A former senior intelligence official who resigned in protest over the Iran war is under investigation by the FBI for allegedly leaking classified information, a source familiar with the matter told NBC News.
The source said the probe 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 he disagreed with the decision to go to war with Iran and that the regime did not pose “an imminent threat,” contrary to assertions from the Trump administration.
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 requests for comment Wednesday night.
In his first interview since resigning, Kent told Tucker Carlson on Wednesday he expected attempts to “discredit” him for his protest but said he would welcome the 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,” Kent added.
Gabbard pushed back on Kent’s characterization, posting on X that the president is responsible for determining what qualifies as an imminent threat and that her office’s role is to coordinate intelligence to give Trump the best information possible.
At a congressional hearing Wednesday, Gabbard declined to say whether she believed Iran’s nuclear program presented an “imminent threat.”
Kent served 11 combat deployments over a 20-year Army Special Forces career before working at the CIA. His wife, Shannon Kent, was killed in a 2019 terrorist bombing in Syria, where she 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. He wrote 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 pushed back in a post on X, saying Trump “had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first.”