The Counterterrorism Czar Without a Counterterrorism Plan by Hannah Allam

 

March unfolded like a stress test for U.S. counterterrorism authorities.

The month opened with a gunman in an Iranian-flag shirt killing three people at a bar in Texas. Then, an attack with homemade explosives outside the mayor’s mansion in New York City. Next came a deadly shooting March 12 on a Virginia college campus and, the same afternoon, a car-ramming at a Michigan synagogue. Days later, agents arrested a man charged with threatening a mass shooting at an Ohio mosque.

To current and former national security officials, these were omens, signs of the dangers they predicted last year when President Donald Trump began redirecting counterterrorism resources toward his mass deportation campaign.

They had warned of a diminished ability to respond should major global events inflame threats at home and abroad. Now, they say, the war in Iran has locked the Trump administration into a showdown with a sophisticated state sponsor of terrorism at a time when U.S. security agencies have hemorrhaged expertise and leadership is in flux.

The urgency of the moment has trained a spotlight on Sebastian Gorka, the White House counterterrorism adviser tasked with drafting a blueprint for fighting homegrown and international threats. Nearly a year ago, Gorka declared a national counterterrorism strategy “imminent.” By July, he was “on the cusp” of unveiling the plan — a phrase he repeated three months later in October. And again in January.

 To date, no strategy has appeared, and no explanation for the delay. When it is finally released, current and former counterterrorism personnel say, they expect a document rooted in politics rather than intelligence, with little detail on how to combat threats after a year of deep cuts across national security agencies.

 

“Strategies are only worth the amount of resources you put into them,” said a former senior official who served in the first Trump administration. “We’re entering very dangerous territory.”

The shifting promises are unsurprising to colleagues familiar with the brash, quick-tempered Gorka, a gate crasher in Washington’s buttoned-up defense establishment. His threats and boasts are laced with grandiose language and delivered in a booming, British-accented voice.

ProPublica interviewed more than two dozen national security specialists across party lines to trace Gorka’s path to one of the most sensitive jobs in government. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity because of the Trump administration’s record of retaliation.

His ascent, they said, tells the story of a startling transformation of the U.S. counterterrorism agenda in Trump’s second term. Eye-rolling over Gorka’s bombast has given way to anxiety about the administration’s preparedness to identify and stop major plots.

In the first Trump administration, Gorka lasted just seven months before being forced out by the “adults in the room,” as some staffers referred to the more moderate gatekeepers then around the president. In that brief stint, he reportedly struggled to obtain security clearance and faced an outcry over ties — which he denies — to a far-right group in Hungary.

After the exit, he hosted a right-wing podcast and popped up in ads selling fish-oil pills for pain relief. Then his fortunes changed again with the 2024 election that swept Trump back to power, this time with a more conspiratorially minded wing of the Make America Great Again movement. Gorka’s loyalty paid off with a phoenixlike return to the White House in a role sometimes called “counterterrorism czar.”

“I’ve been waiting 25 years for this job,” he confided on his podcast before taking office.

The first year of Trump’s second term was so frenzied that even the colorful Gorka faded into the background as the administration dismantled federal agencies and created a secretive, sometimes deadly immigration force. Now, however, the counterterrorism director’s role is coming back to light as hostilities roil the Middle East and heighten the risk of attacks in the United States or against American interests or allies overseas.

 

Days before U.S. military operations began in Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen personnel from a counterintelligence unit that monitored threats from Iran, CNN reported — part of a wider purge of some 300 agents specializing in counterterrorism.

Former officials said the sudden loss of that many colleagues is devastating to the sensitive, granular work of preventing attacks.

“I don’t think about it in raw numbers. I think about it in the wealth of expertise and knowledge that has been cut across all levels,” a former senior Justice Department official said. “What you lose is that nuance — with a smaller team, you can only go so deep.”

An FBI spokesperson said the bureau does not comment on personnel numbers but that agents are “working around the clock” and had disrupted four alleged U.S.-based terrorist plots in December alone. “The FBI continuously assesses and realigns our resources to ensure the safety of the American people,” the statement said.

 

ProPublica sought an interview with Gorka directly and via the White House. He did not respond to a detailed list of questions but assailed the requests in two posts on X, where he has 1.8 million followers. The first was a “no,” along with insults, addressed to several journalists who had asked him to comment on the strategy. In the second post, directed at ProPublica, Gorka accused the reporter of writing a “putrid piece of hackery.”

“If the criticism is we’re killing too many Jihadis (759) since 20th January 2024, or rescuing more US hostages in 12 months (106) than Biden did in 4 years, I stand by our historic wins for AMERICA First,” Gorka wrote, with an apparent typo. Trump took office in January 2025.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in an email that the restructuring of agencies “has made the entire foreign policy apparatus even more responsive to potential threats” and praised Gorka for “an incredible job” leading interagency talks.

“Anyone attempting to smear him and the President’s national security team is only revealing that they haven’t been paying attention for the past year,” Kelly wrote, “as anyone with eyes can see that our homeland is more secure than ever.”

 

Inattention “Can Be Deadly”

Gorka has emerged as one of the last men standing after a tumultuous stretch for U.S. counterterrorism leadership.

His original boss, national security adviser Mike Waltz, was booted to the United Nations after the Signalgate scandal, leaving the role to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was already juggling portfolios and is busier now with Iran.

Another blow came when Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned last month in protest of the war in Iran, which he said was pushing the United States “further toward decline and chaos.”

Gorka was livid. He told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that he called Kent the day of his resignation and left a message calling him an “utter disgrace” for criticizing the president in wartime.

“At the end of my voicemail,” Gorka recounted, “I said, ‘Good riddance to you, Joe.’”

Within days, Gorka was angling for Kent’s old job at the counterterrorism center, the government’s hub for analyzing terrorist threats, The Washington Post reported. Colleagues said they weren’t surprised — the role brings more power — but added that Gorka would likely face a tough Senate confirmation process if nominated.

The leadership disarray compounds the risks of hollowed-out counterterrorism operations, say national security analysts.

At a time when hundreds of personnel typically would’ve been assigned to thwarting attacks amid international conflict, the administration “has gutted this capacity through firings, forced resignations, and slashed budgets,” a panel of national security analysts wrote in the journal Lawfare.

 

The Justice Department acknowledged in budget proposal documents that its National Security Division is facing “unprecedented personnel constraints,” struggling to keep up with increasing caseloads and a 40% drop in the number of prosecutors.

At the State Department, former officials said, Iran specialists at the counterterrorism bureau were dispersed to regional offices where counterterrorism is one of many priorities. The entire team focused on threat prevention was eliminated. As a senior official who recently left put it, “They keep saying we can do it all even though they have half an arm now, and no legs.”

Since the Iran war started, officials say, some counterterrorism specialists who had been reassigned to immigration have returned to their old roles, creating a whiplash that can disrupt investigations and analysis.

“If you’ve dropped all the cases and have taken people off the target set for an extended period of time, you can’t just drop back in and pick up where you left off,” said Ben Connable, a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who leads the nonprofit Battle Research Group. “The men and women who are back on that portfolio are going to have to play catch-up, and that conveys risk.”

The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t published any national terrorism advisory bulletins, periodic updates to alert the public to the current threat level, since September. It has not released the annual Homeland Threat Assessment since Trump returned to office, according to Colin Clarke, executive director of the security-focused Soufan Center, and fellow terrorism scholar Jacob Ware. A DHS spokesperson said updates on the documents “will be provided following the end of the Democrat DHS shutdown.”

Gorka’s long-awaited strategy, Clarke and Ware said in an op-ed, could help clarify White House thinking on how to handle threats when “defenses are divided, disorganized and under-resourced.”

“This is the moment for the Trump administration to demonstrate that it recognizes the stakes,” the researchers wrote. “In counterterrorism, inattention can be deadly.”

 

Winding Path to White House

Gorka’s path to the White House began in the cottage industry of self-styled terrorism experts that sprang up after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

He became a regular on a training circuit where speakers received lucrative contracts from international governments and law enforcement agencies to teach about the threat of militant Islamist movements. Many trainers of that era maligned Islam and backed policies that violated the rights of ordinary American Muslims in the name of counterterrorism, according to civil liberties watchdogs.

“For him, counterterrorism is kinetic and it’s against one type of enemy: the jihadist enemy,” said an associate who has known Gorka for two decades.

Born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, he attended college in London and served as a reserve intelligence soldier in the British military. He later spent time in Hungary, dabbling in nationalist politics and earning a doctorate degree.

In 2008, Gorka moved to the United States with his American wife, also a counterterrorism specialist, and eventually became a naturalized citizen — “a legal immigrant,” as he is introduced at events.

 

As an instructor at think tanks and military institutes, he pushed an image of Muslims as inherently violent, according to current and former colleagues. They say his fixation on Islamist militancy crosses into a more generalized bigotry, a claim Gorka has dismissed as “absurd.” He insists that his focus is “the war inside Islam” between radicals and Western-aligned Muslim leaders. “We want to see our friends win that war,” he has said.

A former senior Justice Department official recalled an FBI agent lobbying hard to get Gorka hired as a counterterrorism trainer several years ago. The official “didn’t feel comfortable clearing him in on my credentials” for an office visit so instead drove over an hour to watch a lecture.

 

Gorka’s talk was “reductionist” in its portrayals of Islam as locked in a civilizational war with the West, the former official recalled. Immediately after the event, the official advised against hiring Gorka because his teachings potentially violated department principles against bias in training.

“I came back and said to the U.S. attorneys, ‘Let’s be careful here,’” the former official said. “They put a flag.”

Concerns about Gorka’s approach flared again when he joined the first Trump administration through the MAGA strategist Steve Bannon. Gorka, who had worked at Bannon’s right-wing Breitbart outlet, was appointed to the Strategic Initiatives Group, an in-house think tank at the White House.

The appointment prompted 55 House Democrats to demand his firing in a letter calling his association with far-right groups “deeply troubling.” They focused on the Hungarian nationalist group Vitézi Rend, whose medal Gorka wore on a military tunic to Trump’s inaugural events. Gorka has denied belonging to the organization, which had Nazi ties during World War II, and said the medal honors his father’s escape from communism.

Gorka’s qualifications for the job also came under scrutiny. Critics dug out and posted his dissertation, which was pilloried by other academics for a simplistic chart that placed terrorism on a spectrum somewhere between “peacekeeping” and “thermonuclear war.”

 

He eventually was ousted in August 2017, days after Bannon, in an internal power struggle. In his resignation letter, Gorka blamed his departure on the idea that “forces that do not support the MAGA promise are — for now — ascendant within the White House.”

Reporters spotted him outside loading his belongings into the back of a Mustang convertible with vanity plates “ART WAR.”

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Dream Job

Gorka’s comeback symbolizes the hard-right swing of Trump’s second term.

Even some prominent conservatives were shocked by Gorka’s return. Michael Anton, who also served in the last Trump administration, reportedly withdrew from consideration for a senior national security role rather than work alongside him.

The jabs don’t seem to faze Gorka, who tells a story of standing outside the White House in January 2025, ready to swipe his badge the moment it was activated after Trump’s swearing-in. He has referred to his role as a dream job.

 

“I pinch myself every single day,” Gorka told the “Triggernometry” podcast.

The counterterrorism director’s responsibilities include coordinating policy for external threats as well as leading efforts to free wrongfully detained Americans around the globe. Gorka can be remarkably candid and mercurial for a senior official with such a sensitive remit, according to hours of his public remarks reviewed by ProPublica.

He has exploded at journalists (“Go to hell!”) and cut off interviews when he didn’t like the questioning (“We’re done!”). He repeats anti-immigrant tropes and boasts that “Judeo-Christian civilization is the ultimate form of human existence.” He has urged Christians and Jews to buy guns to defend themselves “on the front line of the war between civilization and barbarity.”

Gorka’s public remarks also offer behind-the-scenes glimpses of working for a boss he calls “the most consequential American president” of modern times. At one event, he pulled out his phone to let the audience hear his ringtone: Trump delivering his classic “tired of winning” line.

 

Gorka has said his workday begins with a drive to the White House while listening to his favorite podcast, hosted by pro-Trump military historian Victor Davis Hanson. Upon arrival, he has to turn in his cellphone before spending up to 12 hours a day in “my SCIF,” the acronym for the secure chambers where senior officials discuss classified matters.

On Thursdays, he convenes an interagency discussion of the latest threats. He name drops “Marco,” “Kash” and other friends in senior roles: “They ask me as I bump into them in the West Wing: ‘Have you killed more jihadis today?’”

In his office, Gorka keeps a globe on his desk and a large poster of the Twin Towers on the wall, an ever-present reminder of 9/11. His team’s custom lanyards are printed with “WWFY & WWKY” in honor of a Trump line: “We will find you and we will kill you.”

 

Cloud of “Red Mist”

On Gorka’s watch, targeted militants don’t simply die.

They are “human filth” who are “obliterated,” he tells audiences, describing bodies stacked “like cordwood” after receiving “eternal justice” from the Trump administration’s “hammers of hell.”

Before the Iran conflict, Gorka was focused on a revival of the “war on terror” in parts of Africa and the Middle East. He claims U.S. strikes have killed more than 750 militants he has described as “leading jihadis” with “American blood on their hands or who were plotting attacks against Americans.”

“If we know where you are, anywhere in the world, we can kill you within 72 hours if the president says so,” he boasted last spring.

In the example Gorka shares most often, he briefed the president on a militant recruiter in Somalia who had been under surveillance for over a year during President Joe Biden’s administration. On the spot, he said, Trump ordered the fighter killed. Around 30 hours later, on Feb. 1, 2025, Gorka says, he watched live from the White House Situation Room as a U.S. strike vaporized the fighter into “a cloud of red mist,” a description he has repeated at least half a dozen times.

 

He sometimes screens declassified video of the militant being blown to pieces, as several State Department staffers found out when they watched him speak last year. Unsettled, they tried to rush out after the event but were corralled to flank Gorka in a photo op. “I look like a hostage,” one person in the picture said.

The staffers — since pushed out of government by cuts — said they had expected Gorka’s bravado but were horrified by his glee over what they described as a “snuff film.” Many other personnel expressed similar concerns that issues requiring level-headed professionalism were entrusted to someone they regarded as a volatile ideologue openly preaching bloodlust.

“He’s trying to show off” to the president, one longtime counterterrorism official said. “‘I nuked another 100 jihadis — pay attention to me.’”

 

Gorka’s claims of battlefield victories are often exaggerated or misleading about who was targeted and why, according to security officials and counterterrorism analysts. They say there are fewer than 10 “leading” Islamist militants in the world, and the idea of killing hundreds is absurd. The White House did not address a question about whether the numbers are inflated.

“It’s the word ‘leading’ that gets me,” said Clarke, of the Soufan Center. “I have no doubt they’re killing people, but they’re probably foot soldiers.”

 

Reports of civilian casualties from U.S. operations also muddy the death tolls, especially in Somalia and Yemen. But the Trump administration has shown little interest in investigating; it gutted a Pentagon office tasked with addressing civilian harm.

Take the “red mist” strike, for example. It targeted Ahmed Maeleninine, an Islamic State group recruiter who was hiding out in a cave complex in Somalia. Gorka said the Biden administration had surveilled Maeleninine for more than a year without striking. That’s true, said one former counterterrorism official with direct knowledge of the intelligence involved, but there was more to the story.

“He left out the part about the women and children,” said the official, who recently left government. “I knew the reason we hadn’t gone after him before was because he had his wife and children around him 24/7. Now, maybe they got lucky and found one time where they got a clear strike.”

U.S. Africa Command, which oversees the military’s Somalia operations, said in announcing the February 2025 strike that “approximately 14 ISIS-Somalia operatives were killed and no civilians were harmed.”

 

New Urgency

Gorka’s formal title is deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

The role was upgraded from “special assistant” in recent years, though officials say the powers of the office have weakened since the days of early counterterrorism czars like Richard Clarke, who served under three presidents and revealed that senior leaders had ignored repeated warnings about al-Qaida before the 9/11 attacks.

Christopher Costa, a retired Army intelligence officer who spent a year in the same job under the first Trump administration, described the role as “the convening authority for all things counterterrorism for the president of the United States.”

 

“It was rolling up your sleeves,” Costa recalled. “It was more than just policy work — it was mitigating current threats.”

Iranian threats against U.S. targets have brought renewed attention to the lack of a Trump counterterrorism doctrine.

Gorka has been tight-lipped about the contents of his strategy. Officials who typically would’ve been involved in interagency discussions say they haven’t been consulted. One person briefed on a working draft summed it up as “Sunnis. Shiites. Cartels.” Others said they expected the addition of far-left antifascist militants, a tiny subset of the extremist threat that receives disproportionate attention from the Trump administration.

Gorka told another colleague he was writing the document himself, without traditional input from partner federal agencies. “There was no ‘U.S. government strategy’ involved,” the colleague said. “It might as well have been a new book he was writing.”

At his recent Council on Foreign Relations appearance, Gorka was asked — again — when the strategy would be released. He glanced at his staff and shifted in his seat.

He confided that he had “put my life’s work into this massive document” but had received feedback in recent days to “Cut it down, Gorka!” He said he would make trims and send the draft back to senior aides in hopes of getting a presidential signoff.

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Gorka told the audience.

 

 

New federal figures reveal 1 in 3 US households struggle to pay energy bills, but the reality is likely even worse

 By Diana Hernández 

 

Americans’ concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect.

The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, a representative survey of U.S. households conducted every four to five years by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. These early results show that energy insecurity, a hidden hardship defined as the inability to adequately meet household energy needs, affects millions of American households and is worsening quickly.

As a scholar who has spent years sitting in hundreds of homes around the country, hearing firsthand accounts about energy insecurity, I turn to this survey data to quantify the suffering I have witnessed up close.

The latest tranche of data was collected in 2024 and released in March 2026, but full results won’t be available for some time. The preceding survey was taken in 2020, but results weren’t finalized until August 2025.

Though that data is incomplete and slow to emerge, the picture is unambiguous: Even households once confident they could afford energy costs are at risk of falling behind on bills, making hard trade-offs to keep the lights on and living in homes they can’t afford to properly heat and cool.

 

Energy costs are hitting more American households harder than in past years. Olga Rolenko/Moment via Getty Images

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Americans’ concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect.

The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, a representative survey of U.S. households conducted every four to five years by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. These early results show that energy insecurity, a hidden hardship defined as the inability to adequately meet household energy needs, affects millions of American households and is worsening quickly.

As a scholar who has spent years sitting in hundreds of homes around the country, hearing firsthand accounts about energy insecurity, I turn to this survey data to quantify the suffering I have witnessed up close.

The latest tranche of data was collected in 2024 and released in March 2026, but full results won’t be available for some time. The preceding survey was taken in 2020, but results weren’t finalized until August 2025.

Though that data is incomplete and slow to emerge, the picture is unambiguous: Even households once confident they could afford energy costs are at risk of falling behind on bills, making hard trade-offs to keep the lights on and living in homes they can’t afford to properly heat and cool.

Transparent, research-based, written by experts – and always free.

A pandemic success story

The survey asks respondents whether, in the prior 12 months, they received a disconnection notice threatening to terminate their home’s electricity, gas or other fuel service because they hadn’t paid the bills. It also asks whether any of those services were in fact disconnected; whether they bought less food or skipped taking medication to be able to afford their energy bills; or whether they left their home at an unhealthy temperature because running or repairing the heating or cooling equipment would be too expensive.

The result is a portrait of a significant swath of the population that has a hard time affording housing and energy, and who adopt various coping strategies to get through.

A closer look at the data over time reveals that more Americans live with energy insecurity now than in years past. In 2024, 43.6 million American households – 32.9% of all homes – reported experiencing some form of energy insecurity. In 2015, that figure was 31.3%, and in 2020 it was 27.2%.

The lower rate in 2020 confirms that pandemic-era government policies, including cash relief payments and bans on utility shutoffs, were effective, though they were too short-lived to last through the 2024 survey data.

Recent surge hits new households

Middle-income households, those earning between $60,000 and $200,000 a year, were hit hardest by post-pandemic inflation of housing costs, food prices and interest rates on loans and mortgages. The new survey data shows that energy costs added to the squeeze.

In 2020, 20.1% of households earning between $60,000 and $100,000 reported experiencing problems affording their energy. In 2024, 32.1% of those households did – a 12 percentage point increase, more than double the overall national increase of 5.7 percentage points.

There were also racial differences. Historically, Black, Hispanic and American Indian households have been disproportionately likely to have trouble affording energy bills. And between 2020 and 2024, those households’ risk grew.

But white households’ risk climbed even more steeply: In 2020, 20.1% of white households reported trouble with energy costs. By 2024, 26.4% of them did.

 

Working-age adults and seniors are increasingly insecure

In 2024, higher proportions of householders under 60, and of householders with children, reported struggling to meet their home energy needs than in 2020. The similarities in these increases verify that younger, working-age households are more strained.

Yet working-age adults without children, particularly moderate-income renters, don’t have as much potential support as seniors when they fall behind on utility bills. That’s because energy assistance programs direct support toward those who have historically been the most vulnerable.

 

Seniors have historically been among the most protected, partly by the designs of government and corporate programs to assist with energy costs and partly because wealth usually peaks in later life. Even so, the share of older Americans experiencing energy insecurity climbed to 1 in 4 in 2024 from roughly 1 in 5 in 2020 – a sign that long-standing safeguards for older Americans are no longer making as much of a difference as they used to.

Housing in good repair is no longer enough protection

An efficient home has long been considered a solution to high energy bills. But the data shows that’s not enough anymore. People who live in well-insulated homes and those with double-pane windows saw their likelihood of energy insecurity rise by a similar amount as those who live in poorly insulated homes.

People in uninsulated homes still have the highest risk of being unable to afford their energy costs, though their risk grew more slowly than those in homes with better insulation.

And people with single-pane windows, already in a tenuous position, saw their risk of being unable to afford their energy costs rise by 7 percentage points.

 

Where need is greatest, help is least available

Geographically, the steepest increases in energy insecurity were found in warm-weather regions. The Southwest experienced the largest increase of any climate category – 10 percentage points – followed by the Southeast and Gulf Coast, which rose from 30.1% to 35.6%.

Though rising temperatures are increasing the need for cooling in warm-weather climates, most attention and government assistance for energy costs continue to be concentrated on the need for home heating in cold-weather states.

But even in the Northeast, where federal assistance with energy costs helps large proportions of the population, higher percentages of households had trouble affording energy costs.

 

A problem that has outgrown its framing

The severity of energy insecurity remains highest among the most disadvantaged Americans, which includes low-income people, renters and Black, Hispanic and American Indian households.

But the trend lines show that energy insecurity is now spreading into middle-income, white, working-age families in efficient homes in warm-weather climates – families that previously had relatively little trouble meeting their household energy needs.

The 2024 RECS data indicates that the safety net designed to address energy affordability is insufficient and does not match the regions or populations where energy insecurity is actually growing.

The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides money to help families pay their utility bills, was created in response to the oil crisis of the 1970s. It was built to prioritize home heating assistance – not cooling – and help for people in immediate danger of having life-preserving utilities shut off. Little has changed in its focus or funding level since its inception.

Meanwhile, the economics of household energy costs have shifted dramatically and are quickly evolving.

New wars are sustaining old energy regimes, driving price volatility through the same fossil-fuel supply chains the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program was designed to buffer against half a century ago. On the domestic front, meanwhile, data centers are increasing residential electricity rates. Clean energy developments that might have shielded households from price shocks have been politicized and curtailed, harming both affordability and public health.

The 2024 data – high-quality and reliable as it is – is already behind in an escalating energy affordability crisis. Many more Americans are having trouble keeping the lights, heating and cooling on in recent years, and it’s a trend that may already be worse than what the most recent data shows.

Evangelicals amplify Trump's religious framing of Iran war by Nathan Layne and Tim Reid

April 8 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is using Christian rhetoric to rally core supporters behind the increasingly unpopular war with Iran, religious and political experts say - a message amplified from pulpits by evangelical leaders who cast it as a struggle between good and evil. Trump, who announced a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday, ​has struggled to persuade Americans to back the war, which has triggered a surge in energy prices, killed American servicemen and Iranians, and further eroded his standing among voters. Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone further, citing scripture to justify the use of "overwhelming violence" against enemies he said "deserve no mercy." That message has been echoed by conservative Christian leaders - from those close to Trump like Robert Jeffress, an influential Texas pastor, to small-town preachers. They have emphasized the biblical significance of the modern state of Israel, which many evangelicals associate with a prophecy about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

 

EVANGELICALS SEE IRAN WAR AS GOOD VS EVIL

Jackson Lahmeyer, an evangelical pastor and Trump supporter ​who is running for the U.S. Congress, said in an interview he has told his Tulsa, Oklahoma, congregation in some Sunday sermons that wars are typically battles between good and evil and that Iran was no exception.

"Evil people exist, and ​if you don't deal with them, they'll deal with you," he said. "Good and evil, that's the story of the Bible. The good news is that at the end good always wins."

White evangelicals are ⁠among Trump’s strongest supporters: more than 80% voted for him in 2024, according to exit polls, and surveys have shown they account for about one-third of his support.

This political reality is a major reason why Trump and members of his cabinet are increasingly leaning ​into religious framing of the conflict, several political and religious experts told Reuters.

 

"Look at Mr. Trump's standing in the polls and recognize he only has a little more than a third of the public on his side. A big part of that constituency is made ​up of white evangelical Christians," said Jim Guth, a political science professor at Furman University in South Carolina who studies religion in U.S. politics.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump's use of Christian rhetoric but spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in a statement that the president had taken bold action "to eliminate the threat of this terrorist regime, which will protect the American people for generations to come."

To be sure, U.S. presidents have throughout history invoked the Christian faith in times of war. But the experts interviewed by Reuters said the Trump administration's use of stark, unequivocal language to frame and ​justify violence in explicitly religious terms sets it apart.

 

"It's the same language as the crusades of the Middle Ages. You know, we must stop the infidel, we must defeat the wicked," said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah University who has written extensively ​about evangelicals and politics. "We've never seen anything like this in American history."

The overt religious messaging has drawn criticism from some Democrats and left-leaning Christian leaders, who see it as a misguided use of faith to justify an unpopular five-week-old war that has left 13 U.S. service members and ‌thousands of Iranians ⁠dead.

Addressing tens of thousands in St. Peter's Square on Palm Sunday, which opens Holy Week ahead of Easter for 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Leo called the conflict "atrocious" and said the name of Jesus should never be invoked to propagate a war.

Doug Pagitt, a progressive evangelical pastor, said he believes the administration was deploying a "very specific Christian narrative" to keep evangelicals onside and Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) coalition intact.

 

"What they are saying is Trump is on God's side. You can rest easy at night," he said. "Because without the Christian coalition, the MAGA support base gets very fractured."

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published last week, 60% of respondents opposed U.S. military strikes on Iran. The survey highlighted a deep partisan divide, with 74% of Republicans backing the war versus only 22% of Democrats.

TRUMP LIKENED TO JESUS IN ​WHITE HOUSE MEETING

The prominent evangelist Franklin Graham has praised the strikes ​on Iran in biblical terms and likened Trump to the ⁠biblical figure of Esther, a Jewish queen who, according to the Bible, was elevated by God to save her people from annihilation in ancient Persia, now modern-day Iran.

Ken Peters, leader of the Patriot Church in Tennessee, delivered that message to his congregation this past Sunday, voicing hope that the war would yield a "pro-Israel, pro-America Iran" — a comment that drew applause, according to a video recording the pro-Trump ​pastor shared with Reuters.

"We see Trump as a man of the world that God is using to help us," Peters said in an interview, adding that he was supportive of framing ​the war in religious terms.

Hegseth in ⁠particular has used overtly religious language to frame the war. On Sunday, he likened the rescue of the U.S. airman inside Iran to the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.

"A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing," he said. "God is good."

In a statement to Reuters, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said wartime leaders have long invoked the Christian faith, pointing to the example of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt distributing Bibles to troops during World War Two.

"Secretary Hegseth, along with millions of Americans, is a proud Christian. Encouraging the American people ⁠to pray for our ​troops is not controversial."

Similar religious rhetoric was used by evangelical pastors close to Trump at an Easter event with Trump at the White House last week. ​Televangelist Paula White-Cain, senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, likened Trump to Jesus, saying both were "betrayed and arrested and falsely accused."

Jeffress, the First Baptist Church pastor in Texas who was among the faith leaders who laid hands on Trump during the meeting, told Reuters he did not believe the Iran war was against ​Islam or Muslims, but "a spiritual war between good and evil, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan."

Reporting by Tim Reid in Washington and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Additional reporting by Jason Lange in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin and Edmund Klamann

Trump budget seeks $1.5T in defense spending alongside cuts in domestic programs By LISA MASCARO and KEVIN FREKING

 

President Donald Trump has proposed boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion in his 2027 budget released Friday, the largest such request in decades, reflecting his emphasis on U.S. military investments over domestic programs.

The sizable increase for the Pentagon had been telegraphed by the Republican president even before the the U.S.-led war against Iran. The president’s plan would also reduce spending on non-defense programs by 10% by shifting some responsibilities to state and local governments.

 

“President Trump is committed to rebuilding our military to secure peace through strength,” the budget said.

The president’s annual budget is considered a reflection of the administration’s values and does not carry the force of law. The massive document typically highlights an administration’s priorities, but Congress, which handles federal spending issues, is free to reject it and often does.

 This year’s White House document, prepared by Budget Director Russ Vought, is intended to provide a road map from the president to Congress as lawmakers build their own budgets and annual appropriations bills to keep the government funded. Vought spoke to House GOP lawmakers on a private call Thursday. 

 

Trump, speaking ahead of an address to the nation this week about the Iran war, signaled the military is his priority, setting up a clash ahead in Congress.

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” Trump said at a private White House event Wednesday.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal.”

 

Immigration enforcement, air traffic controllers and national parks

Among the budget priorities the White House called for:

-Supporting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and deportation operations by eliminating refugee resettlement aid programs, maintaining Immigration and Customs Enforcement funds at current year levels and drawing on last’s year’s increases for the Department of Homeland Security funds to continue opening detention facilities, including 100,000 beds for adults and 30,000 for families.

 

A 13% increase in funding for the Department of Justice, which the White House said would be focused on violent criminals.

-- A $10 billion fund within the National Park Service for beautification projects in Washington, D.C..

-- A $481 million increase in funding to enhance aviation safety and support an air traffic controller hiring surge.

With the nation running nearly $2 trillion annual deficits and the debt swelling past $39 trillion, the federal balance sheets have long been operating in the red.

About two-thirds of the nation’s estimated $7 trillion in annual spending covers the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs, as well as Social Security income, which are essentially growing — along with an aging population — on autopilot.

The rest of the annual budget has typically been more evenly split between defense and domestic accounts, nearly $1 trillion each, which is where much of the debate in Congress takes place. 

 

The GOP’s big tax breaks bill that Trump signed into law last year boosted his priorities beyond the budget process — with at least $150 billion for the Pentagon over the next several years, and $170 billion for Trump’s immigration and deportation operations at the Department of Homeland Security.

The administration is counting on its allies in the Republican-led Congress to again push the president’s priorities, particularly the Defense Department spending, through its own budget process, as it was able to do last year.

It suggests $1.1 trillion for defense would come through the regular appropriations process, which typically requires support from both parties for approval, while $350 billion would come through the budget reconciliation process that Republicans can accomplish on their own, through party-line majority votes.

 

Congress still fighting over 2026 spending

The president’s budget arrives as the House and Senate remain tangled over current-year spending and stalemated over DHS funding, with Democrats demanding changes to Trump’s immigration enforcement regime that Republicans are unwilling to accept.

Trump announced Thursday he would sign an executive order to pay all DHS workers who have gone without paychecks during the record-long partial government shutdown that has reached 49 days. The Republican leadership in Congress reached an agreement this week on a path forward to fund the department, but lawmakers are away on spring break and have not yet voted on any new legislation.

Last year, in the president’s first budget since returning to the White House, Trump sought to fulfill his promise to vastly reduce the size and scope of the federal government, reflecting the efforts of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

As DOGE slashed through federal offices and Vought sought to claw back funds, Congress did not always agree.

 

For example, Trump sought a roughly one-fifth decrease in non-defense spending for the current budget year ending Sept. 30, but Congress kept such spending relatively flat.

Some of the programs that Trump tried to eliminate entirely, such as assisting families with their energy costs, got a slight uptick in funding. Others got flat funding, such as the Community Development Block Grants that states and local communities use to fund an array of projects intended mostly to help low-income communities through new parks, sewer systems and affordable housing.

Lawmakers have also focused on ensuring the administration spends federal dollars as directed by Congress. This year’s spending bills contained what Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, described as “hundreds upon hundreds of specific funding levels and directives” that the administration is required to follow.

 

Traveling Along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail

 

Nine Black College Students Were Arrested in 1961 for Reading at a Segregated Public Library. Their Contributions to the Civil Rights Movement Have Long Been Overlooked

by  Kayla Randall - Digital Editor, Museums

 When nine Black college students walked into a segregated public library in Mississippi on March 27, 1961, they knew what to expect next: Staff would call the police, and they would probably be arrested if they refused to leave. According to local laws, being Black in a space designated only for the white public constituted a breach of peace. By stepping through the doors of the Jackson Municipal Library, they would be risking physical harm and verbal abuse. They might even face an angry crowd.

 But the students, from the historically Black Tougaloo College, had trained for this moment. This was a sit-in, a nonviolent direct-action protest, and they were prepared. They’d been guided by the likes of Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first Mississippi field officer, who was known for his public investigation into the murder of Emmett Till and his fight against Jim Crow laws in the state; Ernst Borinski, a Jewish lawyer who’d fled Nazi Germany, then accepted a position teaching sociology at Tougaloo after World War II; and Tougaloo chaplain John Mangram.

 The civic-minded students wanted to effect change in Mississippi. Entering that library would boldly oppose the state’s unyielding system of segregation and highlight the disparities they experienced as Black residents.

 The Tougaloo Nine’s demonstration would etch their names in Mississippi history: Meredith Anding Jr., James Bradford (better known as Sammy), Alfred Cook, Geraldine Edwards, Janice Jackson, Joseph Jackson Jr., Albert Lassiter, Evelyn Pierce and Ethel Sawyer. Nationally, though, their story is “often overlooked” in the broader civil rights narrative, says historian Daphne Chamberlain, chief program officer at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Mississippi and a Tougaloo College alumna.

 

At the library, most of the students found the books they were looking for and sat down to read. As expected, a librarian called the police. Despite the presence of law enforcement, the Tougaloo Nine didn’t move. Eventually, the officers told them they were under arrest.

“Why can’t I go in and read a book? It comes back to that, the simplicity of it all,” says Tony Bounds, an archivist and institutional historian at Tougaloo College. The response to this question at the time was, “Well, you have a Black library across town,” he adds. But the Tougaloo Nine had done their homework. They’d specifically requested texts that weren’t available at the Black library.

 

Following their arrest, the students were held in jail for more than 30 hours. Behind bars that night, Jackson Jr. reflected “on Emmett Till, the history of lynching connected with Mississippi,” as he told OC Weekly in 2015. “The later it got that night, I was in fear of my life.”

Black community members, particularly students at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University), a nearby historically Black public school, rallied around the Tougaloo Nine and began protesting in support of them. Although authorities had arrested the Tougaloo students without resorting to violence, the Jackson State students’ demonstrations sparked a brutal crackdown. As the young people marched, police officers armed with billy clubs, tear gas and dogs forcefully dispersed their gathering.

 When the Tougaloo Nine appeared in court on March 29, police beat a crowd of Black onlookers, including Evers, who had gathered outside the courthouse. They also attacked the group with dogs.

 

Law enforcement officers had recruited canines for policing long before 1961, but their use in Jackson represented what the author and researcher M.J. O’Brien, in his book The Tougaloo Nine: The Jackson Library Sit-In at the Crossroads of Civil War and Civil Rights, describes as “the first attacks by police dogs on nonviolent crowds during the civil rights era, two years before the more sensational attacks in Birmingham grabbed national headlines.”

The students pleaded not guilty to the breach of peace charge, but a judge found them guilty anyway. As first-time offenders, they were each fined $100 and sentenced to 30 days in jail, although the court ruled that this time would be suspended if they pledged to avoid participating in other protests. They all agreed.

 In a letter to NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, Evers wrote, “These young people exhibited the greatest amount of courage in the face of mounting tension and were reported in our local newspapers as being ‘orderly, intelligent and cooperative.’”

 

The Black community’s embrace helped keep the students afloat in the aftermath of their sit-in. While they were in jail, this assistance “was demonstrated most tangibly in the cookies, cakes, hot food and snacks that individual families, mostly Black women, brought to the jail to help support this newly forming resistance movement,” O’Brien writes.

The college’s leadership also supported the Tougaloo Nine. “After they’re released from jail, they go back to class,” Bounds says. “They’re not expelled.” All eventually went on to earn bachelor’s degrees, most from Tougaloo but some from other institutions. Their sit-in and the protests that followed had reverberated in Jackson. College students were helping the NAACP lead the fight against segregation and anti-Black discrimination in Mississippi’s capital.

“It’s a game-changing moment, certainly within Mississippi, which at one point in time had the highest lynching rate in the 20th century,” Bounds says.

 For the students, simply reading in the Jackson library “was an act of defiance,” Bounds says. “It was an open act. Jackson had never seen anything like it.”

 

The Tougaloo Nine have only recently had their collective story told in detail, most notably in O’Brien’s book, which was released in the fall of 2025.

“It’s a project that is long overdue, but he had been working on it for several years,” says Chamberlain, who was one of the book’s early reviewers. Through interviews and deep research, O’Brien wove together the events of March 27, 1961, and beyond. He was able to talk to all but one of the nine students, as Pierce died before O’Brien started working on the book.

The author places the Tougaloo Nine’s actions in the context of state and local history. “Such a direct assault on segregation had never been tried before in Mississippi’s capital city,” O’Brien writes. He provides insights on the day of the sit-in, down to the weather.

 That morning was cold with rain on the way.

“Lassiter remembered specifically deciding to wear a trench coat to keep off the chill and the rain, yes, but also ‘to provide an extra layer of protection’ against whatever beatings might come,” O’Brien writes. According to O’Brien, Edwards later recalled, “I was very concerned that I dress well and that I dressed warm. That I was comfortable. That I was well protected.”

 As the students approached the building, the significance of their protest dawned on them. Janice Jackson remembered walking into the municipal library as a “surreal” experience. “It was like I was there doing what I was supposed to do, but I felt like I was lifted out of my body or something,” she added, per O’Brien’s book.

The Tougaloo Nine were determined, though, and they continued in their mission.

 Evers had helped the students plan the read-in. He was “an energetic man who was committed to bringing about integration in public facilities,” Jackson Jr. told OC Weekly. The protest was executed exactly as planned: The Tougaloo Nine aimed to get arrested only for breach of peace. As soon as they were placed under arrest, they got up and followed officers’ instructions to avoid charges of resisting detainment.

 

The students’ time at Tougaloo primed them all to become leaders in their own ways. After graduating, four of the nine went on to become educators. Lassiter served three decades in the Air Force. Anding pursued careers in both the military and education, enlisting in the Air Force before teaching at universities.

A tenth student who was part of the demonstration but has long been excluded from the story is Jerry Keahey. A graduating senior at the time, he was the photographer behind a frequently distributed group picture of the nine ahead of their read-in. “That’s a really important role because he was able to document by way of camera what was going on at the time,” Chamberlain says. Keahey also helped the students travel to the library that day. Driving in two separate cars, Mangram and Keahey dropped the students off near their destination.

 Tougaloo is a small private school with a big history. Known as “the oasis,” it was founded in 1869 by the American Missionary Association, a Christian abolitionist organization. For the past 15 years, its enrollment has hovered around 600 to 900 students; that number would have been even smaller in the 1960s.

 The college is located “off the beaten path,” Bounds says, yet it has welcomed such distinguished visitors as Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael.

 

“You cannot detach Mississippi’s civil rights movement from Tougaloo,” Bounds notes. “Those are two synonymous terms.”

The school fostered an environment in which the Tougaloo Nine could grow into activists. Previous protests also laid the foundation for these students. One of the earliest library sit-ins took place in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1939, when a group of Black men visited a public facility that was open only to white community members. As the men picked up books and began reading, library staff called the police, who arrested them and escorted them out of the building.

 In 1960, the year before the Tougaloo Nine’s protest, four Black men participated in one of the most well-known sit-ins of the era—at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. This protest inspired an array of similar demonstrations across the American South.

 “You had sit-ins, you had read-ins, you had church-ins,” Bounds says. “On the coast, you had wade-ins, because the beaches were segregated.”

 

In an email, Kevin Strait, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, says, “By targeting public spaces like lunch counters and libraries, participants directly confronted the daily practice of racial exclusion and helped spark the public awareness and pressure that made desegregation possible.” The Tougaloo Nine’s action was “a powerful statement about access—and who gets to learn, gather and belong in our shared public spaces,” he adds.

Making the public library the focus of the their demonstration put a spotlight on the uneven distribution of educational resources to segregated public schools. Often, Black students received “secondhand books that are years old,” Chamberlain says. Despite 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which deemed segregation in American public schools unconstitutional, “states like Mississippi were rolling out desegregation as slow as they possibly could,” she notes.

 The books that the Tougaloo Nine picked up in the Jackson library, while obscure and selected for strategic reasons, symbolized freedom. Bradford chose Introduction to Parasitology, while Cook picked Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology—a text that “would become central to his later profession but n

Following the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, “one of the definitions of freedom became access to education,” Chamberlain says. “As an enslaved person, you could not be learned, you could not know how to read. It was to keep people powerless and of course ignorant to the world around them, and to also keep them subservient in this status that they were born into.”

It took another three years for the goals of the Tougaloo Nine’s sit-in to be enshrined in federal law. The students—and the broader civil rights movement—lost a leader along the way.

 

In June 1963, 37-year-old Evers was murdered, shot in the back in his own driveway. Byron De La Beckwith, a known white supremacist, was convicted of the killing three decades later, in 1994. Evers had been working tirelessly right until the end: Two weeks before his death, he shepherded another Jackson sit-in that became national news. Several Tougaloo students sat at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter, where they were harassed and attacked by a hostile crowd.

The struggle for desegregation continued, and in July 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation of public facilities and race-based discrimination in the U.S.

 Later, in the 1980s, some members of the Tougaloo Nine received notices that the City of Jackson had absolved them of their breach of peace violations. But they still faced difficult realities: “Some complained that the misdemeanor continued to show up on their formal criminal record for years to come,” O’Brien writes.

 Today, four of the Tougaloo Nine are still living: Jackson Jr., Edwards, Sawyer and Lassiter. Edwards wrote about her life in the 2011 book Back to Mississippi. Members also gathered periodically for anniversary celebrations of their sit-in.

In 2017, the state dedicated a historical marker outside the Jackson Municipal Library to the students and their groundbreaking action. The group’s surviving members and their families were also honored at a local baseball game in 2022.

 Back in 1961, the Jackson library’s sea of books represented everything that the Tougaloo Nine were trying to achieve. Chamberlain says, “Just by being able to pick up a book and having access to that knowledge, it opened a world of opportunity for those nine young people.”

ow was a convenient foil,” according to O’Brien.

 

 

---

 

Former Alex Jones employee says: 'It was nonsense, it was lies' by Dave Davies

 

Alex Jones, founder of the media company Infowars, had made a fortune promoting conspiracy theories online. He's insisted that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job and claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, staged by the government to justify seizing the firearms of American citizens.

Josh Owens spent four years in his 20s as a video editor and field producer for Jones and his media company. "In Jones' world, it was all about making things look cinematic," Owens says. "We would go out there, we would shoot videos and almost like Vice News — like, we were in the weeds, we were showing what was really going on. ... But it was nonsense, it was lies."

At one point, Owens was dispatched to El Paso, Texas, because a conservative website had alleged that ISIS had established a training base just across the border in Juarez, Mexico. Finding no evidence of ISIS, Owens says the Infowars team dressed a reporter up to look like an ISIS operative and filmed him crossing "the border" while holding a prop of a severed head. Except it wasn't actually the border.

 

"We just happened to find a little stream that looked like it could be the Rio Grande," Owens says. "We said we were on the border. The reporter I was with simulated the beheading, walked across, and that's what we posted."

Owens says the video of the fake ISIS agent garnered a million views overnight. Infowars did not respond to a request for comment.

Though he was troubled by work, Owens says he stayed because the pay was good and Jones was an engaging force. He says a turning point came when he was seated next to a Muslim woman with a young girl on a flight home from a different reporting trip. 

 

"I remember sitting there watching her, and it sounds so cheesy, but it was just this moment of like ... these people didn't do anything. There's no reason for suspicion; it's just racism," he says. "It's not like after that I changed everything and all of a sudden became a good person or started to do the right thing. But it did start to make me look at things a little bit differently."

Owens left Infowars in 2017. He has since appeared in the HBO documentary The Truth vs. Alex Jones and provided a deposition in the successful defamation case the parents of Sandy Hook children brought against Jones. Owens' new memoir is The Madness of Believing: A Memoir from Inside Alex Jones' Conspiracy Machine.

How Jack Smith connected the dots between GOP lawmakers, Trump aides in 2020 election probe by Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney

 

Former special counsel Jack Smith’s office sought to map a vast web of contacts between President Donald Trump’s most vocal Republican allies in Congress and key players in his bid to subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to newly released records of the Smith-led investigation.

Emails from January 2023 circulated among Smith’s deputies show how top GOP lawmakers communicated directly with individuals later identified by Smith as Trump’s co-conspirators in his election interference plot, including attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

 

Those contacts became the Smith office’s justification for pursuing subpoenas of phone logs for more than a dozen Republican officials. That includes former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who were previously known to be of interest to Smith’s investigators — as well as then-Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, who is now Trump’s head of the EPA and is among other lawmakers not previously known to be under Smith’s microscope.

A spokesperson for Zeldin did not immediately provide a response to a request for comment.

These Republicans and others are featured in the materials released Tuesday by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, who has been leading a probe into Smith’s work. The Iowa Republican made the documents public to help support the party’s widely held position that Smith was politically motivated in his pursuit of criminal charges against Trump during the Biden administration — for efforts to overturn the election and his mishandling of classified documents.

“They were not aiming low. They were trying to take out everyone on the other side,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose data Smith’s office sought to obtain via subpoena, said Tuesday.

Cruz delivered the remarks while presiding over a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing comparing Smith’s investigations into Trump to the Watergate scandal that took down former President Richard Nixon and led to new rules cracking down on government corruption.

 

But the newly public documents also offer a more expansive picture of who Smith’s team believed might have had information that could bolster their probe into the campaign to undermine the 2020 election results that culminated in a deadly riot.

The special counsel’s office found that Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) had communicated with Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who is now director of the CIA. A spokesperson for Ratcliffe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Zeldin corresponded with Meadows and Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who was a close Trump ally in the effort. Cruz had calls with Meadows, Eastman and Ratcliffe and was one of several senators who received a call from Giuliani on Jan. 6.

 

Those contacts explain Smith’s interest in obtaining subpoenas for the phone logs for a dozen current and former Republican members of Congress, which his team said would be used to “establish logical evidentiary inferences regarding Trump and his surrogates’ actions and intent.”

The list of potential subpoena targets also includes Arizona Republican Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar. Spokespeople for Biggs, Gosar and Perry did not immediately return a request for comment.

According to the documents, Smith’s team methodically reviewed information provided in a report produced by the Democratic-led House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, suggesting a nexus between the two parallel inquiries.

New documents released by Grassley Tuesday also revealed the scale and scope of Smith’s scrutiny of Kash Patel, a longtime Trump ally who now serves as FBI director. Patel was previously established to have been a target of the special counsel’s investigation, but it was not known that Smith sought to obtain Patel’s phone and text message logs spanning two years.

A FBI spokesperson pointed to a comment FBI spokesman Ben Williamson previously gave to Reuters, in which he said, “The FBI under prior leadership was weaponized in ways the American people are only now beginning to fully grasp.”

 

The materials also provide new details about the backchanneling between former Vice President Mike Pence and Smith’s team regarding Pence’s grand jury testimony, and the efforts investigators took to screen out privileged information before they accessed devices they seized from targets of their probe.

At the Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday, Democrats continued to defend Smith’s work and urged Republicans to schedule a public hearing with the former special counsel.

“Apparently when the Trump DOJ does it, it’s nothing new; when Jack Smith does it, it’s a modern Watergate,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. “With Patel, it’s obvious why Jack Smith was looking at him.”

 

Grassley has said Smith will receive an invitation to address the full Judiciary panel in the coming months, following testimony the attorney gave to the House Judiciary Committee late last year.

A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment.