Time was, you could trust Joe Kent. And by “you” I mean Donald Trump.

“The only good that came out of the election in 2020 and the impeachment votes is that we were able to really identify the establishment Republicans — the country club Republicans, the RINOs — and make them vulnerable,” Kent, a former Green Beret, once said, while running to oust Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the January 6 riot.

“Putin has laid out what he wants in Ukraine” and his demands that Kyiv cede Donetsk and Luhansk are “very reasonable,” Kent declared, during the same congressional race. “The neocons on the right are power drunk, bloodthirsty and cannot be trusted,” he carried on. “Biden is sleepwalking to war.”

Kent lost his bid to occupy Herrera Beutler’s congressional seat to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez who, as a quick aside and at the risk of throwing stones from a glass house, is a bit of an eccentric.

Gluesenkamp Perez actually beat Kent twice, once in 2022 and then in a rematch two years later. During the 2024 campaign, Gluesenkamp Perez said of Kent, “It’s shocking to me how willingly [he is to] repeat the propaganda narratives pushed out by the Kremlin. Joe Kent would be Putin’s go-to guy in Congress.”

The only thing more dangerous than an (alleged) Kremlin sympathizer in Congress is one in The White House, because in that scenario you could end up with (alleged) Putin sympathizers in national security roles. Guess where Kent ended up in Trump’s second term?

In July of last year, Kent was confirmed as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, which technically made him a report of Tulsi Gabbard’s. If you know anything about Gabbard, you know where this is going.

Gabbard, herself accused by detractors of harboring sympathies for the Kremlin’s position on international affairs, and who famously met with Bashar al-Assad prior to backing legislation aimed at stopping the CIA from arming anti-regime elements in Syria, was reportedly out of the loop this year as the Trump administration embarked on back-to-back regime change operations in Caracas and Tehran, both allies of Moscow.

It’s a safe bet that Gabbard doesn’t support the trajectory of US foreign policy this year, and on Tuesday we learned that her subordinate doesn’t either.

In a scathing letter posted to Elon Musk’s “X,” Kent asserted that Iran posed “no imminent threat to our nation.” “It’s clear,” he told Trump, “that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Yikes! And it got worse. A lot worse.

“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,” Kent went on. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat.” That, Kent said, was “a lie.”

I’d be totally remiss not to point out — and I think, as a sharp critic of Israeli war tactics, I’ve “earned” the right to say this — that Kent’s letter could be read as overtly anti-Semitic. He posits a vast conspiracy, and at one point blames Israel for the death of his wife, who was killed in Syria in 2019.

To say it’s a stretch to blame Israel for Syria’s civil war would be an understatement, but it’s consistent with what you might expect to hear from Gabbard. Kent’s boss blamed everyone for the war in Syria except Assad, who fled to Moscow in December of 2024.

There’s a fine line between acknowledging the persuasive power of the Israeli state on US foreign policy and trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, most of which revolve around the idea of a global Jewish conspiracy. In my opinion, Kent’s letter is too explicitly conspiratorial for Joe to plead ignorance on that front.

In any event, the Gabbard faction’s restless. Tulsi will be on the Hill this week to testify about threats to US national security, and now we have one of her top advisors telling Americans that Iran constituted no such threat. I suspect the timing isn’t an accident.

Kent closed his letter to Trump with an appeal for divine intervention. “I pray you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran and who we are doing it for,” he said, warning Trump that if he doesn’t “reverse course now,” he’ll “allow America to slip further toward decline and chaos.”