Joe Kent Claims Probe Into Trump’s Would-Be Assassin and Link to Iran Was Shut Down: ‘We Were Stopped’

Former Trump administration counterterrorism official Joe Kent claimed in an interview that a probe into finding a connection between Iran and President Donald Trump’s would-be assassin was shut down.

In a Thursday chat with Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, Kent said he had concerns about Thomas Crooks, 20, not acting alone when he tried to assassinate Trump during a Pennsylvania rally in 2024. Kent resigned from his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the U.S. strikes against Iran.

“Two days prior to Crooks taking the shot in Butler, there was a guy named Asif Merchant, who was hired by the Iranians to come here and assassinate President Trump in retaliation for killing Qasem Soleimani,” Kent told Uygur, adding the FBI was “all over” Merchant when he came to the U.S.

Merchant was arrested one day before Crooks took his shot at the president and was killed himself by a Secret Service agent. He has since been convicted of “murder for hire and attempting to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries.” According to the Department of Justice, Merchant admitted he was a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and he was sent to the U.S. to assassinate political leaders.

“My basic question was, ‘Have we done our due diligence to make sure that there was no linkage between the two events?'” Kent asked.

Kent said that in light of very little information being released about Crooks, he found information about his online presence from a documentary released by Tucker Carlson in 2025.

“I wanted to go back and make sure that we checked all that through intelligence channels and really researched into what we had learned through Tucker’s investigative journalism about Crooks’ online persona,” Kent said.

The inquiries, however, were not welcome, he added.

“The FBI did not tolerate this at all. They basically said, ‘Hey, there’s nothing else to see here’ and stopped us from investigating any of those potentials, to my knowledge,” Kent said, adding later, “Why wouldn’t we look into everything? And then we were stopped.”

White House Assistant Director for Public Affairs Ben Williamson denied Kent’s claims through an X post responding to a Daily Caller story about Kent’s theory about a possible Iranian “plot” to kill the president. Williamson called Kent a “dishonest hack” who had zero “investigative authority” when it came to the near-assassination of Trump.

“This is like me saying I was ‘blocked’ from playing receiver for the Commanders – it’s an issue of having no business or frankly ability doing something, not an issue of access,” he wrote. “Furthermore, FBI actually made an early exception and allowed NCTC to assess intelligence reports, and International Terrorism returned zero connections. None. Joe Kent kept making things up anyway.”

He accused Kent of spreading conspiracy theories with his recent “shameless media tour.”

“The shameless media tour he’s on reeks of being desperate for attention and the baseless conspiracy theories he’s spreading about the admin, particularly Charlie [Kirk’s] murder, could very well make it more difficult to get justice for our friend,” Williamson wrote. “If he had any shame, Joe Kent should be ashamed of himself.”

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