Something doesn’t add up in the intelligence community. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s top intelligence official, had no idea that one of her most senior subordinates was under active FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified information. That’s not a bureaucratic hiccup. That’s a red flag.
According to a senior intelligence official who spoke to Fox News Digital, Gabbard was completely unaware that National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent was being investigated by the FBI when he abruptly resigned Tuesday. The probe had been ongoing for weeks. The director of national intelligence was never told.
The FBI was investigating the head of the National Counterterrorism Center for leaking classified information, and the person constitutionally responsible for overseeing the entire intelligence apparatus didn’t know about it. Kent stepped down after publicly breaking with President Trump over the war in Iran, penning a resignation letter that claimed Tehran posed “no imminent threat” to the United States. That letter made headlines. What wasn’t public at the time was that Kent had been under investigation for weeks, with two sources confirming to Fox News that the FBI probe was already well underway.
FBI leak investigations are typically tightly held in their early stages. The Bureau doesn’t want to tip off the subject. But when the subject is the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a position that oversees the integration and analysis of terrorist threats with access to some of the government’s most sensitive secrets, the director of national intelligence should have been read in. Administration officials have confirmed that Kent had been cut out of planning meetings for Operation Epic Fury and excluded from the president’s daily briefings.
One senior administration official described Kent as a “known leaker” and claimed Gabbard had been asked to fire him but hadn’t acted. Another official disputed that, saying the White House had complained about Kent but never formally requested his termination. An ODNI official pushed back further, stating the president never asked Gabbard to fire Kent, or she would have done so. The conflicting accounts paint a picture of an intelligence community in disarray, with unclear lines of authority and communication breakdowns at the highest levels.
Kent’s resignation letter itself raised eyebrows. For a senior counterterrorism official to publicly contradict the commander-in-chief on an active military operation is virtually unprecedented. His claim that Iran posed no imminent threat directly challenged the administration’s justification for Operation Epic Fury. Within hours, he was gone.
What we do know is that the FBI investigation was already active when Kent submitted his resignation. We know Gabbard wasn’t informed. And we know that the National Counterterrorism Center, the very agency responsible for tracking terrorist threats against the homeland, was being led by someone under investigation for mishandling classified information while being gradually frozen out of the government’s most sensitive planning. This isn’t how the intelligence community is supposed to work. The DNI exists precisely to coordinate among the various agencies and ensure that critical information doesn’t fall through the cracks.
Gabbard now faces the unenviable task of cleaning up a mess she didn’t know existed until it exploded into public view. The Kent affair has exposed fault lines in the intelligence community’s chain of command that need to be addressed, and quickly. Providence watches over the bold.
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