Who is in line to take Lindsey Graham’s role as ‘Trump whisperer’ for Zelensky and Netanyahu?
Source: Washington Examiner · Bias: Center Right
Summary
Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Washington Secrets. It’s a day dominated by the late Lindsey Graham, with a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda in the morning, followed by a funeral service at Washington National Cathedral. Three world leaders will attend: President Donald Trump, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. […]
Who is in line to take Lindsey Graham’s role as ‘Trump whisperer’ for Zelensky and Netanyahu?
Center Right
Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Washington Secrets. It’s a day dominated by the late Lindsey Graham, with a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda in the morning, followed by a funeral service at Washington National Cathedral. Three world leaders will attend: President Donald Trump, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. […]
President Trump, lawmakers, and world leaders are paying their respects to the late Senator Lindsey Graham this afternoon. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are in Washington DC for the funeral.
The post WATCH LIVE: Trump Attends Lindsey Graham’s Funeral appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
A top immigration policy expert accused a right-wing online news source of spreading an “outrageous lie” on Monday about the US Department of Homeland Security’s top statistician, who resigned over the weekend and cited President Donald Trump’s “war on immigrants” as a major reason for his departure.America First Post wrote in a post on social media that Marc Rosenblum, who until recently was the executive director of the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), “easily could’ve been underreporting deportations or illegal populations, ruining data.”Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, countered that Rosenblum sought under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration to publish “the most transparent data on immigration enforcement ever; monthly information on [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection] arrests and removals, stuff that had NEVER been published before.”Such data has not been published since the first days of Trump’s second term in the White House, said Reichlin-Melnick, as the president has ramped up deportation operations and federal agents have violently carried out his anti-immigration agenda—arresting more than 10,000 people in a recent five-day span and killing at least 11 people during enforcement operations.In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum wrote that over 10 years, the team he managed at OHSS grew from 11 people to 45 people under the Biden administration.“We matured official data processing to update monthly,” wrote Rosenblum. “We launched new lines of daily and weekly internal reports. We massively expanded our analytic capacity.”“My OHSS co-workers are outstanding career federal civil servants. They are smart, mission-focused experts who produce high-quality results in a challenging and often hostile work environment,” he continued. “But it will come as no surprise that I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration. Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”Daniel Delgado, a former DHS deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy, said the department was “far better off for the work that Marc accomplished, no matter how hard the current incompetent leadership try to hide it.”David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute—which has found that the majority of immigration arrests made last year were of people who had no criminal convictions—told NOTUS last November that under the Trump administration, DHS was providing “no accountability, no way to assess, no public understanding about what’s really going on that is not curated by a press release from the agency.”Reichlin-Melnick has also frequently spoken out about the lack of data being publicly released by DHS to back up its claims about immigration arrests.While DHS has repeatedly claimed in public statements that its agents are getting “the worst of the worst off our streets,” the agency’s own “Worst of the Worst” database released late last year showed less than 10,000 people who had been arrested—a tiny fraction of the 220,000 people who had been detained by federal agents up to that point.“Marc Rosenblum was one of the most dedicated civil servants I’ve ever met, a man who spent his career working to get DHS to share more data,” said Reichlin-Melnick. “Since Trump took office last year, his office has been repeatedly blocked from sharing previously public data.”
President Donald Trump has run out of time, and he doesn't appear to know it yet. The president took to Truth Social earlier this month after his failed ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court over birthright citizenship. "Signs and Billboards are being put up all over our Southern Border, and Mexico, advertising birthright citizenship, with 'deliveries starting at $4,000.' Likewise, similar signs are going up all over our country. Billions of dollars will be illegally made by this scam, with citizenship going to anyone willing to pay," Trump said with his random capitalizations. "It will be by far, the number one way of becoming a citizen, and then the entire family will be allowed to follow. Not sustainable ... In fact, that is a crime, and therefore, the Supreme Court's ruling is wrong. I will be asking for rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, immediately. This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don't change their absolutely insane decision. Thank you for your attention to this matter," the message read.As William and Mary law professor Jonathan H. Adler explained, Trump's demand hit a brick wall."The deadline has passed, and the Docket does not indicate any petition was filed," he wrote on X.com. SCOTUS Wire explained, "Rule 44 allows 25 days to seek rehearing. It requires the support of at least one Justice from the majority, and is rarely granted."The Supreme Court decision was handed down on June 30 and Tuesday marks 28 days since the ruling. Trump is officially outside the rule. Trump and his allies continue to make claims about birth tourism, saying that women who are eight months pregnant either fly or walk across the U.S. border to give birth. That claim was cited by Solicitor General John Sauer in oral arguments in April. Chief Justice John Roberts asked Sauer how often this is happening. Sauer responded, "No one knows for sure."Trump alleged that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing this each year."In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates low immigration, estimated the possible number of birth tourism cases at 20,000 to 26,000 per year. For context, there were 3.61 million births in the U.S. that year," explained FactCheck.org.
President Donald Trump's negotiations with Iran have even stumped Fox News, The New Republic reported.Fox News host Brian Kilmeade grilled Trump during an interview Tuesday after the president had claimed talks were underway "right now," despite Iran’s foreign ministry saying the country has no interest in direct talks."We hear that you’re talking right now with leaders on Iran,” Kilmeade told Trump. “But Iran has come out publicly and said ‘we’re not talking to the U.S.—""Well, they just came out and said ‘we are talking’ a little while ago," Trump said, interjecting Kilmeade's comment. "So could you tell me who you’re talking to, Mr. President?" Kilmeade asked.Trump avoided directly answering the question."For some reason, we can be in the midst of a beautiful discussion, and they’ll come out and say 'we’re not talking' or 'we didn’t discuss nuclear,'" Trump said. "Well, that’s all we discussed, because they’ll never have a nuclear weapon, they understand that. We’ve had some very good talks."Trump then shifted the conversation to the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). "It does not inspire confidence when the president can’t confidently say who he has been in contact with while supposedly trying to negotiate an end to his increasingly unpopular and expensive war," The New Republic reported. "This conversation came after a recent pause in violence in the region, and ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Tuesday—in which he most likely lobbied Trump to start bombing Iran again."KILMEADE: We hear that you're talking with leaders from Iran. But Iran has come out publicly and said 'we're not talking to the US'TRUMP: Well, they just came out and said we are talkingKILMEADE: So could you tell me who you're talking to?TRUMP: We've had some very good… pic.twitter.com/bAqKISTbjU— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 28, 2026
Despite the White House’s myriad attempts to rein in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiratorial rhetoric, Donald Trump himself is still expecting anti-vaxx results.The president is reportedly losing faith in his health secretary’s abilities to slash childhood vaccines. The issue came to a head during a May lunch at Trump’s National Golf Club in northern Virginia, when Trump pressed Kennedy as to why he wasn’t doing more to probe into the (widely debunked) tie between vaccines and autism. At the time, Trump told Kennedy point blank that he believed the secretary “had the yips,” The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday night, citing sources familiar with the conversation.The topic reared its head again at a mid-June meeting between the two men in the Oval Office, during which Trump lamented that Kennedy simply wasn’t doing enough.Trump reportedly believes he has given Kennedy ample time to prove himself, and is disappointed that Kennedy hasn’t made more progress.Practically every conversation between Trump and his health secretary circles back to the vaccine conspiracy, reported the Journal. The president has shared with his aides that he believes Kennedy will be a failure if he fails to produce results.In fact, lobbyists and Department of Health and Human Services staffers suspect that Trump will replace Kennedy with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Dr. Mehmet Oz, likely after the midterms, the Journal reported.Trump regularly turns to Oz for health policy advice, even on issues that have nothing to do with Oz’s agency. Oz, in turn, makes sure Trump gets his way every time.The president’s priorities on the matter have since been made clear: HHS must do more to peel back the federal guidelines for the childhood vaccine schedule, reducing the number of shots given to children.Sources who spoke with the Journal suggested that the president is all-in on the anti-vaxx conspiracy, sharing that Trump expects to see autism rates drop as a result of the decreased inoculations.Limiting vaccine access was a core tenant of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—until White House advisers pressured him to lay low, fearing that his rabble-rousing, anti-science ideology could further harm Republican odds come November.Already at issue at the ballot box: the price of food, the price of oil, the price of water, the price of energy. Yet Republicans have failed to offer a resonant message to keep their party in power. Instead, Trump started an inexplicable war with Iran that has exacerbated the already astronomical cost of living. He has also slashed taxes for the wealthy and stalled the mechanics of Congress by strong-arming his allies into supporting his wildly unpopular voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act.Meanwhile, Kennedy is running HHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—rather, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked, and his off-the-wall notions about health have thus far proved disastrous for the agency.Kennedy has transformed HHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.
The IRS is falling apart, a new report from Mother Jones said on Tuesday. Reporter Stephanie Mencimer writes that she received a notice from the Internal Revenue Service claiming she underpaid her 2025 taxes, even though the agency had not credited payments she had already made. After two hours on hold, she gave up. A few days later, a recorded message about “high call volume” disconnected her. Her accountant said even dedicated lines for tax practitioners were not working, leaving serious issues unresolved with “no contact available at all.”Mencimer said she “realized that the IRS was finally imploding.”It's what everyone warned would happen when Elon Musk used his DOGE program to reduce the IRS by 25,000 people. It was about one-third of the entire IRS. “When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership,” former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said when speaking to Mother Jones reporter Michael Mechanic in April 2025. “You really are disabling the IRS.”Frank Bisignano, a former finance executive whom Trump named to a newly created “IRS CEO” role while also overseeing the Social Security Administration, had boasted in April that the cuts would not hurt operations. But Mencimer writes that her experience, along with IRS data and accounts from other taxpayers and professionals, suggests otherwise.“You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional,” said Traci DiMartini, a former IRS human capital officer who was laid off last year. “Things are starting to break.”Members of Congress are now echoing those concerns. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement, “The Administration laid off close to a third of the IRS workforce, sabotaging its mission, and making it impossible to get someone on the phone to answer even the simplest of questions, let alone resolve issues. Yet this Administration refuses to acknowledge the predictable consequences of gutting an agency and keeps telling taxpayers not to believe what they are experiencing.”The decline follows years of Republican efforts to shrink the IRS. When the Biden administration took office, Democrats directed new funding to the agency to pursue wealthy tax dodgers and improve customer service. By the end of that term, the IRS had collected about $1.3 billion in unpaid taxes from high-income filers and had hired more customer-service staff — the very people Mencimer could not reach.Under Biden, IRS call performance improved: in 2024, the agency answered more than 1 million additional calls during filing season than the year before and cut the average hold time from 28 minutes to 3 minutes, according to IRS data. Those gains have largely disappeared under Trump.“It’s infinitely worse in 2026 than it was in 2025,” New Jersey tax attorney Richard Champion told Mother Jones. He represents low-income taxpayers in tax court and says he now has at least four or five cases where he is “just stymied” because he cannot get through by phone.Experts across the board report the same problem: taxpayers cannot reach a live person, much less get help setting up payment plans. Wait times now average about 45 minutes, and many calls are disconnected.The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights (CTR) conducted its own testing this year and found that government measurements showed IRS phone wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls on its main 1040 help line than the previous year. CTR testers found that nearly 40 percent of calls to various IRS numbers were disconnected.Online access has also deteriorated. When Mencimer logged into her IRS account, she repeatedly saw a message: “Account features limited due to partial outage. While you can still access your account, some features are unavailable, including account balance and payment history.” She checked for a month and never could view her details.Biden’s administration had allocated funds to modernize IRS IT systems, but Trump cut the IT office by 40 percent. The Taxpayer Advocate Service, which helps people navigate the bureaucracy, was also reduced.Mencimer’s next step was to contact her congresswoman, but as a D.C. resident without a voting member of Congress, she assumed no one would intervene. Her last resort was snail mail. But the IRS mailroom has been hit as hard as IT.“According to a recent report by the Taxpayer Advocate, the number of unprocessed correspondence and amended returns languishing at the IRS jumped from 3.8 million in 2025 to 7 million this year,” Mencimer wrote. “And that was before all the people like you were sending in letters,” said CTR’s Nina Olson.Despite the deteriorating service, the Treasury Department said about 8,000 new hires could be added through September — a small fraction of the tens of thousands of positions eliminated.
Former intelligence officials are demanding answers about an alleged CIA document used by President Donald Trump to promote his election denial claims. According to officials, this “weird” document appears to have been “tailor made” for Trump rather than adhering to normal agency procedure. According to MSNOW, these officials “think the public should know when and why it was written, and who requested it.”The matter involves a CIA note on the People’s Republic of China entitled “Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018 – 2020.” As MSNOW explained, “The date is redacted, and it is unclear where within the CIA it originated. Trump quoted directly from the three-page document in his speech when citing debunked claims that the intelligence community withheld information from him about China, and called on the Justice Department to ‘fire those involved in the cover-up’ and ‘file criminal charges if appropriate.’”Former officials, however, have raised alarms that the document appears to be “raw intelligence all supporting a single view — alleging that China wanted Trump to lose the 2020 election and sought to influence the outcome — without including the full scope, context or any definitive conclusion from the agency’s information. The Trump administration, the officials said, should answer whether the document was drafted in response to a narrowly tailored request from someone within the administration, noting that to do so with the purpose of supporting Trump’s accusations about the security of America’s elections would be a clear politicization of the country’s intelligence community.”According to a Democratic lawmaker with national security oversight, there are many questions about the document, a list of which will be sent to the CIA. For example, “the document does not show traditional accountability markers, such as authorship and footnotes, and the high degree of confidence expressed in the document is unusual.” Six former CIA and intelligence officials agreed that the CIA and White House should answer questions.“The fact that the document presented only one viewpoint and appeared to be crafted in response to a narrow query should be investigated, the former officials said,” explained MSNOW. “The Steady State, a group of former national security and intelligence officials, is calling for an independent investigation by key congressional committees and the inspectors general for the intelligence community and CIA. Steven Cash, executive director of The Steady State and a former CIA and Department of Homeland Security official, is sending a letter Tuesday to top lawmakers on the intelligence committees and agency watchdog offices, detailing key ‘anomalies’ in the document.”The Steady State concluded that the document “departs in both style and format” from CIA drafting norms and does not have caveats typical of CIA analysis. One former official called it “weird,” saying it “doesn’t read like a finished product.” According to former CIA analyst Julie Curlee, the document looks recently generated and “tailor made.” As she explains, “Released under CIA letterhead, but with its author and publication date redacted, it has all the hallmarks of a memo built to serve the president’s political needs and the intelligence community’s authority turned against the American public.”“Was this done to placate Trump?” another former senior intelligence official wondered.
