He’s a 45-year-old former Army Special Forces officer. He’s a former politician with ties to far-right conspiracies. He’s also out of a job.
Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation,” he said, adding the war was launched “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Kent’s departure from one of the country’s most sensitive intelligence posts marked a dramatic break from a man long considered among Trump’s most committed loyalists.
Kent enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 17, completed Airborne School and the Ranger Indoctrination Program, and earned his Green Beret as a Special Forces Weapons Sergeant in 2003 after arriving at the qualification course just days after the 9/11 attacks. Over 20 years, he rose through the ranks to become a Warrant Officer and was selected for a Special Missions Unit—an elite tier-one designation comparable to Delta Force—deploying across Iraq and Yemen.
Kent’s foreign policy worldview is shaped by personal tragedy. His first wife, Navy cryptologist Shannon Smith, was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in 2019 while aiding in the U.S. fight against ISIS, with her death hardening his skepticism of U.S. foreign intervention. During the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, he tore into the defense industry and Washington’s “permanent ruling class,” arguing the wars had been prolonged “on the backs and dead bodies of U.S. soldiers” by people “making money and making their careers at the other end of it.”.
That anti-interventionist conviction ultimately ended his tenure in the Trump administration. In his resignation letter, he accused “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” of running a “misinformation campaign” to push the U.S. into conflict, language critics noted drew on antisemitic tropes about Jewish Americans’ political influence.
It was a striking end for someone Senate Democrats had unanimously opposed at confirmation—every Democrat citing his right-wing ties—and who even one Republican, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, had voted against.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
