#452 - “Shocking COVERUP!” - Joe Kent UNLOADS on Iran, Butler, Charlie Kirk & Epstein

Interviewer

Foreign. You're an ex intel guy. Is McConnell dead or alive? What are we doing? Come on. He's got to be cooked.

Joe Kent

I mean, that's. Everybody keeps thinking, right. I mean, but he just keeps coming back. So I, I don't, I don't know. I feel like he's like, keep voting in the Senate regardless of his status of being alive. Dodging the question.

Interviewer

You're dodging the question.

Joe Kent

Dodging the question.

Interviewer

You're dodging it. Is he alive or. You know, I know this is your moment to tell the truth to everyone.

Joe Kent

So part of my old last job, I had to get confirmed by the Senate, so I had to go meet with senators.

Interviewer

Sorry to hear that.

Joe Kent

I. I know, yeah, it was quite the experience. Whole, whole separate podcast there. But I didn't actually meet with McConnell, but I did see him in the, like, the underground tunnel they have there. He was just being pushed in a wheelchair, like, literally, like not making this stuff up. Pushed in a wheelchair. And it's just like, what point do you just go home and not go to the Senate anymore? So I'm going to go if he's still alive and maybe, you know, will still be very old men and he'll be voting in the Senate.

Interviewer

So that's like early 2025 when you're going. When you're down there.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

And you're.

Joe Kent

Wow. Yeah.

Interviewer

It's kind of crazy. It's like, that seems like such a simple solution if you just put some term limits on it. So the people that are generationally relevant, if you will, are actually running the country. You know, that sounds like a pretty bright idea to me.

Joe Kent

I would think so. Yeah. The problem is you could term limit people, but we choose not to. So the people could term limit, you know, their elected officials all the time, but name recognition and money play and unfortunately, that's the state of our, our political affairs.

Interviewer

Yeah. It's also like the people who are responsible for voting on the term limits are the people who are in the jobs who don't want the term.

Joe Kent

Exactly. Exactly.

Interviewer

So it's like they're incentivized against it.

Joe Kent

They totally could vote themselves out of a job, but I don't think very many of them actually would.

Interviewer

Yeah. Yeah. And I think you've been at the middle of seeing that up close with certain influence and stuff that we'll talk about today, where it's like people literally vote based on who's paying them rather than what their constituents want, or even at a higher level, what's good for, you know, Your fellow veterans and the, and the people who are in uniform right now, so that we're not putting them in unnecessary harm's way. So to kind of go there for a minute, because I do want to get into your full career today so that people really understand your story as well. I feel like that's kind of been ignored since you pretty bravely came out in March, but you made the decision in March to resign from the administration. You were the director of the Counterintelligence. Counterterrorism, I'm sorry, Counterterrorism center. And that effectively was like number two in that department behind DNI Gabbard. Is that fair to say?

Joe Kent

Yeah. I mean, so if you look up the National Counterterrorism center director, I work under Dni Gabbard, but I was the President's principal advisor for counterterrorism. That's the by statute, the position.

Interviewer

It's a nice thing on the resume, not going to lie. But anyway, so you were, you were very high up there and you chose to resign because the Iran war had broken out a couple of weeks before and it was something where, at least on the advice you had given behind the scenes and maybe some other people in the administration as well, you didn't want to see that happen. You felt like this was an unnecessary war in that decision to resign though, was it, Was it more of a principal thing or was it, I can go affect things outside of this office more than I can inside of it. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help.

Joe Kent

Thank you, combination. So first and foremost, it was principle. The entire time I've been in the public light, and a big reason why I supported President Trump was his stance to not get us involved in any more needless wars. And in my opinion, this was and still is a needless war. There was no imminent threat posed by Iran. We were engaged in good faith negotiations with them throughout the course of the, the previous year, especially in the lead up to the 12 Day War. In Midnight Hammer, I had seen the. The Israeli lobby, for lack of a better term, between the Israeli government, their influencers, with Don influence in the media just really move American foreign policy, move President Trump's red line and have undue influence on him. So with that in mind, as we moved in towards this war, I knew if we committed to it that I just couldn't stay on principle. And that's twofold. Number one, I think it's absolutely Needless, I think it's a betrayal of the voters who voted for President Trump and everybody who supported our movement. I also think that I also know, you know, in my, my soul that I couldn't be part of an administration that was sending more young men and young women off to go die in wars in the Middle East. I, you know, 21 plus years ago is on my, my third deployment to Iraq. And that's when I kind of had the epiphany that we'd been lied to, that there was no weapons of mass destruction, that we were hunting Al Qaeda, but we, in fact, pretty much made it so Al Qaeda was in Iraq. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before us being there in a meaningful way. And I was very, very mad and frustrated that many of my friends had gotten killed based on, and that no one from within the Bush administration had had the moral courage to speak out, especially the veterans. And I use Colin Powell as an example because he was probably the most prominent Vietnam veteran who stayed in service, passed his military career, and then was in, you know, the highest levels of the Bush administration. He helped sell the Iraq war. And he could have spoken out in the lead up, and he could have spoken out immediately afterwards. And he, and there's others like him, too. They probably would have saved lives. And so for me, I was like, you know, I'm, I'm not going to, now that I'm the guy who has all the experiences that I've, who's worked my way into this position, I'm not going to sit here and be a part of this morally. I have to leave. But then, also, to, to your point, I did think there was some utility in being able to speak out publicly because those of us who were dissenting and trying to give the President advice to not do this or how to get out of this and how to push out a lot of the Israeli influence out of our government. We were siloed. We weren't listened to. And so I said, hey, if I can take this bold move and step out and do it publicly, then perhaps I can help move the needle. Now, whether or not that's been successful or not, I don't know. But I also felt it was really important to tell the American people just how this decision, you know, was reached, like why we went off to war, why young men and young women are coming back to Dover and body bags. So that's kind of the three big reasons why I stepped out.

Interviewer

Yeah. And, you know, another thing that strikes me is like, you're not that far out of your service. You know, it's not like you retired 20 years ago or something like that and had a lot of different jobs In Washington, in D.C. you're not separated from that experience. You quite literally have had to live with it at home with, with your wife tragically being killed, I guess. What was that, seven years ago?

Joe Kent

Yeah, 20.

Interviewer

So you know, like you, you get it. And sometimes I wonder if like a guy like Colin Powell, who, you know is from the Vietnam era, if you Fast forward to 2000-2001-2002-2003, it's almost like he's been so separated from that experience. Not that he ever forgot it or anything like that. And not to excuse him sell, but it's like you, I could see you getting caught up in that group thing, kind of just like neocon Washington D.C. well, I guess this is the thing to do, you know, when you're in a suit, behind the closed doors rather than on the other side of it. And it's been so long.

Joe Kent

Right, yeah, for sure. And Palad stayed in the system as four star general. He's commander, Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War and I think during the Gulf War he actually gave pretty good military advice to, you know, Bush won at the time where he's like, we will go in, we'll hammer him quick and then we don't want to be part of this whole nation building thing. That's what we can do. Well, as Americans, Americans, we can go in, we can conduct strikes, but then we need to get out. He stayed, you know, somewhat active, but I do think he kind of got consumed by the beltway, the group think, and just a desire to please the President, which I've seen a lot of people, they, at the end of the day their number one goal is to just please the President. And there's a debate within those of us who were chosen by the president, like is our job 100 just to serve him and to please him? There's a school of thought that says so and says what I did was, was wrong. I think you, you serve him the best that you can until you can no longer do it. And then I think you, you step out. Now others would say when out you need to keep your mouth closed. But I think the circumstances of just what was taking place from the country, the war in Iran and just the consequences that's going to have, I just, I couldn't stick with it.

Interviewer

Well, I admire it a lot and I have particularly admired what I've described to these guys. As like your Marcus Aurelius type attitude since then. And here's what I mean by that. You stay right here. You don't like. I've seen some nasty attacks come your way. I don't need to get into some of those. But I've seen some awful lies spread your way. I've seen you object, objectively tweet things out because you instantly became an analyst after this for all of us, which was really cool. We've covered it on the show, obviously. But I've seen you objectively tweet things out that are fully true, backed by then either what just happened or what then happens next and then still be labeled and gaslit into being called a liar. And you've never gotten mad, that I can tell. And I know obviously you have some personal internal anger about the fact that we're in this war, but you maintain such a composed public presence. How do you do that?

Joe Kent

I mean, I think it's my background. I mean, you, you, what's, what's the saying? You don't rise to the occasion. You fall back to your baseline of training. And so just from being in special operations, we, we are not recruited, trained, and then ever rewarded in our career for, for losing our cool, losing our temper. So I, I would attribute that to it. And then also I, I mean, I'm trying to be self righteous here, but I truly believe in everything that I'm saying. And I'm not going to say I'm always right, I don't always get it right. But at the end of the day, I know where I'm coming from morally and I know it's a place that I'm comfortable with and look my kids in the eyes and I can explain to them what I did, what I'm saying, why I believe it. And I'll just say that I think a lot of people right now who are pushing out talking points, especially in support of this war, they can't say the same thing. Now. Some can because I think some truly do believe what they're saying. But the vast majority who are, who are, you know, paid to put out personal attacks against me and whoever else speaks out against the war, they can't say that. They don't have that moral clarity.

Interviewer

Yeah, it's like being able to live with yourself at night, you know, right or wrong, at least, you know, like you're giving it your honest take. I think that's, that's awesome. But how old are your kids now?

Joe Kent

So my youngest just turned 9 and then my oldest will turn 11 here next month.

Interviewer

All right, so they're not. They're not three and four. Like, they. They have to understand at least some gravity of a, what a serious job you had, and B, that you really did something on a limb here. Have you. I'm just curious, like, what were the conversations like, maybe with your oldest when you made this decision to. To jump out?

Joe Kent

Well, luckily, we keep them pretty isolated, so we live kind of out in the sticks, and they don't have devices or anything like that, much to their. Their chagrin, so they don't see any of that. We homeschool. We're in, like, a homeschool. Oh, you homeschool group. Thanks to my wife. She's amazing. So. But they're still kind of aware because they go to a jiu jitsu gym. So we have a little bit of a community. Community was great. Like, they were like, you know, hailing me as some kind of a hero. And so my kids were like, what happened? What'd you do? I'm like, well, you know, I don't have the same job I had just a little bit ago, but I did something that made the news. And from running for Congress before, they were kind of used to me being a little bit on the news, But I explained to them specifically, like, hey, this is. This is what we were doing. This is why I'm against it in particular. And then obviously, they've been so close to death and loss from. From losing my late wife, their mom, that they. They get that. And I just said, hey, look, there's. There's more people that are having the same thing happen to us right now because of this war, and I just don't support that. Yeah, they. I think they. They understand that as much as a 9, 11 year old can.

Interviewer

I think that's what resonates with most people at home. You know, obviously there's a lot of families out there who have family members in the military or have lost family members in the military. But even for, you know, people who don't have people close to them in either of those scenarios, when they see someone speaking out, who has had to live that and pay the highest price, whether you agree with them or not, I've always. There needs to be some kind of serious reverence on that and, like, giving more room for, well, what is this person's opinion here? Because they've seen the things that, you know, I was never brave enough to go over there and have to see. You know, whenever I've had special Forces guys in here where some of my guys in the military who served, it's like they know a world that the best I can do knowing it is watch YouTube videos or go on Twitter. So even sometimes where someone will be given some opinions that, like, objectively I disagree with, with those guys, like from, from your background, I'm always like, I give that way more because it's like, well, at the same time, how much do I have to stand on to disagree with that? When this guy saw it with his own two eyes, you know?

Joe Kent

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I, I think especially in times of, like, war like this, I think our, the veteran voice is actually pretty important. And then to ask the question why too, because there's a lot of veterans who I, I understand we can get into all this, like, why they might still have a grudge against Iran. Like, I get it. But at the end of the day, if on our wars, or really all the wars we fought since the end of World War II, for those who are alive right now, to include the Vietnam veterans, are getting older and older, it's like, what did we gain after all these? And why do we think this time will be any different? Like, it's literally the same lies, it's the same talking points. And so are we going to be staring down, you know, in 10, 20 years? And it's like, well, that Iran thing was a mistake too. It's like, well, we should have learned enough by this point to go ahead and now that we're six months into it or so or four months into it, be able to say, like, let's just get out now before this gets even worse.

Interviewer

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Joe Kent

That's a good question. In the lead up to the 12 Day War, in the lead up to Midnight Hammer, there was a very robust period of debate and looking at different courses of action that included the National Security Council process, the Deputies Committee process, the things that you would expect to happen where there's actually systems and processes built in. And there was really robust debate there. I would say there was only a handful of people who were truly, truly like in support gung ho, really about any of it. There was a lot more who were just kind of like, all right, well the best thing is like, all right, well let's at least try and make sure this thing isn't too big of a disaster. Or especially if Midnight Hammer, there was a hope that we would just take out these nuclear facilities and Then we'd be done with it. We'd get back to negotiations, which was the initial track that we, we were on. And we can get into this too. I, I think we were on the cusp of the deal before the 12 day war, which is why, which is why the Israelis sprinted to the 12 Day War. When the Trump administration, When we took office In January of 2025, the Iranians knew that Trump wasn't a guy to screw with because of killing Qasem Soleimani in the first Trump administration. And Abumani Mohandas, deputy, what did you

Interviewer

think of that at the time?

Joe Kent

I fully supported it. I still do. It's interesting because I defended that for quite some time. And there were some folks who were probably more non interventionalists who would say no, killing Soleimani was the first step into a broader war of Iran. And for years I said, no, no, Trump never took the bait. He was smarter than that. That we didn't end up in a broader war of Iran. Well, unfortunately, like they, they proved to be correct. I, what I think President Trump got right in his first administration was he showed that he would decisively use military action. He would take the gloves off. ISIS is a great example. Somani is a great example. The first time I ever heard President Trump speak as a candidate, I was actually sitting in Iraq again, fighting air quotes, fighting isis, because we didn't really have the authorities to meaningfully fight isis. We were out there, we were taking risks, we were taking losses. But this is when Obama was like, yeah, the fight against ISIS is going to be like a decade long. Trump comes back in. We dropped the hammer on ISIS like we knew we could have. And we have the ISIS problem taken care of. And greatest speech of all time in less than a year. Yeah, yeah.

Interviewer

Abu Bakr Baghdadi is dead.

Joe Kent

He's dead. You know, I mean, and then even before that, he had taken away all the ground that ISIS controlled. But he didn't get us sucked into a broader war. He understood at like a Trump intuitive level that if a president gets deeply involved in the Middle east, it will screw him over because he watched that happen to Bush, he watched that happen to Obama, and he knew that that was the hot stove he didn't want to touch in the first administration. He knew he had to go in and he had to drop the hammer every now and again, but don't get stuck in it. He was trying to get our guys out. He was blocked from getting our guys out of Syria. That's why my late wife was killed.

Interviewer

She Was blocked.

Joe Kent

Yes, he was blocked by pretty much the bureaucrats in his own administration.

Interviewer

Now, you explain that. How the president gets blocked from making a decision like that, that's kind of wild.

Joe Kent

It's actually pretty easy. I mean, the President has such a broad portfolio that if the, you know, chief of staff and the people who run the president's schedule, essentially, if they keep him busy moving from thing to thing to thing to thing, the President never has time to go back and say, hey, what's that, that one thing that we were talking about 10 minutes ago? Did you guys do that or were we talking about it last week? It's. It's. I mean, if you've ever managed anything, you kind of understand that. Now imagine running the most power in the world. So when Trump said, get our troops out of Syria, because he said, get our troops out of Syria after we took down the last bit of ground that ISIS controlled, this is something else that Trump understood, I think, that. That he doesn't get enough credit for. He understood that if we stayed in Syria or Iraq to chase down every single last ISIS guy with a black flag who had, you know, sworn Albaya to isis, we'd be there forever. So he said, okay, ISIS controls ground right now. That's the problem. I'm going to take away all the ground they control. Then we're getting out. We took down the last town that is held inside Syria in the fall of 2018. Right around December, early December of 2018, Trump said, get our troops out. And that's. He even tweeted it out to make sure that was kind of Trump's kind of way, I think, of trying to, like, dummy proof it from the military from blocking it. Said, get our troops out. My late wife and her team were supposed to be out of Syria in. On Christmas Eve of 2018. But this is when all the bureaucrats. Matt has publicly resigned. There's a bunch of other folks who dragged their feet and said, no, we need to stay, Mr. President. So he starts getting his head full of like, we can't leave on this timeline. We need to stay. And so we end up, unfortunately, staying in Syria. He tried to get us out of Afghanistan, too. He cut a peace deal. He got a lot of crap for it, but he cut a peace deal with the Taliban that would have had us on a planned withdraw ahead of the disastrous withdrawal from. From Kabul. That's a big reason why in 2021, the Taliban launched a major offensive because the Biden administration broke the Doha Accords in order to have a Symbolic victory withdraw on the September 11th anniversary. They should have been out in May. That's when the Taliban started the, the, the actual offensive there. So Trump had, he understood how to use power and then when to use diplomacy. And then same thing with Somati. The Iranians were starting to pick away at us a little bit because the Iranians didn't need us anymore for the counter ISIS mission because Trump had just won against isis. And so the Iranians wanted us out of Iraq, and so they started attacking our guys. And Trump basically said, I'm not going to take the bait. I'm not going to get sucked into this, but if you guys kill one American, I'm going to hammer you. They killed an American interpreter, a contractor, but he was an American citizen. Prison. Trump says, okay, who do I got on the target board? Who can I affect? And the military came to him and said, qasem Solmani is the number one, you know, Iranian. You basically terror proxy master. Trump says, okay, fine, kill that guy. And the military at the time and the intelligence community was pretty shocked because Obama and Bush, like, were basically taunted and hunted by Qassem Soleimani and they didn't have the stones or the resolve to actually go and kill him. Trump kills him. The Iranians, they freak out. I mean, they launch a couple ballistic missiles at our bases to show that they actually did some form of response. Now all the war hawks on our side, John Bolton, these guys, they come to Trump and they say, now's the time, let's go. The Israelis too. Let's go. Let's, let's go hammer Iran. And Trump's like, are you kidding me? Like, I just, I just one up them. They killed one of our guys and I killed their terror proxy master. Custom Somani that Bush and Obama didn't have the result to kill. Fast forward to, you know, the Biden administration comes in under Biden after October 7th. The Iranians and their proxies are attacking our troops in Iraq, in Syria almost, I think 300 times. Those attacks are never answered for in a meaningful way. We took out a guy here or there. When Trump comes back in, though, those attacks stop. The Iranians stop. They stop. The Iranians tell us that they're done. Like, they just like call you up

Interviewer

and be like, yeah, well, they have,

Joe Kent

they, they have ways, they have ways of making it very clear ways we should. Well, they back channels. And so we talked to the Qataris, we talked to other folks. Iraq, I mean, the Iraqi government, Iraq is literally in the middle between us And Iran. And so they talk to kind of everybody, which. Which is a good thing. It's a good ally to have there because they can talk to the Iranians. So we knew through multiple different streams, essentially that the Iranians were withholding their proxies. Now, there was a big debate whether or not Iran could withhold its proxies. Like, do all the different proxies that have been attacking Americans since October 7th, do they listen winter on calls? That was a big debate that we had. I was skeptical. I was like, I don't know, man. I think these guys are going to keep attacking us. I think they're going to test us. I think this is going to be, you know, a big contest of which one of these little proxy groups is the. The biggest dog on the block. That didn't happen. The Iranians held them back. And so even going in, all through the winter and the spring, while Steve Wyckoff was engaged in negotiations with the Iranians, I kept waiting. I was like, these guys are going to hit us at some point. And they didn't. They were able to actually hold back their proxies. This showed that they were serious about the negotiations process because they knew that if they were starting, if they're going to start attacking our bases again, then that they would have to deal with Trump.

Interviewer

Just to be clear, the winter and spring you're referring to is this 25 and 2026. Yeah, 2025, meaning not before the 12 day war, just in the lead up

Joe Kent

to the 12 day war.

Interviewer

So it was that.

Joe Kent

It was.

Interviewer

Yeah, early 2025. So you saw that they pulled off. So this is right when you're getting into office. It's like, I would imagine. When did you get confirmed? Beginning of February.

Joe Kent

So I didn't get confirmed officially until August, but I was working as DNI Gabbard Chief of Staff.

Interviewer

Oh, so they did. They waited a long time for. I didn't know that.

Joe Kent

I had my hearing. I had my hearing in April, and then they. They waited, wait. It takes a while for. For the. If you're not in the primary Cabinet, they. They make you wait.

Interviewer

You think we could move this a little faster in the government. But they never.

Joe Kent

They got things to do in the Senate, I guess.

Interviewer

So they named you the Chief of staff then at the time, which I guess that, like, kind of effectively, like, waves you into.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

Doing a lot of the same things you were going to be doing.

Joe Kent

Yeah. So after Trump won the election in 24 and I lost my congressional race, I. I jumped in on on Tulsi's team as part of the transition. So led ODNI transition. There's a portion where the president's been elected, but he's not, he hasn't been. He hasn't come into office. So the whole transition period, I was representing odni, interacting with the ODNI staff. And then when we came in, even before she was confirmed, there's about five of us that came in on the landing team on day one. So President Trump swears in, and we came in and we swore in at, at ODNI to kind of start running the framework there for her. So that's. That was my role basically up until I was confirmed armed.

Interviewer

Got it. So a little side tangent here, but what was your relationship previously with Tulsi before the 2024 election?

Joe Kent

So we had some mutual friends from the military and then obviously mutual friends from politics and similar views. She came out to Washington State and helped campaign with me in 2022. And then when the Ukraine war was kicking off, her and I were kind of like on Tucker show all the time. So Tucker introduced us, but at the same time, she had just gotten back from a deployment to the Horn of Africa where she was embedded with Special Forces. So she was actually with a Special Forces group and a couple guys I knew that connected us as well in

Interviewer

the Horn of Africa. What were they doing out there fighting like Boko Haram and stuff or over

Joe Kent

on the the other side? So Al Shabaab and the ISIS affiliate out there.

Interviewer

Yeah, it's a nasty fight over there that gets ignored a lot.

Joe Kent

Yeah, that's actually probably America's longest ongoing wars. In Mogadishu.

Interviewer

In Mogadish.

Joe Kent

In Somalia. Yeah.

Interviewer

That's wild. So anyway, you get, get. You're effectively in his chief of staff, at least while the administration is starting to ramp up. But right at the beginning, essentially what I'm hearing from you is that this was already a conversation like, what's happening with, with Iran? Are we doing something? What's Israel doing with them? And it culminates at the time. And what was the 12 day war in June where we ended up going in and bombing the Florida facilities and then afterwards saying, we got their nuclear facilities, we took out their capabilities, we're good. So two questions there. Number one, did you believe, like, was what they were saying publicly about taking out any nuclear capability accurate to what you guys knew privately, number one? And number two, what about this was good enough to you that you didn't decide then that you were stepping down?

Joe Kent

Yeah. So actually, for even to back up even further. So in the winter and spring, I didn't think that President Trump was even going to tolerate the idea of us doing anything offensively against Iran unless they attacked us. I had seen him get the sales pitch of like, hey, from members of the National Security Council and the Israelis. I mean, we were meeting with the Israelis. Like, the Israelis were like, this is the time to take down the Ayatollah. And I'm like, okay. I mean, I get you've heard of it. I've worked in the Middle east before. Like, you know, you get the sales pitch. You know, if you worked, if you worked in the region, you kind of know what the general vibe is from. From every one of the players there. And my perception. And of course, I wasn't in every meeting, but ODNI does give the President his presidential daily brief. Formal intel briefings only happen, like, probably about once a week. So at that time, I was probably only in the Oval with the President probably about once a week. So wasn't with him at all times. But when I saw it brought up there, he was, like, utterly uninterested in it because he knew he had leverage over Iran and because of not just killing Somani, but also the mass max pressure sanctions. Sanctions. He knew economically that the Iranians needed sanctions relief. They needed to get their oil and gas industry back up online. And to do that effectively, they needed sanctions relief. So who had the most leverage? President Trump did. The Iranians really just wanted the ability to enrich some of their. Their nuclear weapons. They didn't. Or nuclear, excuse me, nuclear material, their enriched uranium. They had a prohibition on developing a nuclear weapon that it held since 2003. And so whenever I bring this up, people will say, well, that's an Iranian religious decree. Do you trust Iranian Shia fatwas? I'm like, no, I don't. But I trust things that I can observe over time. And so basically from 2003, when the Iranians said, we are going to prohibit ourselves from developing a fatwa via. From developing a nuclear weapon via fatwa, they observed that. And we had watched the Iranians go back and forth and members of, you know, different parts of the Iranian government try and convince the Supreme Leader to lift the fatwa, they were never successful. Iran basically had this nuclear policy where they would be a breakout state where they would have breakout. They would have the ability to enrich uranium so that if they wanted to, they could break out and develop a nuclear weapon. So they would basically always be somewhere between several months to a year plus from developing a nuclear weapon. They said, and they still say that they would never surrender their ability to enrich uranium. Now, that worked out just fine with what President Trump's stated policy and what he still basically still says to this day. He says, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Well, under the previous. I told you, their policy was Iran can never have a nuclear weapon either. And so that got them to the negotiating table. And this is why the president was putting so much emphasis on Wyckoff's endeavors in terms of reaching some sort of a deal with the Iranians. This is why really early in the administration, you would see Witkoff go on some of the Sunday shows and he would talk about the negotiations and he would even talk about what level of enrichment is appropriate. Which one. Which level enrichment will we tolerate? What level of enrichment are we going to be able to observe? That was the discussion what the Israeli apparatus, echo chamber, however you want to phrase it, what they did very effectively was they moved the president's red line. President's red line was no nuclear weapon. The Iranians agreed. They were able to make the president's red line, no nuclear enrichment, knowing that that was a poison pill for the Iranians. Because anytime we say no enrichment to the Iranians, the Iranians say, no, absolutely not. We're not going to do that. Now. Why, why the Iranians have that stance? It's actually pretty pragmatic. They saw when a. A leader in the Middle east gave up all of his ability to enrich uranium and give up all of his nuclear program, he got a regime change war that was mumar Gaddafi and Libya. Yeah.

Interviewer

Didn't turn out well.

Joe Kent

Also, they also saw if they sprinted towards getting a nuclear weapon or if they were even like, coy about it and hinted that maybe we do have a nuclear weapon, like. Like Saddam did. And Saddam, you know, we now know that he didn't have one, but he, for a while there, his whole thing was to kind of like, I'm the big man in the Middle east and maybe, maybe I do have one. Screw you. I'm not going to tell you. You. They also knew if they did that, that that would basically give us and the Israelis the justification for going after them. Hence their. I call it the Goldilocks version. So that was. That was their doctrine. The Israelis were able to come in and use official engagements with members of the US Government, Trump's cabinet, and then also use their. Their network of donors who has access to the president, to get his ear. But then also they use their media apparatus on, you know, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, various think tanks, foundation for domestic democracies to basically tell the president that if the Iranians had, have any kind of enrichment capability, if they can enrich anything, that, that that's the same thing as a nuclear weapon. So they basically were able to move the president's red line. Now we had an opportunity in the lead up to the 12 day war. We knew that the Israelis were pretty freaked out because Wyckoff was having successful negotiations and they were not, they weren't confident in their ability to continue to move the President's red line. So the Israelis basically said we're going to go attack Iran trying to force our hands hand. Now the operation Midnight Hammer was an effort to take the whole enrichment thing off the table completely. So if we went and we totally destroyed, totally obliterated all of their enrichment capabilities, then the enrichment issues, it's dead. We don't talk about it anymore.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

Then we can move on to a broader deal of Iran which is what the president wanted. So you asked how did that come

Interviewer

together though Joe, like meaning they did the attack, how soon before that did you guys know they were going to

Joe Kent

be doing that, doing Midnight Hammer, doing It happened pretty quick.

Interviewer

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Joe Kent

And I, I'm, I mean I from we, we on the intel side, especially not being like a tactical targeting, you know, this is where you drop the bomb side of the intel that wasn't our, our wheelhouse. Like they would come to us and say intelligence community, if we were to bomb these, what do you guys think would happen? I think the prep work was happening, happening separately from us, probably with the Department of War.

Interviewer

Okay.

Joe Kent

Etc. But that, that was the goal with Men and Hammer was to take that completely off the table. Then to get back to the neg negotiating table. The Israelis were freaked out. The negotiations would happen. That's why they sprinted the 12 day war. The first time I really saw that the Israelis had entirely too much influence over us. I was already pretty dismayed by just how much they had inserted themselves into the, the policy process. But in the lead up to the 12 Day War, we basically had this problem where we're like, we know the Israelis are going to attack. And then we feared that the Iranians would say that, well if Israel attacked us, that means America's attacking us. And that would kick the war off in the way that it did in February, March. That was our concern. And so a few of us sat down and we said, well, how do we prevent this from happening? And it was pretty simple. We remove some of the air defense features that we give the Israelis. We take it away from them and we say that we will not allow you guys to go on the offensive now because we've taken away some of your defensive capabilities that are ours that we, we give to you. You're going to have to use your own equipment, your own capabilities to defend your country. So if you're attacked by the, by the Iranians will help defend you. But if you attack, we're not going to defend you. It's pretty simple math. Like we provide these Things to the Israelis, they shouldn't be taking actions that we don't approve of. They're going to put us in a bad position. Me and some others floated this idea and I wouldn't say we were laughed out of the room, but nobody wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole.

Interviewer

Oh, wait, so you were, you guys weren't just meeting about this. You guys proposed this in maybe not the Oval Office, but somewhere pretty high up?

Joe Kent

Yeah, we proposed this in, in order to prevent the 12 day war from happening it, to prevent the Israelis from attacking. Because we knew that once the Israelis got off the ground with this attack law of unintended consequences. We don't know what's going to happen now. 12 day war that we, we lost that argument. We didn't take anything away from the Israelis. And the Israelis, like clockwork, they went and they conducted the attacks. The 12 Day War. President Trump conducts Midnight Hammer. And then after that, you saw President Trump's demeanor. He was like, they need to stop the attacks. You know, he even told the Israelis when they were there, the Israelis are trying to start a second wave. And he told them to turn around midair. That's when he was out on the helo pad saying like, they don't know what the they're doing. He was frustrated because he thought, okay, if I take out, if I take this stupid enriched uranium thing off the table, it's done. Now the Israelis, when you would talk to them, they knew that the, the nuclear issue and the enrichment issue was just a way to get us into the war. They knew it was something that would draw a lot of fear here in America. But it wasn't their number one concern. Their number one concern. And they've always been laser focused on this. And I, I respect, I respect them for being able to pursue their own objectives. Their number one goal has always been regime change. But they know regime change there is going to take a long time. So their initial good enough goal is regime decapitation and chaos. And that's never anything that we've been good with. Like in, in America, the American mind, we are not good with chaos. The Israelis are good with chaos. The Israelis are okay with lighting all of their adversaries nations on fire and having them be too chaotic to pose a threat to them. That's, that's literally an Israeli doctrine. It's a doctrine that we don't, we don't think like that. But that's basically how they think. Yeah, mowing the grass. This is basically what they'll do. They'll they'll, they'll go in and they'll say, every now and again, we need to go into Gaza, we need to go into southern Lebanon, we need to go into Syria, and we need to just kill a whole group of leaders. And then we'll come back later on. We'll kill a whole nother group of leaders. Like, we don't know. Like, they're not going to worry about installing another government. All these different things that we kind of twist ourselves in the knots thinking about. But the Israelis knew if they sold, if they, if they said that to us, that we'd be like, yeah, we're not in with this. So they made this nuclear issue and they made enrichment this, this thing that we had to go take out. So you asked a very important question. When we went in, we did Midnight Hammer. Did we totally obliterate the, the uranium? Now, having us center our success in Iran off of getting all the nuclear dust or getting all the enriched uranium, that is a recipe for us to forever be chasing things inside of Iran. So did we destroy the nuclear facilities? Absolutely, we destroyed them. Buried deep down under miles of rubble. Is there some form of, of enriched uranium? Yeah, probably. I mean, because it doesn't when you drop bombs on it. Like. But realistically, we set their program back very. A good, you know, a good deal. And then also we can observe all these locations of satellites. But again, this is where the Israelis are pretty smart. They're always now able to go and say like, well, until you physically hold that ground, then it's unsecured, and it's still out there.

Interviewer

But would you, you just, you said something about the Iranians with the ayatollah, with the fatwa, and whether or not you would trust the Iranians. And you're like, I don't trust them, but I do trust things over time or something like that.

Joe Kent

If you can verify something over time.

Interviewer

Right. So why. This is what I don't understand. In all these rooms where whoever's in there, all these different people, you've seen literally over just Benjamin Netanyahu's political career, which never ends, you have seen actions over time where they move a red line or change the scenario and say, no, no, no, trust me, this is the most important thing to us. And then, you know, over here say, actually, you know, it's really this. But the Americans will never understand that you guys are all smart. You know, like, aren't there enough people going, yeah, they've told us this forever, that they care about this, but they really just Want regime change. I mean, we'll skip ahead later, but like obviously it ended up with Trump even in the new war with it ended up saying terms like regime change. But at the time, if he wasn't and how could he not see that that's exactly what they wanted?

Joe Kent

I think a lot of that is just the siloing off that goes on around the President in the lead up to the 12 day war. Like I said, there was pretty robust debates and president was there for some of those robust debates. But a lot of people don't want to tell the president things that he doesn't want to hear. And if you tell the president something that he doesn't want to hear, I think a lot of times with the President Trump that I knew and I have some questions about what of kind, kind of happened to that guy, but the President Trump that, that, that I knew that I was around, he didn't mind dissenting opinions. As a matter of fact, he would focus in on dissenting opinions and say, well, why do you think that? It's one of the things I always really respected about him. However, that is a threat to people that are seeking power around him. So there's, there are people who want to control the room around any principle to say that like, you know, the party line is basically what we're going with. So that's, that's number one. And, and it's on the president and ultimately the buck stops with him. He should have that. I'm hoping right now because the war is going so poorly that he looks around at the people who've been telling him all you need is one more bombing campaign and says, guys, you've been wrong about everything so far. Like, why don't you, let's bring in some more people here that are actually dissenting voices. He, he needs to do that. I, I am, you know, questioning whether or not his, his own ego and pride is going to let him do that. I don't, I hope it will. I don't, I don't know if it is. But also a big reason why the President didn't hear a lot of this is because again, the Israeli are smart. They know that when they were dealing in a regular intelligence liaison capacity with someone like, like me and other intelligence professionals that they actually, and they're, they, they have a lot of professionals too. They have a very capable intelligence apparatus. Oh yeah. And when you would talk to them candidly, like they wouldn't us, I mean candidly, if it was one on one, their intelligence guys with our Intelligence guys, they would say, now is the time for us to take down the regulation regime. We've already decapitated Hezbollah. They'd tell you this, yeah, yeah, yeah. They'd be like, but we can't do it without you guys. And then we want to do this by killing the Ayatollah and killing all the leaders. And so we would come back and say, well, if you do that, don't you think there's going to be a big rally around the flag effect? Don't you think Iran is already gradually becoming more weak? We're in negotiations right now. The negotiations that we were engaged in, and even the negotiations that the president says he'll tolerate right now, they leave that same structure in place. Place.

Interviewer

Our.

Joe Kent

Our basic, you know, our overall, you know, stated goal was we don't need to do regime change. We just want to make sure that you guys agree with us that you're not going to have a nuclear weapon. And then we can talk about sanctions relief, etc. That's not. The Israelis. The Israelis are saying, we want to completely decapitate the entire regime. When they said they wanted to do that, we said, okay, if. If you kill this, the freaking supreme leader, guys, you guys know Shia Islam. You know human nature. If you do that, don't you think you'll just galvanize and strengthen the regime? And they were like, yeah, yeah, to a certain extent. And that's gonna. It's gonna take some time. Yeah. They were basically like, of course there will be a rally around the flag effect. These guys are smart. They're not dumb. They knew that there was going to be a rally around the flag effect. And they're like. And then we'll just have to keep doing it. So this is where. This is where the Israeli mentality, they're basically just like, we can keep going in and mowing the grass. And when they say we, they mean us doing it for them because Iran is much further away than Gaza or southern Lebanon. They need our capabilities. It's also a very modern country with ballistics and drones that they can produce. So they need Big Brother to come in and do that heavy lifting. Now that's when I'm dealing with Israeli intelligence professionals who, if they would have said something like, no, Joe, it's going to be bing bang boom, just like Venezuela. I'd have been like, stop. Like, please don't. At least they respected us enough not to say that. But then when you would have individuals like Benjamin Netanyahu and the other individuals from his cabinet that have access to the president or to Marco Rubio or Hegseth or any of these guys. Guys, they would then go with the party line of saying like, hey, this is, look, 12 Day War. It wasn't that bad. They didn't hit us that hard. And then also, you guys just went and snatched a president in Venezuela. Look what happened. That country didn't, you know, fall into chaos. Iran's a paper tiger. And so by then the people who were the descending voices had already been pushed out. And so this whole thing got sold to the president. That was going to be quick and easy and. And now here we are.

Interviewer

Yeah, I remember sitting here that Saturday night after they did the Venezuela Venezuela mission early that morning, which was a very impressive mission. But you know, I had a native Venezuelan kid In here, Daniel DiMartino, who obviously was very happy about it and I understand that. But you know, my concerns about it, among them was the, I'll make up a word here, but the parallel ification that could happen with this when, you know, no disrespect to Venezuela, but you're talking about a country in south america with roughly 30 million people that doesn't have a regional cultural. Like, what's the word I want to use here? It's not like in, in the Middle east where you have a lot of different countries that follow different sects of a major world religion and there's a lot of shit going on there. This is like its own kind of thing. There's some other countries in South America, they're a mess, but it doesn't create spark a cultural revolution in the area. If you go into Iran, it's a nation of 90 to 93 million people. It's geographically fucking a nightmare to go into. It's in the dead center of earth, effectively between the Western and Eastern worlds, if you want to put it that way. China's on the other side and you are not going to be able to take down the regime that quickly. And if you now use the Venezuela thing as an example to say you will, you are just going to, to spark exactly what you said, a rally around the flag scenario. You're going to spark all the other countries around there hating you, potential their people at least hating you potentially more for creating a mess. And yes, you're going to have Israel now in the middle of it too, and they're not exactly popular in the world. And I was like, this is how I'll judge whether or not Venezuela was, you know, two, three years from now when we're looking down the line that night I was like, we'll judge whether or not this was a good idea on, on X, Y and Z factors in Venezuela. But then fucking A, b, C, D all the way through the Alphabet on what happens in the rest of the world. And so far it feels like we're. We were scoring an F over here because we did effectively take that and say, you know what, like you're saying that was easy so we could at least try this. And now it's got these 10th order effects. And we're sitting here today. You're sitting here today not sitting in that office anymore because of it.

Joe Kent

Yeah. I mean, after the Venezuela raid, had a. A friend of mine and he said he was still in special operations and he said, hey man, do people in D.C. understand that like we kind of got lucky on this one?

Interviewer

Lucky?

Joe Kent

Yeah. They're like, hey, you know, we're skilled. We go in and we've been snatching people out of their houses in the middle of the night now for 20 plus years. Like hella born assault. Like we, we are very good at that. But for us to be able to go in and grab a president, like we. We cannot go in and grab, stab or kill the leader of a country that we're mad at. Like we got pretty lucky here that this wasn't much worse.

Interviewer

Yeah.

Joe Kent

And the second and third order effects were there. You know, that was their. That was the concern of the guys on the ground. They're like, this is not going to be panacea. This is not going to be the fix all, cure all for any foreign policy issue that we have. We can't just go in and topple the regime by killing one guy or snatching one guy out of his bed at night. That was their, their big takeaway. And that was a lot of our concern too. We were like, okay, we're glad that this went well. I still don't kind of know fully what the plan was. I get it. We want to have a strong partner down there. Hemispheric defense. It makes a lot more sense than us going over to the middle East. But that was our concern was like this was really easy. Thankfully no one got hurt. But is the president going to now believe that as opposed to having to do much more complex negotiations and diplomatic processes that we can just go in and kind of force our will on countries and have it work out our way?

Interviewer

Right. And I, I mean I, I talked to some people as we had John Kiriakou in here. I think we recorded Friday the 20th. Deef is that right. Yeah. So it's Friday the 20th. And he, he. It then went viral where he had a clip where he was explaining he had talked to someone in the White House that morning. They were going, and it was gonna happen. And, you know, some people were giving him about that. People were fighting about it online. But after that came out, I put it out on that clip on Saturday night. I had some people hit me up who were, I guess, like, I'll call them, somewhat close to the situation. And the way they laid it out was that Trump, regardless of who had convinced him of this or if he had convinced himself of it, they weren't clear on that. He really felt like it could be his legacy, that he was the one who took down the Islamic Public Republic of Iran and, you know, the Ayatollah, and that this would be something that could be done. Yeah. Not in a night like Venezuela, but the way they described it was it could be done in weeks.

Joe Kent

Yep.

Interviewer

So obviously he thought that, but you didn't think that. Most people who have looked at the situation didn't think that. So is that, that has to be. You know, people talked about, like, Netanyahu and Rupert Murdoch calling them and, and trying to convince him to do this. It's got to be more than that, though. It's got to be like a big apparatus of people really telling them, yeah, you're going to be able to do this in weeks. And then provide. Provide. Obviously it's not good evidence, but evidence as to. Here's how.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

So what could they have said to make him believe? Four weeks.

Joe Kent

Well, luckily, you're seeing a lot of it trickle out right now in reports and leaks and whatnot. So, again, the, The Israelis knew that this was going to be a mess, but they knew they needed to get us on board. But we couldn't get ourselves out of the mess, so that we had to continue to fight, fighting it out, which has proven to be true. Right. So they got us on board of killing the Ayat Tola right away. And they even got Trump to kind of go out and crow and brag about that a little bit. And that galvanized the Iranian people, and that made. That made it. So the Iranians, even, like some of their. Their best diplomats who probably wanted to cut a deal, made it so those guys can't cut a deal. I mean, look at, look at how Iran reacted to the actual burial of the Supreme Leader and members of his family. Like, right now, if you're in Iranian, who says, I want to go cut a deal with the Americans, it's probably the last time we hear from you. Yeah, you know, so the, the Israelis baked into the cake. They knew that that was, that was coming. So they very effectively used what I call the, the echo chamber. You probably had a lot of like, you know, whatever, Mark Levins, Benjamin Netanyahu, Rupert Murdoch's calling Trump and speaking to Trump in language that the President understands. At the same time, you had the Israelis doing what I basically call throwing, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. So they would come with like a series of plans. And look, none of their plans, plans I don't think were serious because I think the Israelis are a very serious intelligence service. And the plans that they were presenting, they weren't serious, but they wanted. The goal of the plan was to make it look like they had a plan. Their plan all along has been chaos. And to get us bought into the chaos. They're okay with having to mow the grass in Iran indefinitely, especially as long as we pay for it, we fight for it as we believe, we bleed for it. So they would come and they would say things like, and you're seeing this in, in the, the news and I don't think any of it actually even and got off the ground like, oh, we'll have the Kurds do it. Well, have you ever looked at a map? I mean, the Kurdish region in Iran, it's not like the Kurdish region in Iraq, which, the Kurds region in Iraq is big, but it's still not that big. Like we, we couldn't overthrow Saddam with just the Kurds. We tried in 91, it didn't work. So same thing here. You had people going and saying like, oh, we have a plan with like the Kurds. And it's like, okay, this isn't a serious plan, guys. And then you'd hear other nonsense about like the MEK. And then there was a report the other day about the blue separatists on the Pakistan border. I mean, none of these are serious plans. But there was enough of a media, I think, push and then a push from the Israeli government to say that like, oh no, sir, we actually do have a plan if we kill the Ayatollah. And when you guys do a weeks long air campaign, you see the protesters on the streets that will automatically then transfer, translate to these people overthrowing their government and installing, you know, a pro Western government. Which to me, this is why these things were never said like very seriously to us. Because it's like, guys, we've tried this before. We've Tried this over and over again and it never works. And then the Iran factor, just how old, you know, Persia is, you kill the Supreme Leader like it makes exponentially more impossible of a scenario. But they, they would come and, and they would brief like they had a plan. That was, even for a while there, you heard people talking about installing the Shah's son back in the country. You know, that's something, that's something that the National Council for Resistance in Iran, they've wanted that for a while. I mean it just. None of the, none of those plans were very serious. But they wanted to make it look like they had a plan.

Interviewer

Plan, yeah. The son has been living in palatial significance in Washington D.C. since 1979, which I'm sure there's no strings attached to that.

Joe Kent

Right, Right, right, right. And he would just be able to go in there and start governing on day one.

Interviewer

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Joe Kent

Musha Hadid bin Laden's guys, like literally

Interviewer

the guys that became like bin Laden in Al Qaeda. And you're saying it worked like, it's crazy to me. But I do, you know, I'm one of these guys. I love America. And I think part of loving America is you do have to look inward at things where you're wrong and where the rest of the world may have moments where they hate you. And you have to say, you know what? We earn that. And to me, when I see Scott Bessant go to Davos, which the optics there are already bad, but goes to Davos in January and is bragging to people about how he is going to take the Iranian currency with this next round of sanctions and effectively put it down to zero. And he's laughing about it because. Because he's saying what's going to happen is because they have a totality, totalitarian regime in charge, which they do. And because those are not necessarily good people, which they're not, they're then going to have people that are forced into the streets because they can't pay for anything, and they're then going to kill a lot of those people, which is going to give us an impetus to maybe have to do something. And to me, it's like if I walk outside right now and I see a guy tripping out on fent, and if we walk a few blocks, we'll find. If I then come back in here and grab a Danielson and take it out there fully loaded with the whole clip in there and hand it to him and say, have a day, my friend. If he goes and kills 100 people, I get tried as accessory for murder and I deserve to get tried. So when I see Scott Besant bragging about the fact that he is going to force people into the streets, which will then force them to get shot and killed by bad people. To me, it's like, Scott, you know, I think you're an accessory to murder there. Could you see why I come to that conclusion?

Joe Kent

Delusion. Yeah. And it's just never worked. I mean, we've been able to create chaos that way before. But then also like his theory of squeezing them so hard economically that they crumble, that was a valid theory. Until you killed the Supreme Leader, there was people on the streets protesting against the Iranian government. And this has happened basically since, you know, 2009, where there's been different series of popular protests where the Iranian people have said to their own government, why are you spending so much time on literally foreign wars? Like, why are you supporting Hezbollah? Why are you supporting Iraq when we can't. You can't afford bread? I mean, these are things that the Iranian people were saying. Now, when a foreigner comes in with the Israelis, when America and Israel come in and kill the Supreme Leader, we basically take that away. I mean, if you look at the way that the. The Iranians endured the Iraq Iran war in the 1980s, it was long said, and I think this is still true. What saved the Iranian Revolution post 1979, 1980, was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, backed by us when we were to trying. Trying to play both sides, because that's how we thought we were going to get back at the Iranians. That galvanized the people around the Islamic revolution. And so just this just did as well, too. So now I personally think that's a nice theory that he has about like, oh, we'll squeeze them now economically. The Iranian people have shown that they can take a ton of economic pain. And us squeezing them now, it's not going to matter at all. And if we were to go and try and, you know, drop guns into some different resistance groups here and there. I used to do that professionally. I was a Green Beret. That's literally our main mission. And then in the CIA, I was a parent paramilitary operations officer. That's literally our main mission. We have a very, very successful tactical record of being able to go and do this, but a horrible strategic record of doing this. Like, whenever we go and do it, we always are very tactically proficient at going out and doing guerrilla warfare because we train for it. However, the strategic results always end up being a disaster in Iran would make Libya look like a day in the park. If we were to go and create that much chaos and arm enough of these different groups right now, I think most of those groups wouldn't be able to go get their resistance movements off the ground. I don't think a lot of the Kurds who may have had a beef with the previous Ayatollah, the Blue Jes, the Arabs down in the Ahawaz area that we keep hitting, I don't think a lot of these, these individual groups that at one point in time were against the government. I don't think they're going to want to be caught dead accepting money and weapons from the Americans and the Israelis right now. Or they might accept them and say, thank you very much. We just, we just plussed it back up and we stand with the people of Iran because that's what we did by killing the Supreme Leader. So the whole thing is just. And obviously it's immoral as well, and it's never worked out well for us. And the more we continue to take these actions in the Middle east, the more blowback terrorism that we're going to get in turn because of it.

Interviewer

When you were having these conversations though, with Israeli intelligence, it seemed to me the way you were describing it is that they would just, when they weren't moving the ball and they were actually saying, saying what they really thought, which is we want regime change and stuff like that. Mow the grass. It seemed to me like they were just kind of volunteering this information rather than you having to be like, you know, listen up, what are you really trying to do here? Is that fair to say they would just tell you straight up?

Joe Kent

Yeah. And also I think the Israelis had a pretty good dossier on who they were dealing with. Like, not that I'm like a badass or anything, but I think they also knew that, like, they knew my background, but they also knew that I wasn't like a super pro Israel guy. So I think they were just like, well, we're not going to win this guy over. Like, let's, let's, let's spend our time elsewhere with other people. But also they're professional. So like if you have a background in intel, and again, these guys probably read my resume and we're like, okay, this guy probably knows some things about intel, I think. So we'll just straight him shoot. We'll just shoot him straight, you know, because if we try and BS him, then he's just gonna say we're a bunch of clowns. But that's, that's not, that has not been my experience with the Israelis. When you, when you deal with them, they are usually very, very forthcoming about what they want. A lot of that also is because they're used to getting whatever they want from the Americans. They're used to, like a lot of us just thinking they, that like whatever Israel wants is what we want as well. And so to a certain extent, they are used to coming in and being like, hey, we'll tell you guys what we need to do here. That's, that's, that's not on them, that's on us. We've just accepted that for, for so very long. And also we've become so dependent on a lot of the intelligence that they provide us that a lot of our own capabilities have atrophied. So a lot of times they will come in and they will say, like, you guys don't know this yet, you

Interviewer

know, but what do you mean our capabilities of atrophied?

Joe Kent

Our capabilities to collect intelligence in a lot of places, Iran being one of them. Like, it's, they have significantly atrophied. John Brennan, who I think most people know from being the CIA director. Yeah, great guy. Yeah, right. Russia, gate, all that. He's a political hack. But beyond being a political hack, John Brennan ran the CIA for many years and even before that he was in senior positions in the intelligence community. John Brennan is an analyst. And analysts are great because analysts do deep dives. They understand topics very, very well. But they're not operations officers there. Before John Brennan, that the CIA was ran by operations officers, by case officers, like you had John Karaku on your show. The guys who actually go out and sources and they go out and they get their own intelligence. And human intelligence is probably the most valuable intelligence that we, we can get. Because only human intelligence can tell you why someone is thinking the thing that they're thinking. Like, why are they. Why. Why would the ayatollah want to do what he's doing? You know, signals intelligence and all these other disciplines, they can tell you what, where people are, they can tell you how they're moving, but they're not going to tell you the why. Because when Brennan and others too took over large parts of the, the intelligence community, they started prioritizing analysts and analysts prioritized bureaucratic process and they, they prioritize the things that analysts know. And so the operations sections took a back seat. And so risk aversion became the name of the day. War on terror has a lot to do with this too. A lot of people got very comfortable in the intelligence community of operating off of secure bases secured by the US Military. Military and having people drive people with guns, drive them around and do all the, the more dangerous stuff. For them. And then liaison relationships, which is what we have with a lot of intelligence services like the Israelis, we started leaning heavily on liaison intelligence. Like, if we don't have access somewhere like these guys do, because it's their backyard, let's just go through them. That's fine. And you need those relationships. However, you can't rely solely on them. And so that's. That's really the. That's part of the story of what we've done with the Israelis. We. We've atrophied our own individual unilateral collection capabilities. Capabilities. We've leaned heavily on liaison collection so that now when the Israelis come and say something's happening in Iran, a lot of times it's kind of hard for us to check in on. On that. Now, those capabilities, I think they're not easy to bring back, but we can because we have very capable people in the intelligence community. And I think we're. I think this war has shown us that we need to get some of those capabilities back. But that's another big issue we have when. When dealing with the Israelis, that sometimes the things they say, it is hard for us to. To check that math.

Interviewer

Essentially, putting the Israelis aside for a second and just looking at it generally. Is it even possible for you to trust anyone in the intelligence world? And when I say trust, I mean trust them. Like you're in a relationship with them.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

You may fight once in a while. You know, every marriage has its difficulties and stuff like that. But even if, like, can you look at any intelligence relationship, whether it's with one of the five eyes or any type of ally around the world, and say, you know what? This actually is like a good marriage. And what we. What they say we can always kind of take at face value. Is that possible at all?

Joe Kent

I just don't think we should. We should do that, I think, with, like, the five eyes. Usually, if we're talking about, like, a counterterrorism target or whatever. Sure. But even like us and, you know, the five eyes partners, we have differences of policy opinion all the time. So I. I just don't. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we get so comfortable with a partner that we just take it, you know, face value, whatever they say is as good as if we collected it ourselves.

Interviewer

Yeah. Now, going back to the Israelis, though, and their intelligence that you were talking about, you know, I think one thing we've probably been guilty of here in America at points over the last 20 years is not being able to read a room Sometimes. So we have our own egg on our face with that. However, I can't even describe in words how much it appears the Israelis cannot read the room room right now when it comes to how certain they are of what they need to be doing and more specifically, what they need us to be doing. And that we should never even be questioning it because they're just our greatest ally and everything. When, you know, I haven't checked the literacy rates in Israel in a while, but I think they're quite high. And, you know, I can read a poll. I'm sure they can read a poll, too. It's not looking great.

Joe Kent

No.

Interviewer

For them. And it's not looking great. Great. Including people in our own government in some cases. So, like, why are they still so confidently gung ho saying, yeah, we're going to do this. That's what you're going to do, Joe, step in line. This is what we got.

Joe Kent

I think in many ways they're going for broke. I think, I think they realize that Donald Trump being a baby boomer is the last, regardless of being an army. It just is what is, regardless of being a Republican or Democrat, Trump is the, is the last, last truly pro Israel president that they're going to get in the White House. So I think they're like, let's go for it right now. Also, they think post October 7th, everything, all the battlefield gains they've had, this is the time to just stay on the gas and, and, and keep going. I think there are some in Israel who are just like, if we don't slow this down right now because of the polling and because of the way that the younger demographic in America is, is voting and thinking if they don't slow down and check themselves a little bit, that they're going to lose the relationship in the long term. But I think the people that are in power inside is right now Likud Party. I don't think they give a damn. And I also think they, they still very confidently and there's, you know, they're not wrong in thinking this. When it comes down to exerting raw political power inside of America, they can still do it with money. I mean, look at Thomas Massey's congressional primary. I mean, they spent close to 40 million. I think when it's all said and done, a lot of that money we can't even track to take out one congressman. Right. Because it's Massey and you know, he was saying things, things they don't like. And then the vote yesterday, which was, which was pretty historic, you had 100 and I think it was 103 Democrats voted to. To not fund Israel. And Massey was the lone Republican which is a. I think that's black eyed to my party to the Republicans. But they won. Yeah, the only one. So they still think even though that that is significant because I think you know, a couple years ago you would not have gotten four, let alone 104.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

Representatives of any, any party to say that. But that said they, the bill still didn't pass. So I still think there's a lot of them back there, you know, Miriam Adelson and these big donors that are just like let them throw their tantrums on podcasts and we'll still win in the end because in the American system you can flood the zone with endless money. And we have endless money.

Interviewer

Well we saw what happened to I think his name was Frank Church back in the 70s when he brought up that commission. I believe it was that we can check this thief. It's been while but I believe it was the next election. He was primaried with a lot of dark money.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

And sent out. And so when people start barking up the wrong tree, they'll do that. That said, if there's a little silver lining here with the Massey thing and we'll see what happens with Ron and his next primary. It's like the place where they could most do that is a closed primary because in depends on the state and the district. But in a lot of these states it's like only people registered under that party can vote. It's not a November election. So it's lower turnout. It's also lower turnout because it's a primary, not a general. So like technically you could flood the boomers TVs and maybe get enough people to go vote for a warm body. Trump's words, not mine anyway. But you know, I think if Massie went into say a general election for I don't know, the Senate in Kentucky right now.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

I think they'd be very surprised at how not far their money goes in that kind of thing.

Joe Kent

Yeah. And if you extrapolate it to on onto a national scale, I mean it took him 40 million for a congressional seat. Like somebody else can do the math there. But there's 400 whatever, 35 congressional seats. Can you spend whatever that 40 times? Can you spend that much on a national stage? Especially if the younger generation is, is watching podcasts, they're on social media. The fundraising push that Massey did to fight back against that, especially the couple online campaigns that he had were very Very significant. And they, they could potentially be game changers. So I mean for people who are frustrated with the political system and the money involved, the small dollar donor contributions that go to individual candidates and not packs etc, that is kind of how we, we, we can potentially break, break through a lot of that. And I think just the way that the demographics are, are changing and as those demographics change, it's going to be harder and harder for APAC and other groups to come in and just straight up buy these seats.

Interviewer

I agree. And I think it's also a matter of, of, you know, people are so focused on it because of the actual influence within legalized organ, which is what it is. Like we gotta, we gotta look in the mirror with that. Like APAC is a legal organization. They are doing what they are legally allowed to do and we don't change that. But like, because there is that kind of influence happening, obviously there's a massive sight on that because they're also in the middle of a big problem in the Middle east that people had large opinions about. But what ends up happening as well is then all the focus will go on that. And I understand that. But then focus moves away from other threats as well. It moves away from, hey, what the fuck is China doing here? You know, by the way, it's hilarious to see you get called like an Islamist or whatever jihadi online. You spent 25 years fighting them. Like, I think there's nobody who understands, you know, certain places that may not like us very much. Like you, you. What you seem to be attacked for is the fact that you are just pragmatically saying, unfortunately the world has some evil in it. And as much as you want to be the good guy at all times and cleanse the world of all that, it's an imperfect place. And you can't just go invading places because you think they're bad and you know, whatever, there has to be stakes to it. Otherwise we'd be invading China right now. For how long have they been massacre in the Uyghurs? Since fucking being Vietnam. Yeah, whatever. I don't know, a long time, you know, but we don't do that because we can't do that.

Joe Kent

Exactly.

Interviewer

You know what I mean?

Joe Kent

Yeah. I've always said like, if, if the bar for us going to war and getting involved in the country is that country is doing something bad, they're, they're oppressing their people, then you better start the draft because we, we're going to need to, you know, put like thousands, hundreds of thousands of millions of Men and women under arms, and we're going to need to invade, I don't know, throw a dart at the map. And there's probably a government somewhere doing something that we, we don't approve of here in America.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

And so the whole thing is just. It's ridiculous. I mean, our founders had it right when they said, don't go abroad looking for monsters to slay, you know, have good trade and commerce for everybody. Don't have alliances that get you sucked into other people's cousins, wars, you know, and that's what we just have been. We have been unable to resist that temptation for, for most of the history of our republic. And if we don't change that here really quickly, because if I spread thin, we are with the empire. And I think this, this war in Iran, because of the energy implications and all and all that, I think this could be, you know, an event that jump starts a lot of the, the downfall of the American empire. And I would just say, like, what, I mean, America's really blessed with what we have here at home. What has the empire, the post World War II empire that we're supposed to worship, what has that gotten most Americans, like most lives have actually gotten a lot worse because we're trying to prop that up. What if. What if we reverse that when we prioritized our nation's defense and then the prosperity of our country ahead of the

Interviewer

empire higher, just like every country around

Joe Kent

the world does everybody else? Yeah.

Interviewer

You know, it's not like when people look, oh, it's a selfish thing. It's like, no, no, that's what every country is supposed to do. And then once you take care of something at home, if there's things you can work on, friendly with other places, go ahead and do it. I don't know why this is so hard, but you raised the point at a really interesting time as well, because we just had the 250th anniversary of this country. I would imagine you're a guy that's studied the Revolutionary War pretty closely.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

Fair to say. Yeah, I love it too. And I studied it for a long time. And obviously coming up on the anniversary, I got to do some podcasts on it. It was really, really cool. But, you know, it's amazing how prescient some of these guys were. And you talk about, like, the foreign influence aspect. Washington famously warned about it in his closing speech, slash written out speech that he published in the paper about staying away from far as foreign interests. And, and you look at the people throughout history who were tested by the times too. George Washington was able to win the Revolutionary War in part because of the help of the French who came in with especially naval power and overall support to be able to work with them against the British and just call it a decade later, roughly, he's faced with the moment where suddenly France has an enormous problem with the French Revolution that is not in America, America's interests at all. And even though they had been this ally that he wanted to be friendly to, he was like, yeah, we can't get involved in that war. And you know what? It turned out okay. They were pissed. It took a decade or two, but then, you know, Napoleon came in and did his thing and suddenly things were fine. Like, it feels like the hardest thing to do is nothing at all. And we always fucking do something in post World War II America. And we haven't learned that, that lesson.

Joe Kent

We haven't. And just the track record is abysmal. I mean, it's never worked out the way that we say it's going to work out. It always ends up being a long quagmire. Our country ends up with, you know, thousands more dead because of it and then trillions in debt. And that's what we have right now. I think the 250, the 250th anniversary is a good time for us to reflect on like where we are, especially in the post, you know, World War II, you know, we're the global superpower in that era and just see where we are and at the end of the day, because you always hear, you know, when people try and justify this war or Ukraine, they'll lay out the risk board and they'll be like, yeah, if we, you know, if we choke off the straits here, then that's going to really hurt China. And it's always like this really involved, you know, game that they're playing. And it's like at the end of the day, whenever we try and play these games, we end up losing in some way, shape or form, you know. Now I'm not saying if someone comes over here and messes with us, if they come over here and mess with us, then we do have to go take care of business. We do have to defend our borders. I'm buying, you know, I'll get labeled as a, an isolationist, a dove or anti war or whatever. Like I'm not. If someone screws a fucking us like we should go and salt the earth if we need to. However, us going and trying to prop up all these different, you know, aspects of Our empire controlling strategic, you know, control. I mean Trump the other day was talking about how like we're going to be the guardians of the Straits of Hormuz. Like, how absurd is that?

Interviewer

How does that, how would that even work?

Joe Kent

And even if it did work, like why, how much would that affect people here in New Jersey? Hey guys in, you know, Hoboken, New Jersey, you're now the guardians of the Straits of Hormuz. Most of them rightfully would be like, where the hell are the Straits of Lose? It's like, well we, we have to secure that so we can get the gas over here. It's just like the whole thing is absolutely absurd. So I don't know, I think if, if we don't reign that in here really, really soon and start like single mindedly focusing on what's in our interest, a lot of the systems are to come crumbling down. Like with what's taking place with, with the Straits, what's going to start happening with the dollar? We're already seeing the end, or at least the petrodollar being significantly threatened, which goes after us, our status as a global reserve currency.

Interviewer

Older. Can you explain that to people like, for we all hear terms like petrodollar and stuff like that if we're not in the financial markets every day or in intelligence, a lot of people out there, smart people I talk to are like, yeah, I don't fully understand that. So like we're in fourth or fifth grade, me included.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

How would you explain that and how maybe close we are to a cliff with the petrodollar suddenly being pointed, no return.

Joe Kent

Yeah, I mean so basically at the end of everything kind of goes back to the end of World War II. We're the dominant power. And so most countries, world banks, they say that they will settle their transactions, they'll do trade big, you know, big the trade of natural resources, massive commerce deals. They'll do all that in the dollar, which means people want the dollar, which means basically here in America we can print money. It's a bad idea, but we can just sort of print money. We can run these big debts because everybody needs the dollar. And so us having deficit spending here in America doesn't matter because the rest of the world is going to continue to use the dollar. Now market really came alive. The oil and producing states in the Gulf said, hey, we will settle all of our oil transactions in the dollar. That basically means that every single bit of oil, natural gas, energy that gets pumped out of Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, etc. We're in that transaction. We didn't lift the finger, but we're getting a cut, we're getting a taste, because they're all using the dollar. And this has been a system the whole world has agreed upon. This is why you years ago heard guys like Ron Paul and Pat BUCHANAN say that U.S. using sanctions, sanctions against different countries and stopping them from using the dollar is shooting ourselves in the foot. And they're 100. Right. And sanctions can be a decent tool to use against countries. But the sanctions we talked about with Iran were sort of working. Now, if you go and you sanction a major country like the Biden administration did against the Russians and told Russia, the world's largest natural resources producer, that you guys can't use the dollar anymore, well, who does that hurt more? Does that hurt more, us more or Russia more on the long term, long run. I mean, Russia has commodities that people want because it's natural resources. You know, they're not selling, you know, intellectual property like we are here in America. They're selling real hard resources. And so that transaction we're not in on anymore, we got cut out of it. Now the same thing is happening because for a long, because of the war in Iran, for a long time that the petrodollar system existed because we said that we would provide the security guarantees, we would be the guarantors of the security of all those different gold states there. We'd put our military bases there and they'd be safe because Uncle Sam was there in their backyard. Well, we kicked off this war with Iran and what did the Iranians do? The Iranians hit our bases. Number one, we couldn't fight wars from our bases, which is absurd. We even have them over there in the first place, we had to evacuate the bases. But number two, because we had the bases there and we launched attacks against Iran, Iran hammered a lot of the infrastructure of those Gulf states. So now a lot of those Gulf states are saying, like, I don't know, maybe we're going to start looking at some alternatives to the dollar because they're not happy with us. And you're even seeing a lot of the transactions now that are, that are coming out the Straits of Hormuz, those are being settled in yuan crypto and other currencies. And so you're starting to see the end of the petrodollar, which, between that and what we did in Russia, and we've kind of created this alliance too, by sanctioning different countries. You sanction Iran, that has tremendous oil and natural gas resources. You sanction Russia, world's biggest natural resources producer. You've got China there in the mix. China can easily go to them and be like, hey, I've never started a war, a proxy war with you guys, like, why don't you guys settle your transactions in the yuan, I'll help you guys convert all this onto the world stage. And that's what, that is what we've seen China do in this conflict. And so if China is ostensibly, you know, some people are really hawkish on China. They say they're our number one rival or the enemy. We got to worry about someday we're going to end up fighting China. I don't agree if that theory of the case, but if China is what we need to worry about, and I think to a certain extent we should be worried about China, then what we've done in the Gulf is completely and totally worked against our own interests. So really, at the end of the day, if we have enough countries throughout the world that say they're going to no longer use the dollar, or if they don't even say it, if they just stop using the dollar, that erodes our system. And that means this deficit system that we have here in America, our entire financial system, it's not going to collapse overnight, but it could slowly start to erode. And that's where you're going to see out of control inflation. We've seen this before. This is what happened in Pre World War II Germany. I mean, this is what happened to Argentina in the 1980s. So this is very dangerous. We've had a very good deal for a very long time. And by us attempting to control other countries through the barrel of the gun and through sanctions, we're eroding our number one asset. And that was everybody using the US Dollar.

Interviewer

Yeah, it seems like the typical group think scenario over time where people are like, yeah, we'll just, we'll do it this time. Yeah, we now we, we do it another time. We'll, we'll stop this at some point and then you just keep pressing that button over and over again and eventually essentially Chernobyl. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's not great. But with the straight of Hormuz now we can get to the MOU in a little bit and what the, is going on there. But did you, were you a part of, without going into anything classified, were you a part of any discussions in the build up to the war mapping out probable scenarios that the straight of Hormuz could be locked off by the Iranian government? In the event of, of war.

Joe Kent

I mean, the, the US government has, has done these war games since the 80s, right? And that's always been the scenario. I mean, so, yeah, I was. But that's not like Joe Kent wasn't sitting there with a map being like, guys, guys. You know, this has literally been DoD and IC war games since I was in grade school. So this was known. We led ourselves to believe because of the 12 Day War, and I think some of the Hubers from Venezuela, that the Iranians were a paper tiger. Because after the, when the 12 Day War kicked off, a lot of us, and I was in this camp too, I thought the Iranians were going to use their proxies and I thought they were going to hammer us. Yeah, yeah, the guys in Iraq. But basically what they did in February, I thought they were going to do. A lot of us thought they were going to do when the Israelis attacked in the 12 day war. Now we stayed out of that. And the Iranians were like, well, we're not happy that we're being attacked right now, but we know the Americans are like, they're helping Israel. They're paying for all the this, but they're not attacking us. Attacking us, Right? So, I mean, we saw after we did Midnight Hammer, the Israelis shot back a volley of ballistic missiles to an empty quadrant of one of our bases in Qatar. They let us know ahead of times they were going to shoot at an empty quadrant of one of our bases in Qatar. And then they wanted to get right back to the negotiating table. Now a lot of us breathed a sigh of relief and we're like, wow, that could have been a lot worse. Hopefully the negotiations can work. The Israelis and the people who are more hawkish went to the President, said, see, they're a paper tiger. They came, do anything. But we had a pretty, I think we had pretty clear eyes at the time of, like, their proxies are still intact. They still have ballistics, they still have drones. If they wanted to, they could make this thing really, really bad. And, and like, like, like I said, for years we knew that the worst case scenario, if Iran was truly threatened, they would play their geographic trump card, which is the strays of Hormuz. Like, you don't need to be a genius to look at that and be like, wow, if you don't need a lot of technology to really be a menace there in the streets, just because it's so narrow and so critical.

Interviewer

Did you discuss this with Pete Hegseth? I mean, he's the Secretary of War. He knew so when he was saying, though towards the beginning of the war and has continued to say, we've totally obliterated all of ba ba ba ba ba. And I'm sure they've obliterated some things, but like, I don't know, one plus one usually equals two if you're policing the Strait of Hormuz. Something's not obliterated.

Joe Kent

Right. The problem is we, I mean we, we speak and we say that we've destroyed their navy, their air force, their art. Like yeah, we control. We destroyed their conventional forces to a certain extent, but their conventional forces were never the real power. The real power was in the irgc, which is different than their military. It's also in a lot of their, the besiege. But then the way that the Iranians dispersed a lot of their capabilities, especially ballistics, the production of ballistics drones, the way that they dispersed a lot of those capabilities when we went and we hit their conventional navy, I mean it's pretty easy for us to see satellites like where those naval assets are. They don't have a, they have a lot of coastline, but it's not that big. So yeah, we blew it up. But the Iranians aren't dumb. They knew we were going to do that. Right. So they weren't going to use those capabilities to go shut down the Straits of Hormuz. They were going to use what they're using right now. Like whenever the, whenever a tanker goes outside of where the Iranians say the tanker can go, they don't hit all of them, but they hit enough of them to slow down the ship shipments. It's usually a drone. It's usually a low tech drone that they're, they're hitting them with. So it's almost, it's dang near impossible short of us occupying, you know, the vast majority of Iran militarily for us to stop that capability. Because literally, you know, you and I could go 3D print some drones and we could sit up on the hills there with some binoculars, you know, and we could probably have a run at shutting down the streets. Horror Moose too.

Interviewer

It'd be kind of fun, right?

Joe Kent

Probably kind of fun, yeah. I mean, and the same thing, fishing ships too. Like you throw enough dows out there and all, every single one of them has one mine. You drop those mines in like, okay, well now the shipping industry is like, well I'm not going to have one of my ships go to the bottom. Like, we're just not going to send the ships through. Yeah. So I mean, because it's so small, the train, etc. Like it's almost impossible to shut down. So we can, we can come out every day and we can be like, last night we bombed X amount of whatever boats, military targets and it's really not going to affect the problem. This is why this leads us into the mou. This is why we got into the mou. And you saw Trump come out and say this. He basically, he didn't say there was no military solution, but he said, said like, we got to come up with something because we're up against, you know, economic cliff. Right. He said that. I mean the President said it publicly. That's why we got in the MoU. And he, the only reason he accepted getting into the MOU is because like we went through, you know, a month or so of like we're going to bomb the crap out of them and at some point it's like, well, we're bombing them, but it's not really having any effect.

Interviewer

Yeah. And when you guys are making any intelligence related decisions on any actions that are going to happen, obviously at least one part of the report is like downstream economic effects of what said action may cause and stuff like that. How much in the conversations you were around, how much did like playing out the scenarios of what will happen to the economy and the stock market weigh in on decision making?

Joe Kent

Not enough. I mean from, from the IC side, that wasn't really like our wheelhouse, but we had smart people there from, from Commerce, from Treasury. I mean, look, I think we just got too cocky and we thought they wouldn't shut down the Straits for Moose. I think we said, we convinced ourselves that because they didn't do it during the 12 Day War, that they weren't, they just simply weren't going to do it.

Interviewer

Why didn't they do it during the 12 day war?

Joe Kent

Because they wanted to negotiate with us and we didn't get overtly involved. They knew that we were involved. They knew that we were helping the Israelis, but we didn't take any American strikes. And then when we did, we messaged right away. So Trump dropped the bombs on Midnight Hammer and then he came out right away of a press conference.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

And then at the same time we were saying to the Iranians like, hey, we, we want this to be done. And now we don't need to talk about that stuff anymore. Let's get back to the negotiating table. And to my surprise, and everyone's surprised, the Iranians said, okay, let's do that. Let's get back to negotiating table. We got the Israelis through a tantrum. Let's get back to the negotiating table.

Interviewer

Yeah, you were saying earlier how like in the past the way you'd kind of get back channels to Iran would be through proxies, whether it be Iraq or Qatar and stuff like that. But, but once these hot wars are happening, effectively, whether it's a 12 day war or this one, are we in an understanding where like, I never remember how to pronounce their names, but the dude with the goatee who goes on the TV all the time with Iran, like a guy like that literally calls the White House and they have direct conversations. Does it get to that point or is it still. There's an intermediary every time and we never really are talking to each other until you actually see J.D. vance to face with them negotiating.

Joe Kent

So the Iranians, especially since we killed the Ayatollah, the Iranians have been pretty adamant they won't directly meet with us. So the Iranians are going through different intermediaries, Pakistanis, Qataris, you know, the, the Omanis are in there as well. So. Yeah, and we've used Geneva, etc, so there's, there's different mechanisms, what they always say. But I think our ability to actually have those direct talks, those direct talks were going on before the 12 Day War, they're happening right after. But since this iteration of the war, they're limited. Even, even when they were doing talks, there were still intermediaries in the room. And so there always was a procedure there. The Iranians are very procedural. The Iranians are very bureaucratic as well. And they can be frustrating. Yeah, yeah, they can be very frustrating, I think, to attempt to work with. But yeah, so right now that's, it's never, it's not direct and that's a, that's a huge problem. And I think since we've killed the Ayatollah, we've taken a lot of that off the table. I think, you know, pre killing the Ayatollah, I think President Trump probably could have gone directly to the Iranians, like, had he said, like, I'm going to have my Nixon moment and go to, go to China, he, he went to Tehran. I think he could have pulled that off or I think he could have gone to Qatar and met them in Qatar, you know, and said, send the President over here, let's just hash this out because you know, President Trump, that's, that's his thing, it's strength. And now there's folks who say that the Iranians messed that up because they should have, you know, said that they wanted to meet President Trump. Trump ahead of the 12 day war. And they would have had that opportunity. They may, may have been able to have that opportunity. I just don't know if we're going to get back to that place anytime soon because of killing the atoll. And again, that goes back to what I've been saying the whole time. The Israelis were genius because they wanted, they wanted us to get into a situation that we couldn't extract ourselves from. And even if we wanted to extract ourselves from, how willing would the Iranians be now? The Iranians can't be willing to directly negotiate with us or talk. Talk with us.

Interviewer

Well, they also keep trying to kill the negotiators over and over.

Joe Kent

Yeah. Multiple times. And Trump even came out and said that, like, really early on, he's like, well, I can't say who I'm talking to because I'm afraid they'll get killed.

Interviewer

Yeah, it's, it's like, it's like, read the room.

Joe Kent

It's right there. The answer's in front of your face. Yeah. Yeah. And so this, this is why I said from, you know, the very first interview I gave of Tucker, I was like, step one's restraining the Israelis. And people got really mad. People got really mad at me for saying that. But it's just like it's born out to be true because any, like, I mean, you even have the President tweeting in all caps, like, Israel is prohibited from striking Lebanon. And within. And within hours, they're like, let's go ahead and level a couple apartment complexes. And they've obviously made the President frustrated because he's come back out and said, you know, they need to stop doing that. If you're trying to kill one guy, you don't need to level the whole apartment complex. But the problem is, and this is what I keep going back to, people will always ask me now, whenever President Trump comes out with a statement that's like, generally trying to restrain Israel or saying something against the Israelis, they're like, well, what do you think about that? That it's like, until we actually take something away from, like, they're not going to take us seriously. Like, it's basically all pro wrestling, even if the President means it. And I'm not saying he doesn't mean it, but the Israelis are going to be like, okay, well, we met. What's he going to do, though? You know, it's like with my kids, like, I, I, I have this conversation with my kids all the time whenever they they do something they know they're not supposed to do. I have to say, like, you understand, like, I'm not punishing you because, like, I want to or I get some satisfaction from it. If I don't take away something from you right now, you're going to repeat the same behavior. And that's literally where we're at with the Israelis. They won't respect us until we take something away away from them.

Interviewer

Well, you're assuming we're the adult and they're the kid.

Joe Kent

Well, we're paying for everything. That's the thing. Like, I'm not saying. I'm not saying 100. Our. Our rationale is always right. But at the end of the day, if we. If we allow emotion and how we feel about them or how we feel about the region to get in the way, the simple math is we are paying for their military, we are paying for a good deal of their defense. If they say they can do it on their own, then Godspeed, I hope you can. But as long as we're giving this much much, we get to call the shots.

Interviewer

It's the most. And that's what you said from day one since. Since you left office. It's like, it's the most obvious thing, though. But that doesn't happen. Which begs the question beyond just like Miriam Adelson having a lot of money from Vegas.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

Why? Why? Here's the thing about Trump. There's never been a guy in politics that I've seen, seen who is more hyper aware of polling and where the pulse is than Donald Trump. I mean, he would find polls 10 years ago when he was running that no one has ever heard of or heard of since. And what he had a real understanding of is he knew it wasn't like a criminal trial, it was like a civil trial. All he needed to have was the scale just barely twinge this way. And he could go all in on that thing because the math was on his side and he would always follow that. That's why, you know, the famous first words of like, we're gonna build a wall, you know, because people were. He saw the math was on his side with some immigration issues and stuff, and he went all the way in on it. Despite the fact that then some people really hated him for it. He knew he had it on his side. So I look at all these polls he's followed over the years, and yet two polls that stand out that he just seems to like, you know, like a horse with blinders on, not look at or just decide to, to amnesia, ignore, I don't know, are related to, like, Epstein and Israel. And so to your point, now, we've seen in some recent weeks, like, he's said some interesting things, but then it doesn't get backed. I saw a tweet the other day where it was like, president Trump has told Benjamin Netanyahu to pull his troops out of Lebanon and Syria. Two hours later, Benjamin Netanyahu has told Donald Trump to go himself. Nothing happens, nothing gets taken away. Why?

Joe Kent

That's the big. I mean, this has been a question that I struggle with, and I've articulated it publicly. And, you know, here's the problem. President Trump knew an level like everything we talked about in the first Trump administration. He understood that the Middle east was quicksand, and you can't get sucked into the quicksand. He also understood as a candidate, when he was going after, you know, his former adversary, now friend, Marco Rubio, he said, marco Rubio is just going to do what Sheldon Adelson says because he's going to give him all the money. He's going to what AIPAC says. Trump knew that. He called it out. He understood how these things worked. He also, at the beginning, like I said, at the beginning of the Trump, at the beginning of this administration, the President was not interested in this, this conflict of Israel. People will say, no, Joe, you don't know what you're talking about. When I was there and he was getting the briefings, he was not interested in it. He wanted the negotiations to work. He wanted a Nobel Peace Prize. He thought that he could cut a deal. He thought that every other president, and I think there was a lot to back that up, had, you know, not been able to get a good deal if Iran, because they were weak or because they, they were dumb, and he thought that he could get a very good deal from Iran, and he was off to a good start. Something in the spring, late spring, early summer timeframe happened. I don't know what happened. I, I can't tell you why. 2025. Yeah. I can't tell you why his mentality changed. But it went from, like, we're going to create the most space that we can for the negotiations to take their course, and we're not interested in a war. We got other things to do. Like everything else he ran on in 2024 to, okay, we're going to support the Israelis and we're going to do Midnight Hammer and we're going to continue to entertain. I don't know what happened. And so for me, when Something like that happens from an intelligence background. You do have to step back and look at. Okay, so what else could be influencing the president? Like, if he's the president, he makes the ultimate decision here. Did he just change his mind? And I have a hard time believing that Donald Trump, like you said, the guy who can look at polling and understand which side of the issue to be on. And the president also, too, I think, is very good at intuiting vibes, for lack of a better term. He was the first, like, Twitter, social media president. I mean, the president can take a large swath of data, and I think this is probably why he was successful in real estate and construction. He could take a large swath of data, and maybe he doesn't know every last little detail of it, but he understands the general theme and he can make a really quick assessment.

Interviewer

Yes.

Joe Kent

And for him not to see where this whole thing was going to end up, I just don't buy it. And I know there's. There's people out there who hate Donald Trump, and they're like, see, I told you. You know, he's. He's just dumb, and he fell for the whole thing. I have a really hard time believing that. And maybe I'm putting too much stock into. In him. However, I just don't think he was. I don't think he changed his mind. And I don't think he was, like, deceived or tricked. You know, I think there was a. There was a fair amount of deception and trickery that was going on there. So he definitely got a lot of bad information. They definitely played to his ego. They definitely told him it was going to be easy. That's all true. But for him to go through with it, ultimately, I do think there's potentially, I don't know, 100%, but I think there's potentially other factors there. And so what could those other factors be? What. What influences a president? Why would a president make decisions that he. He doesn't agree with? If you just look at what happened to President Trump with the assassination attempts, I think that those things could factor in, you know, he came within a fraction of an inch of having his head blown off on. On national tv. I looked into the Butler investigation. We can get into that, basically.

Interviewer

Yeah. I was just gonna ask. It's funny. You read my mind on this. I was gonna ask you about that.

Joe Kent

Yeah. So between.

Interviewer

Why does Donald Trump not get curious about that case? This is a guy who remembers enemies from 1964 in fucking. In high school.

Joe Kent

Yeah. That's a Huge data point. I mean, so I'll get into Butler, but you have Butler, you have West Palm Beach. And then he comes into office and it's like, we don't make any changes to security detail. As a matter of fact, some of the same people who were on duty then get promoted. Then there's multiple breaches of his, multiple public breaches of his security that happened. There's the stoppage at the, at the UN on the escalator. There's the armed police officer who comes up and shakes his hand, who wasn't part of the President's detail. Whoever. Everyone's like, how'd the guy have a gun get in here? Well, he put on a cop uniform. Well, he was a cop, but he, he walked in and did it, and then it made the paper and it was, you know, a huge embarrassment. And then you have the, the restaurant in Washington, D.C. when Trump and the Cabinet are going to go out and show how safe Washington, D.C. is, code pink reserves a table right next to him. They wait for the President to come in, and they jump up and do their Code Pink thing where they yell at him or whatever. It's just Code Pink. It was harmless. But still, it shows that someone got the President's itinerary and they knew exactly where he was going to be sitting. So between the breaches of the security, between the assassination attempts, that. What does that tell the President? If you have Donald Trump's mind, where you can take in a large amount of data that lets you know that you're not safe, that, like the people that are around you, you're the most powerful man in the world, they can't keep you safe. He's got a lot of kids, he's got a lot of grandkids who I think he does love dearly, and I think he has concern for them. It also says that, okay, they can't be kept safe either. Then in the interim period between Operation Midnight Hammer, when Trump tried to get us out of this disaster that the Israelis attempted to get. Get us into, and what happened in February, where the war restarts in September, you have one of the most vocal advocates against the Iran war, who was in the Oval Office advocating against the Iran war. In the lead up to Midnight Hammer, Charlie Kirk also publicly assassinated. Now, I'm. We can talk about any of the. I don't know if there was potential linkage there. I would, I would say what it is right now.

Interviewer

But you were stopped from looking into that.

Joe Kent

We were stopped from looking into it. But if you put all Those on it, on a, on a timeline, and you say, what else could be affecting the president that I'm looking at right now? You have to factor that in. If, if this was a foreign country and I was looking at it from an intelligence perspective, I would have to factor all that in. Now with Butler, Butler happened obviously, under the Biden administration. When we came in In January of 2025, there was a lot of us who were eager to get to the bottom of lots of things that happened during the Biden administration. Butler was like, top on my list. It was top on lots of people, those lists. And so I came in, I said, all right, let's figure out what happened with Butler, because what happened on the ground didn't make sense. But then there's also been a bunch of innuendo where people said, Iran tried to kill the President. So I said, okay, I want to, I want to get to the bottom of this, and I want to figure out if Iran had anything to do with trying to kill the president for, you know, killing. At the time, it was vengeance for killing Cosmos Almani. So I said, when I came back in, from the intelligence community perspective, I said, show me all the intelligence that we have have on assassination attempts against President Trump, Iranian involvement. When I got into the Butler file, this wasn't publicly disclosed at the time. This is all out in the public sphere now. There's a guy named Asif Marant. He was just tried in New York. He's, he's a Pakistani national who ostensibly was recruited by the Iranians to come here to America and find a way to kill President Trump. Mer is arrested two days before Butler. Right before he's arrested, he's in a hotel room, and he hires some guy, a guy who, he's says he's a sniper, and he, you know, reports back up to the Iranians. I've got a sniper, and that's how I'm going to kill President Trump at one of his rallies. So I, I, I read this, and I'm like, well, what happened to the sniper? We know what happened to Mashant. I got it. He's in jail. What happened to the sniper? It's, you know, I, I have to do some asking around. FBI comes back and they say, well, don't worry about that guy. He's one of our informants. And, okay, I'm like, all right, he's one of your informants, huh? Okay.

Interviewer

The sniper.

Joe Kent

The sniper. The sniper. Because he was never a sniper. He, he wasn't a sniper. He basically just kind of Tricked Mert into saying, you know, sniper doesn't seem to be the, the sharpest tool in the shed.

Interviewer

Yeah. So that's the guy they pick to.

Joe Kent

Yeah. Yeah. So Marant's in jail. I said, okay, well, you know, I've, I've ran a lot of sources in my, my time overseas. And when you start hiring a source to go hire people, things get out of control really quick. It's already hard enough to control a source that you're not with all the time, but when the source starts hiring what we call subsources, where it's like, you know, you go hire your buddy, but I only talk to you, you, things get pretty crazy pretty quickly. So I asked the obvious question, like, okay, so that guy was your, your, your CHS number one. Are you sure that Merant wasn't talking to other people and he didn't hire other snipers? Have we done the proper analysis to see if there was any linkage between anyone in Butler, Pennsylvania, Thomas Crooks and anybody else that Mer interacted with? We got blocked. Got, you know, crickets on that one. You know, like, no, no answers whatsoever. You know, nothing to see here. If, if you basically, if you keep investigating, you keep asking questions, you're going to mess up the trial that's ongoing with, with Maran. That's what the FBI always says. So I said, okay, fine, Crooks's devices, his computer, his cell phone, etc, he's an American citizen, so normally the intelligence community wouldn't get to look at that. But he's dead. There's no fourth Amendment issues. Let's take a look at his devices and let's see if he was talking to anybody internationally, if there's any international ties here whatsoever. For the first couple months we were told no one can get into his devices. He's got encrypted on him. I said, okay, well if, if the FBI can't get into his devices, let's just open it up to the broader community because we've got the nsa, we've got, we've got, you know, a huge intelligence community. I think someone's going to be able to get into those devices. Crickets, fast forward later on and I actually meet with Dan Mangino and I asked Dan, did you guys get into the devices? And Dan says, yeah, we got into the devices. Okay, great. Like, he's like, well there's nothing there.

Interviewer

Nothing there.

Joe Kent

I'm like, there's nothing there. Okay. I'm like, well, I'm like, if there's nothing there, let's like, let's just let us still do our due diligence. Can we, can we at least see, you know, what's in the devices and maybe there's, you know, potentially foreign ties. If not, fine. But at least we've done our due diligence. Dan says, you know, he'll see what he can do about it. You know, I also said, I also said, Dan, can we, can we see the brief that you guys showed the president? Because the president publicly had said he was satisfied with Butler later on, behind closed doors, the president said, at least around me, that he wasn't satisfied.

Interviewer

We told you that.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah. And then later on he said, I think he said to Tucker much later, like a couple months later on, that he was satisfied. So that's what, you know, it's hard to pay where all these different things are.

Interviewer

I say one thing publicly and another thing privately.

Joe Kent

Right.

Interviewer

I'm gonna believe the private thing almost every time.

Joe Kent

Yep. And then a couple months later, after, and this is like in, I think August, Dan and I met, or maybe September, right after that, I think shortly thereafter, that's when Tucker disclosed his investigative journalist had found Crooks's online profile. And Crooks had a prolific online profile to include interacting with a guy from, I believe it's called the Nordic Resistance Front. I'm not going to try and say his name. It's a, it's like a white nationalist group that is a specially designated global terrorist organization by the U.S. so we are monitoring these people. Thomas Crooks, In, I think 2020, 2021, was in touch with, with this group. And so to think that he wasn't on our radar in some way, shape or form, I kind of have a hard time believing, proving that, can't prove it. But for a while there we said that like there's nothing there. But then Tucker's investigative journalist does, you know, basic Internet deep dive researches that most private investigators are capable of doing, and he finds those actual foreign ties. And so again, we still don't know what happened with, you know, Thomas Crooks, who he was linked to. And then at the same time, the investigation of what took place on the ground, that wasn't my purview, but that was like a DHS purview.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

The DHS Inspector General, also another Trump appointee. He goes in, he starts wanting to run down all the after actions reports. He wants to look into the actions the Secret Service took that day, what other federal agencies were involved, et cetera. He gets blocked from doing so as well. So, okay, that's a data point, you know, like, what, What's. What's going on there? You know, fast forward to October of 25, and I have the opportunity to share it, because this isn't public yet. And I have an opportunity to share this with. With President Trump. And he says he's not satisfied with. With Butler. Like, he didn't know that there was a CHS involved with the Machant case,

Interviewer

et cetera, without going into anything that, of course, would be privileged and, like, off the record, with the sitting President of the United States, was there any pickup that you got from it that he had continuing fears? Meaning, like, like, if this got looked into farther and got to some answers, that maybe certain people didn't like his life and people around him would be strongly in danger. Did you pick up on that at all?

Joe Kent

No, I didn't. I mean, and I don't think I would. I mean, the President's pretty strong guy, and he presents, you know, a pretty strong Persona. He. He just said that he, like. Because when you lay out the facts of Butler, like, how can you say you're satisfied with it? He's a smart guy. Of course, if you lay that out there, he's just like, yeah, I'm not satisfied with it. That was.

Interviewer

I can't believe he doesn't tweet about it every. Every day.

Joe Kent

Yeah, that's the, that's the, that's the part that's off, right? Yeah.

Interviewer

And it's like, you know, and now you see, again, there's new intel, and this is technically unrelated to Butler, but there's new intel that, like, Trump has been warned by Israeli intelligence that Iran is trying to kill him. Again, it's the same intelligence that has selectively given us stuff that you've laid out that doesn't come to pass and hasn't for decades now at this point, for the most part, you know, and. And they're running the same narrative on the place that they're upset that we're stopping the war against. And like, the other thing about Iran. Great to criticize their regime and all that. And yes, they, they funded all these proxies. You fought against them. Like, they're not great. We know that, but they're not suicidal.

Joe Kent

Right?

Interviewer

In my opinion, no, they're fine with some other people being suicidal. They'll celebrate the martyrs or blow themselves up any day. But, like, they want to exist. And they do know that a country like ours, if we were pissed off enough, has the ability to blow them off the map if we needed to. Not that that would be like publicly supported, but if they, you know, human beings, if they got pissed enough, they could do it. So why on earth, number one, would they try to kill the sitting president? And number two, less explored question here, why didn't they do it while he was out of office for 4 years?

Joe Kent

Years.

Interviewer

Had a better shot then.

Joe Kent

Yeah, I mean, the Iranians, after Somani was killed, they, they publicly said that they were going to avenge Somani. I think they had to say a lot of that for domestic consumption. The, the actions we saw them take, like the, some of the plots, they were like pretty weak. They like the, the Iranians are pretty, we, we. So since we've seen, since this war started, the Iranians are actually pretty capable. So then it comes down to like intent versus capability. Like they had the capability, but they didn't necessarily have the intent. Now fast forward to where we are now. We've killed the Supreme Leader, we've killed their head of state, slash the religious leaders. You now have the son, one of his first, I think, statements he's put out. Not publicly, but he put out a written statement. I mean, they're talking about avenging, you know, the, the Ayatollah, they're talking about going after Trump and members of his cabinet. So that I think we do have to take pretty seriously.

Interviewer

Sure.

Joe Kent

Because, because we've basically made a self fulfilling prophecy at this point in the lead up to killing him. There was threats here and there, but none of the plots ever turned out to be, to be very seriously. And this is serious. And this is a problem that, you know, we would always have with the Israelis. They would put something out and then you'd have to put it in the context of like, okay, well, the Israelis, clearly they're giving us this information, some of it's probably true, but they're giving it to us because they want to influence us.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

As well as inform us.

Interviewer

So now you keep describing a lot of these different things today in different contexts, like data point and you'd like click it and be like, okay, okay. And then eventually, like, it added up so much across so many different things that you took the action you did in March and stepped aside. But when you get in there and as you described it, like your first priority was like, all right, let's look into Butler.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

And then you start to do that and you kind of get stonewalled everywhere you go and you click that data point is. You know, I'm just trying to get into the psychology because I'm not, you but, like, I'd just love to know how you were thinking, is that there? Do you go home one night and it's not like you can discuss that because it's privileged information, but at least, like, go for a walk or, like, sit out on the back deck and say, wait a minute, what's up here? Like, are there moments like that?

Joe Kent

Oh, lots, lots. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we had a pretty good team there in OD9 that, that, that came in with, with Tulsi. And so we talked about these things quite a bit because we were all working on them together of, like, why, when we request this from our fellow Trump appointees over at the FBI, like, why we aren't, aren't they looking for this stuff too? Like, what, what's going on there? And there's still a lot that I don't know. And I, I genuinely, I have no idea why people took the actions they did. But a lot of it I think is it's really easy when you're on the outside to say, like, the system is, is bad. The system's messed up. And here's how it's messed up. It's really hard when you get on the inside to be part of that, to now be part of that system and to start going after that system. Because the system has a way of embracing you and telling you that you're the greatest guy ever. And especially if you're going to lead an organization like the FBI, they've got a way of saying, like, you know, here's your security detail. We'll take you and you can go watch the, the guys clear the shoot house at the hostage rescue team range. And here's your private plan. You're one of us now. Like, you, you run this entire thing or you run the CIA. Like you're going to run all of our covert action. You're the head spy guy. And so then it's hard for you to, to turn around and be like, now I'm going to start going after where all the rot is here. These organizations are very good and very proficient, especially the intelligence agencies at cap, capturing their principles. And I think a lot of that is what, what has happened in, in the Trump administration. Unfortunately, a lot of people who I think were very, very good at pointing out why these agencies, these institutions were very flawed and working against the American people when they were on the outside. They got captured by them when they, they went on the inside.

Interviewer

Did you feel that happening to you at all, too?

Joe Kent

I mean, it's pretty easy. I mean, once you're like, send it confirmed. People call you sir, and, like, you've got your own office and you got a driver and, like, it can. It can totally. Had I not been in the military before and been in the CIA and spent so much time, like, as a guy on the ground, I could totally see it happening to me. I mean, because, you know, it doesn't happen with any nefarious intent, but it just happens because you get told, like, hey, you're running this great organization, and like, now you're the head guy that's part of the organization, and here's just what we do every day, and they keep you. I mean, principals can be kept very, very busy. If you don't take steps to, like, manage your own schedule. You will be managed.

Interviewer

They will feed them shit. Keep them in the dark.

Joe Kent

Yeah, no, 100%. They'll keep you moving from meeting to meeting. It'll be very important. They'll have an agenda for it, presentations, you know, like, it's just that the apparatus is very, very proficient at doing that. And usually not really for, like, any nefarious. I mean, some of it's definitely got some nefarious intent, but most of it's just like, that's what these positions do. You know, you're on the director's staff. Your job is to keep him moving from meeting to meeting. And, you know, you. You plan out the schedule. That's what you do.

Interviewer

Yeah, Joe Rogan always had this great line where he'd say, these people were there before, before the leaders got there, and they're gonna be there after they. 100% and they know it. And so it's like anything that regardless of politics or policy, whatever you wanna say, anything that could threaten just the order of business and how they do things, they're gonna find little, even subtle ways, or not so subtle ways to quietly divert that from happening. And I think we've seen that over the past two and a half decades.

Joe Kent

A lot. A lot. I mean, and this is. If we get a shot at this again, I think we've got to go in, like, bulls and china shops.

Interviewer

I mean, how would you do that?

Joe Kent

I would put people in charge of these organizations. They have, especially in the intelligence community. They have to have a background in at least the ic. Like, you can't walk into the CIA as a guy who's never dealt with. You don't have to have been a CIA officer, but before, it helps. But you do need to have dealt a good deal with the CIA. You need to know what the Department of Operation. The Director of Operations does what Special Activities does. You have to know those things. Same thing with the nsa. You've got to know the lay of the land and know what the organizational priorities are of these different organizations. Number one, to do your duty and to make sure that the, those organizations are still keeping the American people safe. But then number two, to really start understanding where the rot is. And so you have to have people that are not just your standard pay to play political operatives who like, you know, I, I ran in the primary against the guy and now I'm going to get a cool cabinet position. You, you've got to have people who like, hey, this is probably gonna be the last thing they do in government and they're, they're okay with that and they're okay with not getting put on any boards at Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or, you know, any of these other great Washington D.C. institutions afterwards.

Interviewer

Great Washington D.C. i see what you.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah, because there's just so many boards, there's so many places that you can go afterwards if you play the game, if you just kind of hold the seat and get your picture on the wall and you know, you go receive awards and you go visit people at, you know, different outposts and say, everyone's doing a great job, there's going to be a great job for you somewhere in Northern Virginia or Washington D.C. on a board or a think tank or university, etc. We need people who don't want any of that crap, who want nothing to do with it. We, we have a good cadre right now, I think, of experienced people from the war on terror and from the intelligence community who understand where the rot is. We brought a lot of the in odni. Unfortunately, a lot of them have kind of gotten pushed out. We've had a lot of whistleblowers come out, I think in the last five, six years in these different organizations that could go in and say, I want to say single minded, focus on what the, what the, the true mission of this organization is, cut out all the fluff and start exposing a lot of the rot, which is going to be very unpleasant, I think, for the US Government writ large. But if we don't, my fear is that if we don't do that soon, if we don't start exposing a lot of the places where the intelligence community has kind of gone off the rails. If we don't do that soon, eventually this next generation that's coming up, they're going to say like, I don't think we need, and we just need to shut the entire thing down. Like the, the, the bounce back effect from what we've had so far, from all the dishonesty, all the corruption, all the lies, it's going to be such a boomerang effect that I think it's going to make the country, it's going to put the country in a very unsafe place. So if we don't get people who are like, this is going to be the last thing I do in government, potentially even professionally. But I'm going to go in and I'm going to start exposing the rot. If we don't have those people in and we let this system continue, I'm afraid it will implode on itself.

Interviewer

Yeah. I mean it, you see more and more people out there, and I understand it, who are like, get rid of all of it. But at the same time, the way that, let's say, some of the really awful corruption that's existed in some of these places has been allowed to continue, continue to exist as they've been able to manipulate and distract the public again and again and again over the decades. So that when, you know, like they had the Church commission in the 70s.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

CIA is still strong and powerful today, still going, you know what I mean? So they find a way to move the ball off it. And like, you even talked about the, the 12 day war and how it escalated, I think you said, pretty quickly and that something changed with Trump and I don't know what that was. It's pure spec for me to say this. I got no proof of this kind of, of thing. But thief, there was kind of like a big tweet, Friday, June 6, 2025, where you had Elon and Trump go at each other and then suddenly we're in Iran. Boom. Like a week later, I see shit like that and I go, huh, Data point, to use your term.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

Could you see why the average guy out there like me is sitting there listening to this right now and thinking that, like, yeah, maybe. Oh, yeah. Then we invaded, we did the Somalian fraud thing, a week later, did the Venezuela thing. That was two weeks after they were released. The Epstein files on a Friday before Christmas. And then another big one came out that was a big problem. So four weeks later, when we're in Iran all the way, like, could you see why people think like this and just see that? It's like distraction after distraction after distraction.

Joe Kent

Yeah. And then we turn around, we say, like, how dare you talk about Jeffrey Epstein still? I mean, it's. Come on. I Just, this is not what we ran on in 2024. And so I, if we're not more forthright and honest about what these things truly are, are with the American people. Like, again, the whole system, I'm afraid, is going to implode. And again, like the, the number of data points that we've had, not, not just in this administration, but if we step back in like the 2020 time frame with COVID and everything else that's come out, like, there's a reason why your average person who's generally informed right now is starting to think like, hey, our government actually is always doing the opposite of what they tell us and they're always working against us. Like, they have really, really, really good reason to think that right now. And again, my fear as a guy who served my country for, you know, 20 plus years is that, like, pretty soon here the whole bottom is going to fall to this whole thing because we, at the end of the day, we have a pretty high trust society. But if people think like their votes don't matter, if they start thinking that, like, no matter who I vote for, I get another stupid war in the Middle east, inflation goes up even more. My, you know, intelligence agencies are spying on me and taking away my civil liberties. You know, that, that, that is going to erode the entire system faster than the financial collapse we've were just talking about.

Interviewer

Yeah. And then they can't pay for groceries.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

They're putting data centers everywhere for Peter Thiel, you know, and flock cameras so

Joe Kent

they can stock us. This is because we need to win an AI. We need to monitor absolutely everything that you guys are doing. Like, I, I'm sorry, like, I have a problem with that, you know.

Interviewer

Of course, I'm glad you do.

Joe Kent

I don't trust my government.

Interviewer

Now, to be a cynic for a minute, I, I don't like being a cynic. I'll admit, when it comes to the government, I'm a bit of a cynic, though. You know, you talk about, like, if we get another shot at the, this, you know, whoever it is, we got to go in there and do it right. And you laid out some of the ways you would do that. But there's a lot of people out there thinking right now, regardless of Donald Trump's like, politics, they're going, well, technically, this was the outsider. This was, you know, the guy who was like, I'm so funded my campaign and all that, who, you know, was coming in and was going to drain the swamp and was going to put people like you in charge and stuff and support them even when it was some points maybe they didn't want to hear. And yet here we sit, you know, and it appears to be the opposite in a lot of ways. Could you see why people out there are like, Joe, that's an amazing idea and I believe you, you want to do it, but that's not going to happen.

Joe Kent

Oh no, I totally get that. And that's another thing that I'm, the younger generation is very informed and I love the way they think. My fear with younger generation is that they're going to say like, yeah, I tried that in 24 and I got so screwed.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

And so I'm just not going to participate anymore or they're going to go completely the other direction and they're going to go if one of the more socialist leaning candidates and say like, okay, like let's, let's actually try that now. So I, I think there is a pathway where we could get another shot at this. But I do think we have to keep the scope very, very narrow and a lot of it is going to be involved in educating the people on, you know, some of the reasons why I think Trump went off the, went off the rails. A lot of it is money. I mean he, to a certain, you can't say that 200 million, over $200 million from Mary Adelson, 232, yeah. Didn't influence him. And that's just her. I mean that doesn't include the rest of the pro Israel apparatus. So we, we have to say like, hey, sometimes these candidates aren't going to have as much money as the next guy, but we've got to be able to either through small dollar donors, raise the money ourselves or just be willing to have a true grassroots campaign and support people who say and that we can check in on that they're just simply not taking the money. I think that's going to be a huge, a huge part of it. Yeah.

Interviewer

Now another thing that's come up a lot that I don't know what to think because it's just like kind of all over the place is like the relationship intelligence community wise between the United States and Israel. And obviously this is all now top of mind with section 219 and all that stuff potentially going through which we can talk about. But what's always been interesting to me is any intelligence guy I've talked to and I'm going to put this on a scale of Andrew Bustamante to John Keaton Kiriaku from one end of the Spectrum to the other whenever I have asked them off camera. And then eventually it's been on camera too, about their relationship with Israeli intelligence. Yeah, I have never heard a positive word in my life from any of them.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

And it is people I've talked to before that haven't been on the podcast, people that have been on the podcast who are in other agencies as well. There seems to be to be a unanimous consideration that they are fucking annoyed. And so that's different. That's different than the diplomatic relationships we see in, say, Congress, Senate and, you know, where there's politics and stuff like that. But you see a lot of this thing online where people are like, well, CIA and Mossad are one in the same. And I guess I'm open to the argument, but I don't. How can it be that way when so many people there at least behind, you know, maybe publicly they say one thing, but behind the scenes, you know, there seems to be a lot of disagreement there. So maybe the better way to ask it is, as someone who now lived in the intelligence apparatus, did you find that there was a different opinion among a large group of people within the intelligence agencies about our relationship with Israeli and specifically with their intelligence agencies?

Joe Kent

Yeah, I mean, at the, at the ground, like operations, operational level, I mean, what you described is pretty accurate. I think most of us, though, especially if you're more of a special operations guy, we have a lot of respect for the Mossad. I mean, the operations that those guys can carry out, the target assassinations, the way that they're able to run proxies, support agents, what they did in the early phases of the 12 Day War, very impressive. That stuff that like we, we aspire to do in some theaters and we just haven't been able to do like, they're, they're good at what they do. So there is a healthy respect back there. However, if you work for them for, for a while there, there does come an annoyance where, you know, a lot of partners that we work with, they will kind of ask us constantly for things, which is to be expected, but they still are deferential to us in the sense they know that we're the world's most powerful nation and we're funding them and they, and they need it more than we need them. With the Israelis, you don't get that with the Israelis, best case, they'll shoot, shoot you straight like a peer. But a lot of times there's an entire entitlement that comes with that of like, you know, you guys are going to end up doing this anyways. And a lot of times, like, a lot of times, they end up being right. Because the problem is why people will say the CIA and the Mossada are joined at the hip because the CIA director, in a lot of cases, will end up being. It's a political appointee.

Interviewer

Yes.

Joe Kent

Chosen by the President. The President needs to show the donors that he's going to put one of their guys in there. I mean, at the beginning of this administration, you had the head of aipac bragging on camera about Radcliffe, about Ratcliffe, and about a guy who I like, Mike Waltz, being the National Security Advisor. So if you can short circuit that system. I think the way that you put stopgaps in there is you grab guys that have been out in the field who, you know, the President needs to feel that he politically aligns with them, that he's one of their guys. But that's who needs to be in charge of these organizations, as opposed to the guy who owes his political career to aipac, who then is a favor to the donor that donated to President Trump to be in of charge of one of the. The intelligence agencies. That's how you sever that joint at the hip. And then we can start treating the Israelis like any other liaison partner. Like, some things are good, some things are bad. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. This is a good relationship. We're just. I think we're just so far removed from that with the Israelis.

Interviewer

Now, you said you had a chance to listen to Rogan with J.D. vance. I did on the way here. So Amanda and I were listening to like maybe 40 minutes of it on 2.0 speed before. So we got like the middle of it right there. But JD had kind of was like the same week where Trump started to say some things like, yeah, you don't need to blow up the whole building or whatever, and things like that. JD Went out and suddenly it felt a little bit gloves off with saying, hey, let's cut the shit here. Which. Okay, cool. Some of us are like, well, this is two years and 1.2 million people displays too late, but, all right, it's better than nothing. Nothing. What did you think of what I picked up on as like, a little bit of talking out of both sides of his ass with Rogan? I don't want to put words.

Joe Kent

Yeah, no, no, he's got a tough job. I mean, like, I think. I think at some point in the. The Rogan interview, he even said like, my job is to support the President, not opine on his policies. I I don't think it's too far out of school for me to say, like, J.D. was probably one of the more skeptical people about the war. I mean, even the president has come out and said that. Yeah. So I don't think I'm like, spilling any, any tea.

Interviewer

Yeah. He said that.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

I'm pretty sure the President said JD

Joe Kent

Was not right, because the president, and like you said, the President, at some point when he got frustrated, he did let J.D. go out. And I, and I think speak very, very frankly, but, you know, he's. He's in a spot where he wants to keep his job. He's the only member of the cabinet that can't get fired technically, because he was on the ballot, though. Right. So he's actually got a little more leeway there.

Interviewer

But he's got 28.

Joe Kent

Yeah. And he may be political future, but the problem is, like, he's in a tough spot because of the things he's already come out and said publicly. He is now, even if he spent the rest of the, the administration trying to be back on good terms with that lobby with you, with the pro Israel lobby.

Interviewer

Luck.

Joe Kent

No, they're, no, they're, they're going to, you know, there's no way they're going to spend millions against him. So, I mean, now I think he is probably more incentivized to refer to, reflect what I would say is the base of not just the MAGA coalition, but probably even just the younger voters. And so I think he is a little bit more free to speak more candidly about, you know, how lopsided our relationship is with Israel.

Interviewer

Yeah, he's in the toughest spot of all because his name was literally on the ballot and it is, like, kind of in his job description, maybe even literally, like, it's to support the person he ran with, which is the President. So, so, like, he has to do things that are unpopular, but that is the job he signed up for. It was interesting, though, because he said something like, you know, my job is not to come out and commentate on things. My job is to support the President. I'm like, you're sitting here for three hours with Joe Rogan. I mean, I kind of call this, like, commentating on things, you know, so it's, it's, it's a tough spot. But he has also been the guy who's been sent as the, the, you know, lead negotiator.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

For the MOU throughout the time, and he's seen how frustrating that is to. Where he tries to make A deal and then out of his control with, you know, another country in the Middle east tends to happen and things up. So, you know, why is he, while he's in the middle of those negate negotiations, why is he the guy who's now also publicly coming out and posturing? I would think, and maybe I'm way off here year. He would be the guy that would be kept away from the cameras so that he can really actually deal with all parties involved behind the scenes. What's the calculation there? That it's like, you know, what they're going to send out? J.D. and he's done more talking than Trump in the past month. You could argue in a lot of ways.

Joe Kent

Yeah. I mean, he was pretty quiet, I think, while the MOU is, was kind of being worked out. But then he came out to defend it. And I think that that was the president and maybe. And probably, you know, Rubio and some of these other guys were like, let him go out there and try and defend it. Because a lot of the, you know, the Rubio camp still wanted to keep fighting. I think the Rubio camp, the Rubio, the more hawkish people.

Interviewer

Do they have, like, their own side of the room and you wave to him from across it or.

Joe Kent

Well, I mean, he was in a much higher position than me. So, I mean, that, that I think it's pretty obvious. You know, you, Rubio, you've got Ratcliffe, you've got these guys who for a long time they've been very hawkish on.

Interviewer

Yes.

Joe Kent

On Iran. And so I think they're much more. You didn't hear them say very much about the ML mou. They let Vance go out there and attempt to sell it. At the same time, though, you had Rubio go and basically cut a parallel deal, you know, with the blessing of the president, obviously, but cut a parallel deal in Lebanon that allowed the Israelis to stay in Lebanon, which directly. Did it directly violate the mou? I don't know. But it definitely didn't strengthen the mou. No, because we knew, we knew within the mou, they said complete ceasefire, complete withdraw. So that didn't make things, you know, better at all. Yeah, so he's, he's in a. He's in a very tough position, I think, right now for him to come out more publicly. He's doing so because the MOU is clearly dead and had a.

Interviewer

Dead.

Joe Kent

Had a very short life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say so. Especially after. It was always a long stretch, a long shot. If the entire MOU was going to remain intact. But I think we had hoped that it would at least last long enough to get us to a place where we could start more serious negotiations. But because the Iranians fared so well in the first part of the war, they were able to get in the MoU, that Lebanon stipulation. And so then for the Israelis to be able to play spoiler there, the Israelis are basically like, we're not going to get out of Lebanon. We're still getting shot at by Hezbollah. So, no, no deal that allowed Israel basically to. To help negate the mou. It was really. Even if we would have restrained Israel in a more meaningful way, I think had we restrained Israel in more meaningful way, we could have gone to the Iranians and said, hey, we're trying, but Lebanon's in their backyard. So it would have been hard to stop Israel from doing things inside Lebanon. But then we came in and we cut that parallel deal where Rubio went to Lebanon and he said, okay, we're going to help, you know, rid Lebanon of Hezbollah and the Israelis are going to stay here. There's, like, joint monitoring center, and centcom's going to be here. Like, America's going to go play referee in Lebanon. Because that's worked out well in the past wars. But that pretty much helped kill the mou. And then the Iranians were going to test, you know, their ability to control the shipping. Now, the Iranians shot at the. The ships. They shouldn't have shot at the ships if they wanted the MOU to last. But honestly, I don't think the Iranians wanted the MOU to last either. Because again, this goes back to us killing the Supreme Leader. I think the guys Arachi and Golly Boff, that cut the mod. The. The mou.

Interviewer

That's his name. Golly Buff.

Joe Kent

I think they were. Yeah, maybe I'm saying it right. I don't know.

Interviewer

No, Arachi is the guy that goes on tvarachi.

Joe Kent

Goes on tv. He's. Yeah, I think Arachi is pretty proficient in English. And Gali Baf is the. He's the other. The other guy. I think that they started shooting at the ships again. There's some who say that was a rogue element of the irgc. I don't. I don't know about that. But I do think that the Iranians were just like, we can't go bury our Supreme Leader, our ayatollah, members of his family, while we've signed a peace deal. And the Iranians said from the very beginning that they weren't going to Surrender anything in a memorandum or in a treaty that they hadn't lost on the battlefield. Like, they basically said, america's not getting anything else. They couldn't take on the battlefield. And for them to say like, okay, we're just going to hand over the Straits of Hormuz or let the Straits of Hormuz go back to the way it was pre28 February. I think you had a lot of people in Iran saying, like, well, you can't let the straits go Back to pre 28th February because they killed our Ayatollah. Like pre. Pre 28th February. Like we had a supreme leader. He was killed. Where is our revenge? So I think the Iranians were incentivized to shoot at those ships, to tank the entire thing.

Interviewer

Also from a leverage capacity. What's their incentive to stop that? They have more people rallying around their flag at the moment than they did pre war. So they have a little extra strength in the country they have. They know that in the propaganda war, like, it's easy for them because so many people in America, righteously so don't support these endless weapons wars and are upset about it. Like, they have all the juju, like, kind of on their side. Why would they go into any type of MOU or deal that doesn't get them, I don't know, 80, 90% of their biggest goals that they want? I don't see a scenario where, where that would happen.

Joe Kent

Yeah, I mean, it was a nice thought and I supported, you know, the idea of an MOU that would help get us to a peace deal. The problem is when you get these formal agreements, it's that it's really easy for one side or the other to say the other side violated this very specific, subjective, you know, portion of it and then to resume hostilities. I, I think that what we should do, and I don't think we will do this because I think the President's too far into this thing. But I think what he should do and this, I think this would open up the straits, is if we pulled our forces out of the region, we took our naval blockade off, we moved our ships away from their shores, we started moving away some of our biggest basis, and we said, okay, hey, we're not going to be the guardians of the Straits of Hormuz anymore. We have no more business here. We want the free flow of commerce. Now, Iran, you want the free flow of commerce too. You want sanctions relief? We will start giving you sanctions relief if you open up the streets of Hormuz and then The Iranians, they lose their justification for aggression in the Straits, but then they're also incentivized because then they can start moving out more of their oil to the market through the Straits of Hormuz, which would also help out with the global energy crisis, too. If we could put more of their oil onto the market, which has previously been sanctioned, say you guys will get the sanctions relief if you open up the Straits of Hormuz. And then, even, even then, if they still, they still said, okay, well, for, in order for us to recoup some of the losses from the war, we're still going to charge some sort of a fee. I think that's going to basically become a experiment in the free market.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

They're going to see what they can get away with, and they're going to see what the market will bear as opposed to us trying to enforce it to the barrel. Yeah, that's interesting, because I think that's the only way that we're actually be able to, to reset this, because right now, if we still have our forces over there in an aggressive posture, number one, we give them targets to strike, so anytime the Iranians want to send us a message, they can hit us. We proved with Midnight Hammer that we can send guys from across from the United States of America over there, spank them, fly back here for dinner. We don't need those bases there. Those bases were a strategic liability, not a strategic asset. Pull them out. Number one, they can't hit us. Number two, if we pull our guys out of the region, what Iran. Tell your people you won. Who cares? Tell your people that you won and you chased us out of the region. We're not here. We can still hit you if we want to, but then we're. Then all we have to talk about are the finite things that are within our interest, and that is opening the Straits of Hormuz. If they do that, they get the sanctions relief and we can start to put the world back on its normal course once again, and we can reset our diplomatic relationship over Iran. It's going to take some time, and I, and I don't think they're going to trust this set of negotiators because, you know, we killed the Supreme Leader and all that type of stuff. But we put enough distance that we can start to reset that relationship. And then, like I said from, from the very beginning, restrain Israel, reset that relationship as well. Until we take big steps like that, we're going to be stuck in this cycle for years.

Interviewer

Yeah. We have to prove it's. Like, it's like a relationship if, if something turns toxic, you have to have the ability to walk out and accept the fact that you may never speak to them again. Right. Like, because that's the only way it could improve. But what you're talking about is for us to do that, that would mean that the minute we go to pull out and do something and then Israel fucking bombs Lebanon again or, you know, hits infra. That was the best. There was one day, I think it was the end of March where Trump's like, all right, we have a five day agreement on peace and we agreed not to bomb their infrastructure. And 10 minutes later the IDF, we are bombing Iran's infrastructure with heavy strikes right now at it's like, you gotta be willing to walk away and be like, yeah, good luck with that, pal. Yeah, your problem 100%. We prove again and again that that's not the case. And by the way, it causes more humanitarian crisis because, you know, the same, I would imagine the same cabinet members you're referring to, at least some of them who have direct access to the White House are some of the same people who have told you what they're doing. Let's take the land up to the Latani river and it's going to be ours after, after that. Like, you know, I don't know, I haven't read the Geneva Conventions in a while, but that seems like fucking Lebensrum in the modern day. You know what I mean? Like, let's take living space from other people for our people to live there because they shouldn't be there. And yet every time they go to do that, we pull back into the war to help them out against Iran and it starts to beg the question, like, who is the bad guy here?

Joe Kent

Well, it makes it really hard for us to go and yell at the Russians about taking the Donbass. Right?

Interviewer

So not other thing.

Joe Kent

How dare you, Russia, you're, you're taking land that doesn't belong to you, but yet we're sending billions of dollars to Israel and enabling them to do the same thing. So I mean, again, for me, from an America first perspective, it's like, hey, we're pretty blessed. Like, we've got the Atlantic and Pacific as our neighbors and then we've got guys the north and south we share a lot of commerce and culture with and we're not going to invade each other. We got it pretty good over here. If all these other guys want to scrap over who controls, I don't know, the Latani river and The Golan Heights. I don't care. Like, I don't why we have put ourselves in the center of that or the center of, like, which guy runs, you know, the Donbass in the Slavic cousin war. The whole thing is. The whole freaking thing is absurd. You know, I mean, it's just. I. I don't. I don't get it. But we keep inserting ourselves into these different quagmires, and it never ends up working out well for us.

Interviewer

Yeah. Have you been in touch. You don't have to say who, but have people from the administration been in touch with you since you left? Left at all?

Joe Kent

Yeah, I mean, some. Some former friends and colleagues, but nobody, like, high up. They're not calling me to say, you know, do this.

Interviewer

What do you think, Joe?

Joe Kent

Yeah. No. No.

Interviewer

So no one rhyming with schmedy Schmance calls you up about this?

Joe Kent

Well, luckily, from. For. For him, if he wanted to know what I was thinking, I've been doing as much media as possible, so he can. He can probably be like, well, Ken's just a loudmouth. I don't need to call him. I can just look at his Twitter and he's. And see whose podcast he's. He's running his mouth on.

Interviewer

He's tuned in on that. No, it's. It's an interesting dynamic because you go from, like, you know, lips sealed, working behind the scenes, just trying to see how it plays out to suddenly, like, all right, let's download everything I saw, and let's tell you what's going to happen next. And that's what's been amazing. You. You'll put. I said this at the beginning, but, like, you will put out these tweets, analyzing what just happened and saying, okay, like, they're almost like a positive thinker, too, which I like about them.

Joe Kent

You're like, yeah.

Interviewer

You're like, all right, so here's. Here's a positive thing that could happen here. Here's what we need. And then the next paragraph is always, in order for this to work, we must. And then boom, boom, boom. But we never do the boom, boom, boom. And then we get another tweet like that from you two weeks later when another slightly, maybe positive thing happens, say, and it just repeats over and over again. It's very annoying to have to watch. But, like, unfortunately, you keep getting proven right with what your concerns are at each step of the way to stop this. So now that you view the MoU as dead, your words, not mine. But it's hard to Argue with it.

Joe Kent

I mean, I think the President said that, too.

Interviewer

I mean, he says a lot of things.

Joe Kent

He says a lot.

Interviewer

You know, like, that's not what J.D. vance was saying with Joe Rogan. He's like, you know, I still think this can work out, but if, if you do view it as dead, and I think you have a really good argument there, what are the next steps here? How does this wind down? Or are we headed for boots on the ground in Iran?

Joe Kent

Well, first off, I, I hope to always be wrong when I give my doom and gloom. So I hope, I hope the, the MOU is still alive and I hope President Trump pulls off some great 5D chess and this all works out great. I, I just don't, I don't see how it. I, I've still got friends that are very much in that world. They're like, no, you don't, you don't understand. He's got China right where he wants them. Like, I'm like, okay, I, I just don't understand how we extract ourselves from this. Because even, even if we say the status of the MOU is, is unknown, Iran still has the streets of Hormuz. They, they've proven durable with their drones and their balloons, ballistics. They're able to now include Lebanon and Hezbollah in on, you know, the, the outcome of, of what takes place next. That's part of their deal. Now, it wasn't before, but it is now. Just like the Straits of Hormuz. They were open before, now they're closed. We proved in the initial onslaught of this that we can hammer Iran really hard. They can stay very, very durable. They can close down the streets of Hormuz. That's why Trump got in the MoU. Now, the MoU has been basically sidetracked, derailed, killed, whatever, for all the reasons that we just discussed. Discussed. Now the President is frustrated and so he's going to go back to his military commanders, which we've seen him do over the course of the last couple nights, and just say, what do you got? And they're like, well, boss, we can bomb some more stuff. And so after a while, he's going to be like, well, bombing more stuff isn't getting the straits open. The straits are still not fully open. If we continue to go at the level that we're at right now, which is still very, very low. I think it's somewhere, best case scenario, 10 to 20% of what normally flowed out of there. We, at some point in the summer or fall, maybe even pushed out into the winter.

Interviewer

Winner.

Joe Kent

We're going to hit a major crisis. The President knows that. But the problem is because the diplomacy is more or less dead, because the mou, and then also too like just how galvanized the Iranians are right now from us killing the Supreme Leader, members of his family, the fact that we basically started the war twice during negotiations before, I think when Trump goes to whoever he's using as his diplomats and says, what do you guys got? I think they're just kind of like, we really don't have a way out of this diplomatically. He goes to the military and the military says, well, sir, we can keep bombing things, things. And the bombing isn't opening the Straits of Hormuz. So then he's going to say to the military, can we force the Straits of Hormuz open? And I think we can force the Straits of Hormuz open for a limited amount of time. But in order to do that, you have to seize ground.

Interviewer

And seize ground.

Joe Kent

Well, you, you do, yeah. You, you at least have to control some of that high ground, potentially some of the islands. Would it hurt the Iranians economically if you seize Krog Island? Sure, it would hurt them economically. But again, I don't think there's an economic blow that we can deal to the Iranians. It's going to cripple them. I think they can endure a ton of people campaign. The problem is we are going to take casualties when we start doing that, and then once we take casualties with any of these boots on the ground operations, we essentially then are locked into like a blood debt, then we're going to be told like, we can't leave because we have to now avenge our fallen by, you know, killing more of them and actually finishing the job. You'll keep hearing the, the pro Israel hawk lobby say, like, we have to finish the job and go in there. But what does that even mean exactly? Like, because the country's too big. Even if we had a coalition of the willing like the we did, which we aren't going to get this time, but let's just say hypothetically we could get like half a NATO to roger up combat forces, we still would not be able to take over that country. The terrain and just how big it is, it doesn't work. Iraq was kind of perfect for it because it's like relatively flat urban centers. Control that. And we, we still weren't able to fully that. No, because there's this thing called the insurgency and this was before the era of drones and ballistic missiles. So when I get. When I see these generals get on TV and they're like, yeah, we just land a Marine expeditionary force here, here, and here. You know, he sees the Highland, the high ground, you see some of the islands. It's like, okay, at what point in the global war and terror that we, we all fought here did just seizing the ground ever work? Because then you have to hold it. And when you go and you seize ground, you occupy ground within striking distance of an enemy that has a very capable drone and ballistic missile capability, they essentially are going to be able to then keep our guys as hostages without ever having to actually lay hands on them. So I think that's a disaster. I hope the President avoids that, and I hope he comes to his senses and we just leave. But this basically is how we end up in these quagmires. And there's a. There's a chance that maybe we seize one of the islands and nothing bad happens. And that gives him more confidence to go in even further, which, look, the Iranians are pretty smart. They've. They've proven to understand how we think pretty well. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if they're like, okay, let them get cocky and we'll deal them a serious blow. Because Iran now, not just because of how galvanized they are because of the, the spiritual effect of killing the Supreme Leader. Iran is also in a position right now where they have to bloody our nose significantly, because if they don't, then they're going to lose their deterrence. They have to show anyone in the whole world that if you come into Iran and you kill our leadership, we will not crumble. As a matter of fact, we will hit you back twice as hard. If they don't send that message, then in their heads, they're basically dead as well. So, again, this is why I advocate for us just walking away and resetting it that way. But if we stay, I don't see a diplomatic path. I don't see how the MOU comes back alive and saves us. I just see Iran continuing to try to force us into a military solution. And the same thing with the Israelis. The Israelis are going to continue to try and force us into. Into a military solution. And right now, they actually don't even need to do that much to. To do. So

Interviewer

how. How is our relationship these days with Jordan? And I'll get to why I'm asking

Joe Kent

this in a minute. I mean, I think it's always been good. I mean, the King, King Abdullah and his family have always been strong partners. Again, that's another country that's in a tough spot, too. I mean, because the majority of people there are Palestinian refugees.

Interviewer

That's right. His own wife.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah. And so if you, have you been to Jordan?

Interviewer

I never been.

Joe Kent

It's great. I mean, a lot of great. Amman's awesome. Petra is awesome. But, you know, the cities are very nice. The people are very nice. It's a very modern, modern place. But a lot of the people there live in essentially, they're not confined, but they live in like, basically displacement camps, refugee camps. That's where Musabar Zarqari came from. He came from the Zarqa, the town of Zarqa, which was a Palestinian refugee refg camp. So he's in a tough spot as well. I mean, I think he's hedged his bets pretty well with us and having good relationships quietly. He maintains with, with the Israelis. He does. He's, he is definitely a pretty, pretty smooth and savvy guy. But I, I, I don't see our relationship with Jordan changing. Now. The other Gulf states that are closer to Iran, I think that's a much different story just because of all the, the, the abuse they've endured.

Interviewer

All right, stick a pin in that for one sec because I do want to come, come back back to that. That's a really important, like, mass casualty event of this whole war because they're the ones who are taking all the hits from all the drones and everything on, on our bases that are in their countries. But with Jordan, my, my friend Joby Warwick, who's going to come on the show again soon for the fourth time. He wrote a great book in 2015 called Black Flags, which won the Pulitzer. And it's funny, I don't know what it's like at all the different bases across the military or anything, but friend of mine a couple years ago was assigned to, like, a, I'll just say, a pretty important base out there somewhere in the world. And one of the recommendations is not, I guess, like, mandated or anything, but, like, when he was talking to people who were on the base before he went there, they gave him, like, three different books that they wanted him to read before being there. And Black Flags was at the top of that because it lays out Al Zawi and how he effectively built ISIS and how it became ISIS and all the mistakes that happened that went into the, that. But when I read that book, which I always recommend to people because it's great and it's also very entertaining, when I read that book, I was kind of blown away by The King of Jordan. Because when you look at his career, ironically, Al Zakali happened because of him, because of a clerical error when he first entered office, where he did, like a political, you know, we're gonna even the scales here. Mass pardon, like, whatever it was, maybe it was 1200 people. I don't remember, remember. And Al Zakari accidentally made the wrist, the list, and the rest is history. But when you look at the, the advice and the predictions that the King of Jordan has made over the years, and I'm going to say the last 25 years in the Middle east, where he expresses this to the United States, who he's been a very good friend to, he is right much of the time, and yet he doesn't get listened to. And the guy is also, like, kind of a savage. Like, when they, when they, they, when they burned that, When ISIS burned alive that one Jordanian pilot in a cage when they did the mission to go hit the cell that did that, he flew the plane and dropped the bomb. I mean, we don't like kings in this country very much, but he's kind of cool, you know, when a guy like this has been right so many times, why are we not leaning on that kind of advice? When he sits in the backyard there at all times, like, literally smack dab in the middle of this region, why do we not lean on that as much?

Joe Kent

I mean, the short answer is there's no Jordanian. Miriam Olson that I'm aware of. I mean, there's no, there's no, there's no one that captures that much political juice. You've got to be pretty deeply steeped in, like, the Middle east and want to hear the guy's perspective legitimately to listen to him. And I'm sure the station chief and the ambassador, I'm sure they listen to him right, a good deal. But I don't think there's a really strong Jordanian lobby. I think their lobby is that they're a capable partner that will kind of have our back no matter what, but they're not able to drop a bunch of money in elections. It just, that's the, that's the, that's, that's on us, not him. That's the flaw of our stuff system.

Interviewer

Wow, that's really. That sucks. But straight to the point. All right, so the Gulf states you talked about, though, obviously they all get hit, right. Right away with the reaction bonds, which, by the way, I forgot to ask you this earlier. Why was the, the Chinese. I don't remember who it was, but, like, the spokesman, I'll just call him a spokesman for the Chinese government, publicly calling on Iran to stop that. A few weeks into the war, I remember there was a public video where he was like, please stop bombing the Gulf countries. What's the. Doesn't China. It didn't sit with me because doesn't China want the chaos so that they can seize on that economically? Or am I.

Joe Kent

Well, just remember, in a chaotic situation, whoever restores order has the most power. And I think China is showing the world right now that they're not the ones that are invading people. They're not the ones that are starting wars like that. They will come in and they'll, they will, they will say, hey, wait a sec, you guys are. You're having your war here. But the Gulf states, like, that's the capital of commerce. There's a lot of critical energy that comes out of there. Why are you bombing them? We were in no position to say that because we are an aggressor in the war. So China. I think this was just some subtle diplomacy by China coming out and saying, like, we're the adults in the room here. Interesting. The rest of the, this region is being hurt because of the actions that the, the Israelis and the Americans are taking into. And Iran, because they were kind of, you know, spanking Iran a little bit there. But they were saying that they're the ones that restore order. And that's why, I mean, that's another other, you know, case to be made for just leaving and resetting, that there would be an opportunity for President Trump to be. To say, I'm going to restore.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

You can say that I retreated. You can say that I, you know, I got my butt kicked, whatever, but I'm big enough and I'm strong enough to say, no, no, the most important thing actually is restoring order. It's opening the Straits of Hormuz. So we will. We are strong enough now to walk away. I think consistently we see China step in and do this in public diplomacy, but then also coming to the Gulf states and saying, like, why don't you guys settle some of the transactions in Yuan right now? Just to send a message to the Americans, but also to keep the, the flow of commerce moving. This will help you also get the Iranian oil in and out, et cetera. So. And then same thing, too, with the way that we project our empire, which is usually through the barrel of gun, military bases, those types of things. Coercion, telling different countries how they need to live their lives, how they need to govern themselves, whereas the Chinese come in and say, that's a nice port. Can we buy half of it and we'll develop it for you? Like, we don't really care what your policy is on, you know, X, Y and Z, or how, how you, how you guys live your lives. But we like that port and we like those bridges and we like this, this trade route.

Interviewer

That's a good point. They've done that all over the world for sure. But the, the, the Gulf countries themselves, you know, before we get to the actual war, in your time in office, how. And they're all different countries, so I'm sure it's a spectrum. But from like a, I don't know, ally scenario or intelligence sharing scenario or just general, like positive or negative relations relationship scenario. How was your department, the intelligence side's relationship with some of these places pre Iran war?

Joe Kent

I mean, with counterterrorism, it was great. I mean, honestly, like all the, like, they'll have problems with each other and there'll be, there's economic and oil issues, but from just counterterrorism, they are threatened by the same selfie jihadis, isis, al Qaeda, even some of the ones who back in the past had some dubious connections here and there, Saudis, etc. They're good partners because they, those same organizations are a direct threat to them. And in general, same thing with like, military cooperation. That's why, like, there's a lot of times I think in life where you don't want your, your, your bluff called, you don't want your hand called. And we should have realized that if this war of Iran kicked off, we wouldn't be able to defend all these different bases and all these different countries from the ballistics and the drones. The relationship was good because we shared an interest, but also because we were providing the security guarantee guarantees to these countries that gave us a lot of leverage and those countries were pretty, actually pretty grateful and they would do things for us now that our bluff has been called.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

With those security guarantees. I don't know what the sales pitch is now for the security guarantees. As a matter of fact, we're sitting there probably in a much more precarious situation, a much more awkward situation with those countries who for years had been deferential. Welcome to our country. You know, we value America. Like, what can we, what can we do? You guys are helping us out in the event that they're is a war. But there was never supposed to be a war, but now there is. And you've seen that with the Saudis. So the, the Saudis are Still good partners with us in terms of, you know, economic trade, but also in terms of defense and intelligence. However, the Saudis went and they actually sent a delegation to attend the Supreme Leader's funeral, which they were also.

Interviewer

This is what's so confusing to me. They were also the ones like, pressuring Trump to keep up the hits on Iran prior to that and everything. Like, it feels like they've played both, both sides.

Joe Kent

Once it, There was a while there where the Saudis were very hawkish about us getting into a war with Iran. There's a, there's a famous quote from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates where he said, the Saudis want to fight the Iranians up to the last dead American soldier.

Interviewer

Right?

Joe Kent

Yes. But once the war, actually, again, that was kind of like a, I think more of a not, not a bluff. But that was something they aspirationally wanted because the Iranian influence in the region did frighten them. But once the war started, I think they were a bit taken back, especially when a lot of those drones and ballistic missiles actually reached inside of, inside of Saudi. And I think then they were like, well, if America is going to, going to actually do this, they need to actually just finish the job. So then they became part of the finish the job camp. But then when it was evident that we couldn't just finish the job and there was going to be a lot of economic pain, there was going to be a lot of actual, like, military pain. Military pain. I think they started hedging their bets. I think they started saying, well, actually it looks like Iran's faring pretty well on this thing. So just to make sure we're still good with them, if they end up winning this whole deal and America ends up losing, leaving, let's just go ahead and send a delegation out there. I mean, look like this is just human nature, but also a lot of it too, is, is Arab tribal culture. I mean, there's a famous. I think it's, I think Bin Laden even said this. He said nobody backs a winning horse like an Arab. So in a lot of cases where you're seeing that the, the Iranians have fared well here, I mean, this is just human nature. Like, they fared well for a while there. The, the Gulf states had hedged their bets of us. I think now a lot of them are looking to Iran and saying, like, maybe we could work something out here, which again, that goes back to, to we could probably just leave, let them sort it out. As long as the straits say open, everybody can win. I mean, we can go Back to everybody, like kind of, kind of settling this whole thing out.

Interviewer

Aren't those bases like some of them just decimated now though?

Joe Kent

I mean it sure looks like it, yeah. I mean even if we were able to, to defend, like can we do that forever? Like the Iranians can produce Shahid drones to send across the Gulf a lot faster than we can produce the miss the, the base defense systems. And then at the end of the day, like if we had to evacuate our military bases to fight the war that the military bases were there for, like why would you reinvested them? It's absolute insanity.

Interviewer

It's insanity. And where are we on? Because obviously they haven't, you know, like we were saying they got a lot of leverage now. So they're not saying they're going to stop trying to produce nukes or whatever, but there was also evidence that they weren't trying to produce a nuke for a lot of years. And we just said they were like, where are they with the enriched uranium at this point? And as it relates to like the different facilities between Ford and some of the other sites that we hit, like is it like whack a mole? Where now they've kind of set up new places and are actively working on this stuff as a deterrent to war or.

Joe Kent

I mean I, I believe that we did completely obliterate their, their capability in, in Operation Midnight Hammer because we just, we buried the stuff, a lot of it was destroyed. So I think their capability is significantly set back right now. Now we, we have this way of creating self fulfilling prophecies. We said for years that Iran was gonna, they were on the cusp of building a nuclear weapon when they had doctrine and they had, you know, we had observed behaviors over time that showed that they were not developing a nuclear weapon. Well, what did we just show them? We showed them that having the Goldilocks solution of like not having a nuclear weapon but having the capability, that didn't work either. You know who did get hit? North Korea. We, we just showed the entire, if we're, if we care about nuclear proliferation, this war was the biggest mistake because we just showed every country that like if you ain't got it, we're coming. You do something we don't like, we're coming. But if you are a nuclear superpower, if you're not even a nuclear superpower, if you're a nuclear power and you can slap that nuclear device on any kind of missile system, we'll kind of leave you alone. So I think at some point in the near Future because the Persians are smart. And this is a conversation we had really early on with the president. He said, well, why don't the Iranians have a nuclear weapon? And this is where it came in. Because people were saying, like, yeah, you can't trust the fatwa. We're like, well, fatwa has been in place since 2003. If the Iranians wanted to have a nuclear weapon, they would have had one before, you know, you were even president the first time. So the Persians are smart enough to develop a nuclear weapon. So I, I think at some point in the near future, I don't know exactly when, I, I have no estimation on this, but just showing the incentives, the Iranians at some point are going to develop a nuclear weapon. And I think they'll kind of do what Pakistan did, where at some point in the near future, we'll, we'll pick up the seismic activity and the blast where they blow something up in their desert and then like two, two weeks later they blow up another one to show us that they have, like, more than one. And then them we'll just kind of have to deal with that. And then after that it's like, well, now they're a nuclear power. And it's like, okay, well, now we, now we have to engage with them or we have to completely isolate them. I've said, wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. Right, exactly. That works of North Korea. But then again, you just. Geography.

Interviewer

They don't have oil.

Joe Kent

Yeah, and geography too. So you can't actually. So then we're going to end up having to deal with them. Like, are we excited? Are we happy that Pakistan has a nuclear weapon? No. But they do. And we deal with them.

Interviewer

We deal with it. The question, do you think they'd use it?

Joe Kent

The Iranians know, for the, for the exact same. Yeah, they. Mutually assured destruction. Right. For the exact same reason that nobody else did. Because. So like the whole myth that Iran is full of like crazy suicide bombers and like crazy jihadis number one, like, that's not the Shia, Shias. Like, the Shias don't use suicide bombers. The Shias have never come over to America to kill Americans. Now, the Shias have been pretty proficient at killing Americans when we come to their shores, like in Iraq and in Lebanon. But the selfie jihadis, the isis, the Al Qaeda, those are the suicide bombers. Those are the guys who are like, you know, at all costs we're going to hit America who are, who are crazy. And the only solution to them is to hunt them down and to kill them.

Interviewer

I was under the impression you supported those people. If you listen to the Internet. Holy shit.

Joe Kent

No, actually, I mean that on camera. One of our. And you can have Joey work, check my math on this one. Our big ground forces that we use in the fight against isis, it was the Kurds, but also it was the Shia militias. I mean, when I was In Iraq in 2016, we were partnered with the Kurds, but right over, just to our south was the, the. The popular mobilization forces, right, that, that had Quds Force advisors. That was there as an American Special forces advisors. There was Kudz force forces advisors over there. We were bombing ISIS positions and they were advancing on it. They were the ground forces, they were the infantry against ISIS in many cases.

Interviewer

Wow. So many, so many different groups over there too. So there's so much going on. Like, even if you just look at Syria, there was what, like a thousand factions, like, fighting against each other at

Joe Kent

one point in the civil war. This is a big reason why when Shara took over Syria and he was getting ready to take over the Kurdish, Kurdish areas, one of the last things I did as the director of National Counterterrorism center, we arranged for the worst of the worst. 5,000 ISIS detainees to be transferred out of SY Syria, away from Shara to Iraq, which is ran by the Shias, which is.

Interviewer

Why did you do that?

Joe Kent

Because the Iraqis have a justice system that puts members of ISIS to death. And also they are not sympathetic to, to isis. They, they have people in their, in their government that by and large are Shias who fought against isis. Shara still untested at times. He was part of isis, one of the founding members, and then at other times, you know, he fought against him. So we wanted to make sure that, you know, he already had to absorb, absorb the 20,000, 30,000 members of the displaced personnel camps into the Syrian population. We wanted to tip the scales a little bit in his favor and take the worst of the worst out and send them to the Iraqi government that more than likely will at least detain them indefinitely. Make sure they're transferred back to their. Many of them are foreign fighters transferred back to their homes of origin or hopefully put them to death because we actually trust the Shia government there to handle isis.

Interviewer

Now we've said it a million times today. Obviously the world's a messy place. Shit is not organized when you want it to be organized in, in a certain fashion. But did you feel a certain type of way about, you know, like an ex Al Qaeda guy getting put in charge of Syria, which is also where, where, where your wife was killed. And then, you know, he's on stage with Petraeus shooting hoops in the back of the White House like, you know, you're a human being.

Joe Kent

Yeah, not a good feeling. Wasn't a fan of it.

Interviewer

Did you meet him?

Joe Kent

We. No, I did not. I met his Chobani. I met his foreign minister at the coalition, the, the defeat ISIS coalition meeting in Saudi Arabia. Look, I've been through this iteration before. I know the guys who, who killed my wife were taken care of, were killed. I, I. And we killed Abu Bakr Baghdadi. We took out isis. As it stood, I didn't support us overtly engaging with Al Shara, but at the end of the day, I'm a realist. And I think when, when there is a governing body of a country, I think we should, as opposed to trying to change that government, we should just deal with it. So I think Trump actually had the right take when the government fell in December of 24, before he was actually in office, he basically said, everything in Syria has always been a mess. We wish that government all the best. We'll deal with them. I don't think we should have done the full embrace because I think that could come back to bite us because that government is still untested. I would have tested them a lot more. More. And that's what you have a CIA for. That's what you have, like, more, you know, under the table type of arrangements. But Trump made the decision that he did. I mean, I think at the end of the day, it is a more realistic and more pragmatic one. The, one of the guys who has the toughest jobs in the world right now, who I don't really particularly like that much is Shara or Jelani, because he is now caught between the Turks and he's caught between the Israelis. And he has. He was brought to power by not just support from the Turks, but he was also brought to power by a very hardline group of suicide Sunnis. And so the more concessions he makes to America and to the Israelis, the more his own people are probably going to kill him. So he is in a very difficult position too. And it wouldn't surprise me if, if someone took a shot at killing him, then, then kind of all bets are off. Oh, we got it. So that, that's a whole nother powder keg that we're potentially sitting on right there.

Interviewer

How. You know, you see this whole thing where now some of the hardliners in Israel are trying to Already label Turkey the new Iran and create, like, yeah, Andrew over there is laughing. We're laughing too. Like, create this new propaganda to eventually go to war with them. And they're a NATO member. What was our relationship from your seat with Turkey like? And, you know, what are. What was the good and the bad

Joe Kent

that you saw there? I mean, the bad is that the. The Turks do support, in many cases, more hardline elements, like Chara. They helped rebrand him, but at one point in time, he was an Al Qaeda guy. They were using him against Assad, but so are we, you know, Right. Turkey's a NATO member for all the obvious reasons. Again, geography. Just look at where they're, where they're located. They have a very professional military, the Turks do, and intelligence service, very capable. We're also closely aligned with the Kurds, we, America. And they have a contentious relationship with the Kurds. And that's always a place where we're going to have a bit of friction and back and forth. Now, the Turks and the Israelis, they're both very strong militaries. And so I think they, they, one or the other, wants to be the more dominant force in the Middle east. Now, Israel, because they're a small country and they rely 100 on us, that that's going to be tested by other regional powers, like Turkey and like, Iran. So the question is, again, like, what are we doing here? Like, what do. What do we benefit from that specific relationship with the Israelis? Especially if Israel and Turkey are going to clash and they're going to clash in, you know, Syria, a place where we've already had to expend way too much, way too many lives and way too much time and money. Money. And again, and for what? So, I mean, this is Israel trying to drag us into yet another war. They want us to kind of break that NATO alliance because they. They want to take over large swaths of Syria. And the Turks would stand in their way of doing that.

Interviewer

And again, it's not like, you know, obviously there's been issues with Erdogan, like, as a guy and stuff like that, but for I think the 50th time today, world's an imperfect place. You know, you can't just get every perfect leader in place that you want. Our leaders aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination in every way.

Joe Kent

So.

Interviewer

So it's like, I just hear that and it's. It's like, especially when you hear it from some of the hardliners in Israel's government, you're like, are you trying like, if I were running a PR campaign to get people to dislike me more, I would do this, you know, and that's been. That's been the thing. This is interesting. So these people aren't dumb. These are very smart people. Benjamin Netanyahu, I may strongly dislike him, and I. I do. He is a very, very intelligent guy. And one thing that's been really confusing to me since October 7th is, like, when you look at anyone who's in support of the government or, you know, supporting the movement in the country, whatever it may be, across across the world or from there, whatever it might be, whenever they go to do something publicly, could be something as simple as sending a tweet, could be going on and giving an interview, could be talking at a conference, could be fighting with people on Piers Morgan and, you know, that whole thing. Thing, you know, I know you've done that a little bit.

Joe Kent

I've been there.

Interviewer

Yeah, it's very entertaining. It's. It's very entertaining stuff.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

But, like, every time they go to do these things, I want you to imagine there's only two choices for their strategy, and it's choice A or choice B. Choice A isn't even like, this is a good choice. This is going to make things better. Choice A is simply, this won't make things worse. Like, if I say these things or tweet this thing or whatever, it won't make it worth worse. Choice B is like, this is the worst possible thing I could say for my PR OJ Simpson writing if I did it. Level pr. Why do all these intellectually smart people. Choice. Choose choice B every time?

Joe Kent

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, because you're right, they're not dumb people. So I do think a lot of it is the BB and the LUd party, they're going for broke, and so they want to see who's with them and who's against them, and they don't want to be settled about it, and they want to draw those lines. I think they understand the media game pretty well. I think it's backfiring on them because I don't think they understand the younger generation as well as they think they do. But for a long time, they have. They have been able to be bulls in the china shop and to throw money at problems and to kind of throw their weight around. And they've always had the backing of, you know, the vast majority of the American political machine, and then, you know, same thing with media apparatus, too. So. So I. I think they've lost a Lot of their, their subtlety, but I think in the, the sort of go for broke lacud mentality, they're also like, we'll just say it and we'll see who wants to come out against us and we'll go after them. You know, like, I, I, that's, that's the only way that I can read the situation. Because you're right. I mean, like, there is the do no harm option and then there's the like, let's go pick a fight. Like, let's go, let's go punch the biggest guy in the bar, like for no reason. And that's, that's, that seems to be the, the path they've chosen in, in many cases. And the only reason I can think that smart people would make that decision decision so they could automatically, you know, draw everyone out and see who's going to defend them and who's going to go go against them.

Interviewer

I think people, you know, if there's people out there listening to you for the first time right now, and that's almost hard to do because you, you've been out there really doing the Lord's work. I think it's so clear when I hear you talk and break down all these things, from strategy to the actual geopolitics of things, to human nature nature to military strategy as well. Like, you are so well versed in so much. And like I said at the outset, a lot of it is you've been there, you've done that, you've lived it, you've been in it. So, you know, to kind of go back to that and, and some of your story. You got in the military when you were like 18 or 19, is that right?

Joe Kent

18, yeah. Joining right out of high school.

Interviewer

Was this something you always wanted to do as a kid?

Joe Kent

Yeah, that was it, man. I had no other. From the time I was like, probably five or six. I was like, that's what I'm doing, five or six.

Interviewer

Playing like GI Joe.

Joe Kent

Playing GI Joe's. Yeah. I was like, I'm gonna be a commando of some sort. There was a, the only debate was like, what flavor of commando I wanted to be. You know?

Interviewer

What were you thinking?

Joe Kent

I mean, at first it was like GI Joe. And then it gets more specific, you know, and be a Green Beret. And then I read Rogue Warrior by Marenko and I'm like, I'm gonna be a Navy seal. And then Blackhawk down happens and, you know, I'm like, okay, I want to, I want to be around Ranger. So, yeah, I mean, this is all pre Internet, so I was just reading things. But I went and talked to army recruiters when I was like, 16. 16, yeah. Yeah. And they were like, well, you can't be a. You can't go right to Special Forces. You have to go do something else in the army first. You should go to the infantry. You can go to the. You can try out for the Rangers right away. And so I just. I set my sights on that pretty early on.

Interviewer

What'd your parents think of that?

Joe Kent

Well, I like to say, growing up in suburban Portland, Oregon, in the 1990s, if you want to rebel, like, the way to do that was like, I'm gonna go join the army arranger at high school. So it wasn't a common career path, but they were. They were pretty supportive. I mean, there was no war going on, so I think they were like, I'll go get this out of the system, and it'll pay for college. And, you know, my parents were patriotic, great American, so they were. By the time they had heard me, you know, talk about it, from the time I was like, six on, you know, to the time the recruiter showed up, they. They were like, okay, I guess. I guess he's serious about it. So they were supportive.

Interviewer

And this is. So when you go to join us in the 90s and we haven't, you know, outside of, like, Desert Storm and then, like, the Mogadishu.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

Stuff. It wasn't like we were in hot wars or anything like that.

Joe Kent

Couple years. It was just training and. Yeah.

Interviewer

So how'd you end up in the beret?

Joe Kent

So after my first three years in the. In Ranger regiment, I just said, okay, I've done enough time in the army where I can. I'm eligible to try out for Special Forces. So went and saw the recruiter and. And signed up and went off to selection.

Interviewer

Yeah. The thing about the berets is that you always hear. And I. I've had a. I have a couple friends who have been in here. I've had Johnny Glenn in here and Danny Hall. And what they'll talk about is the berets among the Special Forces are known as, like, they're on the ground. Hearts and minds. Like, they're really good at making relationships with people on the ground while also being badass Special Forces guys. Was that. That, you know, like, the people aspect of it was that something you were really drawn to?

Joe Kent

It was. I mean, I figured. This is funny to say now, but my. My 1990s mentality, I thought Special Forces would probably give me the best shot at going somewhere and doing something real world. Because there's always Green Beret teams out there working with local populace, doing things kind of below the waterline as opposed to being a Ranger, being a seal, that's like break, break glass. The war has begun. You have to go, like, actually kill people. People. I just didn't think a lot of that was going to happen. But I figured, hey, being off in some of these remote locations, I'd get to see some action, experience some things, learn a foreign language. It would just be. It would give me a much broader portfolio. And I liked how unconventional it was too, especially after three years. Being in the Ranger regiment, which is the best place in the army to start, gave me great hard combat skills, gave me great discipline. But it's very. It's regimented. It's the Rangers, they think a certain way, so the Special Forces being able to kind of be a little more autonomous. Everybody's more secret, you're more mature, your mission's a little bit more nebulous. That really appealed to me.

Interviewer

You also have, like. It's a totally different process of trying out for it than it is for, like, the Navy SEALs, they obviously have buds and they go through this whole thing, like, all together or they get tortured. And it's very impressive. But you guys within, like, the Green Berets, my understanding is, like, you have to go do a lot of stuff out by yourself, and you have to, you know, accomplish all these test missions and stuff just to be able to make it. Like, essentially the skill that they're trying to build into you is like, all right, we drop you in the middle of a mountain somewhere. You're gonna figure it the out. That's kind of hard, though, like, to. To train for that and, and simulate that. And then you're actually like. The way it's been explained to me is they literally do that, and it's a training scenario, but, like, you're out there for days at a time just doing all kinds of badass Special Forces. Thing was, did you find the. The training for it to be extremely difficult, or do you feel like you were kind of born for it?

Joe Kent

Well, I was prepared for it, coming from a Ranger regiment, especially if, like, a background of, like, not just physical fitness, but, like, mental everything. Everything you do. Ranger battalion really sucks. So. So mentally, I was already pretty. Pretty tough. But what's different about Special Forces using the tool of land navigation? And they use land navigation because, you know, it's obviously important, but they use it as a. As A way to assess people's not just their mental fortitude and toughness, but also how do you make individual decisions over time? Because that's what land navigation, especially longer land navigation courses, that's what they're all about. It's really every little decision that you make on which route you select, how you shoot your asthma, how you plot your route, all of the things are eventually going to add up and compound to whether or not you're able to find your, your point. And when you inevitably don't find your point, how do you react? How do you adjust fire from there? Are you just done at that point or can you make a mistake and come back from it? So being alone in that environment, a lot of people coming from, you know, prestigious places in the military, the military where you're always in a team environment, they have a really hard time. I, I remember the first time I was out on a, on a land nav course in Special Forces selection. And I knew physically that like I could, you know, if it was run a straight line distance with the, with the, with the backpack on and all that, like, I knew I was, I was ready for it, but I was like, actually this is pretty different. This is challenging. Like, if I screw this map plot up, like, I'm out here, like, it's all on me. And you do a lot of different tasks like that in Special Forces selection. And there's a lot of guys who, I think, who most of them probably were physically capable of passing the course and getting selected, but that just breaks them for, for whatever reason.

Interviewer

Is it like a mental thing you notice with, like, is there one, I don't know, mindset type quality that the people who make it have that you notice, or is it a litany of things?

Joe Kent

Well, I mean, I think the, the grit is the consistent, you know, just like that I'm not going to quit. Like, I'm going to stay here, here. And whether I get it on the first try or whether I get it on the 15th try, like, I'm, I'm going to stick with it. Like, even if I'm not the fastest guy, like, I'm going to, I'm going to complete the, the ruck march or, or whatever the task is. I would say that that grit and determination is probably the biggest factor and that that probably flows through all different aspects of, of special operations. I think the seals have that as well. But yeah, I'd say that's probably the biggest characteristic.

Interviewer

Were you always like this stoic and calm growing up, or did it Kind of get built up in. Through your years of being in the Green Beret.

Joe Kent

I think it got built in. I mean, that's. It's a big cultural thing. Rangers are a little. Rangers are pretty stoic, too, but you're definitely more, like, direct. You know, it's a younger crowd, too, so it's. It's a lot more chest pounding and then. And Special Forces. It's just like. I remember one of the first. I wouldn't even say it was a full gunfight, but. But, like, contacts we made in. In Iraq. I'm on a knee. Knee, like, trying to look for, you know, to lay down fire into shooting. And there's. The guy on my team had been there for this was like his third or fourth combat deployment. Been around forever. And he just says, hey, Joe. I'm like, look over, you know, and he's like, hey. I look over at him again. He's like, hey, how's my hair? He was like, smile, man. I'm like, yeah, okay. I'm like, we're trying to figure out where the. Where the guys are. And he's like, yeah, yeah, we're good. Like, okay.

Interviewer

Yeah. A little comedy and relaxedness under pressure. Yeah, that's another comment.

Joe Kent

Just the mentality, reality, you know, just kind of detach and breathe and, you know.

Interviewer

Yeah, I like that. Detach and breathe.

Joe Kent

Detach and breathe and think it through. Yeah.

Interviewer

What year do. So when you. After three years in the Rangers, then you try out for Green Berets? How long is that process again?

Joe Kent

It's long, man. So the. The selection process is about 30 days. Ish. Then you go back. If you get selected, you go back to your unit, and then you wait for your orders to come in, and then you go to the qualifications course. And the quickest you can get out of the qualifications course is about a year. If you're like, I was. If you're a weapons guy or a demo guy, it can be about a year if you're a medic or a combo. If you're a medium medic, you're there for basically two years. By the time you're done with language and you have your brain, all that, and you're a. You're a certified green brain medic. Like, it's like two years for those guys almost.

Interviewer

So when you were done and out and now in the Green Berets, what year was it?

Joe Kent

03. So when I was in Special Forces selection, it was 9 11. So my, like, second or third day was. Was 9 11.

Interviewer

So you obviously Remember exactly where you were. What were you thinking when that happened?

Joe Kent

Well, I thought they were screwing with us. So, like, a lot of trainings you go to, they. They do like a scenario. Scenario. And so we had only been there for, I think, like two or three days. We had done like one timed road march, but we weren't that tired yet, you know. And so, like, they call us all into this big classroom they have where they'd give you, like, a lot of your instructions. And one of the instructors came in and he said, like, listen up. Like, America's been attacked. And he went into the whole, we've been attacked. And I'm sitting there thinking, like, america's been attacked. Like, okay, this is, this is like, they're.

Interviewer

They're messing at the screen going, man, the CGI got good.

Joe Kent

Well, they didn't bring in the TVs. Yeah, they just came up there and said that. And this is, this is pre. Like people having cell phones. And so they, they said, they. I knew it was real when they said, hey, if, if, if any of you are from New York or From the Washington, D.C. area, you can call your families. And they, they, they have like, you know, phones in the offices. Like, the offices are open. They're like, just form a line and call your family and we'll. We're. We're going to bring in tv so you guys can see what happened. Because the whole country just changed, I thought. I mean, obviously I was frustrated mad all that, but after watching our embassies get bombed when I was in basic training, the coal was bombed. I was in Ranger battalion. And I was like, okay, are we just going to take this on the chin? And so I kind of thought that we were going to bomb some stuff, maybe in Afghanistan, maybe do some combat operations. But I, I did not think it was going to be a war that all of us were going to participate in. Over the course of, like, the next month, while we were in selection, you're, again, you're completely isolated. But the instructor actors would kind of break, roll, and like, you guys understand when you leave here in 30 days, like, the whole country's changed.

Interviewer

That's wild. So you see those buildings falling down and you're like, yeah, we might just take this on the chin.

Joe Kent

That was my thought. I mean, I was like, I was like, I think we're gonna bomb some people, but I don't know if we're gonna actually go do anything about this, you know, because I, at that point I was just, you know, what do I know? I was 21 years old, right. But I had watched a couple different attacks come. And then when I got back to Ranger Battalion, we thought we were gonna jump into Kandahar. I was in 2nd Ranger Battalion. It was 3rd Ranger Battalion time they jumped into Kandahar. And I was like, well, that was it, man. That's it. That's the war. Like, we. We just missed it because there was a bunch of guys at that time. There was a handful that had been in Panama, had been in Grenada, that were still around. Like, we had one or two Mogadishu vets, but there was a lot of other guys who had 10, 15 years in the army who had just never been to combat. And so I was like, well, if you miss your. Your one chance, if you weren't in the right place at the right time, you're never going to get to go. And that's kind of what I thought.

Interviewer

Yeah, it's so interesting, too, because is. Is the same for all you guys, I find. It's like. It's a really obviously heavy thing, having to go to war, and it's like, holy. Like, you're out on the battlefield, the worst could happen, or the worst could happen to the guy next to me. But at the same time, like, that's what you train to do. And so when it calls, like, you want to be there, it's like. It's like a football player, he wants to be in the game. It's an interesting mental thing going on there. You ever thought about that?

Joe Kent

Now that I'm older? Yeah, definitely. At the time, though, no, because everybody was like, our number one concern concern was that, like, we were gonna miss it, right? Especially, like, once stuff started kicking off, it was like, when. When do we get to go? And if. When. If. When we get to go, like, is the war still going to be going on? Because again, late this. This wasn't the case a couple years, once everybody had had a chance to go. But at the time, it was like, oh, man, I'm gonna be one of those guys who was in the army for 10, 15 years. And, like, I was just somewhere else when. When the war happened. Because we all knew guys that, like, they missed Desert Storm, they miss Mogadishu. And so it was just like, that was. That was definitely a concern.

Interviewer

Yeah, it's. You thinking about that, though. Like, oh, are we going to take this one on the chin? It is different. Like, obviously, the coal was an awful attack, and what happened in the embassies in Kenya and stuff, like, they're like, you said there were build ups to this, but as bad as those things are, they're happening somewhere else.

Joe Kent

Yeah, exactly.

Interviewer

And then when, you know, like right now, you've been talking all day about, for example, the drones hidden all of our bases in the Gulf. It's horrible. None of us see it. You know what I mean? Like, we're going out on the street going about our day, but, like, if that base were right here, we'd be like, what the.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

You know, so there's. That's what sucks about human nature. It's like you have to have it happen to you to know what's up. I mean, you guys know in the military, but like, the average person, it's like, oh, that can happen. And 911 was obviously that. That huge wake up call. So you still had another year, year and a half or whatever as it would turn out after that to be in trouble training.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah.

Interviewer

And then you're officially green beret in 03, you said, right?

Joe Kent

Yeah. Yeah. So I missed the ground more too. So I thought I was in language school for the invasion of Iraq. So, like me and all my buddies that I was in selection with, like that Mike, my Q course class, we. We thought that we were the guys that missed two wars, which is hilarious now because all of us have multiple, multiple combat deployments. But, you know, by the time I got done, it was like June of 03, leave Fort Bragg, go to Fort Campbell, and I get to fifth group. And fifth group, those are the guys who invaded Afghanistan on horseback.

Interviewer

Back.

Joe Kent

They had just gotten back from the ground war in Iraq. And so I'm like, oh, man, I'm. I'm like the worst dude ever because, like, these guys just invaded two different countries and like, they were basically like, we're going right back and this isn't they. I don't know how they knew, but they're like, this is far from over. Don't worry, you're gonna get plenty.

Interviewer

Yeah. Do you know Danny Hall?

Joe Kent

I think I do now.

Interviewer

He won the. You'd fucking love him. He's savage. So he won the Silver Star or it was. I'm sorry, it was awarded the Silver Star from Iraq. He in O5. He and four National Guardsmen, like two or three Iraqi trainees and seven other berets were attacked in the middle of the night by. I forget what it was. Maybe it was like 58 guys. And he ended up weaponless and there were. Were 18 guys down left in a ditch. And he. He had no bullets and he was the 19th guy and one of them walked out of there. Wow, he's, he's something else. But like I remember him talking about 9, 11 and he's going to be able to come on the podcast now. He's gotten some of it cleared to talk about it, so I won't say some of it yet. But he was like, oh, we were burning, boy. We were ready to go. And he was a part, I'll just say, I'm not going to say whether it's fifth group or whatever, everybody's like a part some of that stuff. And it's just like, I could imagine that's the kind of thing you live for.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

You know, like, like what those guys got to do when they got on the ground there.

Joe Kent

That's pretty nuts for sure.

Interviewer

Now what were you thinking, you know, worldview wise about us going into Iraq? Were you like all about it at the time?

Joe Kent

Oh yeah, I believed all the. Yeah, I was like, man, Saddam's got weapons of mass destruction. If, if we don't get there now, like he's going to give him the Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is there, we gotta go, man. You know, like I was a little confused though why we let Bin Laden slip away.

Interviewer

Why we let him slip away.

Joe Kent

Not let him, but like we didn't chase him. So like maybe he slipped away but like we didn't follow him into Pakistan. I was a little bit like, well wait a sec, why aren't we all, like, why isn't every light infantryman available right now in the mountains of Pakistan if we knew he went that way, you know what I mean? Like we knew he went east into Pakistan, understand, like pretty easy to me, like, why aren't we doing that? But they, they spun things so quickly around to Iraq that like I didn't even have time to really concentrate on that. But I, I know I, I 100 bought off on WMD alcohol in Iraq.

Interviewer

We gotta go. Like watching the hearing where he's like, it's slam dunk. And you're like, goddamn right.

Joe Kent

I was like, yes, it is. Yeah, let's go.

Interviewer

So when was your. Obviously it's in 03, but you get out of language school, I guess, and it's still going on and they're like, you get to go and you're pretty pumped.

Joe Kent

Yeah, I get to group. And basically those guys had just gotten back and they're like, we're going back in August, man. And so we did a, a brief train up there at group and by I think like the 1st of September, I was on the ground in Baghdad now.

Interviewer

So when you get to Baghdad, are you. Did you go into the Green Zone at first? Like, kind of.

Joe Kent

So we went into the. Right off the international airport. There's this place called Robinia palace complex.

Interviewer

It was.

Joe Kent

It's like the only hill in Baghdad. It's this big evil looking castle that Saddam had built that we took over. That was the Special Forces headquarters for the. For the entirety of the war. So went there initially. My handover was abbreviated though, because the team that we were replacing the night before that, we got in, they went out and they went after Zarqawi's suicide bombers that had just hit the U.N. they went after that cell. They got ambushed in the house, lost to two Green Berets. Bill Bennett and Kevin Moorhead were killed on that. Bunch of. The team got shot up. So the team that we were supposed to replace, the vast majority of them got medically evacuated from that. And so like, there's two of that. There's like two or three. Three of them that stayed to help do the handover with us. And so there's like literally still blood in the. In the Tacoma pickup trucks. There's still gauze, gauze, bandages and stuff like that from the medevac. And so that was like day one.

Interviewer

That's your first day deployment. First.

Joe Kent

First deployment, yeah.

Interviewer

How do you deal with that? You look at that, you're like, oh, it's real now.

Joe Kent

It means pretty surreal because the part of the. The palace complex we were in is pretty nice. You know, we had like a pool. Like there's the stuff there and then. But then like there's these bloody Tak comas and there's the other last team. It's just like. Yeah, we went into, you know, they gave us the after actions review of how they went in the house. The guys were barricaded in there waiting for them. You know, they fought him to the death. But, you know, much of the team. Team got shut up. So we reviewed the after actions report. Literally got the blood out of the trucks, got the trucks back, ready to go again. Because I'm the. The new guy, so that was my job. But no, I was like, this is pretty surreal. This is real. Like we're actually out there just right outside that wire, like getting a gun fights.

Interviewer

And this is. This is now after the whole mission accomplished thing.

Joe Kent

Yes, at that point.

Interviewer

So.

Joe Kent

Exactly.

Interviewer

Were there any whispers among anyone going, maybe, maybe this is a little more than we thought it was going to be at that point?

Joe Kent

Yeah, for some. All of Our senior guys, they. They knew it, like, right when I got the group. And like, I, you know, said, I'm. I'm afraid I missed the war to somebody. And they laughed at me. They're like, this ain't going. This ain't going away anytime soon, buddy. So I think the guys that had been on the, on the ground level there, they knew. I don't remember. I wish I remembered. Our, our actual intelligence. The guy who was like the Overall intelligence officer, fifth group, but he gave a great brief in 03, and basically he was just like, this insurgency is only going to get worse, you know, and he, he laid out all the reasons why, which, you know, he ended up being. Being very, very right. But. But, yeah, I mean, for the guys that were on the ground, this is one of the first times I started seeing, like, the stuff on the ground is very different than when I see the top talking heads, say, in Washington, D.C. data point. Yeah. No, it's a data point. Yeah. I didn't know it was, but it was. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Interviewer

Now, were people at that time openly constantly discussing Al Zakari because he was the leader of the insurgency in Iraq from the beginning, but, like, was he at that point almost like the bin Laden of Iraq yet, or was it still.

Joe Kent

It was. It was two tracks then. And so my team's mission initially, us and another team were combined. This is of kind. Kind of like a not typical Special Forces mission. Our job was unilateral direct action. So basically we got fed targets from teams that were out in the field, and then we'd go hit the. Hit the targets. We did that for a couple months, and we transitioned to a different mission later on. But we knew at the time that Zarqawi was going to be a big problem because we had just. He had just claimed the bombing of the U.N. which made the U.N. leave, killed the head U.N. diplomat. And then we had guys get killed going after that cell. So we knew that they were very serious. But at the time, we were still spending about half of our time going after, after the deck of cards, going after the former Saddam loyalists, which I forgot they had a deck, of course. Yeah, Republican Guard guys. And Saddam was still on the loose, too. So there was still a hunt for Saddam.

Interviewer

When they get him. December.

Joe Kent

December.

Interviewer

Is that it? Yeah, we got him, ladies and gentlemen. We got him. It's all over.

Joe Kent

Hiding out in the spider hole.

Interviewer

Were you buying it at that point? We're good.

Joe Kent

Well, I mean, that point was a little confusing because it was like, well, okay, for we came here to take out Saddam. We got Saddam. Guess we can go now. I do remember thinking, like, really probably more towards O, because we stayed till the spring of 04, my first deployment. I do remember thinking in. Sometime in like, early 04, when we moved bases, I'm like, why is the army building more stuff? I do remember having that thought. I was like, everything that we were doing was very mobile, like living out of a rucksack and a truck and, you know, we weren't laying down roots. But I. I was like, man, there's a lot of. A lot of people looking long term here. Why is that? I didn't know we were doing that.

Interviewer

A lot of Hell Burton signs.

Joe Kent

Yeah. Yeah. It took me a couple years to put that one together, but yeah.

Interviewer

Yeah, that was one of my favorite. When Sean was on my show, like, Sean Ryan, over three years ago, he just had a. A clip in there where he's like, I look around how Burton, you look, right? I think he said Halberton like, 40 times just like that. I was like, all right, I got it. There was a lot of that going on.

Joe Kent

Yep.

Interviewer

Your first firefight, though, how quickly after you first got there was. Was that.

Joe Kent

It's pretty quick. I mean, Baghdad in 03, short of, like, going after a nest of Al Qaeda guys like the team that we replace did there, there wasn't a ton of, like, gunfight. Gunfights there would be hit and run. The Iraqis are pretty smart. Like, they're. They're not big fans of going up against us because they knew they'd lose. So that's why they had developed IEDs, that's why they did the ambushes. So it was. It was pretty quick on that. We. We took some fight fire and, you know, exchange some fire here and there, but it. Nothing huge initially, but still, like, you

Interviewer

go through years of training, like, you're built for this, and you're obviously one of the best in the world at it, but like every other human being before you who goes into a firefight for the first time where there's real bullets flying.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

You know, was that like a reality check moment or were you like.

Joe Kent

Yeah, it definitely is. It's a little. I mean, you do what you're. You do what you're trained to do, and then when you have a second to think, right, that's when you. I mean, I remember thinking, like, why are they shooting at us? I do remember that. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Okay, That's. That's what we're doing here. I do remember how absurd that thought was and then thinking how absurd it was. But, yeah, no, it's definitely a very human thing. But I think the level of training that all of us were at, you're more concerned with, like, screwing up and getting somebody killed than you are anything else. And then also, like, if someone's shooting at us, like, I want a piece of that right away. Like, I want to be the guy that returns fire, right? And so a lot of it was like, the frantic. That's why I think my. My. My buddy who was senior to me on the team was like, hey, how's my hair? Because I was probably, like, looking around like a psychopath. Like, you know, like, how do I. How do I show that I'm not scared and shoot or something?

Interviewer

You know, I mean, you might be. You're obviously mature to be able to do something like this, but you're still at the time, what, 22, 23, something like that?

Joe Kent

23? Yeah.

Interviewer

Yeah. Like, have you. I mean, I was such a moron at 20. I was a moron at 27. But, you know, have you. Did you ever have time to think about the fact that, like, yeah, you are putting yourself in life and death scenarios now, and any one moment something goes wrong, the lights are out.

Joe Kent

I mean, conceptually, I knew it. And my team was really lucky for a long time. It wasn't until my third deployment, we lost guys on my team. I lost guys I knew. But still, even then, like, you. You, It's. It's funny. It's not funny. This is probably human nature too, but the more dangerous things you go through, the more you start to think like you're invincible. And then, even then, even even though, you know, you're not supposed to think that, you start. You're like, well, it's not gonna happen to me. And like, the. More especially in. In special operations, because this is true to a certain extent. Like the motto of the. The Brit, Special operations, who dares wins. It's true to a certain extent. Like, if you're audacious and you're confident and you have a good plan and you execute it violently, like, chances are you're gonna be okay. But too much of that, you can. You can kind of start to believe your own hype.

Interviewer

Oh, yeah.

Joe Kent

And. And there was definitely a. A period of several years there where I was just like, it's not going to happen. I'm good. You know, even I would never say that because I was superstitious enough, you know, but Looking back, like, it, mentally, mentally 100%, like in the back of my head, I was just like, it's not going to happen to me.

Interviewer

Yeah.

Joe Kent

You know.

Interviewer

Were your parents worried about you?

Joe Kent

I imagine, I'm sure, I can't even imagine. I, I mean, honestly, I didn't start thinking about, like, the totality of the situation until years and years later. I didn't, I didn't deploy as a dad until 2016. And that was when I had, I actually had a son at home.

Interviewer

Oh, that's interesting.

Joe Kent

And then I was like, oh, this is a whole. And that was my ninth deployment.

Interviewer

Because now you have someone to live for after. Wow.

Joe Kent

Yeah. And if I get killed, like, there's real ramifications here. It's a big deal. That was like the first time where I was like, man, I'm kind of getting old here. Like, this is, you know, a little, little different. But it did definitely give me perspective because I, I, I always, you know, wondered why, you know, guys cared about being away from home, why they, you know, cared about taking risks, you know, like, so I, it definitely gave me perspective of the guys who I'd been with for years before, who had kids and deployed time after time after time.

Interviewer

When you got into the teams and, and you're doing these first deployments and stuff, did you find that the, the older guys served as like, really good mentors for you? Like, they had a good culture like that?

Joe Kent

Yeah, incredible. Yeah, incredible. So when I came in, you couldn't come right off the streets and go to Special Forces. And I having three years in Ranger battalion, I was by far the most junior guy. Like there was guys on my team who had done 10 years in the infantry. You know, my team sergeant had been in Special Forces for like 10 plus years. So I mean, it was, yeah, really solid crew.

Interviewer

That's awesome.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

How were, how were the people when you first got there? Like the Iraqi people, obviously, like you're going out into these war zones and stuff where people have lived there and now it's a war torn country. Like did you find in maybe 03, early 04, they were still really excited for you guys to be there or, or did you run into situations where it's like there were people like, get the out of here.

Joe Kent

It's interesting because, you know, I had never been to the Middle east before and so I thought everything in the Middle east was, you know, sand dunes and camels and like, you know, just like the, the ridiculous vision that we have. And I remember like the first time I really drove around Baghdad. I was like, this is trippy because this could be almost anywhere in America. You know, I could tell the signs were older because of sanctions. And so, like, they had. You know, the cars weren't as modern, but the new cars are starting to pour in because sanctions were gone. But it was a modern city. And, like, you know, in Baghdad, most people don't dress in traditional garb. They dress in Western garb. So I was just like, man, this is. This is pretty wild. Like, this could be, you know, downtown Portland, where I grew up.

Interviewer

Yeah, it brings it home in a weird way, right?

Joe Kent

It does. And the people. It's interesting because there's, like, at the time, and I think this is still true in a lot of places we go. There's the official people that you deal with who want something from. From you. And they're. They were the ones who at the time, were telling us, like, you know, we're so glad that you're here, America. You know? But then you'd go out on the streets, and you could tell. You could just feel that a lot of the people, like, they. They weren't happy that we were there. Even if they didn't like Saddam, like, they. They weren't happy that we were there. And that would play out, you know, in years to come. We. We'd see that in a very big way. But even early on, but we still had the hope that we were going to kind of be in and out. And I think the Iraqis had a lot of tolerance for that. I think that they were like, okay, if you're here to get rid of the guy we didn't like, okay, like, you guys can. Don't stay too long.

Interviewer

Right?

Joe Kent

But, yeah, it was.

Interviewer

Don't overstay the welcome.

Joe Kent

Don't ever say the welcome. Yeah, yeah. Which, I mean, to me, I was like, this is kind of how I would feel, you know, like, it. It kind of brought it home a little bit for me because I'm like, I would probably be like, okay, if I didn't like the Saddam. Saddam had done bad things to my family and hurt my country. I'd want him gone, but at the same time, I wouldn't want a foreigner, you know, on my street telling me where. Where I can and can't go.

Interviewer

Right, Right. I forgot to ask you this. When you were in language school, what language did you learn?

Joe Kent

Posh. Dune.

Interviewer

Okay, so you're going into. I went in Iraq. You're not.

Joe Kent

So I spent six months in posthumous language school and promptly never Went to Afghanistan.

Interviewer

So in Iraq, you're just the regular Joe there?

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I mean, I could. I could sound out the Alphabet. And so after a couple months of doing direct action, my team got tasked with standing up the Iraqi special forces. And so we had to demobilize the anti Saddam militias and cobble them together into a fighting force. Yeah.

Interviewer

How do you do that?

Joe Kent

Oh, it was. It was kind of a mess. We got shotgun together really fast without having a lot of interpreters. And so luckily a lot of the. The kids from Baghdad spoke some English. And so we, we hired some local interpreters who just like, literally had listened to pop music and like, watched American movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would, I would have them, I would just write down the words I needed every day, which predominantly was like, you know, shoot, don't shoot, left, right, straight, slow down, speed up, follow me. Like those. I'd like write them down and then like, just the phonetics and so forget the.

Interviewer

No, like. Oh, wait, wait.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, that's where pointy talking comes in. You know, like, they, they kind of know what you mean. The distress signal definitely works, you know, but at the language school, in the Q course actually, though, gave me the confidence because, like, when they were like, hey, you have to learn posh tune. The Special Forces language process is really funny. If you go to test to be a linguist, like, for anywhere in the military, like my late wife did, they want to make sure you actually have an aptitude for it and that you're actually going to be good at it. Special Forces, by the time you get done with the Q course, they're basically like, you're going to get assigned the language that you need for your group. And if you don't pass, we don't care, you won't get your beret. So. So you better figure it out. We don't care how well you did on your aptitude test. We don't care if you failed every class in. In school. You better pass this. This. You better pass this. You're not gonna leave. So having to go through that process, which sucks, sucked, gave me the confidence that once I hit the ground in Baghdad, I was like, okay, well, at least I know the Alphabet. I can kind of figure this. I can figure this out enough to be proficient.

Interviewer

Yeah. Now, when did the data points start adding up enough for you in these various deployments you were doing to Iraq to where you started to think like, hey, maybe this wasn't what I thought. Maybe this wasn't the Best idea. How long did that take?

Joe Kent

It was, I mean, I hate to say it, but it was a while for me. It was probably into my third deployment. My first two deployments were so, so fast paced and they were in Baghdad and they were, they were pretty cut and dry. I mean, we were going after bad guys. We were training the Iraqi special forces and we were just constantly in that targeting cycle. And at the time it seemed like all we had to do was catch Zarqawi and we'd be out of there. Once Saddam was caught, it was like, okay, we catch Zarqawi, we whack a couple of these foreigners that are here and we're done. And I, I truly believed that at the time. And then my third deployment, we went up to a border town on the Iraq, Syria border.

Interviewer

What year?

Joe Kent

This is 040506. Long deployment. We weren't supposed to go on it. We got shotgunned into it again and we had a little bit. It wasn't as fast of an operations tempo, but I really started to see this is when the US Military was flirting with the idea of a surge of putting more troops into Iraq. And I was just like, man, I've been now at the ground level for two years of this war, back for a third. And I was just like, I don't see how throwing more combat troops here is going to do anything but get more of them killed. I don't think that's actually going to work. I think that we've really screwed this whole thing up. My first deployment, when we had to demobilize the anti Saddam militias, that's around the same time that Bremer said that we had to fire anybody who was affiliated with the Bath Party, which was pretty much everybody. And also like, it basically galvanized all the Sunnis against us.

Interviewer

Yeah, that won't do anything bad.

Joe Kent

And so I, I remember thinking at the time, and I'm low man on the totem pole, but my, my team, we're like, this is probably a bad idea because we actually needed a, a lot of the former Saddam military officers and military non commissioned officers to help us pull this whole thing together. They got fired. We were only able to keep a handful of them. They got fired. And so we kind of sat down as a, as a team and we're like, well, what does that mean? And you know, my, my team leader, who was a pretty smart guy, was like, well, imagine if they just fired everybody at Fort Campbell. But we still had the keys to the base and they told us we could never have a job in the government ever, ever again. And actually half of us are, are branded as criminals if we were above a certain rank. I was like, well that's pretty easy, right? Like, you know, data point as. And so I had seen us consistently make these mistakes. And then we luckily were able to keep a couple of the former Saddam era leaders. We, we were able to basically make the case that a couple of them we could keep. And that was an exception that Special Forces got and, and those guys were wealth of knowledge. And they basically were like, look, the only reason there's freaking Al Qaeda here is because, because of America. They were like Zarqawi, when he was in Iraq, he was up in the Kurdish controlled area and he was up there because there was a no fly zone. And, and they were basically like, if we would have had our dres, if Saddam would have had his way, he would have thrown that dude into a dungeon and torched him to death. That's what he did to jihadis because jihadis were a threat to Saddam.

Interviewer

Yeah.

Joe Kent

And so the more Al Qaeda guys I fought in Fallujah in, in 04 as well, we hit the.

Interviewer

What was that like?

Joe Kent

It was. Fallujah was a mess, man. Fallujah was just. When they went in in the spring of 04, we were back home when that happened. But we had the team that replaced us went in and did that. They had the momentum to go in and to take out some of the Zarqawi lieutenants and maybe even Zarqawi. They got stopped for political reasons. And then basically we isolated Fallujah. We built a, built like essentially a cordon around it and then just said at some point, at some point we're going to come in here and we're going to get all you guys. And we didn't even completely contain it. And so for. It became a vector for foreign fighters. And so we knew going into Fallujah that most of the people that were there, most of the bad guys that were in Fallujah were there to fight and die. And our, the guys that were senior to me in Special Forces were, you know, doing a really good job of painting the intelligence picture to senior leaders and saying that like all the guys in Fallujah are here to fight and die. Most of them want us to come into the houses because they've been watching how we fight and they want to, you know, draw us into baited ambushes or blow up houses on us. So trying to go door to door here is a really bad idea. Idea. The Marines, Mattis and those guys were like, no, we want to put a Marine in every single house and dominate this whole thing. And so to me it was just like, yeah, Fallujah's full of bad guys, but why are we having this big fight here? Why are we even doing this?

Interviewer

That's what the British tried to do to the Americans. That didn't turn out too well.

Joe Kent

No, exactly.

Interviewer

You know. Yeah, like can just real quick joy. I always ask this of guys who were on the ground doing that though, going door to door. Like someone like you obviously has all the right intentions and you're doing your, your job. You know, I never ever am gonna not condemn terrorism or anything like that, but I do always try to figure out where it comes from and how it starts. Could you see how a 7 year old whose house gets raided in the middle of the night and he's thrown on the floor and zip tied while his dad is beat up in front of him being asked questions because he might actually be a threat possibly and stuff like that. Could you see how a kid like that might grow up and be a terrorist even if that Wasn't the intention?

Joe Kent

100%. 100%. And that's, I mean that's where we get blowback terrorism from.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

Not just our support for, for Israel, all that, but like the actions that we've taken in the last 20 plus years in the Middle East. I mean we, we definitely created way more terrorists than we took off the battlefield in Iraq because there were no Iraqi terrorists that were coming over here to, to take us out at the time. There's a handful here and there, but in terms of the insurgency that we dealt with, we by and large created the vast majority of that, that insurgency either because of tact we took or because of strategic mistakes that we made in terms of, you know, firing all the Sunnis de Ba'. Athification. And then on the Shia side we put in a lot of the more Iranian aligned guys which galvanized some of the more nationalistic Shias against us. We again, we got in the middle of a problem that we didn't understand and we took sides. And then the longer that we. This is why I was skeptical in 05 of the surge. I was like, if we add more troops, all we're going to do is we're going to give more targets for the insurgents to shoot to shoot at. We're going to give more targets for the, the IEDs to pop off. Because that was the big threat at the time and it remained the threat the entire time. So I, I just saw our actions as being very counterproductive. And by then, by 05, the narrative of WMDs was basically, it was a public joke. At that time, you even had. The Bush administration was like, laughing about it. And I was like, that's crazy. I was like, that's kind of funny, but that's not really funny. Like you, you sent us over here. We're still here. There's still kids dying. Especially like when 04,05, when the casualty rate was just skyrocketing and then, you know, it got worse. Throughout the surge, like, I was like, well, this, it's not funny at all. And by then I was also pretty convinced that, like, the only reason that Al Qaeda was there, especially being up on the Syrian border, that's when the foreign fighter flow was starting to pour into Iraq. Well, they were coming to where it was supply and demand. They were coming to where the actual supply of Americans were to kill. You know, we, we created the demand signal for foreign fighters and for jihadis to come there. I mean, bin Laden said that, you know, publicly. He was like, I can't believe America took, took the bait. So I was very skeptical by, by 05, but I still, number one, I, I didn't want to, you know, just quit then and leave other guys to go, you know, fight and die. I also really like Special Forces. It was my profession I really liked. I mean, I liked being in combat. I still miss combat, even though I like.

Interviewer

You miss it.

Joe Kent

All the, all the combat stuff I did, at the end of the day, was it really worth anything? Did it make our country safer, better? No, but like, individually, like, do I miss it? Yeah, absolutely, man.

Interviewer

What about it?

Joe Kent

I mean, it's as real as it gets. I mean, after you've done combat, it's like, I don't know, it's probably how people who've been addicted to cocaine or whatever feel.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

You know, And I never thought of myself, like, as an adrenaline junkie or anything, but in terms of, like, especially if you train for something for so long and then you get to go do it for so long, it's hard to go. Do, you know, other things?

Interviewer

How have you replaced that void? And I asked that because, like, I've talked with a lot of guys, especially from special Forces and stuff, who struggles with that because it is so high octane and there's nothing like it. And they've even described it like it's like some kind of weird drug. You know, some of them have different Ways that I'll call healthy of how to deal with it and others like, you know, I don't know if that's the best idea, but, you know, am I to give them advice on it? You know, like, how do you, how do you manage that void, not being able to do that anymore?

Joe Kent

I mean, really what I'm doing now, I. I want to make the experiences that we had over there count for something. Because I think if you're left, if we're left our own devices to say, what was all that for? I mean, I don't, like, even the strongest amongst us, I think is going to go to a pretty dark place and probably, you know, pick up some pretty bad habits, best case scenario. So for me, it's like, I, I want to be the generation. I want our generation, the. The war on terror generation to. To be the ones that actually help set this right, to continue the service. So that for me, that's kind of given me like a new perspective, purpose. I still struggle with it. I still have to like, work out every day. Like, if I, if I don't have some kind of like physical challenge or whatever, I still, you know, I have a little bit of a, you know, I'll get inside my own head a little bit too much.

Interviewer

So you're on the treadmill, going back there in your head a little bit.

Joe Kent

Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah.

Interviewer

Yeah.

Joe Kent

I have to. Yeah. I have to tell myself, like, next deployment, like, it's like, no, you're in your mid-40s, they don't want you. Yeah.

Interviewer

That's funny. I bet you could still hold your own out there.

Joe Kent

I think if I had to, I could, right? Yeah.

Interviewer

Yeah. You look like you're in shape.

Joe Kent

Yeah. Recovery and like, things hurt more, but I can still more or less do the same. The same stuff.

Interviewer

Yeah.

Joe Kent

I just can't like, do it hungover, you know.

Interviewer

How many total deployments did you do in all your years?

Joe Kent

11. 11. Yeah.

Interviewer

So is in Iraq. Where else?

Joe Kent

Yemen and then Horn. Africa. So I was on. So 5th Special Forces Group was on repeat in Iraq. So every year of the Iraq war from 03 until we left. Air quotes. In 11 were there. I was there for at least six months, if not more. 2010, I spent 2010 was the exception. I was in Yemen for about eight months.

Interviewer

So you, as you said, the third deployment in 05 is when you started to be like, what the. With some of this. And you know, that's a lot of deployments to 11. And also, like you said you loved being in Combat, you love being with your guys and you love the job. So that's part of the reason you stayed in. You know, was there ever a point, though? Maybe it's, I don't know, 07, 08, 09, where you start to where you were tempted to leave because you didn't believe in the overall mission of what you were doing.

Joe Kent

I, at the time, I thought the issue was that the ground truth wasn't getting up to our decision makers, that if we could get more ground truth to our decision makers, we wouldn't make bad decisions. And that's why I gravitated. Because when you're in special operations, you've kind of got two tracks you can go on. You can stay all door kicker and I just want to go kicking doors. I want to be a sniper, I want to do free fall operations. Or you can kind of gravitate more towards operations and intel and you can get qualified to be a human intelligence collector. And that, that, that's the direction that I went in my career because I wanted, I, after about like 04, I was like, well, the issue with the enemy isn't that we can't kill them. Whenever we get the, whenever we can put the enemy in time and space, like we kill them, it doesn't matter if it's freaking, you know, the seals or if it's the Kentucky National Guard. Like, we kill those guys, we win, they lose. That's how this works. That part's not hard. That part's really exciting. That part's really challenging. Challenging. I like it. But that's not the issue here. The issue is, number one, we can't find bad guys because insurgencies in foreign countries are very challenging. So I want to be able to hunt the humans, but also I want to be able to give that ground truth so that we don't get into a situation. I said, my problem is I never really assumed mal intent. I didn't think that people were blatantly lying. I thought they just got it wrong. And so I said, okay, now that I'm here on the ground, I want to be a guy who can collect as much ground truth as possible so that someday, if I am in the room, the ground truth is actually reflects and we can, we can help set the course straight. So as the years went on, I felt like it was my duty to go back over and to continue to collect more ground truth. You know, send that up, try and articulate like what I thought that we were getting wrong and how we could fix it too. I also Felt like as a guy who advocated for it, who fought for it, who fought to be there, that I needed to be part of, like helping fix it. Which is crazy because I wasn't like a senior ranking guy or anything, but in my own head I was like, okay, I was want to be part of the solution, not just leave and kind of, kind of call this out. And then long term, the more I was in, the longer I was in, the more I saw, you know, the CIA and other parts of our government that I thought needed more ground truth. And I was like, at some point I want to be in one of those organizations so that I can.

Interviewer

Needed more ground truth at the CIA.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

It's not a word associated with them. Too much truth.

Joe Kent

Right. Well, in theory there, their motto is know the truth and truth is.

Interviewer

Yeah, you had great, great intentions.

Joe Kent

I had great intentions, Yeah. I believe the propaganda, man. That's my opinion. It's too much GI Joe.

Interviewer

Well, you didn't end up there for a while. When did you end up doing paramilitary? What year?

Joe Kent

When I retired from the military. Yes.

Interviewer

Okay, so we'll get there. But you did Yemen and Horn of Africa. And by the way, Deep. Can we pull up that picture of Joe? Because like, you went. This wasn't that long ago either. You went from Jon Snow to Rob Stark real quick. I mean.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah. So when I got out of the military, like at my retirement tournament ceremony, my wife's like, you shouldn't get a haircut like for two years. And I didn't.

Interviewer

So you look like that for a couple years.

Joe Kent

I look like that. And then also too, like. And you, you've, you know, enough guys in the soft community, you've probably picked up on this. The longer your hair is, if you're still in special operations, like the cooler you are, the longer, the longer you can get away with like having like the most non military haircut ever. Like, the cooler you are, you can

Interviewer

go back to it.

Joe Kent

So I was, so I was go. I could. Yeah, I might. You never know. Yeah, I do. I don't like getting haircuts.

Interviewer

So not so a good look.

Joe Kent

That was definitely a mentality. Yeah.

Interviewer

So this, that. When was that? That picture was right after the career, right?

Joe Kent

Yeah, that was. I was probably still. I probably just. Just gotten out of the. Out of the agency at the point now.

Interviewer

What was Yemen like?

Joe Kent

So Yemen in 2010 when I was over there was awesome. It was awesome. Yemen is a freaking beautiful country.

Interviewer

Tell me more.

Joe Kent

This is the first I've heard this. The cool Thing about Yemen, most people don't know this because you look at it on a map and it's on the Arabian Peninsula. So you're like, it's probably a bunch of desert deserts, and it's probably just like, really hot Sanaa, basically that western coast. Once you get just a little bit north of Aiden, you start climbing. So the capital city, Sanaa, sits, and I want to say about almost 8, 000ft. And so basically most of the year, you kind of have San Diego weather. It gets a little bit hot during the day, but right when the sun goes down, you're so high up in the mountains, it's, like, pretty temperate. And the. The Yemeni. Yemenis have a very interesting, like, tribal culture. Culture. They. I call them the Yams. The Yems are aware that, like the rest of the world exists. They just don't really care. They've. They've done a really good job of keeping their traditions. Like, Sanaa is like, one of the world's, like, longest populated or oldest and most continually continuously populated cities, and they've kept a lot of the architecture at the time. Ali Abdullah Saleh, the guy who kind of held the country together, him and his family were. Were running Yemen, and he did this through a very complex tribal system of, you know, patronage, bribes, and occasional military action. That's kind of like where the Houthi. The whole Houthi thing came from. We ostensibly were over there. I say ostensibly because the Yemeni government was never really on board with this. We're on. We were over there to go after Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The guys who had bombed Nicole, Anwar Alwaaki, the American was over there. The Yemeni government knew that that was cash cow for them. They knew that if America cared about Al Qaeda that we would, like, fund them. Right. But what's. All I cared about was holding on to power. Power. And that's why he was at war with the Houthis. It's complicated. He eventually ended up defecting and becoming part of the Houthis. But I. I had a great time in Yemen because our. It was still relatively permissive or safe enough for us to live in the city. So we had a team house downtown Sanaa. We were training the Yemeni special forces, but then also kind of trying to map out a lot of the different tribal dynamics and trying to hunt down some of the. The Al Qaeda guys.

Interviewer

How was the op tempo compared to Iraq? I imagine a lot more laid back.

Joe Kent

Yeah, Much, much more laid back. So we weren't out there kicking Indoors or anything like that. I mean, Sanaa was still like a. A little bit. It was dangerous enough to be exciting because Al Qaeda would come in every now and again and plant bombs in places and, you know, try and kill people at the embassy. Yeah. So there was some cat and mouse.

Interviewer

We.

Joe Kent

We. We were able to do more traditional, like, human intelligence collection, but then also advisory work going up and training up the special Forces. And they were operating pretty high up in the mountains there. So it was. It was really cool. And the. The interesting thing there, too, is that that the. The country at the time was ran by the Salah family. And so we were interacting on a daily basis with, like, Salah's kids or his nephews, because they were at the top. Yeah. So basically from the guys that we would interact with, it went like, right to the president. That's how tight a control. Span of control he had over the country. So we actually were really juiced into, like, politically what was taking place there too. At the time, Salah was telling us that, like, our biggest threat was the Houthis.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

Which nobody had really heard of a Houthi before then, but he had. He had, you know, a power struggle going on with the Houthis.

Interviewer

These.

Joe Kent

So it's an interesting time to be there.

Interviewer

Yeah. Because what.

Joe Kent

You were there 2012, 13, 2010, 2010 to early. Early 11.

Interviewer

And that was the only time you were in Yemen.

Joe Kent

I was back in 2017, but I was down in Aiden. And that was after the whole country collapsed.

Interviewer

I was gonna say that's when had popped off and everything, because then, I mean, this was a whole proxy war between.

Joe Kent

Yep.

Interviewer

Effectively Saudi Arabia and Iran. There was more going on there, but,

Joe Kent

like, yeah, we were involved. The Saudis, the Emirates are playing because they want to control the port ports.

Interviewer

They've since left, so the country looked entirely different.

Joe Kent

Oh, entirely different. Yeah. We can. We had freedom of movement. We really couldn't go far out west because Al Qaeda did hold some ground out there. But we could drive out to Houdeida, we could drive down to Aiden. So it was cool in terms of, like, just being with, like, one other dude and going out. And Yemen, the Ms. Have an interesting culture. I mean, they're. They're very addicted to cot. So, like, half the day, every day after lunch, like, forget about it. Everybody's hanging out and. And cot, it's like literally a country ran by like, your. Your. Your pothead friend from. From high school or college. So.

Interviewer

Well, it ended up not working out for him, but it sounds Fun.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, like a lot of my deployments, it ended up not working out in the end, but we, we kind of had a good time.

Interviewer

So those years in between 2012, 16, is that all Hornet Africa.

Joe Kent

Well, that was a lot of, well, a lot of training and then back to Iraq for the counter ISIS fight. Iraq.

Interviewer

Oh, you did okay.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

All right, so what, what year is that? 2015.

Joe Kent

15 back in Iraq. 15 16.

Interviewer

What was that that like?

Joe Kent

I mean, I, I was there when we left in 2011, and when we left in 2011, one of the last missions that I, that I had, we were consolidating. We, we were trying to make sure that we, we kept a lot of our tribal alliances and a lot of our key relationships in 2011 because we all had this inclination that we'd be back at some point in time. One of the last meetings we had in 2011, big interagency meeting, and I, I asked the question of like, what is once we leave here once a. What is America's life long term goal for Iraq and the State Department, it wasn't the ambassador, but, you know, junior person was just like, well, we want to make sure that Al Qaeda never finds a permanent base again in Iraq. We want to make sure that Iraq is not a, you know, safe haven for terrorist organizations. And at this point, we had basically stacked the deck so much against the Sunnis that it was a, it was a pot that was going to boil over at some point. And so basically we were like, okay, well if that's the case, then the government that we're supporting is working, working basically directly against that aim because the Syrian civil war had already started. And so you already had a powder keg of, you know, Sunnis out here fighting against Assad, who we were kind of enabling at the time, more so later on. But then you had the Sunnis who had basically been beaten into submission by us and by the Shia government that we installed. And so a lot of us in 2011, early 2012, we were like, all the Iraqi government is doing now is they're going out and they're arresting all their different, you know, Sunni adversaries. And so they're going to crack down so hard on them. We think that we're going to end up coming back. So fast forward to when we actually do have to come back after ISIS comes back in. It was a bit of like, okay, well, yeah, here we are. What you expect, what you expect. It was also frustrating too, because at the time, you know, throughout the entire Iraq war, the way that we just threw money at the problem to build an Iraqi security forces, it was never going to be enduring. And we kind of knew that just because we were trying to throw money at the problem to say that we had a standing military. And then when ISIS rolled across the berm, that military crumbled. They threw their weapons in the dirt, and they basically, all of them, except for the Iraqi special forces and the Kurds basically handed over their, their stuff to isis. And so we are back not having to deal with that problem. We then saw that we, that the next brush fire that we had to create to try and get ourselves out was we had to then arm the popular mobilization forces who were the Shia militias that we had fought during, during the surge. So a lot of, a lot of it was just like, yeah, time is flat. A lot of it just like on and on, man. Like, we're just trying to push this big rock up the hill. But 20, it was frustrating because, like I said a while ago, we knew that we could take out isis. I mean, because they were holding ground. And like, if you're holding ground, the US Military can, can smack you pretty hard. But Obama didn't want to go in that hard and heavy because he really didn't want to have any boots on the ground. And so he wanted the Iraqis to kind of lead on everything. And so we were kind of in this trench warfare slow log against isis, when really it seemed like we could pick out ISIS in pretty short order, which happened later on.

Interviewer

Trump, did you ever get on the ground at all there? I mean, obviously, like you're saying, there wasn't a ton of that. So what was, where was that in Iraq and what did that look like?

Joe Kent

I was up towards Kirkuk and it was, it was trench warfare. So ISIS had taken over basically, Mosul, and they had a, a pretty, you know, a line that they had, they had held, held, and they held the train, but they held it by digging berms, kind of like World War I style. And so there'd be a berm that ISIS held kind of like around their cities, and then there'd be a berm that the Kurds and the, the PMF that the Shia militias held. And basically we'd come in if air cover to try and bomb enough of the ISIS berms or provide artillery or provide mortars to allow either the, the Kurds or the, the Shia militias to advance. And so it was just like a long slog. And they were all. We were trying to push all of them into Mosul and they were pretty hunkered down inside Mosul. And eventually that worked out when Trump came in because we were able to drop the hammer on them and eventually able to take Mosul. But it was a lot more, it wasn't as house to house door kicking like the previous rotations had been. It was much more of a war fought by air power. But we were doing a lot of liaison stuff, like trying to, you know, get the, the, the Kurds and then having to work with the Shia militias. You know, I had, I, I'd worked on the, I'd worked on the Ambar Awakening before in, you know, 0506, where I was working with guys that we had fought in Fallujah. So now we, we had come full circle and now I was working with the same guys we had fought in Ninja and in Soler City. You know, so it was just, you know, here we go again.

Interviewer

Yeah. Your career, you really. Because of how long it was too. And then where you ended up up like with the White House and everything, you really have seen all the different 180, 360s.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

That have happened from every angle, which is kind of crazy.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

But you know, and then you're on the ground and obviously ISIS is a whole different level. I mean, Bin Laden was like, hey, those guys are nuts.

Joe Kent

Like, yeah, he's like, listen, we're not like that.

Interviewer

You know, that's. You're fighting with people that, you know, I, I think just lack all humanity. Like everything that I've read about that, it's like, you know, you're just.

Joe Kent

No, they're savages. I mean, I mean, usually it, when, when people call their enemy savages and all these horrible things, they're, they're finding a way to justify having to kill them. But with isis, literally, I mean, they literally are. I mean, that's just that. That's the only solution for those guys is you do have to hunt them. Hunt them down and kill them.

Interviewer

So what, what years were you in the Horn of Africa though, with?

Joe Kent

So I wasn't there for very. So when I was in Aiden in 2017, we were in the Horn of Africa and then back. We were kind of back in four forth and then in. I was actually in, in Africa, in Northern Africa in, in 2019. But I wasn't there for very long because that's when my late wife was killed.

Interviewer

How, when, when did you meet your wife? Along the way?

Joe Kent

I met her. Well, I mentioned initially I met her briefly for like 10 minutes in 2007, she was given an intelligence briefing that I was a part of. And I was like, I'm gonna come back and see her later on. And I didn't. And I didn't. She was there and I didn't see her again for, for several years. So 2313, we, we both ended up in the same special operations unit.

Interviewer

That's cool.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

And what, what was her specialty?

Joe Kent

So technically she was a crypto linguist.

Interviewer

Crypto linguist?

Joe Kent

Yeah. So stealing intercepting signals, so cell phones, radio transmissions, etc, that's what she was trained to do. She was a natural linguist. So she, you know, learned, learned Arabic at the, at Monterey, at dli, but then she self taught herself several different dialects of, of the language. And this is at a time when there wasn't, number one, there wasn't a lot of people who understood the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. And because of the Iraqi culture, there was, there wasn't a lot of women that were linguists that were willing to go out on target. And so she volunteered to start going out with. She was, she was in the Navy, So she started volunteering to go out with the seals to interrogate the women that were on target because even the male interpreters, a lot of the women wouldn't talk to. So she would go out there and speak Arabic to the women and the girls on target to get intelligence. And so that kind of like branched her off into human source operations, so recruiting source horses.

Interviewer

She was a badass.

Joe Kent

Yeah. Yeah.

Interviewer

Wow.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

Now what drew you to her?

Joe Kent

What's that?

Interviewer

What drew you to her?

Joe Kent

Oh, man, it was, it was, it was. She's very pretty. So, you know, there's that, but that helps. But then also like just turn out like we both had kind of lived a very similar life. We both spent a lot of time in Iraq. We both had a, I think a pretty strong mission focus. I mean, she joined, she's native New Yorker, her father, New York state trooper uncle, New York City firefighter. They're both ground zero first responders.

Interviewer

Oh, wow.

Joe Kent

So her and her brother, she's like not even about 18 months older than her brother. They both went and joined the military right after 9, 11. So we both had the same, you know, patriotic, this is our war mindset. And then after that, I think everything else is just like literally the, the magic of love. When you meet your person, you meet your person.

Interviewer

That's cool.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

When did you guys get married?

Joe Kent

We got married in 2014 and then

Interviewer

had started having kids short after that. I guess now she ends up as you've said a couple times today, deployed in Syria. What was just. You might have said this earlier, I can't remember if it was before. CAMERA ON CAMERA but what was the nature of that mission there that she was supposed to be doing at the time in Syria?

Joe Kent

So she was collecting intelligence. So she, she was working with the task force that was going after isis, the last stronghold of isis.

Interviewer

And you had said there were some bureaucratic things that even led to us still being there at the time. Time where we didn't even have to be there. But what, what, what happened when, when she was killed.

Joe Kent

Suicide bomber. So they were out in a place called Manbage. They're with the, the Kurds. They were out doing a meeting with some of the local leaders there. And unfortunately, a suicide bomber, like, infiltrated their perimeter. So there was just a handful of them that were out there killed. So the suicide bomber came right up and detonated, killed my late wife, Shannon. John Farmer, Green Beretta, who I actually served with. Scotty Warts, Navy seal, and then Gaddier Taha, who was a Syrian American linguist.

Interviewer

Where were you at the time?

Joe Kent

I was in. I was deployed, so I was in, In Africa. Yeah.

Interviewer

What was that like, getting that call to find out about that?

Joe Kent

It was. I mean, it was unconventional. I knew because we could communicate, because we were. I was in the CIA, then she was in Special Operations, so I could commute. We could, we could be frank with each other. Other, because I could speak with her on secure phones, so I knew generally where she was and what she was doing. And I knew she was going out that day. Coincidentally, I, I was out different place, but doing something very similar. Nothing super dangerous, but still dangerous, looking for bad guys. I came back in and a guy who I'd served with in Special Forces who had crossed over the. The Agency, he was my. He was my boss, and he just pulled me aside and said, hey, I'm just going to tell you what we know know. In a suicide attack in Manbage, he didn't know where Shannon was, but he knew she was in Syria. So he was like, do you know where Shannon is? I was like, she's in Manbage. He's like, man, there's two females that were killed, and there's not a lot of women in the, in the profession. So we spent the next hour or so trying to figure out if it was her. And they got confirmation. So then I knew. I was like, I. Then I felt really guilty for evil, guilty for being. Well, for being there because I had put, I had been out and had I gotten killed, my kids would be orphans. You know, my kids were with my parents at the time. I was only supposed to be over there for a little bit, so I thought it was fine. You know, I thought she'd be on a longer deployment. I'd go over for like a month, do, do some stuff and then come back and be okay kids, be with my parents. But I was like, I, you know, neither one of us should have been here. But I definitely now that, now that this has happened, I shouldn't be here either. So I just got home as fast as I could.

Interviewer

Had you guys, guys had. Because you guys have both been in for a long time at that point and now you were even in CIA. So out of the active military, but doing paramilitary for CIA. Had you guys had discussions about winding down your military careers prior to that?

Joe Kent

Yeah, but they were. Her being frustrated with me, but still accepting. I mean, she knew who I was. I mean, she had been in the community. She knew, she knew what I wanted to do and why I wanted to go do it. She was just like, hey, you've already been in the military for like 20 years. Do you think you still need to be doing this? Does this really need to be your post retirement job? And I was like, you know, negotiating. I was like, yeah, just. But just for a couple years, then we can go work at an embassy. It'll be a, you know, a good life, right? And she was generally acceptable, accepting of that. She wanted to step away from it as well. You know, being a mother, it definitely changed her, her outlook. But I think both of us too, like, you know, you tell yourself it's never going to happen to you. And we treated the deployment of like, like, hey, we'll get through this deployment and then we'll figure out everything else later on. Sounds like a big deal to people who haven't been in that environment. But both of us have been deployed so many different times. We were just like, all right, you know, sucks. She didn't want to go. But, you know, your time comes up, you go on the planet, it's not a big deal.

Interviewer

Right?

Joe Kent

So we, we definitely, we seriously thought about it, but at the same time, I don't think we were ever. We just, it hadn't struck us directly, so we weren't serious about it, although we should have been. We both buried, you know, countless friends over the years.

Interviewer

Like you said, like, you're a dad at that point too. And then the thought goes to, to your kids who are back home and the immediate priority shifts. I mean, I, I can't even fathom that. But you know, I, I think it's. Again, I think it's something that is really important in who you are and what you do. Obviously I wish that had never happened to you, but the fact that, that it did, did it adds a, a level of seriousness to the things you say because it has had the ultimate cost for you and you know, good on you to, to speak out on, on the things you do given, you know, that, that something like that happened to you.

Joe Kent

Thank you, man. Yeah, that's why I do it.

Interviewer

All right, real quick. I have to go to the bathroom. Can we come back and talk about the aftermath?

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

All right, we're back. What. How old were your kids again in 2019 when, when your wife passed?

Joe Kent

Passed three and then one. Yeah.

Interviewer

So you can't, you can't even really have the conversation with them at all at that point. What, I mean, what do you even say?

Joe Kent

Well, I got, I got some advice from a, a child psychiatrist and they were like, they were like, you have to just be like incredibly blunt. Like they said, even, even saying things that most people will say about death, it doesn't make sense to a child. So you have to be really blunt. So I had to just tell them like, your mom's dead. Mom's dead and she's, she's not coming back. Like you, you have to be that blunt. You can't really even say. I mean, I'm saying this definitively. This is advice. I got. It made sense to me. If you say things like passed away, no longer with us, those types of things, like, it's like pretty open ended and so to just let them know fully what happened happened. But we, you know, we're Christians, so you said, you know, mama's in heaven. And they, I mean, they, they were so young that I think that they just kind of absorbed it. Definitely left the, you know, leave scars and stuff that we still deal with, you know, all the time.

Interviewer

That's one of those things as they grow up.

Joe Kent

Yeah, they, they have questions. But we talk about her a lot. I mean, I wrote a whole book about her that they'll read someday when they're, whenever they want me. They can both, they're both voracious readers, so they could pick it up and read it if they wanted to have her pictures up. So, you know, her parents are still involved in the kids lives. Her sister is too.

Interviewer

That's awesome.

Joe Kent

So. Yeah.

Interviewer

How soon after that did you Leave

Joe Kent

CIA pretty much immediately after. Yeah, immediately after. I mean, takes you a month or so to get out of there. But they, I mean, the, the CIA was, was great. I mean, the paramilitary wing is so small and it's all guys from the soft community. So they, they took great care of me, getting me out of country. And then afterwards they're basically just like, tell us what you want to do and you can do it.

Interviewer

That's great.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

Well, to take a step back for a second, when you made the decision to leave Green berets, that was 2018.

Joe Kent

Yeah, I retired. Yeah.

Interviewer

2018, okay. But then you immediately went into CIA paramilitary. So first question, what made you want be ready to retire from Green Bra at the time other than the fact you'd been in there a long time? Like, what, what was it that did that? And then what was the timeline of you being like, yeah, I'm going to go do this at CIA.

Joe Kent

So I got out at 20 years because that's basically when you can retire and get all your, all your, all your benefits. The only reason I got out of the military though is because if you stay in long enough, they eventually want to put you behind a desk. And I had stayed a moving target. So when I first came into Special Forces, I was a weapons specialist. I did that for a couple of years and then I switched to over, over to Special Forces Intelligence. So there's only a certain amount of time you can spend on an oda, on an A team, in any one job. So I went from weapons to intel. That basically bought me six years or so. And then around the time I would have to go be an instructor or go do something behind a desk, I applied to become a warrant officer. So Special Forces Warrant Officer, it's the smallest, it's the smallest kind of warrant officer there is in the military. But it puts you back on a team. You're supposed to be the continuity on the team. You're the continuity between the enlisted guys and the continuity between the officer, because the officers kind of rotate in every 18 months to two years. So that bought me more time on a Special Forces team. And then when I left Special Forces Group proper and went to a specialized unit within Special Operations, that bought me more time on the ground. But by the 20 year mark and I was a Chief Warrant Officer 3 at the time, you can't stay a Chief Warrant Officer 3 and not have to go do some time on a desk. So I still said, okay, I'll take my pension right now, 20 years, but I'm not done. So I'm going to retire on a Friday and on Monday I'm going to swear at the CIA. I had already been to the Farm while I was in the military.

Interviewer

Oh, really?

Joe Kent

So, yeah, I was a farm grad.

Interviewer

When was that?

Joe Kent

Went to the farm in 2015.

Interviewer

What, how do you get on the farm as a Green Beret? Like, what's the.

Joe Kent

About half the. A lot of the farm students are DoD because the DoD needs that skill too, to go out and collect, collect human intelligence. So I got the opportunity to go from the specialized unit that I was in, went to the Farm then. And so, you know, basically once you have that qualification, it's pretty easy to switch over to the agency. But also coming out special operations, going over to, you know, being in the CIA, paramilitary especially, the longer you're in special operations, the more likely that becomes. Right. So it sounds like super, you know, secretive and sexy, but it's probably about the most normal thing you can do.

Interviewer

Yeah, you're, you're, it's flipping the switch over on. You're using the same skill set now, just under a different branch.

Joe Kent

Yeah. And when the CIA wants something, they don't tend to grow things homegrown. They just go out and recruit people because that's what the CIA does. And so there's a really clear pipeline. So I knew once I had the farm done, I knew that I wanted to go over to the CIA, but I opted not to go over as a contractor. I opted to go over as a full blue badger. When most guys who have 20 years in and they retired, they'll go be contractors. Because you can make more money, you get more flexibility. However, if you're a contractor, you don't really have a seat at the table. You're there to apply a certain trade and to do that trade well. But that's it. Other than that, people don't really want your opinion. I wanted to have a seat at the table. I wanted to work my way up in the intelligence ranks because again, I still truly believed that we needed more people that had ground level experience. Because as I got older, I was like, at some point my generation is going to take over. We're not going to be the door kickers anymore. We're going to be the guys that get to make these decisions. And so I was like, I'm a farm grad now. Now I can walk into the CIA and I can say, like, hey, you know, like, I know, I know what this is supposed to do and I know what we're supposed to be doing that. I know that we're supposed to be providing ground truth. So that was my. My vision and why I went over that direction.

Interviewer

So that's interesting, though, because you go into the Farm, you get the case officer training and everything, but you have the. The special forces skill to add to that. So what. What was your, like, official title when you went in there?

Joe Kent

There? Paramilitary operations.

Interviewer

Okay. That's literally what it was. And where. Where did they send you right away?

Joe Kent

Well, I mean, every place has its own, like, unique pipeline, so I had to go. I had to go to a course to basically prove that I could still do Green Brace. I could still do commando stuff, which was actually really fun. So. Shooting, driving, blowing stuff up, all that. All that. Did that for a couple months. Yeah. And then where do you do that?

Interviewer

Like, in the middle of the woods or.

Joe Kent

I mean, it's the same military bases. Like, it's. You know, it's nothing. Nothing too sexy. It's the same. Same places, but you have longer hair and you get paid.

Interviewer

Same backdrop stuff.

Joe Kent

Yeah, so did that, and then. Then I deployed over to Africa.

Interviewer

You know what? I just remembered this, too. I have. Remind me to tell you off camera. I have a buddy who. Who's, you know, Tommy G online. You ever seen his stuff?

Joe Kent

Yeah. Yeah.

Interviewer

He's got great shit. So he's trying to do. He's trying to experiment with something. He might need someone like you. So I might connect you if. If you're interested in it. Just remind me about that afterwards. But. So you do that for a couple months, and then they send you the Horn Africa with. With CIA. Now what? You know, as someone who's never going to the Horn, Africa in a military situation, like, was it a totally different cadence when you're on the ground there working for CIA, versus, like, when you're on the ground there with the Green Berets? No, I mean, same kind of thing.

Joe Kent

Most. The counterterrorism stuff that we were engaged in at that time, not all of it, but most of. Especially me as a newer guy there. It's the same stuff we've been doing. It's just a different set of authorities. It's the same mission. So it's. It was another day at the office, really. I could have my hair a little bit longer, and I was gonna pay a little more money, so. Yeah, no, it was. It was very similar. And I. I, you know, over the years, especially Special Forces in the CIA are pretty intertwined, so I had already worked in a lot of those. Those same Situations. So I. I knew it was very familiar what I was getting into.

Interviewer

Did you deal with some of the guys who had been in Ground branch for a really long. A long time?

Joe Kent

Oh, yeah, for sure. So my. Throughout the years in Iraq. So the first Ground branch guy I was ever exposed to. I mean, I can say his name now because tragically he's dead. Brian Hoak. He was killed in 2017 in Afghanistan. Great guy. Former Navy Seal, just all American stud. He came out, he was a ground branch guy. I met him when I was still in Special Forces. But he came out like on his own, like, helicopter, like, long hair, you know, like came up and was like, hey, I'm. I'm Brian from the CIA. Like, and I. And I need your guys help, you know, what do you do? I was like, who is this dude? You know? And we were already doing some pretty cool stuff, I thought. And so he helped us do some even more cool stuff. And I was like, what's your job? And he was just like, I'm a paramilitary operations officer. And so he basically recruited me and several other guys from my, from my team, you know, over to. Come over to, to, to, to. To Ground Branch throughout the years. So. But then other deployments too. We were, we were just working with those guys all the time. Yeah, right.

Interviewer

Yeah. You hear about like those legend, like the Billy Walls of the world and stuff, and you're like, holy shit. He just lived like 47 James Bond Bond movies.

Joe Kent

Yeah. Yeah. And when. I mean, Billy Wall was in fifth group in Vietnam, but like once or twice a year he'd come back to the fifth group compound and give a speech or not really a speech. He'd go, just hang out in different team rooms and. Yeah. Drink their beer and tell some stories.

Interviewer

Yeah. Joe Ted. I was saying he ran into him in a bar. Was that enough on a base in Afghanistan or something? This wasn't like that long ago. Maybe like 15 years ago or something like that. He's like, you, Billy wa. It's like, goddamn right I am. He's like 85 years old, just chilling there. And someone like that's built different. But he also. Didn't he like have a shot at Bin Laden or something?

Joe Kent

Yeah, in the 90s in Sudan, I think.

Interviewer

And he's like, let me take it.

Joe Kent

And they're like, no. Yeah, it's before bin Laden had really done much. And Billy Wall was like, I can strangle this guy. I don't know. But yeah.

Interviewer

Oh, that's crazy.

Joe Kent

Yeah, it's funny when he Would come by the fifth group compound found every now and again they do something formal for him. But I remember the last couple years I was in group, we would just get an email and they're like, hey, if Billy wa is like in your company area, just like let him in your team room and give him a beer. That was like the guidance.

Interviewer

Oh, that's so cool. That's so cool. He just died a few years ago too. He was. He lived to be like 100 or something?

Joe Kent

I think so.

Interviewer

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty unbelievable career. But you. After your career, you end up. You ended up running for Congress and. And then that was out in Seattle area.

Joe Kent

No, I just watched Washington. It's like. Right. I grew up in Portland then right across the river. Because Portland kind of lost its mind. I ended up settling over there.

Interviewer

Right.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

You don't seem like a Portland guy these days.

Joe Kent

It's tragic what happened to Portland. Portland used to be really cool, but. Yeah. Not. Not anymore.

Interviewer

And you're like a five genders kind of guy.

Joe Kent

Right? You know? Yeah, yeah. Non. Binary. Yeah.

Interviewer

Move across to Washington. You ran for Congress and then out.

Joe Kent

I.

Interviewer

You lost by like a few votes or something.

Joe Kent

Right.

Interviewer

You.

Joe Kent

The first time I ran, it was like less than a percentage point. So the first time I ran, I ran against one of the Trump impeachment voters and I beat her in a primary. So I was like the underdog candidate. So be. They spent like 12 million against me. Beat her in a primary and then 12 million against you? Yeah, yeah, they spent a lot of money against me. Yeah.

Interviewer

God, that's so. I mean. And then you're seeing like fake ads about you on tv.

Joe Kent

That's why I've had the unique honor of getting hammered by both sides. Sides. And that will probably continue. So like when I ran in a Republican primary against an incumbent, I had the. The Republican establishment spending money against me. And then when I won that one, they were like, good luck, buddy. And so they didn't give me any money. Democrats. Then the Democrats hammered me. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interviewer

That's wild. So you. Because that. That didn't turn out, then you end up connecting with Tulsi and you end up in the administration.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

And we already talked about Butler and all that, but were there other things on your list when you got in there? So seen as you were going to have access to some pretty crazy that you were like, I really want to get to the bottom of this that you had a chance to really look at.

Joe Kent

Those were the big ones. Tulsi established a whole another group that's gotten some publicity and I think one of the guys is going to start coming out now more. He just left the government. He was actually Rand Paul had that hearing with whistleblower. He talked about the biolabs.

Interviewer

Yes.

Joe Kent

Jim Ergman American Patriot CIA OFFICER so Jim, I think is going to start coming out and talking more now. But Tulsi established an entire group. A lot of what the President I think is going to put out tonight. Not a lot, but some of it put out tonight I believe. I don't know this for sure about the 2020 election came from, from, you know, this group. So this group basically wanted to look into the weaponization of the intelligence community against the American people. And that's everything, you know, from COVID origins to anomalous health, health incidents. So the Havana Syndrome January 6th. So you name it. Like a lot of these hot button issues. We, we were able to look into the, a lot of the declassifications, the jfk, rfk, those types of things. That's what, that's all the JFK files charged with. I mean I, I at one point in time carried around a lot of them because like there's this huge like files, files. And then we found more. So I don't know if anybody's ever like at this point, I don't know if anybody's ever carried them around.

Interviewer

But you didn't open them up?

Joe Kent

No, no, I opened them up. I read, I read, I read that. I went to the parts that I thought were like the good stuff was

Interviewer

all right, it's just you and me. So it was dulles and lame.

Joe Kent

I don't even, at this point, I don't even remember what we shooters. What I can, what I, what I can tell you is there's more that should be put out there. And that from this is what I saw. The, the CIA, actually the intelligence community, the US Government writ large. The people who operate there in the permit state, they don't like the idea of declassification. Not because there's any like massive secret in any one of those locations. Especially something as old as jfk, right? Like the obvious common sense question is why do we care? This was so long ago. Like just declassify all of it. The system in my, this is Joe Kent's opinion. The system doesn't want the American people getting used to saying give us that and declassify it. And every little organization wants to say we have equal equities and they want every organization, they don't ever Want to say, we have nothing here. Go ahead and declassify it. Every organization wants to say, we're very, very important. We have the following things can't be declassified in there. And then when you test them, you know, like, why. Why can't that be declassified? You know, for example, and. And that they'll come back with some nonsense answer or they really won't fight you, but then they'll come back with five more things.

Interviewer

So it's a leverage, precedent kind of thing.

Joe Kent

Very much so. That's. That's my opinion. So I think if you were to sit down with the same JFK files that I sat down with, it probably wouldn't be much that you don't already know. But I, for the life of me, I don't know why we let the system. This is probably one of the first times where I saw, like, this. We let the system win. And I was kind of pissed about it. I was like, hey, we're like the fricking Trump appointees. Like, we're supposed to be in here smashing stuff. And we just let the system tell us that they get to keep stupid little black markings on files that are older than my parents. Like, like, yeah, what the hell? Like, why are we getting punked out like that? Like, literally like that? That was my. I was like, Because I know how this. I know how this works. If we let them win this. This fight, they're going to continue winning fights. And unfortunately, I don't think we. We got our momentum back after that.

Interviewer

What about. Obviously, like, everyone is righteously, extremely pissed off about the Epstein stuff, and they're pissed that there's a law passed that they're openly breaking where there's 3 million more files that aren't being released. And they already redacted a bunch of names in the first files and everything. Did you. I don't know what you're allowed to say, so don't say anything you're not allowed to say, obviously, but did you have a chance yourself to look at, say, any of the 3 million files that haven't been released?

Joe Kent

No, because that was doj.

Interviewer

Okay.

Joe Kent

So I could look at IC stuff, but everything that was held in, like, a DOJ process. So we didn't touch a lot of the Epstein stuff, actually, I think. And the vice President mentioned this yesterday on Robo. Like, a lot of the other stuff that was there, I think, after 2007, probably went away, but a lot of. Almost all of it was sealed under doj, so we didn't really, really Touch the Epstein stuff. A big problem with a lot of that, though, is the.

Interviewer

The.

Joe Kent

At the level that those relationships exist, a lot of that stuff just doesn't get written down.

Interviewer

Like, doesn't get written down.

Joe Kent

There's no files for a lot of that stuff. There's at least not going to be files inside Langley. A lot of this is going to be done through so many different cutouts that it. It can't be traced back. If you know exactly where to look, it can be. And I think you'd have to offer people immunity. I think you'd have to be willing to go into the. To the government and talk about immunity with some people. But in order to incentivize the immunity, you'd have to figure out who some of these people are. Are. And then say, like, well, it's immunity or it's. It's something else. And another problem, too, is, like, a lot of it gets buried so much through so many different cutouts that it's. They. They play the Simon says game. When you want something from the system, if you don't ask for the exact right thing, they won't give it to you. Right. So you can't say, give me all the stuff that pertains to Epstein. They'll. They'll give you nothing. You have to know the exact thing that you're after. And that's the same thing. You can't say, give me all the things you know about aliens. Like, okay, well, we don't know anything about aliens, you know, or UAPs, whatever. Well, if you don't ask the right thing. If you don't ask the exact right thing, Simon won't say, you know, if Simon doesn't say it right.

Interviewer

I would have been asking the right things day one on that one.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

Down every question we had, we had

Joe Kent

people that I think did. And there was still just a lot of, you know, bureaucratic inertia that we then, unfortunately, we let win, which I don't think we should have. I think we should have just busted a lot of this stuff wide open.

Interviewer

So it sounds like even in a seat as high as yours, yours, you're still compartmentalized in a way where, like, you're wondering a lot of the same things that we're still wondering. Like, you haven't had a chance to see some of these. A lot of these things.

Joe Kent

Yeah. I mean, we got enough of a preview that, like, we kind of know where some of them are. Right. I think, though, people would be surprised about how little the. The really salacious Stuff Epstein's probably the best example that we can use. Like a lot of that just never gets really written down in Joe Kent's opinion. I mean, now doj, when they're charging people, they've got it. But when you're talking about, about like looking for a document that explains what the Epstein network is and what it's got ties to US Intelligence, some Assad. But then clearly when you read the emails, it does seem like there's something above that, where there's like a government above governments.

Interviewer

You know, the super government.

Joe Kent

Right, right. There's no file in Langley that you can go declassify that's going to be like, and here's the super.

Interviewer

I, I don't, I don't think you're right about that.

Joe Kent

You know, so people are, people are looking for that and they're getting frustrated. And this is why I think the Trump administration really kind of whiffed it on the rollout of the files. They should have just rolled all that stuff out to be like, look, we're telling you everything we know, you know, and we turn it over to the, the Internet and the people who've looked into this stuff for, for decades to, to fill in the blanks.

Interviewer

You know, why would the, think about the logic of it too. Why would those people in the Supra government operate differently than the Mafia? It's not like when the Mafia had a made man ceremony. They're like, all right, we're checking in Colombo over here.

Joe Kent

Like a certificate.

Interviewer

Yeah, it's not like that. It's, it's, it's what's understood don't have to be explained or you could say doesn't have to be written down.

Joe Kent

Right.

Interviewer

As well. And, and I think that's a part of the problem, obviously, the stuff that is written down, which they were doing on Gmail and together. Yeah, I think the American people have a right to know. But you were there during the whole, I mean, it's been since the beginning of the administration because it was part of what he ran on that he was going to release this. So you were there at least witnessing the rollout or lack of a rollout in how this was brought to the American people. Now that, you know, we're, it's still a mess today, but based on what you saw, you know, were there conversations behind the scenes where people like you or people around you were talking to people close to the situation saying, what the. Are we doing here?

Joe Kent

Oh, yeah, I, I mean, I would, across the board of most of the stuff I think there was, you know, there was the people that were the good soldiers, like, yeah, we'll get it all out there. But at the end of the day, too, I think that the President wanted a lot of this stuff to get out there. And because he was moved from issue to issue, he didn't have time to follow up on all of it fully. And then the people that were supposed to be there either caved to the administrative state, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, or they got moved from item to item, too, and none of it was ever really stuck with. And there's a lot of other times, too, where just the apparatus of the machine really won out. Like the group that Tulsi established, the Directors Initiative Group, it was disbanded after a while because of pressure from, you know, the CIA.

Interviewer

From the CIA, yeah. She's technically supposed to be above them, though. Like, it isn't that.

Joe Kent

Yeah, that's the problem. I mean, like, the statute that created dni, it says the DNI sits above all of the intelligence community, but there's no enforcement mechanism there. She doesn't. She has oversight of the budget, but she doesn't. She can't pull in strings. Technically, she outranks, but at the end of the day, day, all of that is based on. She can see things, but she can't. She technically should be able to go in and make changes, whoever. Whoever the DNI is, but they don't usually have the actual power to do so. Tulsi pissed off a lot of people in the intelligence community because she's the first dni, in my opinion, that's. That. That read the statute and was like, I'm going to do this. I'm actually going to oversee the intelligence community. And they were furious that she even. She tried.

Interviewer

Oh, I think they were furious she was even in.

Joe Kent

Well, they were fur. They were furious that she was in. In the building, you know, but that's, that's the big. That. That's the big thing they were mad about. I mean, everything that she attempted to do, it was backed up by statute and backed up by law. It was, it was literally what that job was created to do. And they were just outraged that in the two decades since that position had been created that somebody had the audacity to try and execute the. The statute.

Interviewer

Sounds like you had a lot of respect for the job and intention she had behind it and doing it, which she obviously just left because her husband's sick. But to you, she seemed to. She seemed to actually try to execute on the Things that she was going in there to do, in your opinion for sure.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

I'm sorry. It didn't last too long. You know what I mean? But it's. But again, that's like another cynic point because it's like, you know, someone like that and she's talked publicly about this for a lot of years. She was in government, she was in military as well. She's had a race. Range of political opinions. Like it's like, all right, finally, boom, we get someone like that in there. We get in there with Joe Kent and now the two of you are. Are home. That's. That's tough for the American people to see, but it's nice to see like at least she was trying. And she did this. She did. As you said, she did the biolabs thing on the way out, which I feel like that went really under the radar.

Joe Kent

Yeah. Because the Iran war was.

Interviewer

There was right.

Joe Kent

Going on there.

Interviewer

Yeah. But everything going on in Ukraine. How many labs was it again?

Joe Kent

Deep.

Interviewer

We were looking at this. It was a lot. And what were they? What, what was. What was the allegations? There's so much that's been going on, I can't remember all of it. What were the allegations of what was going on in these places?

Joe Kent

Well, Mitt Romney accused her of being a traitor for saying it. She said Romney said it was Russian propaganda. That Tulsi even brought it up.

Interviewer

The biolabs.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah. And then she presented the receipts. That we actually met.

Interviewer

You're a Mormon.

Joe Kent

That we were actually funding. That we are funding the biolabs. So. Yeah. No, it's all right.

Interviewer

Gabbard is revealing new evidence of long standing United States government funding for more than 120biolabs in over 30 countries. These biolabs include labs in Ukraine which may be at risk of compromise due to the ongoing Russia Ukraine war. For example, the intelligence community previously warned that a US funded biolab in Ukraine likely housed dangerous pathogens. That's nice. And remain vulnerable to long standing threats of Russian attack, seizure, damage. Here's. And then you can click where the new lead declassified evidence is. So until now, evidence regarding the full existence and funding these laboratories have been knowingly withheld from the American people. The information surrounding their existence, history, locations and funding of these US funding biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America. Which again, it's like, who's doing the Russian propaganda here then? You know What? I mean, like, good on her to, to put it out there. So at least we know this. But it's like this seems like the tip of the iceberg. I'd been hearing for years from guys who actually knew some stuff, obviously, like how crazy Ukraine was. But, you know, you shouldn't be. There's, there's millions of people dying in that war.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Interviewer

Like, you should be concerned about all of it. It's all 18 to 25 year old kids on both sides too. Like, shouldn't we be like trying to make peace? I'm not saying that, like Putin's not a good guy, but like the world Again, for the 50th time today, the world's a complicated place. Like, should be bringing this to it to a halt. Were they trying to do that behind the scenes?

Joe Kent

Oh, for sure, for sure, man. I mean, this is another place, unfortunately. I think on this one, the President had the deck stacked against him.

Interviewer

Yeah.

Joe Kent

Because by the time he came into office, Russia was, in the Russian view, they were winning, which in an American view, we'd say they weren't winning. We'd say, oh my gosh, you guys are taking so many casualties, you're losing thousands per week. But in the Russian mentality, they were clawing back, they were clawing more and more territory away from the Ukrainians. And I think the Russians, not because of lack of respecting President Trump as a negotiator, as a guy who wanted peace, they've just seen American presidents come and go and they've seen us continue to push NATO expansion on their border. And so I don't know if there was a deal necessarily there for the President to get. I do agree with, with President Trump that had he been in power in 2022, the war wouldn't have happened. I think he would have been able to basically stop the NATO expansion. He most certainly would have sent. It would not have sent his vice president to the NATO conference to say that they're going to put Ukraine inside NATO. Right.

Interviewer

Yeah.

Joe Kent

So.

Interviewer

But I agree with him on that. Yeah, I think he's probably right.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but now, I mean, I know Trump, everybody gives him a hard time because like you said you were going to solve the Russia, Ukraine war 24 hours. I just don't know if that was even feasible. I think in his head he thought it was, but like, right now we just have to kind of get it through our skulls that like, Russia is going to continue to run the meat grinder until they take at least the Donbass. I mean, they've even publicly said this. They said, if Ukraine surrenders the Donbass, the whole thing's over. I think we should be putting a lot more pressure on the Ukrainians to just say, like, you guys need to make peace right now. Like, you can be mad, but you can't. You can't keep fighting. But the Europeans, NATO proper has kind of lost their mind on this, and they've let this become a blood vendetta, which kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning. I mean, this is what even the founders were telling us about. They were. They were warning us about, like, European cousin wars, you know, and that's what. What are we doing here?

Interviewer

So it's like, who's paying who, though?

Joe Kent

Yeah, no, exactly.

Interviewer

You know what I mean?

Joe Kent

And for a while there, this was a big boon for the defense contractors because the war in Afghanistan had wound down. And now we are sending over conventional munitions, we are sending over drone technology. And the crazy thing is, for a long time, I heard from, you know, friends of mine in the intelligence community, the military, that we need to be involved in Ukraine so that we stay up to date with the latest of from the battlefield. It's like, well, great, we invested billions of dollars, but then when this war kicks off in the Gulf, it's like, well, we didn't even send over any note takers because we tried to remain static in our bases and we got our freaking lunch eaten by ballistics and drones. So that whole theory of the case that we are going to stay up to date with the battlefield by hanging out in Ukraine, it didn't work out either.

Interviewer

Good luck with that. I just had my friend Kat Schultz in here who does reporting down in Mexico on the cartels, and she just got back from Ukraine because there's like, cartel mercenaries wearing the drones. It's literally.

Joe Kent

And they got them on the border.

Interviewer

Now it's ins. I. I can't even imagine, like, all the. I always use the term whack a mole, but the whack a moles you guys have to do, like when you were in that job, it's just like, all right, throw the dart at the map today. What's happening that we got to stop? It's. It's got to be very, very stressful.

Joe Kent

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interviewer

So the other thing I wanted to ask you about was you've talked about it before. You wanted to look into the Charlie Kirk thing. Obviously, very tragic what happened there, and very odd, the aftermath and all that. I. I'm open to pretty much any story, but I, I think the way it's been presented publicly, the optics at the very least have, have been bad. And you know, we've covered it a little bit in here, but, but not a ton. A ton. But you had said you were a little bit stonewalled in trying to look at details there. What were the specifics with that?

Joe Kent

Well, by the time Charlie was killed, the FBI was already mad at me for Butler. So we were already like, kind of adversarial in terms, in terms of like you stop asking questions. So when Charlie was killed, obviously, whenever there's a terrorist attack or like an assassination of a prominent figure in National Counterterrorism center will investigate in parallel with the FBI.

Interviewer

FBI? In parallel?

Joe Kent

Yeah, in parallel. Because we're looking for foreign ties. And once it's established there's no foreign ties, NCTC stops, we're done. Because we don't do anything, we don't, we don't do anything domestically. So with the Kirk case, he was killed in a very public event. He was an international figure. He had lots of international connections. So we were in the very early phases of looking at, you know, potential. And I say potential because if there was something that I knew definitively, I would, I would say it. Sure. We were in the initial phases of looking at, you know, potential international ties. We were quickly told like, hey, stop what you're doing now because we have Tyler, we have a suspect. We have Tyler Robinson in custody. And to me I was just like, okay, well fine, you, you have a suspect, great. Do the FBI criminal investigation do that whole thing? We need to continue to look at all the potential foreign ties because there was people who clearly had pre knowledge, there was people posting online who said that Charlie Kirk was going to die like that day, you know, so like the idea that he simply worked alone. Maybe we'll find out that that ends up being the case. Although when you have people posting and have pre knowledge of his assassination, I'm going to go on a limb here and say more than likely there's something else at play here.

Interviewer

Another one plus one equals two.

Joe Kent

Another. Yeah, another one plus one. Until we, until we disprove it, it's our duty to run that down. And then also too like, look, Charlie had a lot of foreign ties. There's, you know, what's been disclosed about the, the disputes he was having with different donors, you know, pro Israel don owners. So I, I felt on the international front, in terms of international connections potentially to any, in foreign individuals, foreign entities, or foreign governments. We had more work to do. The way any investigation works, you run down 100 leads and 99.5 of them were total business. Right. So a lot of the stuff that I wanted to do, maybe it was going to end up being nonsense, but there was still more work there that I, I thought needed to be done. So that was, was my, my issue with the, with, with the Kirk case and the fact that I think we were pulled off a little bit early on that one.

Interviewer

Who pulled you off? Was it all the way at the top, like Cash Patel telling you to stand down?

Joe Kent

Yeah, I mean, the FBI basically, because, because Charlie's an American citizen. So then like the case file, so to speak, like the, the case is handled by the FBI, which that's fine because that's, that's going to go to court someday. And in the National Counterterrorism center, created after 9, 11 so that intelligence and law enforcement cooperated. We can see, see kind of the full story from both statute. But the pipes, the, the control for that really is what the FBI is. When the FBI says, you guys can't look at this anymore, that's when we have to go and kind of have a bureaucratic battle. That battle had fits and starts. There was different times where they blocked us off and we were allowed to stay on and then, you know, blocked back off again.

Interviewer

When were you fully blocked off once and for all?

Joe Kent

Probably around the winter. Winter time. Wow.

Interviewer

So it's a few months.

Joe Kent

A couple months. We were going back and forth. Yeah. There's things we were looking into to trying.

Interviewer

Was there anything you found that was like, ooh, maybe

Joe Kent

there was. And now at the end of the day, if I, if I had the opportunity to fully investigate it, it might not be. And I don't want to say like what that was because, you know, whatever the, the threat that I would always get from the FBI. And they said the same thing about Butler. They're like, well, anything that you do, you could be called by the defense because this is going to go to trial. And my answer was always like, okay, if the defense wants to call me, there's not much I can do that's going to help prevent, prove their client innocent. But I, I need to continue to do my investigation to make sure that we did our due diligence to make sure there actually is no foreign ties here.

Interviewer

So did you appeal to Trump on this?

Joe Kent

Yeah, we appealed. Not directly to him, you know, right, right below him. And we had that hashed out and we got put back on it. But then by the time the winter rolled around, it was kind of like a. FBI said, this is all with Utah. Utah now. And that was kind of the end of it, unfortunately. Oh, that's interesting.

Interviewer

God, what a mess. What a mess. Well, we've been talking for a couple minutes. Yeah, about 4 hours and 15 minutes or something like that. We. We've covered a lot. I really appreciate you hanging in there to go through all these different details today, but, you know, obviously, pretty amazing career you had, and I'm sorry this part came to an end the way it did. But like I said earlier, I think it's. I think it's really impressive that you've put yourself on a limb out here to discuss all this stuff and try to bring to the people the transparency that was also, like, promised with this administration as best you can so that more American soldiers aren't killed in unnecessary wars. So I really commend you for that, and thank you so much for doing this.

Joe Kent

Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me.

Interviewer

All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.