Tag Archives: Joe Kent

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Another Extremist Trump Appointment

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.

Joe Kent (Photo credit: Jenny Kane/Associated Press)

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. 

Jeannine Pirro (r) ( (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

“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.

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A New I-5 Bridge: A Vital Transit Link or a Corridor for Crime?

The I-5 Bridge connecting Oregon and Washington

NOTE: Paul O. Edgar, a retired Business Systems Analyst, submitted a response to this post. It is reprinted at the conclusion of my post.

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Shades of the U.S.-Mexico border conflict.

Stephen F. Austin, the “father of Texas”, had strong opinions about ” invaders”. In a May 4, 1836 letter, appealing for U.S. assistance during Texas’ war of independence, Austin declared “A war of extermination is raging in Texas — a war of barbarism and of despotic principles waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race…. Indians, Mexicans, and renegades, all mixed together, and all the natural enemies of white men and civilization.”

It doesn’t look like Republican Joe Kent, who lost his 2022 race in Washington’s in Washington’s Third Congressional District against Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and is challenging her again in 2024, likes outsiders much either,, especially folks from Oregon.

In mid-January 2024, Kent proclaimed that a replacement for the deteriorating I-5 bridge and a new light rail line “… would be an expressway for Portland’s crime & homeless into Vancouver…”

“…the drug addicts and criminals in their tent colonies that are spreading their crime from Portland into Vancouver…,” are not welcome in his district, he said.

In a Feb. 29, 2024 news release, Kent repeated that allegation. “What we don’t need – and the people of my district agree on this regardless of party – is a toll road that unfairly targets Washingtonians commuting to Portland, or light rail that there is no demand for and would bring Portland’s crime problem further into Clark County.”

Kent has repeated that point of view on Facebook. ““We don’t want the problems of downtown Portland dumped right into our district in Vancouver,” he said. “If you look at the murder rate, the crime rate, that’s the last thing we want in Vancouver.”

The New York Times says the I-5 dispute “… is an example of how Republicans…are seeking to transform even the most basic of local issues into battlegrounds in the nation’s culture wars in elections this year in which control of Congress is at stake. Mr. Kent’s attacks, which rely on buzzwords of the hard right, place the bridge at the center of a national political discussion that vilifies the left and plays on fears of demographic change.”

So I guess we can expect more of this as the Kent-Perez contest heats up.

Response by Paul O. Edgar

The I-5 bridge and light rail issues are about more than crime. 

The most important issue is whether there is a need to have this very expensive TriMet Light Rail Transit (LRT) line extended into Clark County, with an additional $2 billion added into the I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) plan cost. 

TriMet also wants to also get reimbursed for all operating costs. Currently they are estimated to be $21.6 Million dollars per year. 

TriMet already has a huge under-funded earned health and retirement obligation that the citizens of Clark County Washington would become partners in if the I-5 bridge/Light Rail project goes through. TriMet has been working on trying to deal with those obligations, but the limit on payroll tax revenues and other State of Oregon funds already make TriMet look like a Chapter 11 bankrupt organization. 

Reading its performance reports, TriMet ridership has plunged and costs have been understated.  The West-side Commuter Rail System (WES), for example, appears to be losing $1 million dollars per month and TriMet’s LRT may well be losing $10 million dollars per month. Some of that is because of the increase in virtual offices and public concerns about drug addicts and other troubled people on the system.

All this, plus burdensome bridge tolls, will mean added costs for Clark County commuters, 99% of whom will also not be able get directly to their place of work or back home on a Fixed Rail System without even more added costs. 
The cost of what Clark County residents would be the assuming of the costs associate with extending TriMet Light Rail Transit are to far great.

This is important, and you can read TriMet’s performance reports that less than 1% of the incident of travel generated in the TriMet Service are handled by TriMet. Not enough people will use TriMet Light Rail Transit and it would be very hard for people to justify the ongoing cost, including the toll costs that will go on for ever and ever. 

Maybe the answer for many Clark County residents who now travel to Portland will be to find employment and do their shopping elsewhere.