WATCH: Joe Kent Questions Charlie Kirk Assassination and Attempted Trump Assassination – Says National Counterterrorism Center was Blocked from Investigating Kirk Assassination: “we’re not allowed to ask any questions”
Former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent questioned the narratives surrounding the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and the attempted assassination of President Trump at a 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday.
Kent made his first interview appearance since departing the Trump Administration with Tucker and gave a somewhat tell-all behind-the-scenes account of many of his experiences as a top intelligence official, especially with regard to the war in Iran, Israel’s influence, and the factors driving the war.
He is also expected to join Mark Levin, who holds an opposing viewpoint and has clashed with Tucker for the last several months, for an interview.
During the discussion with Tucker, Kent spoke of the circumstances surrounding the would-be Trump assassin and the Charlie Kirk assassin, as well as the roadblocks he’s faced trying to get to the bottom of it at the National Counterterrorism Center.
Kent notably suggested that President Trump may feel like he is “under threat” due to “unanswered questions” surrounding the attempts on his life and the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
“By no means am I saying, like, you know, the Israelis did this or any of that,” Kent told Tucker before highlighting the bizarre timing and circumstances surrounding the shooting at Trump’s rally in July 2024, after the FBI used a confidential human source to arrest Iranian national Asif Merchant in a foiled assassination plot. Just one day after Merchant was arrested in the murder for hire scheme on July 12, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire after sneaking onto a roof at the Trump rally on July 13, 2024.
But shockingly, Kent told Tucker, “We’re not allowed to ask, basically, was there any linkage between what took place with Asif Merchant, who was recruited by the Iranians to come to America to recruit proxies to kill President Trump.”
“Crooks, according to the official narrative, anyways, is an enigma. We don’t know anything about him. We can’t get into his devices. If we did get into his devices, maybe there’s nothing there. No more questions are allowed to be asked about Thomas Crooks,” he said. “The DHS IG is currently being blocked from investigating Butler as well. That’s out in the media, that’s all well known. Your investigative journalists found that crooks did indeed have an online persona, online footprint, he was talking to people. So it’s like, why aren’t we investigating this? You know?”
Kent went on to describe the “multiple public breaches of President Trump’s security over the last year” before highlighting Charlie Kirk’s very public assassination by Tyler Robinson, which “we’re not really even allowed to look into that at all,” he said.
Last time he saw Charlie Kirk before his murder, Kent said, “He said, ‘Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran,’ very loudly. And he walked off, and he went, I believe, into the Oval.”
“So, when one of President Trump’s closest advisors, who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink, at least, our relationship with the Israelis, and then he’s suddenly publicly assassinated, and we’re not allowed to ask any questions about that, it’s a data point. It’s a data point that we need to look into,” Kent continued before explaining what he means by “not allowed to look into” the assassination.
“We’ve been told that this individual, Robinson, is a lone gunman, and maybe he is. But the investigation that I was a part of, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) was a part of, we were stopped from continuing to investigate. And the FBI will say that they stopped that because they wanted to have— turn everything over to the Utah State authorities, everything’s going to trial, it’s very, very sensitive, but there was still a lot for us to look into that I can’t really get into, but there was still linkage for us to investigate that we needed to run down,” he said.
“I’m just saying there’s unanswered questions. We know the pressure, because of the text messages, the text messages that have been made public, that Charlie was under a lot of pressure from a lot of pro-Israel donors. And again, we know Charlie was advocating to President Trump against this war with Iran. And we knew at the end of the 12-day war, at the end of midnight hammer, that the Israelis were going to come back and ask us to go back to war again. So, we have a lot of data points between Butler, the assassination attempts against President Trump, the breaches of his security, what happened to Charlie Kirk.”
Kent then revealed, “The National Counterterrorism Center’s mandate is to investigate any foreign ties, to see if there’s potentially any foreign ties. If we don’t find any foreign ties, we back off. What I’m saying about getting into too much detail is there was more for us to investigate.”
Kent added that the FBI and DOJ “basically cut off our access to be able to get into that information” before clarifying, “Look, I didn’t even say necessarily that I believe there’s 100% foreign ties. There were data points that we needed to investigate.” He continued, “We still had a lot more leads to run down that pertain to some kind of a foreign nexus that we were stopped from investigating.”
While it would appear that Charlie Kirk being killed by a foreign country is highly unlikely, Kent has long been a defender of Israel and taking action in Iran. It does not seem likely that he would accuse Israel of killing Charlie Kirk, nor did he. What he did reveal is an alarming refusal by the government to allow the leading authority on national and international terrorism in the United States to further investigate an act of terrorism.
Kent explained that his agency was “cut off” because it’s just “the way the bureaucracy works” and that interagency data-sharing failures effectively stonewalled the NCTC’s investigation of various leads.
He further slammed the FBI’s investigation of Kirk’s assassination for not going far enough to investigate or arrest potential coconspirators or others with knowledge of Tyler Robinson’s plot. As The Gateway Pundit reported, Robinson was discovered to be a member of online communities, including one where users appeared to foreshadow the shooting, suggesting Kirk’s death was no lone-wolf act but potentially part of a planned operation within radical left-wing circles.
“I just think, considering they knew the guy, they knew Charlie was going to be assassinated, and there was enough of them that it wasn’t just some rando who maybe he tags every TPUSA post with that, there was enough of them that there’s something there,” Kent said.
“To me, there’s more work to be done, and because that could have been posted from anywhere, that would be in the purview of the FBI or NCTC if they’re overseas. And to me, I, personally, did not see any effort being taken to continue to run that down,” he continued, describing himself as “very bothered by it.”
“There was people publicly posting; they had prior knowledge of this. And I’m here telling you, as someone who’s involved in the investigation, there was more stones for us to overturn, and every time we asked, we were blocked. And then they, you know, leaked to the New York Times that we had a blow-up, and we had to throw them out of the room because they’re crazy, etc. So, it’s incredibly frustrating that there’s not more, especially considering how pivotal Charlie was to the MAGA movement and to President Trump, that there hasn’t been a more concerted effort to find the truth and to find justice.”
“I pray there is. I hope this helps. I know we know you, and I will probably take some flak for it,” he added.
Tucker chimed in, “I don’t know why, and I doubt I’ll be— at a certain but I’ve really tried not to say anything about it because I don’t, I don’t know the answers and but I want them to be found because I believe in justice and because I love Charlie, but I think everything you have said, you know, may be dismissed as crazy or evil. Tell me how. With reference to the words you’ve just spoken, I don’t see how someone could level a legitimate attack on you; it won’t stop them.”
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