The Pacific Northwest is in the national news with the appointment of Washington State’s Joe Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center.

The Center, which is charged with analyzing and detecting terrorist threats, leads the way for the government in analyzing, understanding, and responding to the terrorist threat.. Of course the supine Republican-led Senate confirmed Kent’s appointment on Wednesday, with only one Republican, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, voting against Kent’s nomination to the role.

Kent initially went to Washington, D.C. in early 2025 when he was picked to be Chief of Staff for Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.

Kent has said he plans to devote the Center’s resources to targeting Latin American gangs and other criminal groups tied to migration. “President Trump is committed to identifying these cartels and these violent gang members and making sure that we locate them and that we get them out of our country,” Kent said at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee in April.

Kent ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in Washington state’s Third Congressional District twice, once in 2022 and again in 2024, losing both times to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

In 2022, he paid Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right military group the Proud Boys, for consulting work. He also worked with Joey Gibson, the founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer.

In March 2022, Kent endorsed remarks by Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) who had called Ukrainian President Volodymyr “a thug”.  He added, “We, the west at large, pushed (Russia) into this situation of encroachment”. 

“Zelenskyy was installed via a US backed color revolution, his goal is to move his county west so he virtue signals in woke ideology while using nazi battalions to crush his enemies,” Kent wrote on Twitter. “He was also smart enough to cut our elite in on the graft,” he said, while adding that Cawthorn “nailed it.”

At an April 2022 conservative political conference Kent claimed that Russian President Vladamir Putin’s demands to take over the highly disputed Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine were “very reasonable.”

The Associated Press reported that during his Senate confirmation hearing for the Counterterrorism post, Kent refused to distance himself from a conspiracy theory that federal agents had somehow instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol. “We’re looking into whether elements of the government could have enhanced the criminal acuity of some of the rioters that day,” Kent also endorsed  false claims that Trump won the 2020 election over President Joe Biden.

 “No one who…says government-controlled agents were part of the Jan. 6 attacks should be in charge of counterterrorism – period,” Democratic Majority for Israel executive director Mark Mellman said in a statement on Kent’s nomination to be Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “Joe Kent is a zealot whose blind devotion to an extremist ideology concerns us deeply.” 

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the  the Senate Intelligence Committee, was also critical. “At a time when domestic violent extremism is one of the fastest-growing threats to the homeland, we are being asked to put someone in charge of counterterrorism who has aligned himself with political violence, promoted falsehoods that undermine our democracy, and tried to twist intelligence to serve a political agenda,” Warner said in a speech on the Senate floor.

As a side note, the appointment of Joe Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center is only slightly more despicable than the August 2, 2025 confirmation of former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in a 50-45 vote along party lines. 

“She has supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to exact vengeance on his political enemies and backed his challenges to federal judges who have questioned the legality of his immigration policies,” The New York Times reported. “And she was vocal in raising doubts about the legitimacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election to the presidency in 2020.”

And so it goes.