US downs Iranian drones headed toward Strait of Hormuz
Source: Washington Examiner · Bias: Center Right
Summary
The U.S. military downed four Iranian drones launched toward the Strait of Hormuz on Friday evening, marking the latest scuffle as the fragile ceasefire holds in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. “The attack drones posed an immediate threat to regional maritime traffic,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement. “U.S. forces subsequently struck Iranian coastal […]
US downs Iranian drones headed toward Strait of Hormuz
Center Right
The U.S. military downed four Iranian drones launched toward the Strait of Hormuz on Friday evening, marking the latest scuffle as the fragile ceasefire holds in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. “The attack drones posed an immediate threat to regional maritime traffic,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement. “U.S. forces subsequently struck Iranian coastal […]
Sen. Rand Paul has released a tranche of Dr. Anthony Fauci's diary entries from the COVID-19 pandemic. Fauci is set to appear before a Senate committee Wednesday on the origins of the coronavirus.
President Donald Trump doesn't seem to have much sway in the negotiations to end the war against Iran, but there is someone else who may hold the key, insiders revealed on Monday. Axios reported, citing multiple anonymous White House officials, that Iranian officials seem more afraid of the U.S. Treasury than of the Department of Defense. The insiders argued that Iranians are more afraid of sanctions now because of the country's economic conditions. "The Iranians want to stop being bombed, and they want money," a senior administration official told the outlet. "But that's almost in reverse order. They really want the money first."That seems to give Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent significant leverage over how the war negotiations proceed, according to the officials. "They're in danger of runs on banks. There are gasoline shortages in this giant oil-rich country," one official told Axios. "They're more scared of Treasury than the War Department.""The president has a win-win optionality. The U.S. is capable of prosecuting this militarily to the fullest extent. And the U.S. is capable of exerting economic sanctions that cripple Iran," another official said.
Following a combative vote last week to allow controversial U.N.
The post Ambassador Mike Waltz Hits Back After France Attacks US on Social Media appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
President Donald Trump has politicized America’s intelligence-gathering operations to an unprecedented degree, and a former CIA analyst who worked for Trump’s NSC is now raising the alarm.“In 2025, I watched from inside the White House and at the CIA as the intelligence community came under assault: senior officers fired in public, clearances revoked for dissent, decade-old assessments denounced by the CIA director in the press,” Julia Curlee, a former CIA analyst and an NSC director for Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, wrote for Lawfare on Monday. “Earlier this month, the campaign reached the raw intelligence itself, as the White House declassified selected reporting to sustain election interference claims that the intelligence community’s own finished analysis would not support.”As one example of Trump’s politicizing intelligence, Curlee described how members of the CIA with expertise in Venezuela were fired when they did not back the administration’s position on taking over that country.“Twenty years later, days after taking office, the second Trump administration tasked the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to assess whether the Venezuelan regime had directed Tren de Aragua—a criminal gang—to invade the United States,” Curlee wrote. “The question, from Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, matched nearly word for word the predicate for the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, last invoked in World War II to intern Japanese, German, and Italian nationals.”She added that she knows this firsthand because she tasked the Venezuela assessment.“I was the NSC’s acting senior director for intelligence programs across the transition—Biden’s last week, Trump’s first,” Curlee said. “I knew the NIC, the intelligence community’s most senior, most deliberate analytic body, would carefully weigh the evidence and reach a consensus position. How much rode on that judgment became clear when the administration carried out lethal strikes on alleged drug boats off Venezuela and, in January 2026, sent U.S. forces into Caracas to seize Nicolás Maduro himself.”She added, “The NIC did not give the answer the White House wanted, concluding that Tren de Aragua had not entered the country at Maduro’s direction, undercutting the administration’s case in court. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard denounced the finding, and her chief of staff, Joe Kent, pressed the acting NIC chair to “rethink” it. When he held firm, Gabbard had him walked out of the building, ending the career of one of the country’s most accomplished analysts.”From there, Curlee lists other ways that Trump has pushed out people in the CIA and other intelligence agencies for engaging in work that the president disliked for purely political reasons.“From its first days, the second Trump administration treated the intelligence community not as an instrument of the state but as an enemy within: a ‘deep state’ that had allegedly lain in wait for the president during his first term,” Curlee wrote. “The aim was explicit: Put career civil servants ‘in trauma’ to make them not want to come to work. At the CIA, that program arrived on schedule.”She continued, “First they came for the people. On day one, the president revoked the clearances of 51 former officers who had spoken on Russian election interference. A month later, amid the purge of trans service members, the DNI fired 100 trans intelligence officers from 15 agencies. In May 2025, she fired two senior analysts over the Tren de Aragua assessment. And in August 2025, Gabbard publicly revoked 37 more clearances—including that of one of the intelligence community’s most respected experts on Russia—seemingly without irony, for the ‘politicization or weaponization of intelligence.’”Curlee said that Trump then denounced findings that had previously been proven beyond reasonable doubt, from Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election to warnings about white nationalist terrorism, violence against LGBT people and assessments about women’s reproductive health.“And the threat did not stop at termination,” Curlee pointed out. “Former CIA Director John Brennan was referred for criminal investigation and interviewed by the FBI over the same analysis the administration had set out to discredit. The lesson reached every desk—a clearance, and with it a livelihood, could be revoked with a phone call; a career could end in front of a grand jury. By mid-2026, the president was describing intelligence that contradicted his preferred reality as ‘treason.’”Curlee also warned about Trump politicizing intelligence during his July 16th speech falsely claiming that China had meddled in the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Biden.“The president delivered a primetime address alleging that China had interfered in the 2020 election, built on a mass declassification of election-related intelligence assembled by the White House’s Government Transparency Task Force—a body created to comb the classified...
President Donald Trump has long benefited from support in the so-called “manosphere,” with even Democrats like former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg pandering to them while female conservatives try to create an analogous “womanosphere.” Yet according to a recent interview between Trump’s former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor and political Ross Morales Rocketto, founder of the 2024 political group White Dudes for Harris, Trump is starting to lose support among white men.“Donald Trump went from 50 percent approval in this country, that means he had some independents on his side; then he went down to 40 percent, which basically meant any independents he had, those people are gone,” Taylor told Rocketto during their interview. “They're bailing. He's losing some concerned conservatives. Then you go from 40 to 30 percent and you're literally losing millions of your followers. It means you are losing millions upon millions of your followers, and a lot of them are dudes. They're just guys that kind of got recruited into the movement. They felt like it was cool to back Donald Trump since it was provocative. They don't pay attention to politics. They're like, ‘I don't know. Everyone hates him. Could be kind of cool to see this come back into office.’” Yet he added that because of Trump’s various unpopular domestic and foreign policies, “now they're not happy with what they are seeing. Do you think this is a significant pickup moment? And what might we look for in the numbers at the midterms to see whether folks have really started to bail and gone to the other side?”Rocketto offered a nuanced analysis, saying that Democrats stand to make some gains but not all at once.“What I hope we see is more young men coming out to vote in this election cycle, because I think if we see more young men voting in this election cycle, they will probably be voting for Democrats, and I think that bodes quite well,” Rocketto told Taylor. “I think what we are likely to see is a lot of these guys will just stay home and not vote, which will also mean that we probably do quite well in the midterms. I'm still pretty bullish on us retaking the House. I'm a little more skeptical about the Senate.”While he anticipated a lot of Trump’s manosphere supporters will sit out during the 2026 midterms, he suspects they will also be up for grabs in the 2028 contest.“I think how we talk is going to matter,” Rocketto explained to Taylor. “I've been saying this a lot over the last six months. The 2028 election isn't going to be decided in a fight between moderates and progressives. It's going to be between people who are angry and people who aren't angry. And I think the candidates who are angry and can show that anger, and can show that they are willing to do something to completely shake up the system — I think that's who we're going to end up with as a nominee.”Earlier in their conversation, Taylor described the recent arrest of manosphere influencer Andrew Tate as a metaphor “because the rest of the MAGA manosphere is looking around and saying, ‘I don't know if I want to be a part of this.’ Turns out these guys are losers, and they might be corrupt losers, and they might be getting us sent to jail with the things that they're doing and recommending.”Rocketto agreed with Taylor, opining that “as we've learned with folks like Andrew Tate — who spent a lot of time during the [former President Joe] Biden years not in the United States — we know that it's extremely important, and we also know that these far-right movements find a home in far-right culture. And I think what Donald Trump was able to do in both elections that he won is unite a group of people that we'd never seen someone on the right unite before.”The influencer added, “The cultural right and the political right, for many, many years, had never really been able to get united to build power together. And what Donald Trump did at its core was unite those two groups of folks in a very unholy union. And what you're starting to see is that union starting to fray as he gets a little bit older, as people remember what the first term was like, and as folks are realizing that maybe he is going a little too far. You know, [far right podcaster] Joe Rogan was one of the first folks on the cultural right to start talking about the administration's immigration policy. And I think it would be a mistake to say that we're going to get all those folks back overnight because of his overstepping. But it has created an opportunity, because many of those folks might be saying, ‘You know what? We do think we should deport criminals, but we don't like it when it's being done this way. We don't like it when people are getting shot in the streets of Minnesota and Houston and cities across the United States.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said Sunday the U.S. will not be “exporting enrichment capacity to” Saudi Arabia under the new nuclear deal announced last week. Waltz appeared on the Sunday morning shows to clarify aspects of the deal, which would eventually allow the Saudis to enrich uranium, raising fears the Persian…
U.S. officials have claimed that the Iranian regime is seeking a deal to end the war, but an Iranian spokesperson has refuted these claims. These back-and-forth claims […]
