Trump Official Behind Controversial Russia Decision Has Kremlin Ties

EDITOR’S NOTE: Since the publication of this post The Telegraph has retracted its original story. In its place, the paper has left this apology:

An article, “Trump official who shut down counter-Russia agency has links to Kremlin” (3 June), erroneously stated that Mr Sergei Chernikov – and, by association, his niece, Ms Yulia Kirillova – had current ties to the Kremlin and to President Putin personally. This is false. In fact, neither Mr Chernikov nor Ms Kirillova has any association with the Kremlin or Mr Putin. Mr Chernikov has lived away from Russia since 2008 and has not returned since 2020.

It was also incorrect to state that Mr Chernikov once served as Deputy Governor of the Nenets region in Siberia, or that he received a personal note of thanks from Mr Putin for supporting his electoral victory in the 2000 election campaign. The article also omitted certain publicly available relevant facts, including that President Putin publicly condemned the key shareholders of Bashkir Soda Company (in which Mr Chernikov held shares) prior to its expropriation.

Original post continues below.

Senior State Department staffer Darren Beattie, a passionate Putin supporter behind the move to dismantle a key agency fighting Russian propaganda, is married to a Russian woman whose uncle is a longtime Kremlin ally, according to The Telegraph.

Yulia Kirillova grew up in Moscow, studied abroad in North America, and married Beattie in 2021 in Florida. She moved to D.C. in January. Her uncle Sergei Cherniko is a drinks magnate who had an estimated net worth of $150 million in 2005. That year, he served in Russia’s ministry of natural resources and was then deputy governor of Siberia’s Nenets region. Cherniko later served in Putin’s civic chamber from 2008 to 2010.

The relationship raises even greater scrutiny around Beattie’s April decision to eliminate the Global Engagement Center, a State Department office tasked with dealing with Russian disinformation campaigns. Beattie has been a staunch supporter of Putin, setting himself apart from the traditional conservative right in Bannon-esque fashion.

“US gov’t has been supporting Ukranian neo-nazi groups in its obsessive proxy war against Russia,” he wrote on X in 2022.

“State Department could sell butt plugs and forward proceeds to fund resistance effort in ukraine,” he wrote again that year. “Iran Contra but with a modern American twist.”

“A big part of American ruling class’ hatred of Russia is that Russia is a major power that rejects the woke ideology at the core of American regime,” he wrote in 2021.

This is a clear conflict of interest that is extremely typical within the Trump administration. And on top of that, Beattie was initially fired from the Trump administration in 2018 for attending a white nationalist conference. He has a long history of many other deeply problematic views.

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Beattie wrote on X in October. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” On January 6, 2021, he spent the day on X warning Senator Tim Scott, “BLM,” Ibram X. Kendi, and Kay Cole James to “learn their places” and “take a knee” to MAGA.

That, on top of this personal in at the Kremlin, is highly questionable behavior for a ranking official, which has been overly normalized by this administration.

The Pentagon’s new press secretary is a chronically online 26-year-old white nationalist who believes in the “great replacement” theory, thinks Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy is an “entitled midget,” and pushed an antisemitic conspiracy theory about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched after being falsely accused of murder in 1915. 

Kingsley Wilson, who has served as deputy press secretary since January, is the daughter of right-wing talking head and former Trump adviser Steve Cortes and previously worked for Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by Project 2025 architect Russel Vought. She will now act as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s primary mouthpiece at the Pentagon, a department that has not had regular press briefings for some time now. 

“The Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs is announcing that Kingsley Wilson will serve as Press Secretary for the Department of Defense,” senior Defense Department adviser Sean Parnell wrote on X last week. “Kingsley’s leadership has been integral to the DOD’s success & we look forward to her continued service to President Trump!”

Wilson’s personal X page is a treasure trove of ultraright-wing content. 

“Minneapolis became Mogadishu in 10 years time,” she said over a video of Muslim Representative Ilhan Omar at a rally in her district. “The Great Replacement isn’t a conspiracy theory … it’s reality.”  

She has posted about the great replacement therory—a racist conspiracy theory that alleges there is a coordinated plot to decrease America’s  white population through immigration, in some iterations at the behest of Jewish leaders—incessantly for the past three  years. 

She said, “I hate this entitled midget,” in response to Zelenskiy receiving military aid from the U.S last year, and lauded Russian President Vladimir Putin for having “encyclopedic knowledge of his people’s history,” which she called “beyond impressive … especially when contrasted with the low-IQ lunatics working at the U.S. State Department.”

“Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl. He also tried to frame a Black man for his crime,” she wrote on X. “The ADL turned off the comments because they want to gaslight you.” The ADL stated that they were “deeply disturbed” by Wilson’s comments. 

While troubling, this is a predictable pick, as Trump has lined his highest ranks with fringe MAGA loyalists with often openly racist politics, like State Department official Darren Beattie and National Counterterrorism Center head Joe Kent. They, like Wilson, are anti-neocons who subscribe to the same far-right, deep-MAGA views as figures like Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, rather than the more conventional conservatism of the GOP.

Trump officials claim the suspect behind Sunday’s attack in Boulder, Colorado, was in the United States illegally. But they’re leaving out one convenient detail: He had filed an asylum application.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, has been charged with a federal hate crime for attacking peaceful demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages held captive in Gaza, leaving eight people injured.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Soliman entered the country on a B-2 tourist visa in August 2022. He filed for asylum the next month, and his visa expired the following year.

Donald Trump and his entire administration seem to have seized on the expired visa as proof that an “illegal” immigrant committed such a heinous crime.

“He came in through Biden’s ridiculous Open Border Policy, which has hurt our Country so badly,” said Trump in his own statement on Monday, conveniently ignoring that Soliman entered the country on a tourist visa. “This is yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.”

“The Colorado Terrorist attack suspect, Mohamed Soliman, is illegally in our country,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.

“There’s certainly a concern that the previous administration allowed way too many terrorists and illegal immigrants into the interior of our country,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “This individual, this terrorist, was allowed into the country by the previous administration, was foolishly given a tourist visa, and then was illegally allowed to stay.”

But each of these statements seems to be obfuscating the truth: If you file for asylum, you are not here illegally until a judge denies that request. Until then, you have a pending asylum application.

“He entered the country in August 2022 on a B2 visa that expired on February 2023. He filed for asylum in September 2022,” McLaughlin said on X on Monday.

But what happened next? If his asylum application was denied and he stayed anyway, why wouldn’t she say so?

Perhaps because that’s not the case. Soliman entered the country legally, filed for asylum, and then very likely was living here while he awaited the decision. Asylum applicants who have been awaiting a response for longer than 180 days are typically granted work authorization, under laws passed by Congress decades ago.

In other words, Soliman was not in the country due to Biden’s “open border” policy. But then again, Trump and co. have never liked sticking to the facts.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was enraged to hear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had been focusing on arresting only criminals, The Washington Examiner reported Monday.

Last week, 25 field directors from ICE’s Enforcement Removal Operations, as well as 25 special agents from Homeland Security Investigations, were called to Washington for a meeting. Officials told the Examiner that the president’s ghoulish immigration czar wasn’t happy.

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone,” said one official. “‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down.”

The official told the conservative outlet that Miller didn’t want ICE to narrow its field to just undocumented immigrants with criminal records. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recalled.

When one ICE official pushed back against Miller’s call to widen the deportation dragnet, citing border czar Tom Homan’s claims that ICE’s deportation efforts would target criminals, the deputy chief of staff seemed confused.

“What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” the official recounted Miller as saying. “Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest.”

Last week, Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced that the Trump administration had set a new quota of a minimum 3,000 ICE arrests per day. On Monday, ICE announced that it had completed its largest operation ever in Massachusetts and the Greater Boston Area—but as the number of arrests rose, so did the number of people detained with no criminal record or deportation order. Hundreds of so-called “collaterals” were arrested as part of the massive operation.

At least 11 large companies—including Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, and Oracle—are cutting ties with law firms that caved to President Trump’s threats of political retribution, according to The Wall Street Journal.

General counsels for multiple companies told the Journal that the law firms’ willingness to cut deals with the president, rather than stand up for themselves, greatly eroded their confidence in the ability of those firms to represent them in court or in high-pressure negotiations.

Massive law firms that work on lucrative contracts, like Paul, Weiss, Kirkland & Ellis, and others, struck deals with the Trump administration after he aimed six executive orders at them, removing clearances, building access, and government contracts from firms he thought were attacking him. The law firms capitulated, offering billions of pro bono work to the Trump administration, allegedly in the name of protecting their clients and their contracts.

But multiple lawyers at each firm think that their leadership should’ve put up a tougher fight. One staffer told the Journal she felt “physically ill” upon hearing of Paul, Weiss’s sellout to Trump. Some younger lawyers have even quit over these deals, as one associate at Simpson Thacher said in his exit email that he would not “sleepwalk toward authoritarianism.”

The firms that decided to strike back did end up losing clients but kept some of their principles intact. Jenner & Block declared in a statement that folding to the Trump administration would require “compromising our ability to zealously advocate for all of our clients and capitulating to unconstitutional government coercion, which is simply not in our DNA.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries more or less admitted he has no plan to actually hold the Trump administration accountable for targeting sitting members of Congress and their aides.

Department of Homeland Security police briefly detained an aide to Jeffries’s fellow New York Democrat Representative Jerry Nadler on Wednesday. DHS officers entered Nadler’s Manhattan district office, which is above an immigration court, and accused staff of “harboring rioters.”

One staffer was handcuffed but ultimately was not arrested or charged. Nadler slammed his aide’s detention, saying the administration “is trying to intimidate members of Congress.”

“They’re behaving like fascists,” Nadler said. “We have to fight them.”

But when Jeffries was asked about the detention on Sunday, he had little more than vague statements to offer.

“In terms of how we will respond to what Trump and the administration has endeavored to do, we will make that decision in a time, place, and manner of our choosing. But the response will be continuous and it will meet the moment that is required,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.

“What exactly does that mean? Have you not decided how to respond?” asked host Dana Bash.

Jeffries sat silently for several long seconds before finally responding with more bureaucratic jargon.

“We’ve publicly responded in a variety of different ways. We haven’t let our foot off the gas pedal in terms of additional things that may take place with respect to our congressional oversight authority and capacity. We will respond in a time, place, and manner of our choosing if this continues to happen,” he said.

Waiting for more bad things to happen is a markedly different strategy from what Jeffries promised just a few weeks ago. In mid-May, Jeffries warned the administration against targeting sitting members of Congress.

“It’s a red line,” he said. “They know better than to go down that road.”

But just a few days later, interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba announced criminal charges against Democratic Representative LaMonica McIver, accusing her of interfering with law enforcement and assaulting officers while trying to enter an ICE facility in New Jersey.

Jeffries has done nothing to actually stand up for McIver, or Nadler’s aide, or Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka, who was arrested for trying to enter the same ICE facility before the charges were later dropped. Safe to say that Jeffries’s bluff has been well and truly called.

Former Biden State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller now admits that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza.

In a Sky News podcast interview released on Monday, Miller—who was infamous for smirking every time he took a question on Gaza during State Department briefings in the Biden administration—said Israel is “without a doubt” committing war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza.

“Do you think what’s going on in Gaza now is a genocide?” asked Sky News correspondent Mark Stone.

“I don’t think it’s a genocide, but I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes,” Miller replied.”

“You wouldn’t have said that at the podium,” Stone pressed.

“Yeah, look, because when you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government. The United States government had not concluded that they committed war crimes, still have not concluded that,” Miller replied.

Stone said, “But your personal view is that they have—and they were while you were there.”

“Yes,” Miller said, before stumbling over his words to add a qualification. “There are two ways to think about the commission of war crimes. One is if the state has pursued a policy to deliberately committing war crimes, or is acting reckless in a way that aids and abets war crimes, if the state is committing war crimes. And that I think is an open question.

“What is almost certainly not an open question is that there are individual incidents that have been war crimes where Israeli soldiers and members of the Israeli military have committed war crimes. And we do know that Israel has opened investigations. But look, we are many months into those investigations and we’re not seeing Israeli soldiers held accountable. So ultimately, in almost every major conflict, including conflicts prosecuted by democracies, you will see individual members of the military, of militaries, commit war crimes, and the way you judge a democracy is the way you hold these people accountable.”

“But Israel hasn’t,” Stone asked.

“And that’s my point, we have not yet seen them hold sufficient members of the military accountable, and I think it’s an open question whether they’re going to,” Miller said.

Miller, who served as Joe Biden’s State Department spokesperson for the last two years of his administration, spent that time defending U.S. arms sales to Israel, justifying U.S. vetoes of U.N. proposals calling for a ceasefire, and downplaying Israel’s war crimes—over and over again.

If Miller really believed that Israel was committing war crimes and could not express his true thoughts from the podium, he could have resigned from his position, like a few other brave people in the Biden administration did. But his Sky News interview reveals that he’s simply interested in avoiding blame, as Israel continues its mass starvation of Palestinians and its war crimes become even more evident to the public.

In fact, before his half-hearted admission that Israel is committing war crimes, Miller still took some time to blame protesting college students in his analysis of the situation.

“There was a time when our public discussion of withholding weapons from Israel, as well as the protests on college campuses in the United States, and the movement of some European countries to recognize the state of Palestine—appropriate discussions, appropriate decisions, protests are appropriate—but all of those things together were leading the leadership of Hamas to conclude that they didn’t need to agree to a ceasefire, they just needed to hold out for a little bit longer, and they could get what they always wanted,” he said.

“Now, the thing that I look back on, that I will always ask questions of myself about, and I think this is true for others in government, is in that intervening period between the end of May and the middle of January [2025], when thousands of Palestinians were killed, innocent civilians who didn’t want this war, had nothing to do with it, was there more that we could, could have done to pressure the Israeli government to agree to that ceasefire? I think at times there probably was.”

What brilliant insight.

Surprise, surprise: Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s biggest operation to date was also a huge failure.

Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin reported on X Monday that ICE completed a massive month-long operation in Massachusetts in response to the state’s sanctuary policies.

Of the 1,461 arrests made as part of Operation Patriot, only 790 individuals—or roughly 54 percent—had criminal convictions or charges. Meanwhile, 277 detainees, or about 19 percent, had received final orders of removal or deportation, though it’s unclear whether there was overlap between those two groups. This disastrous sweep comes as the Trump administration sets a new quota of 3,000 ICE arrests per day, and continues to stray from its commitment to target criminals for deportation.

Fox reported that many of these arrests were so-called “collaterals,” a strange euphemism for people whose only crime was being with an ICE target at the time of arrest. Fox said that ICE had repeatedly warned sanctuary city officials that a failure to enforce immigration policies would result in collateral arrests. According to ICE’s own numbers, the agency made a minimum 394 wrongful arrests as part of Operation Patriot.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote in a post on X Monday that this latest ICE sweep was even worse than April’s Operation Tidal Wave in Florida, which previously held the record for ICE’s largest operation with a whopping 1,120 arrests.

“Wow. Just 54% of all the people arrested during this operation had a criminal record at all. That’s an even lower percent than the big Florida operation in April, where 63% had criminal history,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote. “ICE is expanding its dragnet even more to go after people with no criminal history.”

ICE told FOX that Operation Patriot was significantly more difficult due to a lack of cooperation from local officials, and claimed that they’d encountered “almost daily interference” from activists.

But Massachusetts officials say that ICE had failed to communicate with them. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey expressed outrage Monday after an 18-year-old student at Milford High School was arrested by ICE, just days before graduation.

“Yet again, local officials and law enforcement have been left in the dark with no heads up and no answers to their questions,” she said.

A day late and a dollar short, Donald Trump has finally responded to the violent attack in Boulder, Colorado.

Eight people were injured Sunday when a 45-year-old man allegedly attacked a peaceful protest remembering Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. The suspect, who has been identified as Mohamed Sabry Soliman, first fired on the crowd with a homemade flamethrower and then threw Molotov cocktails.

Mark Michalek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Denver field office, said that Soliman shouted, “Free Palestine!” A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security wrote on X that Soliman “is illegally in our country.”

About 19 hours after the fact, Trump shared his official reaction.

“Yesterday’s horrific attack in Boulder, Colorado, WILL NOT BE TOLERATED in the United States of America,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social. “He came in through Biden’s ridiculous Open Border Policy, which has hurt our Country so badly. He must go out under ‘TRUMP’ Policy. Acts of Terrorism will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law. This is yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland. My heart goes out to the victims of this terrible tragedy, and the Great People of Boulder, Colorado!”

According to the DHS, Soliman, an Egyptian national, entered the country on a B2 tourist visa in August 2022. He filed for asylum the next month, and his visa expired in 2023. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said that the agency was treating the case as an “act of ideologically motivated violence.”

But the DHS’s interpretation of Soliman’s time in the U.S. stretches the facts a bit (to put it mildly). Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, pointed out that it’s not clear whether Soliman was here illegally, given his asylum application.

“It’s not even fully accurate to say he was in the country illegally—despite the visa overstay,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote. “Because he filed for asylum before his status expired, by law he was not accruing ‘unlawful presence’ while waiting for an answer.”

About two dozen hostages are believed to be alive in Gaza. The Israeli government and Hamas are currently considering a U.S.-led proposal for a ceasefire. Both sides intend to propose amendments to the agreement.

Since the October 7 attack, Israel has killed at least 54,400 Palestinians in its relentless assault on Gaza. The majority of the victims have been civilians. Israel has also choked off almost all aid into the region.

On Monday, the Supreme refused to hear two significant cases challenging Maryland’s state-wide ban on semiautomatic rifles and other assault-style weapons like AR-15s. The court’s rejection of the cases, a somewhat surprising move for the conservative majority, means that the gun control law will stay in place—for now. The court also refused to hear a challenge to Rhode Island’s restrictions on high-capacity magazines.

Four Supreme Court justices are needed to hear a case.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion on the Maryland case, arguing that it wasn’t consistent with the Supreme Court’s conservative 2022 ruling that the right to bear arms extends outside the home, which loosened gun restrictions and caused states like Maryland and Rhode Island to enact bans like the ones being challenged in court.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the other conservative justice, wrote his own dissenting statement, calling the Maryland ban an “outlier” and positing ominously that “this court should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon.”