The Real Reason You Shouldn't Trust Joe Kent's Insane Stories on Tucker Carlson

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1:21Good morning, everybody. I'm Dave Reuben. This is the Reuben Report. It is March 20th, 2026, and do not adjust your screens. Yes, we are on location. We are here at the Danube Institute in beautiful, safe, and clean Budapest, Hungary. This is my third year in a row here. I'm here for CPAC tomorrow, where I'll be doing some speaking and doing a whole bunch of interviews on both sides of the microphone for that. So I'm looking forward to a couple great days here. I had some amazing goulash last night. I think they've got a picture of it. I'm going to be eating a tremendous amount of Hungarian goulash while here.

2:00And we'll talk a bit about Hungary in their upcoming elections. They have elections in about three weeks coming up here. And, you know, for as safe and clean and as sovereign as this nation is, the election is a little bit closer than you might think as an outsider. So we'll do that at the end. I want to get caught up, obviously, on some of the Iran stuff and the big story that seems to be happening back home, which is Joe Kent going on Tucker Carlson. And it seems to be a bit of a strange framing about why he stepped down. So let's dive in and just get right into it. There's a whole bunch that we're going to hit on here.

2:39So now I can say former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, who is basically serving under Tulsi Gabbard. As you know, he stepped down and he wrote a letter, he posted it on X, basically saying he was stepping down in protest for the Iran war. Now, what was a bit strange is that the day after he steps down, he immediately went on Tucker Carlson's show. And I don't have to explain to you guys, Tucker, let's say in the last year has gone a bit off the reservation. So it seemed like maybe a bit of an odd choice to do immediately after. And here he is, here's Kent on Tucker claiming that Charlie Kirk, that the last time he saw Charlie Kirk, Charlie was telling him to stop the war in Iran.

3:27And then, you know, Charlie Kirk is killed publicly in a very horrific way. And we're not really even allowed to look into that at all. And Charlie Kirk was one of President Trump's closest advisors. And he also advocated heavily against a war with Iran. He was in the Oval Office in the lead up to the 12-day war. I wasn't particularly close with Charlie he was very gracious to me when I was running for Congress very very supportive so we knew each other and the last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June in the West Wing in the stairway and I said hi to him and he looked me in the eye and he said very loudly and it's a small you've been in the West Wing it's small it's a tight space and he said Joe stop us from getting into a war with Iran very loudly he was single-minded and he walked off and he went, I believe, into the oval.

4:15All right. So first, I just want to talk about something that I think we've seen a lot of over the last six months, which is all sorts of people using Charlie Kirk's former tweets, former thoughts, former video clips for their own political purposes, using private conversations, text messages, and things of that matter. And they always release them or mention them, and it so happens to fit what their political ideology is. I've really tried not to do that. I think when I've showed you clips of Charlie, you know, since his assassination, I think I've tried to show you clips that stand on their own without manipulating what he may or may not have said.

4:58I also had many, many conversations with Charlie, and we were very close for a long time and used to tour together. And Charlie said all sorts of things to me off camera that I wouldn't repeat. And I have all sorts of texts from him saying rather controversial things that I wouldn't bring up because they were private things that he sent to me. So I think this, just generally speaking, I think this notion that Kent did right there, and we've seen so many people do it, the last thing Charlie said to me just so happens to be the thing that I'm on this show to talk about. I think you should take that with a grain of salt.

5:31It is also worth mentioning that, A few days ago, I had Andrew Colvett on. Andrew Colvett was the executive producer of Charlie Kirk's show and the guy that I saw with Charlie more than anyone else. I mean, he was really his right-hand man. And Andrew even said to me on the show, and you can watch the clip, we'll post the link in the description below, that Charlie was completely supportive of Operation Midnight Hammer, which was the 12-day war, and that he trusted Trump. And, you know, my position on all of this has been that Trump deserves our trust at this point. We don't know exactly what's going to happen.

6:04But the idea that Trump isn't making the decisions or he's being manipulated into these things when he's been so consistent about Iran for 40 plus years seems rather crazy to me. The other part that was going sort of viral was that Kent took the position that Iran was not going to get a nuclear weapon. Take a look. Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon? No, they weren't, you know, three weeks ago when this started, and they weren't in June either. 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.

6:42That'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. Okay. So first off, we have to understand that we don't think that this guy was privy to all the information because he was thought of as a known leaker. We'll have more on that in just a second. Also, you may remember we showed you the video about two weeks ago. I think we showed it to you a couple of times. Steve Whitcoff, who was our lead negotiator, talking about the Iranian enrichment that the Iranians were doing and that they said that they could, they were close to being able to build 11 nuclear bombs.

7:18Those are their words. So at some point, you have to just sort of people are giving us all sorts of information. You have to choose who to believe. To me, it's a little tough to believe a guy who was working in counterintelligence suddenly comes out against the war. We've shown you many tweets and previous comments of Kent where he's completely foregoing after Iran over the years. And then the next day goes on Tucker Carlson, who has been the most radically anti-Trump person on the right, if Tucker is even on the right anymore. So something seems a little bit thin there to me. But as it pertains to nukes and ballistic missiles and all of the bad things, the exporting of terrorism quite literally all over the world that Iran's been doing for years, here's Bongino talking, Dan Bongino on Fox, talking about the Iranian threat.

8:03If you were making a court case here for a threat that was imminent, right? You know, we had Erbil, Beirut, Beirut, the Khobar Towers, EFPs, explosively formed penetrators in the Iraqi battlefield. We've had drone attacks. We've had threats of drone attacks. We've had, you know, decades of hostage taking in the strait. We've had decades of actual hostage taking in our own embassy. This, Cafe Milano. You've had lethal plotting. Asif Merchant, just the federal case and the Pakistani at the IRGC's beholding in the assassination case. What more evidence could you possibly need that this was an actual threat that was imminent and they still want a nuclear weapon while chanting death to America so much it's becoming, you say it on TV, it almost sounds like you're telling a story.

8:50Okay. So look, Dan Bongino happens to be one of those guys that I trust, but I also want to show you a video we showed you last week where Marco Rubio lays out why we did the Iran situation right now. Because Kent is basically saying Iran was no threat, even though he has been on the record with all sorts of tweets and comments over the years encouraging Trump to go after Iran. But suddenly he's completely 180'd on that. So you just heard Bongino laying out a bit of a case. Here's a bit more from Marco Rubio about the timing as it relates to all this, because everyone seems to be getting hung up on the word imminent.

9:23Are they a threat? What is imminent actually mean? And basically, do you wait for a threat to become more of a threat before you do something about it? They're attacking airports. They're attacking hotels. They're hitting not just military bases. They're attacking our embassies directly. They're attacking facilities that have nothing to do with war or with military. And that's a weak in Iran. That's in Iran despite years of sanction. Imagine a year from now or a year and a half from now the capabilities they would have to inflict damage on us. It's an unacceptable risk, especially in the hands of a regime that's run by radical clerics.

9:58There absolutely was an imminent threat, and the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded, because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked, and by someone else, Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage.

10:27Had we not done so, there would have been hearings on Capitol Hill about how we knew that this was going to happen and we didn't act preemptively to prevent more casualties and more loss of life. Okay. And as you know, Donald Trump has subsequently said, even after that, that he may have even pushed the Israelis into it. That in some sense, that doesn't even matter. We are, as Pete Hegseth says, we're a force multiplier together. And So the question really is, who do you trust, right? You have to figure out who to trust here. Do you trust Marco Rubio, who's been wildly consistent on this stuff for over a decade?

10:59Do you trust Donald Trump, who's been saying the exact same things about Iran for 40 years? Or do you trust Joe Kent, who will get to the leak part in just a second, was saying all the reverse things about Iran for years, then steps down in the very next day, does a PR tour on Tucker Carlson? Again, of all shows to do, Tucker Carlson, who's the most radically against Trump and the administration of all the pundit class on the right. You have to decide. But Rubio's broader point there, it's interesting. Bongino laid out, here's a whole bunch of stuff that Iran has been up to that we know about.

11:34And then Rubio's point is, do you wait for them to be stronger, right? And what we've done in this month, less than a month, it's 21 days or so of the war, is completely take out their ballistic missile program. They were building about 100 of them a day. They cannot build any of them. Their air force is gone. Their navy is gone. And all of this falls in the end. At the end, it all falls to the people of Iran. And will they be able to take their country back? And that is a huge if. So let's put the military part aside for just a second. I think the big thing that we're seeing around Joe Kent resigning is that it seems that he was trying to actually get ahead of a story.

12:12And the story that he was trying to get ahead of was that he has been a known leaker from this administration, which has had remarkably few leaks, actually. But this is from Jackie Heinrich, who is the chief White House correspondent over at Fox. She wrote on X, senior administration official says Joe Kent was a known leaker and was cut out of the POTUS intelligence briefings months ago. He has not been part of any Iran planning discussions or briefings at all. Officials say the White House told DNI Gabbard Kent should be fired for suspected leaks, but she never did. OK, so that's super interesting there.

12:49So you have Kent telling Tucker that Iran was not an immediate threat. There's no nuclear threat or anything else. here you have the White House chief correspondent over at Fox saying he wasn't involved in any of these meetings because they knew he was leaking. Now, I think we're going to find out who he was leaking to. I suspect it probably was Tucker and maybe some other people as well. But the point is he wasn't even privy to the information that Marco Rubio and Trump and Hegseth are now laying out there. So something seems a little fishy there. And if you want a little more fishiness, well, how about this?

13:22These are images from press TV, which of course is the Iranian regime state media, and they are now posting, this is just a small selection of it, they are posting multiple clips of Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson. So do you think that maybe what they are doing is actually pro-Iranian? Perhaps. But let's continue a little bit with what's going on on the sort of right-wing punditry class, because the other person who I think, unfortunately, this one really is unfortunate, has gone off the reservation, gone off the deep end, is Megyn Kelly. And she's just all in if there is a conspiracy to be had or the wrong take to be chosen.

14:06She's just doing it every time. She put this up on X. She wrote, holy S-H-I-T. I'm trying not to curse these days, as you guys know. is this real? And somebody took a screenshot of Fox and in their war coverage, you can see on the bottom there, what they have is the American and Israeli flag. Now, this is a joint American-Israeli war on Iran. Everybody knows that. As I said before, Pete Hegseth is calling this a force multiplier, having the two most powerful air forces in the world working together. Our armies are working together. That's what allies do. You may not like what they're doing. I guess Megan doesn't like it.

14:42But it's absolutely not just an American war and it's not just an Israeli war. It's a joint war. And hopefully we'll have some other allies getting involved. But anyway, she was very upset that those flags were merged together. Of course, it took the sleuths of the internet about two seconds to find this. Yes, her own thumbnail on her own show after saying that you shouldn't merge these two flags together. Well, there it is, the American and Iranian flag meshed together. And then, Megan, this was really the broader point that I wanted to bring up with Megan. She wrote this on Twitter. You want to rip the GOP right to its core and prevent a single America First voter from participating in the midterms?

15:24Indict Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson. See how that works out. Megan, let me talk directly to you, my former friend, Megan Kelly. Maybe we can do this over your favorite chicken parm that David used to make you. you should indict people who are known leakers, right? I'm not for indicting people or going after people who didn't commit crimes. So if Joe Kent didn't commit a crime, didn't leak classified information, then they shouldn't go after him. But to blanket say that the Republicans will lose, in essence, if they go after him, well, don't you go after people who commit crimes, especially as it pertains to national security?

16:05And it sounds like maybe Tucker did that, too. I'm not I'm not for chasing people down for nothing. But I think Republicans actually want rule of law. And I think they want to actually go after leakers. And we shouldn't have these people in the government. So we'll see about that. Like she's taking a political position over over a moral and legal position. And I think that that is very dangerous. It also is not congruent with what's going on with MAGA itself. You know, there's if you just pay attention to the to the ex-pundits, it seems like these like the Tucker Megan wing of this thing is winning.

16:42And in reality, it is not at all. Americans are not isolationists. Americans do believe in America. And MAGA absolutely believes in Donald Trump. Here's the guy that I call the dorkiest dork in dork town, Harry Enten, with some numbers over on CNN. Yeah, you know, sometimes you look at the polling data and there are numbers that just jump off the screen at you. And this is one of those, because just take a look here. MAGA, GOP, view of Trump, approve 100 percent, 100 percent. If you are a member of MAGA and the GOP, you approve of Donald John Trump. Zero percent say that they disapprove. You don't have to be a mathematical genius to know you can't go higher than 100 percent.

17:25He is the 1972 Miami Dolphins. Now, there are some Republicans who disapprove of Donald John Trump, but they are not members of the Make America Great Again movement. OK, that guy is dorky. He is just dorky. He loves numbers. That's fine. Look, 100 % seems a bit much to me. So, you know, you have to take these polls with a bit of a grain of salt. And there's always, you know, a little variableness on each side. And, you know, you can also whittle it down to what does MAGA mean, right? Like Tucker is no longer MAGA, obviously. If MAGA is Trump, then Tucker is not MAGA. So there's ways you could sort of decipher the information and say, okay, it's not really 100%.

18:06But let's say the poll is wildly off by 10%. Like that would be a pretty big number. That means that 90 % of the base still supports Donald Trump. So I see no break in Trump. I think if they find out that Kent is a leaker, which again, seems quite likely and perhaps that he was leaking to Trump, that people will want to go after him. I think that Rubio and Hegseth and Trump have made a consistent case. In Trump's case, it's been for 40 years. In Rubio's case, it's been for at least a decade. They've made a case for why this is happening right now and that you don't wait for your enemies to get stronger.

18:41And clearly the 13 or so countries in the Middle East outside of Israel who are getting bombed right now by Iran are happy about this. And I said it weeks ago, and I'll say it again right now. I think when this thing is wrapped up, there are going to be new peace deals on the table because everyone's going to realize, boy, America's back in action. They're not messing around. Israel was actually protecting and getting rid of our number one enemy. And let's sign some peace deals and not have rockets being lobbed all over this part of the world. But let's do a little more on the granule side of what's been going on over there.

19:16There was a little controversy yesterday. Listen to this on Truth from Donald Trump. Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars gas field in Iran. A relatively small section of the hole has been hit. The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen. Unfortunately, Iran did not know this or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar's LNG gas facility.

19:54No more attacks will be made by Israel pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar, in which the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars gas field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before. I do not want to authorize this level of violence and destruction because of the long-term implications it will have on the future of Iran. But if Qatar's LNG is attacked again, I will not hesitate to do so.

20:28Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. So there were all sorts of people yesterday freaking out that, oh my God, Israel and America are going to have a problem now because they went ahead and did this. Things are going to happen in war. I think it's going to be fine. And I think it's also interesting that Trump is very, very defensive over Qatar, right? Like that's definitely a piece of this that is interesting and you can extrapolate from whatever you want for that. But beyond this one little hiccup, which I think is worth mentioning because this has been going so well, Trump is basically saying, we're moving forward with all of this and we're going to keep going and going and going and going.

21:09This is also to the backdrop of the fact that so many people online have just been lying relentlessly about everything happening. That's why I've tried to read as many of the Trump Truth social posts. It's why I try to go to direct statements from Rubio and Hegseth, etc., because I think you have to get the information from the source, not the pundit class. And I say that with all due irony, because one of the big conspiracies over the last couple of days online was that Bibi Netanyahu was dead. and it was being pushed by all sorts of people with millions and millions of views. And it was obvious to me it just wasn't true.

21:46But here is Candace Owens, who Joe Kent apparently is going on Candace Owens' show to continue his PR tour. Here's what she wrote a couple of days ago. There is a pound of makeup on his face and he's shooting SNL skits with Mike Huckabee while missing serious meetings. Everything is wrong. You don't need to produce skits to prove you're alive. You just have to go on living. This is after Candace had also tweeted that there was a big conspiracy around Netanyahu's health and everything. And of course, he's completely fine. And here's Netanyahu addressing one of the things that Kent and some of these people are saying, that somehow Israel or some other people tricked Donald Trump into this Iran war.

22:29Welcome to the foreign press. First of all, I just want to say I'm alive and you're all witnesses that someone can tell President Trump what to do. Come on. President Trump always makes his decisions on what he thinks is good for America. And may I add, I think what is also good for future generations. In this case, those interests are absolutely clear. And so is the clarity of our achievements. I thought throwing that video up there would be important for two reasons. One, if you're following these people who just consistently lie about everything, not get things wrong. I get things wrong. Some of my predictions as to what might happen at the end of this war might be wrong.

23:16I've gotten other predictions wrong in the past. It's one thing to get things wrong. It's one thing to, it's another thing to blatantly lie about everything all the time. And that's what Candace has been doing. That's what Tucker has increasingly been doing. And the fact that those are the two shows that Kent chooses to do right after stepping down tells you a little something beyond his flip-flopping on the Iran issue, beyond that. So there you have Netanyahu having to address something that's completely ridiculous. It's just like internet brain slop that he's not even alive. But the bigger point on that, point number two, is that there he is saying what I think we all know to be true, but they keep pushing as well.

24:00Does anyone honestly believe that Donald Trump doesn't make the decisions at the end of the day? Does Donald Trump bring in all sorts of people? J.D. Vance talked about this the other day, that Donald Trump brings in everybody. We have some different opinions on things and Donald Trump's the decider and it's his job as the vice president and it's the cabinet's job to then follow his lead, right? But the idea that Mark Levin or anyone else walks into the White House and just bamboozles and confuses Trump and Trump doesn't know what he's doing. It's actually, at this point, after all these years with Trump, it's offensive and it's ridiculous and it is just internet slop.

24:38So let's leave that there. Let's put the international stuff aside for a moment and let's deal with some of the things happening in America right now because the great divide in our country is that we have some states that basically work. They happen to be red and we have a whole bunch of states that really don't work and they happen to be blue. So we're going to get to Cali in a second, but we will start in the place that I was born, New York. It is very sad to me what has happened to New York. Kathy Hochul is the mayor, the governor of New York. And here she is begging wealthy New Yorkers to come back.