New Pentagon spokesperson promoted antisemitic conspiracy theory last year
The US department of defense, which has held just one news conference this year, announced on Friday that it has a new press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted by neo-Nazis.
As NPR’s Tom Dreisbach reported in March, Wilson claimed in a post on X last summer that Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915 after being falsely accused of raping and murdering a young girl, “raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl” and “ tried to frame a black man for his crime”.
Wilson posted that false claim in response to a post from the Anti-Defamation League commemoration the 109th anniversary of Frank’s lynching, and noting that Frank had received a posthumous pardon from the state of Georgia in 1986. The 1915 lynching spurred the creation of the ADL.
As NPR explained, neo-Nazis have continued to claim that Frank was guilty, and a group of neo-Nazis protested the Broadway musical “Parade,” which dramatizes Frank’s trial and lynching, in 2023.
Wilson previously endorsed the neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that same year, in response to a tweet from the head of the ADL.
“White supremacists and other antisemites have long used conspiracy theories about the Leo Frank case to cast doubt on the circumstances of the antisemitic lynching,” an ADL spokesperson told the Guardian in March. “We are deeply disturbed that any public official would parrot these hateful and false conspiracy theories, and we hope Kingsley Wilson will immediately retract her remarks.”
Wilson has served in the Pentagon press office since January, before being promoted on Friday. When her repeated endorsement of the attacks on Leo Frank were first reported in March, the American Jewish Committee said in a statement that she was “clearly unfit for her role”.
“Anyone who posts antisemitic conspiracy theories lifted right out of the neo-Nazi playbook should not be in public office”, the AJC wrote in March. Two months later, and just days after two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered as they left an AJC event in Washington, Wilson has been given a much more prominent role in the Trump administration, as the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson.
Tom Malinowski, a former diplomat and Democratic member of Congress, noted on X that Wilson was promoted by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, despite Wilson’s recently revealed history of promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory. “Please don’t tell me this administration gives a damn about anti-Semitism”, Malinowski wrote.
Last year, Wilson also endorsed the “great replacement theory”, which has inspired antisemitic violence. “The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory”, she wrote on X last August,” it’s reality”.
Wilson previously served as a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America, a Christian nationalist group founded by Russ Vought, a Project 2025 architect who is now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Wilson in the daughter of Steve Cortes, a Fox News contributor and former Trump campaign operative who served on Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council.
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Trump said that a 25% tariff he said he will impose on Apple will also apply to Samsung and other smartphone makers who don’t make their products in the United States. “When they build their plant here, there’s no tariffs,” he said.
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Trump said he’s not looking for a trade deal with the EU – which he announced earlier today will be slapped with 50% tariffs from 1 June – but said he’d be open to talking about a delay if companies were willing to build their plants in the US.
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The US department of defense announced that it has a new press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted by neo-Nazis.
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Paul Weiss, the law firm that agreed to provide $40m in free legal services to support Donald Trump’s administration after he targeted it in an executive order in March, lost four senior litigators on Friday.
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The US departments of state and treasury acted on Friday to lift sanctions on Syria, following Donald Trump’s meeting with the new Syrian leader, the former Islamist rebel Ahmad al-Sharaa, last week in Saudi Arabia.
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A US judge on Friday overturned a Trump executive order targeting Jenner & Block, a big law firm that employed Andrew Weissmann, who helped lead special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Russian government’s effort to help elect Donald Trump.
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One of the stranger aspects of Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is the creation of a social media account, DOD Rapid Response, dedicated, it says, to supporting the defense secretary’s work and “Fighting Against Fake News”.
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The account, which was run until Friday by the right-wing podcaster Graham Allen, who stepped down after spending much of his time arguing with reporters on X, has been used for nakedly political posts, to boost Trump administration officials and attack critics.
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On Friday, for instance, the account lavished praise on the vice-president, JD Vance, for what it suggested was an incredible feat of physical stamina: shaking the hands of all of this year’s graduates of the naval academy.
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“It’s nice to have a Leader like @vp who can stand for hours just to honor the accomplishments of our newest officers. He literally is shaking every single hand” the account posted along with 54 seconds of video of Vance at the naval academy graduation ceremony.
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While it is indeed true that Vance stood on stage at Annapolis on Friday and shook the hands of graduates for an hour and seven minutes straight, the feat is hardly unusual. The previous vice-president, Kamala Harris, did exactly the same in 2021, for an hour and 19 minutes. And in 2015, in Joe Biden’s final year as vice-president, he did the same for an hour and eighteen minutes.
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Paul Weiss, the law firm that agreed to provide $40m in free legal services to support Donald Trump’s administration after he targeted it in an executive order in March, lost four senior litigators on Friday.
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The four partners — Karen Dunn, Bill Isaacson, Jeannie Rhee and Jessica Phillips — plan to form their own law firm.
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Dunn, who was co-chair of the firm’s litigation department, helped prepare Kamala Harris for her debate victory over Trump last year.
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Dunn and Phillips, with support from Isaacson, also helped win over $25 million in damages by suing the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, in which a white supremacist killed a counter-demonstrator. Their litigation work on behalf of nine pro bono clients who were injured in the violence was featured in the HBO documentary No Accident.
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In the film, Dunn recalls that she was invited to join the civil rights suit by Robbie Kaplan, a lawyer who later represented E. Jean Carroll in her successful sexual abuse and defamation lawsuits against Donald Trump. “Robbie called me out of the blue and said, ‘Do you want to sue the nazis with me?’”
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When he was pressed to condemn the violence in Charlottesville that year, Trump, who was near the start of his first term as president, claimed that there were “some very fine people on both sides”.
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Rhee was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Russian government’s effort to help Trump win the 2016 election.
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The resignations from the firm came the same day that a federal judge ruled that another Trump’s executive order targeting another firm, Jenner & Block, for employing a lawyer who had investigated him, was unconstitutional. Trump’s order punishing Jenner & Block had cited the firm’s decision to hire Andrew Weissmann after he served as the lead prosecutor on Mueller’s special counsel team. Weissman left the firm in 2021.
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The executive order against Paul Weiss, which Trump withdrew after the firm agreed to donate $40 million of pro bono services to support his agenda, had also specified that the firm was to be punished for employing a lawyer, Mark Pomerantz, who worked for Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance on an investigation of then former president Trump’s finances.
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The US department of defense, which has held just one news conference this year, announced on Friday that it has a new press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted by neo-Nazis.
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As NPR’s Tom Dreisbach reported in March, Wilson claimed in a post on X last summer that Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915 after being falsely accused of raping and murdering a young girl, “raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl” and “ tried to frame a black man for his crime”.
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Wilson posted that false claim in response to a post from the Anti-Defamation League commemoration the 109th anniversary of Frank’s lynching, and noting that Frank had received a posthumous pardon from the state of Georgia in 1986. The 1915 lynching spurred the creation of the ADL.
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As NPR explained, neo-Nazis have continued to claim that Frank was guilty, and a group of neo-Nazis protested the Broadway musical “Parade,” which dramatizes Frank’s trial and lynching, in 2023.
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Wilson previously endorsed the neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that same year, in response to a tweet from the head of the ADL.
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“White supremacists and other antisemites have long used conspiracy theories about the Leo Frank case to cast doubt on the circumstances of the antisemitic lynching,” an ADL spokesperson told the Guardian in March. “We are deeply disturbed that any public official would parrot these hateful and false conspiracy theories, and we hope Kingsley Wilson will immediately retract her remarks.”
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Wilson has served in the Pentagon press office since January, before being promoted on Friday. When her repeated endorsement of the attacks on Leo Frank were first reported in March, the American Jewish Committee said in a statement that she was “clearly unfit for her role”.
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“Anyone who posts antisemitic conspiracy theories lifted right out of the neo-Nazi playbook should not be in public office”, the AJC wrote in March. Two months later, and just days after two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered as they left an AJC event in Washington, Wilson has been given a much more prominent role in the Trump administration, as the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson.
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Tom Malinowski, a former diplomat and Democratic member of Congress, noted on X that Wilson was promoted by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, despite Wilson’s recently revealed history of promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory. “Please don’t tell me this administration gives a damn about anti-Semitism”, Malinowski wrote.
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Last year, Wilson also endorsed the “great replacement theory”, which has inspired antisemitic violence. “The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory”, she wrote on X last August,” it’s reality”.
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Wilson previously served as a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America, a Christian nationalist group founded by Russ Vought, a Project 2025 architect who is now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Wilson in the daughter of Steve Cortes, a Fox News contributor and former Trump campaign operative who served on Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council.
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The US departments of state and treasury acted on Friday to lift sanctions on Syria, following Donald Trump’s meeting with the new Syrian leader, the former Islamist rebel Ahmad al-Sharaa, last week in Saudi Arabia.
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A statement from the treasury explained that the Office of Foreign Assets Control had issued a license “to provide immediate sanctions relief for Syria” which “ authorizes transactions prohibited by the Syrian Sanctions Regulations, effectively lifting sanctions on Syria”.
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The state department also issued a waiver required by the 2019 Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act to suspend sanctions. “This is just one part of a broader U.S. government effort to remove the full architecture of sanctions imposed on Syria due to the abuses of the Bashar al-Assad regime”, the treasury said.
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The 2019 law was named for a Syrian military photographer, code-named Caesar, who defected with tens of thousands of photographs documenting war crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government. After Assad’s fall, he revealed his identity as Farid Nada al-Madhan, the former head of the judicial department for the military police in Damascus.
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The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said the authorizations would “encourage new investment into Syria. Syria must also continue to work towards becoming a stable country that is at peace”.
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“I have issued a 180-day waiver of mandatory Caesar Act sanctions to ensure sanctions do not impede the ability of our partners to make stability-driving investments, and advance Syria’s recovery and reconstruction efforts”, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state wrote in a statement. “These waivers will facilitate the provision of electricity, energy, water, and sanitation, and enable a more effective humanitarian response across Syria.”
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The 2019 law limits any presidential waiver of sanctions to six months. For more permanent relief, administration officials are debating the extent to which Syria’s transitional government should be required to meet tough conditions.
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After meeting Sharaa, Trump told reporters that he was impressed with the former commander of al Qaeda’s franchise in the Syrian civil war. Sharaa, he said, was a “young, attractive guy; tough guy, you know. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”
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