In a rare instance of bipartisan alarm, Republican-chaired committees in the House and Senate announced that they have launched inquiries into an explosive Washington Post report alleging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a spoken order to “kill everybody” aboard a vessel carrying suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. The occupants included two people who had survived an initial missile strike on the vessel and were seen “clinging” to the wreckage. “We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee said in a joint statement on Friday. “The Committee has directed inquiries to the [Department of Defense], and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” leaders in the Senate Armed Services Committee said. The September 2 attack kicked off what has now been nearly two dozen attacks, killing at least 83 people, who the US military claims, without evidence, had been attempting to smuggle drugs into the US. The attacks, which President Trump justifies as a part of an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, have been likened to extrajudicial killings. Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona told CNN on Sunday that Hegseth’s actions, as reported by the Post, appear to be a war crime. “If what has been reported is accurate, I’ve got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over,” Kelly said. “We are not Russia. We are not Iraq. We hold ourselves to a very high standard of professionalism.” Kelly is locked in a related battle of words with Hegseth after Kelly participated in a social media video with five other Democrats seeking to remind members of the military that they can “refuse illegal orders.” Hegseth has blasted the Post’s reporting on the missile strikes as “fabricated.” “As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” he wrote on X.

When I went out to fetch lunch last Wednesday, three Louisiana Guard members were lounging outside the Mother Jones building, enjoying the perfect weather and watching dialysis patients spilling out of Metro access vans. The soldiers wore handcuffs on their belts and handguns strapped to their thighs, unaware that they were protecting some enemies of the people inside. Later that afternoon, even more soldiers flocked to our building after a fire truck and ambulance pulled up to deal with a medical emergency. The Guard members stomped around, barking into walkie-talkies, but they contributed little more to the operation than the reporter and other rubberneckers on the sidewalk. They were back on Friday, clustered near the parking garage like smokers sheltering from the wind. President Donald Trump has deployed more than 2,200 of these National Guard members to DC to execute his “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” as he described it during an August 11 news conference. “This is liberation day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back.” City officials protested that crime in DC had fallen to near-historic lows. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser called the presence of the military in the city “un-American.” > American soldiers and airmen policing American citizens on American soil is > #UnAmerican. > > — Muriel Bowser (@MurielBowser) August 17, 2025 Nonetheless, armored vehicles rolled in the next day and lined up in front of the Washington Monument. The initial optics of an occupied city were terrifying, the fever dream of a budding authoritarian. Several weeks later, however, the military “liberation” of DC looks a lot different from the war on crime that Trump had promised to bring to our city. National Guard members here aren’t actually doing much. Groups of bored soldiers seem to wander aimlessly around the city like tourists, taking selfies at national monuments and enjoying our varied dining offerings. On Tuesday, when I was walking my dog, I ran into a few Guard members patrolling my local coffee shop. The regulars were chatting them up, while expressing polite outrage at the militarization of this quiet, historic, gayborhood. The soldiers were from Louisiana, a state whose capital city boasts a crime rate twice as high as DC’s. In their civilian lives, one was a cop, another an “assistant chiropractor.” They seemed oblivious to the pressing local crime wave: cyclists in the nearby bike lane blowing through the stop light, a scourge endlessly decried by the café denizens. > Groups of bored soldiers seem to wander aimlessly around the city like > tourists, taking selfies at national monuments and enjoying our local dining > offering The presence of all these soldiers in my orbit this week left me pondering something that had nagged me since they first arrived in DC last month: If I got mugged in broad daylight, what could those National Guard members really, legally, do? I put the question to John Dehn, a West Point grad and professor in the national security and civil rights program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. The answer, he explained, depends on the mission and “the specific operational plans that have been put in place.” These guidelines, he said, are spelled out in the “Rules for the Use of Force,” which Guard members are supposed to carry with them. Two weeks ago, a HuffPost reporter got one from a local Guard member and posted it online. > Had a chance to stop a member of the Guard and ask whether they carried any > guidance on their person about Posse Comitatus Act (and/or a list of > "exceptions" like the troops in LA were given per DOJ). He didn't seem sure > what PCA is but did show me this doc he had in his pocket on rules of force. > > — Brandi Buchman (@brandibuchman.bsky.social) 2025-08-23T15:51:43.825Z The RUF and Rules of Conduct state that “This is a civilian SUPPORT mission.” The document emphasizes that the National Guard can’t arrest people. Nor can soldiers investigate anything or conduct searches and seizures, hostage negotiations, or extract a suspect from a barricade. Trump made a big deal recently about allowing Guard members to carry weapons, but the RUF says they are strictly prohibited from using those weapons except for self-defense and defense of others. No pulling a gun on a fleeing suspect. (“Warning shots are NOT authorized.”) A JTF-DC spokesperson later confirmed that the National Guard “will not be conducting law enforcement.” However, the Department of Justice recently deputized many Guard members as US Marshals. The DC Attorney General has argued in a lawsuit that deputizing them does, in fact, empower National Guard members to make searches, seizures, and arrests, and as such, violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the military from participating in domestic law enforcement. Given all the mixed messages, the Guard members I spoke with appeared somewhat confused about what the rules of engagement were. But they seemed to agree that if they witness a crime, they are mainly supposed to detain a suspect if possible, call for help, and wait for real cops to show up. “If there’s any concerns, we notify Metropolitan Police Department or the right personnel to make sure that the situation is taken care of,” US Air Force Maj. Jay Green, a chaplain with the 113th Wing, District of Columbia Air National Guard, explained in one recent Defense Department website posting. That seems to be what they’re doing in DC. The Washington Post recently sent out a team of reporters to observe troops during rush hour in the Metro system. Fanning out across various stations, Post reporters witnessed National Guard members standing around watching Metro police arrest a woman with an outstanding warrant. They did not assist. In another station, a Metro rider mistakenly assumed the soldiers could help and told them someone was selling drugs on a stalled train. What did they do with that information? “One of the Guard members passed the details about the alleged drug dealer to Metro police,” the Post reported. The Defense Department has published several puff pieces on military websites touting the National Guard’s work in DC. But even those official accounts indicate that when Guard members witness a crime, their main job is to call for help and wait for the local cops to arrive. Last month, for instance, Joint Task Force-DC proudly announced in an online release that two Guard members had “alerted local law enforcement to a potentially life-threatening situation involving a man brandishing a knife and threatening another man at the Waterfront Metro Station.” “We showed our presence and then made sure that citizens around that area were safe,” said US Army Capt. Giho Yang, with the District of Columbia Army National Guard. “To do that, we had to partner up and communicate with the law enforcement officers that were nearby, making sure that we had eyes and ears on the situation to keep everyone safe.” They didn’t mention whether any ordinary citizens also communicated with the nearby law enforcement officers or called 911, as they are wont to do when they see someone brandishing a knife in a subway station. It’s probably a good thing that the National Guard isn’t doing more to fight crime in DC. They’re not trained for domestic law enforcement. Besides, DC has seen plenty of enhanced federal policing since Trump declared his crime emergency. Most of the action is driven by the city’s multitude of federal law enforcement agencies, such as the US Park Police, plus the stepped-up presence of ICE and Border Patrol. They’re the ones kidnapping and beating up DoorDash drivers, chasing drivers with fake tags and causing car crashes, and arresting people for drinking in public. But using soldiers as props in Trump’s fake crime emergency seems insulting to people serving the country honorably. Indeed, deployed to a city whose crime rate was already plummeting, the National Guard has been filling the time by picking up trash and spreading mulch in federal parks. Social media wags have dubbed them “National Gardeners.” (“Fighting crime one weed at a time,” the local joke goes.) > National Guard doing landscaping right now in McPherson Square. > byu/sillychillly ineconomy As humiliating as this might be for the troops, they are providing DC with a useful service. Some 200 US Park Service employees once helped maintain the city’s parks and gardens. But soon after taking office this year, Trump got rid of all but 20 of them, leaving the city’s lovely green spaces seriously neglected. Of course, at the cost of $1 million a day, the military troops make very expensive landscapers. The pointlessness of sending the National Guard to pretend to fight crime in DC isn’t deterring Trump from planning to repeat the operation in other cities, even though a federal judge just ruled that it’s blatantly illegal. Trump appears intent on “creating a national police force with the President as its chief,” US District Judge Charles Breyer warned in a September 2 decision, finding that Trump’s use of the military in LA earlier this summer violated the Posse Comitatus Act. Because the District of Columbia is not a state, Trump has had more leeway in deploying the National Guard here. Nonetheless, on Thursday, the city sued the administration, arguing that the National Guard deployment in DC is illegal and runs “roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy—that the military should not be involved in domestic law enforcement.” Trump has claimed that DC “is very safe right now” since he sent in the troops, and that crime has plummeted. Even if that’s true, and it’s not clear that it is, the ceasefire is likely to be short-lived. “You can have a massive police presence that you put in the communities,” Elliott Currie, professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, told me recently. “They can really show some impressive optics when they do this… But history tells us you can never sustain this for very long.” The DC National Guard recently announced that its deployment to the city will be extended through December. But eventually, the local criminal class seems likely to realize that the soldiers are no more of a threat to their activity than CVS security guards. And when that happens, Trump’s vaunted crime reduction may prove as ephemeral as his plan to end the war in Ukraine.

President Trump is planning to ramp up his federal reach into local enforcement after first flooding the streets of DC with National Guard troops, and this week he promised to send troops to more cities—including Baltimore. Despite a federal judge ruling that Trump broke the law when deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles earlier this summer, Trump insisted during a press conference on Tuesday that his administration had “a right to do it because I have an obligation to do it to protect this country… and that includes Baltimore.” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has been speaking out in defense of his city, including in a sit-down interview this week with me. Scott pushed back against Trump’s claims, saying that this year, his city has witnessed “the fewest amount of homicides through this date on record. That’s a 50-year low, and that’s still not good enough for me.” The Washington Post recently reported that homicide rates in Baltimore have plummeted nearly 23 percent compared with the first half of 2024, while non-fatal shootings fell by nearly 20 percent. Scott also decried federal cuts to the very programs he says have been instrumental in reducing crime in Baltimore. “Community violence intervention, victim services, all of those kinds of services that have been cut,” he said. “What we want from the president is very simple — reinstating all the cuts that they’ve made to federal grants to programs that have been working to reduce violence.” Watch the full video here:

The Trump administration’s campaign of vengeance against perceived political enemies escalated Friday morning when the FBI raided the home and office of former national security adviser John Bolton, a vocal Trump critic. That search follows Attorney General Pam Bondi directing federal prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into whether former President Barack Obama and his aides concocted evidence about Russia’s efforts to help Trump in the 2016 election. Last month, the Justice Department said it was separately investigating former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, without specifying the allegations. Meanwhile, loyal Trump underlings— including DOJ official Ed Martin and Bill Pulte, a real estate heir running the Federal Housing Finance Agency—are using government power, along with social media gimmickry, to allege wrongdoing by frequent Trump foils. The various investigations may differ in their legitimacy. But they are all the manifestation of Trump’s promises to use the White House to prosecute his enemies. The threat of an authoritarian president using his office and control of federal law enforcement to try to imprison critics is not hypothetical. It is happening, as Trump advisers race to please him by launching probes aimed at his foes. These efforts are predicated on concocted claims that it was the administration’s Democratic predecessors who misused federal agencies for politics. The Trump administration is politicizing intelligence, law enforcement, and other government functions while pretending to be punishing politicization, as with the ironically named “Weaponization Working Group” that Martin now leads. That can feel a bit confusing, but it is more easily understood as a string of efforts by individual Trump advisers to their please boss by helping him crack down on dissent and deliver retribution. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s report on “Russiagate” was widely derided, but it came following reports that suggested Trump was considering firing her after she contradicted his claims about the danger of Iran’s nuclear program. The former Democratic representative appears to have protected her job by handing Trump a report that helped him try to shift attention amid scrutiny of his relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bondi, too, has faced withering attacks from within MAGA over her botched handling the Epstein scandal. Her quickly launched investigation aimed at Obama may never meet the standards of federal judges, but it made her boss happy. The search of Bolton’s home required a judge to find probable cause to issue a warrant. The FBI is reportedly looking into accusations that Bolton, who was investigated during the first Trump administration for revealing sensitive information in a book, had leaked national security information more recently. Trump on Friday claimed he was not aware beforehand of the Bolton raid. But that claim, true or not, overlooks the reality that various Trump advisers appear to be using attacks on his enemies to win or keep the mercurial president’s favor. Vice President J.D. Vance even weighed in on Bolton Friday. “If we think Ambassador Bolton committed a crime, of course eventually prosecutions will come,” Vance told NBC’s Meet the Press. Vance added that “classified documents are certainly part of it, but I think that there’s a broad concern about Ambassador Bolton.” FBI director Kash Patel—who attacked Bolton in a 2024 book, complaining at length that Bolton had dragged his feet on hiring him during the first Trump administration—tweeted about the raid at the time it occurred, writing: “NO ONE is above the law…@FBI agents on mission.” Bondi then reposted Patel, adding, in part: “Justice will be pursued. Always.” Such public pronouncements were once unusual for DOJ officials. But they are increasingly standard under Trump. Martin, who got his current position after the Senate declined to confirm him as US attorney for DC, is seeking presidential favor through highly public, if legally dubious, campaigns. He said in a May press conference that he planned to use publicity to attack Trump foes. “If they can be charged, we’ll charge them,” he declared. “But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.” Earlier this week, Martin appeared outside the Brooklyn home of New York Attorney General Letita James, where—clad in the trench coat he has attempted to make his signature—he posed for pictures taken by the New York Post, all part of an effort to call attention to claims that James committed fraud in private real estate dealings. In a letter to James’ lawyer, Martin said he would consider it “an act of good faith” if James resigned. The New York Times recently noted that Martin’s actions violate a slew of DOJ rules and norms: “Prosecutors are barred from making investigative decisions based on politics; they are asked not to comment on specific cases; and they are supposed to avoid turning their investigations into public spectacles.” But Martin took a similar tack this week in a letter he reportedly sent Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell urging him to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board member, over allegations that Cook had improperly claimed a property she owns in Atlanta as her residence. “Do it today before it is too late!” Martin wrote. The allegations against Cook came from Pulte, the 37-year-old head of an agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte has used his post to highlight unproven mortgage fraud accusations against James, Cook, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and has issued letters asking the DOJ to investigate. (All three have denied breaking the law.) Martin reportedly met with Pulte early this month. Pulte, who has 3 million followers on X, posted recently that he had “obtained” a document submitted to the government that he claims shows Cook committed fraud. Pulte’s accusation was quickly taken up by Trump, who is attempting to gain control of the Federal Reserve and oust Powell before his term ends, in effort to push for lower interest rates. Bloomberg reported Friday that Pulte, who has been “struggling” to maintain influence with the White House” amid irritation by some officials there over his bombastic online behavior—including his habit of announcing significant policy changes via tweet—had returned to favor with the president through his attacks on Cook. Trump’s efforts to target his critics also got help earlier this month from the Office of Special Counsel, or OSC, a small independent agency charged with enforcing federal rules. The office, which is not part of DOJ, announced that it was investigating whether Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who twice indicted Trump, had violated a law barring federal workers from using their government jobs to engage in political activity. Since the strongest sanction OSC can apply is to urge the firing of a federal employee, it cannot impose any real penalty on Smith, who resigned from his post in January. But the agency—whose previous head Trump fired earlier this year, and where Trump has tried to install a far-right loyalist—appears eager to ingratiate itself with the president. Such efforts show how a president can attack officials he wants to oust—and how the vast powers of a sprawling federal government can be wielded against his critics. These attacks certainly reflect Trump’s own pathology. But they would be impossible without the collaboration of influence-seeking enablers using public positions to enact Trump’s vengeance agenda.

Since March, the Trump administration has dismantled a leading office at the Department of Homeland Security whose mission was averting terrorism and targeted violence. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3, has been stripped of funding, and most of its 40-plus personnel have been fired, reassigned, or otherwise pushed out. Amid this process, the White House temporarily put in charge a 22-year-old Trump superfan who arched an eyebrow for his agency portrait and has zero leadership experience in government, let alone in national security. The demise of CP3 comes as the White House has diverted major law enforcement and security resources toward deporting undocumented immigrants. It also comes as high-profile acts of political violence have surged in the United States. The list of recent devastation includes an ISIS-inspired truck massacre in New Orleans, the bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, and a spate of antisemitic attacks—including the murder of a young couple working for Israel in Washington, DC; an arson attack against the governor of Pennsylvania; and a fiery assault on peaceful marchers in Boulder, Colorado. Last year, a healthcare CEO was gunned down point-blank in Manhattan, and President Trump barely avoided death from an assassin’s bullet on the campaign trail. Twelve days ago, a right-wing extremist in Minnesota targeted Democratic state lawmakers in a deadly gun rampage, killing former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her spouse, and gravely wounding two others. The nation is now also on heightened alert after Trump ordered the bombing of Iran, a major state sponsor of terrorism. Though political extremism has been rising, it is almost never the only factor in targeted violence, including with most, if not all, of the above cases. Most perpetrators are also driven by a mix of rage and despair over acute personal problems, such as financial or health crises—and many are suicidal. This complexity was a focus of CP3’s $18 million in annual grants to state and local partners. Drawing on long-established public health research, the office worked with law enforcement, educators, faith leaders, and others to use “upstream” interventions with troubled individuals who may be planning and moving toward violence. The work gained traction over the past couple of years, according to William Braniff, a military veteran and national security expert who was director of CP3 until March. He said that many states were working with the office to build this kind of strategy and that CP3 was flooded with $99 million in eligible grant applications—exceeding its funds by more than fivefold. He resigned when eight of his colleagues were fired without cause. “I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance,” Braniff told me. “A lot of the headquarters-based offices within DHS are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted.” As the wave of recent attacks shows, a variety of extremism is fueling the danger. Researchers have tracked growing acceptance and endorsement of political violence in America in recent years, particularly among people who identify as MAGA Republicans, a finding reaffirmed in a new national study from the Centers for Violence Prevention at University of California, Davis. > “We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our > democracy.” In response to my email asking for an explanation of the shutdown, DHS assistant secretary of public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said CP3 “plays an insignificant and ineffective role” in DHS counterterrorism efforts, and further claimed, without providing any evidence, that CP3 was “weaponized” under the Biden administration for partisan purposes. Braniff, who is now executive director of the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University, explained in our recent interview (lightly edited below for clarity) how CP3 built out its national model for violence prevention. He also spoke about what citizens and communities can do to counter the danger of political violence—and the disturbing normalization of it. First, can you talk a little bit about the CP3 strategy and how the programs worked? From school shootings and grievance-based workplace violence, to hate-fueled violence, to terrorism, we needed an approach out of the federal government that would address all of those. And so we looked to the public health community, and specifically the decades of work on violence prevention from places like the Centers for Disease Control—evidence-based programs for prevention of suicide, intimate-partner violence, violence against children, and community-based violence. And we said, well, what if we could apply those tested approaches to some of these more “exotic” forms of violence? For too long, and especially after 9/11, we exoticized terrorism as this foreign kind of violence, when in reality, underneath the manifestation, you have these very human things happening: individuals who have unaddressed risk factors in their lives. That might be an adverse childhood experience, trauma, or financial hardship. That might be social isolation. And these risk factors, when left unaddressed, might spur the individual to go seeking answers down dark rabbit holes that preach hate, that preach violence for the sake of it. And regardless of the way that violence might manifest later, there are these upstream preventative programs that we can put in place. So CP3 was the primary entity in the US government for creating these upstream programs, informed by public health. Social isolation is a massive risk factor for all kinds of negative health outcomes, including self harm and perpetration of violence. And so you look at these underlying risk factors and you say, well, we can actually mitigate against them. Very rarely in the national security realm do we get to talk about building positive programs that make us all happier and healthier and less susceptible to violence as a solution. Sometimes people still might gravitate towards violence. And in those instances, we invested in secondary prevention. These are multidisciplinary interventions, so that if someone makes an offhand comment about starting a racial holy war, accelerating the downfall of the government, or being an infamous school shooter, these ideations of violence are not dismissed. We created these programs so that bystanders had a place to refer someone they cared about. And the purpose wasn’t criminal justice, it was to get them access to help. > “You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from > more mental health professionals and social workers. We were bringing these > folks together and blending their assets.” Out of the 1,172 interventions that we funded through our grant program, 93.5 percent of the individuals who were exhibiting threatening behavior got help. They got access to a clinician or a caring professional. In 6.5 percent of the incidents, the persons had already broken the law or were an imminent threat to public safety, and they were referred to law enforcement. And that wasn’t the point of the intervention, but there was that safety net there for when that person really was an imminent risk to their community. We could balance public health and public safety through these multidisciplinary, evidence-based programs. There’s a lot of research on their efficacy, including to make sure that persons of color are getting equitable treatment and programs are not succumbing to implicit bias in schools and workplaces. And so there’s all sorts of value to these programs socially as well as economically. They’re much cheaper than criminal justice or the cost of violence. Given that we’re in this heightened environment of political extremism and attacks, why shut down CP3? What is your view of that? I don’t think that CP3 was targeted by the Trump administration specifically. I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance. A lot of the headquarters-based offices within the Department of Homeland Security are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted. Ignorance is not an excuse for what’s happening. The primary mission of DHS, as enshrined in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, is to prevent terrorism. And CP3 was the latest manifestation of an office within DHS that was trying to find a way to get traction in this prevention space. And we got it in the last couple of years. Eight states worked with CP3 to publish a state strategy, and when I left in March, another eight states were drafting their strategy with CP3’s help. Twenty-seven states had agreed to work with CP3 and were in the queue. So we were normalizing this at the state and local level. Why? Because it’s pragmatic. It’s cost-effective. It works. You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from more mental health professionals and social workers, because law enforcement officers are not equipped to do this kind of upstream intervention. We had $99 million of eligible grant applications for our $18 million grant pool, which means we were wildly oversubscribed. We were bringing these folks together and blending their assets. A whole range of political ideology and extremism feeds into targeted violence, but we also know there’s been a steady rise in far-right domestic terrorism in recent years. I’m curious how you view the long-term impact of losing this type of work in the federal government, particularly as it relates to things like Trump’s clemency for January 6 insurrectionists, including a lot of violent offenders who attacked police. Some groups associated with that event are again instigating on social media for potentially violent behavior. What message is this all sending, and what does it do in terms of the political environment that we’re in? It’s such a good set of questions. We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our democracy. And that is a potential death blow to a free and open society. It’s not to say that these things can’t gravitate back towards a norm of nonviolence. But right now we are creating permission structures for individuals to dehumanize the transgender community, to dehumanize Jews or equate their individual actions with that of the Israeli government, half a world away. We’re at risk of normalizing school shootings among youth who don’t imagine a healthy future for themselves and are succumbing to this kind of nihilistic manipulation that we’re seeing in [online extremist] movements like “764.” And when these norms are accepted at a societal level and encouraged at a political level, they become entrenched and really difficult to reverse. And so what we were doing at CP3 and what we’re doing now at my current organization at American University is trying to normalize prevention, the idea that we can and should build thriving communities where individuals don’t need to buy the violent empowerment that either a politician or an online groomer is selling that leads to violence. The things you’ve listed are incredibly concerning, and frankly, we all have to decide that we care about this issue. If we don’t, if we decide we’re going to be apathetic about it, the violence is going to win the day because it’s going to capture the news headlines, and the algorithms, and the path of least resistance is to surrender to violence as a norm in our current information environment. And so it’s going to take intentional decision making by all of us as individuals to decide that’s not the country or the community that we want to live in. So there are some real problems in our political system right now with a permission structure, as you describe it, for violence. Isn’t rejecting that part of not normalizing it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the techniques that we study and work with at PERIL is called video-based inoculation. It’s the idea that you can give individuals a microdose of some sort of manipulative tactic that they might come across on social media or cable news. And you give them this microdose of this manipulation so that they develop “antibodies” to it. They realize that they’re being manipulated. That is really important, for us to sort of throw sand in the gears of what otherwise spreads like wildfire when we’re passive consumers of information. And so with the last antisemitism video that we tested, individuals were 24 percent more likely to openly challenge manipulative material online if they saw the inoculating video first. So we think there’s a lot of promise there to engage all of us as stewards of our information environment. Is it your hope or expectation that this kind of prevention work will come back more strongly in the federal government in the future? Yes, it has to. The threat is growing and manifesting in more and different ways. There’s been nearly a 2,000-percent increase in mass casualty attacks in the United States since the early 1990s. There are approximately three violent attacks per day that either are plotted or carried out in the United States. School shootings are up linearly since the Columbine attack of 1999. Political assassinations are being normalized. We have to marshal resources to push back on this. I do believe it’ll come back—I think Americans will demand it, but only if they know that violence is preventable, which it is. If, instead, they’re told by their government or anyone else that this is just inevitable and we should be resigned to it, they may believe that. Instead of recognizing that the overwhelming majority of school shooters tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, and that nearly 50 percent of mass-casualty attackers tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, we’ll ignore that reality and just accept the violence. And so it’s really important that we continue to push on this now, but ultimately demand it of our federal government.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In October 1978, two leaders of the Iranian opposition to the British-backed shah of Iran met in the Paris suburbs of Neauphle-le-Château to plan for the final stages of the revolution, a revolution that after 46 momentous and often brutal years may now be close to expiring. The two men had little in common but their nationality, age, and determination to remove the shah from power. Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the secular liberal National Front, was a former Sorbonne-educated professor of law. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the leading Shia opponent of the Iranian monarchy since the 1960s. Both were in their 70s at the time. Sanjabi had arrived in Paris with the draft declaration of goals of the coming revolution the two men were to lead. The document stated that the revolution would be grounded on two principles: that it be democratic and Islamic. Yet Sanjabi later recalled to historians that at the Paris meeting Khomeini in his own handwriting added a third principle to the declaration—independence. > Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense > that it was the wronged partner. That third principle, the primacy of independence, born of Iran’s history of exploitation by colonial powers, helps to explain what may seem otherwise mysterious in the current dispute between Iran and the US: Iran’s dogmatic insistence that it must have the right to enrich uranium. It has been the issue that dogged the talks between Iran and the west over Tehran’s nuclear program since the turn of the century and was the sticking point in the two years of discussions that were eventually settled in Iran’s favor when the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA) was agreed under the Obama administration in 2015. It is the reason why Iran is being bombed now by Israel and, over the weekend, by the US. Yet to many American eyes, this obsession with enrichment inside Iran, instead of importing, for instance, from Russia, is only explicable if it is accepted that Iran covertly wants to build a nuclear bomb. The fatwa against “un-Islamic” nuclear weapons twice issued by the supreme leader has to be a smokescreen, this US perspective goes. On social media last week, Vice-President JD Vance largely took that view. He wrote: “It’s one thing to want civilian nuclear energy. It’s another thing to demand sophisticated enrichment capacity. And it’s still another to cling to enrichment while simultaneously violating basic non-proliferation obligations and enriching right to the point of weapons-grade uranium. “I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use. I’ve yet to see a single good argument for why Iran was justified in violating its nonproliferation obligations.” The process for enriching uranium to make civil nuclear energy and a nuclear bomb is broadly the same. It is generally accepted that uranium enriched to 3.67 percent is sufficient for civil nuclear energy, while purity levels of 90 percent are required for a nuclear weapon. Once purity levels reach 60 percent, as in the case of Iran, it is not a lengthy process to proceed to 90 percent. Iran, of course, argues there is no mystery why it has enriched to these high levels of purity. It was part of a clearly signalled staged escalatory response to Donald Trump unilaterally pulling the US out of the JCPOA in 2018—an act that that had deprived Iran of the sanctions relief it had negotiated. Moreover, Trump, by imposing secondary sanctions, made it impossible for Europe to trade with Iran, the second planned benefit of the JCPOA. Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense that it was the wronged partner, and the US confirmed as inherently untrustworthy. Centrist figures such as the former president Hassan Rouhani and the foreign minister Javad Zarif expended huge internal political capital to sign a deal with the west, and the west promptly reneged on it. Meanwhile, Israel, a country that is not a member of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty—unlike Iran—and which has a totally unmonitored and undeclared nuclear weapon, receives largesse and support from the west. Nevertheless, Vance may have a point. As a casus belli, the right to enrich uranium to purity levels of 3.67 percent, the level permitted under the JCPOA, seems on the surface an implausible issue for the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to risk martyrdom. Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pointing) during a visit to the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in 2008. Associated Press Why did a country with large oil reserves feel such a need to have homegrown civil nuclear energy? A persuasive new account by Vali Nasr, entitled Iran’s Grand Strategy, helps unlock the key to that question by placing the answer in Iran’s colonial exploitation and its search for independence. He wrote: “Before the revolution itself, before the hostage crisis or US sanctions, before the Iran-Iraq war or efforts to export the revolution, as well as the sordid legacy of Iran’s confrontations with the west, the future supreme religious guide and leader of Iran valued independence from foreign influence as equal to the enshrining principles of Islam in the state.” Khamenei was indeed asked once what was the benefit of the revolution, and he replied “now all decisions are made in Tehran.” > It was the British and the Americans who introduced nuclear power to Iran. Nasr argues that as many of the lofty ideals of the revolution such as democracy and Islam have been eroded or distorted, the principle of Iranian independence has endured. The quest for sovereignty, he argues, arose from Iran’s benighted history. In the 19th century, Iran was squeezed between the British and Russian imperial powers. In the 20th century its oil resources were exploited by British oil companies. Twice its leaders—in 1941 and 1953—were removed from office by the British and Americans. The popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was removed in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 due to his demand to control Iran’s oil resources. No event in contemporary Iranian history is more scarring than Mosaddegh’s toppling. For Khomeini it confirmed Iran still did not control its destiny, or its energy resources. Although civil nuclear power and the right to enrich became a symbol of independence and sovereignty after the revolution, Ellie Geranmayeh from the European Council on Foreign Relations points out it was the British and the Americans that introduced nuclear power to Iran in what was named an “atoms for peace” program. The shah of Iran, with US approval, embarked on a plan to build 23 civil nuclear power stations, making it possible for Iran to export electricity to neighboring countries and achieve the status of a modern state. Michael Axworthy, the pre-eminent British historian of contemporary Iran, said: “Using oil profits in this way seemed a then sensible way of investing a finite resource in order to create an infinite one.” In an interview with the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger later admitted that as US secretary of state he raised no objections to the plants being built. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” he said. Work started on two nuclear reactors including one at the port city of Bushehr with the help of the German firm Kraftwerk Union a subdivision of Siemens and AEG. The shah recognized the dual use for nuclear power, and in June 1974 even told an American journalist that “Iran would have nuclear weapons without a doubt sooner than you think,” a remark he rapidly denied. Gradually the US became more nervous that the shah’s obsession with weaponry might mean Iran’s civil program turning nuclear. > “In my view, Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be > recognized as a regional power.” After the Iranian revolution in 1979, progress on the near-complete two stations ground to a halt. Khomeini regarded nuclear power as a symbol of western decadence arguing bloated infrastructure projects would make Iran more dependent on western imperialist technology. He said he wanted no “westoxificiation,” or gharbzadegi in Farsi. The program was largely ended, to the disappointment of some nuclear scientists. But within a year or two electricity shortages and the population boom put pressure on Tehran’s policy elite to start a discreet reversal of the shutdown. Iraq’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, Tehran’s sense of diplomatic isolation in seeking international condemnation of Iraq’s repeated attacks on the incomplete Bushehr nuclear station, and finally multibillion-dollar legal wrangles with European firms over the incomplete nuclear program of the shah, together spawned a nuclear nationalism. By 1990, Iran’s Atomic Energy Authority declared that by 2005, 20 percent of the country’s energy could be produced by nuclear electric power and 10 power vaults would be built over the next decade. Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s speaker of the parliament during the 1980-88 war and then president from 1989 to 1997, made numerous appeals to Iran’s nuclear scientists to return home and build the program. In 1988 he said: “If you do not serve Iran, whom will you serve?” Suddenly Iran’s nuclear program had shifted from a symbol of western modernism to a source of patriotic pride. By the turn of the century, the Iranian nuclear program was erroneously thought to consist primarily of several small research reactors and the nuclear light water reactor being constructed by Iran and now Russia at Bushehr. Rafsanjani later admitted Iran first considered a deterrent capability during the Iran-Iraq war, when the nuclear program first resumed. He said: “When we first began, we were at war and we sought to have that possibility for the day that the enemy might use a nuclear weapon. That was the thinking. But it never became real.” Rafsanjani travelled to Pakistan to try to meet Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program who later helped North Korea to develop an atomic bomb. In mid 2002, a leak from a dissident group, possibly via the Mossad, revealed that Iran had two secret nuclear installations designed for enriching uranium at Natanz near Isfahan and Kashan in central Iran. Iran said it was under no obligation to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency UN nuclear inspectorate of the existence of the plants because they were not operational. Iran added the nonproliferation treaty declared it was the “inalienable right” of all states to develop nuclear programs for peaceful purposes under IAEA safeguards. In itself, uranium enrichment is not a sign of seeking to make a nuclear weapon, but critics said it was hard to explain why Iran needed to make nuclear fuel at a stage in which it had no functioning nuclear reactor. From then on, the diplomatic dance started and has continued at various levels of intensity ever since. In October 2003 via the Tehran declaration, Iran under huge international pressure due to the leak, agreed to sign the additional protocol, which authorized the the IAEA to make short-notice inspections. In November 2004, under the Paris agreement, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment temporarily pending proposals from the E3 (France, Germany and the UK) on how to handle the issue on a more long-term basis. But in deference to Iran’s sovereignty, the E3 recognized that this suspension was a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s populist president elected in June 2005, became more assertive, insisting Iran’s technology was the peaceful outcome of the scientific achievements of the country’s youth. “We need the peaceful nuclear technology for energy, medical and agricultural purposes, and our scientific progress,” he said. Gradually the case for negotiation increased. With the US demanding an end to enrichment and Iran insisting on its legal right to enrich, the E3 were caught in the middle. All kinds of compromises were floated, including by Brazil and India. But western opinion was shaped by the then head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, Mohamed ElBaradei, who said: “In my view Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be recognized as a regional power, they believe that the nuclear knowhow brings prestige, brings power, and they would like to see the US engaging them.” Rouhani made a similar point in an article in the Washington Post. He said: “To us, mastering the atomic fuel cycle and generating nuclear power is as much about diversifying our energy resources as it is about who Iranians are as a nation, our demand for dignity and respect and our consequent place in the world. Without comprehending the role of identity, many issues we all face will remain unresolved.” Nevertheless, if Iran’s goal with its nuclear program was security and independence, and not something more sinister, the leadership has paid a huge and probably self-defeating price.

President Donald Trump insists that accepting a $400 million Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from Qatar’s ruling family would not amount to huge bribe. That’s because this opulent new Air Force One would go to his “library”—not to him personally—when he leaves office. That, at least, is what the president claimed amid concern that he might make personal use of a library-owned aircraft. Disputing that, he has suggested the plane would instead serve as a museum piece, like the decommissioned former Air Force One displayed at President Ronald Reagan’s library facility. It’s not yet clear whether this curious claim—that a so-called “flying palace” that US taxpayers may pay more than $1 billion to upgrade will be parked at a to-be-determined site in Florida after just a few years of use—will really come to pass. Facing rare bipartisan criticism over his plan to accept what experts call an unconstitutional emolument, Trump left Qatar Thursday without a public announcement finalizing a deal for the plane. But Trump’s explanation is part of a trend. The president, or unnamed aides, are regularly attempting to wave off ethical concerns by saying that various huge donations will eventually go to the “library.” Trump’s inaugural committee hasn’t said how much remains from the record-shattering $250 million raised via fealty displays from corporate chieftains. But the balance will go to the library, a “person close the inauguration” told the Wall Street Journal. Proceeds from the million-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinners and $5 million-one-on-one meetings with the president—organized by the pro-Trump MAGA Inc PAC—are “all going to the library,” a “person familiar with the dinners” told Wired. Then there are Meta (owner of Facebook) and Disney (owner of ABC News), which settled dubious lawsuits Trump had filed against them by pledging $15 million and $22 million, respectively, to Trump’s presidential library foundation.   There is ample reason to be wary about how the money could ultimately be used. For one, these are pledges to give money to a organization that is only partly established. Disney, in its a settlement actually said it would transfer settlement funds “to a presidential foundation and museum” before one existed. The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library was incorporated in Florida a few weeks later, apparently as a way to accept the settlement. (Meta’s January settlement, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said “looks like a bribe,” is also reportedly bound for that foundation.) Modern presidential libraries are run by nonprofit foundations. They often take the form of hagiographic museums, which include a repository of presidential papers administered by the National Archives. Trump’s library foundation has not indicated if it has yet sought IRS recognition as a nonprofit, and it hasn’t publicly announced a board of directors. Trump’s record with non-profit organizations leads to additional reasons for concern. In 2019, a New York judge ordered his nonprofit Trump Foundation to pay $2 million to an array of charities—and then to dissolve entirely—after finding Trump misused the foundation to further his political and business interests. In 2022, the Trump Organization and Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a suit brought by the DC attorney general charging that the committee illegally misused nonprofit funds to enrich the Trump family by “grossly overpaying” Trump-owned companies “for use of event space at the Trump Hotel for certain inaugural events.” Trump, of course, was indicted in 2023 for hiding highly classified government documents he had removed from the White House. Trump reportedly insisted the federal records, which belonged to the National Archives, were “mine.” Whether the 747 and the millions in donations and settlement money truly end up benefiting the future library—which would be run in part by the very same National Archives—remains to seen. “If past is precedent, I don’t know that we should take them at the word until we see how the money is spent,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Mother Jones. Regardless, the library itself is hardly an ethical panacea. Gifts to presidential libraries “fall between the cracks of campaign finance regulations and rules governing ethics in office,” Jacob Levy, a political theory professor at McGill University, wrote in a recent op-ed arguing that presidential fundraising for libraries while in office creates a “loophole you could fly a plane through.” Levy noted that the foundations are bound only by loose rules applied to US nonprofits. Critics have labeled presidential libraries, generally, “a scam.” “The fact that, according to President Trump, the plane would not remain in service to the United States but would rather be donated to his presidential library after his term concludes further raises the possibility that this ‘nice gesture’ is intended as a bribe to Donald Trump,” Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee charged in a letter to Trump’s attorney general and White House counsel. The plan, they argued, was “corrupt.” Though legally Trump cannot simply pocket funds and assets intended for the library, he faces few other limits. He could choose to “take a salary,” Levy told Mother Jones. “He can fly around on the plane.” Trump’s ability to raise donations that he could later personally benefit from creates a major ethical issue, Levy argued. “The fact that he can solicit those contributions” from people currying his favor during his presidency, Levy said, “makes them corruption.”

On Sunday evening, The New York Times published details of another potentially damning security scandal involving the chat app Signal and discussions of “detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15″—this time centered on a group chat created by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Citing four people with knowledge of the group chat, the report describes strikingly similar details to those revealed last month by The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who earlier disclosed that he had been inadvertently added to a different Signal group chat discussing the same Yemen war plans. According to the Times, Hegseth shared information that “included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis” in a “chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.” The Times noted that Hegseth’s brother, Phil, holds a job at the Pentagon, as does his lawyer, Tim Parlatore. His wife, Jennifer, has recently become notable for accompanying her husband to high-profile meetings abroad. The Times reports: > Unlike the chat in which The Atlantic was mistakenly included, the newly > revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a > dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, > before his confirmation as defense secretary ,and was named “Defense | Team > Huddle,” the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone, > rather than his government one, to access the Signal chat. > > The continued inclusion following Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation of his wife, > brother and personal lawyer, none of whom had any apparent reason to be > briefed on operational details of a military operation as it was getting > underway, is sure to raise further questions about his adherence to security > protocols. The report cites a US official claiming that there was no national security breach: “Nothing classified was ever discussed on that chat,” the official said. Nonetheless, news of the second Signal group comes amid a dramatic leak probe at the Pentagon that has resulted in the departure of top Hegseth advisors and aides. Read the full Times report here.

Just after noon Eastern Time on Monday, the Atlantic published a story that seemed, on its face, too absurd to be true. Entitled “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” and written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, the story reported that Goldberg had been, seemingly accidentally, added to a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal that featured Cabinet officials—and even Vice President JD Vance—discussing plans to bomb Houthi movement targets across Yemen. The Signal group’s members reportedly included a who’s who of top national security officials; among them were National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. On March 15, the US carried out the plan the chat’s members discussed and debated. Which is to say: The details reported in the Atlantic story were, in fact, legit. Brian Hughes, spokesperson for the National Security Council, also confirmed that, telling the Atlantic that the Signal group “appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.” Hughes added, “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.” But upon publication of the story, top Democrats quickly argued otherwise. Senior Democrats on the House Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight committees sent a letter Monday to Waltz, Gabbard, Hegseth, and Rubio, writing that their actions “may have constituted a security breach” and demanding they respond to a series of questions about whether classified information was shared and how often Signal is used for such conversations, among other inquiries. Senate Democrats also slammed the leak as “malpractice,” “amateur behavior,” and “an egregious threat to US national security.” Democrats also used a previously scheduled Tuesday morning Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on “worldwide threats” to question Gabbard and Ratcliffe about the leak. Some Republicans—including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R- La.), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—have conceded that the leak constituted a serious mistake. But President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and several of the officials included in the group message have gone to great lengths to hide their embarrassment and claim the whole thing was, actually, no big deal. Here are all the ways thus far that they have tried to obfuscate and downplay what national security experts are calling a massive—and possibly illegal—leak. Claiming the information shared was not classified White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed in a post on X Tuesday morning that “No ‘war plans’ were discussed” and “No classified material was sent to the thread.” She added that “the White House is looking into how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread.” A few hours later, Gabbard and Ratcliffe followed Leavitt’s lead when they testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and repeatedly claimed the information was not classified. “My communications, to be clear, in a Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information,” Ratcliffe claimed at one point. “There was no classified material that was shared,” Gabbard subsequently agreed. But Democrats on the Committee were not satisfied, charging that the Trump officials should release the full transcript of the chat if the leaking of the material did not constitute a national security threat. (The Atlantic did not publish the whole chat, writing that it was withholding information that could be used by foreign adversaries and was related to specific intelligence operations and personnel.) “If there is no classified material, share it with the committee,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) told Gabbard. “You can’t have it both ways. These are important jobs. This is our national security. [You’re] bobbing and weaving and trying to filibuster your answer.” > Gabbard claims "there was no classified materials that was shared in that > Signal chat." pic.twitter.com/gJP4mX7IlL > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 25, 2025 Sen. Angus King (D-Maine) also wasn’t having it. “So the attack sequencing and timing and weapons and targets you don’t consider to have been classified?” he asked Gabbard. To that, the Director of National Intelligence said she deferred to Hegseth and the National Security Council—prompting King to again demand that officials involved in the chat release the full transcript if the material was not, in fact, classified. “You’re the head of the intelligence community,” King also reminded Gabbard. “You’re supposed to know about classifications.” > .@SenAngusKing: "So the attack sequencing and timing and weapons and targets > you don't consider to have been classified?" > > DNI Gabbard: "I defer to the Secretary of Defense and the National Security > Council…" > > King: "You're the head of the intelligence community." > pic.twitter.com/R59vbevaSx > > — CSPAN (@cspan) March 25, 2025 On an episode of the Bulwark podcast that aired Tuesday, Goldberg rejected officials’ claims that the information was not classified. “They are wrong,” he said. Declining to answer questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee At the Tuesday hearing, Gabbard repeatedly refused to even confirm whether she was on the group chat in response to a question posed by Warner. “You are not ‘TG’ on this group chat?” Warner pressed, after Gabbard’s first denial. “I’m not going to get into the specifics,” she replied. > Tulsi Gabbard refuses to answer Warner's questions about the Signal group chat > pic.twitter.com/vMLfszfFMN > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 25, 2025 She also declined to respond to a question from Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) about whether she was using her public or private phone to participate in the Signal chat. “I won’t speak to this because it’s under review by the National Security Council,” Gabbard said, adding the information would be shared when the reveiw was complete. “What is under review?” Reed asked. “It’s a very simple question.” Gabbard again stonewalled. > Question: Were you using your private phone or public phone for the signal > discussions? > > Gabbard: I won't speak to this because it's under review > pic.twitter.com/nPMM5NGwOu > > — Acyn (@Acyn) March 25, 2025 Trashing the Atlantic and Jeffery Goldberg When Trump was first asked about the leak by a reporter on Monday, he appeared to be unaware of it. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, adding later, “You’re telling me about it for the first time.” Nonetheless, he felt confident enough to trash the Atlantic: “I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic. To me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine.” > President Trump, when asked about the Atlantic story in which The Atlantic’s > editor-in-chief was accidentally included in a Signal group chat with his top > officials discussing Yemen war plans, said he knows nothing about it. > > It’s an example of Trump trying to pretend he’s above… > pic.twitter.com/cqNqImhPQh > > — Yashar Ali (@yashar) March 24, 2025 Musk did the same, posting on X on Monday night: “Best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of The Atlantic magazine, because no one ever goes there.” Hegseth, for his part, characterized Goldberg as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” when speaking to reporters on Monday—even though the National Security Council had already confirmed the veracity of the chat. > NEW > > Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just landed in Hawaii and was asked about the > Yemen Signal group chat. > > His response was to attack The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Trump has > long despised. > > He refers to Goldberg as a “deceitful and highly discredited, so-called… > pic.twitter.com/Cw1qrLX7Fh > > — Yashar Ali (@yashar) March 24, 2025 Leavitt also tried to undermine Goldberg, writing in her X post that he is “well-known for his sensationalist spin.” (Goldberg, and the Atlantic, do not appear to have responded to those attacks.) Claiming that, all in all, it wasn’t such a big deal Officials have also tried to simply dismiss the incident as not that big of a problem. After learning the full details of what occurred, Trump told NBC News that the incident was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one,” adding that Waltz “has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.” Musk appeared to try to downplay the significance of the leak, writing in a post on X, “Most government systems are shockingly primitive” in response to a post from author and cartoonist Scott Adams arguing the same point. An especially telling exchange came when, during the Tuesday hearing, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) asked Ratcliffe: “Director Ratcliffe, this was a huge mistake, correct?” To this, Ratcliffe had a clear response: “No.” > OSSOFF: Director Ratcliffe, this was a huge mistake, correct? > > RATLIFFE: No > > OSSOFF: This is an embarrassment pic.twitter.com/Yi5NOHdj3O > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 25, 2025

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on Thursday morning to approve the nomination of Kash Patel to be FBI director, despite a host of issues that once would have sunk any nominee for this critical national security and law enforcement post. These include Patel’s reported role in a planned political purge of FBI agents and his apparent lies to the committee regarding that and other matters. And there’s much more. Patel has received payments from sources linked to Russia, China, Qatar, and other foreign interests that he has not explained, or, in one case, divested from. He has embraced false and dangerous conspiracy theories, including falsehoods about the 2020 election. He has endorsed using government power to seek revenge against his and Donald Trump’s political enemies. He has even seemingly encouraged violence against Trump critics. Republicans don’t seem to care about any of this. In fact, they appear eager to confirm Patel before more damaging information about him emerges. Here is a rundown of some of the matters these Republicans are ignoring. THE PURGE On January 30, the same day Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, news broke that Trump administration officials had ordered the firing of multiple senior FBI executives. The next day, reports emerged that Trump appointees were compiling a list of thousands of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases, with the possible aim of firing them. Patel told the Judiciary Committee—under oath—that he was not involved in personnel issues nor in touch with the White House about any such decisions. He further claimed he would protect FBI officials from political retribution for past work. But on Tuesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, accused Patel of lying about this. In a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Durbin said he had learned from “multiple sources that Kash Patel has been personally directing the ongoing purge of career civil servants” at the FBI. In that letter and during a Senate floor speech, Durbin said whistleblowers told him that Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, a former personal lawyer for Trump, told top FBI officials in a January 29 meeting that Patel wanted the bureau to remove targeted employees quickly. “KP wants movement at FBI,” a person at the meeting wrote in notes that Durbin said he reviewed. Durbin also said his sources reported that Patel, as he has awaited confirmation, has been receiving information from an advisory team at the FBI and then passing on instructions to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, “who relays it to” Bove. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Judiciary Committee, dismissed Durbin’s new charges as “hearsay.” He expressed no interest in gathering more information and rejected Democrats’ call for a second confirmation hearing where they could ask Patel directly about the firings of FBI officials.  Responding to Durbin’s letter and floor speech, a Patel spokesperson said, “The media is relying on anonymous sources and secondhand gossip to push a false narrative.” That was not a clear denial. When Mother Jones asked if Patel communicated with Miller about firing FBI personnel, neither Patel nor his spokesperson responded. POSSIBLE PERJURY During Patel’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) asked, “Are you aware of any plans or discussions to punish in any way, including termination, FBI agents or personnel associated with Trump investigations?” Patel said he was “not aware of that” and added: “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there.” Patel made similar claims in written responses to questions that six Democratic senators sent to him after the hearing. Each of these senators submitted queries regarding whether Patel knew of plans to oust senior FBI officials and whether he was involved in that effort. He repeatedly answered that he could not recall any such conversations and claimed he was not involved in these decisions. “Did you approve or have any role in the decision to terminate these senior FBI employees?” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) asked. “No,” Patel responded. Those replies, if Durbin is correct, were lies. But Grassley and other Republicans are unwilling to confront Patel about this possible perjury. OTHER POSSIBLE LIES Asked during his testimony about his promotion of a recording of a song performed by the so-called J6 Prison Choir, which was comprised of inmates at a DC jail who faced assorted charges for their participation in the January 6 insurrection, Patel said he was “not aware” that this group was composed of imprisoned rioters. He also testified that he “didn’t have anything to do with the recording.” In fact, Patel personally released the song on Steve Bannon’s War Room show, and told Bannon that he had overseen the song’s recording and mastering. And he hailed the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.” Patel has insisted that the money he raised from the recording went to the families of January 6 prisoners who were not convicted of any violent offenses. In his written responses, he claimed “the financial details” on his use of the funds were in his organization’s public disclosures. That’s not true. Patel’s nonprofit, the Kash Foundation, says in an IRS filing that it gave “direct cash assistance” totaling $167,821 to 50 people, but it does not identify them. That leaves Patel’s claim that he did not support families of violent attackers impossible to verify. Patel also said under oath that he was not familiar with Stew Peters, a far-right and antisemitic podcaster known for spreading false claims about Covid. Patel, however, has appeared at least eight times on Peters’ podcast. Following the hearing, Peters declared: “Clearly Kash Patel is lying.” TIES TO RUSSIAN PROPAGANDIST As Mother Jones first reported, Patel last year was paid $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI documentary produced by a Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties. That filmmaker, Igor Lopatonok, worked on an overt Russian propaganda campaign funded by Vladimir Putin’s office, and in 2019 he produced a pro-Putin film partly financed by an Ukrainian oligarch and pro-Kremlin politician who had been sanctioned by the United States since 2014. Lopatonok also worked with an American who obtained political asylum in Russia and who has mounted extensive disinformation operations against the United States. Patel declared in the documentary that the Russians had not intervened in the 2016 election—despite multiple investigations confirming they did so to assist Trump—and Patel said that he hoped to “shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the “Deep State.” Patel later said that remark was “hyperbole.” He has not explained whether he knew of the filmmaker’s background as a Russian propagandist. FOREIGN TIES In the financial disclosure form Patel submitted to the Senate, he revealed that he was paid an unspecified amount in 2024 for “consulting services” for Qatar. That raised the question of why Patel did not register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. Patel has not addressed that subject. But a “source close to Patel’s confirmation” told the far-right Federalist that “his work for Qatar was limited to securing the 2022 FIFA World Cup and other security measures” and that this did not require him to register as foreign agent. The problem with that explanation is that Patel reported working for Qatar until November 2024. That was two years after the World Cup took place there. And it includes the time Patel spent working as a surrogate for Trump’s most recent presidential campaign. Patel’s disclosure form notes that he was paid by the Qatari embassy in Washington, which runs the Gulf state’s US lobbying efforts, not Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, which organized the nation’s World Cup effort and related programs. Spokespersons for Patel, the Supreme Committee, and the Qatari embassy did not answer questions regarding the details of Patel’s work for Qatar. Patel’s financial disclosure report also revealed he worked for the Czechoslovak Group, a Prague-based arms company, as it was buying Vista Outdoor, a US company that owns assorted ammunition brands, including Remington. Senate Republicans previously argued that the Vista Outdoor purchase was a threat to national security. But none have publicly asked Patel to explain what he did for the Czechoslovak firm. Patel also disclosed that he was given between $1 million and $5 million worth of unvested stock in Elite Depot Ltd. for consulting work he did not explain. Elite Deport is the Cayman Islands-based parent company of Shein, a Chinese fashion company. Patel has declined to divest his stake in the company—even as he prepares to oversee FBI counterintelligence operations against China. After Trump slapped a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports, including Shein’s, Patel’s stake in the company means he has a personal interest aligned with Chinese business interests. In a letter sent to Patel on Wednesday, five Democrats on the committee noted Shein has faced “criticism for its use of forced labor in China, including persecuted ethnic minorities and children.” “Continuing to profit from forced labor by refusing to divest your financial interest in this company,” they wrote, “demonstrates a callous disregard for forced labor victims and calls into question your judgment and ability to impartially lead the FBI’s efforts to combat the scourge of human trafficking and the PRC’s foreign influence activities.” A few years ago GOP senators aggressively opposed some Biden administration nominees for perceived links to, or past work for, Chinese businesses. But no Republicans have publicly pressed Patel about his plan to retain an interest in a Chinese manufacturer. QANON  Patel has pushed far-right conspiracy theories, including the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; the baseless claim that the January 6 riot was instigated by the FBI; and the false notion that there was no Russian effort  to help Trump win the 2016 election. But perhaps his looniest far-right flirtation has been his past support for QAnon, the movement that holds that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles—which includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and business tycoons—has been operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination, with Trump secretly battling against them. And QAnon is not just a kooky theory; it has sparked multiple acts of violence. Patel repeatedly has hailed QAnoners and promoted their unhinged narrative. On social media, he amplified QAnon messaging. He has been a guest on numerous QAnon-supporting shows to promote Trump’s Truth Social platform. On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.” On another occasion, he agreed with a host who said Q had “been so right on so many things.” Patel chimed in: “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it.” When Democratic senators inquired about those comments, Patel insisted his remarks were “taken out of context.” He asserted, “I do not support or promote QAnon.” His past comments show he did precisely that. RETRIBUTION AND VIOLENCE Patel has long portrayed himself as an avenging angel for Trump who has battled the supposed Deep State on Trump’s behalf. Appearing on Bannon’s podcast in 2023, he proclaimed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether its criminally or civilly.” In his 2023 book Government Gangsters, Patel called for mounting “investigations” to “take on the Deep State.” In an appendix, Patel presented a list of 60 supposed members of the Deep State who were current or former executive branch officials and who presumably would be targeted. Patel listed names that would be the obvious purported cabalists for a MAGA activist, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Merrick Garland, Hillary Clinton, former CIA chief John Brennan, and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. This line-up also included a number of Republicans and onetime Trump appointees: Bill Barr, who served as attorney general for Trump; John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers during his first White House stint; and Mark Esper, a secretary of defense under Trump. This roster has been characterized as Patel’s “enemies list” of people he might target for investigation or prosecution should he become FBI chief. During his confirmation hearing, Patel denied he had any intention of seeking revenge against Trump’s political foes. He referred to this list as merely a “glossary.” When Senate Democrats challenged him on this characterization in written questions—noting he had told Bannon that “Deep Staters” would “be held accountable and prosecuted, criminal prosecutions” during a second Trump presidency—Patel sidestepped. “This language is taken out of context and does not accurately or fully represent my prior statements or positions,” he wrote. No Republican Senator has publicly expressed concern over Patel’s demonstrated desire to use government power to extract revenge. One of the most absurd moments of the hearing came when Patel was questioned about a 2022 social media post he had amplified that showed an AI-generated video of him using a chainsaw to attack various Trump critics, including former Rep. Liz Cheney, Sen. Adam Schiff, and Anthony Fauci. He claimed this meme had been taken out of context—it hadn’t—and pointed out that he had not created it, as if that were mitigating. Asked about this meme in the written questions, Patel replied that he had reposted the “meme in question as a private citizen.” He added, “It was clearly intended as humor. A chainsaw as a symbol of government reform is not unusual.” He also stated that “reposting an individual’s perspective on a specific issue does not constitute my endorsement of how their views or other positions may be interpreted.” Here was a nominee to be FBI director both justifying and downplaying his dissemination of a meme that could be read as encouraging violence against his political enemies, including Schiff, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee overseeing his nomination. It was just one more troubling thing for Senate Republicans to ignore.