Category: Washington Post

Days before protests erupted in Iran in late December, Israeli officials notified the Iranian leadership via Russia that they would not launch strikes against Iran if Israel were not attacked first. Iran responded through the Russian channel that it would also refrain from a preemptive attack, diplomats and regional officials with knowledge of the exchange said.

The communications between Israel and Iran — and the role Russia played as the intermediary — were unusual given the hostility between the two Middle Eastern rivals, which engaged in a 12-day war in June.

But the contacts reflected Israel’s desire to avoid being perceived as escalating tensions toward Iran or spearheading any new attacks against it at a time when Israel was preparing a significant military campaign against Hezbollah, the Iran-aligned militia in Lebanon, according to the diplomats and regional officials. The private reassurances contrasted with Israel’s public rhetoric late last year, when its officials openly hinted at the possibility of carrying out renewed strikes on Iran to roll back what they said was the country’s rapidly replenishing ballistic missile stockpile.

Although Iranian officials responded positively to the Israeli outreach, they were wary of Israel’s intentions, said two officials with knowledge of the message exchange. Iran believed that even if the Israeli assurances were genuine, they left open the possibility that the U.S. military would carry out attacks on Iran as part of a campaign coordinated by the two allies, while Israel was training its firepower strictly on Hezbollah, the officials said.

Still, “for Iran, it was a good deal” to stay out of any Israel-Hezbollah clash, said a senior official in the region who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive communications. U.S. officials have said that Iran’s substantive support for Hezbollah, in any case, has already decreased as Tehran grapples with domestic upheaval.

It’s not clear now how the furious protests in Iran in recent weeks, which have challenged the government’s grip on power, have changed Israel’s and Iran’s calculations and whether the two countries will still abide by their private agreement. President Donald Trump has been weighing attacks against Iranian regime targets in response to the crackdown on the protest movement, and any strikes could provoke Iran to retaliate against Israel, a U.S. ally, analysts say.

A senior Iranian official told Reuters that if attacked, Iran would retaliate against U.S. military bases in the Middle East, the news agency reported Wednesday, without mentioning Israel as among the potential targets.

Nor is it clear whether Israeli officials would renege on their December reassurances and join in a U.S.-led attack if they sensed an opportunity to topple the Iranian government. As protests flared in Iran, Israeli officials described their military preparations as defensive in nature, and Israeli government and security officials have avoided overtly bellicose language. In June, Israel launched an elaborate surprise attack against Iran even as nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran were underway.

“Israel is giving the U.S. the leading role [in any potential strikes against Iran], but there is no question Israel would love to see regime change because that would change the Middle East — as well as Hezbollah,” said Sima Shine, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and a former head of research at the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. “But Israel could be a target for the Iranian response, and therefore Israel has already taken a lot of steps to be better defended and prepared.”

For Israel, the outreach to Iran was designed to keep Tehran on the sidelines and leave Hezbollah isolated if Israel were to attack. The “same logic” may hold today, with Israel seeking to prevent the two countries from trading direct blows, at least initially, an Israeli official said. The official added that a military campaign against Hezbollah was not off the table, regardless of what transpires with Iran. Israel has warned that it continues to face a threat from Hezbollah because the group has not disarmed.

“The [Lebanon] campaign will take place, and Hezbollah will be heavily targeted,” the official added. “The question is if it’s during or after the Iran war.”

The most recent exchange of messages between Israel and Iran came in late December, shortly after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi visited Moscow, the senior regional official said. It was not the first time that Russia has sought to serve as an intermediary between the two countries or bolster its standing with Trump as a mediator to win concessions in negotiations over the war in Ukraine.

The Kremlin previously raised to Trump the idea of serving as an intermediary between Israel and Iran, according to a Russian academic close to senior Russian diplomats. Trump declined the offer, this person said, telling the Russians “to deal with Ukraine first.” It’s not clear whether the December exchanges took place with Washington’s knowledge or participation.

The Israeli public broadcaster KAN reported last week that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had recently asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to relay messages to Iran that Israel did not intend to attack it.

A spokesman in Netanyahu’s office and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not respond to requests for comment.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he’s been told “on good authority” that plans for executions in Iran have stopped, even as Tehran has indicated fast trials and executions ahead in its crackdown on protesters.

The president’s claims, which were made with few details, come as he’s told protesting Iranians in recent days that “help is on the way” and that his administration would “act accordingly” to respond to the Iranian government. But Trump has not offered any details about how the U.S. might respond and it wasn’t clear if his comments Wednesday indicated he would hold off on action.

“We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping — it’s stopped — it’s stopping,” Trump said at the White House while signing executive orders and legislation. “And there’s no plan for executions, or an execution, or executions — so I’ve been told that on good authority.”

The president on Tuesday consulted with his national security team about next steps after telling reporters he believed the killing in Iran was “significant.”

Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and key White House National Security Council officials began meeting last Friday to develop options for Trump, ranging from a diplomatic approach to military strikes.

The Iranian security force crackdown on the demonstrations has killed at least 2,586, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported.

On Wednesday, Iranian officials signaled that suspects detained in nationwide protests would face fast trials and executions while the Islamic Republic promised a “decisive response” if the U.S. or Israel intervene in the domestic unrest.

The threats emerged as some personnel at a key U.S. military base in Qatar were advised to evacuate by Wednesday evening following Trump’s escalated warnings of potential military action over the killing of peaceful demonstrators.

Mohammad Pakpour, commander of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, reiterated Iranian claims, without providing evidence, that the U.S. and Israel have instigated the protests and that they are the real killers of protesters and security forces who have died in the turmoil, according to Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency.

He added that those countries will “receive the response in the appropriate time.”

Earlier Wednesday, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, Iran’s judiciary chief, said the government must act quickly to punish more than 18,000 people who have been detained through rapid trials and executions. Mohseni-Ejei’s comments about rapid trials and executions were made in a video shared by Iranian state television online.

“If we want to do a job, we should do it now. If we want to do something, we have to do it quickly,” he said. “If it becomes late, two months, three months later, it doesn’t have the same effect. If we want to do something, we have to do that fast.”

The comments stand as a direct challenge to Trump, who warned Iran about executions in an interview with CBS aired Tuesday. “If they do such a thing, we will take very strong action,” Trump said.

“We don’t want to see what’s happening in Iran happen. And you know, if they want to have protests, that’s one thing. When they start killing thousands of people, and now you’re telling me about hanging — we’ll see how that works out for them. It’s not going to work out good.”

One Arab Gulf diplomat told the AP that major Mideast governments had been discouraging the Trump administration from launching a war with Iran, fearing “unprecedented consequences” for the region that could explode into a “full-blown war.” The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to journalists.

Satellite internet service offer

Iran’s government cut off the country from the internet and international telephone calls on Jan. 8.

Activists said Wednesday that Starlink was offering free service in Iran. The satellite internet service has been key in getting around the internet shutdown. Iran began allowing people to call out internationally on Tuesday via mobile phones, but calls from people outside the country into Iran remain blocked.

“We can confirm that the free subscription for Starlink terminals is fully functional,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, a Los Angeles-based activist who has helped get the units into Iran. “We tested it using a newly activated Starlink terminal inside Iran.”

Starlink itself did not immediately acknowledge the decision.

Security service personnel apparently were searching for Starlink dishes, as people in northern Tehran reported authorities raiding apartment buildings with satellite dishes. While satellite television dishes are illegal, many in the capital have them in homes, and officials broadly gave up on enforcing the law in recent years.

Death toll continues to rise

The Human Rights Activists News Agency said 2,417 of the dead were protesters and 147 were government-affiliated. Twelve children were killed, along with 10 civilians it said were not taking part in protests.

More than 18,400 people have been detained, the group said.

Gauging the demonstrations from abroad has grown more difficult, and the AP has been unable to independently assess the toll given the communications being disrupted in the country.

Melanie Smith pulled grueling hours alongside FBI agents and other prosecutors as she prepped dozens of witnesses to prove that a Virginia sheriff had accepted $75,000 in bribes from wealthy business owners and undercover agents. Just over a year ago, the jury returned a guilty verdict against former Culpeper County sheriff Scott Jenkins in an astounding 90 minutes.

V. Grady O’Malley built one of the most complicated cases of his 47-year Justice Department career to prove that a New York businessman who owned a chain of nursing homes had failed to pay more than $38 million in employment taxes, then laundered the money by bouncing it from account to account. The defendant, Joseph Schwartz, pleaded guilty.

Just months after the defendants were sentenced, President Donald Trump pardoned them as he wielded his executive power to grant clemency to a host of convicts — many of them politically connected — outside of the traditional pardon-application process.

Jenkins was pardoned the day before he was set to begin his prison sentence, his entire punishment erased and the restitution he owed taxpayers wiped out.

“The president has the authority to grant a pardon, but when you have a strong case, and it is a good case, and you are holding elected officials accountable for wrongdoing, it is frustrating,” Smith said in an interview. “You put a lot of time and energy into these cases. It was a righteous case. The fact that the pardon happened before he went to prison, it undermines one of the purposes of the criminal justice system.”

White-collar and public corruption cases are among the most resource-intensive for the Justice Department to pursue. Prosecutors, FBI agents, and other specialists often work for years to build such cases, following money trails and interviewing scores of witnesses before they even file an indictment.

More than half a dozen experienced prosecutors interviewed for this story, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, said Trump’s clemency acts have eroded faith among current and former Justice Department employees that the cases they devote years to prosecuting will lead to accountability.

Calculating the amount of government resources poured into prosecuting a single case is next to impossible. But the cost can often run to millions of dollars when factoring in salaries and travel expenses, prosecutors said. On top of that, witnesses might require transportation to court and accommodation for the duration of the trial, paid for by taxpayers, the prosecutors noted.

Some complex cases can take years to investigate before charges are filed, with prosecutors interviewing dozens of witnesses before grand juries to build their cases. Years typically pass before those cases reach a trial date.

And once the trial arrives, prosecutors can spend upward of 80 hours a week preparing witnesses and getting exhibits ready. A long trial can involve more than 1,000 exhibits that need to be prepped and reviewed.

“To bring a case to trial is just an incredible effort and use of department resources,” said John Keller, the former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. “There’s an intensity of experience and effort and emotion that doesn’t come at any other stage of the case. It’s the pinnacle of the practice.”

During Trump’s two terms, multiple defendants whose cases Keller has tried and supervised have received pardons. He said the pardons sting, but prosecutors are focused on their cases and trials, and do not allow a potential presidential act of clemency to influence how they approach a case.

“There’s a feeling that, if a jury or judge has reached a verdict after hearing all the evidence, it’s even more of a slap in the face to have clemency handed down,” he said.

During the first year of his second term, Trump has pardoned some of the most high-profile public corruption and white-collar defendants prosecuted during President Joe Biden’s administration, as well as some prosecuted during his own first term and some under earlier administrations.

Among them: former Republican congressman George Santos of New York, Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, former Tennessee state senator Brian Kelsey, and Trevor Milton, the former executive chairman of electric trucking company Nikola. One of the defining acts of Trump’s return to office has been his sweeping pardons of more than 1,500 people convicted in connection with the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including those who assaulted police officers.

Trump has defended his use of the pardons, saying the people to whom he granted clemency had been pursued by what he considers a corrupt and overzealous Justice Department under Biden. But the attorneys interviewed said they investigated each case scrupulously and apolitically to ensure a fair prosecution.

“It’s personally upsetting because of how much time I invested in this case — the time traveling, the late nights looking through documents and prepping for witness interviews,” said Jacob Steiner, a former Justice Department employee who prosecuted the Santos case. “Beyond and more important than the personal aspect, it’s really disheartening that someone who lied to the public and stole a lot of money just gets to walk free and not have to pay back his victims.”

In Atlanta, prosecutors and federal agents spent years investigating reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley. The couple were found guilty of bank fraud and tax evasion in 2022 after a nearly three-week jury trial. The Justice Department then defended the conviction during appeals. But after a public campaign from the Chrisleys’ daughter, who spoke at the Republican National Convention and socialized at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the president granted the reality stars a pardon in May.

In New York, prosecutors and federal agents spent roughly two years investigating the online black market Silk Road before indicting its creator, Ross Ulbricht, on charges related to the sale of drugs and other illegal goods on the platform. It took another two years before the case went to trial in 2015, resulting in convictions on seven counts and a sentence of life in prison. Trump pardoned Ulbricht on his first full day in office.

“I couldn’t believe it was a complete and total pardon,” said one law enforcement official who worked on the Silk Road case.

Santos, the Chrisleys, Ulbricht, and others who received pardons from Trump have said they deserved forgiveness because they were prosecuted at the hands of a corrupt Justice Department or were innocent and wrongly convicted.

Every recent president has exercised the pardon power to benefit his allies, but legal experts say that Trump’s use of clemency has bucked every norm of a largely undefined process. Typically, Justice Department employees vet tens of thousands of applications, only recommending to the president people who have completed their sentences and showed contrition. Trump, however, has pardoned criminals without any such vetting, people familiar with the process said, sometimes granting clemency to convicts who have not started their sentences or admitted wrongdoing. Trump and his allies have pointed to Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter as an example of how Trump’s predecessors politicized the pardon.

O’Malley, who retired in 2023 and described himself as a supporter of the president, said he was flummoxed over Trump’s pardoning of Schwartz, the nursing home magnate. He said that sifting through the more than 100 accounts Schwartz set up to evade taxes had required a lot of effort, and that the prosecutors and agents assigned to the case did “yeoman’s work.”

The Washington Post reported that Schwartz paid two lobbyists, right-wing provocateurs Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, $960,000 to help secure a pardon from Trump. (Schwartz must still complete a sentence on state charges in an Arkansas prison.)

“I think the president was misled as to the reasons why [Schwartz] should be pardoned,” O’Malley said. “I can’t see anyone accepting an application and alleging that he somehow deserves to be pardoned unconditionally and completely in this case. Something had to be said to the president. Whether he was paying attention to it or not, I don’t know.”

O’Malley continued: “I was stunned and angered. The $5 million in restitution was vacated. It was a strong case. I do not indict cases on a wing and a prayer.”

In December — less than a month after Trump pardoned Schwartz — the Internal Revenue Service decided to present O’Malley with an award for his work on the Schwartz case. O’Malley said he declined to attend.

Senate Democrats are asking the nonprofit group that is managing donations to the White House ballroom to explain how much money has been raised and whether donors have been promised any special access or influence in exchange for supporting the estimated $400 million project, a top priority of President Donald Trump.

“You owe Congress and the public answers about your role in managing funds for President Trump’s ballroom,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and colleagues wrote in a letter Tuesday to the Trust for the National Mall that was shared with the Washington Post. The lawmakers gave the group two weeks to respond.

Democrats say limited public disclosure has made it impossible to assess whether safeguards are in place to prevent donors from gaining access or influence through the project. The concerns are heightened, they argue, by Trump’s personal involvement in both the project’s design and fundraising.

The White House has said private donors will entirely cover the ballroom addition’s cost but has declined to share basic details about the value of those gifts, or whether donors were offered meetings, access or other consideration in return. Publicly identified donors, such as Amazon, Google and Lockheed Martin, collectively have billions of dollars in contracts before the administration. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.)

The Trust for the National Mall, which has managed past fundraising campaigns to restore the Washington Monument and other projects, has largely referred questions to the White House and the National Park Service since its role in the ballroom project was announced last year. The group also is expected to retain a small percentage — about 2.5% — of donations to the ballroom project for its own use, Democrats wrote. The Trust did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Administration officials have said the Trust could receive hundreds of millions of dollars in donations tied to the ballroom project, placing the group at the center of a fundraising effort unlike any it has previously managed.

Trump administration officials have shared few details about the project, the most significant change to the White House grounds in decades, including the building’s final design. The lack of disclosure has also drawn legal scrutiny. Historic preservationists last month sued the Trump administration, arguing that the ballroom construction is illegal because the project did not undergo required review by two federal panels and Congress did not appropriate funding. The White House has denied the allegations. A hearing in the case is tentatively scheduled for Jan. 29 in U.S. District Court in Washington.

Trump administration officials made their first public presentation on the ballroom Thursday, justifying their rapid teardown of the White House’s East Wing annex last fall as a financial decision.

“The cost analysis proved that demolition and reconstruction provided the lowest total cost ownership and most effective long-term strategy,” Joshua Fisher, a senior White House official who is helping manage the project, said at a meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission, a review board set to weigh in on the ballroom’s design.

Trump has also steadily increased the project’s planned seating capacity and estimated cost since announcing the ballroom in July. Officials now say the ballroom will seat about 1,000 people.

“I started off with a building half of the seats … and then it just kept growing and growing, and the money kept pouring in and pouring in,” the president told the New York Times last week, adding that he would make the ballroom “bigger” if he could.

Shalom Baranes, the architect Trump tapped to lead the project, told the National Capital Planning Commission last week that the ballroom would not grow further.

In their letter to the Trust for the National Mall, Warren and her colleagues asked the group to explain whether it has internal controls or has undertaken other steps to ensure that donors are not given preferential treatment by the Trump administration.

“This leaves open the question of whether the Trust is being misused to facilitate special-interest access and influence,” the senators wrote. They also asked whether Meredith O’Rourke, a longtime Trump fundraiser who has been coordinating donations, is employed by the Trust or otherwise affiliated with the group. O’Rourke referred questions about her role with the Trust to the White House, which did not immediately respond.

Warren’s office also shared letters the senator received from companies that have donated to the project, which offered varied explanations for how they expected their gift to be used. Comcast, for instance, said its donation “included no specific limitations or conditions,” while Microsoft said its gift would go toward construction. Trump has also said several companies have pledged to cover specific aspects of the project, such as Carrier offering to cover an estimated $17 million in air-conditioning and heating costs.