CRIMINAL REFERRAL OVER ALTERED IRAN WAR CASUALTY COUNT
August 28, 2026
By Electronic and First-Class Mail
Criminal Division
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530
Federal Bureau of Investigation
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20535
Office of the Inspector General
Department of Defense
Defense Criminal Investigative Service
4800 Mark Center Drive
Alexandria, Virginia 22350-1500
Office of the Archivist of the United States
National Archives and Records Administration
8601 Adelphi Road
College Park, Maryland 20740-6001
Re: Request for investigation and preservation of evidence concerning the alteration of federal casualty records in the Defense Casualty Analysis System
To Whom It May Concern:
The Steady State is a nonpartisan organization of more than 420 former national security professionals committed to defending American democracy, the constitution, and the rule of law. Its members include former ambassadors and senior State Department officials, senior CIA and Defense officials, FBI and DHS leaders, USAID and National Security Council staff, and senior congressional staff who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The Steady State respectfully refers for investigation a documented series of alterations to the Department of Defense’s official casualty database (the Defense Casualty Analysis System) in which, between July 22 and July 27, 2026, the deaths of four service members killed in action were removed from the Department’s public casualty count without explanation, its wounded-in-action figures were repeatedly revised downward, and the removed deaths were restored days later under a newly created category whose start date of July 7, 2026 matches the date of commencement of hostilities the President reported to Congress under the War Powers Resolution. This referral is submitted to the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General and is provided additionally to the Archivist of the United States as formal notice of facts bearing on the duties imposed by 44 U.S.C. § 3106. This referral does not assert that any identified person has committed a crime and does not urge any particular prosecutorial outcome. The publicly available record described below is sufficient to warrant investigation, together with preservation of the records necessary to conduct it.
On or about Thursday, July 23, 2026 and Sunday, July 26, 2026, the Defense Casualty Analysis System (“DCAS”), the Defense Manpower Data Center system that serves as the Department of Defense’s official public accounting of United States military casualties, was altered in two respects: first, on or about Thursday, July 23, 2026, the publicly reported casualty figures for the current Iran-related operation were reduced from 18 killed in action and 482 wounded in action to 14 killed in action and 420 wounded in action — a reduction of four killed and sixty-two wounded in a single day, without records-management explanation, and a reversal of an addition made only one day earlier: archived captures of the Department’s own DCAS pages — cited throughout this referral by
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the “As of ” date displayed on the page itself, the Wayback Machine capture timestamp in each hyperlink being in some instances up to one day later — show that DCAS reported 14 killed in action and 447 wounded in action as of July 21, 2026, and 18 killed in action and 482 wounded in action as of July 22, 2026 — an increase consistent with the addition of the four service members killed in action during the July 17–19 period — before the July 23 reduction removed the four killed in action again and cut the wounded figure to 420 — below even its July 21 level — a state the Department’s own deaths and wounded pages continued to reflect as of July 24, 2026, whose branch-level tables show that all four removed deaths and all sixty-two removed wounded were Army personnel; and second, on or about Sunday, July 26, 2026, DCAS was restructured to create a new operational category designated “Overseas Operations,” assigned a start date of July 7, 2026, into which four killed in action and 207 wounded in action were placed. The Department’s own archived pages bracket this change as well: the DCAS conflict-casualties menu as captured on July 25, 2026 contains no “Overseas Operations” category, while the July 27, 2026 capture shows the new category — headed “Overseas operations casualties starting July 7th 2026” — reporting precisely four killed in action, all Army, and 207 wounded in action; the same July 27 capture shows that the “Operation Epic Fury” wounded figure had been further reduced, again without explanation, from 420 as of July 25 to 417 as of July 27. Joel Valdez, the Department’s acting press secretary, publicly characterized the changes as “temporary data disruptions,” and Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, subsequently stated that “the site errors on the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) were due to a temporary data disruption.” The circumstances of the alterations, the timing of the alterations, the selection of July 7, 2026 as the start date of the new operational bucket, and the identity of the named service members moved out of the prior operation are documented in contemporaneous public reporting by CNN, ABC News, The New York Times, The Intercept, Newsweek, and The Washington Times. The public record establishes these changes as they appeared in the Department’s public-facing reporting system; whether corresponding changes were made to the underlying casualty records — DCIPS source records, DD Form 1300 reports, service casualty files — or to retained historical data is among the questions the preservation and investigation requested below are designed to answer. That publicly reported record is sufficient to warrant investigation under the federal criminal statutes and federal records-law provisions identified below.
The Factual Predicate
On June 17, 2026, according to contemporaneous reporting, the President and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a fourteen-point Memorandum of Understanding establishing a sixty-day period for negotiations aimed at limiting Iran’s nuclear program and reopening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial navigation. The President’s July 10, 2026 letter to Congress describes the Memorandum more narrowly, as requiring the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran “to make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels . . . from the Persian Gulf to the Seas of Oman.”
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By letter dated July 10, 2026, printed as House Document 119-169 and referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs on July 13, 2026, the President reported to Congress that “military action commenced on July 7, 2026, against the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” describing that action as “defensive strikes against targets within Iran.” The letter invokes no subsection of the War Powers Resolution: it states only that the President is “providing this report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148),” and it is captioned in the printed House Document as made pursuant to 50 U.S.C. § 1543(b) — the provision under which the President supplies “such other information as the Congress may request” — rather than 50 U.S.C. § 1543(a)(1), which requires a report within forty-eight hours of the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities. The same letter recites three earlier commencements of military action against Iran, on June 9, June 26, and June 28, 2026, each the subject of its own notification “consistent with the War Powers Resolution.” Contemporaneous reporting characterized the letter as formal notification to Congress that hostilities against Iran had resumed on July 7, 2026.
On July 8, 2026, the President publicly declared the June 17 Memorandum of Understanding to be “over.”
Between July 7 and July 23, 2026, United States forces conducted sustained strikes against Iranian targets — by the Department’s own account, three rounds against more than 300 targets in the first week, followed by near-nightly strikes thereafter, including strikes on Iranian infrastructure in Tabriz, Urmia, and Khuzestan; during that same period, four United States service members were killed in action at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, Jordan (July 17–18) and at Erbil, Iraq (July 19).
The four service members killed in action during the July 17–19 period were 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, Staff Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, and Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton.
As of July 21, 2026, the Defense Casualty Analysis System reflected 14 killed in action and 447 wounded in action in connection with operations against Iran; as of July 22, 2026, those figures rose to 18 killed in action and 482 wounded in action — an increase consistent with the addition of the four service members killed during the July 17–19 period; on or about July 23, 2026, the figures were reduced to 14 killed in action and 420 wounded in action, without records-management explanation; on or about July 26, 2026, the Defense Casualty Analysis System was restructured to create a new operational category designated “Overseas Operations,” assigned a start date of July 7, 2026, into which four killed in action and 207 wounded in action were placed.
The start date assigned to the “Overseas Operations” category is the same date the President’s July 10, 2026 War Powers Resolution letter identified to Congress as the date on which military action against Iran commenced. The alterations described above occurred while twelve United States Senators were formally demanding an accounting of casualty figures, while a Member of the House of Representatives was publicly describing the recategorization as an “absurd ruse” and accusing the Secretary of Defense of “BREAKING THE LAW,” and against the backdrop of an earlier (2020) episode, disclosed by a former White House communications official, in which the White House
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pressured the Department over the cadence of its casualty reporting — background pattern evidence discussed further below.
The Executive Branch’s two official records concerning the July 7 date are not readily reconciled on the present public record. The President’s July 10, 2026 letter reports to Congress, consistent with the War Powers Resolution, that United States military action commenced on July 7, 2026 against the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran — a record that identifies Iran, by name, as the state against which United States forces were engaged from that date. Under the July 26 DCAS restructuring, the same July 7 date is treated as the start of a new operational category that does not, on its face, identify Iran as the adversary. No records-management rationale has been offered that reconciles those two treatments. The Department has since offered a public explanation of the new category — that “since Operation Epic Fury has concluded, the department classifies casualties as overseas operations in the CENTCOM area of responsibility” — but that explanation deepens rather than resolves the inconsistency: for casualty-accounting purposes the Department treats the operation against Iran as concluded, while for War Powers Resolution purposes the Executive Branch reported to Congress that military action against Iran commenced on July 7, 2026. Investigators should determine whether the restructuring was undertaken in order to obscure from the public the Iran-related character of casualties whose Iran-related character the Executive Branch had, that same month, formally identified to Congress.
On or about August 17, 2026, the sixty-day negotiation period established by the June 17 Memorandum of Understanding expired without an agreement between the United States and Iran; contemporaneous reporting describes the conflict as stalemated but unresolved. Contemporaneous reports differ on whether the sixty-day period lapsed on August 16 or August 17, 2026; this referral accordingly uses “on or about.” Since the expiry, the confrontation has continued in economic rather than kinetic form: on August 19, 2026, the President publicly announced a sweeping campaign of economic measures against Iran, Iranian officials have responded with threats to halt oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz, and no United States or Israeli strike inside Iran had been confirmed by United States Central Command through August 23, 2026. The casualty-reporting structure described in this referral therefore remains the Department’s operative public accounting of an ongoing confrontation. Measured from the July 7, 2026 commencement date the President most recently reported to Congress, the sixty-day period of 50 U.S.C. § 1544(b) has not yet run. This referral describes that computation without adopting it: the President’s own July 10, 2026 letter recites earlier commencements of military action against Iran on June 9, June 26, and June 28, 2026, and the operation to which these casualties were first assigned commenced on February 28, 2026. Which date controls under 50 U.S.C. § 1544(b) is not a question this referral asks the recipients to resolve; it is relevant here only because the start date of the Department’s restructured casualty category matches the latest of those dates.
The alteration functions as a prospective legal instrument bearing on the sixty-day War Powers Resolution period.
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Under 50 U.S.C. § 1544(b), the President must terminate any use of United States armed forces in hostilities within sixty days of the date on which he is required to submit the notification described in 50 U.S.C. § 1543(a)(1), absent a declaration of war, a specific statutory authorization, or an extension of the period by law. (The statute also permits a single thirty-day extension of the period, but only upon the President’s written certification to Congress that unavoidable military necessity respecting the safety of the forces requires their continued use in the course of bringing about their prompt removal — a withdrawal provision, not an authorization of continued hostilities.) The President’s July 10, 2026 notification identified July 7, 2026 as the date on which United States military action against Iran commenced. Like the letter as a whole, that identification is framed in the Executive Branch’s customary hedged formulation — provided “consistent with” the War Powers Resolution, rather than expressly as the report described in 50 U.S.C. § 1543(a)(1) — and the letter characterizes the July 7 strikes as “defensive.” That framing does not alter the statutory computation: section 1544(b) runs the sixty-day period from the date on which a section 1543(a)(1) report is submitted or is required to be submitted, whichever is earlier, and the introduction of United States forces into hostilities against Iran on July 7, 2026 required such a report. The hedged framing is noted here because it is itself consistent with the pattern this referral describes — official records drafted to preserve a future legal position concerning the character of the hostilities. That report was due within forty-eight hours — that is, by July 9, 2026. Measured from that date, and without conceding that an earlier commencement date controls, the sixty-day War Powers Resolution period expires on or about September 7, 2026; the earlier commencement dates recited in the President’s own July 10, 2026 letter would place its expiry earlier still. A chronology of the War Powers Resolution votes referenced throughout this referral, and of related congressional oversight activity through August 2026, is attached as Exhibit A.
The July 26, 2026 restructuring creates, within the Department’s own casualty-reporting system, a category — “Overseas Operations” — that on its face does not identify Iran as the adversary and that begins on the same date the President’s July 10 letter identified as the date on which military action against Iran commenced. Post-July 7 casualties suffered in incidents publicly reported as Iranian attacks, including the four service members whose remains were returned in the Dover ceremony of July 22, 2026, now appear in the Department’s records under a category name that does not identify Iran. The Department has offered no records-management rationale that reconciles the July 7 start date of the “Overseas Operations” category with the July 7 commencement date reported to Congress. The Department’s subsequent explanation that the new category reflects the conclusion of “Operation Epic Fury” does not address why the category begins on the precise date the President identified to Congress as the date on which military action against Iran commenced.
The concurrent existence of these two federal records — the July 10 War Powers Resolution notification, which for purposes of preserving Executive Branch authority treats July 7 as the commencement of renewed United States military action against Iran, and the July 26 DCAS restructuring, which for purposes of the Department’s public casualty accounting treats July 7 as the start of a newly created category that does not identify Iran — could supply a factual predicate for a
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future position that United States military activity continuing beyond the sixty-day period is not a continuation of the notified military action against Iran but a separate operational construct falling within pre-existing statutory authorities. The Department’s casualty-reporting system is not the appropriate instrument for laying such a predicate. Nor would the July 26 restructuring be the first instance of the practice: the July 10, 2026 letter itself reports military action as having “commenced” on July 7, 2026 against the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran while reciting three earlier commencements of military action against the same adversary within the preceding month. The July 26 restructuring appears to reflect the same practice in the Department’s casualty records. Investigators should determine whether the July 26 restructuring was undertaken, in whole or in part, in order to establish a Department-of-Defense-official record supporting a future position concerning the scope, character, or statutory basis of United States military activity in the region after the sixty-day War Powers Resolution period expires. A restructuring undertaken for that purpose would be an alteration of a federal record made “in relation to or contemplation of ” matters within the jurisdiction of a department or agency of the United States; whether it was undertaken with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the administration of those matters, as 18 U.S.C. § 1519 requires, is the question investigators should resolve.
The public record supplies a particularized factual basis for investigation.
The alterations at issue are documented in contemporaneous public reporting by ABC News, CNN, The Intercept, and Newsweek, and are the subject of a formal congressional inquiry by all twelve Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a letter led by Senator Mazie Hirono and joined by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and ten other Senate colleagues. In public posts, Representative Thomas Massie has described the recategorization as an “absurd ruse” — “The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire” — and has stated that “[b]y going more than 90 days without congressional authorization [Secretary Hegseth] IS BREAKING THE LAW and must be held accountable.” Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House communications official, has publicly disclosed that during a 2020 controversy over the reporting of U.S. troop injuries from an Iranian missile attack on Al Asad Air Base, Iraq, the White House pressured the Department of Defense to change the cadence of its casualty reporting — an earlier episode offered here as pattern evidence of White House involvement in casualty-reporting decisions, not as a disclosure concerning the 2026 Iran-related operation. The Department’s initial public response was to characterize the alterations as “temporary data disruptions” — a public affairs description that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of that phrase, which does not typically involve the addition of named service members to a newly created operational bucket whose start date matches the commencement date reported to Congress. The Department’s subsequent explanation — that the new category exists because “Operation Epic Fury has concluded” — is addressed above and supplies no records-management rationale for the July 23 reduction or for the selection of the July 7 start date.
Congress has continued to press the Department for answers, and its inquiries press the same questions this referral raises. On July 29, 2026, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Representative Pat Ryan,
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and eleven other members sent a follow-up letter to Secretary Hegseth posing twenty-three questions on medical care, casualty reporting, force protection, and ongoing investigations, with an August 12, 2026 response deadline, a deadline that has now passed without, as of the date of this referral, any public indication of a Department response; the letter’s questions expressly ask why the Department reduced the reported death toll from 18 to 14 in DCAS and why post-July 7 casualties were moved into the newly created “Overseas Operations” category. That letter’s principal investigative focus is the March 1, 2026 Iranian drone strike on a U.S. military post at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, which killed six American service members and injured more than thirty others, and it separately reports that some wounded service members arrived at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany without being identified as medical evacuees or seriously injured patients in the Department’s casualty-processing database, which the lawmakers say resulted in only limited treatment. (The letter itself uses the general term “casualty-processing database”; this referral does not independently confirm that DCAS specifically, rather than a related casualty-processing system, is the database at issue in that finding.) Independently, CNN has reported that the same four service members killed in the July 17–19 period were recategorized three separate times within a single week in the Department’s public-facing records: first as supporting “Operation Inherent Resolve” (the 2014 mission against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, although these service members were killed by Iranian attacks), then as “supporting overseas operations in Jordan,” and finally under the newly created “Overseas Operations” category. The newly created category has continued to grow: The Intercept reported on August 4, 2026 that, per the Department’s own “Overseas Operations” page, “[t]wo hundred and seventy-three U.S. troops were killed or wounded since July 7,” and that “[w]hen combined with the existing DCAS page for the Iran war, the official count stands at 704, an 83 percent increase in casualties since April 8.” The growth has continued: between August 19 and August 20, 2026, the Department raised the wounded count published in the Defense Casualty Analysis System from 697 to 757 — sixty additional wounded service members, recorded without public explanation — bringing the combined publicly reported total across the two categories to 775 killed and wounded (fourteen killed and 418 wounded under “Operation Epic Fury”; four killed and 339 wounded under “Overseas Operations”); asked about the increase, the Department, per contemporaneous reporting, “did not immediately respond … to a request for more information about the increase, including when and where the injuries occurred.” On August 4, 2026, Representative Robert Garcia and Representative Suhas Subramanyam, the ranking Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and its Subcommittee on Military and Foreign Affairs respectively, wrote Secretary Hegseth that “[i]n an apparent overreach of authority you resumed attacks on July 7, declaring yourself entitled to a fresh 60 days—as though resetting an imaginary stopwatch could trick the American people into forgetting that the war in Iran was never authorized,” and that “this timing raises the grave possibility that DoD created the new category to support an illegal attempt to defy the War Powers Act to continue a war,” with an August 18, 2026 response deadline — a deadline that has likewise now passed without, as of the date of this referral, any public indication of a Department response. On August 6, 2026, Senator Tammy Duckworth and seventeen Senate colleagues introduced the Honoring the Sacrifice of Troops in War Act of 2026, S. 5300, 119th Congress, legislation that would bar the Department from resetting a war’s
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casualty count through the creation of new operational categories, require the Department to maintain a single combined casualty count for the current operation, and require next-of-kin notification of any correction to a casualty record. This referral does not rely on, and does not adopt, any characterization made by a Member of Congress; it cites this activity solely because the volume, consistency, and escalating character of contemporaneous congressional inquiry into the same conduct described above bears on the timeliness and public importance of the investigation requested here.
The alterations do not appear to be isolated. On March 12, 2026, a fire broke out aboard the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, then deployed in the Red Sea in support of United States military operations against Iran. United States Central Command publicly reported that two sailors were receiving medical treatment for non-life-threatening injuries. Subsequent reporting described a far larger event: The New York Times reported that the fire burned for more than thirty hours and displaced more than six hundred sailors from their berthing, and USNI News reported that one sailor was medically evacuated, two others were treated for lacerations, and more than 200 sailors were treated for smoke inhalation and returned to duty. The gap between the two-sailor figure in Central Command’s public statement and the more than two hundred sailors reported treated, together with the presence or absence of associated records in the Department’s casualty-reporting systems, warrants examination as potential pattern evidence bearing on intent, on the identity of the personnel involved in casualty-coding determinations, on the reporting criteria applicable to each figure, and on the presence or absence of a lawful records-management basis for the coding decisions.
The arrangement raises at least four related questions requiring prompt examination.
First, investigators should determine when the DCAS entries for the current Iran-related operation were altered, by whom, and on what records-management authority. The change-management history of the DCAS database, the DCAS administrator user-access logs, the DCAS ticketing and workflow records, and the internal communications directing or coordinating the alterations described above — the July 22 addition, the July 23 reduction, the July 26 restructuring, the further reduction reflected in the Department’s pages by July 27, and the August 19–20 addition of sixty wounded — should identify the personnel who executed the changes and the personnel who directed them.
Second, investigators should determine why July 7, 2026 was selected as the start date of the “Overseas Operations” category. July 7, 2026 is the date the President’s July 10, 2026 War Powers Resolution letter identified to Congress as the date on which renewed United States military action against Iran commenced. Under 50 U.S.C. § 1544, the sixty-day War Powers Resolution period runs from the date on which the report described in section 1543(a)(1) is submitted or is required to be submitted, whichever is earlier. The selection of that date — the commencement date identified in the President’s War Powers Resolution letter — as the start date of a newly created casualty-reporting bucket is a casualty-reporting decision that has the operational effect of aligning the reported casualty period with the period of renewed hostilities reported to Congress, and of excluding earlier casualties from the reported figures for the current operation. Investigators should
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determine whether that alignment reflects a records-management judgment, a public affairs judgment, or a judgment made for the purpose of affecting a federal proceeding within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 1519.
Third, investigators should determine who participated in the decision to alter DCAS on July 23 and July 26, 2026. Relevant categories include the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness; the Director of the Defense Manpower Data Center; the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs; the Chief of the Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Division at the Army Human Resources Command; the DCAS system administrators; any Department of Defense officials who directed or approved the changes; and any White House personnel who communicated with the Department concerning the cadence, categorization, or content of casualty reporting during the period from February 28, 2026 — the date on which Operation Epic Fury commenced — to the present.
Fourth, investigators should determine whether the coding of casualties associated with the March 12, 2026 U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford fire, the coding of casualties associated with other incidents involving United States forces deployed in support of the current Iran-related operation, and the July 22–27, 2026 alterations reflect a common pattern of decision-making, a common set of participating personnel, or a common set of directives concerning the classification of casualties as combat or non-combat. The archived DCAS branch tables supply one concrete instance of that question: of the four deaths removed on July 23, three had been recorded as hostile and one as non-hostile, a coding that appears to correspond to the death of Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, whom the Department’s own casualty-identification release describes as killed in action during the controlled detonation of a downed one-way unmanned aerial system. The Department’s records are thus internally inconsistent as to that death: its casualty-identification release designates it killed in action, while its DCAS branch table records it as non-hostile — an inconsistency that is itself a proper subject of the investigation requested here. Investigators should determine how each of the four was coded, and why. The relevant categories of records include the Navy casualty records concerning the March 12 incident, the DCAS coding decisions and change-management records associated with those casualties, and any internal Department of Defense guidance concerning the coding of casualties suffered during the current Iran-related operation, issued during the period from February 28, 2026 to the present.
Depending on the facts, the conduct described above may implicate several provisions of federal law.
Falsification of records in a federal matter
Title 18, United States Code, section 1519 prohibits any person who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case.” Section 1519 carries a
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maximum penalty of twenty years’ imprisonment. The plurality opinion in Yates v. United States, 574 U.S. 528, 535–36 (2015), recounts that section 1519 was enacted as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to close gaps in the pre-existing obstruction statutes — including by reaching a person who destroys records himself — and the statute’s text extends to “any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States.” Yates separately held that the term “tangible object” in section 1519 is limited to objects used to record or preserve information — a limitation that poses no obstacle here, because the DCAS entries and casualty records at issue are “record[s]” within the statute’s express terms — electronic records used precisely to record and preserve information — not the kind of physical object at issue in Yates.
The publicly available record raises questions section 1519 is designed to reach. DCAS is a matter within the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense within the meaning of the statute. The Department’s administration of its casualty-reporting duties under 10 U.S.C. §§ 1471, 1475–1492 and Department of Defense Instruction 1300.18, and any investigation by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, are each a “matter within the jurisdiction of a department or agency of the United States” for section 1519 purposes. The congressional inquiry led by Senator Hirono and joined by Senator Gillibrand and ten other members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the continuing oversight of the Armed Services and Oversight Committees of both chambers, supply the context in which those matters were being administered: an alteration undertaken to influence the Department’s responses to those inquiries would be an alteration intended to influence the Department’s administration of its own casualty-reporting function. Section 1519’s “in contemplation of ” language does not require that a formal investigation be pending at the time of the alteration; it reaches alterations made in anticipation of any such matter. Whether the July 22–27 alterations were undertaken with the requisite intent to impede, obstruct, or influence such a matter is a question that cannot be answered on the public record; it can be answered from the Department’s own holdings — the change-management, ticketing, access-log, and internal-communications records identified above, to which the Inspector General has an immediate statutory right of access under 5 U.S.C. § 406 — no grand jury or other compulsory process is required for the Department’s own investigators to examine the Department’s own records. Nor is the question technically obscure: the Department itself maintains the means to identify who altered its records, and when. Under DoD Directive 5205.16, the Department’s insider-threat program gathers and reviews information derived from, among other sources, “the monitoring of user activity on DoD information networks.” The identity, timing, and authorization of each alteration should accordingly be ascertainable from the Department’s own holdings, to the extent those records were created and retained.
Concealment, removal, or mutilation of public records
Title 18, United States Code, section 2071 prohibits the willful and unlawful concealment, removal, mutilation, obliteration, destruction, or attempted concealment, removal, mutilation, obliteration, or destruction of any “record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited . . . in any public office” of the United States. Section 2071(b) further provides that any
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custodian of such a record who willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the record forfeits the office and is disqualified from holding any office under the United States. Both subsections carry a maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment. Subsection (a)’s verbs do not include falsification: it reaches willful and unlawful concealment, removal, mutilation, obliteration, and destruction by any person; subsection (b) additionally reaches falsification of a record by its custodian. The conduct described in this referral may implicate both: the removal and concealment described above would fall within subsection (a) if evidence establishes that qualifying federal records — not merely their public presentation — were willfully and unlawfully concealed, removed, or impaired, and the falsification of such records by an official charged with their custody would fall within subsection (b). Courts construing section 2071 have often required proof that the government was deprived, or was intended to be deprived, of the use of the record; whether the removed entries remained available to the Department internally, and which officials were custodians of the records within the meaning of subsection (b), are among the questions that examination of the Department’s own holdings would resolve. The records at issue in this referral — DCAS entries maintained by the Defense Manpower Data Center, Navy casualty records associated with shipboard incidents, DD Form 1300 casualty reports, DA Form 1156 casualty feeder cards, Line of Duty determinations, and Purple Heart packets — are records “filed or deposited” in a public office within the meaning of section 2071.
False statements to the United States
Title 18, United States Code, section 1001 prohibits any person, in a matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the United States, from “knowingly and willfully” falsifying, concealing, or covering up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; making any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or making or using any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry. Violations carry a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment.
Section 1001 would be implicated as to any Department of Defense official who has made, or who may make, materially false or fraudulent statements or representations concerning the July 22–27 alterations — whether to the Congress in connection with the Hirono-led inquiry or subsequent congressional inquiries (subject to section 1001(c), which applies subsection (a), as to legislative-branch matters, only to administrative matters and to investigations or reviews conducted pursuant to the authority of a congressional committee, subcommittee, commission, or office); to the Office of the Inspector General in connection with any administrative or criminal investigation; to the National Archives and Records Administration in connection with any notification or referral under 44 U.S.C. § 3106 concerning the alterations; to Freedom of Information Act requesters in connection with any FOIA response denying the existence of responsive records.
The Federal Records Act
The Federal Records Act, 44 U.S.C. §§ 3101 et seq., imposes on each federal agency an affirmative duty to make and preserve records “containing adequate and proper documentation of the
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organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency,” and to establish safeguards against the removal, loss, alteration, or destruction of records. Section 3105 requires each agency head to establish safeguards against the removal or loss of records, and to make known to all officials and employees that records are not to be alienated or destroyed except in accordance with the disposal provisions of title 44, and the penalties provided by law for the unlawful removal or destruction of records. Section 3106 requires the head of each federal agency to notify the Archivist “of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, corruption, deletion, erasure, or other destruction of records in the custody of the agency,” and, with the Archivist’s assistance, to initiate action through the Attorney General for the recovery of records unlawfully removed. Section 3106(b) directs — not merely authorizes — the Archivist to request that the Attorney General initiate such an action, and to notify the Congress of that request, whenever the agency head does not act within a reasonable period of time or “is participating in, or believed to be participating in” the unlawful action.
The Federal Records Act framework is identified here because it establishes (i) that the underlying casualty records are federal records within the meaning of 44 U.S.C. § 3301 — and that the DCAS entries themselves, on their face, appear to qualify as well, a question on which the determinations of investigators and the Archivist will bear — and (ii) that the unlawful alteration or corruption of those records is itself the subject of statutory notification, referral, and recovery obligations imposed on the agency head. The Federal Records Act does not itself create criminal liability, but it provides the records-law framework against which the intent element of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1519 and 2071 is to be assessed: the question that framework poses is whether previously recorded information was deleted, overwritten, or concealed outside authorized records-management procedures, and without the notification section 3106 requires. Whether the alterations described in this referral in fact occurred outside those channels is a question that requires investigation. Because the facts described in this referral, if accurate, are facts of which the Archivist must be notified under section 3106(a) — and because section 3106(b) directs the Archivist to seek action by the Attorney General, and to notify the Congress, where the agency head fails to act or is participating in the unlawful action — this referral is provided directly to the Archivist of the United States as formal notice of those facts.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States
Title 18, United States Code, section 371 reaches not only conspiracies to commit substantive federal offenses but also conspiracies “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose” — the doctrine known as Klein conspiracy after United States v. Klein, 247 F.2d 908 (2d Cir. 1957). A Klein conspiracy does not require that the government hold a property interest in any particular thing; it requires an agreement between two or more persons to obstruct or impede the lawful functions of the United States through deceit, craft, trickery, or dishonest means, together with at least one overt act in furtherance of the agreement. See Hammerschmidt v. United States, 265 U.S. 182, 188 (1924) (the defraud clause reaches conspiracies “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”). Violations carry a maximum penalty of five years’
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imprisonment. If two or more Department of Defense officials, White House personnel, or other federal employees agreed to alter, coordinate the alteration of, or conceal the alteration of federal casualty records by dishonest means, with the object of impairing the Department’s lawful administration of its casualty-reporting functions or of impeding the pending congressional inquiries, section 371 is engaged. Whether such an agreement exists is a question that cannot be answered on the public record. Persons who knowingly assist an underlying federal offense may also be liable under 18 U.S.C. § 2 for aiding and abetting.
Underlying statutory casualty-reporting duties
Title 10, United States Code, sections 1471 and 1475 through 1492 (chapter 75, “Deceased Personnel”) establish the Department of Defense’s underlying statutory duties concerning deceased personnel, including death investigations, next-of-kin notification, and the death benefits that turn on casualty-status determinations. Department of Defense Instruction 1300.18, “DoD Personnel Casualty Matters, Policies, and Procedures,” prescribes the Department’s casualty statuses and casualty categories — including “killed in action” — and identifies the Defense Casualty Analysis System, maintained by the Defense Manpower Data Center, within the Department’s casualty-reporting infrastructure. Together, these provisions establish that the coding of an individual service member as killed in action or wounded in action is not a discretionary public affairs judgment but the execution of duties fixed by statute and by Department regulation; the assignment of casualties to a particular operational category, while not expressly prescribed by chapter 75, is carried out within that regulated casualty-reporting framework; and although Instruction 1300.18 assigns Public Affairs a role in coordinating the release of aggregate casualty statistics, the underlying classifications and operational-reporting processes remain subject to prescribed Department procedures rather than free-standing public affairs discretion. Records generated in the course of executing those duties are federal records subject to the Federal Records Act, and false entries in those records are the type of conduct 18 U.S.C. §§ 1519 and 2071 are designed to reach.
Whistleblower protections
Any Department of Defense civilian employee or applicant who discloses information that he or she reasonably believes evidences a violation of law, rule, or regulation — or gross mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety — is protected against reprisal by 5 U.S.C. § 2302(b)(8). Any current or former member of the armed forces who communicates with a Member of Congress, an Inspector General, or a Department of Defense audit, inspection, investigation, or law-enforcement organization concerning a violation of law or regulation, gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety is protected against retaliatory personnel action by 10 U.S.C. § 1034. The Steady State respectfully requests that the recipients of this referral take steps consistent with those protections in the course of any investigation undertaken in response to this referral.
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Requested action
I respectfully request that the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General promptly take the following actions.
Preservation and preliminary inquiry. Open a preliminary inquiry, and as predication develops, a full investigation, into the July 22–27, 2026 alterations to the Defense Casualty Analysis System and the coding of casualties associated with the March 12, 2026 U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford fire, and issue or extend preservation directives to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, the Defense Human Resources Activity and its Defense Manpower Data Center, the Washington Headquarters Services, the Department of the Army, the Army Human Resources Command Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Division, the Department of the Navy, the Department of the Air Force, United States Central Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (as host of the DoD Insider Threat Management and Analysis Center), requiring preservation of the DCAS database and all prior versions, snapshots, backups, and disaster-recovery copies; the DCAS change-management, ticketing, and workflow records; the DCAS administrator user-access logs; the records of the Defense Casualty Information Processing System (DCIPS), which Department of Defense Instruction 1300.18 identifies as the Department’s functional information system for casualty and mortuary affairs; the Navy casualty and medical-treatment records associated with the March 12, 2026 U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford fire; any user-activity monitoring and insider-threat program records, including any records reported to or held by the DoD Insider Threat Management and Analysis Center, concerning activity on the DCAS and DCIPS systems during the relevant period; all DD Form 1300 casualty reports, DA Form 1156 casualty feeder cards, Line of Duty determinations, Purple Heart packets, and Casualty Assistance Center records associated with the named fallen; and all internal and external communications concerning casualty coding, casualty reporting, and the July 22–27 alterations.
Investigative determinations. Determine — through the Inspector General’s statutory right of access to Department records and subpoena authority under 5 U.S.C. § 406, and, for materials beyond the Department’s holdings — including Executive Office of the President communications and any personal devices or accounts — through lawful process available to the relevant recipient, coordinating with the Department of Justice as appropriate: the identity of each individual who executed or directed each of the alterations of the DCAS record described above — including the July 23 reduction, the July 26 restructuring, and the August 19–20, 2026 addition of sixty wounded without public explanation; the records-management authority, if any, on which those alterations were undertaken; whether the July 7, 2026 start date assigned to the “Overseas Operations” category was selected for the purpose of affecting the reported scope of the current operation, the War Powers Resolution period, or any pending congressional inquiry; whether the coding of casualties associated with the March 12, 2026 U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford fire, and their apparent exclusion from the Defense Casualty Analysis System, reflect a common pattern of decision-making or a common set of participating personnel with the July 22–27 alterations; whether any Department of Defense
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official has made materially false statements to the Congress, to an Inspector General, to the National Archives and Records Administration, or to a Freedom of Information Act requester concerning the alterations; whether the head of the Department has made the notification to the Archivist of the United States required by 44 U.S.C. § 3106(a) concerning the alterations described above; and whether any White House personnel communicated with the Department concerning the cadence, categorization, or content of casualty reporting during the period from February 28, 2026 to the present.
Interagency coordination. Coordinate as appropriate with the Office of Special Counsel, the Inspectors General for the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, the Government Accountability Office, the Committees on Armed Services and on Oversight and Government Reform of both chambers, and the National Archives and Records Administration.
Urgency
Particular urgency is warranted. The DCAS database is a live production system. The change-management history, administrator access logs, and internal communications required to reconstruct the July 22–27 alterations reside in Department of Defense information systems subject to ordinary retention schedules and to the risk of continued modification. That risk is not hypothetical: as described above, the Department’s public casualty figures were altered again as recently as August 19–20, 2026, when sixty wounded were added without explanation. The named fallen honored at Dover on July 22, 2026 are not, at present, displayed under the DCAS category labeled “Operation Epic Fury.” The sixty-day War Powers Resolution period, computed under 50 U.S.C. § 1544(b) from the report due for the July 7, 2026 introduction of forces the President most recently reported to Congress — the computation most favorable to continued operations, since the earlier commencements recited in the President’s own July 10, 2026 letter would produce earlier expiry — expires on or about September 7, 2026, less than two weeks from the date of this referral. On any computation that treats the July 7 introduction of forces as reportable under section 1543(a)(1), expiry comes no later — and the evidentiary questions surrounding the July 26 restructuring will accordingly become acute by that date. The Congress is in its August recess, and a pending war-powers measure filed by Senator Adam Schiff has been reported as awaiting floor action upon the Senate’s return. Without preservation directives issued immediately, the evidentiary record most probative of the questions raised in this referral may be irretrievably lost or altered in the ordinary course of the system’s operation.
Conclusion
This referral asks the responsible authorities to determine, on the basis of a publicly reported record that on its face raises serious questions, whether federal casualty records maintained in the Defense Casualty Analysis System and the Department’s related casualty-reporting systems have been unlawfully altered, whether false entries were made in those records, whether federal officials have made materially false statements concerning the alterations, whether any of that conduct was undertaken pursuant to an agreement among two or more officials, and, if so, whether the conduct
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violates 18 U.S.C. §§ 1519, 2071, 1001, and 371, and the records-preservation provisions of 44 U.S.C. §§ 3105 and 3106. The public record is sufficient to warrant investigation. The integrity of federal casualty records — the records by which the United States accounts to its citizens for the human cost of its military operations — requires prompt examination. This referral is provided to the Archivist of the United States to alert him to facts that may warrant consultation with the Department and inquiry into whether the notification duties imposed on the agency head by 44 U.S.C. § 3106(a), and in turn the duties imposed on the Archivist by section 3106(b), have been triggered.
Please confirm receipt of this referral and advise, to the extent permitted by law, whether it has been directed to the appropriate investigative components.
Respectfully submitted,
Steven A. Cash
Executive Director, The Steady State
(212) 685-9660
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