Trouble at home for journo at Kameinei's funeral

[Opinion. Let’s get this out of the way first. Max Blumenthal is an observant anti-Zionist Boston Jew. The son of political journalist Sidney Blumenthal and Jacqueline Jordan, Jewish on both sides.

He also attended Khameinei’s funeral in Tehran, the largest ever held with 10.2M mourners and one Western journalist: Max Blumenthal.

Is Blumenthal pro-Iran? Is it somehow fishy for an American to go to Iran in the midst of war? Blumenthal describes himself not as pro-Iran but anti-imperialist. He has appeared on Iran’s Press TV, Russia’s Sputnik and China’s Global Television Network. Does that make him pro-Russian or pro-China.

Blumenthal opposes U.S. interventionism and Israel’s illegal wars, including war on Iran. Economic blockades and US foreign policy influence by governments like Israel. He praised Spain for refusing to allow the US to use NATO joint bases for attacks on Iran.

He is published at The Nation, AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, Mondoweiss, Media Matters for America, Al Jazeera English, Russia Today, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. Blumenthal is author of four books which appeared on the NYT bestsellers’ lists. You may be interested in Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013).

Of course, the US was going to search his cellphones! But a good journo doesn’t leave trails on phones. I wonder how you fly to Tehran these days?]]

US reporter fighting back after border patrol seized his cell phones

Max Blumenthal says he was singled out at airport after Trump ally Laura Loomer targeted him in online posts

Timothy Pratt

The Guardian: 1 Aug 2026

SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/border-patrol-reporter-laura-loomer

When reporter Max Blumenthal went to a cafe in Tehran one night a few weeks ago to upload videos from his reporting on the funeral of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, he began seeing social media posts from Trump ally Laura Loomer targeting him, including one that suggested he should be “taken off the plane by US Marshals when he lands back in the US … [and] detained”.

The confiscation started a legal fight that freedom-of-the-press advocates say shows the determination of the Trump administration to crack down on members of the media whose reporting it disagrees with.

On 10 July, border patrol agents at Virginia’s Dulles airport flagged Blumenthal, founder of the independent outlet the Grayzone, for a “secondary inspection”. Agents asked him how he had paid for his trip to Iran, whether he knew the people who had hosted him and whether he had plans to return.

They asked to see his two phones. He declined to give them the passwords. They seized the phones, but not his laptop or digital cameras.

The federal agency returned the cell phones a week later – less than 24 hours after the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed an emergency motion in district court seeking their return.

The US federal government said they couldn’t get into the phones and returned them, and that therefore the motion was moot. But Blumenthal went back to court on Wednesday and got a judge to agree that the government must prove it – by supplying evidence of who had his phones, when they had them and what they did to them. Federal judge Leonie M Brinkema gave the government 14 days to respond.

Blumenthal’s treatment and case pose “serious constitutional problems”, said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “The Trump administration is finding any excuse it can to target journalists it dislikes, and border searches are one more play in the playbook.”