Hegseth Wants Public to Watch First Firing Squad Execution Since WWII

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s execution by firing squad to be open to the public.

Speaking to Jack Posobiec for Real America’s Voice on the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday, Hegseth was asked about the decision to execute Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist who shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian in 2009 on the base before being shot, wounded, and arrested. President Trump approved Hasan’s death by firing squad to take place December 3, the first such execution in over 60 years.

“Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood. We’re going to do it on a Thursday, we’re going to do it at one o’clock, which is when he did it, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth said. “We know what it is, it was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

What Hegseth means by “public” is unclear. Will it be broadcast live? Will spectators from outside of the military be allowed onto the Texas base to see it? We’ll probably learn more in the coming days, but current Army regulations allow for at least two media outlets to be present for the execution. No legal execution has ever been broadcast live in the U.S., and the country’s last public execution was in 1936.

Since he was convicted of a military crime, Hasan’s execution required approval from Hegseth and then Trump, which was granted. Trump’s Department of Justice doesn’t want this to be the last firing squad execution. In April, the DOJ announced it was bringing back federal firing squads for death penalty sentences. President Biden had paused all executions and commuted the death sentences of 37 prisoners to life without parole as he was leaving the White House.

The Trump administration wants to prosecute Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was one of the star witnesses for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Punchbowl News reports that the Department of Justice wants to criminally indict Hutchinson, accusing her of lying to the January 6 committee about what she saw that day in 2021. The DOJ’s civil rights division presented evidence to a federal grand jury on Tuesday, and is expected to present additional evidence and witnesses in the coming weeks, unnamed sources told Punchbowl. NBC News confirmed the report. Hutchinson, who worked for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, has not yet received a subpoena from the grand jury.

Republicans have been calling for Hutchinson’s prosecution for years, with Representative Barry Loudermilk referring her to the DOJ in March and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan signing off on it. In 2022, Hutchinson testified that President Trump wanted to join his supporters and march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but his aides and Secret Service detail said it wasn’t safe.

Hutchinson said that Trump then tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, and when a Secret Service agent grabbed his arm, he grabbed the agent’s neck. Hutchinson also testified that Trump wanted his armed supporters to march that day, and said Meadows overheard the president say Vice President Mike Pence “deserves it” in response to the MAGA faithful chanting “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol.

The DOJ’s civil rights division usually handles discrimination cases, and it’s not normal for the office to oversee a case of lying to Congress. The division has resorted to hiring questionable candidates to fill vacancies, including lawyers convicted of crimes themselves. These substandard lawyers will hopefully have a tough time convincing a federal grand jury to pursue revenge against one of Trump’s perceived enemies, who simply testified what she witnessed on January 6.

Vice President JD Vance was asked to define socialism on Thursday. Instead of even trying to sincerely engage with the concept, the Harvard-educated lawyer and author offered a brain-dead, tailored-for Fox News answer.

Vance was fielded the question at a press conference in which he announced that Microsoft and other tech firms would be temporarily suspended from sponsoring H-1B visa workers seeking green cards.

“Oh man.... It’s a hard term to define these days because very often socialism … classically, you would think socialism is about prioritizing workers. And yet in reality, most of the self-described socialists running across the United States of America are going to howl about this announcement today, which is prioritizing American workers over foreign workers. So I don’t know what the term means anymore,” he said.

“I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is that you wanna replace American workers with foreign workers and you want boys to play in girls’ sports. That’s what unites the socialists that I see running across the United States of America today.”

There are quite a few different definitions and perspectives on socialism. There are the so-called “sewer socialists,” like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who believe that Americans should have “whatever they need to live a dignified life” and that it is “the government’s job to deliver on that.” The more specific, classical definitions go beyond filling potholes and housing affordability, advocating for a future in which wealth is redistributed from a small minority of elites to the working class. It can have both market and non-market models and takes various economic and social formats.

Regardless of what you think socialism means, it is certainly not “replacing American workers with foreign workers” and wanting boys to play girls’ sports.

This was a confusing, unintelligent answer from a man who’s supposed to be quite smart. What does Vance have to lose by just answering the question in good faith, especially as someone uniquely positioned to answer it? I bet Secretary of State Marco Rubio would have had a more interesting response.

White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities to be inhumane.

The Department of Homeland Security shot down a plan to construct immigration detention facilities that were more humane, a government contractor told NPR News Thursday.

At a meeting with the DHS deputy director, the contractor pitched constructing a FEMA-style camp, believing that would be more humane than building megaprisons inside of warehouses. But his company’s plan was rejected.

“No one that we spoke to at DHS was for this idea whatsoever. The deputy director told us point-blank that they had pushed back very hard on it. Everybody knew warehouses are horrible places to put people,” the contractor told NPR.

The contractor believed that the directive to construct facilities with the worst possible conditions came from the White House itself—specifically Stephen Miller, who was not present at the meeting.

“Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted,” the contractor said.

“Steve Miller certainly seemed to make that point to everyone that he wanted it to be cruel. This was what Miller had stated to the DHS at that time, to the DHS director and deputy director. What surprised me was just how adamant the people were that it was going to happen. Damn the consequences. I would say in 25 years of working with the U.S. government, I’ve never been in that position before.”

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told NPR that the contractor’s comments were “false hearsay allegation(s) from someone who has never even met or talked with Stephen Miller,” and that the comments were “defamatory.”

Under Miller’s leadership, ICE has subjected tens of thousands of people—including U.S. citizens, lawful immigrants, and immigrants with no criminal convictions—to overcrowded rooms, unsanitary conditions, insufficient food and water. Immigrants have been denied adequate medical care, and legal counsel, and were even locked in cages. As of earlier this week, 28 people have died in ICE custody in 2026. In 2025, ICE reported 33 detainee deaths, the highest in two decades.

MAGA world has turned its fire and fury toward two of the president’s closest advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, after it was revealed that the pair were more interested in assisting a pro-Russia Balkan regime than helping Republicans win the midterms.

“This has opened the floodgates,” a person close to the White House told Politico Thursday. “The knives are now fully out for these two.”

Donald Trump tapped both men to oversee his midterm advertising campaign. But LaCivita and Blair were not stateside last week amidst the Republican blitz, instead visiting a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska ahead of its regional elections, according to several sources that spoke with The New York Times Tuesday.

Republika Srpska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin and, according to the Times, has made a considerable effort to make inroads with Trump and his allies.

Blair and LaCivita were paid well for their time and, presumably, their connection to the president, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars through a Washington-based law firm affiliated with Republika Srpska’s government.

Trump, for his part, was apparently unaware of the duo’s travel plans. In a post on Truth Social Wednesday, Trump immediately tried to distance himself from his beloved strategists, claiming that Blair and LaCivita were “outside consultants” and “do not work for me.”

Yet the sudden disownment is a convenient revision of Blair and LaCivita’s broad influence on the MAGA movement. Both have held significant positions within Trump’s orbit: Prior to running the president’s midterm spending campaign, Blair served as Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff. LaCivita worked as the chief strategist of Trump’s primary super PAC, MAGA Inc., and later became chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee.

Both are also connected to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—but even the famed “ice maiden” reportedly couldn’t protect Blair and LaCivita from the White House’s ire.

“[Trump] has been livid for awhile over how things have been heading, and he hates nothing more than when people make money off him, especially when those people abandon him like this,” another person close to the president told Politico, noting that Trump could “could cut them off forever” if the situation continues to go south.

But outside of the White House, political strategists have viewed LaCivita and Blair’s disembarkment as a sign of Trump’s troubled waters.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie explained to Politico that “if your top political advisers are not paying attention to the midterms and instead are paying attention to taking money off the table in a foreign country, that seems to indicate to me that they’ve moved on from Donald Trump as their top priority, and I think you’re going to see a lot of that.”

Others were simply stunned by Blair and LaCivita’s foreign affairs. James Carville, who worked on former President Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, told Politico that the entire scandal was “jaw dropping.”

“Everything I did, I cleared with the White House,” Carville said. “When I saw this I did one of those sitcom spit takes.”