Trump’s pick for key national security position linked to far-right figures

Donald Trump’s pick for the head of US counterintelligence has advocated for the FBI to surveil “antifa” groups, and has lingering questions over millions of dollars in campaign finances, his employment with a shadowy military contractor and links to far-right figures.

Joe Kent, twice an unsuccessful congressional candidate in south-west Washington state and a former Green Beret and CIA operative, has also been criticized for his proximity to white nationalist activists such as Nick Fuentes, and for the revolving cast of far-right activists his campaigns employed.

If appointed as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, he will work under Trump’s director of national intelligence nominee, Tulsi Gabbard, in one of the most important intelligence roles in the administration.

The Guardian contacted Kent on a phone number and an email address identified with him by multiple data brokers, but received no response.

Kent, now resident in Yacolt, Washington, was born and raised in Sweet Home, Oregon, by his own account in podcasts and candidate interviews. He spent 20 years in the military, including serving as a US Army Green Beret in Iraq and Afghanistan during the global war on terror.

According to podcast interviews and media reports, Kent subsequently served as a “CIA paramilitary officer” and a military contractor who offered training services at Joint Base McChord in Washington state.

He ran for Congress in 2022 and 2024 in Washington’s third district, centered on Vancouver, losing both times to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. In his first campaign, in particular, Kent drew criticisms for multiple far-right connections.

He was a beneficiary of donations from tech figure Peter Thiel, whose largesse that cycle also saw him bankrolling campaigns by JD Vance and Blake Masters.

He was endorsed that year by Nazi-sympathizer Nick Fuentes, but later attempted to distance himself from the prominent white nationalist. Nevertheless, in an interview with a member of the Fuentes-aligned group American Virtue, Kent opined that American culture was “anti-white” and “anti-straight-white-male”.

In June 2022, he was also interviewed by Greyson Arnold, a neo-Nazi streamer. One of his many controversial campaign hires was Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right Proud Boys organization, who Kent retained in 2022 as a consultant.

Views on federal agencies

Kent has expressed extreme but shifting views on the investigative role and priorities of US federal agencies.

During protests following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Kent tweeted that the FBI should track “leaders & financiers of antifa”, defund them, and arrest their leaders. In 2022, after the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to seize improperly retained classified documents, Kent posted that “We are at war” with a “shadowy leftist cabal”.

By 2023, Kent was calling the FBI a “secret domestic intelligence agency” that should be defunded.

After FBI agents killed a 74-year-old Maga supporter – who had threatened to assassinate Democrats and pointed a gun at agents – Kent falsely claimed the man was killed “for Facebook posts”.

Kent released a video articulating his defund-the-FBI platform, stating: “I really don’t know if we actually can save the FBI.”

The same year he said he would use the congressional appropriations process to “gut the FBI”, transforming it into a purely investigative body working with local sheriffs. He argued the FBI’s current structure leads to “total authoritarianism”.

He also said he would demand that the FBI prioritize targeting “ANTIFA and cartels” over “parents attending school board meetings”.

Kent’s shadowy employer

Kent’s history as both a Green Beret and a “CIA paramilitary officer” have triggered conspiracy thinking among his critics on the far right, but during his first congressional run, a mysterious employer also provoked questions from reporters and regulators.

A subsequent FEC investigation into his work at Advanced Enterprise Solutions cleared him of wrongdoing but shed little light on what the company did, and why it employed Kent.

Initial media reports just days out from the 2022 election highlighted that in FEC filings and public appearances, Kent claimed to be earning a six-figure salary from “American Enterprise Solutions”, but the company did not appear to exist.

Those reports cited the anonymously-created JoeKentIsCIA website, now preserved at the Internet Archive, which called Kent “An agent of the deep state, a CARPETBAGGER, a LIFELONG MARXIST DEMOCRAT RINO and a corrupt opportunist”, and of American Enterprise Solutions that there “is no trace of this company anywhere online, not even a website. Could this be a CIA black company? A slush fund for mega donors?”

His campaign soon released tax documents to a local public radio station seeking to clarify “the question of who pays Kent’s salary”. They showed the company was actually called Advanced Enterprise Solutions (AES), and was based in Herndon, Virginia, close to Washington DC.

At the same time, a former Kent staffer, Byron Sanford, claimed that “Kent spends most his time campaigning” and called his work for AES “a ‘phantom job’”, also telling OPB that “I really don’t think he put any actual hours into doing anything other than campaigning.”

A year later, the FEC ruled that there was insufficient evidence to indicate that he had a so-called “no-show” job with AEC, which would be a violation of campaign finance laws.

The commission also found, however, that AES’s CEO Sean Reed took a “personal interest” in Kent’s candidacy, and commissioned polling on the race.

At the time the allegations surfaced, Kent gave only vague explanations of what the company – which records showed paid him $122,110.36 in 2021 and $111,799.96 in 2020 – actually did.

OPB reported that Kent said the company “mainly works internationally” and “is often hired by governments and private companies – sometimes both – to analyze telecommunications infrastructure and provide reports detailing eventual upgrades”.

On 2 November 2022, however, the Columbian reported a phone number on AES’s benefits filings matched that of “a company called Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions LLC, (Torres AES) a “global security, turn-key logistics, remote housing and life-support” firm.

The newspaper also reported that an address given by AES in its filings matched one given by Torres AES, and that Torres AES had changed its name in 2020 to Continuity Global Solutions (CGS).

Torres AES and Continuity Global Solutions each have registered international branches in Uganda and Panama, and LinkedIn searches indicate that dozens of locals are working for CGS as security and office staff in each of those locations.

The Guardian can reveal that Torres AES was founded by Jerry W Torres, who, like Kent, is both a former Green Beret and an unsuccessful 2022 and 2024 congressional candidate.

Reporting also reveals that Torres AES has operated as a security contractor on six continents, including in authoritarian regimes in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The firm attracted significant controversy and the attention of US federal authorities ahead of its rebrand.

In 2020, transparency site The Black Vault obtained FBI documents via Foia that detailed a 2015 investigation into Torres AES’s execution of what then amounted to “$75 million in [Department of State] contracts for security guards and patrol services and $92 million in translation and interpretation services”. FBI Foia logs confirm that the documents were released in 2020 following a 2017 request.

The documents detail more than $109m in US government contracts for US outposts in countries including Iraq, Uganda, Panama, Peru and Ecuador. A contract for embassy security in Islamabad, Pakistan, alone stood at over $51m.

The investigation was initiated, according to the documents, for alleged breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The file contains local media reports in 2014 on allegations of financial “kickbacks” made by Torres AES’s local subsidiary to ministry of justice officials, and an exchange of letters between the state department and the company about those allegations, in which Torres AES says the allegations are “politically motivated”.

The file also contains heavily redacted 2015 interview transcripts with local employees over allegations that the company paid bribes in order to obtain the local weapons permits needed in order to fulfill their US government contracts.

There’s no record of any prosecution arising from this investigation.

The Guardian sent questions via Continuity GS for Jerry Torres.

In 2010, Torres failed to appear at a hearing of the commission on wartime contracting in Iraq & Afghanistan, which was convened over concerns about the conduct of contractors during the global war on terror.

Despite all this, Torres was cited by the rightwing Heritage Foundation in their pursuit of allegations of wrongdoing by former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, in her handling of an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

According to a report published by Heritage in 2017, Torres and another man, Brad Owens, “came forward with allegations that a Clinton state department official told them after the Sept 11, 2012, attack to keep silent with information they had regarding the security situation in Benghazi”.

Torres lost in the Republican primary in Florida’s 14th district in 2022. In 2024 he lost the general election for Virginia’s eighth congressional district to Democrat Donald Sternoff Beyer. Virginia’s 11th district, immediately west of the eighth, includes Herndon, where AES is headquartered.

Campaign finance questions

Lingering questions hang over millions of dollars which have flowed from Kent’s campaign committees and aligned Pacs to apparent “shell companies”. The beneficial owners of those companies are impossible to conclusively identify, but previous media reports have associated them with a long-time rightwing activist and Maga world figure who was a Kent spokesman in 2022.

Last January, the Daily Beast reported on campaign finance oddities suggesting that Kent had maintained his controversial links with a “former top aide with white nationalist ties”. The aide in question, Matt Braynard, is a long-time far-right figure who also acted as a frequent spokesman for Kent during his 2022 campaign.

Braynard was a 2016 Trump campaign operative and was an early 2020 “stop the steal” campaigner who raised nearly $700,000 for a “voter integrity project” and acted as an expert witness in Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona election fraud lawsuits. He subsequently campaigned from 2021 for the release of January 6 rioters. On X last week, Braynard repeated his offer, first made in 2022, that his organization Look Ahead America (LAA) would assist newly-freed rioters in their search for employment.

Braynard’s white nationalist associations – including his attendance at the 2021 iteration of Nick Fuentes’s AFPAC conference – dogged Kent’s first congressional campaign, in which he also had to bat off accusations that he was close to Fuentes. For his part, Braynard as campaign spokesperson struggled to answer questions about Kent’s employment at Advanced Enterprise Solutions.

The Daily Beast’s reporting showed that as of September 2023, a significant proportion of campaign spending had been routed to companies associated with Braynard’s wife and a Republican operative, Thomas Datwyler.

Datwyler, meanwhile, was treasurer of both Kent’s campaign committee and the Joe Kent Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that also donated directly to Kent’s campaign. He is also treasurer of LAA, Braynard’s nonprofit, and the two also collaborated in 2024 to set up Save Our Orange county, dedicated to fighting a development in the DC-adjacent Virginia suburbs.

The Guardian can reveal that this pattern of routing money from Datwyler-helmed committees to companies apparently associated with him and Braynard continued and even accelerated as the campaign wore on.

FEC records show that Joe Kent Victory fund, paid out more than $914,000 to a Delaware-registered company, HWY 99, during the 2023-2024 election cycle. The same records indicate that this was over 20% of the campaign’s total spending; the only bigger beneficiary was Kent’s campaign committee itself, which received 37% of the Pac’s spending. Other spending on expenses like direct mail costs happened at a regular cadence throughout the campaign season; only HWY 99 received large lump sums.

The vast majority of the money to HWY 99 went out in the dying weeks of the campaign: seven payments totaling $730,000 in October included individual payments of $215,000, $200,000 and $150,000, while November saw $160,000 flow from the Pac’s coffers to the LLC.

Almost all of the payments are labeled as being for “strategy consulting”. Two payments for “strategy consulting” totaling $100,000 were made by the Pac for “strategy consulting” after the 5 November elections had concluded.

No other Pac or campaign committee has ever disbursed money to HWY 99 Pac except Joe Kent Victory Fund and Kent’s campaign committee during the last election cycle.

Kent’s own campaign committee, meanwhile, paid out over $1.25m to HWY 99 during the last election cycle. That company enjoyed windfalls from the campaign throughout the cycle, with bumper months including last July ($380,000), September ($250,000), and October ($115,000).

That represented 47.92% of the account’s total spending. Previously, HWY 99 received just over $1,000,000 from Kent’s committee during his first failed congressional bid during the 2024 mid-terms.

As The Daily Beast initially reported, while it is impossible to determine the beneficial ownership of the two companies they share a Washington DC mailing address with a number of other companies, trade marks and political committees which were registered by Datwyler, or which list him as an officer.

Brendan Fischer, deputy director of Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism organization focused on money in politics, said the ongoing disbursement of Kent campaign funds to “shell corporations” raises “further questions about where the money was ultimately going”.

Fischer said “there appears to have been an incredible amount of money flowing to this apparent shell corporation in a very compressed period of time and the public has no idea where the money actually went.”

He added that this practice has been a growing problem, “especially after Trump”.

“This is a tactic really pioneered by the Trump campaign in 2020 when it routed most of its spending through a shell company set up by campaign operative. The problem is that the spending is ultimately dark. So we don’t know exactly what is being hidden from the voters and from the public”.

Fischer said it “has the potential of disguising any unsavory characters who might be working for the campaign”.

He asked: “Why would a campaign choose to structure their payments in this way? There’s hundreds of other line item expenditures that the campaign found it perfectly manageable to document and publicly report on FEC filings. Why is this portion of expenditures disguised from public view?”

Other unresolved questions concern $35,000 from a previous pro-Kent Pac, to QUB Consulting Inc, a company controlled by Braynard’s wife, and the fact that Heather Kent, formerly Heather Kaiser, Kent’s wife, identified herself as Kent’s campaign manager in donation forms, but no traceable payments were made to her.