Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, is facing an FBI investigation over allegations he improperly shared classified information, according to a report from Semafor citing four people with knowledge of the inquiry. The report landed a day after Kent resigned from his post in protest of the war in Iran.
The probe has reportedly been ongoing for months and predates Kent's departure from the administration. The FBI declined to comment when reached by Newsweek. No charges have been filed, and it remains unclear whether the investigation will expand or result in any.
The timing, however, is impossible to ignore.
Kent posted his resignation statement on X on Tuesday, and the language read like it was engineered for a very specific audience:
"After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."
That last line should be read carefully. Kent didn't merely disagree with the administration's Iran policy on strategic grounds. He invoked the "Israel lobby" as the causal force behind American military action, a framing that has far more in common with Ilhan Omar's talking points than with any serious conservative national security argument.
Kent closed by thanking President Trump and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The graciousness was a thin veneer over a statement designed to detonate on impact.
The response from the administration was swift and unambiguous. President Trump addressed Kent's departure during comments at the White House on Wednesday, Newsmax reported:
"I always thought he was weak on security. Very weak on security. ... It's a good thing that he's out."
Trump followed up on Truth Social with a broader message aimed at critics of the Iran policy:
"Remember, for all of those absolute 'fools' out there, Iran is considered, by everyone, to be the NUMBER ONE STATE SPONSOR OF TERROR. We are rapidly putting them out of business!"
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was equally direct, pushing back on Kent's claims on X Tuesday. She stated that President Trump "had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first," and called Kent's characterization "both insulting and laughable."
DNI Tulsi Gabbard posted a detailed statement on X Tuesday that laid out the administration's position with precision. She noted that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence coordinated all available intelligence for the president's review, and that Trump, after carefully examining the information, "concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion."
That statement matters because Gabbard was Kent's direct superior. If there were legitimate intelligence concerns about the Iran rationale, Kent had the most senior possible audience for those concerns. He chose X instead.
According to Semafor's reporting, Trump aides and allies have denounced Kent as a leaker. One source described the FBI probe as predating his resignation by months, which means the investigation into improper handling of classified information was already underway while Kent was still inside the building with access to some of the nation's most sensitive intelligence.
This reframes the resignation. If Kent knew an FBI inquiry was closing in, his dramatic public break with the administration over Iran starts to look less like a principled stand and more like a preemptive play for sympathetic media coverage. Resigning as a "whistleblower" is a far better narrative than departing under the cloud of a federal investigation.
It is a pattern Washington has seen before. Officials under scrutiny suddenly discover their conscience, race to a microphone, and hope the press will treat them as martyrs rather than subjects of inquiry. The media, predictably, obliges.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, Kent claimed that the late Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk once told him, in the West Wing no less, to "stop us from getting into a war with Iran." Kent appeared to invoke Kirk's memory as a kind of posthumous endorsement of his own position.
Using a man who can no longer confirm, deny, or provide context for a private conversation is a choice. It is not an especially admirable one.
Former Georgia lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene posted her support on X Tuesday:
"Joe Kent is a GREAT AMERICAN HERO. God bless him and protect him!"
Kent does have a military record that commands respect. No one disputes that. But a distinguished service record does not immunize someone from accountability for how they handle classified information as a civilian appointee. These are separate questions, and conflating them serves only to muddy the water.
There are two distinct stories tangled together, and the media will try to make them one.
The first is whether Joe Kent improperly shared classified information. That is a serious allegation. The FBI is investigating. The facts will either support charges or they won't.
The second is whether Kent's resignation was a genuine act of conscience or a strategic exit by a man who saw the walls closing in. The timing alone raises the question. The "Israel lobby" rhetoric in his resignation letter raises it further. The invocation of a dead man's private words raises it further still.
The left will try to elevate Kent as a brave dissenter, the way they elevated every Trump-era official who turned critic the moment it became professionally convenient. They will ignore the FBI probe or frame it as retaliation. They will treat his "Israel lobby" language as courageous truth-telling rather than what it plainly is: a conspiracy-flavored deflection from a sitting president's national security judgment.
Conservatives should resist the impulse to rally around anyone who wraps a questionable exit in populist language. The administration made its case on Iran through the proper chain. The intelligence was reviewed. The commander in chief acted. Kent had every channel available to raise objections internally. He chose spectacle.
That tells you more than his resignation letter ever could.
Dallas police released photos Wednesday of an arsenal recovered from a convicted felon who had worked as a personal security guard for Democrat Representative Jasmine Crockett (TX): eight pistols, two revolvers, an AR-15 style rifle, and multiple pieces of body armor emblazoned with the words "police" and "special agent."
The man who carried them, 39-year-old Diamon-Maziarre Robinson, is dead. Three SWAT officers shot Robinson on March 11 after a multi-hour standoff in a parking structure at Children's Medical Center Dallas. He was pronounced dead at 11:09 p.m.
Robinson had spent years operating under the alias "Mike King," posing as a federal agent using fake badges and police-style uniforms. He had multiple felony warrants and one for parole violation. The handgun he produced during the standoff was stolen.
And somehow, this man was trusted to protect a sitting member of Congress.
According to Newsweek, the Dallas Police Department's Fugitive Unit tracked a vehicle bearing stolen government plates to the parking garage at Children's Medical Center Dallas. Officers located Robinson inside the vehicle and attempted to negotiate. That negotiation stretched for more than an hour before SWAT arrived and continued efforts to talk him out.
Body camera footage released Monday captured officers pleading with Robinson to comply.
"We want you to do what I ask you to do, then you won't get hurt."
"Don't reach for it, don't do anything, and nothing will happen to you."
Officers ordered him to keep his hands up and stand up. Then Robinson reached toward his waist and lifted what appeared to be a firearm. Officers deployed a chemical agent and flash-bang diversion device. Three SWAT officers fired.
The weapon in Robinson's hand turned out to be stolen. It was far from his only one. Subsequent searches of vehicles associated with Robinson and his residence turned up the full cache that DPD posted on X Wednesday: eleven firearms total and multiple sets of body armor designed to make him look like law enforcement.
Robinson had been impersonating a federal agent since at least February, according to police. He set up businesses using false information to hire sworn officers for off-duty work. He wore the badges. He wore the uniforms. He carried the guns. And he walked straight through whatever vetting process is supposed to prevent exactly this scenario.
Crockett's office acknowledged that Robinson, whom she called Mike, "had been in and around our team for years." Not weeks. Not months. Years.
Her office released a statement Monday that read like a character reference for a man carrying an illegal arsenal:
"He never endangered our team, worked diligently, coordinated with local law enforcement, and maintained positive relationships throughout the community."
"Mike always conducted himself respectfully and with care for those around him."
Coordinated with local law enforcement. The man had multiple felony warrants. He was on parole. He had stolen government plates on his car and a stolen handgun in his hand. Whatever "coordination" he managed with local law enforcement apparently did not include anyone running his actual name through a database.
Rather than grapple with the obvious question of how her office employed a wanted felon for years, Crockett pivoted. Her statement acknowledged the security failure only in the most passive terms possible:
"The fact that an individual was able to somehow circumvent the vetting processes for something as sensitive as security for members of Congress highlights the loopholes and shortcomings in many of our systems."
Note the construction. An individual was able to "somehow circumvent" the process. The systems have "loopholes." No person failed. No office bears responsibility. The loopholes simply exist, floating in the ether, waiting to be exploited by enterprising felons.
Then came the truly remarkable line:
"We are fortunate that this is someone who used those loopholes without malice."
Without malice. A man with eleven firearms, body armor marked "police" and "special agent," stolen government plates, a stolen handgun, multiple felony warrants, and a parole violation used those loopholes "without malice." The only reason anyone knows about Robinson at all is that he died in a standoff with police at a children's hospital after refusing to surrender.
Crockett's statement then completed the pivot by turning the entire episode into an argument for more government protection for people like her:
"The situation reiterates the need for Capitol Police to provide security for members of Congress, especially under this administration's new normal of inciting attacks on those who dare to speak out."
A felon infiltrated her personal security detail for years, and the lesson she drew is that the current presidential administration is the real threat. That is a genuinely impressive act of political redirection.
The Dallas County District Attorney's Office is conducting an independent investigation into the shooting. The facts released so far, including body camera footage showing officers repeatedly warning Robinson not to reach for a weapon before he did exactly that, suggest the officers acted within the bounds of the situation Robinson created.
But the larger questions have nothing to do with the shooting and everything to do with what preceded it:
Crockett's office offered no answers to any of these. Instead, her statement characterized Robinson's past as something that "did not align with the man she and her team knew." That framing treats the security failure as a sad surprise rather than a systemic collapse in basic due diligence.
Eleven firearms. Multiple sets of body armor. Fake badges. Stolen plates. A stolen handgun. Felony warrants. A parole violation. An alias has been maintained for years. Businesses established under false information to hire actual sworn officers.
This was not a man who slipped through a crack. This was a man who built an entire false identity and operated it at the highest levels of access a civilian can reach, including the personal security of a United States congresswoman. He did it for years, apparently without a single person in Crockett's orbit asking the kind of questions that a basic employment screening would answer.
Members of Congress routinely demand more oversight, more regulation, more background checks for ordinary Americans. Crockett herself now demands more Capitol Police protection. The irony is that the most basic check, the kind any gun store runs before a sale, would have flagged the armed felon standing next to her.
Nobody ran it.
A gunman opened fire at a Veterans Affairs clinic in Pickens County, Georgia, on Tuesday afternoon, sending at least one victim to the hospital by airlift before officers shot and killed the suspect at the scene.
Jasper police and the Pickens County Sheriff's Office confirmed the shooting occurred around 1:30 p.m. at the VA Clinic, located in a shopping center on E. Church Street. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation was called in to assist, and as of 6 p.m., investigators were still working what remained an active scene.
The victim's identity has not been released. Neither has their condition.
Details remain thin. Local affiliate WSB-2 reported that Jasper Police Chief Matt Dawkins confirmed that the gunman "is from the Jasper area," but no further information about the suspect has been released. No motive has been disclosed. It is not yet clear whether anyone else was injured in the incident.
The suspect was shot by responding officers and died at the scene. The victim was transported from the clinic and airlifted to a hospital, but authorities have offered no update on their status.
A man shopping at the Goodwill next door to the clinic gave an account of the incident to a local reporter, though his name has not been made public. The landlord of the shopping complex called the shooting "really disheartening."
There is something particularly grim about violence at a VA clinic. These are facilities built to serve men and women who already risked their lives. They go there for care, not combat. The people working inside those clinics chose careers dedicated to the Americans who gave the most. A shooting in that space violates something beyond the law.
Veterans and VA staff deserve the full picture of what happened in Pickens County, and they deserve it quickly. Right now, the community is left with fragments: a suspect from the area, a victim whose name and condition remain unknown, and a shopping center frozen behind police tape for hours.
What is clear is that law enforcement responded and ended the threat. The suspect did not walk away. He did not barricade himself for a standoff. Officers engaged, and the shooting stopped. In an era when police response times and decisions face relentless second-guessing, the officers in Pickens County appear to have done exactly what the public expects of them: they ran toward the gunfire.
The GBI's involvement signals that this investigation will be handled with the seriousness it demands. Georgia law requires an outside investigation when officers use deadly force, and that process is now underway.
Pickens County is a small, tight-knit community in the north Georgia mountains. Jasper, its county seat, is the kind of place where a shooting at a VA clinic doesn't just make the news. It shakes the whole town. The landlord's one-line reaction captures the weight of it plainly enough.
There will be more information in the coming days: the suspect's identity, the victim's condition, and a motive if investigators can establish one. Until then, speculation helps no one. What matters now is that a veteran or a VA employee is fighting for their life, the person responsible is dead, and the officers who stopped him went home to their families.
That is the bare minimum a community should be able to count on. On Tuesday in Pickens County, it held.
A 35-year-old Marine Corps veteran has been indicted on two counts of willful transmission of national defense information after allegedly copying classified material from a secure site and sending it to a person believed to be in China.
Seth Chambers pleaded not guilty Friday in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Missouri, entering his plea before Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Willie J. Epps Jr. He faces up to 10 years in federal prison on each count. His trial is scheduled for Aug. 10.
Chambers served as a Marine Corps intelligence analyst from April 2011 to March 2021, Newsmax reported. That is a full decade inside one of the most sensitive pipelines in the U.S. military. He held a security clearance that let him access classified material up to the top-secret level. He had received training on handling classified information and had signed nondisclosure agreements acknowledging that unauthorized disclosure could harm U.S. national security.
He knew the rules. He signed his name to them.
After leaving the Marines, Chambers worked as an analyst for a U.S. government contractor in Erbil, Iraq, from November 2021 to January 2023. According to the Department of Justice, he allegedly:
On Dec. 10, 2022, while still working as a contractor, Chambers allegedly sent a white paper containing excerpts from classified U.S. government documents to a person in Maryland who was not authorized to receive it. Then, on April 20, 2023, a second document containing similar excerpts was allegedly transmitted to someone believed to be in China.
Two transmissions. Two different recipients. One of them overseas, in the country that represents the single greatest espionage threat to the United States.
This case lands in a context that should make every American uneasy. Beijing's intelligence apparatus has spent years cultivating sources inside the U.S. defense and intelligence communities. Former military personnel with security clearances are prime targets. They have knowledge. They have access, or at least the residue of it. And some of them, apparently, are willing to use it.
The indictment does not identify the person in China or the person in Maryland. Federal public defender Ian Lewis, Chambers's attorney, has been contacted for comment. The silence from the defense at this stage is unremarkable. What matters is what the prosecution can prove at trial.
But the broader pattern is worth examining. China does not rely solely on professional spies planted under diplomatic cover. It exploits relationships, financial pressure, ideology, and simple greed to turn Americans with access into assets. The method varies. The target is always the same: classified U.S. defense information that can erode American military advantage.
Every time a case like this surfaces, it reinforces a truth that Washington's foreign policy establishment has been slow to internalize. China is not a competitor. It is an adversary. It treats American national security secrets as resources to be harvested, and it finds willing hands to do the harvesting.
Chambers is entitled to his presumption of innocence, and a trial date is set. But the facts alleged in this indictment describe something more calculated than a lapse in judgment. Copying classified material, removing it from a secure environment, packaging it into a report, and transmitting it electronically to unauthorized recipients requires deliberate effort at every step.
This was not an accident. If the allegations hold, it was a process.
The case also raises questions about the contractor pipeline. Chambers left active duty, moved into a contractor role in Iraq, and allegedly began transmitting classified material within a year. The security clearance system is supposed to be a gate. When someone walks through it and allegedly hands secrets to a foreign adversary, the system failed somewhere.
Twenty years in federal prison is the maximum Chambers faces if convicted on both counts. For a man who spent a decade entrusted with America's most sensitive intelligence and allegedly chose to send it to China, the justice system will have a chance to demonstrate whether it treats espionage with the gravity it deserves.
The trial is set for August. The country will be watching.
A 55-year-old Brooklyn man is dead after being punched in the face by a stranger on a New York City subway platform Saturday evening. The suspect fled and, as of late Saturday night, remains at large.
The fatal encounter unfolded on the northbound C and E train platform at the 34th Street-Penn subway station just before 7 p.m. According to law enforcement sources who spoke to the New York Post, the victim apparently bumped into the suspect on the platform. That exploded into a heated argument. Police sources said the suspect then pummeled the man's face, leaving him to stumble around the platform for a few minutes before he collapsed.
A 911 call reported an unconscious man on the platform. Police found him unresponsive. First responders attempted life-saving measures before rushing him to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The attacker fled. The New York Police Department told the Gothamist that an investigation remains ongoing and no arrest had been made as of late Saturday. Authorities have yet to release the victim's identity. The assailant apparently remains at large.
There is no mystery about what kind of city produces an incident like this. A man bumps into a stranger in a crowded subway station during the early evening. Within moments, he is dead. His killer walks away and vanishes into the city.
This is not an anomaly. It is the predictable result of years of treating public safety in New York's transit system as a secondary concern, something to be managed with social workers and reduced enforcement rather than the visible, assertive policing that once made the subway rideable for eight million people a day.
The details here are sparse, and that itself is telling. The Post obtained a blurry photo of the suspect on the platform, according to Breitbart, but no physical description has been released to the public. A man is dead, his killer is walking free somewhere in the five boroughs, and the public has been given almost nothing to work with. If the goal is to actually catch this person, that approach is difficult to explain.
New York's subway system has long functioned as a barometer of the city's willingness to maintain order. When the system is safe, it signals that basic civic expectations still hold. When it isn't, everything downstream suffers. Businesses lose customers. Workers drive instead of riding. Tourism takes a hit. The people who suffer most are working-class New Yorkers who have no alternative, the ones who cannot afford a cab or an Uber every time they need to get across town.
A man should be able to accidentally bump into another person in a crowded subway station without it becoming a death sentence. That used to be an unremarkable expectation. The fact that it now reads as almost naive tells you everything about where New York's public safety culture has drifted.
The political class in New York has spent years agonizing over whether police are too visible in the subway, whether fare enforcement is equitable, and whether quality-of-life policing disproportionately affects certain communities. Meanwhile, a 55-year-old man from Brooklyn rode the train on a Saturday evening and never came home.
The NYPD says the investigation is ongoing. That is the bare minimum. What matters now is whether this case receives the resources and urgency it demands, or whether it quietly fades into the background noise of New York's violent crime statistics.
Every New Yorker who steps onto a subway platform is making an implicit act of trust in the city's ability to keep them safe. Saturday night at Penn Station, that trust was betrayed in the most fundamental way possible. A man bumped into a stranger, and it cost him his life.
His killer is still out there.
Casey Means, President Trump's nominee for surgeon general, now says she supports the measles vaccine and views the ongoing outbreak as "largely preventable with the MMR vaccine," according to written responses obtained by MS NOW.
The clarification comes after Means drew criticism last month for sidestepping a direct endorsement of the measles vaccine during her Feb. 25 confirmation hearing before the Senate HELP Committee. At the time, she told senators that vaccinations "save lives" and were a critical part of public health strategy, but stopped short of broadly encouraging parents to vaccinate their children against measles, the flu, or whooping cough.
In her updated written responses, Means said she agreed with "Dr. Oz's message to Americans to take the measles vaccine." She also reportedly quoted acting CDC Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya's assessment that the vaccine "remains the most reliable and effective way" to prevent the disease.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and physician himself, pressed Means during the Feb. 25 hearing on whether she would encourage mothers to get their children vaccinated against measles. Her answer at the time left room for interpretation:
"I'm supportive of vaccination. I do believe that each patient, mother or parent needs to have a conversation with their pediatrician about any medication they're putting in their body and their children's body."
That was it. Cassidy pressed further. Means refused to go beyond that statement.
The response wasn't wrong on its face. Parents should absolutely consult their pediatricians. Nobody seriously argues otherwise. But for a surgeon general nominee in the middle of the largest measles outbreak in the United States since the start of the century, the careful phrasing landed as evasion rather than prudence, as The Hill reports.
The numbers tell the story plainly enough. The CDC confirmed 1,362 measles cases across 31 states as of March 12, 2026, with 14 reported new outbreaks, each defined as three or more related cases. The ongoing outbreak in South Carolina alone has grown to nearly 1,000 cases, surpassing the West Texas outbreak from last year to become the largest in the country since the start of the century.
The United States met the typical criteria of 12 months of consistent spread on Jan. 20, putting the country on the verge of losing a measles elimination status it has held for more than two decades.
That status isn't a trophy. It's a public health infrastructure achievement that took decades of vaccination campaigns to build. Losing it would be a concrete, measurable failure.
Dr. Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, encouraged Americans in early February to get vaccinated amid the resurgence. Acting CDC Director Bhattacharya has been clear about the vaccine's efficacy. The administration's public health apparatus has been pointing in one direction on this question. Means is now aligned with it.
There is a reasonable conservative position on medical autonomy that respects parental decision-making and doctor-patient relationships. Means gestured toward it in her hearing testimony. But that position doesn't require ambiguity about whether a proven vaccine works or whether people should take it during an active, spreading outbreak. You can defend informed consent without hedging on the science.
The MMR vaccine is one of the most effective tools in the history of medicine. It is not experimental. It is not new. It is not controversial among serious medical professionals of any political stripe. Saying so plainly isn't a concession to the public health bureaucracy that conservatives rightly distrust on other matters. It's just accurate.
Means still faces a vote from the Senate HELP Committee, where members from both parties will have read both her hearing testimony and her written clarification. The gap between the two will not go unnoticed. Senators like Cassidy, who already pressed her once, will want to know which version of Means they're confirming.
The written responses are a step in the right direction. But a surgeon general's most important tool is the ability to speak clearly to the American public when it counts. The next time the moment demands it, the answer needs to come the first time it's asked.
Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's 56-year-old new supreme leader, finally broke his silence Thursday with a statement read by a news anchor on Iranian state TV. Not by Khamenei himself. An anchor read the words while an image of the new ayatollah was displayed on screen.
The statement was loaded with threats. Khamenei vowed to avenge "the blood of your martyrs," promised to keep wielding the "lever" of closing the Strait of Hormuz, and hinted at opening entirely new fronts against the United States and Israel. He pledged to obtain compensation from Iran's enemies, and if that failed, to destroy their assets outright.
The man delivering these threats could not be bothered to show his face.
Khamenei was a no-show at his own succession rally in Tehran on Monday. Thursday's statement, his first since assuming power following his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's death in an Israeli strike just after the war began, did nothing to quiet growing doubts about his physical condition, as The New York Post reports.
An Iranian source told The Sun that the new supreme leader's injuries are severe:
"One or two of his legs have been cut off. His liver or stomach has also ruptured. He is apparently in a coma as well."
Other Iranian sources insisted the injuries were minor, though none were named and none provided direct quotes. No explanation has been given for why Khamenei did not appear in the flesh.
Annika Ganzeveld, the Middle East Portfolio Manager for the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that Iran's military leaders are likely shielding him from public view:
"Right now, they want to portray strength, and if he's injured, they might not want to put him on display."
That's a generous reading. A less generous one: the regime is Weekend at Bernie 's-ing its own supreme leader.
Khosro Isfahani, the research director for the Washington-based National Union for Democracy in Iran think tank, was considerably more blunt about the nature of Thursday's statement. He said the message was a clear call for Iran's allies abroad to take revenge, and pointed to what he saw lurking between the lines:
"It hints at activating terror cells, like the warnings that have come out of Europe and the US, and the reports of preparing strikes on the West Coast."
Isfahani did not believe Khamenei wrote the statement at all:
"It's clear that he has not written this himself, or we would have seen him on air or in a recorded message."
He went further, calling Khamenei a puppet for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Having previously described the new supreme leader as possessing the "charisma of a boiled potato," Isfahani said the IRGC is happy to let him take the reins to avoid being targeted themselves:
"He's just being used as a puppet for the IRGC's message to the world."
And then the line that deserves to be framed: if Khamenei is alive, Isfahani said, "he's not even a good enough puppet to be put in front of a camera."
The substance of Khamenei's statement reads like a wishlist from a regime running out of options. Consider what he actually promised:
The statement also specifically noted to avenge those killed in the strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building in Minab. Khamenei framed retaliation broadly:
"The retaliation we have in mind is not limited only to the martyrdom of the great leader of the revolution; rather, every member of the nation who is martyred by the enemy constitutes a separate case in the file of revenge."
This is a regime that has lost its supreme leader, may have lost its replacement, and is now broadcasting threats it may lack the capacity to execute. The language about "other fronts" and enemy vulnerability is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a government that can't even produce a video of its own head of state.
Khamenei did acknowledge the death of his father in Thursday's statement, describing what he claimed was a personal viewing of the body:
"I had the honor of seeing his body after his martyrdom. What I saw was a mountain of steadfastness, and I was told that the fist of his intact hand had been clenched."
He also confirmed that his wife, one of his sisters, his niece, and the husband of his other sister died in the airstrike. The personal losses are real, and they matter, both as human tragedy and as the fuel for whatever decisions come next from Tehran.
But note the construction. Even grief is propaganda in the Islamic Republic. A clenched fist on a dead man's "intact hand" is not a eulogy. It is a recruitment poster.
Since the war began, law enforcement officials in the US and around the world have issued warnings about the possibility of sleeper cell attacks from Tehran's agents and supporters. Isfahani's reading of Thursday's statement as a signal to activate those cells deserves serious attention.
A regime cornered militarily does not become less dangerous. It becomes increasingly dangerous. Iran's conventional options are narrowing. The Strait of Hormuz threat is not new. The proxy networks are degraded. What remains is the unconventional: terror cells embedded in Western countries, soft-target operations, and the kind of asymmetric warfare that a state on the brink reaches for when it has nothing left to lose.
The fact that Iran's supreme leader cannot appear on camera does not mean Iran's intelligence apparatus cannot operate abroad. Those are two different capabilities, and confusing them would be a mistake.
What Thursday revealed is a regime in profound crisis. The new supreme leader is either gravely injured, incapacitated, or so diminished that even his own government won't put him on screen.
The IRGC appears to be running the show, using Khamenei's name as a letterhead for threats they author themselves. The statement was dressed up in revolutionary language, but the delivery told the real story.
Iran's top leadership wanted someone to hold the title so they wouldn't have to hold the target. Mojtaba Khamenei fit the bill. Whether he is conscious enough to know it is another question entirely.
FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the Bureau is investigating the shooting at Old Dominion University as an act of terrorism after an armed individual opened fire on campus, killing one person and wounding two others. The shooter is dead, subdued not by a SWAT team or a negotiator, but by a group of students who rushed him.
Patel delivered the announcement via an X post, laying out the facts without ambiguity:
"Earlier today, an armed individual opened fire at Old Dominion University, leaving one person dead and two others wounded. The shooter is now deceased thanks to a group of brave students who stepped in and subdued him – actions that undoubtedly saved lives along with the quick response of law enforcement."
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force is fully engaged and embedded with local authorities on the ground.
According to various reports cited by Breitbart News, the alleged attacker has been identified as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a 36-year-old who carries a history that should have kept him nowhere near a university campus or, frankly, American soil.
Jalloh was arrested on July 3, 2016, for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In 2017, he was convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Right Line News's Eric Daugherty noted that Jalloh was a "migrant from western Africa."
This is not an isolated data point. Breitbart News noted that the attacker who opened fire on Burford's Backyard Beer Garden in Austin, Texas, on March 1, 2026, was also from West Africa. Two mass shootings. Two attackers from the same region. Both on American soil.
The immigration question here is not a tangent. It is the story. Every time an attack like this occurs, the same machinery activates: the calls for gun control, the pivot to mental health funding, the insistence that we not "politicize" tragedy. But the one question that keeps proving relevant, the question of who was allowed into this country and why they were still here, gets treated as impolite to ask.
Jalloh wasn't some unknown quantity. He was arrested, tried, and convicted of attempting to support a terrorist organization.
The system identified him. The system processed him. The system sentenced him. And then the system released him back into the population with enough time left on the calendar to allegedly carry out exactly the kind of attack his original crime suggested he wanted to commit.
There is one detail in this story that deserves to stand apart from the policy failures surrounding it. A group of students at Old Dominion University charged a gunman. They subdued him. They stopped the killing.
Patel's statement credited their actions directly, saying they "undoubtedly saved lives along with the quick response of law enforcement." That language is worth noting. The FBI director did not bury their role in a subordinate clause. He led with it.
These were not trained operators. They were college students who decided in a moment when most people freeze. Whatever conversation follows about sentencing, immigration, and vetting failures, their courage deserves its own weight. More people are alive because of what they did.
The terrorism classification matters. It directs federal resources. It shapes the investigation's scope. It means the FBI isn't treating this as a random act of campus violence to be filed away under "lone wolf" and forgotten by the next news cycle.
But classification alone doesn't answer the harder question: how does a convicted terrorism supporter end up free and operational? The sentencing was eleven years. The conviction was in 2017. You can do the math. Either the sentence was served, and the system deemed him safe for release, or he was released early. Neither answer is comforting.
This is the consequence of a justice system that treats terrorism convictions with the same revolving-door philosophy it applies to everything else. A man who tried to materially support ISIS should not get a second opportunity to act on those loyalties. The leniency wasn't compassion. It was negligence. And someone at Old Dominion University paid for it with their life.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force is on the ground. The investigation will proceed. More details will surface about Jalloh's movements, his associations, and how he spent his time after leaving federal custody. Those details will matter.
But the structural failure is already visible. A convicted terrorist sympathizer, a migrant from western Africa, was given a sentence that allowed him to walk free while still young enough and motivated enough to kill. The vetting failed. The sentencing failed. The post-release monitoring, if it existed at all, failed.
One person is dead at Old Dominion University. Two more are wounded. A group of students had to do what the system should have made unnecessary.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used a rare public appearance alongside Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Monday to forcefully criticize how the Supreme Court has handled emergency applications, calling the court's increasing willingness to intervene "a real unfortunate problem." Kavanaugh, sitting beside her at the federal courthouse in Washington, pushed back and defended the court's actions.
The hourlong event, attended by lawyers and judges, including Chief Judge James E. Boasberg, laid bare the internal fault lines on a court that has repeatedly stepped in to unblock the Trump administration's agenda after lower courts tried to stop it.
According to NBC News, Jackson did not hold back. She characterized the court's emergency docket work as fundamentally flawed, arguing that it distorts the judicial process itself.
"I just feel like this uptick in the court's willingness to get involved ... is a real unfortunate problem."
She called the emergency proceedings "a warped kind of proceeding" and declared flatly that the practice is "not serving the court or this country well." Her proposed solution was straightforward: if the court were "stingier about granting them," the filings would drop. She also claimed the uptick "affects how lower court judges approach cases," suggesting the court's emergency interventions ripple downward through the entire judiciary.
This is a revealing complaint. What Jackson frames as a procedural concern is, at bottom, frustration that the court's conservative majority keeps clearing the path for lawful executive action. The lower courts she worries about "approaching cases" differently are, in many instances, the same courts that have issued sweeping injunctions to stall presidential authority. When the Supreme Court steps in to lift those blocks, the system is working exactly as designed. The problem Jackson identifies is not a broken process. It is a process producing outcomes she opposes.
Kavanaugh offered a measured but pointed rebuttal. He noted that government emergency applications to the court are "not unique to Trump," pointing out that the Biden administration made similar requests, "albeit at a lower rate." He also identified the structural cause that Jackson conspicuously ignored: presidents in recent years have relied more heavily on executive orders because persuading Congress has become increasingly difficult. Those orders are then immediately challenged in court, which generates the very emergency filings Jackson objects to.
In other words, the uptick in emergency applications is not a symptom of a rogue Supreme Court. It is the predictable result of an executive branch governing through its constitutional authority and a sprawling legal apparatus rushing to the nearest friendly courtroom to stop it.
Kavanaugh insisted on institutional neutrality:
"We have to have the same position regardless of who is president."
Jackson said she agreed with that statement. Whether her broader critique is consistent with it is another question entirely.
In the last year, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to fire thousands of federal workers, assert control over previously independent federal agencies, and implement key elements of its immigration policy. Each of these actions had been blocked by lower courts. Each time, the Supreme Court's conservative majority intervened to let the executive branch function.
This is what Jackson calls a problem. But consider what the alternative looks like: a single district judge, sometimes hundreds of miles from Washington, issuing a nationwide injunction that freezes the agenda of a president elected by tens of millions of Americans. The Supreme Court stepping in to restore executive authority is not an abuse of the emergency docket. It is the court performing its most basic function, ensuring that one branch of government does not strangle another.
The left has grown comfortable with judge-shopping as a governing strategy. When a policy they oppose survives the legislative or electoral process, they route it through the judiciary. When the Supreme Court clears the obstruction, they call the process broken.
Both justices acknowledged the rising temperature around the judiciary. Jackson expressed concern about "the increase in violent threats against judges," calling it "unfortunate because it relates to a lack of understanding about judicial independence." Kavanaugh praised Chief Justice John Roberts, saying he had "picked his spots" in responding to criticism. Roberts recently put out a statement rebuking suggestions that judges should be impeached for ruling against the administration.
Notably, Chief Judge Boasberg, one of the judges some Republicans want to impeach, was among those at Monday's event. His presence added a layer of gravity to the discussion that neither justice could ignore.
Threats against judges are unacceptable regardless of the source. That principle is not complicated, and it does not require elaborate framing about "judicial independence" to state clearly. But the conversation about accountability is a separate one. Judges who issue sweeping injunctions against the elected executive should expect scrutiny. Scrutiny and threats are not the same thing, and conflating them serves only those who want to insulate the judiciary from any public accountability at all.
Kavanaugh noted that the court has, in some cases, opted to hear full oral arguments and issue longer written rulings in response to criticism of the shadow docket. That is a reasonable concession to transparency. But the core dynamic is not going to change. As long as lower courts continue issuing aggressive nationwide injunctions against executive action, the Supreme Court will continue fielding emergency applications. And as long as the conservative majority holds, it will continue lifting those injunctions when the law supports it.
Jackson acknowledged as much, conceding that "there's no easy answer, for sure." She is right about that, though perhaps not in the way she intended. The answer is not for the Supreme Court to stop intervening. The answer is for lower courts to stop overreaching.
Until that happens, expect more hourlong public events where liberal justices call the process broken and conservative justices explain, patiently, that it is working.
A Fulton County judge ruled Monday that District Attorney Fani Willis cannot participate in the legal battle over millions of dollars in attorney fees that President Donald Trump and his co-defendants are seeking to recoup from her failed racketeering prosecution. Judge Scott McAfee found that Willis, already "wholly disqualified" from the case itself, has no standing to intervene in the fee dispute either.
Trump has requested that Willis' office reimburse him more than $6.2 million. Across all defendants, the total sought reaches $16.8 million.
Willis' lawyers argued that blocking her from the proceedings would deny her due process. In their filing, they claimed:
"Without intervention by the District Attorney, any award would violate basic fundamental notions of due process by denying her an opportunity to be heard or even challenge the reasonableness of the claimed attorney fees before it is taken from her budget."
McAfee was unmoved. The judge noted that Fulton County itself could be involved in the proceedings, since any award would ultimately come from county coffers. But Willis personally? She's out.
The RICO prosecution was supposed to be the crown jewel of the legal campaign against Trump. Willis brought the case in August 2023, charging Trump and 18 co-defendants with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. It was ambitious in scope and unmistakable in its political timing.
Then it unraveled.
The Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis in 2024 after finding that her undisclosed romantic relationship with lead prosecutor Nathan Wade presented a conflict of interest. Not a technicality. Not a procedural hiccup. A conflict of interest was born from a relationship she chose to hide while running one of the most politically significant prosecutions in American history.
The case was transferred to the Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys' Council, headed by Director Peter Skandalakis. He took one look at the wreckage and moved to dismiss. McAfee granted the request. Skandalakis offered a blunt assessment of what continuing the prosecution would have meant:
"In my professional judgment, the citizens of Georgia are not served by pursuing this case in full for another five to ten years."
Five to ten more years. For a case that was already politically radioactive and legally compromised. Skandalakis made the only responsible call available to him.
A state law passed in 2025 opened the door for defendants to seek reimbursement in cases where prosecutors are disqualified. Trump and his co-defendants walked through it. The $16.8 million price tag reflects the staggering legal cost of defending against a prosecution that should never have survived its own internal contradictions.
Trump's lead attorney in the case, Steve Sadow, framed Monday's ruling as the logical consequence of Willis' own misconduct:
"Judge McAfee has properly denied DA Willis' motion to intervene in POTUS' action for reimbursement of attorney fees because her disqualification for improper conduct bars Willis and her office from any further participation in this dismissed, lawfare case."
There is a certain symmetry to it. Willis built a sprawling prosecution, leveraged the full weight of her office, and concealed a relationship that compromised the entire enterprise. Now she wants a seat at the table to argue about the bill. McAfee told her the seat was never hers to take.
The Willis saga is worth studying not as an isolated scandal but as a case study in what happens when prosecutorial power is wielded for political ends. Consider the sequence, as reported by Fox News:
Every step follows from the one before it. The conflict of interest didn't appear out of nowhere. It was baked into the prosecution from the beginning, hidden deliberately, and only exposed because the defendants fought back.
Trump called Willis a "rabid partisan" and labeled the prosecution a "witch hunt." Those are the words of a defendant. The court record tells the same story in quieter language. Disqualification. Dismissal. Reimbursement.
McAfee's acknowledgment that Fulton County could be drawn into the fee dispute raises an uncomfortable reality for residents. The $16.8 million in legal fees wasn't spent by abstract institutions. It was forced out of the pockets of defendants by a prosecution that a court found was compromised by the prosecutor's own conduct. If that money comes from the county budget, Fulton County taxpayers will foot the bill for Willis' choices.
That is what lawfare produces. Not justice. Not accountability. Costs. Transferred from the powerful to the public, from the politically ambitious to the people who never asked for any of it.
Fani Willis wanted to make history. She made a mess. And now she can't even argue about who cleans it up.