Joe Kent Says FBI Stopped Him From Looking At Possible Iran Link To Would-Be Trump Assassin

Former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Joe Kent said Friday that the FBI stopped him from investigating the possibility that the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pa. was linked to Iran.

Kent said the Bureau concluded would-be-assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, acted alone without adequately probing whether the Butler attempt was connected to an Iran-linked Trump assassination plot foiled the day before — and he also said the Bureau stopped his own investigation into the matter. The former Trump administration official — who on March 17 abruptly resigned from his post over the Iran war — made the allegation during his Thursday interview with “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur.

“Initially, we were just told, ‘Hey, Crooks, lone gunman, he was killed.’ And then Crooks was kind of an enigma, and we just didn’t hear much more about him, like there was literally nothing about the guy,” Kent told Uygur regarding the little-known 20-year-old gunman, whom a Secret Service sniper killed immediately after Crooks fired shots at Trump.

“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 said. “When Merchant came over here, obviously … the FBI, was all over him.”

Authorities arrested Merchant, who admitted to being an agent of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, on July 12, 2024, just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump. A federal grand jury convicted Merchant on March 6. (Read more from “Joe Kent Says FBI Stopped Him From Looking At Possible Iran Link To Would-Be Trump Assassin” HERE)