A Far-Right Extremist is Running the National Counterterrorism Center

Senate Republicans voted Thursday to confirm Tulsi Gabbard fanboy Joe Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, despite his known ties to far-right extremists.

Kent previously courted white nationalists as part of his failed congressional campaign against Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler in 2022. Kent was endorsed by white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Oath Keeper Wendy Rogers, and Christian nationalist Joey Gibson spoke at one of his fundraisers. Campaign finance disclosures revealed that Kent paid known Proud Boy Graham Jorgensen $11,375 for “consulting.”

But if Senate Republicans actually had a problem with far-right ideology, then we wouldn’t be in this situation now, would we?

Kent has already been hard at work boosting Gabbard’s latest allegations that the Obama administration concocted the collusion between Russian and the Trump presidential campaign in 2016. Gabbard has claimed that former President Barack Obama ordered a rewrite of an intelligence assessment in 2017 to seed the narrative that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election. (Putin later admitted openly that he did want Trump to win.)

While Gabbard’s findings showed that Obama ordered an assessment to review their work to date, they did not show that he ordered a so-called “rewrite.” But in May, Kent did order a rewrite on an intelligence memo finding that Venezuela did not control the Tren de Aragua gang. The memo directly contradicted Trump’s justification for invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants.

“We need to do some rewriting … so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” said Kent, according to leaked emails viewed by The New York Times. Kent, along with former acting National Intelligence Council head Michael Collins, largely rewrote the memo together.

Kent was sworn in Thursday afternoon by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, for whom Kent has demonstrated a surprising amount of fan behavior, posting fan edits of his new boss on X. Maybe the two have bonded over their favorable views of Russia—Kent having called Putin’s demands for Ukrainian territory after the 2022 invasion “very reasonable.”