National Guard Member Arrested for Pulling Gun in Argument About Hair

A Georgia National Guardsman was arrested earlier this month in Washington after he allegedly pulled a loaded gun on a fellow guardswoman on one of the city’s busiest streets.

Specialist Zion Mitchell, 21, was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a firearm during a crime of violence, according to an arrest affidavit filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

The heated exchange took place in a black van, stationed outside of a Popeyes on northeast H Street, where six other members of the National Guard bore witness.

The victim, who was not identified in the affidavit save for a detail connecting her to New Jersey, told investigators that the original disagreement was over hairstyles, and whether their respective ones followed current Army regulations as set by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. At one point, Mitchell allegedly told her he would “slap the Jackson 5 out of you.”

The victim was seated shotgun in the vehicle, while Mitchell was in the row just behind, to her left. After a fiery back-and-forth, the victim said she heard what she could only describe as hearing a “holster click.” One of the witnesses then accused Mitchell of having “almost shot” them in the hand, according to the affidavit.

The victim did not know until other National Guard members informed her after the fact that Mitchell had drawn his weapon and pointed it at her.

One witness confirmed that Mitchell’s weapon was loaded at the time, with a round in the chamber. Another told authorities that the victim had previously shared that Mitchell frequently threatened women, and that the two of them had allegedly not gotten along since she rejected his advances.

Thousands of National Guard members have been patrolling Washington’s streets since Donald Trump ordered their deployment to the supposedly crime-addled capital last summer (violent crime in Washington is at a 30-year low, according to federal estimates).

Guard members told NPR last month that they felt Trump had “exploited” the National Guard. The seemingly pointless mission—which has amounted to little more than installing a military presence in the city—had left such a bad taste in the mouths of some members that they questioned whether they should fulfill their duties at all.

“If we continue down this path, where this kind of ‘presence patrol’ mission becomes the new definitive image of the National Guard, it’s going to completely rebrand everything that was noble about the National Guard into being mundane at best and threatening at worst,” one guard member told the public radio syndicate.

The Smithsonian’s chief official, Lonnie G. Bunch III, will retire by the end of the year.

The 73-year-old historian said Tuesday that his decision to step down was not tied to the various pressures stemming from the Trump administration, which has spent the last year and a half strong-arming Smithsonian officials into revising portions of U.S. history.

Bunch founded the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and became the Smithsonian’s first Black leader in 2019, overseeing 21 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, numerous research centers, and several education units and centers. Over the course of his career, Bunch spent 38 years working for the institution, advancing public education.

“I have spent nearly half of my life working at and being part of the Smithsonian family, and what a privilege it has been,” Bunch wrote in a statement. “There is no place like the Smithsonian—it has been one of the great loves of my life, and I am extraordinarily proud of what we have accomplished together. I leave with pride and sadness, gratitude and joy, and with enormous confidence in the people who will carry this remarkable institution forward.”

Bunch’s exit will nonetheless catapult the institution into another era of tumult and change, at a time when federal forces have already placed dramatic emphasis on the organization’s restructuring.

Last summer, the White House sparked alarm among Smithsonian staffers after officials laid out detailed plans to eliminate exhibits that they determined represented “improper ideology.” The memo challenged the application of educational lenses on race, gender, and oppression in U.S. history, and accused the Smithsonian directly of advancing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.”

The administration’s critiques were eugenics-adjacent, torching a specific Smithsonian exhibit for accurately describing race as something that is “not a biological reality but a social construct.” The White House further flamed the institution for emphasizing that “race is a human invention.”

Failure to correct these wrongs would turn the faucet off on funding for the world’s largest educational institution, effectively crippling the Smithsonian and nixing two-thirds of the organization’s revenue. Smithsonian staffers described the situation as an “impossible position,” arguing that the Trump administration had ordered them to be nonpartisan while forcing them to follow an extraordinarily partisan directive.

Around the same time, the Smithsonian removed Donald Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under direct pressure from the White House. The “American Presidency” wing’s revised signage explained that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal” over the course of American history. The change was the result of a White House–initiated content review in the wake of an art director’s ousting.

Much of the institution’s compliance was a part of a broader effort to save Bunch’s job, as staffers have described him as “loved” and “respected.”

The pressure has not let up. In June, Trump signed an executive order offering his administration officials unprecedented control over the independent organization’s operations in an effort to “restore trust.” The executive order cited a report by the president’s Domestic Policy Council that claimed the Smithsonian “does not present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated, but instead views American history as a ‘prime tool’ to advance ideas of social justice and the radical transformation of our society.”

President Donald Trump has spent months falsely claiming that the United States has already won its war against Iran—until now.

“Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday. “Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon.”

Trump has previously claimed the U.S. had already “won” the war against Iran at least 66 times, according to an analysis by The Daily Beast.

Trump’s pledge to bring gas prices down came after Americans saw record high fuel prices for Labor Day weekend, and diesel prices jumped to their own record high.

Now Trump is promising to get gas prices down to less than $2 a gallon—but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. The White House is secretly planning to escalate military action against Iran after the midterm elections in November, which Republicans may find a lot harder to win without Trump securing a decisive victory in the Middle East.

A federal court ruled Tuesday that the IRS broke the law when it shared taxpayer data with the Department of Homeland Security.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia called out the Trump administration for violating federal law over the data sharing, writing in its ruling that “The IRS is now on notice twice over regarding the inadequacies of its summer 2025 disclosures.

“The government and its personnel face steep civil and criminal consequences for willful disclosure of information in violation of section 6103,” the ruling states, referring to the law in question.

The IRS argued that a preliminary injunction against sharing taxpayer information is “highly unusual and harmful” because it requires the IRS to provide the district court with “prior notice of criminal investigatory activity,” according to court documents. The ruling panel called this argument “weak sauce,” as a lower court is allowing the IRS to file notifications “‘under seal,’ thereby shielding any criminal investigative activity from disclosure.”

It’s quite a rebuke for administration officials, and is another example of the White House rushing to find targets for its mass deportation machine without any regard for the law. The information sharing in question targeted thousands of taxpayers, ensnaring many people who didn’t commit any crimes. Undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes every year.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency also appears to have been involved in the information-sharing effort, and another court ruled last month that DOGE has to disclose its internal communications related to the questionably legal deal between DHS and the IRS. The Trump administration is trying to stall disclosing to the public how private tax information was shared with immigration agents, who was involved, and whether it will comply with the law going forward.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned of a potential large-scale attack from Hamas nearly two weeks before October 7. He refused to pass that warning down to anyone else in the government.

Haaretz reported that Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet was warned on September 15, 2023, about the threat of an impending “earthquake” and a “huge surprise” from Hamas, a warning that was relayed to Netanyahu. The defense ministry held a meeting two days later, but no decisions were made. After seeing a lack of action, United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed spoke to Netanyahu directly for 45 minutes, trying desperately to convince him of the likelihood of an attack from Hamas after Netanyahu had scuttled talks earlier that year. Netanyahu had reduced the number of Palestinian prisoners he agreed to release and postponed the committee intended to facilitate the prisoner and hostage exchanges—leading frustrated Hamas head Yaya Sinwar to end negotiations entirely in September, just weeks before the October 7 attack.

This breakdown led to a further destabilization of relations, with bin Zayed warning Netanyahu that “something there is about to explode.” But Netanyahu assured him that he was ready for anything.

“The emir hoped that despite his reserved response, Netanyahu would take the message seriously and take action,” an adviser told Haaretz. And yet Netanyahu chose not to brief anyone in the Israel Defense Forces or Mossad about bin Zayed’s warning. About 1,200 Israelis were killed on October 7, and their deaths were then used to justify a genocide of nearly 75,000 Palestinians.

“If we had known about the warnings, there’s a chance it would have given more weight to the first message we received from Sinwar,” a senior Shin Bet official told Haaretz. “Perhaps it would also have clarified what was behind his sudden withdrawal from the talks in early September. It’s possible we would have put two and two together and reached a completely different conclusion from the one we did, one that would have changed our entire assessment picture.”

This report of Netanyahu’s prior knowledge of an impending attack and his lack of action against it elicited countless reactions.

“Netanyahu bears personal and direct responsibility for the failure that led to the deaths of thousands of Israelis on his watch. His ignoring of the warnings is criminal negligence, and therefore he is doing everything to prevent the establishment of a state commission of inquiry that will expose the truth,” former Israeli prime minister and opposition leader Naftali Bennet wrote on X. “He did not go to the field, did not warn the heads of the security system, did not prepare Israel for the attack, and did not convene the cabinet.”

“Netanyahu cannot continue to serve in his position for another minute, and he certainly is not capable of fixing it,” Bennett continued. “If we do not replace this government, we will never know the truth that will only be revealed in a state commission of inquiry, because they are preventing its establishment out of fear of discovering the terrible truth.”

“It’s crucial to remember that the Nova music festival was supposed to end on Friday, October 6, but the organizers reached out to the IDF to get permission to extend it for an extra day. We know that warnings were everywhere at that point, yet the IDF approved the extension and added no security,” Drop Site News’s Ryan Grim wrote. “Now we know, from new reporting in Haaretz, that Netanyahu had explicitly been warned 10 days earlier that Hamas was planning an ‘earthquake’ of an attack.”

“Insane story. He was warned two weeks before the Oct. 7th attacks by the Emiratis about an imminent attack by Hamas—and did nothing,” Zeteo’s Medhi Hasan wrote. “No wonder Netanyahu has always wanted to drag out this war and block any chance of a proper independent investigation into Oct. 7th.”