Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, 18, allegedly pledged allegiance to ISIS and discussed a mass shooting at the Mall of America before buying an AK-47 rifle.
Page A206From§Eachthe early bird edition — 7 October 2026
Klobuchar seeks terror funding citing bust where FBI sold the suspect his own gun.
As it ran on the front
The complaint is a nice piece of work, square corners, nothing hanging over the edge — right up until the number penciled into my own notes, the fourth one of these since mid-September, which is what stopped me cold two pages in. I wrote that number down in the car before I went inside the house, because I did not trust myself to carry it that far in my head alone.
This did not start on Wednesday, so let me walk it in the order it happened. On September 11th a federal court used, for the first time in the thirty years since Congress built it, a statute written after an ISIS plot aimed at an Election Day — the government sent an Afghan woman named Nazira Haji Zada out of the country under that law. Days later, on the 15th, a 21-year-old in Pennsylvania was picked up in a hotel room, which CBS called the second ISIS-related plot to surface since August. That same week, a government-linked research group told the Washington Examiner that federal prosecutors have charged two hundred eighty people with ISIS-related crimes since 2014, two hundred twelve of them United States citizens. I am not raising that last figure to make a point about anybody in particular. I am raising it because it is sitting right there in the clip, and I copied it down, and now I am reading it back to you the way I copied it.…
…(cont) Then Wednesday arrived. Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, eighteen years old, of Richfield, Minnesota — arrested, the complaint says, during an arranged meeting to buy an assault rifle, after pledging allegiance to ISIS and discussing a mass shooting at the Mall of America. CBS has the arrest itself landing on Tuesday. The complaint carries Wednesday's filing date. So does the senator's statement. Two dates, in the order the release gives them to me, and I am not putting anything between them that isn't already sitting there.
Here is where I slow down, and I will apologize in advance for coming back to it, because I am going to come back to it before I'm through. Not seized from him. Not traced to him after the fact. Sold, to him, by the same people who arrested him for buying it. I keep the toolbox out in the garage organized by what each tool does, not by whose hand happens to be on it, and I have never once seen a wrench change jobs depending on who picked it up off the bench. I don't have a shelf in that toolbox for a gun that is the evidence and the merchandise in the same sentence of the same document.
The Washington Examiner's own account of Wednesday's arrest — not a quote out of anybody's mouth, just how the paper chose to frame its own story — calls the whole thing a yearslong sting operation. Years, plural. I think about that some evenings walking the dog around the block, because an operation that runs for years needs somebody buying the parts for it every one of those years, long before anybody downtown had ever heard the name Mohamud.
Which is where Senator Klobuchar comes into my notes. She looked at Wednesday's complaint and told Fox News she wants major investments in anti-terrorism. I don't have a dollar figure for her. Nothing in what I'm holding itemizes one — not the complaint, not the release, not her own statement.
Excuse me — before you go — one more thing. Is that the bust that makes this the fourth?
“They're not fighting terrorism, they're fertilizing it — the Bureau hands an eighteen-year-old a rifle, slaps the cuffs on him for taking it, then the senator waves the arrest around asking for a bigger terrorism budget. That's not law enforcement, that's a factory that grows its own raw material. Every dollar they're asking for buys the next gun they get to sell.”
“Look, sting operations have always required providing some material support — that's basic tradecraft, you can't arrest intent, you need an overt act. Did I just say the Bureau needs to manufacture the crime? That's not — that's not what I meant. The point is, four plots, four arrests, the system is working exactly as designed, however it got designed.”
Earlier in this story
- FBI thwarts Mall of America shooting by supplying the rifle, then arresting the 18-year-old for receiving it By Lou · the matinee edition, 7 October 2026
The receipts
The FBI stopped an 18-year-old man from carrying out a terrorist attack at the Mall of America in support of ISIS, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota announced on Wednesday. Sheikhdoon Mohamud, a U.S. citizen of Somali descent, was arrested and charged as part of a yearslong sting operation undertaken by the FBI.
The FBI thwarted an attack on the Mall of America by a teenager after agents supplied him with an assault rifle, authorities announced Wednesday.
The FBI arrested an 18-year-old for allegedly planning a mass casualty attack at the Minnesota mall, U.S. authorities announced.
An 18-year-old Twin Cities man accused of telling an FBI informant he planned to carry out an attack later this month at Mall of America was arrested at gunpoint Tuesday in Richfield, Minnesota, during an arranged meeting to buy an assault rifle, according to a federal criminal complaint filed Wednesday.
Amy Klobuchar praised the FBI after an 18-year-old was arrested for allegedly plotting an ISIS-inspired mass shooting at the Mall of America.
· FBI says it foiled an ISIS-inspired plot in Pennsylvania from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· Most ISIS-linked federal defendants are US citizens: Study from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· First use of Alien Terrorist Removal Court sends Afghan woman back after Election Day ISIS plot: DOJ from the morgue, 11 Sep 2026
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.