It’s a D.C. cliche. Staffers try to make policy by manipulating from the inside or the outside. Working the outside means coordinating with activists and friendly media. Everyone in D.C. does it, but there’s a big difference between doing it on behalf of your boss, a senator or a president, and doing it to undermine your boss the way Joe Kent did.
The rest of the story is also a D.C. cliche. The staffer gets frozen out of meetings because he leaks them. He grows resentful. Then he does the career calculus of deciding if he should leave quietly or stomp out loudly.
Joe Kent left loudly, badmouthing the administration and going on the podcast circuit. Now he’s being investigated for leaks. But that’s how you do it. Make a lot of noise, play the victim to avert the inevitable investigation.
The FBI is investigating former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent in connection with alleged leaks of classified information, multiple sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell CBS News.
Former deputy White House chief of staff Taylor Budowich alluded to the issue shortly after Kent resigned, writing on X that Kent was “often at the center of national security leaks” and “spent all of his time working to subvert the chain of command and undermine the President.” He didn’t specify what information Kent was accused of leaking.
As much as he tried to pretend to be MAGA, Kent was always a D.C. cliche. A CIA guy who put on flannel to run for Congress. A guy who voted for Bernie Sanders and rebranded as MAGA. A human mirror who says whatever he thinks audiences want to hear. Not long ago he was warning about the dangers of Iran. Now he’s denying that Iran, which had killed over 1,000 Americans, ever posed a threat to us.
Maybe he’ll run for Congress again.
There’s something about ex-CIAers going into politics that always makes me a little itchy. We’ve had too many of them in Congress already. And there’s always something spacey about them. Ellisa Slotkin, Abigail Spanberger, Joe Kent. Something dead in their eyes. Something missing. I’m not prone to conspiracy theories but their politics seem like performances by not very talented actors who lack the ability to project, but who have no substance or depth.
Backstabbing seems to come natural to some of them. Joe Kent burned the people who helped him out. He pretended to be something different, but in the end he was just another Washington D.C. insider playing the game.
