Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome back to Going Underground. Broadcasting all around the world from the UAE as world leaders continue to gather at the UN General assembly in the aftermath of the Trump XI White House summit. In this reordered world, exactly four years ago, the United States blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, the arteries that delivered cheap Russian energy that powered decades of German industrial might. It was an act of industrial terrorism that largest human caused methane emission in history, a deliberate cut that severed Russia from its trading partners in Europe and forced the continent onto expensive American lng, gutted German factories and left lasting pain on ordinary Germans. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sy Hersh laid out the operation ordered by Biden right here on this program. Today, the world continues paying the price for American aggression. Facing Republican losses in November over a botched war co manufactured with Israel that closed the strait Hormuz and Babel Mandeb battering global energy markets, Trump now blames the diesel crisis on his Ukrainian puppet dictator Zelenskyy. That's Zelenskyy, whose attacks on Moscow and whose deep strikes into Russian energy infrastructure are enabled by the United States. It's as if he can't connect gas prices to anything Netanyahu might have ordered him to do. Joining me now is Joe Kent, Trump's director of the National Counter Terrorism center before he resigned in March over the war on Iran. A former US Army Special Forces officer and CIA paramilitary officer, Kent was also the Republican nominee for Washington's 3rd congressional district in 2022 and 2024. He joins me now from Washington, D.C.
thank you, Joe Kent, so much for coming on Going Underground. Trump asked out loud on Wednesday at the United Nations General assembly whether to annihilate Iran and drive it to hell. In your resignation letter you said to him you still support the values in foreign policy he campaigned on in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
What changed?
[00:02:05] Speaker B: That's a great question and I think it's one that will be studied for quite some time. I don't know what changed and I pray and I hope that he wakes up and he sees that this war that we were led into by a foreign government has caused absolute an economic downturn here in America. It is politically hurting him, is going against what he promised on the campaign trail. And so from a political standpoint, but also what's good for Americans here at home and then in terms of stability in the region.
These policies that we have pursued, he knows that they are not good for our country. He won two elections running as the anti war president. He knew that quagmires in the Middle east were basically a death sentence politically for leaders. Yet he let Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis march us into this war. So I think right now the best thing he can do is stop this bellicose rhetoric, declare victory, bring our troops home, and then work quietly and diplomatically using economic carrots and sticks to get us out of this quagmire and get the Straits of Hormuz open back up again.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Certainly a death sentence for thousands of civilians. At the time of this recording, obviously there hasn't been any nuclear attack on Mountain. But you wrote it was the Israel Lobby.
Can you name them? I mean, clearly JD Vance didn't support the war in Iran. You know him personally.
Can you name who this Israel Lobby is?
[00:03:33] Speaker B: Well, it's vast and it's, it's very, it runs very deep in Washington, D.C. but speaking directly to President Trump, you have Miriam Adelson, you have quite a few other prominent pro Israel donors in America who made major contributions to President Trump's campaign. That gives them a certain degree of access into the White House.
You have politicians who are members of
[00:03:57] Speaker A: say it's a very small circle of people around him before the tragic attack on Minab and the assassination of Alex Konini.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: It's very small circle. Basically by the time we got to the deliberations for this war, the President's inner circle had been shaved down a good deal. Basically the photos that were released that night down at Mar a Lago that had President Trump, Secretary Rubio, Director Ratcliffe of the CIA, and then his Department of War team, Hegseth and Kaine, and then Susie Wiles. That's really the small inner circle plus a few others here and there that President Trump is relying on. But these donors like Miriam Adelson, they have a good deal of access. But the Israelis are also able to go to all those individual cabinet members because they've cultivated long term relationships with these individuals during their political careers. A lot of these individuals like Rubio, like Ratcliffe, basically you have AIPAC bragging that they help get them the jobs that they currently have. There's, that gives members of the Israeli government and Israeli donors the ability to go point, to point directly to them and say, hey, here's our, you know, our agenda. Here's some intelligence we haven't put through the regular channels in order to get their, you know, stated objective of a regime change, war in Iran across the finish line. You also have an entire ecosystem in the media. People like Mark Levin, Fox News. You have think tanks like the foundation for the defense of democracies. That's constantly putting so called experts on Fox News. The programs they know the President's consuming. It creates an ecosystem or an echo chamber, however you want to phrase it around the President. And that's, that's a, that's basically the story of how we've gotten into this war, you know, to include. Obviously, the president had a lot of confidence built up.
The, the raid in Venezuela gave him the false confidence that we could just use military might to basically, you know, get whatever we want. There was protesters on the street in January.
The Iranians didn't hit us back in a significant way after Operation Midnight Hammer.
So all those factors played into how the Israelis were able to convince us to get into this.
But the Israelis were very shrewd and they understood that once this war started, it would go exactly like it is right now and it would quickly become politically unpopular in the United States. That's why the Israelis got President Trump on board with killing the Supreme Leader right off the bat. Because once we killed the Supreme Leader, we knew there'd be a rally around the flag effect in Iran. It would be nearly impossible for the President at that point to get a negotiated settlement with the Iranians because the Iranians would become so, you know, radicalized, essentially. They would know that they were under siege. Not to mention the tragedy at Manab where we killed nearly 200 schoolchildren. That basically makes it the popular sentiment in Iran, even for people who were against the Islamic regime. It has them now rally around the Islamic regime. And now even moderates probably can't get a deal with President Trump even if they wanted to, because of the ramifications they would face inside of Iran. The Israelis knew all this, and that's why it was essential for the Israelis to get us on board with killing the Supreme Leader within the first 24, 48 hours of the war. So now the Israelis can kind of back off. And we are, we are now locked into this conflict where Trump wants some kind of a deal. He's not going to get it diplomatically. And so now he's left with nothing but various courses of action that involve military escalation. That's why I'm recommending him just, you know, flip the table and completely walk away and then work on using economic carrots and sticks to get the Straits of Hormuz opened back up again.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Except that the Israeli lobby, I mean, I suppose you imply it there is not all powerful. I mean, what did you think of Trump not acceding to the calls from MBS to help against Yemen. Presumably Israel would have loved the United States to get involved with Saudi Arabia against Yemen. Trump apparently said no at the time of this recording. Again, he hasn't bombed Sana'. A.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: That's a good thing. I'm glad he didn't. And you're correct, the Israeli power lobby is not all powerful. President Trump still has agency. However, the longer this war goes on and he won't pull us out. I mean, he articulated when we got into the memorandum of understanding, the Islamabad Accords in June that, that he had to take this deal because if he didn't, we would be facing a major economic downturn here in America. Yet there was pressure from the Israelis, these are the pro Israel lobby, to basically send Marco Rubio over to Lebanon and to cut a side deal that negated the MoU. So as soon as we got into it, we got back out of it because of domestic, I would say domestic and pressure from that Israeli lobby. I think us not intervening against the Houthis or Ansar Allah, I think that's a good thing. People forget, but we did go to war with ansar Allah in 2025, and we were not able to achieve our military objectives against them then. And so I think he realized, look, there's not much else that we can bomb. That's going to have a major difference here. So. And also, too, we're spread thin. The more that we send military resources to go after Ansar Allah, then that takes away less military options we're going to have against Iran. And look, Ansar Allah has played their cards very well. They have basically said that they're only right now targeting the Saudis and the Israelis. And so right now, Ansar Allah hasn't made things as bad as they possibly.
So again, I think President Trump did the right thing and he said, hey, we're not going to get involved in this. Basically, we've already got enough going on in the region.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Well, could it actually be a reflection of Israeli policy, too, in that Mossad and Aman, the Israeli intelligence agencies believe that Ansar Allah is invincible?
[00:09:27] Speaker B: They may. I mean, because we, we put the full blunt of the US military from the air on Ansar Allah in 2025, and we really weren't able to, you know, take out, eliminate
[00:09:40] Speaker A: Trump, not to strike. In the leak to Signal Gate signal chat with the editor in chief of the Atlantic, Jeff Goldberg, I suppose, is quite proud that you have that leaked. You said to Trump, don't strike Gammon.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: Yeah, in the leak, I was really just saying Hey, I felt that we were being rushed into making a decision. I felt that there was some kind of external pressure that I wasn't aware of that was forcing us to make a decision. There was an issue that, that the Houthis, Ansar law, they were able to restrict and frustrate shipping in the Red Sea. And I thought that we were being forced into taking military action.
And I just pointed out, hey, look, there's nothing time sensitive. There's no reason for us to make a decision right now. I was quickly overruled by people that outrank me that said, no, the President's already made his decision. I didn't feel like we had had a robust enough discussion where we laid out all the things that could go wrong. Something that's always difficult for people who haven't been on the ground in Yemen to understand is the terrain inside Yemen. I mean, it is very mountainous. It's on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. So people, especially in the west, will look at it and think it's, you know, it's like Iraq or it's like Saudi Arabia, but it's very mountainous. Many, many nations have tried before to conquer the Houthis or, you know, the, the tribal group that is the Houthis, and have failed. And so the terrain there, that mountainous terrain, is very hard to kick the Houthis out of. And since they've ma ballistic missiles, they've mastered drones. As long as they control the high ground, they can target the Red Sea. And that was a discussion that we really didn't even get time to have before we launched head on into this war through. I think at the time, it took me a while to put all the pieces together, but at the time, it was pressure from that same Israeli lobby, that Israeli echo chamber, that ultimately got us into the Iran war.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: I mean, you ahead of counter terror under the Trump administration, it kind of feels like financial terrorism on the American people right now because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the intermittent closure of Babel Mandeb. That didn't enter into the equation when decisions were being made by Donald Trump as regards de facto financial terror on the American people.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Unfortunately, President Trump, he was aware of all these factors, but he chose to listen to Benjamin Netanyahu, and he chose to listen to very pro Israel voices within his inner circle. After Operation Midnight Hammer, those of us who were very skeptical of the use of American military power against Iran, against the Houthis, we were really boxed out. So what has been basically the common assessment of the intelligence community now for probably two decades that if Iran was actually threatened, they would hit our bases in the region and they would, I mean, people can just look at a map and look at the Straits of Hormuz. Obviously, Iran will exert control over Straits of Hormuz with very little effort. And so that has always been the worst case scenario. The president was aware of it, but again, he had a very small circle around him saying, no, no, Iran's a paper tiger. They didn't hit you after Operation Midnight Hammer, you were able to just slide into Venezuela, kidnap the president. There's already protesters on the street. This whole thing's going to be over in three or four weeks. That's what the Israelis told them, meanwhile getting him to sign on to killing the ayatollah. The Israelis, when I would interact with them, they were always very clear eyed.
They knew that this was not going to be a quick war. But for them getting us involved in this slog to take out the regime was always their primary objective. And they sold it to President Trump as something that was going to be very easy, knowing that all they had to do was get us bought in and then we really wouldn't be able to get our way out. And that's kind of where we're at right now.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Joe can't. I'll stop you there. More from the former Director of the U.S. national Counterterrorism center under President Trump after this break.
Foreign.
Welcome back to Going underground. I am still here with the former Director of the U.S. national Counterterrorism center under President Trump, Joe Kent. Joe, you were, you mentioned Venezuela a couple of times in the first part. I've got to ask you before we get more back into West Asia themes, what you think of criticism of you about the trende Aragua emails which appeared to show that you were trying to trying to conflate Maduro with this prison gangster operation in Venezuela.
Do you feel bad about that now?
[00:14:15] Speaker B: No, I don't. I was just trying to get our analysts to assess the full picture in the this is kind of like down in the weeds. But the intelligence community usually won't look at all factors, especially factors domestically that may have influenced a foreign policy because it could have them say something about a bad about a presidential administration.
However, in an assessment about should it
[00:14:40] Speaker A: have said probably Maduro is with these gangs, which of course was used as a premise for the kidnapping of Maduro.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: So the, the issue that I had with the analyst is that they said there was no evidence that trend Aragua was sending or Pushing or there was no evidence that the government of Venezuela was sending or pushing Trend Aragua members into America without assessing the fact that the Biden administration had basically opened up the border. And because we are giving Venezuelans preferred treatment under the temporary protective status, that there was actually a pull factor from the US Government. That's all I was asking our analysts to do. I was saying, okay, fine, there's no evidence that the government of Venezuela is funding these guys, Venezuelans, members of Trend Aragua, to come to America. But we also have to mention that for the last four years, the Biden administration basically was giving anybody from Venezuela a free plane ticket. So it's kind of common sense as to what a government would do. They're going to empty out their prisons, they're going to send us the worst of the worst, and potentially some of these guys who even have, you know, nefarious intent. And the way that we saw Trend Arago organize inside the United States and target the American people, you know, that was pretty evident. So all I was asking our analysts to do was to assess the full picture of how people from Venezuela could get to America and what those incentives were.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Does. Does the intel really matter? And is the intel more generally, did you experience it as it's highly politicized and after a decision is made, the intel is then manufactured to support the decision? Quite apart from the Israel lobby, I know what you've been saying about Syria. You said the US Operations in Syria were manufactured by Israel. But what was your experience in the Trump administration of the politicization of intel, or did it not even matter what you guys were writing up in terms of reports for him?
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Well, unfortunately, the intelligence community kind of shot themselves in the foot with President Trump. Now, Trump should have listened to a wide variety of his advisors, and he should have factored in what the intelligence community was saying. However, the intelligence community, because of the Russiagate scandal, they essentially lost a lot of credibility for good reason with the president. So anytime that you'd say, hey, the intelligence community says X, Y, or Z to the president, he has this skepticism in the back of his mind of, well, these are the same guys who basically said that Russia rigged the election for me and then subsequently tried to ruin my life. So there was a massive gap of trust, and I spent most of my. My professional career in the military and the CIA working in the Middle East. So I knew that the intel that we were producing was, like, actually high quality. It was intellectually very rigorous. It had been through the full process, but it was hard for me to articulate to, to him or me and, and others to articulate to him, hey, like actually this isn't the Russia Gate intelligence community. This is from like the, you know, nonpartisan intelligence community that's just giving you information. So there is a gap of trust right now. And so I do think we need people who have experience in the intelligence community who can help navigate some of that to make sure that we actually have a nonpartisan and a non political intelligence community that can give good input to our decision makers and our leaders.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: I was looking through my notes there because you mentioned Russiagate and regardless of the perceived partisanship, I mean, John Brennan, ex CIA James Clapper, DNI, James Comey, FBI Andrew McCabe, Deputy FBI we know all the list of these people who participated in the Russiagate hoax. Trump doesn't even seem to have particularly gone after them in any severe way. I mean, very marginally anything you saw as chief of counterterror, I mean technically it's a terrorist operation. When you have people within your intelligence community acting against an elected president, President.
Anything past your desk? Why has nothing been done about Christopher Steele, Adam Schiff, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page,
[00:18:33] Speaker B: It's a very good question that doesn't necessarily fall under counterterrorism, although I do agree with you that it is in a way a form of terrorism. So I wasn't involved in trying to piece that together to see if there was any criminal charges that could be brought. But I do agree with you it is curious why the President isn't more concerned about bringing those guys to justice. Because actually this is bigger than President Trump, the people who have abused the tools of the intelligence, intelligence community and really just broadly the trust the American people put in our intelligence apparatus, that none of them have been held accountable, that's going to lead to the American people continuing not to trust the intelligence community and leaders too, which is dangerous and is what we're seeing play out here in Iran part of the picture anyways? So I think that is a question more people should ask as to why President Trump is not interested in having some form of accountability for all these people who abuse the tools of our intelligence community.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: What did you get the feeling about AL Qaeda and ISIS? Daesh? We've just passed the anniversary of 9 11. The former head of Shin Betami Ayalon was on this program and didn't really answer, couldn't answer when I asked him why Al Qaeda and ISIS Daesh never attacked Israel. What's your impression now?
So many decades on and you've been so involved in the so called war on terror all these decades as to
[00:19:51] Speaker B: why they don't attack Israel. I think that's a question that we should study and look at and look here in America we still barely have answers to some of the key questions about 9 11. Significant portions of the 911 Commission Report remain redacted. And so do you know thousands of counter terrorists talk about.
[00:20:08] Speaker A: So you were the head account of terror. So you had access to.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: I was.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: You had access to all the secret stuff?
[00:20:14] Speaker B: You would think so.
But in terms of the things that have been redacted from the 911 Commission, a lot of that is still unavailable even for people on the inside because it's held by the home agencies and because it doesn't pertain to a direct threat right now. It's not something that I could just go pull up on my computer.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: First day on the job you'd be straight in there looking at the computers and all the things that even as a CIA ops paramilitary you didn't have access to. I mean what did you, did you not look at all the stuff that you was available to you suddenly to be able to understand better why so many American lives and so many lives of people in this region have been killed seemingly mysteriously quite often.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: I mean the, the declassification of a lot of the 911 documents was something that we, we wanted to do and push for and we were hoping to get an executive order pertaining to those, those but that wasn't something that I had access to. I was looking into what I believe to be more pressing matters, the Butler assassination, what happened during January 6, et cetera. But then in terms of just the bigger picture of Al Qaeda in isis, a lot of the root causes, I did look a good deal into that and again I lived it through Iraq and through Syria and other places as well.
So yeah, a lot of that I am familiar with. But I think it's a big issue here in America that we still have so much of that that hasn't been made available to the 911 surviving families and to the American people. There's a lot that could be released, you know, today if our government chose to. I mean we had people who had some degree of pre knowledge because they were trading stocks on the airlines that ended up, you know, slamming into the Pentagon and into the World Trade Center. So why those names and those entities are still unknown to the American people and why those people haven't been interrogated further? You know our government to some degree knew that the hijackers were Here in America, the government of Saudi Arabia, potentially the government of Israel, Their, their pre knowledge of these attacks, none of that has ever been disclosed to the American people. 25 years on, you're still somewhat shunned
[00:22:22] Speaker A: and even you couldn't get that information just finally, really. I mean, what about Nord Stream?
Is it your understanding that the intelligence agencies colluded with the attacks on the Nord Stream pipeline supplying energy to Russia? It's the anniversary today. The worst methane emission, human methane emission in the history of.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: It wasn't in government then. But just using common sense, I would say it would be hard to pull off that operation, you know, without us knowing about it or without us in some way, shape or form enabling it.
I, I, what Sy Hersh has put out, I think sounds relatively close. I don't know if it's exactly accurate. I can't confirm or deny that. I don't know. But just speaking of somebody with common sense and pattern recognition, I would say more than likely we had some knowledge of or hand in that operation.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: But no concrete files, Alaska, that you could have got your hands on when you were ahead of counter terror. I mean, why do you think during the genocide in Gaza under the Biden administration, no senior officials, officials of your rank in the administration, as high up as you were in the Trump administration, thought to resign over the genocide in Gaza? Is this something, is this something endemic within the Democrat psyche?
What is it?
Why did you resign? And yet there were no Democrat, no appointees in the Biden administration who could resign as they knew the pictures were coming out of Gaza.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: I think this points to just the amount of control and influence that the Israeli lobby has in Washington D.C.
when you leave working in the executive branch and you leave in good standing, there's all kinds of opportunities within the Beltway at think tanks, universities, defense contractors, et cetera, that are open to you, where you can make a lot more, more
[00:24:10] Speaker A: that's more powerful than the photographs of
[00:24:11] Speaker B: dead children, in my opinion. It's not.
However, I'm, I'm just giving you, you know, my, my honest opinion here. We didn't see anyone leave. I think there was, I think there was one or two or two. I think they were fairly, Fairly. Yeah, but not the, no, no presidential appointees. Yeah, no one confirmed by the Senate, appointed by the President did. Because look, there's an incentive system. If you have the title of the Honorable, you've been confirmed by the Senate, et cetera, you can go get on just by leaving government in good standing. You can get on multiple Boards, you're going to get hired by different defense think tanks, you're going to get speakers fees, book deals, et cetera.
And so, you know, at the end of the day, I think most of them say, well, you know, me leaving it wouldn't really change anything in Gaza. I might as well just go out quietly and kind of cash in later. That's just my take on kind of how D.C. works in general.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: I mean, famously, Charlie Kirk said he was under pressure from the Israeli.
Israeli donors to Turning Point usa. What do you make of Ben Williamson, the PR man for Cash Patel's FBI, calling you a dishonest hack after you talked about the shutting down of the investigation into the assassination of Charlie Kirk?
[00:25:25] Speaker B: I'll let the facts speak for themselves. All I've laid out is what the National Counterterrorism Center's role was in that investigation.
And I think anybody who has looked into the case and can use, again, basic pattern recognition and can examine all the facts, they will see that there's still more questions than there are answers. Even if the individual they have right now who's going to get his day in court is, you know, is the suspect.
Was there people who had pre knowledge and there's a lot of indicators. There was people posting online that Charlie Kirk was going to die that day. Charlie had a lot of national, international connections. And so all I have ever said is that we still had a lot more investigatory work, work, you know, to be done. And that's when I was, you know, the International Counterterrorism center was told, there's no more work for you guys to do here. The FBI has. And the FBI's answer has been there's one guy, it's a lone gunman. There's nothing else to see here. And so I, I think, you know, I don't care to go back and forth in some kind of a spat on social media with, you know, anybody from the FBI. But I think most people, if they look at this with clear eyes, there's. They're going to see that there actually is a lot more questions here than there are answers. And I think it's essential that we continue to push for the truth, what the, whatever the truth may be. Because if the truth is it was just one guy who, who killed Charlie Kirk, that's actually, you know, a good thing because that means it was just one deranged individual. We got him. You know, justice will be served. It doesn't bring back, you know, Charlie, and that's a tragedy for his family. And I think a tragedy for the entire country because of the type of figure Charlie was. However, if he didn't act alone, then we have a much bigger problem. That means that there is some powerful entity that is able to pull off operations like this and they likely had, you know, some political motivation. I don't know what it is. Charlie spent his entire career talking about a lot of controversial topics. So as to what the motivation is, we don't know. But if there is a organized effort out there to take out Charlie because of one of his political stances, we should delve deeply into exactly what that entity is and what their motivation was for killing him.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Joe Kent, I'll wait till next time you're on Going Underground to ask whether Tucker Carlson would make a good president. But Joe Kent, thank you.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: That's it for the show. Our condolences to all those of you bereaved or affected by Washington's wars of aggression. We'll be back on Monday with a former deputy commander of CENTCOM who says the answer to Iran is more war. Until then, you can keep in touch. Follow all our social media, if it's not censored in your country, and head to our channel, going underground TV on rumble.com to watch new and old episodes of Going Under. The on the Ground Team Monday.
