Podcaster Nick Freitas Drops the Skinny on Joe Kent’s Resignation | The American Spectator

Nick Freitas — former Army Special Forces veteran, Virginia state senator, two-time congressional candidate, and current podcast host — has taken a careful, frustrated, and ultimately skeptical look at Joe Kent’s resignation from the National Counterterrorism Center. Freitas isn’t dismissing Kent. He endorsed him for Congress, had him on his show, and congratulated him on the appointment. His frustration is more personal than political: the Joe Kent in that resignation letter doesn’t match the Joe Kent he knew.

In a recent podcast episode, Freitas spends considerable time walking through Kent’s own public record on Iran and it’s damning to the resignation letter’s central thesis. As recently as 2024, Kent was posting that “Iran has been after Trump since January 2020,” that Iran was “conducting coordinated attacks across the region,” and that Trump’s killing of Soleimani was entirely justified. In 2021 he wrote, “I stand firmly with Israel against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Islamism is a threat to Western civilization.” In 2020 he wrote, “I personally think we should have crushed their ballistic and nuke capabilities.”

Freitas isn’t playing gotcha. He acknowledges people’s views can evolve and new intelligence can change assessments. But his challenge is direct: “What new information became available to lead you to the conclusion that everything can now be explained by Israel pulling all the strings?” He never gets a satisfying answer because Kent never addressed the contradiction publicly.

The most underreported moment in the episode comes when Freitas pulls the actual Foreign Agents Registration Act data on foreign lobbying in the United States from 2016 to 2025. The top ten countries by total lobbying dollars spent are, in order: China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Liberia, South Korea, Marshall Islands, Bahamas, Qatar, UAE — and Israel comes in tenth. Dead last on the list.

Qatar, which was literally harboring Hamas leadership until Iran attacked them and flipped their allegiances, outspends Israel significantly. Saudi Arabia comes in third. “If you’re saying you don’t like that Israel has poured over $220 million into lobbying the United States, okay,” Freitas says. “Are you equally concerned about the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia? Just checking.” He also notes that when he asked Grok to list the top ten foreign countries providing funding to U.S. universities from 1986 to 2025, Israel didn’t appear on that list either — Qatar topped it.

His point isn’t that foreign lobbying isn’t a problem. It’s that the selective outrage is intellectually dishonest. “I’m not asking anybody to not be concerned about foreign influence. I’m asking people to look at this proportionally.”

Freitas’s sharpest critique isn’t about the substance of Kent’s concerns, but rather it’s about the execution. He argues Kent could have resigned in a way that was both principled and strategically effective. “Had Joe gotten out there and said, Mr. President, I don’t see any way we achieve our strategic objectives in Iran without the deployment of significant ground forces, and I can’t be part of that — I would have said, I get it.” That kind of resignation would have been a warning shot about escalation without torching the broader America First coalition or handing Democrats a weapon heading into the midterms.

Instead, Kent wrote a letter that reduced every complex dynamic in the Middle East to a single explanation — Israel — and then went straight to Tucker Carlson’s show. “Nope, it’s all about Israel,” Freitas says sarcastically. “Is it though? I don’t think the evidence bears that out.”

Freitas doesn’t call Kent a liar. He doesn’t dismiss the concerns about gatekeepers around the president or the role of the Israeli lobby. But he sees a man whose public record directly contradicts his resignation letter, whose timing couldn’t have been worse for American interests, and whose argument mirrors a pattern he’s spent years fighting on the left — where one explanation accounts for everything and anyone who pushes back is either bought or blind. “Foreign affairs are far more complex than that,” he says. “And I’m never going to be in that camp.”

READ MORE from Tyler Rowley:

Broadly Speaking, the Iran War Is About China

Michael Knowles: Coalitions Over Policy

How Thomas Sowell Changed Coleman Hughes’s Mind About Human Nature

Tyler Rowley is a Catholic author and founder of Right Mic, a newsletter that curates the most recent and relevant conservative podcasts.