House Republicans Demand Investigation Into Journalist Who Attended Ayatollah’s Funeral

An American journalist flew to Tehran to stand at the funeral of a man whose regime has spent four decades chanting death to America and funding the people who kill our soldiers and allies. That's not a footnote, that's the whole story. Max Blumenthal has spent years running Grayzone as a sympathetic megaphone for the Iranian, Russian, and Syrian governments, and now he's literally paying respects to Khamenei's coffin. You don't need a subpoena to see what that is.

Still, three House members firing off a letter demanding DOJ and State look into a guy for showing up somewhere and writing about it should give us pause. Attending a funeral, even a monstrous one, isn't a crime. If Blumenthal is doing actual sanctions violations, material support, or coordinating with Iranian state media in ways that cross legal lines, that's a real investigation with real evidence, not a press release with three signatures on it. If he's just being a ghoul with a laptop, the answer is to say so loudly and let readers judge his work accordingly.

We've spent years rightly hammering the left for wanting to weaponize federal agencies against journalists and dissidents they find distasteful. That criticism doesn't evaporate just because the target this time is someone cheering on the Ayatollah's funeral procession. Fine, Self, and Weber would do more damage to Blumenthal's credibility, and Iran's propaganda operation, by naming exactly what he's done wrong than by asking Rubio and the AG to open a file.

Blumenthal's politics are grotesque and his sympathies obvious. Neither of those is a legal standard, and conservatives shouldn't need reminding of that when the target is easy to dislike.