The Justice Department on Wednesday accused Jamshid Ghomi, 63, the founder and owner of Faraz Pardaz Rayaneh Co. Ltd., of selling U.S.-origin computer networking equipment to Iran’s military and nuclear establishments. He faces charges of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which legally underpins America’s broad slate of economic sanctions on Iran.

The case highlights what prosecutors say is an example of Tehran’s ability to gain help from the U.S. to aid its military and nuclear program. The Justice Department charged that Mr. Ghomi, who holds both American and Iranian citizenship, for more than a decade used the company to procure networking equipment for customers in Iran.

Specifically, prosecutors allege that he used his own eBay and PayPal accounts to purchase computer-networking equipment more than 400 times. He had the material shipped to intermediaries in the United Arab Emirates. And he allegedly arranged the smuggling of over 275 tons of networking equipment into Iran by using freight forwarders and intermediaries in Dubai to disguise Iran as the true destination.

You can read the full Justice Department press release here.

The latest episode of the Threat Status podcast dives deep into the Department of the Navy’s plan to dominate the 21st-century naval tech battle with China. In an exclusive interview, Mike Frank, the Department of the Navy’s deputy chief technology officer, explained how the service is implementing acquisition and procurement reform, how the Trump administration’s “commercial first” approach to technology actually works behind the scenes, and the role unmanned surface vessels — or sea drones — will play in the future.

Mr. Frank offered in-depth details on the Navy’s “hedge” strategy, which Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle explained in a recent Threat Status Influencers series video interview. That strategy centers on using a mix of naval assets to maintain America’s maritime advantage, despite currently being unable to match China’s edge in boat production.

“How do we build a fleet that is both manned and unmanned, and how do we build the capabilities that are going to be able to control that fleet, both autonomously but also through more traditional means? And then how do we introduce AI capabilities and the security required for that to be able to really get an advantage from something that may be looked at conventionally as at a disadvantage?” Mr. Frank told the Threat Status podcast.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced legislation this week to halt China’s sale of advanced robotics to the U.S., citing serious national security concerns.

The Guarding the U.S. Against Adversarial Robotics Dominance (GUARD) Act would require national security agencies to begin a review process for any humanoid and quadruped robots made by China or other countries. The proposal comes as U.S. robotics manufacturers face an uphill battle competing with Chinese manufacturing companies, as U.S. firms heavily rely on China for their critical minerals. Some estimates say that Beijing controls as much as 89% of the world’s critical minerals used in the production of advanced robots, meaning U.S. firms heavily rely on Chinese supply chains for their manufacturing needs.

The lawmakers targeted the China-based robotics firm Unitree, which critics say has extensive ties to the Chinese military. The company was most recently valued at about $1.6 billion and filed a $610 million initial public offering with the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Today marks the 37th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s attack on unarmed pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square. But inside China, the event is being spun not as a massacre of civilians but as heroic work carried out by the People’s Liberation Army.

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz is tracking this story and highlights a key takeaway from a recent report by the Air Force China Aerospace Studies Institute. That study focuses on how Beijing has mounted a sophisticated propaganda and disinformation campaign to flip the script on the events of Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

The new propaganda campaign reflects the CCP’s greater confidence that decades of censorship and disinformation about the 1989 events created a blank slate in public consciousness, which they can now fill with a new narrative. The campaign includes a heavy use of social media to push the idea that the CCP and its soldiers didn’t kill civilians but instead put their own lives on the line to counter “the counter-revolutionary rebellion of 1989.”

There’s a growing artificial intelligence backlash across the U.S., driven by fears that AI will destroy jobs, that the infrastructure powering it will burden households with higher power bills, or even that the technology itself could become dangerous.

But anti-AI attitudes harm the U.S. in 21st-century great power competition and create a major window of opportunity for China, according to Lilla Nora Kiss, a senior fellow for international affairs and academic integrity at the National Association of Scholars. In a new op-ed for The Washington Times, she contends that “U.S. hesitation is a strategic advantage for China.

“America does not have to choose between democracy and AI. It can enforce competition laws and demand affordable energy without surrendering the field,” she writes. “The real question is whether Americans shape the next AI era or inherit one shaped by China. Fear will not win that contest.”

• June 5 — Russia’s Illicit Exploitation of Foreign Nationals for Its War Against Ukraine, Atlantic Council

• June 5 — Assessing the State of the U.S. Space Industrial Base, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• June 5 — Russia and Ukraine: Societies Transformed by War, Brookings Institution

• June 11 — 2026 CNAS Virtual National Security Conference, Center for a New American Security

• June 11 — The Future of American Airpower, Stimson Center

• June 11 — The Arab Case for Israel: History, Mythology and Pathways to Peace, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• June 12 — Winning the Innovation Competition (Featuring Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael), Hudson Institute

• June 18 — Deterring Russia and China: Securing America’s Nuclear Future, Hudson Institute

• June 24 — IndoPac 2026 | Naval Dominance: Shipbuilding, Autonomy & C2, Threat Status Events