Joe Kent Says FBI Stopped Him From Looking At Possible Iran Link To Would-Be Trump Assassin

Former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Joe Kent said Friday that the FBI stopped him from investigating the possibility that the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pa. was linked to Iran.

Kent said the Bureau concluded would-be-assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, acted alone without adequately probing whether the Butler attempt was connected to an Iran-linked Trump assassination plot foiled the day before — and he also said the Bureau stopped his own investigation into the matter. The former Trump administration official — who on March 17 abruptly resigned from his post over the Iran war — made the allegation during his Thursday interview with “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur.

“Initially, we were just told, ‘Hey, Crooks, lone gunman, he was killed.’ And then Crooks was kind of an enigma, and we just didn’t hear much more about him, like there was literally nothing about the guy,” Kent told Uygur regarding the little-known 20-year-old gunman, whom a Secret Service sniper killed immediately after Crooks fired shots at Trump.

“Two days prior to Crooks taking the shot in Butler, there was a guy named Asif Merchant who was hired by the Iranians to come here and assassinate President Trump in retaliation for killing Qasem Soleimani,” Kent said. “When Merchant came over here, obviously … the FBI, was all over him.” (RELATED: Joe Kent Says FBI Director Kash Patel Blocked Further Investigation Into Charlie Kirk Murder Case)

Authorities arrested Merchant, who admitted to being an agent of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, on July 12, 2024, just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump. A federal grand jury convicted Merchant on March 6.

“My basic question was, ‘Have we done our due diligence to make sure that there was no linkage between the two events?’” Kent told “The Young Turks” host.

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“Fast forward a couple months, and Tucker Carlson’s investigative journalist finds a lot of online presence from Thomas Crooks, digs up a lot more than it appears the FBI dug up,” the former counterterrorism chief noted, referring to a documentary on the would-be assassin that Carlson released in November 2025.

“And so I wanted to go back and make sure that we checked all that through intelligence channels and really researched into what we had learned through Tucker’s investigative journalism about Crooks’ online persona — again, just to check to see if there was foreign ties and to check to see if there’s any linkage between the Merchant plot —  because maybe we didn’t wrap all of it up —  and what took place there in Butler,” he added.

“The FBI did not tolerate this at all,” Kent said. “They basically said, ‘Hey, there’s nothing else to see here’ and stopped us from investigating any of those potentials, to my knowledge.”

“See, that is incredibly strange,” Uygur chimed in. “Because Merchant is theoretically working with the Iranians. That would help the talking point about, ‘Oh my God, the Iranians tried to murder the president. You got to strike back.’”

“So, why wouldn’t we want to investigate further if he’s [Crooks is] connected to Iran?” the host asked. “Joe, my sense of it from having read what I read that’s public, is that I’d be surprised if he [Crooks] was connected to Iran. It sounds like you’re saying that he definitely was.”

“My argument was, ‘Hey, let’s make sure that this wasn’t a broader Iranian plot. Why wouldn’t we look into everything? And then we were stopped,’” Kent said.

“That is intensely strange from an administration that is obviously opposed to Iran, so opposed we went to war,” Uygur replied. “Iran tries to take a shot at the president. That guy is arrested, a day later, then somebody does take a shot at the president, and they say, ‘Don’t look at the link.’”

The FBI did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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