“DOJ strips US citizenship from 40 alleged criminals”, 5 October 2026 (Photo via Washington Examiner — the original report)
As it ran on the front
The Department of Justice filed denaturalization actions against 40 naturalized citizens on Monday, spread across multiple federal district courts. Follow along — the document is the story here, and it is a stack of court filings with dates attached to each one.
The stack did not arrive first. On September 7, a former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official and an accomplice were charged with taking nearly $960,000 in bribes to fast-track citizenship applications, skipping the background checks those applications exist to require. The charge sits inside the same immigration apparatus that spent Monday deciding, forty files at a time, who gets to keep the citizenship that official is accused of selling. The receipts give the date the charge was filed, not the length of the scheme, so that is as far as this column will go: on September 7, the agency that polices who becomes a citizen was, by its own prosecutor's account, also the agency where a gatekeeper took cash to open the gate.…
…(cont) Ten days after that charge, on September 17, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a law to strip citizenship from Israelis who criticize the Israeli military. The proposal followed a domestic backlash to NAZA, a documentary about the military's AI-assisted killing of civilians in Gaza, after the film won a special jury prize. The tool is the same tool the Justice Department is using this month: an executive filing that unmakes paperwork a person already holds, for a reason the government supplies on its own schedule, in its own court.
All together now — three dates, no connective tissue required. September 7: the department's own gatekeeper is charged with selling citizenship. September 17: a prime minister proposes taking citizenship from critics. October 5: the department files its largest batch of revocations yet, 40 names, multiple courts, one Monday.
Citizenship, read this way, is not a status conferred once and left alone.
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“They want forty names on a court docket to look like law and order, but the guy who set the price for citizenship worked inside that same building. This is the government deciding who stays American the same month it proved it'll sell that exact thing for cash, and the month a foreign leader says he'll just take it from the people who talk back.”
“Look, the department caught its own bad actor and cleaned house — that's the system working, not a scandal. The bribery case and the denaturalization sweep are two completely unrelated matters that happen to run through the exact same citizenship pipeline at the exact same agency. Did I say unrelated? That's — that's not really what I meant.”
The DOJ disbanded its crypto enforcement team in April 2025 and ordered inconsistent investigations closed — while the president's family runs a crypto business CNBC, 8 April 2025 (Blanche memo)
The Department of Justice has moved to revoke U.S. citizenship from a larger number of people at one time than any other single revocation during the Trump administration. The DOJ announced Monday that it had filed denaturalization actions across multiple U.S.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
