking to the president again?

Joe Kent: I would welcome it. I spoke with him before I departed the administration.

Tucker Carlson: How did that go?

Joe Kent: It went great — I mean, not the best conversation ever. I told him why I was leaving. He heard me out. He was very respectful. He was very kind. He always is. And I think we departed personally on good terms.

Again, I'm an adult. I understand that the way I left and writing the letter, there are parts of his administration that are going to have to come after me and try to discredit me. I understand that. But I think the president is someone who listens. And so I think he's listening — not necessarily just to me and to you, but to a lot of different people, because I think he knows at a core level this is not going well and he needs to find a way for us to get out of this.

Tucker Carlson: You're definitely an adult, and I wish there were more of them. And I appreciate all the time you spent here.

Joe Kent: Thank you, Tucker. I appreciate it. Very much.