Donald “Metamucillini” Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he knows where the Iranian sleeper cells are. Not approximately. Not directionally. He has been briefed. He knows. He said so, in his own words, on camera, in front of the press corps at Joint Base Andrews: “We know where most of them are. We’ve got our eye on all of them, I think.”
Sit with that for a moment. The lunatic currently holding onto the title President of the United States, who started a war with Iran two weeks ago without a declaration from Congress, without a plan for winning it, and without explaining to the American people what victory looks like — that piece of absolute trumpshit is telling us that Iranian sleeper cells are operating on American soil and that his administration knows where they are and has chosen to watch them. Not arrest them. Not deport them. Watch them. “We’ve got our eye on all of them, I think.” The “I think” is doing remarkable work in that sentence. The leader of the free world, at war, tracking known hostile operatives on domestic soil, is operating in the general vicinity of certainty.
Here is the question that follows from that statement like a shadow follows a body: if you know where they are, why are they still there?
Here is the question after that: if the threat was real enough to brief the president, real enough to go to war over, real enough to justify seventeen American deaths and 165 children in a school in Minab — why were the boots on the ground in Minneapolis?
Not in the locations you were briefed about. Not kicking in the doors of known hostile operatives. In Minneapolis. Going door to door through immigrant neighborhoods. Arresting people who looked like they might not belong. Killing two Americans who did.
Renée Good was thirty-seven years old. She was a poet. She was a mother of three. She was sitting in her car on a Minneapolis street on January 7th when an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross circled her vehicle, reached through her open window, and fired three shots as she began to leave. She died. The administration lied and said she ran him over. The video showed she was turning away from him. He was cleared by the same administration that employs him within days of the shooting. Her family is still waiting for anything that resembles justice.
Alex Pretti was thirty-seven years old. He was an ICU nurse. He worked at the VA hospital, caring for veterans. He was on a Minneapolis street on January 24th, filming federal agents, because that is what Americans are allowed to do. When an agent pushed a woman to the ground, Pretti put his arm around her. The agent pepper-sprayed them both. At least five CBP agents pinned Pretti to the ground. Video reviewed by Reuters, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press shows an agent removing a gun from Pretti before other agents opened fire. His death was ruled a homicide by the county medical examiner. The former Department of Homeland Security called him a domestic terrorist planning to massacre law enforcement before his body was moved. No video has ever surfaced showing Pretti reaching for his weapon. The federal investigation has been handed to a lawyer from the employment discrimination section who has no experience handling federal criminal cases, while the career civil rights prosecutors who handle cases like this one — who handled George Floyd, who handled Breonna Taylor — were excluded from the investigation entirely.
Two Americans. Both thirty-seven. Both murdered on the streets of Minneapolis by thugs cosplaying as federal agents sent there on a political show-of-force operation. No justice for either of them. The federal government will not cooperate with the state investigation. The state investigators have been denied access to the crime scenes. The county attorney cannot get answers from the people who pulled the triggers.
And the president knows where the sleeper cells are.
Here is what we know from documented reporting: just days before this war started, FBI Director Kash Patel fired the specialized counterintelligence unit that had spent years tracking Iranian-directed threats on American soil. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which existed specifically to counter Iranian and other foreign covert operations inside the United States, was dissolved. The State Department office that oversaw counter-Iran terrorism initiatives was eliminated in DOGE reorganizations. Half of the National Security Division’s counterterrorism prosecutors are gone. The White House blocked a DHS bulletin that would have warned state and local law enforcement of an elevated threat environment. Then Trump told reporters he knows where the people are.
The people who were being paid to actually find them and neutralize them were fired.
The people who were sent out in their place were kicking in doors in blue cities, arresting anyone who looked like they might not have papers, and murdering Americans on the street in Minneapolis.
Chris Hayes said it plainly on MSNBC: taking the president at his word, it would mean the government knows about Iranian sleeper agents in the United States there to do some terrible thing — but is instead expending billions of dollars shooting unarmed protesters and nabbing kids with Spider-Man backpacks. That is a quote from a cable news host. It should have been a question from a congressional committee. It should have been the first thing out of every senator’s mouth at the next confirmation hearing. It was not.
Here is where this publication is going to say what we are thinking, and we are going to say it carefully and we are going to source every word of what comes before and after it so that what we are about to say cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy theory, because it is not a conspiracy theory. It is a question that the documented facts are forcing us to ask.
This administration gutted the agencies responsible for finding and neutralizing genuine domestic terror threats. It started a war that it knew would elevate those threats. It then sent its enforcement apparatus — not into the locations it had been briefed on, but into immigrant neighborhoods in cities it had already identified as political targets. It murdered two American citizens in Minneapolis during that operation. It lied about what happened, called the victims terrorists, blocked the investigations, and excluded the prosecutors who would know how to run them. It watched the threat it told us about, while performing enforcement for a domestic political audience.
And then the dicktater-wannabe said we know where most of them are, we’ve got our eye on all of them, I think.
The question is not whether Iranian sleeper cells are a real threat. They may well be. The question is what this administration chose to do with the intelligence it had, who it sent where, who died, and why the investigation into those deaths has been handed to someone who has never prosecuted a case like this one while the people who have have been specifically excluded.
The question is whose safety this apparatus is actually designed to protect.
The question is who benefits when the threat stays active, the cities stay frightened, and the man who knows where they are keeps watching.
We are asking the question. We are not answering it. That is the job of an independent investigation with subpoena power, cooperation from federal agencies, and prosecutors who have actually done this before. That investigation does not currently exist. What exists is a president who knows where they are and is watching them while two Americans from Minneapolis stay dead and unaccounted for and the war he started keeps burning.
Everything in this piece is sourced. Everything is documented. The question it ends on is the only honest place this set of facts can take you. You are allowed to sit with it.
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