Alleged National Guard Shooter Pleaded for Help From CIA

The Afghan refugee accused of shooting two National Guard members Wednesday used to serve in a CIA-backed military unit, and felt abandoned by the agency, Rolling Stone reports.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal served in the “Zero Units,” a paramilitary unit in Afghanistan led by the CIA and trained by U.S. special operations soldiers. After the Taliban returned to power in the country in 2021, Lakanwal came to the U.S. with his wife and five sons, settling in Bellingham, Washington.

Lakanwal’s move to the U.S. was helped by Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden administration initiative to help resettle Afghans fleeing the new regime, especially those who worked with U.S. personnel and could be in danger from the Taliban. Lakanwal struggled in his new life, though.

Despite receiving asylum and work authorization from the Trump administration, he was fired from a laundromat job because he didn’t have a work authorization card, a fellow member of his unit told the magazine. Lakanwal’s nephew also wrote a letter to the Bellingham housing authority asking to move the family closer to an Afghan community, citing a physical attack on his uncle requiring hospital treatment.

The letter noted that Lakanwal was isolated, lacked English skills, and would benefit from being in a larger area like Seattle where he could easily find work. More than one month ago, Lakanwal reportedly told his unit mate that his missing paperwork meant that he couldn’t get a job, leaving his family unable to afford food or a place to rent.

As a result, Lakanwal had to borrow money from friends and other unit members, breaking down in tears when speaking to his unit mate. In June, Lakanwal reached out to a CIA program meant to aid Zero Unit veterans with their immigration issues. Rolling Stone saw a screenshot of a group chat where unit members shared their issues with an agency representative, including Lakanwal, who repeatedly asked for help.

Lakanwal’s last post was unanswered and deleted by the group’s administrator. When the magazine contacted the CIA representative, they claimed it was a wrong number. The agency did not respond to the magazine’s request for a comment.

All of this must not have helped Lakanwal’s mental health. Other reports say that he spent weeks at a time isolated in a dark room and would suffer “manic episodes,” according to a case worker who helped with his family’s relocation. During these episodes, which could last weeks, Lakanwal would make cross country drives by himself.

After last week’s shooting, which killed one National Guard member and hospitalized another, the Trump administration has used the incident to attack immigration and refugee asylum policies, claiming that Lakanwal was not properly vetted despite the administration approving his asylum claim in April.

Their claim belies the fact that Lakanwal worked directly with U.S. personnel in Afghanistan in a select unit that required extreme vetting and a probationary period. Zero Unit veterans were also vetted upon arrival in the U.S. before getting Special Immigrant Visas, meant for Iraqis and Afghans who aided the U.S. government.

Lakanwal may have been suffering from PTSD and feeling frozen out by the U.S. government, an unfortunately common problem affecting military veterans. He also couldn’t work thanks to missing immigration paperwork, a problem exacerbated by the Trump administration’s wholescale gutting of the federal government. If he had gotten the help he was seeking, who knows if last week’s tragedy could have been averted.

President Donald Trump offered up a truly nonsensical rationale for his latest presidential pardon.

While traveling on Air Force One Sunday, Trump was asked about his decision to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison on drug trafficking and weapons charges.

“You’ve made so clear how you want to keep drugs out of the U.S., can you say more about why you would pardon a notorious drug trafficker?” asked one reporter.

“Well, I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Trump replied. It was not a particularly comforting response after the president previously revealed he has no idea who he’s pardoning. After the reporter clarified that she was asking about Hernández, Trump scrambled to justify his decision.

“Well, I was told—I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup—I don’t mean Biden, look, Biden didn’t know he was alive—but it was the people that surround the Resolute Desk. Surround Biden, when he was there, which was about very little time,” Trump ranted.

“The people of Honduras really thought he was set up and it was a terrible thing. He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country. And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”

“What evidence can you share that he was set up and that he wasn’t—?” the reporter asked, before being interrupted by Trump, who had no such evidence to share.

“Well, you take a look. I mean, they could say that you take any country you want; if somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life,” Trump babbled. “And that includes this country, OK?”

But Hernández wasn’t imprisoned simply for being the president of Honduras. In 2021, U.S. federal prosecutors presented an array of evidence connecting the former foreign leader to the drug-trafficking activities of his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez Alvarado, who was sentenced to life in prison for importing at least 185,000 kilograms of cocaine, securing bribes to public officials, as well as other weapons and false statement offenses. Prosecutors had described the former president as being involved in a “violent, state-sponsored drug trafficking conspiracy.”

Trump pardoned Hernández on the eve of Honduras’s presidential election, in which the U.S. president has endorsed Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a former sportscaster and candidate from the conservative National Party. While it’s unclear what Trump’s exact reasoning is—considering that he had no evidence to back up his claims of a “setup”—it’s possible that pardoning the ex-president may have been an attempt to fire up the conservative voting base on Election Day.

Donald Trump issued a cryptic message regarding his White House ballroom project, promising online that the 90,000-square-foot project would be done “right.”

The president referred to the construction zone as the “presidential ballroom” in a Truth Social post Sunday, insisting—again—that it would be funded entirely by private donations. But then he made note of a curious detail.

“It is something that has been needed and desired at the White House for over 150 years, but something which no other President was equipped to do—But I am, and as long as we are going to do it, we are going to do it RIGHT,” Trump wrote. “It will be a magnificent addition to the White House, the most important since the building of the West Wing!”

The comment comes days after news broke that Trump has been feuding with his architect, James McCrery II, who reportedly doesn’t see eye to eye with him on the ballroom’s proposed size.

Insiders told The Washington Post last week that McCrery has argued the 90,000-square-foot blueprint would overshadow the 55,000-square-foot White House mansion, violating basic architectural principles in the process.

After promising Americans in July that his proposed ballroom would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing, Trump completely razed the FDR-era extension in October, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the express permission of Congress. Conveniently, Trump started demolition during the government shutdown, when the NCPC was consequently closed.

The Trump administration said that the forthcoming 90,000-square-foot event space will be capable of hosting 650 people, a 200-person bump from current maximum seating at the White House East Wing. But real estate experts have since pointed out that the possibilities of that square footage should be much broader, considering a space of that size will be roughly equivalent to two football fields.

The project’s price tag also inexplicably grew by 50 percent after Trump began tearing down the East Wing. What Trump had originally pitched as a $200 million project was instead referred to in late October as a $300 million development plan. The White House suggested that the project would be funded, in part, by some of the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.

Some major players in the defense industry with massive federal contracts, including Lockheed Martin and Palantir, have also forked over significant cash to develop the ballroom, though it’s unclear what they would get out of building a venue designed for dancing.

The president’s crass mouth is losing him Republican support in Indiana.

State Senator Michael Bohacek announced Friday that he would no longer support Donald Trump’s efforts to redistrict the Hoosier State, claiming that the president’s recent decision to call Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded” had put him off the MAGA leader’s plan.

“I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter,” Bohacek said in a statement. “Those of you that don’t know me or my family might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome.

“This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences,” he continued. “I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.”

Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump has issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House.

The unprecedented long-shot effort would win Indiana just two more seats in the U.S. House—but state senators have already signaled that they have no intentions of reshaping the state to aid the president’s ambitions.

Indiana’s Senate announced late last month that it would not meet until January, indicating that redistricting will not be on the state’s legislative agenda this year.

Public GOP opposition to Trump’s offensive nature could be an indicator that his white-knuckled grip on the caucus is slipping. Trump has issued a litany of repugnant statements about women, people of color, and those with disabilities, though none of that seemed to seriously sway Republicans away from the MAGA politician before.

Trump infamously mocked a reporter with a disability while on the campaign trail in 2015, imitating the sporadic arm movements of Serge Kovaleski, an investigative reporter with The New York Times who suffers from a congenital joint condition.

FBI Director Kash Patel is so obsessed with maintaining the facade of power and authority that he wouldn’t even get off a plane to investigate the murder of his friend Charlie Kirk until someone got him a special FBI raid jacket—his specific size, and with all the right patches on it. 

A new report from a “National Alliance of Retired and Active Duty FBI Special Agents and Analysts” has revealed that Patel—just a day after Kirk had been killed—landed in Utah and refused to exit the plane until someone got him a medium-size FBI raid jacket. He ended up taking a female agent’s jacket. He then began to complain that that jacket didn’t have the proper patches on it, and he refused to leave the plane once again until SWAT team members gave him their patches. 

This report, which has yet to be independently corroborated, comes from someone the group calls ALPHA99, a “reliable, trustworthy, and competent” source. 

The FBI director had just landed at the scene of the murder of someone he claimed was a close friend, and he chose to throw a tantrum because he didn’t have the exact right jacket with the exact right patches, rather than just get off the plane and do his job. 

This is just one of many examples of the floundering FBI head’s misplaced priorities. Just last week, it was reported that President Trump was weighing firing Patel in the wake of his premature social media posts during ongoing cases, his use of a government jet for a date with his 27-year-old girlfriend, and giving said 27-year-old girlfriend a SWAT team for her security detail. 

These sound like things a politician’s teenage son would do, not the head of the FBI. That, and this meltdown over a jacket in the midst of a high-profile assassination–with a suspect who had yet to be charged—only beg more questions about the fitness of the least qualified FBI director in U.S. history.  

Read the full report here.

Donald Trump wants to take U.S. citizenship away from people he deems “criminals.”

Trump told reporters on Air Force One Sunday that “we have criminals that came into our country and they were naturalized maybe through Biden or somebody that didn’t know what they were doing.

“If I have the power to do it, I’m not sure that I do, but if I do, I would denaturalize, absolutely,” Trump said. In a follow-up question, a reporter asked Trump what he meant when he posted in support of “reverse migration” on Truth Social on Thursday.

“It means ‘Get people out that are in our country, get ’em out of here. I want to get ’em out,’” Trump said.

Since the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., by an Afghan refugee on Wednesday, Trump has gone on an anti-immigration tirade, pausing all asylum decisions and saying that he wants to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” on Truth Social.

In another post, Trump falsely claimed that “most” foreign-born U.S. residents “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.” Data from 2022 indicates that immigrants per capita consume 21 percent less in public assistance than native-born Americans.

But that’s not of interest to Trump, or his adviser Stephen Miller, a racist and anti-immigration hawk whose fingerprints are all over these new policies and Truth Social posts. It’s clear that the Trump administration just wants fewer immigrants in the U.S. and is willing to challenge long-standing laws and the Constitution to make that happen.

Donald Trump’s fanboys are foaming at the mouth for the arrests of Democratic lawmakers following the president’s latest direction to “DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE!”

In the wee hours of Monday morning, Trump posted yet another screed not so subtly targeting a group of Democratic lawmakers who’d published a video urging members of the U.S. military and intelligence community not to follow illegal orders. His initial attempt was laden with typos, with Trump writing, “Ther [sic] are laws that affect our nation” before deleting, and then trying again.

“There are laws that impact our Nation,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Read Title 18, Chapter 115, Section 2387, ‘Whoever with the intent to interfere, impair, influence the loyalty, moral or discipline of the military and Naval Forces, … to be fined or imprisoned up to 10 years.’ Commander Kirk Lippold, U.S. Navy, Ret. This is right on point. DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE!!!”

During an appearance on Fox 5 Sunday morning, Lippold clarified that there was no legal basis to recall Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatening to do so. Lippold also stated that the president’s claim that the lawmakers had committed sedition was unfounded because they had not advocated for or used violence. Instead, Lippold cited federal law targeting those who act with the “intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces.”

“And that is something the Department of Justice should be looking into,” he said.

It seems Trump intends to make his government do just that, and MAGA was overjoyed that the president was preparing to take action against his perceived political enemies.

“Arrest Mark Kelly!” wrote David Freeman, a right-wing commentator who goes by the name “Gunther Eagleman” on X.

Eric Daugherty, a right-wing commentator, wrote on X that Trump had “posted the exact US law that seditious Sen. Mark Kelly, and other Congressional Democrats, likely violated.”

“Make an example or it happens AGAIN,” he added.

Trumpworld is flailing as it tries to redirect blame for last week’s National Guard shooting onto the previous presidential administration.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem insisted Sunday that the suspected shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was vetted for asylum by the Biden administration—despite the fact that it was her department that granted the asylum request in April.

“I want to be very clear about this, because his asylum was approved in April of this year on the Trump administration’s watch,” said NBC News’s Kristen Welker. “Was there a vetting process in place to approve that asylum request?”

“The vetting process all happened under Joe Biden’s administration,” said Noem.

“But was he vetted when he was granted asylum? Are you saying he wasn’t vetted when he was granted asylum?” pressed Welker.

“Vetting is happening when they come into the country and that was completely abandoned under Joe Biden’s administration. That’s the irresponsibility that has completely devastated our country, Kristen, put us in such a dangerous position,” Noem continued.

“I don’t think people realized when Joe Biden was in the White House exactly how he was allowing our country to be infiltrated with people that we didn’t know who they were, some of them, we did know were dangerous and went after as soon as they came into this country, but under this program we could have up to 100,000 people that came in from Afghanistan that may be here to do us harm,” the Homeland Security secretary added.

Lakanwal, however, wasn’t just a known entity to U.S. officials—he was a foreign partner with U.S. intelligence services. He worked with the CIA as a partner in Afghanistan for more than a decade before U.S. troops withdrew from the region. Lakanwal, who entered the U.S. in 2021, always struggled with PTSD, his family told CNN.

He allegedly shot two members of West Virginia’s National Guard on the eve of Thanksgiving. U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries. The other victim, U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, is reportedly in “very serious condition,” according to West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey.

Lakanwal is currently hospitalized and in custody.

Of course, West Virginia’s National Guard never would have been in Washington to begin with if Donald Trump hadn’t ordered them to occupy the city on false pretenses.

Trump ordered some 2,000 members of the National Guard to Washington earlier this year, blaming rising crime rates, immigrant populations, and homelessness—though the figures he used were actually from 2023.

The cherry-picked statistics misrepresented the state of crime in the nation’s capital, which, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department that was touted by Trump’s own FBI, had actually fallen last year by 35 percent.

Mere days before the shooting, a U.S. district judge ruled that Trump’s order “exceeded the bounds” of the Pentagon’s authority since the troops were being utilized for “non-military, crime-deterrence missions” without the express permission of the city’s leadership.

It looks like President Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba is getting fired—again. 

On Monday, a judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit voted 3–0 to disqualify Habba as interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. 

The appeals court agreed with a lower court’s ruling that Habba was given the U.S. attorney position through a “novel series of legal and personnel moves” and was not legally able to take the job. 

“It is apparent that the current administration has been frustrated by some of the legal and political barriers to getting its appointees in place,” Judge D. Michael Fisher, appointed by former President George W. Bush, wrote in the court’s 32-page opinion. “Its efforts to elevate its preferred candidate for U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, to the role of Acting U.S. Attorney demonstrate the difficulties it has faced—yet the citizens of New Jersey and the loyal employees in the U.S. Attorney’s Office deserve some clarity and stability.”

Habba was supposed to be booted from her position over the summer, as New Jersey federal judges decided to refuse to extend her 120-day appointment as U.S. attorney. But the Trump administration fired Desiree Grace, the U.S. attorney first assistant and Habba’s planned successor, before Habba’s appointment ended, leaving the role vacant. It then made Habba first assistant, allowing her to take the role of acting U.S. attorney without a Senate confirmation.  

The Trump administration bent over backward to try to get Habba the permanent U.S attorney position because it knows she’ll be a mindlessly loyal foot soldier. 

As Trump’s personal lawyer, Habba unsuccessfully defended him in his Stormy Daniels hush-money and E. Jean Carroll defamation cases. In her first 120 days as U.S. attorney, she drew public ire for claiming that the thousands of military veterans indiscriminately fired by DOGE were simply unfit and for attempting to prosecute Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for trying to enter a local ICE detention center. She has operated as an absolute partisan—but now she’s out of a job. 

This story has been updated. 

Donald Trump got an MRI during a visit to Walter Reed Medical Center in October, but doesn’t have a clue what was being examined.

Trump was asked by a reporter Sunday on Air Force One for details about the magnetic resonance imaging test, noting that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has called for the results to be released. The president responded by calling Walz incompetent and saying that the results were “absolutely perfect,” just like the phone call that got him impeached the first time. But he apparently couldn’t say exactly what was perfect.

“What part of your body was the MRI looking at?” one reporter directly asked.

“I have no idea. It was just an MRI. What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it. I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of doing,” Trump said.

Trump’s MRI came as part of an unexpected visit to the medical center only six months after his annual physical exam. MRIs are not routine, and are usually conducted to assess tumors, joint injuries, or heart conditions. But even when asked about it last month, Trump couldn’t say why he was getting the MRI or what was being looked at.

All of this raises further questions about that October medical exam. Why would Trump need to be given a serious test like an MRI six months after his physical? It seems to suggest that Trump received other, serious tests besides the MRI and that he’s hiding something.

The president constantly brags about passing cognitive and mental acuity tests, and Sunday’s remarks to reporters were no different. But the more he talks about his mind, the more it seems that he isn’t on the level.