New Pentagon spokesperson promoted antisemitic conspiracy theory last year
The US department of defense, which has held just one news conference this year, announced on Friday that it has a new press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted by neo-Nazis.
As NPR’s Tom Dreisbach reported in March, Wilson claimed in a post on X last summer that Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915 after being falsely accused of raping and murdering a young girl, “raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl” and “ tried to frame a black man for his crime”.
Wilson posted that false claim in response to a post from the Anti-Defamation League commemoration the 109th anniversary of Frank’s lunching, and noting that Frank had received a posthumous pardon from the state of Georgia in 1986. The 1915 lynching spurred the creation of the ADL.
As NPR explained, neo-Nazis have continued to claim that Frank was guilty, and a group of neo-Nazis protested the Broadway musical “Parade,” which dramatizes Frank’s trial and lynching, in 2023.
Wilson previously endorsed the neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that same year, in response to a tweet from the head of the ADL.
“White supremacists and other antisemites have long used conspiracy theories about the Leo Frank case to cast doubt on the circumstances of the antisemitic lynching,” an ADL spokesperson told the Guardian in March. “We are deeply disturbed that any public official would parrot these hateful and false conspiracy theories, and we hope Kingsley Wilson will immediately retract her remarks.”
Wilson has served in the Pentagon press office since January, before being promoted on Friday. When her repeated endorsement of the attacks on Leo Frank were first reported in March, the American Jewish Committee said in a statement that she was “clearly unfit for her role”.
“Anyone who posts antisemitic conspiracy theories lifted right out of the neo-Nazi playbook should not be in public office”, the AJC wrote in March. Two months later, and just days after two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered as they left an AJC event in Washington, Wilson has been given a much more prominent role in the Trump administration, as the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson.
Tom Malinowski, a former diplomat and Democratic member of Congress, noted on X that Wilson was promoted by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, despite Wilson’s recently revealed history of promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory. “Please don’t tell me this administration gives a damn about anti-Semitism”, Malinowski wrote.
Last year, Wilson also endorsed the “great replacement theory”, which has inspired antisemitic violence. “The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory”, she wrote on X last August,” it’s reality”.
Wilson previously served as a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America, a Christian nationalist group founded by Russ Vought, a Project 2025 architect who is now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Wilson in the daughter of Steve Cortes, a Fox News contributor and former Trump campaign operative who served on Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council.
Key events
A large restructuring of the US National Security Council got under way on Friday as Donald Trump moved to reduce the size and scope of the once-powerful agency, five sources briefed on the matter told Reuters.
Staff dealing with a variety of major geopolitical issues were sent termination notices on Friday, said the sources, who requested anonymity as they were not permitted to speak to the media.
The move comes just weeks after the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, took over from Mike Waltz as national security adviser. The NSC declined to comment.
The restructuring of the NSC is expected to further reduce the agency’s influence, transforming it from a powerful policymaking body into a small organization focused more on implementing the president’s agenda than on shaping it, the sources said.
The aim is to reduce the size of the NSC, which had more than 300 staffers during the Biden administration, to just a few dozen people. Four sources with knowledge of the plans said they expect the final headcount at the NSC to come out to around 50 people.
Paul Weiss, firm that caved to Trump, loses four senior partners
Paul Weiss, the law firm that agreed to provide $40m in free legal services to support Donald Trump’s administration after he targeted it in an executive order in March, lost four senior litigators on Friday.
The four partners — Karen Dunn, Bill Isaacson, Jeannie Rhee and Jessica Phillips — plan to form their own law firm.
Dunn, who was co-chair of the firm’s litigation department, helped prepare Kamala Harris for her debate victory over Trump last year.
Dunn and Phillips, with support from Isaacson, also helped win over $25 million in damages by suing the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, in which a white supremacist killed a counter-demonstrator. Their litigation work on behalf of nine pro bono clients who were injured in the violence was featured in the HBO documentary No Accident.
In the film, Dunn recalls that she was invited to join the civil rights suit by Robbie Kaplan, a lawyer who later represented E. Jean Carroll in her successful sexual abuse and defamation lawsuits against Donald Trump. “Robbie called me out of the blue and said, ‘Do you want to sue the nazis with me?’”
When he was pressed to condemn the violence in Charlottesville that year, Trump, who was near the start of his first term as president, claimed that there were “some very fine people on both sides”.
Rhee was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Russian government’s effort to help Trump win the 2016 election.
The resignations from the firm came the same day that a federal judge ruled that another Trump’s executive order targeting another firm, Jenner & Block, for employing a lawyer who had investigated him, was unconstitutional. Trump’s order punishing Jenner & Block had cited the firm’s decision to hire Andrew Weissmann after he served as the lead prosecutor on Mueller’s special counsel team. Weissman left the firm in 2021.
The executive order against Paul Weiss, which Trump withdrew after the firm agreed to donate $40 million of pro bono services to support his agenda, had also specified that the firm was to be punished for employing a lawyer, Mark Pomerantz, who worked for Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance on an investigation of then former president Trump’s finances.
After appointing an antisemitic conspiracy theorist to serve as his chief spokesperson on Friday, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, also announced a new set of restrictions on the physical access of reporters to areas of the Pentagon deemed sensitive, “in the interest of national security”.
In a memo outlining the newly designated no-go areas for reporters, Hegseth claimed the restrictions were necessary “to reduce the opportunities for in-person inadvertent and unauthorized disclosures” of classified national intelligence information “which could put the lives of U.S. Service members in danger”.
Hegseth did not offer any examples of what such disclosures might look like, or how they would differ from the national intelligence information he accidentally disclosed to a journalist in March when he posted operational details of US strikes on Yemen in a Signal group chat.
The new restrictions limit where reporters can go inside the building and require them to wear new badges with a “clearer PRESS identifier.”
José Olivares
Donald Trump’s administration is attempting to dismiss criminal charges against a top MS-13 leader in order to deport him to El Salvador, according to newly unsealed court records – igniting accusations from critics and the defendant’s legal team that the US president is trying to do a favor for his Salvadorian counterpart, who struck a deal with the gang in 2019.
According to justice department records, the MS-13 figure in question, Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, has intimate knowledge of that secretive pact, which – before eventually falling apart – involved Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s government ceding money and territory to the gang, who in return promised to reduce violence from its side and provide Bukele’s party with electoral support.
Attempts by the Trump administration to expel Arevalo-Chavez are part of its own deal with Bukele to allow for the US to incarcerate immigrants in a maximum security Salvadoran prison. CNN reported in April that Bukele’s government had specifically asked for nine top MS-13 leaders to be brought back to El Salvador from the US.
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New Pentagon spokesperson promoted antisemitic conspiracy theory last year
The US department of defense, which has held just one news conference this year, announced on Friday that it has a new press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted by neo-Nazis.
As NPR’s Tom Dreisbach reported in March, Wilson claimed in a post on X last summer that Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915 after being falsely accused of raping and murdering a young girl, “raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl” and “ tried to frame a black man for his crime”.
Wilson posted that false claim in response to a post from the Anti-Defamation League commemoration the 109th anniversary of Frank’s lunching, and noting that Frank had received a posthumous pardon from the state of Georgia in 1986. The 1915 lynching spurred the creation of the ADL.
As NPR explained, neo-Nazis have continued to claim that Frank was guilty, and a group of neo-Nazis protested the Broadway musical “Parade,” which dramatizes Frank’s trial and lynching, in 2023.
Wilson previously endorsed the neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that same year, in response to a tweet from the head of the ADL.
“White supremacists and other antisemites have long used conspiracy theories about the Leo Frank case to cast doubt on the circumstances of the antisemitic lynching,” an ADL spokesperson told the Guardian in March. “We are deeply disturbed that any public official would parrot these hateful and false conspiracy theories, and we hope Kingsley Wilson will immediately retract her remarks.”
Wilson has served in the Pentagon press office since January, before being promoted on Friday. When her repeated endorsement of the attacks on Leo Frank were first reported in March, the American Jewish Committee said in a statement that she was “clearly unfit for her role”.
“Anyone who posts antisemitic conspiracy theories lifted right out of the neo-Nazi playbook should not be in public office”, the AJC wrote in March. Two months later, and just days after two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered as they left an AJC event in Washington, Wilson has been given a much more prominent role in the Trump administration, as the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson.
Tom Malinowski, a former diplomat and Democratic member of Congress, noted on X that Wilson was promoted by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, despite Wilson’s recently revealed history of promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory. “Please don’t tell me this administration gives a damn about anti-Semitism”, Malinowski wrote.
Last year, Wilson also endorsed the “great replacement theory”, which has inspired antisemitic violence. “The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory”, she wrote on X last August,” it’s reality”.
Wilson previously served as a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America, a Christian nationalist group founded by Russ Vought, a Project 2025 architect who is now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Wilson in the daughter of Steve Cortes, a Fox News contributor and former Trump campaign operative who served on Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council.
US offers ‘immediate sanctions relief’ to new Syrian government
The US departments of state and treasury acted on Friday to lift sanctions on Syria, following Donald Trump’s meeting with the new Syrian leader, the former Islamist rebel Ahmad al-Sharaa, last week in Saudi Arabia.
A statement from the treasury explained that the Office of Foreign Assets Control had issued a license “to provide immediate sanctions relief for Syria” which “ authorizes transactions prohibited by the Syrian Sanctions Regulations, effectively lifting sanctions on Syria”.
The state department also issued a waiver required by the 2019 Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act to suspend sanctions. “This is just one part of a broader U.S. government effort to remove the full architecture of sanctions imposed on Syria due to the abuses of the Bashar al-Assad regime”, the treasury said.
The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said the authorizations would “encourage new investment into Syria. Syria must also continue to work towards becoming a stable country that is at peace”.
The administration did not say how long it would waive the congressional sanctions, but the law limits any presidential waiver to six months.
For more permanent relief, administration officials are debating the extent to which Syria’s transitional government should be required to meet tough conditions.
After meeting Sharaa, Trump told reporters that he was impressed with the former commander of al Qaeda’s franchise in the Syrian civil war. Sharaa, he said, was a “young, attractive guy; tough guy, you know. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”
A US federal judge did not mince words when calling a Trump executive order unconstitutional, which sought to target Jenner & Block, a big law firm.
According to the judge, the Trump administration went after the law firm because of the causes it champions, the clients it represents and a lawyer the firm once employed.
“Going after law firms in this way is doubly violative of the Constitution,” US District Judge John D Bates said in a ruling on Friday.
Trump signed an executive order in March, targeting Jenner & Block by suspending security clearances and restricting their access to government buildings, officials and federal contracting work. This was, Trump claimed, because of politically motivated “lawfare” the firm engaged in.
By attempting to push forward this executive order, Trump attempted to “chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers”.
Bates added that the Trump executive orders against law firms “follow the same recipe: other than personalized touches in their first sections, they generally direct the same adverse actions towards each firm and decry the threat each firm poses to national security and the national interest.”
Bates was appointed to the District of Columbia in 2001 by President George W Bush. He blocked Trump’s executive order completely.
Judge overturns Trump order targeting law firm Jenner & Block
A US judge on Friday overturned a Trump executive order targeting Jenner & Block, a big law firm that employed a lawyer who investigated him.
Trump’s executive order, called Addressing Risks from Jenner & Block, suspended security clearances for the firm’s lawyers and restricted their access to government buildings, officials and federal contracting work.
Trump accused the law firm of engaging in activities that “undermine justice and the interests of the United States”, claiming that it participated in politically driven legal actions. In the executive order, Trump specifically criticized the firm for hiring Andrew Weissmann, an attorney who worked on Robert Mueller’s investigation into allegations of Russian influence in Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The firm sued to block Trump’s order, arguing it violated the constitution’s first and fifth amendments.
A US district judge ruled on Friday that Trump’s directive violated core rights under the US constitution, mirroring a 2 May ruling that struck down a similar executive order against law firm Perkins Coie.
Apart from Jenner and Perkins Coie, two other firms – WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey – have sued the Trump administration to permanently block executive orders he issued against them.
Cases of measles, a viral infection that was considered eliminated from the US since 2000, have climbed slightly to 1,046.
There have been 22 new cases in the past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, a small increase that signals outbreaks are slowing down.
Ten of those cases came from Texas. Other states with active measles outbreaks include Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. Indiana said its state’s outbreak was over.
Two young children and an adult have died from measles-related illnesses this year, the AP reports. The virus that causes measles is airborne and highly contagious, although preventable through vaccines.
Here are the key takeaways from Harvard’s legal battle over the Trump administration’s international student ban, from my colleague Anna Betts.
Trump’s Harvard visa threat could wipe out several of school’s sports teams
Some of Harvard’s sports teams would be virtually wiped out by the Trump administration’s move to make the Ivy League school with the nation’s largest athletic program ineligible for international student visas.
Harvard’s 42 varsity sports teams are the most in the nation, and Sportico reported last month that 21% of the players on the school’s rosters for the 2024-25 seasons – or 196 out of 919 athletes – had international home towns. The site noted that some could be US citizens or green card holders who wouldn’t need one of the international visas at issue in the Trump administration’s escalating fight with the university.
Seven of the eight rowers on the men’s heavyweight crew team that just won the Eastern Sprints title – and is headed to the national championships – list international home towns on the school’s website. Mick Thompson, the leading scorer last season, and Jack Bar, who was a captain, are among a handful of Canadians on the men’s hockey roster; 10 of the 13 members of the men’s squash team and more than half of the women’s soccer and golf rosters also list foreign home towns.
Supreme court temporarily halts access sought by watchdog group to Doge records
The supreme court temporarily paused judicial orders requiring the so-called “department of government efficiency”, established by Donald Trump and spearheaded by his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, to turn over records and answer questions in the coming days and weeks concerning its operations.
The court put on hold Washington-based US district judge Christopher Cooper’s orders for Doge to respond to a government watchdog group’s requests for information after finding that Doge is probably a government agency covered by the federal Freedom of Information Act.
The supreme court’s action, called an administrative stay, gives it additional time to consider the justice department’s formal request to block Cooper’s order while litigation proceeds in a lower court.
