Trump’s pick for key national security position linked to far-right figures

Questions linger for director of counterintelligence nominee, Joe Kent, over ties to white nationalists and employment with shadowy military contractor. Donald Trump’s pick for the head of US counterintelligence has advocated for the FBI to surveil “antifa” groups, and has lingering questions over millions of dollars in campaign finances, his employment with a shadowy military contractor and links to far-right figures.

Joe Kent, twice an unsuccessful congressional candidate in south-west Washington state and a former Green Beret and CIA operative, has also been criticized for his proximity to white nationalist activists such as Nick Fuentes, and for the revolving cast of far-right activists his campaigns employed. If appointed as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, he will work under Trump’s director of national intelligence nominee, Tulsi Gabbard, in one of the most important intelligence roles in the administration.

The Guardian contacted Kent on a phone number and an email address identified with him by multiple data brokers, but received no response. Kent, now resident in Yacolt, Washington, was born and raised in Sweet Home, Oregon, by his own account in podcasts and candidate interviews. He spent 20 years in the military, including serving as a US Army Green Beret in Iraq and Afghanistan during the global war on terror.

According to podcast interviews and media reports, Kent subsequently served as a “CIA paramilitary officer” and a military contractor who offered training services at Joint Base McChord in Washington state. He ran for Congress in 2022 and 2024 in Washington’s third district, centered on Vancouver, losing both times to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. In his first campaign, in particular, Kent drew criticisms for multiple far-right connections.

He was a beneficiary of donations from tech figure Peter Thiel, whose largesse that cycle also saw him bankrolling campaigns by JD Vance and Blake Masters. He was endorsed that year by Nazi-sympathizer Nick Fuentes, but later attempted to distance himself from the prominent white nationalist. Nevertheless, in an interview with a member of the Fuentes-aligned group American Virtue, Kent opined that American culture was “anti-white” and “anti-straight-white-male”.

In June 2022, he was also interviewed by Greyson Arnold, a neo-Nazi streamer. One of his many controversial campaign hires was Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right Proud Boys organization, who Kent retained in 2022 as a consultant. Kent has expressed extreme but shifting views on the investigative role and priorities of US federal agencies. During protests following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Kent tweeted that the FBI should track “leaders & financiers of antifa”, defund them, and arrest their leaders. In 2022, after the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to seize improperly retained classified documents, Kent posted that “We are at war” with a “shadowy leftist cabal”.

By 2023, Kent was calling the FBI a “secret domestic intelligence agency” that should be defunded. After FBI agents killed a 74-year-old Maga supporter – who had threatened to assassinate Democrats and pointed a gun at agents – Kent falsely claimed the man was killed “for Facebook posts”. Kent released a video articulating his defund-the-FBI platform, stating: “I really don’t know if we actually can save the FBI.”.

The same year he said he would use the congressional appropriations process to “gut the FBI”, transforming it into a purely investigative body working with local sheriffs. He argued the FBI’s current structure leads to “total authoritarianism”. He also said he would demand that the FBI prioritize targeting “ANTIFA and cartels” over “parents attending school board meetings”. Kent’s history as both a Green Beret and a “CIA paramilitary officer” have triggered conspiracy thinking among his critics on the far right, but during his first congressional run, a mysterious employer also provoked questions from reporters and regulators.

A subsequent FEC investigation into his work at Advanced Enterprise Solutions cleared him of wrongdoing but shed little light on what the company did, and why it employed Kent. Initial media reports just days out from the 2022 election highlighted that in FEC filings and public appearances, Kent claimed to be earning a six-figure salary from “American Enterprise Solutions”, but the company did not appear to exist.

Those reports cited the anonymously-created JoeKentIsCIA website, now preserved at the Internet Archive, which called Kent “An agent of the deep state, a CARPETBAGGER, a LIFELONG MARXIST DEMOCRAT RINO and a corrupt opportunist”, and of American Enterprise Solutions that there “is no trace of this company anywhere online, not even a website. Could this be a CIA black company? A slush fund for mega donors?”.