White House Struggles to Defend Trump’s Threat to Commit War Crimes

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that President Trump is “not afraid” to commit war crimes against innocent Iranian civilians.

“The president posted this morning … he [threatened] ‘blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells and Kharg Island, and possibly all desalinization plants.’ Under international law, striking civilian infrastructure like that is generally prohibited,” NBC’s Garret Haake asked Leavitt at her Monday briefing. “Why is the president threatening what would amount to potentially a war crime with the U.S. military, and how do you square that with the administration repeatedly saying that the U.S. does not target civilians?”

“The president has made it quite clear to the Iranian regime at this moment in time—as evidenced by the statement that you just read—that their best move is to make a deal. Or else the United States Armed Forces has capabilities beyond their wildest imagination,” Leavitt replied. “And the president is not afraid to use them.”

“Including potential war crimes?” Haake responded.

“That’s not what I said, Garrett. And you’re saying the word ‘potential’ for a reason. I’m sure some experts are telling you that in your ear to try to ask me that question. Of course this administration … will always act within the confines of the law,” Leavitt said.

That has not been the case. Aside from waging an illegal war in the first place, the Trump administration—along with Israel—has already killed more than 1,500 civilians in Iran. Haake’s question was valid, as Trump very much threatened to bomb access to clean water and electricity on Monday morning. That is illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

University of Manchester international law professor Yusra Suedi told Al Jazeera that Trump’s post “reinforces the climate of impunity around collective punishment in warfare.”

“This is clearly an act of collective punishment, which is prohibited under international humanitarian law. You can’t deliberately harm an entire civilian population to pressure its government,” she said.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s outrageous order to immigration officials may have sparked the confrontation that killed an American citizen. 

During one of his many furious morning calls with immigration enforcement officials, Miller demanded that federal agents be dispatched to certain areas of Minneapolis in order to “force confrontations” with anti-ICE protesters, two senior DHS sources told the Daily Mail. 

Miller repeatedly urged federal agents to engage with protesters in order to win a “PR battle,” one official told the outlet. 

He told officials that anti-ICE could not be viewed as successful, and repeatedly said that demonstrators “need to be vanquished by any force necessary,” another DHS source told the Mail.  

Federal immigration agents would later shoot and kill Alex Pretti, a 36-year-old ICU nurse, sparking nationwide outrage and unrest. Miller claimed that Pretti was an “assassin” when he was simply filming agents while exercising his Second Amendment right.  

Miller’s hard-line mass deportation agenda is reportedly falling out of fashion with the fascists, as mounting leaks have detailed his erratic behavior in backing his soft ethnic cleansing. 

The U.S. Army is investigating why two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters flew over a No Kings protest in Nashville, Tennessee, on Saturday, and then performed low-altitude maneuvers near the home of musician Kid Rock.

In a statement, Major Jonathon Bless, public affairs officer for the 101st Airborne Division, said, “Fort Campbell leadership is aware of a video circulating on social media depicting AH-64 Apache helicopters operating in the vicinity of a private residence associated with Mr. Robert Ritchie (also known as ‘Kid Rock’). The command has initiated an investigation to review the circumstances surrounding this activity.

“The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and Fort Campbell maintain strict standards for aviation safety, professionalism, and adherence to established flight regulations. We take all concerns regarding aircraft operations and their impact on the surrounding community seriously,” the statement continued.

Bless later told local TV station NewsChannel 5 that the reason the helicopters flew over the protest was not known.

“Our pilots do regularly fly routes outside the Fort Campbell area,” the spokesperson said. “We just don’t know if it was incidental or if it was deliberate.”

Ritchie gloated over the flyover at his home, posting video taken from his rooftop to X while taking shots at California Governor Gavin Newsom for some reason.

“This is a level of respect that shit for brains Governor of California will never know. God Bless America and all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to defend her 🇺🇸 🙏,” the performer wrote.

It’s normal for police helicopters to fly over large crowds or protests, but very unusual for the military, which is prohibited from engaging in domestic law enforcement by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. And flying over the home of a minor, pro-Trump celebrity in the Nashville suburb of Whites Creek is a waste of military and taxpayer resources at best. As of 2022, an Apache helicopter costs $5,171 to operate per hour.

The Trump administration is citing a racist confederate lawyer who argued for “separate but equal” segregation and Jim Crow law in its attempt to end birthright citizenship.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the Justice Department’s attempt to argue that being born in the United States doesn’t make you a citizen, contrary to what the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment states. A friend-of-the-court brief from the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, or CALDA, highlighted that the DOJ is, in its own briefs, “recycling the losing arguments” of Alexander Porter Morse, who unsuccessfully argued before the Supreme Court in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark that U.S. children born to Chinese immigrant parents had no right to citizenship.

According to The Washington Post, Justice Department lawyers specifically referenced Morse’s argument that the Constitution “exclude[s] the children of foreigners transiently within the United States” from qualifying for citizenship.

Morse believed that Chinese people were “uncivilized,” didn’t want Black people to have the right to vote, and opposed Reconstruction. It’s deeply troubling yet unsurprising that the Trump administration is using his views to support its case.

“In Wong Kim Ark, Wharton, Morse, and Collins lost. And that loss was deserved. Their arguments were built on a racist foundation, attempting to use anti-Chinese sentiment to relitigate, rather than interpret, the Citizenship Clause,” CALDA wrote. “A Supreme Court made up of people who themselves harbored anti-Chinese racist beliefs nevertheless stood up to that moment and defended the Constitution.”

CALDA compared the historic ruling to one far more shameful decades later, upholding Japanese internment. “In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court allowed fear and bigotry to subjugate the Constitution, a mistake that this Court would later say was ‘wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—has no place in law under the Constitution.’

“This is another moment for the Court,” CALDA continued in its brief. “Will it follow the path this Court blazed in Wong Kim Ark? Or will it issue another Korematsu?”

After Israel’s military killed three journalists in a strike on Lebanon Saturday, they took to social media to gloat about the death of one in particular.

“ELIMINATED: For years, Ali Hassan Shaib operated as a Hezbollah Radwan Force terrorist under the guise of a journalist. Turns out the ‘press vest’ was just a cover for terror,” the official X account for the Israel Defence Forces wrote.

The post was accompanied by a collage of Shoaib (the correct spelling of his last name, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ), which showed him dressed half in a press vest and half in a military uniform.

When questioned about the image by Fox News’s chief foreign correspondent, Trey Yingst, the IDF admitted that the image of Shoaib in a military uniform was faked.

“Unfortunately there isn’t really a picture of it, it was photoshopped,” the IDF said.

Shoaib was a reporter for Lebanese TV station Al-Manar TV. The station is affiliated with Hezbollah, an Islamist political group that has been at war with Israel since late 2023.

Al Jazeera reported that the strike consisted of three precision missiles, which hit a “clearly marked press vehicle” that also contained siblings and media members Fatima and Mohammed Ftouni. Another precision missile later hit the same vehicle, killing a paramedic who had arrived to assist the victims.

The Israeli government admitted that it had targeted Shoaib but has not provided evidence that he was a terrorist, or even a combatant in the war, according to CPJ. Instead, the IDF said the strike that killed Shoaib “is being further investigated.”

Eleven media members have been killed in Lebanon since the Israel-Gaza war began in 2023. Two hundred fifty-nine have died in the conflict altogether, CPJ reports, of whom 256 were killed by Israeli forces.

Nebraska’s Senate primary has been thrown into chaos, all because of a 79-year-old pastor who is either an extremely bizarre Democrat or a Republican plant meant to split the vote.

William Forbes entered Nebraska’s Democratic primary in early March, just before the state’s filing deadline, CNN reported Monday. This came in defiance of state Democratic Party leadership, who are backing independent candidate Dan Osborn in the race to defeat incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts. State Democrats had not submitted anyone for their own primary so Osborn could go directly to the general election without facing a Democratic challenger.

The move is an unorthodox one by state Democrats, but it could pay dividends. In 2024, Osborn, a Navy veteran and union leader, came within seven points of defeating Republican Senator Deb Fischer. It was a shocking moment: A progressive independent with zero name recognition almost defeated an establishment Republican, while President Donald Trump carried the state by 20 points. Strategists suggested at the time that Osborn was the perfect example of the kind of candidate Democrats should run to win back working-class voters.

But the Osborn plan has since been upended by Forbes. If Forbes wins the primary, he will likely take hundreds of votes away from Osborn simply because he will technically be the Democratic candidate. These votes could be crucial in such a low-population state.

Things begin to smell fishy when one looks into Forbes’s political history. According to CNN, Forbes has voted for Trump multiple times and is anti-abortion. While he told CNN he was a lifelong Democrat and not a GOP plant, he could not name a single Democrat he had voted for in the past. Instead, Forbes “grew frustrated and said the party needed to return to the ‘morality’ it represented under President John F. Kennedy.”

Forbes attended a conference in January sponsored by the Nebraska GOP. “I’m trying to get information from everybody,” he said when asked why he went to the event. “I think for myself. I’m a free thinker.”

Forbes also deleted a Facebook page containing some of his sermons, which were reviewed by CNN and contain indications that he is more conservative than he claims.

In one sermon, Forbes criticized the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests, as well as “cultural Marxism,” which he said was harming American institutions. In another, he referred to Joe Biden as “dementia Joe”; in a third, he thanked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for restricting abortion rights.

“He is running to trick voters,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said on March 3, adding that Forbes’s campaign was a “political maneuver engineered by Pete Ricketts to split the opposition vote.” Ricketts’s campaign denies this.

State Democrats are fighting back through a woman named Cindy Burbank, who filed for the Democratic primary solely to defeat Forbes and has said she plans to immediately drop out if she wins and endorse Osborn. Nebraska’s Republican secretary of state initially removed Burbank from the ballot, arguing she couldn’t run in good faith after making such statements. Burbank promptly took her case to the state Supreme Court and was reinstated.

This wacky state race will be a fascinating one to watch—the dates to remember are Nebraska’s Democratic primary, on May 12, and the state’s Senate elections, on November 3. Hopefully Democrats—through an independent—can flip the Senate through the Cornhusker State come the end of the year.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf called it: President Trump is using his war on Iran for blatant market manipulation.

“Heads-up: Pre-market so-called ‘news’ or ‘Truth’ is often just a setup for profit-taking. Basically, it’s a reverse indicator. Do the opposite: If they pump it, short it. If they dump it, go long,” Ghalibaf wrote on X Sunday afternoon. “See something tomorrow? You know the drill.”

Sure enough, Trump posted that “Great progress has been made” regarding a peace treaty with Iran at 7:26 a.m. on Monday, two hours before markets opened—and they responded accordingly.

The Kobeissi Letter documented how Ghalibaf—and Trump’s—announcements played out in the stock market. “At 4:12 PM ET on Sunday, Iran’s Speaker of the Parliament said pre-market news is a ‘reverse indicator’ and if they ‘dump’ the market, then ‘go long.’ At 6:00 PM ET, S&P 500 futures opened nearly -1% lower and fell just 30 points away from correction territory. By 11:00 PM ET, S&P 500 futures had reversed all losses and turned green,” the analysis noted. “Then, at 7:25 AM ET today, President Trump posted that ‘great progress’ is being made on Iran peace talks. Now, the S&P 500 is trading +100 points above its low seen just hours ago, adding +$900 billion in market cap. We are in the most unusual times in market history.”

Trump has also been trying to manipulate the market to drive down the price of oil, though it’s not exactly working. Last week, the S&P 500 saw a $3 trillion market cap swing in just 56 minutes after Trump announced he’d “POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES” just hours before the market opened. Ghalibaf—a conservative who is now one of the highest-ranking leaders in Iran—just made the game clear to American investors.

Rioters who took part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, and were then pardoned by President Trump, are now suing Capitol and D.C. Police for excessive force.

Several of the rioters filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court Middle District of Florida Friday alleging that U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia fired chemicals and pepper spray into the “peaceful crowd” that day.

The lawsuit also claims that the demonstrators were hit by billy clubs and strikes to the head, which caused injuries, including “chemical burns, concussive trauma, emotional distress, and other damages.” The plaintiffs say they were “overwhelmingly peaceful” until police used force against them, and that they weren’t given warnings.

The lawsuit’s allegations are rich, considering that 140 police officers were injured as a result of the rioters, who breached the Capitol building and caused extensive damage. At least seven people died in connection with the insurrection, including Ashli Babbit, who was shot by police, and Officer Brian Sicknick, who was attacked by the mob and died the next day. Four police officers committed suicide in the days and weeks following the attack.

Just days into his presidency, Trump pardoned over 1,500 rioters convicted for their role in the insurrection, including members of the radical Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who were charged with seditious conspiracy. But being let off for their crimes on that day isn’t enough for these people, who now want a payday from the police. If anyone should be paying, it should be the man who egged the rioters on—but Trump has gotten off scot-free.

Well, that was quick. Secretary of State Marco Rubio directly contradicted Donald Trump’s claims about negotiations with Iran.

Less than an hour after Trump declared Monday that the U.S. was in talks with a “A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME,” Rubio presented an entirely different picture of Iran’s leadership.

“We have to see if these people end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they are the ones that have the power to deliver,” Rubio said on ABC’s Good Morning America. “We’re gonna test it. We are hopeful that that’s the case. There are clearly people there talking to us in ways that previous people in charge in Iran have not spoken to us in the past.

“We always prefer to settle things through negotiation and diplomacy. But we also have to be prepared for the fact that that effort might fail. That we are dealing with a 47-year-old regime that still has a lot of people involved in it who aren’t necessarily big fans of diplomacy or peace,” Rubio said.

So which is it, a 47-year-old regime or a brand-new one?

Iran’s regime hasn’t actually changed all that much—and it certainly hasn’t been replaced. After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed earlier this month, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-line cleric, was tapped to replace him. At the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has only further consolidated power.

Still, Trump claimed last week that regime change had already been achieved in Iran, and the White House doubled down in a similarly nonsensical fashion.

Former national security adviser John Bolton also disagreed with Trump’s assessment last week.

“The faces may change, but the ideology remains the same,” Bolton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “The regime will change when the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard are gone, and we’re not at that point yet, quite obviously. But it’s another way for him to say that we have won the objective and therefore are victorious and can leave.”

That’s one possible explanation for Trump’s outrageous regime change claims. Another might be that the president just wanted to make a splash before the markets opened. Either that, or Trump truly has no idea who he’s dealing with.

A woman who alleged that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was just 13 years old has had new details about her story verified, following work from the South Carolina–based newspaper The Post and Courier and Substack journalist Ellie Leonard.

The anonymous victim was interviewed four times by the FBI in 2019. She claimed to have been sex-trafficked by the notorious predator Jeffrey Epstein and sexually abused by a variety of Epstein’s associates during the mid-’80s.

These associates allegedly included the president. The woman claimed Trump assaulted her in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1984, back when Trump was a New York real estate mogul. She said she bit Trump’s penis after he unzipped his pants and forced himself on her, leading Trump to smack her in the face. This allegation was initially withheld from the Department of Justice’s Epstein files release before being quietly released on March 3 after a storm of controversy.

The woman also alleged abuse by a man named “Jim Atkins” during the same time period. Leonard identified “Jim Atkins” as Jimmy L. Atkins of Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, earlier this month. He passed away in 2003 at the age of 69.

On Sunday, The Post and Courier uncovered records that confirmed details of the woman’s testimony on Atkins. This included Atkins’s relationship with an Ohio college, his age, his hair color, his general appearance, and details about his employment in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Of course, the validated details about Atkins do not implicate Trump in any way. The White House, and the president himself, have furiously denied the woman’s claims since her testimony was publicly released, falsely claiming that the president has been “exonerated.” But every other detail of the woman’s testimony that turns out to be true gives more credibility to the rest of her story.

The Trump administration’s mishandling and smothering of the Epstein files do not exactly give one confidence in their truthfulness. As The Post and Courier reported, 30 pages of files relating to the accuser remain missing from the public view.