Brown: You can rent Joe Kent’s house

The photos suggest that whomever rents the home will need to enjoy beige, which seems to be the primary color in every room. By the way, the home is not furnished, suggesting the Kent family — he is married, with two sons — has already relocated to the Washington, D.C., area.

The listing went active at the end of March and had received a handful of views when I checked Friday.

According to county records, Kent bought the property in July 2020 for $568,000. It’s assessed at almost $695,000 today and Kent has already paid his property taxes — $7,815 — for the year.

As you may recall, Kent grew up in Oregon and joined the Army at age 18 as an infantryman. He served 20 years and spent time in elite units and special operations that focused on intelligence, then after leaving the service took a job with the Central Intelligence Agency. His first wife, Shannon, was a Navy cryptologist. She was killed in January 2019 in a terrorist bombing in Syria, where she was deployed.

Her death prompted Kent to leave his CIA job and relocate to Clark County. He launched his first congressional campaign six months after buying the property. Running to the right of incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler, he criticized her vote to impeach Donald Trump and touted various conspiracy theories, such as the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, and that vaccines are harmful. His weird ideas caught enough traction with Republicans to defeat Herrera Beutler in the primary. But voters elected a newcomer, Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, in the general election by a very narrow margin.

Kent then pivoted to 2024, wrapping up the early endorsement of the district’s Republican county central committees, and again defeated a more moderate Republican, Leslie Lewallen of Camas, in the primary. In November, he lost again to Gluesenkamp Perez, by a wider margin.

Now, of course, he’s set to join the Trump administration. The Associated Press reported that at last week’s confirmation hearing, he successfully brushed off pointed questions from Democrats about his conspiracy theories and involvement in the recent security breach where war plans were sent to a magazine editor.

A recent precedent

Assuming Kent serves in the Trump administration and returns to Clark County, he’ll be following in the footsteps of another colorful local Republican politician — Don Benton. Benton, whose biggest accomplishment in the state Legislature was killing the Columbia River Crossing project, served in a sleepy job as Trump’s director of the Selective Service System, which is in charge of registering teenagers for a potential military draft.

After returning to Clark County, Benton has kept a relatively low profile. He is now 68 years old and is presumably retired from elective politics. Kent just turned 45, so if he returns to Clark County, he will have plenty of chances to seek office again.