A veteran reporter noticed that President Donald Trump’s top officials are dodging questions about exactly when the suspected Washington, D.C., gunman was granted asylum.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for D.C., identified the suspect as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who had been living in Washington state, but FBI Director Kash Patel avoided a direct question on whether his asylum claim was granted during Trump’s presidency, as multiple outlets have reported.
“There is reporting from CNN and other news outlets about this, the gunman receiving asylum during the Trump administration,” said MS NOW’s David Rohde. “FBI Director Patel referred that to statements by [Homeland Security] Secretary [Kristi] Noem. But our colleagues here at MS NOW, we’ve all looked at Secretary Noem’s remarks and she did not say anything. So essentially, the administration has not answered the question about whether or not he was granted asylum during the Trump administration.”
Lakanwal, who had worked in his home country with the CIA, came to the U.S. in 2021 under a Biden-era program following the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and multiple law enforcement officials told CNN and other outlets that he was granted asylum in April 2025, during the Trump administration.
“One of the details here is that he drove across the entire country to Washington to carry out this attack, drove his own car, and that’s a startling amount of effort that went into this in terms of premeditation,” Rohde said. “It also shows how hard it is to find someone when they drive across the country and have a weapons in a car. There was an incident, a shooting in New York at the building where the NFL is housed, and that was a young man who drove with a weapon in his car all the way from Las Vegas to New York. So those are difficult things to to track.”
Patel was asked directly Thursday morning to comment on Lakanwal’s arrival and asylum approval, and he pointed reporters to statements from DHS, which said the suspect was paroled into the U.S. on Sept. 8, 2021, on humanitarian grounds and applied for asylum with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2024 and had that claim granted in 2025.
“Well, you miss all the signs when you do absolutely zero vetting,” Patel told the reporter, “and that’s exactly what happened in this case, when you in the prior administration made the decision to allow thousands of people into this country without doing a single piece of background checking or vetting, that’s how you miss every single sign, and Secretary Kristi Noem has put out details specifically related to your other questions, so I’ll let that speak for themselves.”
The reporter specifically asked Patel to provide a timeline for his asylum claim, and he again deferred to DHS.
“Yes, I believe Kristi Noem put that out,” Patel said, “and that’s a DHS matter, and I’ll refer it to them.”
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