Joe Kent resigned last month as head of the National Counterterrorism Center over the war in Iran, and in his exit letter he argued that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. He also said there was no available intelligence suggesting that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Now Sebastian Gorka is angling to take the job Kent left behind, a post that would put him at the center of the country’s counterterrorism apparatus. Four people familiar with his potential political rise said the position would give him broad powers over that system, while Gorka has already been serving since January 2025 as a deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.
Gorka has been a fixture in Donald Trump’s inner circle since 2017, and he has pushed at the National Security Council to broaden the definition of terrorist threats to include far-left groups. That line of argument has already found expression in the White House’s September move to brand antifa a terrorist organization, even though the executive order described it as a domestic terrorist organization and no such label exists in federal law, according to reporting on the move.
The National Counterterrorism Center post has remained open since Kent’s resignation, leaving the administration to decide whether to install a successor who has publicly argued for an expanded view of the threat landscape. Gorka told the Council on Foreign Relations last month that Operation Epic Fury would solve perhaps the most trenchant and strategic terrorist threat the world faces today, a phrase that suggests where he wants the counterterrorism fight to go next.