'All 18 ... Agreed — Iran Had No Capacity': Resigned Intel Chief's On-Camera Admission Draws Fresh Iraq War Comparisons

Joe Kent, who until last week led the United States' National Counterterrorism Center, told Megyn Kelly on camera that all 18 American intelligence agencies had reached the same conclusion before the Iran war escalated: Iran was not working towards a nuclear weapon. The admission — made during an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM — has since been widely circulated online, with commentator Brian Allen posting a thread on X that laid out what the intelligence community reportedly said versus the case made to justify the conflict.

'When you have the 18 intelligence agencies saying without a doubt that Iran is not working towards a nuclear weapon and the Defense Intelligence Agency doing battle damage assessment... that's what I'm going to go with,' Kent said on air. He went further, describing the process behind that consensus as exhaustive: 'Getting the 18 intelligence agencies to agree on anything is very challenging. It is a very laborious and sometimes a very intense process of coordination and having people argue their cases.'

Dissenting Voices Were Shut Out

Kent had previously told Tucker Carlson that those who held reservations about the war were systematically excluded from the president's briefings ahead of the conflict. 'In the lead up to this last iteration, a good deal of key decision makers were not allowed to come and express their opinion to the president,' Kent said, adding that the intelligence community's ability to offer a 'sanity check' was 'largely stifled.' A senior Trump administration official confirmed the White House had sidelined Kent from intelligence briefings on Iran before his resignation.

Kent also made clear on the show that his position was grounded in institutional process, not personal opinion. He pointed specifically to the Director of National Intelligence's own assessment: 'I'm going with what the Director of National Intelligence said, and she's saying that based on the research and the analysis and the rigorous debate of 18 intelligence agencies.' That Director of National Intelligence was Tulsi Gabbard — Kent's own former boss — who has since publicly distanced herself from his resignation and affirmed her support for the war effort.

The Iraq 2003 Echo

The admission has prompted pointed comparisons to the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Allen's thread drew the parallel directly: in 2003, Ahmed Chalabi told the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; the intelligence community expressed doubts, was overruled, and 4,500 Americans died — with no weapons of mass destruction ever found. Kent and others have drawn direct parallels between the structure of events in 2026 and 2003.

Kent himself drew the same comparison in his resignation letter, writing directly to President Donald Trump that the situation was 'the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.' He described an 'echo chamber' of high-ranking Israeli officials and influential American media figures who 'deployed a misinformation campaign' to sow pro-war sentiments and convince the president that 'Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie.'

On the Kelly show specifically, Kent addressed the post-Midnight Hammer period head-on — pushing back against Israeli claims that Iran retained nuclear capacity even after the June 2025 strikes. 'Being influenced by the IAEA or by another government, Israel in this case, saying like, oh no, even though you conducted Midnight Hammer and your 18 intelligence agencies say that their nuclear capability is gone, they're still somehow digging out from the rubble and they're going to be able to assemble 10 bombs in two weeks,' he said. 'Again, sorry, I'm going with what the Director of National Intelligence said.'

The White House's Obliteration Claim

That tension sits directly against the White House's own public record. On 25 June 2025 — three days after Operation Midnight Hammer struck Iran's nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — the White House published an article titled 'Iran's Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.' A follow-up piece the following day declared that 'every knowledgeable person' agreed with the claim.

However, a subsequent US assessment found that only one of the three nuclear sites was mostly destroyed, while the other two sustained damage that could allow enrichment to resume within months, according to five current and former US officials familiar with the assessment. That picture was further complicated when Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff said in early 2026 that Iran was 'probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material' — sitting uneasily alongside declarations of total victory made months earlier.

Kent's on-camera account is notable given the position he held. He led an agency that analyses terrorist threats and advises senior officials, making his public break with the Trump administration — and the reported FBI probe that followed — significant. Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner nonetheless said in a statement that 'on this point, he is right: there was no credible evidence of an imminent threat from Iran that would justify rushing the United States into another war of choice in the Middle East.' The White House has dismissed Kent's account, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling the notion that Israel pushed the US into the war 'insulting and laughable.'