Free Speech

Does Reporting Bad News About the Iran War Make You a Foreign Agent?

The Trump administration invokes the notoriously vague FARA to threaten a critic.

Matthew Petti | 5.27.2026 4:35 PM

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(Illustration: Adani Samat. Photo: Bob Daemmrich/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom/@RapidResponse47 via X)

The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to censor bad news about the Iran war. President Donald Trump even accused journalists of treason during the war. Now the administration has found a specific (if extremely tenuous) legal justification for his claims: the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

After The Bulwark journalist Tim Miller shared someone else's paraphrase of an Iranian TV news report about the ceasefire negotiations, the official White House Rapid Response account on X commented that Miller is "starting to take Iranian state media as fact and peddle disinformation on their behalf. Maybe Tim should register under FARA for being an agent of a foreign country."

On its face, Miller's criticism falls far outside of FARA. All he did was........

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