firing

WASHINGTON — FBI employees fired for their roles in the investigation of President Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Florida estate sued on Thursday to get their jobs back, calling their terminations unlawful acts of “political retribution.”

The complaint adds to the growing list of legal challenges to the mass terminations under FBI Director Kash Patel of agents who participated in investigations of the Republican president or are seen as opposed to Trump administration interests.

The suit was filed in federal court in Washington on behalf of nine agents, intelligence analysts and staff operations specialists who were fired in February after dismissals of agents who had worked on the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Patel has said in congressional testimony that employees he has fired had “weaponized” the FBI. But the agents deny that claim in the lawsuit, noting that between them they had more than a century of distinguished and apolitical FBI service that involved responding to the Boston Marathon bombing, hostage recoveries and the investigation into the 2024 assassination attempt of Trump in Butler, Pa.

Their firings, the lawsuit says, create an “immeasurable loss” to “America’s national security.”

“In return for their service, they were fired because they did their jobs, as they always did to follow the facts and law without bias or favor. To this administration, this is an offense. To the rest of us, it is heroic,” said a statement from their attorneys, Margaret Donovan, Abbe Lowell and Rebecca Tinio.

“This lawsuit will prove their unlawful dismissal and hold the administration accountable for this blatant attack on the rule of law,” the statement added.

The Mar-a-Lago investigation produced criminal charges against Trump

The suit lays out a detailed recitation of the allegations against Trump, describing how he improperly stored dozens of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., that he took with him after leaving the White House, showed them off to people not authorized to see them and obstructed FBI efforts to get them back.

The investigation resulted in a dramatic 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago that recovered classified records and later produced an indictment in federal court in Florida charging Trump with dozens of felony counts.

Trump denied wrongdoing, and the case was dismissed in 2024 by a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, who ruled that the special counsel who filed the charges, Jack Smith, had been illegally appointed by the Biden administration Justice Department.

The nine fired FBI employees did not volunteer for the investigation but were rather assigned to it as part of their work on specialized counterintelligence and counterespionage squads, according to the lawsuit, which says they were nonetheless terminated because of baseless perceptions that the performance of their law enforcement duties had run “afoul of the political and personal loyalty to Trump that Defendants demanded.”

“By casting Plaintiffs’ work on the Plasmic Echo investigation as ‘politically weaponized,’ Defendants incorrectly presumed to know the personal political convictions of Plaintiffs and took unlawful action based on that presumption,” the lawsuit says, using the FBI code name for the classified documents investigation. “Worse still, Defendants incorrectly concluded that those personal political convictions affected or drove their work.”

The lawsuit seeks, among other remedies, reinstatement to the FBI, an awarding of back pay and a court order declaring that the firings were unlawful.

The suit says the firings were the culmination of a retribution campaign

Lawyers for the fired employees suggest their clients’ “fate was sealed” well before the February terminations, casting the ousters as the culmination of a long-running retribution campaign that kicked into gear once Trump returned to the White House in 2025.

The lawsuit notes how Patel, in his capacity as a conservative podcaster before becoming Trump’s FBI director, had derided the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search as “unlawful” and had accused the agents who had participated in it as being “corrupt government gangsters.”

Days after Trump was inaugurated, a top Justice Department official demanded that the FBI turn over a list of bureau employees who had participated in Trump-related investigations, an order that the then-director, Brian Driscoll, resisted and that was seen within the workforce as a potential prelude to mass firings.

Over the following year, the FBI and the Justice Department fired waves of employees involved in investigations of Trump, without hearings or proper notice that the plaintiffs’ lawyers say are required by law.

The lawsuit says that the Mar-a-Lago agents and analysts were fired in February after Patel disclosed to Reuters that the FBI, as part of the investigation, had subpoenaed his toll records, which show the date, time and length of a phone call but not the content of the communications.

“The Plaintiffs were unlawfully terminated not for any cause or any legitimate reason, but only to satisfy the President’s personal vendetta,” the lawsuit states. “The firings did not follow any internal investigation or disciplinary process within the FBI, and Plaintiffs were not given any notice, a hearing, or an opportunity to appeal.”

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.

The Pentagon announced last week it would execute Hasan on 3 December 2026 by firing squad.

Hegseth then said the execution would be livestreamed for the public to watch, adding that “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things”.

Trump last Friday called Hasan “totally nuts”, adding: “I really don’t care how he goes, as long as he goes, and I think that the death penalty is a very worthy way of going for him.”

He also said he “absolutely” approved the livestream plans but said the Pentagon was still “making a determination” on it.

Hasan opened fire in a crowded medical building where deploying soldiers were awaiting check-ups and vaccines.

He later admitted in court that he was the gunman and apologised for “any mistakes”. He said during his court-martial in 2013 that he believed he was protecting Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan from the US military.

The killings on 5 November 2009 were the deadliest ever non-combat attack on an American military base.

US military law requires that a military execution be approved by the US president. It also requires appellate review, when a higher court inspects the decision and gives a final judgement on its legality to move forward.

While there were more than 2,700 executions across 17 countries last year, only two nations carried them out publicly. According to Amnesty International, 11 public executions were known to have been carried out in Iran in 2025 and another six in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Army now has at least five named programs seeking new anti-air interceptors of various tiers to collectively address everything from advanced hypersonic missiles to small weaponized drones. In the process, an important central theme is emerging: the service’s days of fielding air defense systems that can only use one type of interceptor look to be increasingly over. For the U.S. military, the impacts from the war with Iran have made clear that diversifying munitions stockpiles and supplier bases is no longer just valuable, it is critical.

Army Lt. Gen. Frank Lozano, the service’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Fires, highlighted this growing trend yesterday during a panel discussion at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual convention, at which TWZ has been in attendance.

To provide some immediate context, with the exception of Patriot, the main ground-based air defense systems in Army inventory today are fielded with just one type of interceptor. In the case of Patriot, the service’s procurement of new interceptors had also been increasingly limited to just one type, the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE). Production of the preceding PAC-3 Cost Reduction Initiative (CRI) missile ended in 2023. Just earlier this year, the Army placed its first order in decades for new PAC-2 Guidance Enhanced Missile-Tactical (GEM-T) missiles, an older interceptor design for Patriot that has remained in production primarily for U.S. allies and partners.

Separately, the Army is in the process of fielding Enduring Shield, a new middle-tier air defense system designed to handle multiple interceptor types. However, the service is currently only acquiring AIM-9X Sidewinders to load into them. We will come back to this later on.

“We have the capabilities we need to have to fight and win, but it’s our job to ensure that victory is achievable in the future inside of any dynamic environment scenario fight we might find ourselves in,” Lt. Gen. Lozano said yesterday. “So, it’s incumbent upon Mr. Ingraham [Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Brent Ingraham] and I to continue to be creative and looking at, well, should we buy GEM-Ts because they’re being produced?”

“GEM-Ts are a really good missile in the battlespace within they operate. I mean, they’re being employed today by air defense brigades around the world,” he continued. “So if we have the opportunity, it’s probably something we should take advantage of, and we’re looking at doing that.

“We’ve had a lot of discussions about even more interceptors. From a PAC-3 MSE perspective, our goal has always been to get to 2,000 [per year],” he added. “Why we’re running programs like LCI [Low Cost Interceptor], and NGSRI [Next-Generation Short-Range Interceptor], and NGCM [Next-Generation C-UAS Missile], and Second Interceptor, is because I think the easy button answer is just buy more of a great missile. We’re going to buy more [PAC-3 MSEs], but when we start talking about overall missile output, we start looking at numbers like is it 4,000, is it 6,000, is it 8,000, we’re looking at a diverse set of capabilities.”

The LCI program is seeking a lower-cost and lower-tier interceptor for Patriot with a unit price of no more than $1 million. PAC-3 MSE’s average unit cost has been around $4 million in recent years.

NGSRI is the Army’s program to find a replacement for the venerable Stinger. The new missiles have to be compatible with existing vehicle-based and man-portable launchers.

The Army is working to field a new counter-drone interceptor through NGCM. Those missiles will be integrated into launchers the service has now for the Coyote interceptor.

Raytheon Missiles & Defense proves counter-UAS effectiveness against enemy drones

The Second Interceptor effort is for Enduring Shield, which is also known as the Indirect Fire Protection Capability Increment 2 (IFPC Inc 2). The main goal there is to provide increased capability against incoming cruise missiles compared to the AIM-9X.

There is also the Army’s Future Interceptor effort, which also came up separately at the panel yesterday, and is also for Patriot. Unlike LCI, the aim here is to acquire a new interceptor with improved capabilities against hypersonic missiles and other upper-tier threats.

Historically, Army programs like these would eventually result in the selection of a single winning missile design. Lozano’s remarks yesterday point to the service increasingly taking a very different approach.

On “second interceptor, obviously, we just moved into phase two of that program. We’ve got Lockheed Martin competing with Boeing, who was teamed with Anduril,” Lozano said. “But we wanted to turn up the heat on that program. I constantly get frustrated when a funding profile emerges over the FYDP [the Future Years Defense Program], and then magically we lay in a five-year program.”

“I’m like, no, I actually need that capability now,” he continued. “So, have we thought maybe what if we ran a 24-month program or a 36-month program, right? And so, in that vein, what we have decided to do is, while those two companies continue to compete, we’re going to create a shoot-off opportunity in [the] fourth quarter [of Fiscal Year 20]27, and I want to run an in-parallel, what I call an in-stride competition.”

“We just held an industry day, and we basically just said, hey, if there’s any other company who didn’t make the first cut in the phase one, but, oh, by the way, who continued to invest in the IFPC Second Interceptor capability, we’d love for you to come out to the range,” he added. “We’ll give you range time, we’ll present targets, and we’ll allow you to recompete with an opportunity to get back into the program folder.”

The Army is doing the exact same thing with NGSRI, where Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have been competing face-to-face. That program is also now planning to hold a new shoot-off that will be open to other vendors in the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2027.

There are signs the Army is moving in a similar direction with NGCM, where it previously selected AeroVironment to supply its Freedom Eagle-1 (FE-1) interceptor. The service put out a request for information seeking new NGCM options in August, with a goal of holding an initial evaluation again in the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2027. A deeper operational assessment could then follow in Fiscal Year 2028.

Freedom Eagle-1, the Next-Gen CUAS Missile

To reiterate, on top of all this, the Army is also now pursuing at least two new interceptor options for Patriot.

“We have to address the threat, and we need to address the threat in a complementary way, meaning we need to fight on a cost curve that’s affordable for the U.S. Army to maintain and sustain that warfighting capability abroad,” Lozano stressed yesterday.

This gets to the crux of the matter. It is not at all a new observation that just having a stockpile of any particular munition on day one of a conflict is not enough, especially if the fight becomes drawn out. There needs to be sufficient depth to those stocks at the start and the ability to readily replenish them in line with expenditures. The war with Iran, compounded by other crises in the Middle East and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, has made clear that these core truths apply to all armed forces, even the U.S. military.

Lower-cost munitions are part of the solution, but they also need to be producible at scale on reasonable timelines. The lead time for higher-end munitions today is often measured in months, if not years. Furthermore, being locked into a single vendor has been shown to not just be undesirable, but a potential national security risk in an actual conflict. Lozano’s remarks yesterday, and how the Army is now pursuing new anti-air interceptors, reflect larger trends, not just in the acquisition of larger volumes of munitions overall, but also from a broader array of total suppliers.

There has also been a push across the U.S. military to bring in new and non-traditional firms, including in partnership with established prime contractors. An example of this is the Boeing/Anduril team-up for Second Interceptor. This was also underscored by new framework agreements the Pentagon announced back in May regarding the planned purchase of thousands of lower-cost cruise missiles.

With regard to the LCI program, specifically, Lozano highlighted an additional aspect of all of this yesterday.

LCI has “a unique twist to it because we’re looking for companies who have all-up rounds, but I’m also asking for companies to come in at the component level,” he explained. “We typically don’t do that, right? There’s a lot of risk in managing components and generating all-up round systems. But we’re also looking for weapon system integrators, because I want to be able to create two or three teams who can compete with the all-up round guys to see if we can generate some momentum behind the fact that we need to thicken our inventory with low-cost, affordable munitions.”

The U.S. Navy is now pursuing a roughly similar approach with its Naval Modular Missile (NMM) program. NMM envisions an entirely new family of sea-launched surface-to-air missiles that offer very different capabilities, but that all feature certain common components, as you can read more about here.

The Army is also eyeing a new family of launcher vehicles, as well as containerized options, all capable of firing various types of surface-to-air and surface-to-surface munitions. Autonomy is also an important aspect of what is aptly dubbed the Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher (CAML) program.

It is also important to note here that the underlying aim is not to eliminate more exquisite munitions, or the capabilities that they offer, but to create a more affordable, complementary mix of options.

“What I would say is we’re solely focused on delivering on the programs we are executing now,” Lozano said in closing at the end of the panel yesterday. “We have to deliver, and if we deliver on that wide variety of capability, then we can increase and ramp that capacity. And that would be my wish list, that we have enough resources and we achieve programmatic success in the way that we’re planning to, so we can deliver in mass.”

All signs point to the diversity in munitions that Lozano is talking about here being particularly pronounced in future Army air defense capabilities full of systems firing multiple types of interceptors.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

In confirming his plans to live-stream Fort Hood mass shooter Nidal Malik Hasan’s military execution by firing squad on Dec. 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it a “no brainer” punishment for a “radical Islamist terror attack” on U.S. service members.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand [that] there are serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said in an interview with the Real America’s Voice network.

Others across the country and around the world — Democrats and Republicans, human rights experts, legal scholars and military and religious leaders — condemned it as a barbaric throwback to an era when executions were cast as entertainment, and as the world’s leading democracy adopting a form of punishment carried out in modern times only by authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations.

Nidal Malik Hasan is shown in a courtroom sketch in 2013.

(Brigitte Woosley / Associated Press)

“Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) wrote on X. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

“I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) wrote.

The United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights said that “the livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture.” The head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said it would “further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”

Matthew Robinson, a criminal justice professor at Appalachian State University and author of a book on U.S. capital punishment titled “Death Nation,” said he was “appalled” by the plans. “It strikes me as meant to be entertaining.” He said the last military execution was in 1961, and the last by firing squad was in 1945.

Soldiers hold a candlelight vigil at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, one day after Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 people.

(LM Otero / Associated Press)

Hasan was an Army psychiatrist and major who in 2009 entered a medical building on the Texas military base with a laser-sighted handgun, shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire, killing 13 people and injuring 32 others. He has since spoken of being a “martyr” if executed.

President Trump, an outspoken proponent of the death penalty for years but also a past critic of public executions in places like Iran, has signed off on Hasan’s execution but not addressed Hegseth’s plans. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, said Friday that people should remember that Hasan “brutally murdered a lot of innocent people.” But he also said he would not watch a live-stream of the execution, and expressed doubt that is “actually going to happen.”

On his first day in office this term, Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to restore the death penalty to prominence. In April, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had taken steps to do so, including by “expanding the protocol” to include firing squads.

Five states currently allow firing squads to carry out executions: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly turned down appeals contending such executions amount to “cruel and unusual punishment,” which is barred under U.S. law. South Carolina executed three men by firing squad last year.

When the Supreme Court last year rejected an Alabama inmate’s request to be killed by firing squad rather than with nitrogen hypoxia, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor — joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented, writing, “Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to four minutes. The Constitution would grant him that grace.”

Kathleen Walter prays outside the Nashville, Tenn., prison where Christa Pike was set to be executed.

(George Walker IV / Associated Press)

Last week, a Tennessee inmate named Christa Pike survived what was meant to be a lethal injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital. Other states have also struggled with executions by lethal injection in recent years.

Much of the criticism of Hegseth’s plan for Hasan has centered not on the method of killing, but on the live-streaming of it.

Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the center has “no record of any execution being live streamed,” and is “not aware of any regulation or precedent for a military execution to be live streamed on the internet or otherwise made widely available to the public.”

Fox News commentator Howard Kurtz wrote: “I’m sensing revulsion on the left and right, not so much for killing a death row prisoner — although firing squad seems extreme in the modern age — but for the Pentagon to live-stream it, turning this into a horrifying TV show to entertain the masses. Is this America?”

Daniel LaChance, an associate history professor at Emory University and author of the book “Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States,” said the last public execution in the U.S. occurred in 1936, when a Black man convicted of rape was hanged in Kentucky — which still allowed public executions after most states had abandoned the practice.

That execution was “by all accounts a grotesque carnival” and “sort of like a gladiatorial contest brought to life in the 20th Century, where the crowd was surly, shouting,” LaChance said. “It was a debacle.”

That the Trump administration is seeking to turn capital punishment into a public spectacle once more, LaChance said, is out of line with decades of thinking on the issue, but in line with Trump’s own ethos about crime and punishment.

“His whole brand is this kind of populist, anti-elitism. And when executions moved into the bowels of prisons in the early 20th century, they were really becoming bureaucratic affairs, run by experts, carried out in front of a small group of professionals and clergy,” LaChance said. “It was a denial of the public’s right to see a punishment that was carried out in their name, in part because there were elites who thought that the public couldn’t handle this kind of spectacle, that they were misbehaving, that it would generate more disorder when an execution is designed to do the exact opposite: to generate order.”

President Trump points to fans to as he walks to the stage at a political rally Wednesday in San Antonio.

(San Antonio Express-News via Getty Images)

Trump clearly thinks he is pushing back against elitism and expertise and giving people what they want, LaChance said, though the question many scholars have is whether doing so will “increase people’s bloodthirst” or force them to recoil — and ultimate decrease support for such punishments.

Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, said Trump has publicly mused about killing people by firing squad for years, so Hegseth’s plans to use a firing squad should not be surprising. However, the decision to live-stream the killing is clearly a source of “dismay” for many. “Even people who are resigned to the death penalty, who don’t have religious or other scruples about the death penalty, have real heartburn over this,” he said.

Fidell said “brutality” has become an “operating principle” for the Trump administration broadly, from its decision to host an Ultimate Fighting tournament at the White House to its immigration tactics across the country to, now, it’s plans to live-stream an execution — which Fidell said has “nothing to do” with deterring future crime.

“There’s a pathology going on here that is so out of keeping with the dignity that ought to characterize the taking of a life as a result of a legal process,” he said.

Robinson, of Appalachian State, said a student of his Friday morning asked what would happen when children tune in to watch the execution, which Robinson said he believes they will do, as if it’s a video game. He said the idea was appalling — and not just to him.

“I imagine the rest of the world, the civilized world, will see this and have the same response that I did,” he said. “They’ll respond with shock.”

Times staff writer David G. Savage contributed to this report.

US Vice President JD Vance has cast doubt on the Pentagon’s plans to livestream a firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter.

Talking with reporters, Vance expressed doubt that it would happen as planned, saying: “I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen”.

He added, that “if it’s through live stream, I’m not going to be watching it”. Vance described the actions by former US Army major Nidal Hasan as “the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11”.

Hasan fatally shot 13 unarmed US soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, injuring another 32. His execution by firing squad would be the first military execution in more than 60 years.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would be “public.”

Hegseth, speaking to the conservative TV outlet Real America’s Voice News on Wednesday, said the execution of Hasan will take place at Fort Hood on Dec. 3. Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others in a shooting at the military base in 2009.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth spoke to the outlet aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier while visiting the long-deployed crew, who supported the Iran war, before their arrival at their home port in San Diego.

When asked if Hasan had made any final requests or reached out to the Trump administration, Hegseth simply replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3rd.”

Officials in the Pentagon clarified Thursday that the execution will be livestreamed and that more details would follow.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell had said Monday that President Trump had approved the execution of Hasan.

Trump has previously been critical of public executions in Iran, at times using the possibility of protesters being killed by the Iranian government as a possible rationale for military action. Those warnings preceded his ultimate choice to attack Iran at the end of February over its ballistic missiles and the risk of it developing nuclear weapons.

“We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping,” Trump told reporters on Jan. 14 of this year. “It’s stopping and there’s no plan for executions.”

He repeated that claim on Jan. 20 at a White House press briefing, saying: “We let them know that if that happens, that will be a very bad day for them. And they decided not to do it. They didn’t hang the people.”

Slightly more than a month later in his State of the Union address, Trump said, “We stopped them from hanging a lot of them with the threat of serious violence.”

The White House on Thursday immediately referred questions about the plans for the livestreamed execution to the Pentagon.

However, experts on military law said Hasan could choose to resist execution and file a habeas petition in civilian court, which could significantly delay the execution.

“It frankly might outlast the current administration, and who knows if the next one will have the same penchant for executions,” said Eugene R. Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School specializing in military law.

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who held the rank of major, walked into a medical building where soldiers were waiting in long lines to receive immunizations and medical clearance for deployment. He shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun.

During the trial it was revealed that Hasan spent weeks planning the deadly attack, and his preparation included videotaping a sales clerk showing him how to change the magazine on the pistol that he purchased. He would later go to a gun range outside Austin and ask for advice on how to reload with speed and precision from an instructor.

Soldiers later testified that Hasan’s rapid reloading made it all but impossible to stop the shooting. Investigators recovered 146 shell casings inside the building and dozens more outside, where Hasan shot at the backs of soldiers fleeing toward the parking lot.

Hasan said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims. A military judge barred him from presenting that as a defense during his trial. Hasan made almost no effort to defend himself in court, telling jurors when he acted as his own counsel that evidence would show he was the shooter and describing himself as a soldier who had “switched sides.”

Hegseth said the military hasn’t executed a servicemember by firing squad since World War II. The last military execution took place on April 13, 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was executed by hanging.

Toropin writes for the Associated Press.

United States President Donald Trump has approved the death by firing squad of Nidal Malik Hasan, a former army officer convicted of carrying out a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, an army base in Texas.

The move, if it proceeds, will revive executions in the army, which has not carried one out since 1961.

Death sentences, as well as executions in the US military, are rare and require presidential approval.

Under the army’s code of military justice, premeditated murder does carry the death penalty, but the process is often strict and prolonged.

However, the Trump administration has shown more willingness to seek death penalties for serious crimes, including against civilians.

Here’s what we know about the case:

What is the presidential order?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had initially recommended an execution order for Hasan, and Trump has now approved it, according to an X statement posted by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell.

Parnell said the time and date of the execution will be set by Army Secretary Adam Telle, who is serving in an acting capacity.

“Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” he wrote.

What happened at Fort Hood?

On November 5, 2009, the US-born army major, Hasan, a psychiatrist in the force, walked into an army processing centre in Fort Hood, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and opened fire on fellow staff members waiting to get medical attention.

Thirteen people were killed, including a pregnant soldier, and 32 others were wounded during 10 minutes of shooting. Analysts have called it the worst shooting at a US military base targeting members of armed forces.

Hasan was shot several times after two officers engaged him and remains paralysed from the waist down.

What happened during the trial?

Hasan was immediately court-martialled, and military prosecutors, from the start, sought the death penalty against him.

However, the process would play out over the course of several years even after his conviction – largely because the US military is averse to capital punishment.

During the trial, Hasan represented himself and admitted to the attacks, saying he was trying to stop deployments to Afghanistan and the killing of his fellow Muslims. He was due to be deployed weeks later.

Investigations revealed Hasan had exchanged emails with Yemeni-American scholar Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of ties to al-Qaeda, before the shooting. He had also repeatedly voiced opposition to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to colleagues and the treatment of Muslims in the army.

Hasan made little effort to defend himself, and his assigned lawyers claimed his testimony aided the opposing side.

He was charged and convicted on 13 counts of premeditated murder in 2013, and jurors recommended the maximum sentence of death. Controversially, Hasan was charged with “workplace violence” because the military justice code does not address the crime of “terrorism”.

The judgement was further delayed by appeals mandated by the military, not because Hasan sought them.

In 2020, the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the death penalty for Hasan, and in 2023, the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces did the same. In March 2025, the US Supreme Court denied a mandatory petition for a judicial review.

In September 2025, Hegseth announced he was seeking presidential approval for Hasan’s execution.

At the time, there was no report of Hegseth specifically seeking death by firing squad.

The president holds the ultimate authority to specify the designated method of execution.

Other forms of execution could have been lethal injection or hanging, which the US military has used in the past.

What next?

While Trump’s approval will begin a series of steps towards preparing for the execution, Hasan can still put the process on hold for years with an appeal in the civilian federal court system.

However, that might be unlikely as Hasan made no effort to defend himself during the trial.

He has been remanded to the US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where three other men have also been on the military death row for years.

Among them is Hasan Akbar, convicted of two counts of murder after attacking fellow army members on a Kuwait base in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq.

Another is the convicted serial killer and rapist Ronald Gray, who was found guilty of four counts of murder and eight counts of rape in 2008. He was approved for execution in the same year under President George W Bush, but the process was put on hold by a judge.

Timothy Hennis, a former sergeant, was convicted in 2010 of a triple murder and is also on death row.

The last military execution took place in 1961, when former soldier John Bennett was hanged for the rape of an 11-year-old girl.