Kent received Trump’s nomination three months after losing his bid last November for a U.S. House seat to Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in the 3rd Congressional District

Jerry Cornfield
Washington State Standard

Joe Kent, a former Army Special Forces soldier and two-time Republican candidate for Congress in Washington state, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday as director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

The 52-44 vote comes nearly six months after President Donald Trump nominated Kent to lead the center. Kent has worked as a top aide to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard during his confirmation process.

“He has dedicated his career to fighting terrorism and keeping Americans safe,” U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, said in urging the nomination be affirmed. “For Joe, this mission is both patriotic and sadly personal as his first wife, Shannon, was tragically killed while serving in Syria in 2019.”

Washington’s Democratic Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell opposed Kent’s confirmation.

Murray called Kent “patently unqualified.”

“It is sober, serious work that requires a level head and a commitment to putting the mission before politics,” she said, adding she was “deeply alarmed” Republicans would put it “under the thumb of a conspiracy theorist who espouses white supremacist views.”

“Just about everything we know about Joe Kent is disqualifying for this role,” she said.

Kent will lead an agency founded in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks and tasked with gathering and analyzing information to help thwart terrorism. He will oversee a staff of more than 1,000 people and report to Gabbard.

He takes the helm with a couple of dust-ups under his belt since he was tapped to work for the Trump administration earlier this year.

In March, he was one of the individuals in a Signal group chat about U.S. plans for a military strike in Yemen. Classified information was reportedly shared in the conversation. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, publicized the Signal texts after disclosing he’d somehow been added to the chat.

Two months later, The New York Times reported on emails showing Kent pressed senior intelligence analysts to amend an assessment of links between the Venezuelan government and a criminal gang to better align with Trump administration policies, and to include references critical of Biden-era immigration programs.

Kent, an Oregon native, grew up in Portland and, at 18, enlisted in the U.S. Army. He had 11 combat deployments and served as a Ranger and Special Forces soldier. He has a degree in strategic studies and defense analysis from Norwich University. In 2020, he served as a foreign affairs advisor to the Trump campaign.

In 2019, his wife, Shannon Kent, a Navy cryptologic technician, was killed by an Islamic State group suicide bomber in northeastern Syria. Kent remarried in 2023 and lives in Yacolt. 

Kent received Trump’s nomination three months after losing his bid last November for a U.S. House seat to Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in the 3rd Congressional District in southwest Washington.

It was his second time losing to Gluesenkamp Perez running for the seat. The first was in 2022. Kent, an ardent Trump supporter, beat incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in the primary, a challenge he undertook because she voted to impeach Trump in 2021.

But that fall, Kent couldn’t hold the seat for Republicans, losing to Gluesenkamp Perez, a relatively unknown politician, by 2,629 votes in what was considered one of the biggest upsets of that year’s elections.

In their rematch last year, Gluesenkamp Perez defeated Kent by 16,000 votes.

This report was first published by the Washington State Standard.