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.
A federal judge ruled Monday that the three attorneys running the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey have no lawful authority to do so, disqualifying the entire leadership team in a 130-page opinion that threatens to upend federal prosecutions across the state.
Chief Judge Matthew Brann found that senior counsel Philip Lamparello, executive assistant U.S. attorney Ari Fontecchio, and special attorney Jordan Fox are all disqualified from serving. The decision was stayed pending appeal, meaning the trio remains in place for now.
But the warning attached to the ruling carries real teeth:
"The Government is warned that any further attempts to unlawfully fill the office will result in dismissals of pending cases."
That's a federal judge threatening to throw out criminal prosecutions, not because of evidentiary problems or procedural defects, but because he objects to who is bringing them.
This is not the first time Brann has inserted himself into the question of who runs the New Jersey U.S. Attorney's Office, the New Jersey Monitor reported. In August, he disqualified Alina Habba, a personal attorney for President Trump and adviser to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, from serving as New Jersey's U.S. attorney. An appeals court later agreed she had "no lawful authority" to run the office, and Habba resigned in December.
The trio of Lamparello, Fontecchio, and Fox has led the office since Habba's departure. Now Brann has knocked them out, too.
The core of Brann's argument is a separation-of-powers claim: that these attorneys were installed without Senate confirmation, and that the administration's legal justification for their authority amounts to a workaround. In his words:
"The Government assembles a convoluted patchwork of statutory cross-references to craft a leadership structure that it contends can do anything a United States Attorney can, without being a United States Attorney."
The opinion also included broader commentary about the administration. Brann wrote:
"One year into this administration, it is plain that President Trump and his top aides have chafed at the limits on their power set forth by law and the Constitution."
That kind of language tells you something about where the judge's sympathies lie. This isn't a narrow procedural finding. It reads like a political statement dressed in legal robes.
Here's the context Brann's opinion treats as irrelevant: the U.S. Senate failed to act to confirm Habba. U.S. Sens. Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both Democrats, opposed her nomination and helped prevent it from advancing. Trump's U.S. attorney choices have stalled in multiple states.
So the sequence works like this:
The result is a federal law enforcement office that effectively cannot function. Not because the administration refuses to fill it, but because the Senate refuses to confirm, and a judge refuses to accept any alternative arrangement. The office is paralyzed by design, and the people who created the paralysis frame it as a constitutional crisis caused by the executive branch.
Brann acknowledged the inconvenience in almost admiring terms:
"This division of power means that the President may not always be able to appoint his first choice to a specific office, and he may sometimes have to wait for the Senate to act, which can take time. But that is the point of this divided authority, not a defect."
Easy to say when you're not the one explaining to crime victims in New Jersey why their cases might get thrown out.
It's worth noting who brought the challenges that led to this ruling. One was filed by Daniel Torres, whom the courts found was unlawfully indicted by Habba. The other came from Raheel Naviwala, a Florida man awaiting sentencing after being convicted last February of defrauding roughly $100 million from Medicare and other insurers.
A man convicted of a nine-figure Medicare fraud scheme now has a federal judge questioning whether the prosecutors who handled his case had the authority to be there. If Brann's ruling survives appeal and the stay is lifted, the implications for pending cases are staggering. Convicted fraudsters and criminal defendants could see their prosecutions collapse, not on the merits, but on a technicality about staffing.
That's what "safety for the people of NJ" looks like when the judiciary decides personnel disputes matter more than prosecutions.
Habba, for her part, did not mince words. She called the ruling "ridiculous" and posted a sharper response on social media:
"The unconstitutionality of this complete overreach into the Executive Branch, time and time again, will not succeed. They would rather have no U.S. Attorney than safety for the people of NJ. Judges do not fire DOJ officials, AG Pam Bondi and POTUS do — get in line."
The frustration is understandable. The judiciary has now disqualified four different people from leading a single U.S. Attorney's Office. At some point, the question shifts from whether the executive branch is following proper procedure to whether the courts are using procedural objections to achieve a policy outcome: an empty office.
Senate confirmation exists for good reason. No serious person disputes that. But the confirmation process also carries an obligation to act in a reasonable time, and when the Senate refuses to hold votes or actively sabotages nominations, the executive branch faces an impossible choice: leave critical offices vacant or find legal mechanisms to keep them running.
Brann's ruling says the second option is off the table. The first option means federal law enforcement in New Jersey grinds to a halt. Democrats who blocked Habba's confirmation will shed no tears over that outcome. And a judge who spent 130 pages explaining why the office can't operate as currently staffed offered zero guidance on how it should operate in the meantime.
The ruling is stayed for now. The appeal will determine whether New Jersey's federal prosecutors keep their jobs or whether the state's most significant criminal cases start falling apart. Somewhere in Florida, a man who stole $100 million from Medicare is watching closely.
The prison guard assigned to the unit where Jeffrey Epstein was held searched his name on Google minutes before his body was found, according to DOJ documents and FBI records. The same guard, Tova Noel, had received a $5,000 cash deposit just over a week before the convicted pedophile died in his Manhattan jail cell in August 2019.
That deposit was the largest of 12 cash deposits into Noel's bank account, stretching back to April 2018. Chase Bank flagged the pattern in a suspicious activity report filed with the FBI in November 2019, three months after Epstein's death.
None of this is speculation. It's in the records.
Breitbart reported that according to the documents, Noel searched "latest on Epstein in jail" twice in the minutes before correctional officer Michael Thomas found Epstein's body. Thomas, for his part, was also browsing the internet during the hours he was supposed to be conducting inmate checks. Both guards were required to check on Epstein every 30 minutes. Neither did.
Epstein's cell sat approximately 15 feet from the guards' desks.
Noel later denied searching for Epstein on Google, claiming she did not remember doing so and also claiming the FBI records were inaccurate. No direct quote from Noel appears in the available documents.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman put it plainly in 2019:
"The guards had a duty to ensure the safety and security of federal inmates in their care."
"Instead, they repeatedly failed to conduct mandated checks on inmates, and lied on official forms to hide their dereliction."
Noel and another guard were accused of falsifying records to make it appear as though they had checked on Epstein during the night hours. Both lost their jobs. Then the charges were dropped.
An unnamed inmate housed in the Special Housing Unit told the FBI what he recalled from the morning of August 10, 2019. At around 6:30 a.m., he heard officers shouting. Among the voices, one command cut through: "Breathe! Breathe!"
Then an unnamed officer said something far more chilling:
"Dudes, you killed that dude."
A female guard, according to the inmate's account in FBI notes, said:
"If he is dead, we're going to cover it up and he's going to have an alibi — my officers."
Other inmates reportedly chanted, "Miss Noel killed Jeffrey."
The FBI interviewed the inmate. What came of that interview remains unclear from the available records.
The financial trail deserves its own scrutiny. Twelve cash deposits into Noel's bank account beginning in April 2018. The largest, $5,000, landed on July 30, 2019, roughly three weeks before Epstein was found dead. Chase Bank considered the pattern suspicious enough to report it to the FBI.
That's a bank, not a conspiracy theorist, flagging a federal employee's account.
The public has never received a satisfying explanation for these deposits. No official named in the available documents has addressed them. The charges against the guards were dropped, and the story was supposed to end there.
For years, anyone who raised questions about the circumstances of Epstein's death was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. The official narrative was tidy: a man facing the rest of his life in prison took his own life, and two lazy guards failed to notice. Tragic. Case closed.
But the official narrative now has a guard Googling the inmate she was supposed to be watching, minutes before he turned up dead. It has unexplained cash deposits flagged by one of the largest banks in the country. It has an inmate recounting a guard openly discussing a cover-up. It has falsified records. It has dropped charges.
The question was never whether Epstein deserved sympathy. He didn't. He was a convicted pedophile who trafficked in human misery. The question is whether the most high-profile federal inmate in America died under circumstances that powerful people had every incentive to arrange, and whether the institutions responsible for answering that question ever intended to.
Every new detail that surfaces points in the same direction. Not toward a definitive conclusion, but toward the realization that the people who were supposed to investigate this had the evidence in hand and let it gather dust.
Fifteen feet from the guards' desks. And nobody saw a thing.