Karoline Leavitt Refuses to Say if Trump Put Land Mines in Iran

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had nothing to say Monday to reports that the United States appears to be placing land mines in Iran. 

During a White House press briefing, Leavitt was questioned about recent reports that U.S.-made land mines had been spotted on the ground in Iran.

“Did President Trump sign off on using U.S.-made land mines in Iran?” one reporter asked.

“I don’t have any comment on that report today,” Leavitt said.

“Can you comment on whether they’re being used at all?” the reporter pressed. 

“I don’t have any comment on that,” Leavitt repeated, before quickly moving on. 

Bellingcat, an open-source intelligence organization, first reported last week that the U.S. military appeared to have scattered anti-tank land mines over Kafari, a village in southern Iran. The mines were discovered in a residential area two kilometers away from the entrance to Shiraz South Missile Base. So far, several people have been killed by the mines, according to Iranian media. 

Three experts told Bellingcat that the mines discovered near Kafari were from a U.S.-made Gator mines system. The United States is the only participant in the conflict known to possess these land mines, as they were developed after the U.S. stopped supplying arms to Iran. Central Command declined to comment on the report to The Washington Post.  

The United States has long resisted global demands to stop the use of anti-personnel land mines, which kill or injure civilians for years after conflicts are resolved.

In December, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reversed a Biden-era policy banning the use of land mines except on the Korean Peninsula. The previous administration had also taken efforts to destroy its stockpile of land mines that were not necessary for use in Korea. In 2024, the Biden administration sent land mines to Ukraine. Hegseth also ordered an end to the long-running U.S. Humanitarian Mine Action Program, through which the U.S. engages in demining efforts alongside other countries. 

Shortly after Donald Trump reentered office, his administration also shuttered the State Department office that handles weapons removal. Now the Pentagon appears to be making a mess that the United States has no ambition to clean up—with deadly results—and the White House won’t even comment on what’s happening. 

A golden toilet mocking President Trump was set up on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Monday.

The toilet is spray-painted gold and set up on a fake marble pedestal—a jab at the president’s preferred design aesthetic—and directly references his renovation of the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House last year. Plaques on both sides of the commode statue read “A Throne Fit for a King,” along with a brief message [sic]:

In a time of unprecedented division, escalating conflict and economic turmoil, President Trump focused on what really mattered: Remodeling the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House. This, his crowning achievement is a bold reminder that the president isn’t just a bussinessman, he’s taking care of business. It stands as a tribute to an unwavering visionary who looked down, saw a problem, and painted it gold.

The golden throne was erected by the protest art group Secret Handshake, who put their name on a toilet roll attached to the sculpture. The group has erected at least a dozen statues mocking Trump and his followers on the mall in the past 18 months, according to The Washington Post. These include a giant replica of a birthday card Trump had sent to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday and a bronze statue of Trump and Epstein holding hands. Earlier this month, the group installed a statue on the mall of Trump and Epstein in the “king of the world” pose from the movie Titanic.

The group keeps the identities of its members hidden, using an intermediary to get installation permits from the National Park Service. One of them told the Post in a phone interview Monday that the secrecy is “because it’s not about us. It’s about the kind of fun, intrigue and mystery of these things.”

“Things are dark right now and feel hopeless in a lot of ways,” he said. “There’s a lightheartedness to this that could be a respite from the darkness. Of course, there’s a lot of imagery around the idea that this guy is king and a supreme ruler that comes from him directly, so the idea of this throne does play into it.”

The Trump administration doesn’t see any humor in it.

“President Trump is making the White House and our entire Nation’s Capital more beautiful than ever before. The president will never stop working on behalf of the American people and fulfill the promises that he was overwhelmingly elected to do,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the news outlet.

Killing people abroad is apparently more important to Republicans than keeping Americans healthy.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused Monday to say whether or not Donald Trump was considering cutting health care access in order to continue funding the Iran war, suggesting that the administration was unaware of the GOP caucus’s plan to do so.

“I don’t want to weigh in definitively because I just haven’t heard that being discussed in the West Wing,” Leavitt said during a White House press briefing.

Top Republicans have already floated the idea and are reportedly eyeing federal health care cuts in order to offset the Pentagon’s massive price tag on its latest military offensive.

House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington has suggested that Congress should revive cost-sharing reductions, which could save the federal government as much as $30 billion. Doing so, however, would drastically increase out-of-pocket premium costs, a possibility that the Congressional Budget Office estimated could cause some 300,000 people to lose their health insurance by 2034. Arrington is selling the scheme as a method of “fraud prevention.”

Cuts presented in Arrington’s budget reconciliation bill include programs aimed at assisting low-income families, such as the earned income tax credit, which helps low-income, working parents recoup their tax dollars by claiming their child as a dependent. Arrington claimed the popular program “loses 30 cents on the dollar.”

“You’ve got low-income housing tax credits, for example, another sort of welfare program within the tax code that doesn’t prohibit illegals from siphoning money off that and jeopardizing the sustainability of that program,” he said.

The cuts are still in discussion, and are likely to face pushback from moderate Republicans, who are already fretting over their reelection odds—and the party’s trilateral grip on Washington—come November.

Meanwhile, the cost of the war is ramping up, hurting Americans at home. The White House has sent more troops to Iran, ramping up fears of a ground invasion, and the Pentagon is readying for “weeks of U.S. ground operations” in the region. Oil prices have soared as a result of the monthlong conflict, which Congress still has yet to authorize.

So far, more than 1,937 people have been killed in Iran, including dozens of political leaders, according to Al Jazeera. At least 13 U.S. soldiers have also lost their lives in the war, and more than 300 have been wounded. Leavitt insisted Monday that the conflict would be resolved in the coming weeks, though military officials have indicated that the war could rage for months.

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.