“It All Comes From The Israelis”: Joe Kent Reveals What Happened When He Told Trump About Iran Intel

Former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent says Stephen Miller, now President Trump’s chief of staff, “knew going into the Iran war that this was bad” – and that Miller’s predecessor, Susie Wiles, gave pro-Israel voices time in front of the president over the intelligence community, while anyone who brought him bad news was asked not to come back.

Kent says it happened to him when he told Trump in the Oval Office that the Iran intelligence being briefed “all comes from the Israelis”: CIA Director John Ratcliffe pushed back but “couldn’t present anything” – and on his way out, Kent was told he wouldn’t be needed at the next briefing. That was “a couple months” before “we let the Israelis drag us in.”

Kent, who resigned in March over the war, told the story on the Shawn Ryan Show (episode #356, posted Nov. 12), his third time on the show. When he quit, he told Tucker Carlson that key officials were kept from briefing Trump, without saying who kept them out. This time he points at Wiles, whom Trump replaced with Miller on Nov. 6.

“It All Comes From The Israelis”

Kent says he and Tulsi Gabbard worried that intelligence reaching Trump wasn’t being labeled with where it came from. On Iran, he said, it was “never being explained to the president that that information, lock, stock, and barrel, all came from Israel.” “Not only did it just come from Israel, we really don’t have a lot of unilateral, like our own intelligence collection, that can confirm or deny it,” he added. Then he described the meeting:

“I had a personal experience where there was information being briefed to the president that was coming directly from the Israelis about Iran. And I interjected and I said, hey, sir, just for your awareness, all of that information on this topic about the Iranians, it all comes from the Israelis. And we don’t have a lot of ways to independently verify it.”

Ratcliffe disagreed and was “adamant” that other information confirmed it, Kent said. “He couldn’t present anything. And he also couldn’t prove that the intelligence report in question was not all from Israel. It was indeed all from Israel. So the president at least got that context there.”

Kent said he was “promptly told as I left the Oval Office that day” that his services weren’t wanted. “They just said, hey, we’re not going to need you at the next briefing. We’ll let you know if we need any, you know, counterterrorism advice or whatever,” he said, allowing that it was “the president and his staff’s prerogative.”

As for who made the call: “I think Susie, for whatever reason, either she didn’t want me telling the president that or she didn’t want the friction between me and Ratcliffe.”

“Not Allowed”

Wiles, a career lobbyist who came from Ballard Partners (the firm has denied pay-for-play accusations against her), decided who got to Trump on national security, Kent said. “She definitely prioritized letting in a lot of the pro-Israel voices to get time in front of President Trump, as opposed to having members of the actual intelligence community come in to give him United States intelligence,” he said. “So Susie was definitely a gatekeeper. I mean, the president enabled that.”

He said she once worked on Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election campaign in Israel and brought donors with her, Miriam Adelson among them, “very close” with Wiles. He also claimed AIPAC’s leader is “on tape” saying AIPAC picked Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former national security adviser Mike Waltz. “She definitely enabled those people to basically serve as conduits to get Israeli intelligence to the president that helped get us into this war,” Kent said.

Under Wiles, Kent said, “bringing the president any bad news or having any friction in front of the president was not allowed.” “And if you brought things that were going to cause friction to the president or any kind of like bad news, you were asked not to participate anymore,” he said.

Asked why Trump let her go, Kent said a strategy of “prioritizing the needs of the lobbyists in order to get the money to win the midterms” had failed, and Trump “needed to kind of blame somebody for the midterms” – while keeping the people who sold the war: Ratcliffe, Rubio and, “to a lesser degree,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “This was such a massive intelligence failure. His entire intelligence team should be gutted,” he said.

Miller Knew

On Miller, who has sworn “absolute loyalty” to Trump since taking over, Kent started with the upside: a longtime Trump speechwriter with a feel for the base. “I think he understands that like the Iran war wasn’t popular,” he said.

Kent said he dealt with Miller only “enough” to know where he stood. “I know that he knew going into the Iran war that this was bad. Like this was not a good thing.”

The risk, Kent said, is that Miller “is like a hardcore Trump loyalist” who could settle for keeping the boss happy. If Miller tells Trump he is “going to be the polar opposite of Susie Wiles,” brings in people “that have two different opinions” and tells him “how unpopular this war is,” things could change. “But if Miller falls prey to, I just want to make the president happy and I want the president to always say nice things about me, which is the culture in the White House, then it’s going to be no change from what we have with Susie Wiles.”

Section 219

In the defense bill the lame-duck Congress is still working on, Kent said, “there’s Section 219 that basically gives the Israelis unfettered access to some of our most sensitive programs, everything with quantum AI, ballistic missiles, everything that’s sensitive. It makes them a co-equal.”

Section 219 of the House’s fiscal 2027 defense bill would set up a US-Israel defense technology cooperation initiative run by a Pentagon “executive agent.” It survived in the $1.15 trillion bill the House passed narrowly in July, after Rep. Thomas Massie’s bid to strip it was kept off the floor. Kent also pointed to a provision in the Senate’s intelligence authorization bill that he says would give Mossad “unfettered access” to the intelligence community, the CIA in particular; that bill would expand intelligence sharing with Israel.

Israel may lose the nearly $4 billion a year it gets from Washington, Kent said, but a seat in the Pentagon’s research programs is “going to be worth way more than four billion.” He says Congress will try to pass both bills before January, and that Vice President JD Vance, as president of the Senate, should tell Republicans to “strip that out of there right now” or have it “used against us all in 2028.”

Kent also has a book, part memoir and part account of “what went wrong” in the administration, now with the Department of Defense for redaction review.