Category: Fact Checking

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that he received “total exoneration” in an investigative report by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General regarding a Signal group chat about a military attack in Yemen. But the report contradicts that assessment, concluding that Hegseth’s messages “created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”

The inspector general report, which was issued Dec. 2 and publicly released two days later, also faulted Hegseth for using a personal cell phone to relay sensitive DoD information, and for not retaining the Signal conversations as official records, as required by federal law and Pentagon policy.

The chat between top administration national security officials on Signal, a private encrypted messaging app, came to light because Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently added to the group chat by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who was later removed from his job. In one of the messages, Hegseth appeared to provide a timeline for impending U.S. military strikes in Yemen on March 15.

According to The Atlantic, two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing in Yemen, Hegseth shared this in the group chat:

• “TIME NOW (1144ET): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w Centcom we are a GO for mission launch.“
• “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
• “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”
• “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
• “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
• “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

Although Hegseth declined to sit for an interview with the inspector general, he provided a written statement on July 25 in which he insisted he provided only an “unclassified summary” of the operation in the Signal chat.

“I am the Original Classification Authority and, in this capacity, I retain the sole discretion to decide whether something should be classified or whether classified materials no longer require protection and can be declassified,” Hegseth wrote to the inspector general. A copy of his statement was attached to the report. “I took non-specific general details which I determined, in my sole discretion, were either not classified, or that I could safely declassify. In making this determination, I chose to keep the details only to the overt actions of DOD assets, which would be readily apparent to any observer in the area and did not include any details about targets or intelligence which may have been derived from other agencies outside of DoD. The purpose of this was to give the principals in the chat thread a heads up on the timeline, as I knew they were going to shortly be notifying partner nations and within hours would also be giving media interviews about what we had done.”

The inspector general report noted that while the information was classified when it was provided to Hegseth, it agreed that as head of the Department of Defense, Hegseth has the “authority to determine the required level of classification for any DoD information he communicates, such as through a document, message, or speech.”

In response to that conclusion, Hegseth’s spokesman, Sean Parnell, released a statement, saying: “This Inspector General review is a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and proves what we knew all along – no classified information was shared. This matter is resolved and the case is closed.”

Hegseth reposted Parnell’s statement on X and echoed his sentiments: “No classified information. Total exoneration. Case closed. Houthis bombed into submission. Thank you for your attention to this IG report.”

In a separate statement, NPR reported, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “This review affirms what the Administration has said from the beginning — no classified information was leaked, and operational security was not compromised.”

The report did conclude that Hegseth had the authority to declassify any information sent via Signal, but the inspector general’s report was not a “total exoneration,” as Hegseth put it.

In his written response to investigators, Hegseth said that “there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission.” However, the IG concluded, “[I]f this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes. Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”

“The Secretary’s transmission of nonpublic operational information over Signal to an uncleared journalist and others 2 to 4 hours before planned strikes using his personal cell phone exposed sensitive DoD information,” the report said. “Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives.”

While Hegseth had the authority to declassify the information, the report noted that based on Hegseth’s written statement, he did send “sensitive, nonpublic, operational information over Signal from his personal cell phone.” The inspector general said that action violated Department of Defense policy, “which prohibits using a personal device for official business and using a nonapproved commercially available messaging application to send nonpublic DoD information.”

The inspector general also concluded that Hegseth violated federal recordkeeping laws and Defense Department policy about retaining public records. “Specifically, those regulations require officers and employees of Executive Branch agencies and DoD employees to forward a complete copy of any record created on a nonofficial electronic messaging account to an official account within 20 days of the original creation or transmission of the record,” the report said.

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President Donald Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, on Dec. 1, claiming without evidence that his prosecution had been a “setup” by the Biden administration and that Hernández was targeted because he was president of a country where drug cartels operated.

“If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life,” Trump said in explaining the pardon.

But Hernández had been found guilty by a jury after a three-week trial. He was sentenced by a U.S. District judge last year to 45 years in prison for using his position to help drug traffickers import more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, while accepting bribes to fuel his political career and protecting violent drug cartel leaders from prosecution in return.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s action as a reversal of “over-prosecution” by the Biden administration. Hernández had been targeted because he was “opposed to the values of the previous administration,” Leavitt told reporters on Dec. 1.

We asked the White House for evidence or further explanation that Hernández’s case had been a “setup” or “over-prosecution” by the Biden administration, but we didn’t receive any response beyond the statements made by the president and Leavitt on Dec. 1.

Hernández was released from a federal prison in West Virginia on Dec. 1.

Here, we will examine the case against Hernández, Trump’s explanation for the pardon, and the response to Trump’s action.

The Indictment

According to the indictment filed on Jan. 27, 2022, in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, from about 2004 to 2022, Hernández “participated in a corrupt and violent drug-trafficking conspiracy to facilitate the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States.” He received “millions of dollars from multiple drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere, including from the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin Guzman Loera,” the Mexican drug kingpin known as “El Chapo.”

Hernández used the drug money to fund his political campaigns and commit voter fraud, the indictment said. “In exchange, Hernández protected drug traffickers, including his brother and former member of the Honduran National Congress Juan Antonio Hernández Alvarado … from investigation, arrest, and extradition; caused sensitive law enforcement and military information to be provided to drug traffickers to assist their criminal activities; caused members of the Honduran National Police and military to protect drug shipments in Honduras; and allowed brutal violence to be committed without consequence.”

Hernández “contributed with his co-conspirators to Honduras becoming one of the largest transshipment points in the world for United States-bound cocaine,” the indictment also said. Loads of cocaine were trafficked through Honduras from Colombia and Venezuela by boat and air.

(The Trump administration has been building up the U.S. military presence in the Caribbean in recent months and striking alleged drug-running boats off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia, as we’ve previously written.)

Hernández, who had served two terms as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, was extradited to the U.S. in April 2022 and was convicted in March 2024 after a three-week jury trial on cocaine trafficking and weapons offenses.

The investigation into Honduras as a drug-trafficking route and the eventual prosecution of Hernández dates back to 2015, the New York Times reported. Emil Bove III, who was then a Department of Justice prosecutor, helped lead that investigation. Bove later became a key defense lawyer for Trump and is now an appeals court judge.

During the trial, according to news coverage, Hernández testified that he had championed anti-crime legislation and worked with the U.S. to fight drug cartels. He said the witnesses against him — which included former drug traffickers — were “professional liars.” Hernández also said he was the victim of “a political persecution.”

In addition to former drug traffickers, the witnesses included a Honduran investigator and evidence from notebooks of drug transactions with Hernández’s initials.

In closing arguments, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacob Gutwillig said Hernández had protected some drug traffickers “with the full power of the state” and that he “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States.”

On June 26, 2024, Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison by District Court Judge P. Kevin Castel, who was nominated by President George W. Bush. Castel called Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who pretended to be fighting against drug traffickers while working with them.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a Justice Department press release at the time: “Hernández helped to facilitate the importation of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine to this country: billions of individual doses sent to the United States with the protection and support of the former president of Honduras.”

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said Hernández “abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences.”

The Pardon

In late October, a month before Trump announced he would pardon the former Honduran president, Hernández sent a letter, obtained by the Times, to Trump seeking a review of his case.

In the letter to Trump, Hernández, who led the conservative National Party, said he “suffered political persecution, targeted by the Biden-Harris administration not for any wrongdoing, but for political reasons.” He also told Trump that “like you, I was recklessly attacked by radical leftist forces who could not tolerate change, who conspired with drug traffickers and resorted to false accusations, lawfare, and selective justice to destroy what we had achieved and clear the path for the Honduran radical left’s return to power.”

Trump ally and adviser Roger Stone, who had supported the release of Hernández, said he gave the letter to Trump, Reuters reported. A White House official told the Times that Trump had not read the letter before announcing he would pardon Hernández.

In a Truth Social post on Nov. 28, in which Trump expressed support in the recent Honduran presidential election for conservative candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a political ally of Hernández, Trump wrote, “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”

(The Honduran election results, delayed by technical problems, showed Asfura and Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla in an extremely close race as of Dec. 4.)

Explaining the pardon to reporters on Nov. 30, Trump said, “Well, I was told, I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup. … The people of Honduras really thought [Hernández] was set up and it was a terrible thing.”

“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump continued. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”

The next day at a White House briefing, Leavitt was asked how Trump’s defense of Hernández differs from the administration’s targeting of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the administration has called the leader of a drug cartel.

Leavitt responded: “You’re cherry-picking the president’s statement a little bit yesterday, as he also said yesterday the people of Honduras have highlighted to him how the former President Hernández was set up. This was a clear Biden over-prosecution. He was the president of this country. He was in the opposition party. He was opposed to the values of the previous administration and they charged him because he was president of Honduras.”

Leavitt noted that Hernández “shared that his conviction was lawfare by the leftist party who, quote, struck a deal with the Biden-Harris administration.”

“Hernández has highlighted there was virtually no independent evidence presented,” Leavitt said, and “his conviction was based on testimony from many admitted criminals who hoped that cooperating would reduce their own penalties.” Trump “heard the concerns from many people, as he does, and he’s of course within his constitutional authority to sign clemency for whomever he deems worthy of that,” Leavitt said.

Hernández could still face charges in his home country. After Trump’s plan to pardon Hernández was announced, Honduras Attorney General Johel Zelaya reportedly said prosecutors there would be “obligated to take action … so that justice may prevail and impunity may be brought to an end.” Zelaya did not specify what charges Hernández may face, but the Associated Press reported there were various corruption investigations during his two terms in office.

Reaction to the Pardon

There was bipartisan criticism from U.S. lawmakers in the aftermath of the pardon announcement.

Democratic Rep. Norma J. Torres of California sent a letter to Trump on Nov. 29 urging him not to grant the pardon, writing: “The victims of Hernández’s crimes, including tens of thousands of American families who lost loved ones to cocaine overdoses, deserve justice. … A pardon would tell these victims that their lives don’t matter and that power can buy freedom even after conviction.”

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana asked on X, “Why would we pardon this guy and then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States? Lock up every drug runner! Don’t understand why he is being pardoned.”

Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts said in a Dec. 1 interview on CNN that the pardon is “completely absurd. It’s totally hypocritical and it just shows that they are completely unserious about actually dealing with narcotraffickers. They’re not addressing the drug problem. And this Honduran president has been proven in a court of law to be responsible for poisoning thousands of Americans and Trump gives him a pardon?”

Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida told CNN that while she supports Trump’s efforts to oust Venezuela’s Maduro, she did not agree with his decision to pardon Hernández. “I would have never done that,” she said. “I would have not taken that action.”

Speaking to reporters on Dec. 2 about the pardon, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said, “I hate it. It’s a horrible message. … It’s confusing to say on the one hand we should potentially even consider invading Venezuela for drug traffick[ing], and on the other hand let somebody go.”

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The head of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division claimed in a leaked email that “at least 10 children” died from COVID-19 vaccination, using that to justify major vaccine regulatory changes. Experts, however, say too little information was provided to verify the claim.

Studies and safety assessments in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly shown that the COVID-19 vaccines are remarkably safe, including for children, and do not increase mortality risk. While serious side effects can occur, they are rare.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, the official who penned the memo, used the alleged deaths to announce a variety of ways in which the agency would be more stringent in approving future vaccines, which some experts say are unnecessary and impractical and could reduce access to shots.

In a perspective published Dec. 3 in the New England Journal of Medicine, a dozen former FDA commissioners assailed the memo, saying Prasad’s proposals would “impede the ability to update vaccines” and “suppress innovation and competition,” ultimately “disadvantag[ing]” the American people. They added that deaths reported to the CDC and FDA previously “had been carefully reviewed by FDA staff, who drew different conclusions.”

Prasad was installed as the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vaccines, in May after his predecessor said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. forced him to resign.

The email was sent to all CBER staff on Nov. 28 and obtained by multiple news outlets the same day.

“I am writing to report that OBPV career staff have found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination. These deaths are related to vaccination (likely/probable/possible attribution made by staff),” Prasad opened the lengthy email, referring to CBER’s Office of Biostatistics and Pharmacovigilance. “This safety signal has far reaching implications for Americans, the US pandemic response, and the agency itself.”

Prasad went on to explain that Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician and then-FDA adviser, started investigating reports of death in children from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, over the summer. By late summer, she had determined “there were in fact deaths,” he said. (On Dec. 3, the FDA announced that Høeg had been appointed acting director of the FDA’s drug evaluation center.)

VAERS is an early warning system that accepts unvetted reports of health problems from anyone following vaccination. The reports do not necessarily mean a vaccine caused a problem, as many events are coincidental. Government websites for VAERS repeatedly caution that it is usually not possible to determine from VAERS data alone whether a vaccine caused an event.

Prasad said he then asked OBPV to analyze deaths reported to VAERS and that the resulting “initial analysis of 96 deaths between 2021 and 2024″ found “no fewer than 10 are related” to vaccination. He added that the coding was conservative and the “real number is higher.”

“This is a profound revelation,” he continued. “For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.”

In closing the email, Prasad said he remained “open to vigorous discussions and debate” but that staff who did not agree with his “core principles and operating principles” should resign.

Prasad did not include details on any of the 10 cases, including age, cause of death or which vaccine had been administered. While he referred to myocarditis in the email, he did not specifically say that the deaths were related to the condition. 

Myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, is a known side effect of the COVID-19 vaccines. It is, however, rare, and while it can be serious, is typically mild and less severe than the myocarditis that is caused by other viral infections, including the coronavirus.

Experts told us and other news outlets that given the lack of information, it was unclear how reliable the assessments were. Some also objected to other claims in the email.

“The memo [is] factually incorrect, misleading and disingenuous,” Dr. Anna Durbin, a vaccine researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us. Prasad “has not provided any evidence to support his conclusion that the vaccine caused the deaths yet asserts he knows the vaccine caused them,” she said, adding that the deaths should be independently investigated.

The FDA did not reply to our inquiry asking for more information, but told the biotech news outlet Endpoints News on Dec. 3 that the agency intended to “make a report publicly available by the end of this month.”

Alleged Deaths

Given the lack of detail, experts said it was difficult to evaluate Prasad’s claim of “at least 10” vaccine-related deaths in children.

“It is impossible to tell from the comments of Prasad any details of the cases and whether they have been comprehensively reviewed and other causes of death have been excluded,” Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a now-retired Vanderbilt University vaccinologist and pediatrician who served on both the CDC and FDA’s vaccine advisory panels, told us in an email. “All deaths reported to VAERS are investigated more fully, but some of the reports do not have comprehensive tests for other causes or autopsies to assess multiple organs.” She added that it is “conceivable” that there were some vaccine-related deaths in kids, “but we have not seen the science to confirm this.”

In previous administrations, Durbin said, reports of VAERS investigations would include how the review of deaths was done, who did the review, and how they came to their conclusions. “We do not have any of this for these. Until we do, it is difficult to assess how rigorous the review was,” she said. “Were those staffers qualified to do the review? I don’t know because none of that information was provided.”

By Prasad’s description, however, it appears that the count includes cases that were deemed only possibly related to vaccination.

One “can never prove with 100% certainty that the vaccine did NOT contribute to the death, so one might question what they meant by ‘possible,’” Susan S. Ellenberg, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine who oversaw VAERS at the FDA between 1993 and 2004, told us in an email. She said it would be interesting to know which types of deaths were considered possible and which were not, as well as how many of the 10 were likely or probable versus possible.

Durbin said it would be “very unusual” to consider cases vaccine-related if there is another possible or probable cause.

Typically, vaccine safety investigations begin but do not end in VAERS. As we’ve explained previously, and a CDC website notes, the system is good at detecting potential safety issues, but such signals are then investigated through other vaccine safety surveillance systems, such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which draws information from U.S. health care organizations.

Such investigations have revealed that myocarditis is a side effect of vaccination, but there is no evidence that the vaccines increase the risk of death. 

During a safety update presentation before the vaccine advisory panel in June, a CDC staffer reviewed the existing data, noting that the agency is “confident” that “there’s no increased risk of mortality” after COVID-19 vaccination.

Vaccine-related myocarditis is most common — albeit still rare — in teen and young adult males after a second dose. It is very rare in children below the age of 12 and virtually nonexistent in children below the age of 5, according to the presentation. In recent years, too, the risk of developing myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination has fallen.

A CDC follow-up study of around 500 12- to 29-year-olds experiencing myocarditis after vaccination found that 83% were fully or probably fully recovered after three months, with the rate rising to more than 90% after at least one year. There were no known deaths or cardiac transplants.

It is nevertheless possible that vaccination could be fatal in extremely rare circumstances. There have been isolated reports in the scientific literature of lethal instances of myocarditis that occurred after vaccination, including two cases in teen boys in the U.S. The risk, however, is very low. One 2023 Korean study identified 21 deaths from vaccine-related myocarditis among 44 million people who were vaccinated with at least one dose.

While COVID-19 is usually mild in children, it has caused deaths and many cases of severe disease.

“The number of confirmed covid deaths in children is certainly higher than 10,” Jeffrey Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told us in an email, adding that the risks go beyond death to hospitalizations, ICU stays, and serious inflammatory syndromes and long COVID.

For a while, although death remained rare, COVID-19 was the eighth leading cause of death in people 19 years of age and younger, and the leading cause of infectious disease deaths.

CDC data show that around 2,000 children have died from COVID-19, including 90 confirmed cases between July 2024 and July 2025, which the agency said is likely an undercount.

Regulatory Changes

Using the alleged VAERS deaths as a rationale, Prasad then proposed broad changes to how the FDA approves vaccines, stating the agency would no longer allow antibody data to be used as a proxy for efficacy when evaluating a new vaccine or extending an existing vaccine to a new population. The method is sometimes called immunobridging.

He also said the FDA would “revise” the framework for approving seasonal influenza vaccines — which he said was “an evidence-based catastrophe” — and would reassess how the agency evaluates the safety of vaccines given at the same time.

In their NEJM piece, the former FDA commissioners explained that immunobridging studies have long been accepted by the agency and are important for updating vaccines against pathogens that rapidly evolve.

“The proposed measures will slow the replacement of older products with better ones and will create potentially prohibitive expenses for new market entrants,” they wrote, adding that the changes would also reduce competition and increase prices. “Moreover, insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit.”

We previously explained the validity of immunobridging when addressing claims from Makary and Høeg in 2022 about the COVID-19 vaccine approvals in children, which were approved based on the method.

“As a former chair of the vaccine advisory committee, VRBPAC, I can say that vaccines are carefully and meticulously assessed for effectiveness and safety and the reviewers at the FDA are experts,” Edwards said, when asked about Prasad’s policy changes. “These comments do not consider any of the adverse events caused by the diseases that the vaccines prevent. None of the benefits of vaccines are acknowledged and none of the rich history and experience of vaccinologists is being called on.”

Other Claims

Experts took issue with several of Prasad’s other claims, including the suggestion that the Biden administration mandated COVID-19 vaccines in schools — the federal government does not have that power — and the idea that there is not “reliable” data on the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination in children.

The FDA commissioners called the latter assertion incorrect. “Reasonable scientists should engage in open debate about how best to shape recommendations for children at lower risk for Covid-19,” they wrote, “but substantial evidence shows that vaccination can reduce the risk of severe disease and hospitalization in many children and adolescents.”

Prasad also implied that the U.S. should have first identified myocarditis as a rare side effect of vaccination instead of Israel. But as Durbin pointed out, Israel began vaccinating earlier and also had the benefit of a universal health care system, which makes it much easier to detect safety signals.

Prasad said that he has seen “no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines, which do not halt transmission, benefit third parties.” Morris told us that his comments misrepresent the evidence. Before the arrival of the omicron variant in 2021, the vaccines were quite effective in preventing infection and thereby reducing transmission. That has since changed significantly, but even now, there is evidence that vaccination helps prevent spread of the virus to at least some degree for a period of time. The main benefit of the vaccines, however, is to prevent severe disease and death.

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In the aftermath of the deadly ambush shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump and others in his administration immediately blamed Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, for failing to vet the Afghan national accused of the attack. Here, we’ll answer some questions about what we know so far about the suspect and the vetting process.

The suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is alleged to have driven across the country from his home in Washington state and then shooting West Virginia National Guard members Sarah Beckstrom, 20, an Army specialist, and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24. Beckstrom died later from her injuries, and Wolfe remains in critical condition. They were serving as part of what Trump has called a crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.

Despite Trump’s claims that Lakanwal and other Afghans were “unvetted” and “unchecked,” there are reports that Lakanwal was vetted several times, in Afghanistan and in the U.S., most recently as part of obtaining asylum status earlier this year. Trump officials say Lakanwal may have become radicalized while living in the U.S.

Details about the shooter’s history and possible motivations are still emerging.

Who is Lakanwal?

Lakanwal is an Afghan national who is reported to have been a member of a paramilitary force that worked with the CIA during the two-decade war in Afghanistan.

Fox News Digital, citing unnamed intelligence sources, reported that Lakanwal “had a prior relationship with various entities in the U.S. government, including the CIA, due to his work as a member of a partner force in Kandahar.”

CBS News reported that in Afghanistan, Lakanwal was part of a so-called “Zero Unit,” an Afghan intelligence unit and paramilitary force that worked with the CIA.

“The units were exclusively composed of Afghan nationals and operated under the umbrella of the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, the intelligence agency established with CIA backing for Afghanistan’s previous, U.S.-backed government,” CBS News reported. “They were considered by the U.S. and its international partners to be among the most trusted domestic forces in Afghanistan.”

FBI Director Kash Patel and CIA Director John Ratcliffe both confirmed that Lakanwal worked with a “partner force” in Afghanistan that included work with the U.S. government, including the CIA.

When the country was overtaken by the Taliban after U.S. forces withdrew in 2021, Lakanwal was among the more than 190,000 Afghans who were resettled in the United States. Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said Lakanwal was living in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and five children.

Fellow guardsmen who responded to the scene shot Lakanwal, who is “under heavy guard” at a local hospital, Pirro said on Nov. 27. On Dec. 2, he appeared before a judge via video from a hospital bed and pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, assault with intent to kill and illegal possession of a firearm.

What is Operation Allies Welcome?

Lakanwal came to the country under Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome following the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Operation Allies Welcome was initiated via a memo from the Biden administration in August 2021 “to lead the coordination of ongoing efforts across the Federal Government to resettle vulnerable Afghans, including those who worked on behalf of the United States.” 

According to a contemporaneous press release about the program from the Department of Homeland Security, those brought to the U.S. would undergo a “rigorous screening and vetting process.”

“The U.S. government is working around the clock to conduct the security screening and vetting of vulnerable Afghans before they are permitted entry into the United States, consistent with the dual goals of protecting national security and providing protection for our Afghan allies,” the press release stated. “As with any population entering the United States, DHS, in coordination with interagency vetting partners, takes multiple steps to ensure that those seeking entry do not pose a national security or public safety risk.”

DHS said it deployed 400 personnel from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Coast Guard, and the Secret Service to so-called “lily pad” countries — Bahrain, Germany, Kuwait, Italy, Qatar, Spain and the United Arab Emirates — to process, screen and vet Afghan evacuees in conjunction with the Departments of Defense and State.

The “multi-layered” vetting process included “biometric and biographic screenings conducted by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals from DHS and DOD, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and additional intelligence community partners,” the press release said. “This process includes reviewing fingerprints, photos, and other biometric and biographic data for every single Afghan before they are cleared to travel to the United States. As with other arrivals at U.S. ports of entry, Afghan nationals undergo a primary inspection when they arrive at a U.S. airport, and a secondary inspection is conducted as the circumstances require.”

What are Trump and other administration officials saying?

“I can report tonight that based on the best available information, the Department of Homeland Security is confident that the suspect in custody is a foreigner who entered our country from Afghanistan, a hellhole on Earth,” Trump said in a video message on Nov. 26. “He was flown in by the Biden administration in September 2021 on those infamous flights that everybody was talking about. Nobody knew who was coming in.”

In a Thanksgiving call to military service members, Trump held up a photo of Afghans crowding onto a plane to flee their home country after its government fell to the Taliban in 2021.

Trump claimed all of the Afghan nationals brought to the U.S., including Lakanwal, were “unvetted.”

“They were unchecked,” Trump said. “There were many of them. And they came in on big planes and it was disgraceful. … They just walked in. Whoever the strongest people were physically … they got on the planes, there was no check-in. They just swamped the planes, they took off. We had no idea who they were.”

In a press conference about the shooting the same day, Pirro said, “This is what happens in this country when people are allowed in who are not properly vetted.”

“This individual is in this country for one reason and one reason alone, because of the disastrous withdrawal from the Biden administration and the failure to vet any way, in any way, shape or form this individual and countless others,” Patel said at the same press conference.

“The individual, and so many others, should have never been allowed to come here,” Ratcliffe told Fox News Digital. “Our citizens and service members deserve far better than to endure the ongoing fallout from the Biden administration’s catastrophic failures.” 

Was Lakanwal vetted?

Contrary to the claims of Trump and others in his administration, the Washington Post reported that Lakanwal “underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the United States, according to people with direct knowledge of the case.”

While critics have claimed many evacuees were able to enter the U.S. without proper vetting, “Lakanwal, however, would not have been among them, according to the individuals, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation,” the Post reported. “One of the individuals said Lakanwal was vetted years ago, before working with the CIA in Afghanistan, and then again before he arrived in the U.S. in 2021. Those examinations involved both the National Counterterrorism Center as well as the CIA, the person said.”

According to Rolling Stone, Lakanwal “underwent more vetting than most Afghans. No one just joined the CIA’s Zero Units. Soldiers had to be recommended by a close family member or friend. The CIA then vetted each member before even offering a probationary period. The vetting process was so successful that Zero Units never suffered an insider attack — when Afghan soldiers turned against U.S. advisers.”

In addition, the Rolling Stone story said that the roughly 10,000 Zero Unit veterans who resettled in the U.S. “were vetted again” after arriving in the country and “before receiving Special Immigrant Visas, meant for Afghan and Iraqi nationals who worked for the U.S. government.”

Samantha Vinograd, a former top counterterrorism official at the Department of Homeland Security under Biden and now a national security contributor at CBS News, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Nov. 30 that Lakanwal’s first vetting would have been over a decade ago by the CIA prior to beginning work in the Zero Unit, “which was a paramilitary and intelligence force that partnered with the CIA incredibly closely on some very intense missions.”

“But, to be clear, Afghan evacuees have been re-vetted since coming to the United States,” Vinograd added. “They were re-vetted under the Biden administration.”

Lakanwal also would have been vetted as part of his application for asylum, which was initiated during the Biden administration but was approved in April under the Trump administration.

Asked about the Trump administration signing off on Lakanwal’s asylum application, Trump said, “When it comes to asylum, when they’re flown in, it’s very hard to get them out. No matter how you want to do it, it’s very hard to get them out. But we’re going to be getting them all out now.”

“The vetting process … happens when the person comes into the country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Nov. 30. “And Joe Biden completely did not vet any of these individuals, did not vet this individual. Waited until he got into the United States, and then that application for asylum was opened under the Joe Biden administration, when he was the president in the White House, and allowed that to go forward with the information that they provided. That’s the Biden administration’s responsibility. This is the consequences of the dangerous situation he put our country in when he allowed those people to infiltrate our country during that abandonment of Afghanistan.”

Noem said the Trump administration has since tightened the vetting process to include social media checks.

Asked if there was any vetting as part of the process to approve Lakanwal’s asylum request, Noem said, “The vetting process all happened under Joe Biden’s administration.”

On the same news program, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly dismissed the Trump administration’s blame of the Biden administration.

“Well, this administration, they’re going to blame Joe Biden on everything,” Kelly said. “I mean, it is almost getting comical, you know, at this point. It sounds like there was some vetting done in the last administration. It sounds like they did not do enough vetting before they gave him his asylum claim. She [Noem] talked about changing the vetting process. I think that’s a good idea. I mean, when you see an issue and a process that isn’t quite working, especially after we go through an investigation on this individual, if there are things that need to be changed, we should change them.”

What concerns have been raised about vetting?

A Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report issued on Sept. 6, 2022, during the Biden administration, warned that vetting of Afghan evacuees was fraught.

“After meeting with more than 130 individuals from the Department of Homeland Security, we determined DHS encountered obstacles to screen, vet, and inspect all Afghan evacuees arriving as part of Operation Allies Refuge (OAR)/Operation Allies Welcome (OAW),” the report stated. “Specifically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees. We determined some information used to vet evacuees through U.S. Government databases, such as name, date of birth, identification number, and travel document data, was inaccurate, incomplete, or missing. We also determined CBP admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States.”

“As a result,” the report said, “DHS may have admitted or paroled individuals into the United States who pose a risk to national security and the safety of local communities.”

DHS disputed the inspector general’s findings, saying that “the draft report does not adequately acknowledge, and account for, the interagency and multilayered vetting process that started overseas, continued at the U.S. Port of Entry (POE), and is currently ongoing with recurrent vetting.”

A subsequent Justice Department audit issued in June looked at the FBI’s role in vetting the national security risk posed by Afghan evacuees.

“According to the FBI, the need to immediately evacuate Afghans overtook the normal processes required to determine whether individuals attempting to enter the United States pose a threat to national security, which increased the risk that bad actors could try to exploit the expedited evacuation,” the audit said.

However, the review found that while 55 Afghan evacuees who made it to the U.S. were on the terrorist watchlist, as of July 2024, just nine remain on the list and were “being tracked, as appropriate.” According to the report, “The remaining 46 were removed from the watchlist for a variety of reasons, which included a determination by the FBI that the individual was no longer considered a threat to the United States.” (According to the DOJ, “Watchlist nominations are based on derogatory information, which the TSC [Terrorist Screening Center] defines as intelligence or other information that serves to demonstrate the nature of an individual or group’s association with terrorism.”)

Vinograd, the former Biden administration official, acknowledged on “Face the Nation” that while there was pressure to expedite vetting “to help our Afghan partners and bring at-risk Afghans here … protecting national security and public safety was the foremost priority. And that’s why a process was designed that vetted individuals overseas, but it was never intended to be a one-and-done. It was a multistage process with various U.S. government agencies. Afghan evacuees were vetted overseas by graphic and biometric vetting. And then there were other stages of vetting that occurred once individuals were here. So we have to put this vetting process in context.”

In an appearance on CNN on Dec. 1, Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, said that while some Republicans are “trying to create the presumption that the mistakes were made under the prior administration,” Lakanwal was vetted repeatedly.

“Vetting is a very imprecise, imperfect science,” McCabe said. “Vetting depends exclusively on checking someone out by accessing information that we have in our own possession or can get from the country that that person’s coming from. … Essentially we’re left with a process where the absence of any negative information equals a positive result. And that is by definition, you know, not completely reliable.”

“There is no guarantee when you look into someone’s background to grant them entry, that they’ll come here and never make a mistake or commit a crime or do something violent,” McCabe said. “This appears to be one of those instances that obviously has gone horribly wrong.”

Was lack of vetting to blame for the attack?

“At this point, we don’t have indications that the horrific tragedy was a result of a vetting failure,” Vinograd said. “Instead, the attorney general also said this morning it appears the individual was radicalized once here.

“And let’s be clear on what the vetting system is and what it isn’t,” Vinograd said. “The vetting system is a system in which an individual’s identifiers, their biographic information and biometric information, iris scans, fingerprints, facial images, are run against datasets of information about individuals with ties to terrorism and criminal history. The vetting system is not predictive of whether an individual with no derogatory information is or is not at some point going to become violent.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Nov. 30, Noem said, “We believe he [Lakanwal] was radicalized since he’s been here in this country. We do believe it was through connections in his home community and state, and we’re going to continue to talk to those who interacted with him, who were his family members, who talk to them.”

A more nuanced picture of Lakanwal has begun to emerge since the shooting. Rolling Stone quoted an Afghan veteran who fought alongside him saying Lakanwal was struggling with mental illness and an inability to financially provide for his family. The man said Lakanwal reached out to the CIA for help.

The former unit mate, who was not named in the story, said Lakanwal lost his job at a laundromat because he didn’t have a work authorization card — even though he was granted asylum. He said Lakanwal spoke of isolation and increasing desperation.

ABC News reported that the recent death of an Afghan commander revered by Lakanwal had deepened Lakanwal’s depression and compounded the stress of his financial burdens.

According to the New York Times, the units Lakanwal served with in Afghanistan “had been trained for nighttime raids targeting suspected Taliban members, and were accused by human rights groups of widespread killings of civilians.” The Times said, “The C.I.A. has denied the allegations of brutality among the units, saying they were the result of Taliban propaganda.”

CBS News obtained emails sent by a case worker who was working with Lakanwal’s family in Bellingham, Washington, which described a deterioration of Lakanwal’s mental health in the last two years.

One email described “manic episodes for one or two weeks at a time where he will take off in the family car” and other “interim” episodes in which he “tries to make amends.” According to CBS News, “The case worker, who is not a mental health professional, later said in the email that they believed Lakanwal is suffering ‘…PTSD from his work with the US military in Afghanistan.’”

“Rahmanulla was a man who was extremely proud and capable in the world he came from, who felt defeated in the world he came to,” the case worker said.

“The investigators haven’t revealed any indication that he was in touch with other radicals,” McCabe said on CNN. “But what is pretty clear is that this person, this Lakanwal, went down, really his life sort of devolved in the last year. We know that he was vetted before he was allowed to work with the CIA and our special forces folks. If there had been any indication at that time that he had contacts with known terrorists or with sympathetic to Taliban or other terrorist viewpoints, he never would have been approved to work with the U.S. military or the CIA.”

What policy has Trump proposed as a result of the shooting?

In his video message, Trump said, “We must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here, or add benefit to our country.”

On X, Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, also blamed poor vetting by the Biden administration. “This is why the DC attack happened,” Kent wrote. “The solution is rounding up everyone Biden let in & deporting them immediately.”

In response, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced, “Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”

The State Department, meanwhile, announced on Nov. 28 that it had paused visa issuance for individuals traveling on Afghan passports.

Trump subsequently announced that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover.” On Dec. 2, USCIS announced in a memo it was pausing the review of all pending applications for green cards, citizenship or asylum from immigrants from 19 countries that were part of travel restrictions implemented in June.

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The vaccine advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is scheduled to meet Dec. 4 and 5. On the agenda: the hepatitis B vaccine, the overall childhood vaccine schedule and vaccine ingredients. We’ll summarize what we’ve written about these topics and what the committee has said about them in recent meetings.

The group, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, was reconstituted in June by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The committee has since departed from its normal evidence-based procedures and has made changes to its vaccine recommendations amid misleading claims about vaccine safety.

As we have written, the panel previously was scheduled to vote in September on a recommendation to delay the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine but tabled the vote at the last minute. The committee presented no clear rationale for why it was considering delaying the birth dose, and one member cited “trust,” and not safety, as the motivator. Since universal hepatitis B vaccination for infants was recommended in 1991, hepatitis B infections in children have fallen by 99%. Babies and young children who are infected with the hepatitis B virus are disproportionately likely to develop chronic infections, which can lead to liver failure and liver cancer.

Also on the bare-bones agenda are items related to the vaccine schedule, vaccine safety monitoring and a presentation titled “Adjuvants and Contaminants.” The committee also typically votes during its fall meeting to approve the next year’s vaccine schedule documents, Jason Schwartz, who studies vaccination policy at the Yale School of Public Health, told us in an email. These documents compile existing recommendations as a resource for health care providers and parents. Such votes are on the design and footnotes of the documents but do not affect “the underlying recommendations” and do not have “immediate consequences for vaccine access or affordability,” he explained.

The committee will meet this week under new leadership. On Dec. 1, HHS announced that biostatistician and epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff’s short tenure as chair of the committee was over and that he had been appointed to a leadership role in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. The committee’s new chair is pediatric cardiologist Dr. Kirk Milhoan, another Kennedy appointee, who has a history of promoting treatments for COVID-19 that are not evidence-based and making unfounded claims about COVID-19 vaccination.

Milhoan confirmed to the Washington Post that the group would vote on delaying the hepatitis B birth dose, although the extent of the delay is “still being finalized,” he said. He also said that the group would discuss the effects of the childhood vaccine schedule on chronic health conditions.

In October, the CDC staffers tasked with supporting the committee were let go, according to the Guardian.

Meanwhile at the Food and Drug Administration, a leaked Nov. 28 letter from vaccines regulatory division head Dr. Vinay Prasad announced a new, stricter framework for regulating vaccines. He justified this proposal by claiming, with little detail to back it up, that COVID-19 vaccines had killed at least 10 children. FDA senior adviser Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician, was involved in the investigation into the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, Prasad wrote. Høeg is an ex officio member of ACIP.

Hepatitis B Birth Dose

Hepatitis B vaccination takes up the majority of the agenda on the meeting’s first day, which includes an anticipated vote on whether to delay the birth dose. Kennedy long has misleadingly claimed that it’s unnecessary to give a dose of the hepatitis B vaccine at birth because the virus is spread via sexual contact and drug use. But an infected mother can transmit the virus to her baby during birth or after, and it also can be spread by other family members or close contacts through minute amounts of blood. 

Getting a hepatitis B vaccine at birth provides a safety net for babies, in case an infection in a mother is missed or the baby is later exposed to another infected person. About half of people in the U.S. who have hepatitis B do not know it, according to data presented at the September meeting by a CDC staff scientist.

A Dec. 2 review by the Vaccine Integrity Project, conducted in advance of the anticipated hepatitis B vaccine vote, found “no evidence of any health benefit with delaying the birth dose and identified only risks related to changing current US recommendations for universal hepatitis B vaccination.” The Vaccine Integrity Project is an initiative of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy that provides evidence-based information on vaccination.

Opponents of the universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine have questioned why some countries have different hepatitis B vaccine strategies than the U.S., but the CDC presentation pointed out that many of these countries have a higher rate than the U.S. of successfully screening mothers for hepatitis B before they give birth and also have universal health care systems.

The move toward changing hepatitis B vaccine recommendations was introduced during an ACIP meeting in June, preceding the September meeting in which the group discussed but failed to vote on whether the birth dose should be delayed by one month.

The group did vote to recommend that all women be tested for hepatitis B during pregnancy. However, this is “already standard clinical practice and outside ACIP’s purview,” a review of the meeting by former ACIP members pointed out.

The member who made the motion to table the hepatitis B vaccine vote, Dr. Robert Malone, subsequently said he had done so because the proposed delay was “not sufficient.” Malone has for years spread false and misleading information about vaccines. Later in September, President Donald Trump suggested that the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine should be delayed until 12 years of age.

The September presentations leading up to the tabled hepatitis B vote offered little detail on topics that would ordinarily be discussed before changing vaccine recommendations, including whether there could be practical ramifications from changing the vaccine schedule. However, the nonprofit Vaccinate Your Family and others have expressed concerns that changing the timing of a child’s first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine could affect subsequent doses, making it more difficult to use certain commonly used combination vaccines. The childhood vaccine schedule recommends three hepatitis B vaccine doses.

“Changes to recommendations for any component within a combination vaccine risk reducing options for families and could disrupt vaccine supply and limit access for years,” the pharmaceutical company Sanofi wrote in a Nov. 25 public comment posted in advance of the ACIP meeting. “These supply challenges would extend beyond combination vaccines to include stand-alone vaccines that prevent diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type b, and polio.” Sanofi makes Vaxelis, a combination vaccine protecting against hepatitis B along with these other listed diseases.

Vaccine Ingredients and the Vaccine Schedule

The second day of the meeting will focus on a wide variety of topics related to vaccine safety, “Adjuvants and Contaminants,” and the vaccine schedule overall, per the agenda. No votes are listed on the agenda for this day.

It is unclear precisely what the presentations will cover, but the topics overlap with interests of a new ACIP work group established under Kennedy. This group will review “the safety and effectiveness” of the childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule, per a document posted in October.

In this document, the work group suggested it would revisit when and in what order vaccines are given and which vaccines should be given together, for example. As we have written previously, new vaccines are studied in the context of the current vaccine schedule and are approved if shown to be safe and effective. A Dec. 2 post on the Substack Unbiased Science explained that the vaccine schedule has been built over time based on multiple considerations, related to ideal timing to get the best protection, established safety of giving immunizations at the same time, and practicality.

ACIP chair Milhoan also told the Washington Post that the committee is beginning a discussion of aluminum adjuvants, an interest also noted in the new work group document.

Adjuvants are substances added to vaccines in small amounts to improve a person’s immune response to the vaccines’ main ingredients. The most commonly used vaccine adjuvants are aluminum salts, which were discovered to work for this purpose nearly 100 years ago.

In recent months, Kennedy has made incorrect and misleading statements about aluminum adjuvants, cherry-picking and misusing data from a July 15 Danish study to claim that aluminum in vaccines has been linked to autism. In fact, this large study found no association between aluminum in vaccines and 50 chronic conditions, including autism.

Kennedy also ordered a Nov. 19 update to a CDC webpage on vaccines and autism, which repeated these claims about the Danish study. The webpage also cited evidence of “a positive association between vaccine-related aluminum exposure and persistent asthma,” based on a 2022 CDC-funded study.

However, the new CDC webpage failed to note that the Danish researchers, who originally set out to replicate the 2022 study, did not find an association between aluminum content in vaccines and asthma. The first author of the 2022 study, pediatrician Dr. Matthew Daley of Kaiser Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research, in July told STAT that the new Danish study was “well done” and “reassuring.”

The ACIP agenda does not specify what “contaminants” will be discussed. At the group’s September meeting, presenters discussed alleged “DNA contamination” in mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. However, claims of higher-than-expected levels of DNA in COVID-19 vaccines are based on flawed analyses that have been contradicted by other assessments. Moreover, as we have written before, the small quantity of DNA left over in vaccines from the manufacturing process is expected and is not considered contamination.

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Since the mid-1600’s, researchers and scientists have shared their discoveries by publishing articles in scientific journals. Knowledge-sharing in this way allowed the scientific community to discover and refine new concepts and expand the community’s collective knowledge.

After World War II, the scientific discoveries made around the world helped build a burgeoning and profitable scientific publication industry. Publishers would source, peer review and publish articles and journals, and universities, libraries and other research institutions would pay the publishers to make them available to their patrons.

That model persisted into the 21st century. In 2025, one X user, upon asking why he had to pay to read research even if the work was taxpayer funded, concluded (archived), “I looked into this and it was literally Ghislaine Maxwell’s father who invented the paywall model for research papers. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The claim circulated on Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), Bluesky (archived) and Reddit (archived) in recent years. 

Ghislaine Maxwell, one of nine children of Robert and Elisabeth Maxwell, became a household name through her association with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, a long-time friend of Epstein, is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Texas after a U.S. judge found her guilty of multiple charges, including sex trafficking of a minor. Epstein died in a Manhattan prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking of minors.

Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a publishing magnate mostly known for his ownership of the Mirror Group Newspapers and the eventual mismanagement of its pension fund. After World War II, he founded the Pergamon Press publishing house that published scores of scientific journals in its day, selling access to customers like libraries and societies. Maxwell grew both Pergamon Press and through it, the business of scientific publishing itself. He eventually sold Pergamon Press for $768 million in 1991.

Though it was unclear at the time of this writing whether Maxwell “invented” the paywall system for scientific publishing that existed in 2025, it was clear from biographies and literature about the publishing industry that Maxwell and Pergamon Press were instrumental in turning scientific publishing into a profitable business — and, in the process, entrenching the user-paid system that exists today.

A changing industry

Maxwell entered the scientific publishing industry at a watershed moment after World War II. 

Before the war, publishers had sold scientific writings though the business did not net the profits Maxwell would later generate. In “Springer-Verlag: history of a scientific publishing house,” an account of the history of the German publishing house Springer, the author Heinz Sarkowski described pre-and postwar owner Ferdinand Springer’s attitude toward journal publication. Sarkowski wrote: 

Ferdinand Springer viewed the publication of journals from its economic aspect as follows: one third of the journals make profits, with which the losses incurred by a second third can be covered; the final third break even. This means that, in any case, there were no great profits to be made with journals in general. Their advantage for the publishing company lay in their ideal importance and in their pioneer function, as described above. The growing economic significance of the journal business for the scientific publisher has changed this concept considerably.

Sarkowski’s research showed that a paid model for distributing scientific research did exist before Maxwell but faced considerable changes after World War II.

Springer was not alone on the pre-war scientific publishing scene. In the U.K., where Maxwell would eventually found his publishing empire, “learned societies” like universities or the Royal Society, which published one of the world’s first scientific journals, dominated pre-war scientific publishing. According to “A History of Scientific Journals,” a book that examined publishing at the Royal Society (page 476): 

The handful of commercial firms involved before the war had tended either to mix short research papers with more marketable news and views (as did Nature) or treated their journals as loss-leaders that might bring contacts “with the prospective authors of profitable books”. The new players, on the other hand, were aiming to profit from the publication of research. They inspired other firms to move into journals.

Both “Springer-Verlag: history of a scientific publishing house” and “A History of Scientific Journals” suggested that Maxwell was not the first person to consider making a profit from publishing research. Where, pre-World War II, publishers mostly used scientific journals as a means to other publishing ends, Maxwell managed to transform his business into one that generated profits from scientific publishing by its own merit.

Maxwell seized post-war opportunities

According to “Maxwell,” Joe Haines’ biography written in consultation with Maxwell’s wife, Betty, Maxwell’s first work in the publishing world was with Springer. 

As the publisher attempted to restart business after the war, it needed someone with Maxwell’s military connections and sway to obtain printing permissions, secure paper and transport stock from then-East Berlin and Austria to be sold all over the world. Maxwell had served as a British army officer in World War II.

Maxwell solved all these problems for Springer, including selling valuable back issues of scientific journals through the European Periodicals, Publicity and Advertising Corporation (EPPAC) he set up in London in 1947, Haines wrote.

According to both “Maxwell” and “Springer-Verlag: history of a scientific publishing house,” Maxwell distributed scientific publications for Springer from 1948 to 1958 through various London-based companies, creating a net turnover of more than 20 million Deutschmarks. Using the last fixed conversion rate for Deutschmarks, that would be the equivalent of around $45 million in 2025.

Striking out on his own

After spending his early years in the scientific publishing business working for others, Maxwell got a chance to strike out on his own when Butterworths, at the time the leading British scientific publisher, pulled out of a co-operation with its German counterpart Springer and sold Maxwell its shares in 1951.

Maxwell renamed the company Pergamon Press and began traveling the world to secure new, international journal titles for the publishing house.

Haines described Maxwell’s view of Pergamon Press as follows:

The original germ of an idea that the crying need of education in the future would be for international scientific publishing of all kinds now began to take commercial shape. Maxwell realised that scientists and academics were desperate to get their basic research work into print; the fees which they were paid were of secondary consideration. Other scientists were just as desperate to read the work their colleagues were doing. University and other libraries were only too eager to buy, at almost whatever price, the reports of the studies in which the scientists were involved. 

Maxwell would continue this business model — buying the publication rights for scientific journals through Pergamon and selling them to libraries — until he sold Pergamon to the publishing giant Elseveir in 1990. Pergamon remained an imprint of Elseveir in November 2025.

According to Brian Cox, who worked for Maxwell and Pergamon Press for 31 years from 1960 and wrote about his time in the journal Logos in 1998, the company “published over 7,000 monographs and reference works, and launched 700 journals, 418 of which were still current titles when the company was sold.” 

Cox described a system of selling subscriptions to journals, at that point physical publications, at different prices and rates determined by duration and whether customers paid directly to Pergamon in a system not dissimilar to the user-paid model still used in the 21st century.

Scientific publishing — time for another change?

In sum, while Maxwell grew the profitability of scientific publishing in a way that did not exist before World War II, he expanded on an existing model but did not invent a new one. 

Before World War II, publishers like Springer were already publishing scientific journals and charging fees for access. Pre-war publishers did not view the business as profitable and did not expressly pursue profits in the field — Maxwell did. Thus, research was not free, even before Maxwell. 

In recent years, the scientific community has attempted to move away from a subscription model that passes publication costs on to libraries, universities or individual readers. In this system, as one X user pointed out, readers can end up paying for research that is carried out with public grants funded by taxpayer money. Some publicly funded organizations like the National National Institutes of Health in the U.S. and the European European Commission have introduced plans to make all or some of their publicly funded research free.

There is also a growing open access movement across the scientific community. This system instead passes publishing costs onto governments, grant funders or authors, which can create its own accessibility issues in turn.

Sources

Kasprak, Alex. ‘Unsubstantiated Trump Child Rape Allegations Originated with “Jerry Springer” Producer’. Snopes, 1 Aug. 2024, https://www.snopes.com//news/2024/08/01/trump-child-rape-epstein/.

Kasprak, Alex. ‘Was Trump “Found Guilty” of Sexually Assaulting E. Jean Carroll?’ Snopes, 9 May 2023, https://www.snopes.com//news/2023/05/09/trump-liable-sexual-abuse/.

Kasprak, Alex. ‘What We Know About Origins of Trump Child Rape Allegations’. Snopes, 3 Sept. 2024, https://www.snopes.com//news/2024/09/03/trump-epstein-katie-johnson/.

‘Mark Ruffalo Apologizes after Reposting False Images of Trump on Epstein’s Plane’. NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/mark-ruffalo-apologizes-after-reposting-false-images-of-trump-on-epstein-s-plane-201646149874. Accessed 17 Nov. 2025.

Rascouët-Paz, Anna and Joey Esposito. ’19 Rumors about Trump’s Relationship with Epstein, Fact-Checked’. Snopes, 12 Nov. 2025, https://www.snopes.com//collections/trump-epstein-rumors-collection/.

‘Trump Asks Supreme Court to Throw out E. Jean Carroll’s $5 Million Verdict’. AP News, 10 Nov. 2025, https://apnews.com/article/trump-carroll-abuse-defamation-supreme-court-be62982deb6821b62e0471f5bea3e64d.

In late 2025, social media users spread a rumor that the Department of Education said it would no longer classify nursing programs and other college credentials as “professional degrees.” 

The allegation spread on X, Instagram, Facebook and Threads. News media outlets ran stories with headlines like “Nursing Is No Longer Counted as a ‘Professional Degree’ by Trump Admin.” Many posts included lists of supposed college credentials the Department of Education purportedly planned to reclassify. Snopes readers sent in examples of a popular list circulating online and asked us to verify whether the federal education agency will “no longer recognize these as professional degrees.” Some asked if this meant the degrees would not qualify for student loans.

The Department of Education had, in fact, moved forward with a proposal excluding a wide range of college programs from the definition of “professional degrees” specifically in relation to eligibility for student loans as part of its process for implementing new rules in U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. The Nov. 6 proposal, if passed, would result in a more restrictive cap on federal loans for students attending graduate programs in varying professions. The post above provided a largely accurate list of some of the excluded degrees. 

As of this writing, the proposal had not been finalized. It was unclear whether this policy that specifically affected student loans indicated a broader shift in the Department of Education’s attitudes toward different graduate degree programs. As such, we have rated this claim a mixture of truth, falsehood and undetermined information. 

In an emailed statement, Ellen Keast, a Department of Education spokesperson, said the agency is using the same definition of what constitutes a professional degree that it has used for decades and the language of its proposed rules “aligns with this historical precedent.” 

“We’re not surprised that some institutions are crying wolf over regulations that never existed because their unlimited tuition ride on the taxpayer dime is over,” Keast said. 

The Department of Education said it expects to release final rules in spring 2026 at the latest (see Page 56). 

How did we get here? 

Trump’s July 2025 budget bill eliminated a program that allowed graduate students to borrow up to the full cost of their attendance and placed caps on how much students could borrow (see Section 81001). 

Under the new law, students in “professional degree” programs, defined as “professional students,” can borrow the highest amount at an annual limit of $50,000 with a lifetime cap of $200,000. Students in other graduate programs can borrow $20,500 annually, with a lifetime cap of $100,000. The new policies on student loans go into effect on July 1, 2026.

In response to this law, the Department of Education began what’s known as a “rulemaking” process to implement the legislation. Part of that rulemaking, in this case, involved determining what counts as a “professional degree” under the legislation. 

As such, in order to determine who qualifies for the higher cap on student loans, the Department of Education has proposed a narrow interpretation for the definition of “professional degree” first described in a 1965 regulation. Here’s the original definition: 

Professional degree: A degree that signifies both completion of the academic requirements for beginning practice in a given profession and a level of professional skill beyond that normally required for a bachelor’s degree. Professional licensure is also generally required. Examples of a professional degree include but are not limited to Pharmacy (Pharm.D.), Dentistry (D.D.S. or D.M.D.), Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M.), Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.), Law (L.L.B. or J.D.), Medicine (M.D.), Optometry (O.D.), Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.), Podiatry (D.P.M., D.P., or Pod.D.), and Theology (M.Div., or M.H.L.).

The Trump administration’s interpretation would define “professional degrees” as those that have the same four-digit CIP code as the listed examples above, as well as clinical psychology (Psy.D. or Ph.D.). CIP, or Classification of Instructional Programs, was developed by the federal government to classify programs to identify courses taught throughout the United States. Schools often use different program names and descriptions for similar courses of study — CIP codes allow the government and other organizations to map those programs across a shared set of codes. 

What is a professional degree under the proposal? 

Here’s an example of how this would work. The four-digit CIP code for “Pharmacy” is 51.20, which, as of this writing, included fields such as clinical and industrial drug development, pharmaceutical sciences and pharmaceutical marketing and management. Thus, these fields would be classified as a professional degree — and students studying in these fields would be allowed to borrow more money — because “Pharmacy (Pharm.D.)” is on the list of eligible degrees. 

Based on a Snopes review of CIP codes, every degree on the list circulating online would not be counted as a professional degree, with the exception of a few counseling degrees that fell under CIP code 42.28 for “Clinical, Counseling and Applied Psychology.” 

The list in social media posts may simply be outdated, as the Trump administration’s previous plan involved offering the “professional degree” student loan cap only to the 10 original examples from the 1965 law (see Page 13). An updated proposal from Nov. 6, which the Department of Education moved forward for further consideration, added clinical psychology and the CIP designations to the “professional degree” definition. 

Here’s the language from that proposal, as published on Page 7 by the National Association of Student Aid Administrators (emphasis ours): 

Professional student: A student enrolled in a program of study that awards a professional degree upon completion of the program; 

(1) A professional degree is a degree that: 

(i) Signifies both completion of the academic requirements for beginning practice in a given profession, and a level of professional skill beyond that normally required for a bachelor’s degree; 

(ii) Is generally at the doctoral level, and that requires at least six academic years of postsecondary education coursework for completion, including at least two years of post-baccalaureate level coursework; 

(iii) Generally requires professional licensure to begin practice; 

and (iv) Includes a four-digit program CIP code, as assigned by the institution or determined by the Secretary, in the same intermediate group as the fields listed in paragraph (2)(i) of this definition. 

(2) A professional degree may be awarded in the following fields: 

(i) Pharmacy (Pharm.D.), Dentistry (D.D.S. or D.M.D.), Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M.), Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.), Law (L.L.B. or J.D.), Medicine (M.D.), Optometry (O.D.), Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.), Podiatry (D.P.M., D.P., or Pod.D.), Theology (M.Div., or M.H.L.), and Clinical Psychology (Psy.D. or Ph.D.). 

(3) A professional student under this definition: 

(i) May not receive title IV aid as an undergraduate student for the same period of enrollment; and 

(ii) Must be enrolled in a program leading to a professional degree under paragraph (2) of this definition.

In sum …

It is true that the Department of Education had advanced a proposal excluding a wide range of graduate programs from the definition of a “professional degree” when determining eligibility for student loan programs while determining rules for implementing new restrictions passed in the 2025 budget bill. It is not true that the agency has “reclassified” these programs or said that they were “no longer professional degrees,” as of this writing, because the proposal has not yet passed. The Department of Education also argued that it is using the same definition of a professional degree first outlined in federal regulations in 1965, although the agency’s interpretation of that definition is, in truth, a narrow one. 

In late November 2025, a rumor spread online that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was running its official X account from Tel Aviv, Israel, shortly after a new feature on the social media platform highlighted the location from where accounts were posting.

For example, multiple X users (archived, archived) shared an image purportedly showing the About page of @DHSgov, the official DHS account on tech billionaire Elon Musk’s app. One person wrote: “A major news story has appeared in the X timeline: The ‘US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’ account is registered in Israel and is managed from there.”

(X user @ps_trump)

The image first appeared in a post by @astrrals on X (archived):

The screen capture read:

Homeland Security @DHSgov

Date joined July 2008 in Israel

Account based in Tel Aviv, Israel

16 username changes Last on July 2008

Connected via Israel App Store

As of this writing, the post had more than 39 million views and 330,000 likes. The same rumor appeared many times on X. Some posts claimed X turned off the feature 20 minutes after the DHS account’s location was exposed. 

The viral screenshot did not include a gray checkmark — which is used for verified accounts of governmental organizations and officials — putting its authenticity in question. Further, on Nov. 25, the account that first posted the screenshot appeared to share information on how it had been created (archived). In other words, it seemed to be an admission that the claim the DHS X account was run from Israel was based on a fabricated screen capture:

We have contacted this account asking for confirmation the claim was a hoax and will update this report should we receive a response.

It is true that in late November 2025, X began rolling out (archived) a feature that had the result of revealing many accounts that claimed to be based in U.S. were in fact run from other countries.

The previous month, on Oct. 14, Nikita Bier — the company’s head of product — said the social media platform was working on developing this feature (archived) to increase transparency:

It was also true that shortly after launching it, X shut off the part of the new feature that showed where an account was created. Bier confirmed as much on Nov. 22 (archived), saying the “account creation country was incorrect on a very small subset of old accounts.”

He later added the company was working to fix this. On Nov. 23, he said an update (archived) was due in 12 hours and that accuracy would be “99.9%.” As of this writing, Snopes had yet to see the feature reactivated on X’s website or iOS app.

After he became aware of the DHS rumor, Bier said it was “fake news” and that @DHSgov, the agency’s official X account (verified with a gray check) never displayed its localization for security reasons (archived, archived):

However, on the morning of Nov. 24 — after X switched off the part of the new feature that showed the creation country — Snopes verified that the DHS X account’s About page did display a localization, saying it was based in the U.S.:

(X user @DHSgov)

Clicking on the small information button next to the localization brought up a pop up window that read “The country or region that an account is based can be impacted by recent travel or temporary relocation. This data may not be accurate and can change periodically.”

(X.com)

Bier said in an email that X added the localization for the DHS account “with their permission” after the “hoax.” Snopes examined the X About pages of the Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Justice and Treasury Department. As Bier said, none of them contained geographical information. 

For further reading, we also investigated whether Musk shut down X’s location feature after it revealed two-thirds of X’s “MAGA and far-right accounts” were based in Bangladesh, Nigeria and Russia.

Weeks after Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, social media posts claimed the conservative activist had secretly subscribed to a trans woman’s OnlyFans account and sent her $30,000, with screenshots allegedly showing his legal name from his credit card.

The rumor spread on multiple social media platforms, including X, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. “Charlie Kirk accused of subscribing to transgender influencer website,” one TikTok user wrote. Videos repeating the allegation often framed it as proof of hypocrisy, alluding to Kirk’s public statements on transgender rights and OnlyFans.

In short, there was no verifiable evidence Kirk subscribed to the OnlyFans creator or that he sent her $30,000. The screenshot at the center of the claim showed only a display name, which subscribers can choose freely and change at any time — not an official or verified name. Because of this, the circulating image does not establish that the account belonged to Kirk.

We contacted the user who first made the allegation and asked whether she could provide any verifiable evidence to substantiate her claim. We requested an unedited screen recording of her OnlyFans dashboard showing the alleged subscriber, along with any metadata, payment confirmations, or communication logs that could link the account to Kirk. We also reached out to OnlyFans seeking additional information. We will update this article if we receive a response.

Source of the rumor

The allegation originated with a transgender online creator using the handle @jadetrapgirlts, who posted a video on Instagram asserting that Kirk had been a paying subscriber to her page.

According to the post, Kirk allegedly subscribed to her OnlyFans under the username “@ownthelibz1776” and used his full legal name, “Charles James Kirk,” which she claimed appeared in her creator dashboard “taken from the credit card.” The circulating screenshot displayed her subscriber list with a profile listed as “Charles James Kirk @ownthelibz1776,” along with supposed subscription earnings and a “last activity” date of Sept. 10, 2025 — the day Kirk was killed during an on-campus event at Utah Valley University. 

(Instagram user @jadetrapgirlts)

But the screenshot being presented as evidence was the only proof offered, and it contained several red flags. The most basic issue was that the claim contradicted how OnlyFans itself handles user information. The platform’s privacy policy explained that creators do not see subscribers’ real names or credit card information. OnlyFans said it shows only a user’s public profile information, meaning the username and whatever display name or bio the subscriber voluntarily adds to their account. Nothing in the creator dashboard verifies that a chosen display name corresponds to a legal identity.

To verify this, we set up a test OnlyFans account. When creating a subscriber profile, we were able to choose any display name we liked, and on the creator side that name appeared exactly as entered — without any verification, and without any link to the actual payment details. This means that the name “Charles James Kirk” in the screenshots could simply be text that any user typed into their profile settings or text that someone edited into a fabricated screenshot. It is not evidence that OnlyFans received or revealed a legal name tied to a payment card.

(onlyfans.com)

Moreover, while OnlyFans stores legal names for creators and content collaborators, it does not display legal names for fans — the category that subscribers fall under.

(onlyfans.com)

Regarding payment data, the platform explains that all transactions are processed by third-party payment providers. Creators receive no cardholder information and OnlyFans itself only receives a nonidentifying token and limited metadata such as card type and the first six and last four digits of the card number. None of this would reveal a subscriber’s legal name.

As of this writing, the OnlyFans profile using the handle @ownthelibz1776 displayed a disclaimer reading: “I am not Charlie Kirk, I am Foilmanhacks” and linked directly to an X account belonging to user @foilmanhacks.

That user, Jason Sawyer, explained in a series of posts how he was able to test the legitimacy of the alleged account. To see whether the username had ever been associated with Kirk, he attempted to create a new OnlyFans account using the handle “ownthelibz1776,” which the platform accepted. Because OnlyFans does not allow duplicate usernames, this indicates that the handle circulating in the screenshot was not in use by anyone else at that time, disproving the claim that the account belonged to Kirk.

Therefore, as of this writing, the @ownthelibz1776 OnlyFans account does not belong to Kirk, and there is no evidence it ever did.

Bottom line

The allegation that Kirk subscribed to a trans creator’s OnlyFans page and spent $30,000 on her content was not supported by any verifiable evidence. The circulating screenshot does not demonstrate access to subscriber data but simply shows a display name that can be freely chosen or easily manipulated. As of this writing, the account at the center of the rumor explicitly states it has no connection to Kirk.

For further reading, we’ve investigated several rumors about statements attributed to Kirk.

In November 2025, a rumor spread online that former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris had called for the voting age in the U.S. to be lowered from 18 to 16. 

For example, one X user posted a meme (archived) featuring a photo of the erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate smiling and a separate picture of young people, one of whom was holding up a “vote” sign. The graphic included text that read: “FORMER VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS ADVOCATES FOR LOWERING THE VOTING AGE TO 16 IN AMERICA.”

The claim appeared elsewhere on X, as well as on Facebook and Instagram.

In short, Harris did make such a proposal. She proposed the idea during an interview on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast in an episode released on Oct. 30, 2025 (archived). In doing so, the former vice president joined a growing number of world leaders who have advocated for allowing younger teenagers to vote. Therefore, we have rated this claim as true.

While speaking to the podcast’s host, British entrepreneur and investor Steven Bartlett, Harris argued that elected officials should work for “the greater good,” before suggesting that leaders need to focus on “being a bit more bold.” One example of this, she said, would be reducing the voting age in the United States to 16.

Harris stated that “Gen Z” — Generation Z, people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, with some sources specifying between 1997 and 2012 — should be invested in “because they know everything that’s happening right now is going to impact them more than anybody older than them.”

Her full remarks, starting at the 1:20:38 mark, were as follows (emphasis ours):

I think we have to do a better job of, also, focusing on being a bit more bold. For example, I think we should reduce voting age to 16. I’ll tell you why. 

So, Gen Z — they’re aged about 13 through 27. They’ve only known the climate crisis. They missed substantial parts of their education because of the pandemic. If they’re in high school or college, especially in college, it is very likely that whatever they’ve chosen as their major for study may not result in an affordable wage. They’ve coined the term “climate anxiety” to describe fear of — not only being able to buy a home — but that fear it’ll be wiped out by extreme weather, but fear of having children. It is expected that Gen Z will have 10 to 12 jobs in their lifetime. They are a larger number than boomers. They’re a specific generation of people who are going to impact our nation and the world. And I think we must invest in them. 

But I think that they are rightly impatient with a lot of what is the tradition of leadership right now. And if they were able to vote — because they know everything that’s happening right now is going to impact them more than anybody older than them, for the most part, in terms of how these systems work — if they’re voting right now, at 16 and up, they’re going to be talking about the importance of climate, they’re going to be talking about the importance of figuring out how AI is going to affect the future of the workforce, they’re going to be focused on what are we really doing about affordable housing.

Harris was not the first prominent politician, current or past, to propose such a policy. For example, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government said in summer 2025 that they woud lower the voting age to 16 before the next general election (people age 16 and 17 in Scotland and Wales could already vote in their nation’s respective devolved Scottish and Welsh parliamentary and local elections, which are separate to the U.K. general election).

Numerous other countries had already implemented this change, including Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua, as of this writing.

Rumors circulated online in late November 2025 that the acting chief security officer of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was named Iwona B. Horyn. 

Some users sharing the claim were suspicious of the alleged DHS employee, citing the apparent wordplay (“I wanna be whorin'”) as an indication it was a prank of some kind.

Users on social media platforms such as Facebook (archived), BlueSky (archived) and X (archived) spread the alleged employee’s purported name and photograph, suggesting disbelief that “Iwona B. Horyn” was an authentic name. 

i’m not sure how but this is real antipolygraph.org/blog/2025/10…

[image or embed]

— andy™ (@andylevy.net) November 25, 2025 at 9:18 PM

Some users (archived) included images from “The Simpsons,” referencing a running gag in which Bart Simpson made crank calls using humorous-sounding names like “Seymour Butts.”

The claim that a person named Iwona B. Horyn was the acting chief security officer of DHS was true. 

The rumor circulated following the October 2025 publication of an article by the website AntiPolygraph.org, which described itself as “a non-profit, public interest website dedicated to exposing and ending waste, fraud, and abuse associated with the use of polygraphs and other purported lie detectors.” 

The article cited a February 2025 Bloomberg report that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “issued an internal directive that all polygraphs the Department of Homeland Security administers must include a question about unauthorized communications with media and nonprofit organizations,” in an alleged effort to contain DHS “leaks on border and interior immigration enforcement.”

AntiPolygraph reported that DHS’ acting Chief Security Officer Iwona B. Horyn would be “given the unenviable task of establishing a department-wide polygraph program.”

Horyn was listed on the official DHS website under “Leadership.” She also was present in an official transcript for a State, Local, Tribal, Public Sector Policy Advisory Committee meeting that occurred on Sept. 23, 2023, which predated her appointment as acting chief security officer but confirmed she was employed in the office. 

According to the transcript, Horyn stated during the meeting: “My name is Iwona Horyn. I’m with the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Chief Security Officer. I am standing in for Mr. McComb today due to his unavailability, and I just wanted to go over a couple of things as we wrap up FY23 and start moving towards FY24.” 

“Mr. McComb” appeared to reference Richard D. McComb, who was appointed chief security officer on April 3, 2016, according to DHS. 

A March 2025 post on McComb’s LinkedIn page confirmed his “retirement from federal service” and on his resume, his time as chief security officer was listed as April 2016 to March 2025. Horyn’s LinkedIn page stated her tenure as acting chief security officer began in August 2025. 

Horyn made a post that referenced her role as acting chief security officer on Sept. 16, 2025, commemorating the anniversary of the 2013 Navy Yard shooting. 

Horyn wrote: 

Years ago, I called the Navy Yard home. On that tragic day, I was fortunate to be working just down the road and even more lucky to be able to tell my family I was safe. Now, as DHS Acting Chief Security Officer, I work with a passionate group of people to do everything in our power to prevent it from happening again by: strengthening physical security, access controls, credentialing, personnel screening, and threat assessment across DHS facilities. 

Snopes reached out to DHS and Horyn for further comment and will update this article if we receive a response. 

Sources