Joe Kent has given his first interview since resigning as the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
On Wednesday evening, Tucker Carlson sat down with Joe Kent and the two discussed his time in the Trump administration and the war in Iran.
Throughout the interview, Kent claimed that the United States entered the war on behalf of Israel.
Take a look:
Joe Kent tells Tucker Carlson that Israel dragged the US into war with Iran.
“The Israelis drove the decision to take this action, which we knew would set off a series of events because the Iranians would retaliate.”
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He later told Tucker that Iran was not on their way to obtaining a nuclear weapon, a statement that contradicts President Trump’s previous statements.
Here’s the moment he said it:
Joe Kent says that Iran was never close to a nuclear weapon, contradicting Lindsey Graham.
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— AF Post (@AFpost) March 19, 2026
The Hill provided a summary of the interview:
Joe Kent, the former top Trump administration intelligence official who resigned this week over the U.S. military’s ongoing operations in Iran, discussed his decision in a podcast interview Wednesday with right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, who shares many of his opinions on the war.
Kent sat for a wide-ranging interview with Carlson and argued U.S. involvement in the conflict was pushed by Israel.
“The Israelis drove the decision to take this action,” Kent told Carlson during the interview, clips of which were circulated on social media soon after it was published. “Which we knew would set off a series of events, meaning the Iranians would retaliate.”
President Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and a number of top administration officials have said attacking Iran earlier this month was necessary because the regime there posed an imminent threat to American national security and was vulnerable after years of waging proxy war on the U.S. and its allies.
Here are some clips:
Joe Kent confirms to Tucker Carlson that Israel is NOT able to fight its wars without America and that the Trump administration refused to discuss it's objectives regarding Iran after the 12 day war.
"In some ways, this is a little humiliating" pic.twitter.com/scCk7tYdLR
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The Independent reported more on Kent’s comments on the Iranian regime:
Carlson — who has described the war as ‘‘absolutely disgusting and evil” — asked Kent whether the regime was on the verge of creating a nuclear bomb.
“No. They weren’t three weeks ago when this started, and they weren’t in June either,” he said, referring to the U.S. military’s June 22 strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
He added that the Iranian government has had a fatwa — or edict — in place since 2004 that bars them from developing a nuclear weapon. “We had no intelligence to indicate that fatwa was being disobeyed,” he told Carlson, describing the Iranian strategy as “actually pretty pragmatic.”
The killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also only served to embolden his hardline supporters, Kent claimed. “I don’t think the ayatollah feared dying. Not because he’s some crazy lunatic, but because he knew if he was killed the regime would survive,” he said.
The entire interview was released on Tucker Carlson’s website, behind a paywall, angering some conservatives.
Apparently Tucker Carlson’s interview with Joe Kent is so big and so important, that you have to pay him 9 dollars a month to watch it.
This is a joke. This is an absolute joke.
Tucker posts interviews on 𝕏 all the time, but apparently this one warranted being behind a… pic.twitter.com/iBYrNobeHc
— Jacktron (@jacktronprime) March 18, 2026
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