A former senior intelligence official who resigned in protest over the Iran war is under investigation by the FBI for allegedly leaking classified information, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The source told NBC News that the investigation began before Joe Kent, a longtime Trump ally and retired Green Beret, announced his resignation Tuesday as director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Semafor first reported the investigation.
Kent, who reported to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, said Tuesday that he disagreed with the decision to go to war against Iran and that the regime did not pose “an imminent threat” as the Trump administration has asserted.
The White House referred questions to the FBI, which declined to comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday night.
In his first interview since resigning, Kent told Tucker Carlson on Wednesday that he expected there would be attempts to “discredit” him for his protest. But he said he would welcome a chance to speak to President Donald Trump.
“I understand the way I left and writing the letter that there’s parts of this administration that are going to have to come after me and try and discredit me,” Kent said. “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 I think he is listening 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.”
Gabbard pushed back on Kent’s comments about the war in Iran, writing in a post on X that the president is responsible for determining what qualifies as an imminent threat. Her office acts to coordinate intelligence that provides Trump with the best information possible, Gabbard wrote Tuesday.
In a congressional hearing Wednesday, Gabbard declined to answer whether she believed Iran’s nuclear program presented an “imminent threat.”
Kent served 11 combat deployments over a 20-year career in the Army Special Forces before working at the CIA. His wife, Shannon Kent, was killed in a terrorist bombing in Syria in 2019, where she had served as a Navy cryptologist.
In his resignation letter, Kent said that while he supported Trump’s values during his first term, the president had been wrongly swayed by Israel. Kent said that he could not support “sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt hit back at Kent in a social media post Tuesday, saying that Trump “had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first.”
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