Iran has not gotten anywhere close to developing nuclear weapons over the last year, according to ex-counterterrorism director Joe Kent.Kent blindsided the Trump administration earlier this week when he suddenly resigned from his post as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, citing the war with Iran—and his assessment that Iran “posed no imminent threat” to the U.S.—as the primary cause for his departure.In a sit-down interview Wednesday night with Tucker Carlson, Kent explained that Iran’s nuclear program was basically defunct. “Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon?” asked Carlson.“No, they weren’t three weeks ago when this started, and they weren’t in June either,” Kent said. “I mean, the Iranians have had a religious ruling—a fatwa—against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That’s been in place since 2004. That’s available in the public sphere.“But then also, we had no intelligence to indicate that that fatwa was being disobeyed or it was on the cusp of being lifted,” he noted.Kent’s resignation sparked a maelstrom across Washington, where top Republicans and Trump officials spent the better part of Tuesday disparaging Kent and his work, branding the Trump appointee as a “crazed egomaniac.” The size and scope of the MAGA reaction was a message to other Trump officials, warning them of the fallout if they publicly criticize the war.The repercussions continued into Thursday, when Representative Elise Stefanik referred to Kent’s letter as “inappropriate,” and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that Kent’s decision to blame Israel for the ongoing war was concerning.In the same interview with Carlson, Kent claimed that U.S. officials had entered a “complacent mode” when dealing with Israel and its shared intelligence, warning that that intelligence could be shared to influence the U.S. administration just as much as it is shared to inform the administration.“We trust a lot of what they have to say, not keeping in the back of our mind that they have their own agenda and we have our own agenda at the end of the day,” Kent said, noting that the U.S. and Israel’s missions are frequently aligned, though he did not believe this was the case with regard to the Iran.“I don’t believe our objective has been clearly defined,” Kent said, citing America’s and Israel’s varied approaches to forced regime change in Iran.Kent also offered some conspiratorial views on Charlie Kirk’s assassination, suggesting that Israel could have been involved in the political operative’s death since Kirk was a vocal opponent against U.S. involvement in Iran.It’s worth noting that Kent is a known extremist with neo-Nazi ties. He has had to disavow a past interview with Nazi sympathizer Greyson Arnold and interactions with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Even his resignation letter included “ugly antisemitic tropes” and “really nasty rhetoric,” Emily Horne, a former National Security Council official under Joe Biden, told The New Republic earlier this week.So far, 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. More than 1,400 Iranian civilians have been killed, including dozens of children at a girls’ school in the country’s south. Some 3.2 million people have been displaced, as the U.S.-Israeli strikes have damaged more than 42,000 civilian sites—such as homes, hospitals, and schools—across Iran, according to Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani.