Law enforcement officials confirmed that 37-year-old former Army veteran Matthew Livelsberger, who lived in Colorado Springs, was behind the rented Cybertruck explosion at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas.
Authorities confirmed that Livelsberger died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound prior to the explosion, which injured seven bystanders. Officials say there was no information as of Thursday connecting Livelsberger to a terrorist group.
The driver of the Cybertruck was identified as Master Sgt. Matthew Alan Livelsberger, a U.S. Army special operations soldier who originally enlisted in 2006 until 2012.
Livelsberger, who was on leave at the time of his death, served in the National Guard from March 2011 to July 2012 before joining the Army Reserve from July 2012 to December 2012. Livelsberger then entered the active-duty Army in December 2012.
Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a news conference Thursday said his office is still waiting for DNA confirmation of the driver’s identity, and that the attack was unrelated at this time to the attack in New Orleans.
Livelsberger was the one identified driving the vehicle at each location as authorities retraced the route taken from Colorado to Nevada, McMahill said.
Officials stated that investigations into the explosion are underway.
The explosion occurred just before 9 a.m. on New Year’s Day near the hotel’s main entrance, and federal, state, and local authorities are jointly investigating.
FBI’s Denver field office, the Denver Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Colorado Springs Police Department confirmed activity at a residential address in Colorado Springs related to the explosion in Las Vegas but no further information would be provided at that time.
Local authorities confirmed a detonator possessed by Livelsberger initiated the explosion, which included fire mortars and camp fuel canisters found stuffed into the back of the Cybertruck.
President-elect Donald Trump took to his social media platform, blaming President Joe Biden’s open border policy, “I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe.”
Investigators confirmed that the vehicle was driven from Colorado and arrived in Las Vegas around 7:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day. Livelsberger reportedly drove up and down Las Vegas Boulevard for about an hour before entering the valet area of the Trump Hotel.
Seven people were injured. Two were briefly hospitalized before being released, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. The department has issued increased officer presence across the community, including the Las Vegas strip.
This attack came on the same day as fifteen people were killed on Bourbon Street after a man plowed his car into a crowd.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a U.S. citizen and U.S. Army veteran from Houston, rented the F-150 Lightning truck and improvised explosive devices that were found in both the truck and in two different locations in the French Quarter, body armor, and an ISIS flag hanging from the tailgate.
The two suspects behind the separate attacks used Turo, a rental car app, to book the vehicles used at both locations.
The mayor said that while there were no immediate threats to the city at the time, the heightened security was “out of an abundance of caution.” He stated that the city will have heightened security and increased NYPD presence at relevant locations, including at Trump Tower and in Times Square.
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Former White House adviser Steve Bannon warned on Friday that Republicans would suffer major losses if President Donald Trump’s administration does not move to release documents related to deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and associations.
Axios reported on Sunday that a two-page memo showed the Department Of Justice (DOJ) and FBI found no evidence Epstein kept a “client list” or was murdered, but public doubts have continued. Bannon said on “Bannon’s War Room” that failure to release information would lead to the dissipation of one-tenth of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and significant losses for the Republican Party in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
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“It’s not about just a pedophile ring and all that, it’s about who governs us, right? And that’s why it’s not going to go away … For this to go away, you’re going to lose 10% of the MAGA movement,” Bannon said. “If we lose 10% of the MAGA movement right now, we’re going to lose 40 seats in ’26, we’re going to lose the [presidency]. They don’t even have to steal it, which they’re going to try to do in ’28, because they’re going to sit there and they go, ‘They’ve disheartened the hardest-core populist nationalists’ — that’s always been who governs us.”
Bannon also demanded the publication of all the Epstein documents on “Bannon’s War Room” Thursday. He called on the DOJ to go to court and push for the release of the documents or for Trump to appoint a special counsel to manage the publication.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 and charged with sex trafficking. Shortly after, he was found dead in his New York Metropolitan Correctional Center cell shortly after. Officials asserted that he hanged himself in his cell.
However, Epstein’s death has sparked years of theories because of the malfunctioning of prison cameras, along with guards admitting to falsifying documents about checking on the then-inmate. The DOJ inspector general later confirmed that multiple surveillance cameras outside of his cell were inoperable, while others captured the common area outside his door.
Both Bannon and Daily Caller News Foundation co-founder Tucker Carlson have speculated that Epstein had connections to intelligence agencies.
Former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta allegedly indicated that Epstein was tied to intelligence, according to Vicky Ward in The Daily Beast.
In a sweeping indictment that tears into an underworld of Chinese narco infiltration of North American cities — including the smuggling of impoverished Chinese nationals across the Mexican border to work as drug debt slaves in illegal drug houses — seven Chinese nationals living in Massachusetts stand accused of running a sprawling, multimillion-dollar marijuana trafficking and money laundering network across New England.
The backdrop of the human smuggling allegations stretches back to 2020, as an unprecedented wave of illegal Chinese migrants surged across the U.S. border with Mexico — a surge that peaked in 2024 under the Biden administration before the White House reversed course. This explosive migration trend became a flashpoint in heated U.S. election debates, fueling concerns over border security and transnational organized crime.
Six of the accused, including alleged ringleader Jianxiong Chen of Braintree, were arrested this week in coordinated FBI raids across Massachusetts. The border exploitation schemes match exactly with decades-long human smuggling and Chinese Triad criminal pipelines into America reported by The Bureau last summer, based on leaked intelligence documents filed by a Canadian immigration official in 1993. A seventh suspect in the new U.S. indictment, Yanrong Zhu, remains a fugitive and is believed to be moving between Greenfield, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.
The case paints a striking portrait of China-based criminal organizations operating behind the quiet facades of upscale American suburban properties. Prosecutors allege the defendants owned or partnered with a network of sophisticated indoor grow houses hidden inside single-family residences in Massachusetts, Maine, and beyond, producing kilogram-scale shipments of marijuana. According to court documents, the marijuana was sold in bulk to distributors across the Northeast, and the profits — amounting to millions — were funneled into luxury real estate, cars, jewelry, and further expansion of their illicit operations.
“During a search of [ringleader Chen’s] home in October 2024, over $270,000 in cash was allegedly recovered from the house and from a Porsche in the driveway,” the indictment alleges, “as well as several Chinese passports and other identification documents inside a safe.”
According to the indictment, Chen’s cell phone data confirmed his personal role in orchestrating smuggling logistics and controlling workers. Additional searches of homes where co-defendants lived yielded over 109 kilograms of marijuana, nearly $200,000 in cash, and luxury items including a $65,000 gold Rolex with the price tag still attached.
A photo from the indictment, humorously but damningly, shows alleged ring member Hongbin Wu, 35, wearing a green “money laundering” T-shirt printed with an image of a hot iron pressing U.S. dollar bills on an ironing board — a snapshot that encapsulates the brazenness of the alleged scheme.
Key to FBI allegations of stunning sophistication tying together Chinese narcos along the U.S. East Coast with bases in mainland China is a document allegedly shared among the conspirators.
“The grow house operators maintained contact with each other through a list of marijuana cultivators and distributors from or with ties to China in the region called the ‘East Coast Contact List,’” the indictment alleges.
Investigators say the conspiracy reveals a human smuggling component directly tied to China’s underground migration and debt bondage networks, mirroring exactly the historic intelligence from Canadian and U.S. Homeland Security documents reported by The Bureau last summer.
The alleged leader, 39-year-old Jianxiong Chen, is charged with paying to smuggle Chinese nationals across the Mexican border, then forcing them to work in grow houses while withholding their passports until they repaid enormous smuggling debts.
“Data extracted from Chen’s cell phone allegedly revealed that he helped smuggle Chinese nationals into the United States — putting the aliens to work at one of the grow houses he controlled,” U.S. filings say.
“This case pulls back the curtain on a sprawling criminal enterprise that exploited our immigration system and our communities for personal gain,” said U.S. Attorney Leah Foley. “These defendants allegedly turned quiet homes across the Northeast into hubs for a criminal enterprise — building a multi-million-dollar black-market operation off the backs of an illegal workforce and using our neighborhoods as cover.”
The arrests come amid a surge of Chinese migrants entering the U.S. through Mexico, part of a pattern previously exposed in Canadian diplomatic and intelligence reporting. In 1993, a confidential Canadian government study, “Passports of Convenience,” warned that Chinese government officials, in collusion with Triads and corrupt Latin American partners, were driving a multi-billion-dollar human smuggling business. That report predicted that tens of thousands of migrants from coastal Fujian province would flood North America, empowered by Beijing’s tacit support and organized crime’s global reach.
It also warned that mass migration from China in the 1990s came during a time of political upheaval, a trend that has apparently re-emerged while President Xi Jinping’s economic and political guidance has been increasingly questioned among mainland citizens, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and lockdowns inside China.
The 1993 report, obtained and analyzed exclusively by The Bureau, described how the Triads — particularly those connected with Chinese Communist networks in Fujian — would leverage human smuggling to extend their influence into American cities. The migrants, often saddled with debts of $50,000 or more, became trapped in forced labor, prostitution, or drug networks, coerced to repay their passage fees.
“Alien smuggling is closely linked to narcotics smuggling; many of the persons smuggled in have to resort to prostitution or drug dealing to pay the smugglers,” the 1993 Canadian immigration report says.
Citing legal filings in one U.S. Homeland Security case, it says a Triad member who reportedly smuggled 150 Fujianese migrants into New York stated that if fees aren’t paid “the victims are often tortured until the money is paid.”
Supporting these early warnings, a 1995 U.S. Department of Justice report echoed the Canadian findings, stating that “up to 100,000 Chinese aliens are smuggled into the United States each year,” with 85 percent originating from Fujian. The DOJ report also cited allegations of “negotiations between the Sun Yee On Triad and the Mainland Chinese Government,” suggesting that smuggling and criminal infiltration were tolerated — if not orchestrated — to extend China’s economic and political influence abroad.
That report added American investigators and immigration officials concluded it was nearly impossible to counter waves of illegal immigration from China with deportation orders, and the government should focus on “the larger menace working its way into U.S. cities: Chinese transnational criminal organizations.”
“To combat the growing threat of Asian organized crime in the West,” it says, “law enforcement officials must tackle this new global problem through an understanding of the Triad system and the nature of its threat to Western countries.”
In New England, the Braintree indictment shows how those old predictions have not only materialized but scaled up.
These networks operate by embedding Chinese nationals into illicit industries in North America, from black-market cannabis cultivation to high-end money laundering. Once inside, they channel profits back through complex underground banking channels that tie the North American drug economy to China’s export-driven cash flows and, ultimately, to powerful actors in Beijing.
In recent years, Maine has emerged as a strategic hotspot for illicit Chinese-controlled marijuana operations. As The Bureau has reported, the state’s vast rural areas, lax local oversight, and proximity to East Coast urban markets have made it a favored location for covert grow houses.
