NEW: Joe Kent's Bombshell Claims About Israel's influence over Trump and Charlie Kirk’s Murder
The former director of the National Counterterrorism Center was interviewed by Tucker Carlson a day after resigning his position in the Trump administration.
Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center on Tuesday. On Wednesday night, he sat with Tucker Carlson for over an hour and laid out a single, devastating argument: Israeli influence over President Trump drove the United States into a war it had no intelligence basis to fight — and that same influence may explain why no one is allowed to ask questions about the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Kent connected the two bombshells explicitly. Kirk was one of Trump’s closest advisors. He was vocally opposing the push for war with Iran. The last time Kent saw him alive was in the West Wing stairway, where Kirk said loudly: “Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.” Then Kirk walked into the Oval Office. Kent said Kirk was under heavy pressure from pro-Israel donors over his antiwar stance. Kirk was publicly assassinated shortly after.
Kent’s NCTC, whose mandate is to investigate foreign ties to political violence, found leads suggesting a potential foreign nexus to Kirk’s murder. The FBI and DOJ shut them down. Data-sharing requests “died on the vine.” People had posted prior knowledge of Kirk’s assassination online before it happened. No arrests followed. Kent’s team was blocked from running down every lead.
“I’m not making conclusions,” Kent said. “I’m saying there were unanswered questions. We had more stones to overturn and every time we asked, we were blocked.”
Then Kent turned to the war itself — and pointed to the same source of influence.
There was no U.S. intelligence supporting an imminent threat from Iran. No evidence of a nuclear weapons program. No evidence the 2004 fatwa against developing nuclear weapons had been lifted. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed it himself: the U.S. struck because Israel was about to attack — not because Iran threatened America.
Kent described the mechanism. Israeli officials bypassed U.S. intelligence channels entirely, going directly to policymakers. They shifted the red line from “no nuclear weapon” — which left room for a Trump deal — to “no enrichment at all,” a position that killed negotiations. Those talking points were then laundered through Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, creating the echo chamber that surrounded the president. Netanyahu visited the White House seven times. Kent questioned whether any U.S. intelligence official had comparable access to Trump.
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