FIRST ON FOX: House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., told Fox News Digital his committee will continue to probe a scrapped plea deal with the alleged terrorists behind the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks. 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday stunningly revoked a controversial plea deal that would have reportedly taken the death penalty off the table for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, who are awaiting trial in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The announcement came after House Republicans on the Armed Services and Oversight committees separately launched investigations into the circumstances of the plea agreement.

“I appreciate that Secretary Austin listened to my concerns and reversed this horrible decision,” Rogers told Fox News Digital on Saturday. “However, this plea deal should have never occurred. I still expect the Secretary to provide HASC with answers on how this happened.” 

The chairman wrote to Austin on Thursday demanding documents related to the plea deal, including “all documents and communications containing terms, conditions, agreements, side-deals, or any mutually developed, related, conditional, or linked agreements with any party relating to terms and conditions of the plea agreements.”

‘BAND OF KILLERS’: MAJOR HOUSE COMMITTEE LAUNCHES PROBE INTO ‘UNCONSCIONABLE’ 9/11 PLEA DEAL

The GOP committee chairman also asked for records of communications spanning the Biden administration regarding the plea deal, which he called “unconscionable.”

“I, along with much of our nation and Congress, are deeply shocked and angered by news that the terrorist mastermind and his associates who planned the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, which killed nearly 3000 innocent people, were offered a plea deal,” Rogers wrote in the letter, first obtained by Fox News Digital. 

“Tragically, the news is a ‘gut punch’ to many of the victims’ families.” 

Rogers gave the Defense Department an Aug. 23 deadline to comply with his request. 

BIDEN-HARRIS ADMINISTRATION BACKTRACKS, REVOKES PLEA DEAL FOR 9/11 TERRORISTS

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers is demanding more information on the plea deal for Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and two other 9/11 defendants.  (Getty Images)

The terms and conditions of the deal were never disclosed, but it took the death penalty off the table, three relatives of 9/11 victims were told by the Office of Military Commissions (OMC), the New York Post reported.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001 in the worst terror attack on U.S. soil in American history. Families of the victims, groups that represent them and lawmakers had expressed bewilderment and fury that those who planned the attack might not be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

PLEA DEAL REVERSAL FOR 9/11 TERRORISTS WINS PRAISE AND DEMANDS FOR JUSTICE FROM VICTIMS GROUPS, REPUBLICANS

The Brooklyn Bridge 9/11 Tribute in Light in New York City. (Fox News Photo/Joshua Comins)

However, that deal was rescinded after Austin relieved the official in charge of the military commission who had signed off on the agreement and assumed their authority for himself. 

“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024,” the secretary wrote in a short memo Friday.

The defense secretary did not explain why he had not intervened before the plea deals were signed and publicly released. The Department of Defense declined to comment on Austin’s decision. 

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., announced a parallel investigation into the plea deal in a letter to President Biden on Friday. The committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Biden-Harris administration’s sudden reversal. 

Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind and Stepheny Price contributed to this report.

Donald Trump is nothing if not consistent, and his Dumpster fire of an interview with reporters at the National Assn. of Black Journalists convention in Chicago this week showed the Republican presidential nominee in full, foul mode.

He lied. He insulted. He whined. He was racist and misogynistic. He evaded questions and elided answers, and showed all the grace and gratitude of a kindergartner who pees in a sandbox and expects others to clean up the mess.

Above all, the Republican presidential candidate kept stabbing at the same illegal immigration scapegoat that’s the centerpiece of his 2024 presidential campaign. This time, though, he tried to further his contention that Donald J. Trump is the greatest president for Black people since Abraham Lincoln.

He unveiled the strategy during his June 28 debate with President Biden, when Trump stated that immigrants were a “big kill on the Black people” and were “taking Black jobs.” In Georgia, which he narrowly lost in 2020, his campaign has aired radio and television commercials insisting Biden cares more about illegal immigrants than the Black community.

At the NABJ convention, Trump blamed open borders for endangering the job security of Black workers — never mind that unemployment rates for them have reached historic lows under both the Trump and Biden administrations, a time when illegal immigration has grown to numbers not seen in a generation. When a moderator asked what was his message to all the Black reporters gathered before him and people watching online, Trump responded it was “to stop people from invading our country … who happen to be taking Black jobs.” When asked what he would do on Day 1 of a new term, he blurted out, “Close the border.”

Trump’s gambit is yet another legacy of Proposition 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants. Then and now, GOP politicians figure that the best way to court Black voters — a longtime bedrock of the Democratic Party — is to argue that immigrants in the country illegally are a burden that hits their community harder than others by taking away social services and bleeding jobs away.

Here’s the thing: There is a historical basis for these concerns, even if Trump has pushed the Illegal Immigrant Bogeyman dial to 11.

When South L.A. began to turn from the heart of the city’s Black community to a Latino-majority enclave during the 1980s and 1990s, the subsequent tensions were real. In the wake of the L.A. riots, groups protested outside work sites and blasted contractors for giving jobs to Latinos instead of Black workers because the former group would work for cheaper than the latter. The assumption by Latino political leaders during the fight against Prop. 187 that Black people would join them without question offended leaders and community activists.

Incidents like that led to 47% of Black voters favoring Prop. 187, a margin that helped the resolution pass comfortably.

Some of the most prominent Black voices in the anti-immigrant movement over the past 25 years — homeless activist Ted Hayes, the late radio show host Terry Anderson, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, former gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder — came from that era. One of the loudest anti-immigrant voices in Southern California today is Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren, a Compton native who has scolded immigrants from the dais for not speaking English and has waged an aggressive campaign against street vendors. Throw in deep-rooted anti-Black sentiments among Latinos that got a prominent showcase during the 2022 L.A. City Hall racist tape leak scandal, and no wonder Trump thinks banking on getting Black voters angry enough against a supposed south-of-the-border invasion is a winner.

The reality is that Black people aren’t as receptive to an anti-immigrant message as Trump and the GOP would like to think.

A 2006 Pew Research Center study showed that 47% of Black people thought immigrants in the U.S. without legal documents should be allowed to stay, compared with 33% of whites. But by 2013, a similar Pew report showed 82% of Black people felt there should be a path toward legalization for those immigrants, compared with 67% of whites. The figure dropped in a Pew survey released this year to 73%, but it’s still far higher than the 53% of whites who feel the same, and just two percentage points behind Latinos, who have increasingly turned to the right against illegal immigration since the Prop. 187 days.

This general acceptance doesn’t surprise L.A. Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson. He campaigned against Prop. 187 in 1994, going door-to-door in his native South L.A. to argue that the initiative was a wedge issue being used by Republicans to divide Black and Latino neighbors against each other and make them forget their shared working-class status.

“One line I would tell people is, ‘Do you hear them [Prop. 187 supporters] talk about people from Canada? From Germany?” Harris-Dawson said. “Black and Latino people I talked to understood it clearly.”

Harris-Dawson didn’t have to make the same argument recently in Atlanta, where the subject of illegal immigration came up in conversation.

“They said, ‘We support immigration reform, because we don’t want working-class people who can’t play defense,’” he said. In other words, it was better for the Black community for immigrants to have full rights instead of keeping them without papers and thus easier to use to undercut Black workers. “The sophistication of that! They get that workers don’t take jobs; employers give jobs.”

He can see Trump peeling off Black voters from the Democrats by continuing to hammer on the illegal immigration issue — but “he’ll also lose them” because of Trump’s long history of racist dog whistles. Besides, the councilmember argued, “people have seen it play out. … You see new neighbors come in and think, ‘Oh, there’s a good family.’ And they are. And then 10 years later, the parents still don’t have papers and the kids can’t go to college.

“Black folks can sympathize,” Harris-Dawson concluded, with “people who deal with systems that are ostensibly there to help you, but in fact do the opposite.”

After several lawmakers criticized the Pentagon for sanctioning painful experiments on dogs, an animal-testing watchdog group said the Defense Department is only the latest agency to be exposed. Now, one-by-one, departments have been forced to put a stop to it. 

One month after Fox News reported on the matter, representatives Young Kim, R-Calif., and Donald Davis, D-N.C., led more than two dozen House members in demanding a specific accounting of how the Pentagon spent taxpayer money in this way.

At the same time, a spokesperson for the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), an organization dedicated to ending the taxpayer-funded experimentation on animals, said he hopes the new attention, as well as a rider in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), will make the Pentagon the second known federal agency to halt painful testing on animals. 

Justin Goodman, WCW’s vice president, said in addition to the experimentation highlighted in June, Pentagon-sanctioned testing has also reportedly been “electroshocking” cats to study erectile dysfunction.

PENTAGON’S ‘BARBARIC’ DRUG TESTING ON DOGS RAISES HACKLES WITH PET-LOVING LAWMAKERS

He noted the exposure of the testing led House lawmakers to insert an amendment into the 2025 NDAA to ban the Pentagon from continuing with any biomedical pet testing. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., a member of the Congressional Dog Caucus, drafted that particular amendment. 

The letter, addressed to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, demands information on the timeline for dog testing, the number of dogs who underwent experimentation, the USDA “pain category” of Pentagon animal tests and an explanation of the testing relative to the fact the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) does not mandate canine testing for human drugs.

“We are concerned by the DOD’s use of taxpayer dollars on inhumane dog experiments for human drugs and do not believe it is a prudent use of its resources,” the letter states.

It also asked for figures on current grants, contracts and expenditures related to testing at the present and within the last five years. Goodman noted the particular defense contract relating to the beagle testing revealed in June ended July 31.

FAUCI UNDER FIRE FOR REPORT ALLEGING NIAID SPENT $400K FOR RESEARCH INFECTING DOGS WITH PARASITES

A plane flies over the Pentagon Jan. 11, 2024.  (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

“This new letter also follows and cites our successful effort in the NDAA to unite Democrats and Republicans to defund all the DOD use (of cat and dog testing).” Goodman, whose group helped draft the letter, said.

“We have obviously exposed drug testing on puppies and these kitten-crippling experiments, but we don’t know the full extent of this wasteful spending because there’s such a lack of transparency about it.

“We eliminated dog and cat testing at the VA in recent years. And now we are working to make the DOD follow suit. And, unfortunately, there are several other agencies, including the NIH and the USDA, which are also spending taxpayer dollars to experiment on pets.”

Kim, the main signatory on the letter, said the Pentagon spent nearly $1 million on beagle testing alone, and she called the practice “inhumane and cruel.”

“The fact that this study was conducted despite DOD’s policy banning the use of dogs and cats for medical or surgical training and weapons development research shows we must continue to hold the administration’s feet to the fire and demand accountability,” she said.

Davis added that public funds should never be used for such testing and that Congress must work to stop the practices.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., who signed the letter, called the practice “horrendous.”

“It must stop immediately,” she said. “As co-chair of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus, I’m proud to work across the aisle on efforts to stop DOD and other government agencies from abusing these innocent dogs and cats with cruel, costly and absolutely unnecessary experiments.”

Her fellow New York Republican, Michael Lawler, added that using taxpayer funds to experiment on animals is the “last thing” the Pentagon should be doing.

“Pet abuse is wrong, and we should all be working to end it. That must include the Biden administration, who have shown a propensity to testing on cats and dogs,” he said.

Two other signers offered similar takes, with Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, calling the practice taxpayer-funded “torture [of] animals,” and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., saying the Pentagon should look to proven, non-animal testing methods that are available.

In response, a Pentagon spokesperson said that, as with all congressional correspondence, the agency will “respond directly to the authors.”

“It wouldn’t be appropriate for the department to comment on proposed legislation,” the spokesperson said. 

In his interview with Fox News Digital, Goodman also discussed a 2022 letter from Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough to Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., regarding feline experimentation to benefit stroke survivors and vets who have undergone amputations.

McDonough wrote to Heinrich, chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the VA, telling him he approved of such a study and included a legally-mandated report on it.

Goodman said the VA has since been compelled by Congress to suspend any active testing on cats, dogs or primates by 2026 and took issue with any claim McDonough has been opposed to such testing.

A metal plaque on the facade of the Department of Veterans Affairs building in Washington, D.C. (Robert Alexander/Getty Images)

In response, a spokesperson for the VA said approval of a study does “not at all mean advocacy for the continuation of the policy” and suggested McDonough has been a bureaucratic leader in trying to halt such tests.

“Under Secretary McDonough’s leadership, we are no longer conducting any feline testing and are now bringing an end to animal research on sensitive species,” VA press secretary Terrence Hayes said.

“Historically, VA has conducted research using sensitive species only when absolutely necessary to care for those who have served in our military. Over the last 19 years, VA has proactively reduced the number of studies involving sensitive species, driving an over 90% decrease in these types of studies,” Hayes added.

“The allegation that Secretary McDonough was personally advocating for this research is false.

Asked about the matter, Kim said it makes her wonder where else such testing is happening in the federal government.

“Resorting to testing animals should never happen, especially as we advance technological innovation,” Kim said.