Mystery Surrounds Company Paying Joe Kent's Salary
As the Donald Trump-backed, alt-right-cozy Washington State congressional candidate Joe Kent tells it—in his public appearances and public filings—he made $122,110.36 last year as a “project manager” for a tech start-up called “American Enterprise Solutions.” One problem: There’s no record the company exists.
The enigma of the former Green Beret’s income has prompted fevered conspiracy-mongering on fringes of the internet where his past work for the Central Intelligence Agency has marked him as a supposed “puppet of the deep state.” These suspicions have arisen despite Kent’s vaccine-bashing, endorsement from not just Trump but right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, and his vanquishing in the August primary of Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA), one of the few Republicans to support the ex-president’s impeachment.
One website, JoeKentIsCIA.com has posted multiple videos in which audience members questioned the candidate about his employment situation. In one clip from May, Kent reiterated that the name of his employer is “American Enterprise Solutions,” and maintained that “we do a wide variety of 5G conversion type of stuff.” In another, Kent told an audience member that the firm is in Virginia and added “we have a lot of proprietary software.”
But American Enterprise Solutions holds no patents or trademarks, has no licenses, no website, no social media pages, and not a single publicly announced contract with a government agency or a private wireless provider. The Daily Beast phoned the owner of the only company ever formed under that name in the Commonwealth of Virginia, who said that the entity—listed as inactive in the State Corporation Commission—has been defunct for the better part of a decade, did not work in the tech sector, and never employed Kent.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mystery-surrounds-company-paying-maga-republican-candidate-joe-kents-salary-as-he-runs-in-washington