Democrat Delegate Stacey Plaskett, the Virgin Islands’ non-voting member of Congress, garnered headlines recently when it came to light that she took direction from sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing.

Her relationship with Epstein is especially notable because Plaskett herself had “private nude images” of her stolen by her own ex-staffers, who used them to attempt to sabotage her re-election campaign. The husband of one of the culprits was, like Epstein, later found dead.

In March 2016, Plaskett asked staffer Juan R. McCullum to fix her iPhone. After snooping around, McCullum found nude images and videos, including one of her husband naked and wearing makeup while their young child was in the room, according to court papers.

Plaskett is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. She has said she had texted with Epstein during a House Oversight Committee hearing because Epstein was providing her information about what to ask President Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, because Epstein “had information, and I was going to get information to get at the truth.”

After the Epstein revelations emerged, she faced a censure vote in the House, narrowly escaping on a 209-214 vote.

In July 2016, after leaving Plaskett’s office to work for Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL), McCullum created an email address and sent the photos to politicians and the media, as well as posted them to Facebook using a fake account. Police traced the accounts to McCullum and found that he had communicated with another former Plaskett staffer, Dorene Browne-Louis, who had gone on to work for the Department of Homeland Security.

“Somebody will pay for how we were treated,” he wrote to Browne-Louis.

Browne-Louis “made numerous false and misleading statements about her knowledge of McCullum’s activities,” and falsely denied deleting relevant text messages, prosecutors said. She later testified before a federal grand jury and provided false statements, including that she “did not know that McCullum wanted to seek revenge against Delegate S.P.,” court papers said.

A superseding indictment said Browne-Louis provided McCullum the email address of the governor of the Virgin Islands and political supporters — taken from confidential campaign documents — for the purpose of sending the pictures to him and others.

Using his fake email account, McCullum sent Browne-Louis multiple messages “containing derogatory statements about” Plaskett, and Browne-Louis “requested that he re-send her the nude Images and Videos,” the indictment said. Browne-Louis gave one of the images to a campaign staffer for Plaskett’s challenger in the August 6, 2016, Democratic primary election, who in turn gave it to a reporter.

In his messages, McCullum “voiced opposition to Delegate S.P. and attempted to use the communications to undermine Delegate S.P.’s re-election campaign.”

Both culprits pleaded guilty. In a victim impact statement, Plaskett told the court that “our family’s privacy was invaded, pillaged and we were basically raped by Juan McCullum and Dorene Browne-Louis… Why, because I was mean? I demanded a lot, I demand most of myself.”

Plaskett continued, “We got calls from the White House with complaints that McCullum was pretending to be a member of the White House staff, we should have fired him then but I asked him to put his head down and let it blow over.”

“I’m so grateful for all the people at home who rallied around me,” she wrote. “The women who saw it for what it was. Bringing a black woman down. McCullum you’re like some creep who rips a woman’s clothes off in public, like the slave seller ripping a black woman’s clothes off.”

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“Then you went further. They tried to first emasculate my husband. Say he was not a man, because there was a picture of him with makeup. Makeup it was obvious he was not happy to be wearing. That he lost in a bet. The worst was that they tried to put in the public that my husband and I allowed our daughter who was around 4-5 at the time of the picture in some perverted unnatural situation. For that reason, I want to physically destroy the two of them.”

Plaskett’s husband, Jonathan Buckney-Small, wrote in his victim impact statement that he ran into McCullum after finding out about the photos and “NEVER had I felt the pulse the beat the flow my blood asking me to take matters in my own hands that night when you couldn’t look me in the eye. It was then it was clear I had a decision I had to make do I go to jail to make myself feel better or do I let time take you do [sic] jail.”

In March 2018, McCullum was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, 100 hours of community service, and two years of probation. In June 2020, a judge agreed to terminate his probation early.

In August 2016, a month after the photos and video were published, Browne-Louis’s husband, Gregory Benson Louis, was shot and killed outside the firehouse where he worked.

Browne-Louis also pleaded guilty. The government did not seek jail time in part because her husband was murdered. She was sentenced to two years’ probation.

At least two media outlets responded to an Afghan national’s attack on two National Guardsmen by fretting over how President Donald Trump’s reaction might hurt refugees.

The suspect in the shooting, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national admitted to the United States in 2021, in the aftermath of former President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. On Wednesday, he opened fire on two National Guardsmen just blocks from the White House, killing one, Sarah Beckstrom and leaving the other, Andrew Wolfe, fighting for his life with critical injuries.

Trump, a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s Afghanistan failures, quickly promised to “fix” the problems created when Biden allowed “hundreds of thousands of people” to come into the United States from Afghanistan, “totally unvetted and unchecked.”

The president also vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and said that he planned to “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Rather than cover the story straight or report on the risk that Biden’s refugee policies pose to American citizens, the Associated Press telegraphed concern for Afghan refugees in the United States.

“Trump administration plan to review Biden-era refugees sparks worry and uncertainty,” one AP headline read.

The Trump administration’s plan to review all refugees admitted to the United States under the Biden administration is weighing heavily on people who could be affected by the evaluation, fueling uncertainty and worry among people who believed their status was secured.

Another headline reported that “Refugee groups worry about backlash after shooting of National Guard soldiers in DC.”

Many Afghans living in the U.S. are afraid to leave their houses, fearing they’ll be swept up by immigration officials or attacked with hate speech, said Shawn VanDiver, president of the San Diego-based group #AfghanEvac, a group that helps resettle Afghans who assisted the U.S. during the two-decade war.

“They’re terrified. It’s insane,” VanDiver told The Associated Press Thursday. “People are acting xenophobic because of one deranged man. He doesn’t represent all Afghans. He represents himself.”

Yet another piece suggested that Trump was in the wrong for criticizing the Biden administration for bringing unvetted Afghans into the United States in the first place. “Trump criticizes the program that brought Afghan refugees to the US who fought the Taliban,” it read.

The program, called Operation Allies Welcome, was created after the 2021 decision to leave Afghanistan following 20 years of American intervention and billions of dollars of aid.

Democratic President Joe Biden, who oversaw the withdrawal started by his predecessor — Republican President Donald Trump — said the U.S. owed it to the interpreters and translators, the fighters and drivers and others who opposed the Taliban to give them a safe place outside of Afghanistan.

The New York Times was slightly more overt in its adoption of the “Trump pounces” theme, with one headline asserting “Trump Uses National Guard Shooting to Cast Suspicion on Refugees.”

President Trump claimed there were “a lot of problems with Afghans,” without providing evidence, as his administration announced that it was implementing new immigration guidelines.

But as those outlets and others have chosen to ignore, Army Ranger veteran and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell warned the Biden administration in real time, telling anyone who would listen that bringing unvetted Afghans into the United States was a recipe for disaster.

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At the time, he told the story of an Afghan interpreter who had been working with his platoon for more than a year before betraying them, putting them on a path where a land mine injured several and killed one of Parnell’s men.

“After that mission was over, during our After Action Report (AAR), we found out that our interpreter — who had been with us every step of the way, someone who we thought was our friend — we learned that he was working with an Iranian IED cell in Pakistan, and coordinated the placement of that mine,” Parnell explained.

But Parnell’s warning fell on deaf ears. Just one day before the deadly shooting cast a pall over a nation preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving, another Afghan national was arrested for making a terroristic threat” and posting it on TikTok.

Fox News national correspondent Brooke Taylor reported that Mohammad Dawood Alokozay made it clear in the video that he was building a bomb and had intended to target the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Like the shooting suspect in custody in D.C., Alokozay was brought into the United States in the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal under Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome. He was granted legal permanent resident status in September 2022.