Surveillance footage shared by Russian media appeared to showed the car igniting in a fireball and careening into a parked vehicle.
If this boat was running drugs, why was it loaded with so many people? The post Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking appeared first on The Intercept.
Reacting to the bombshell reporting in the New York Times about the Jeffrey Epstein “war room” that was convened in the White House Situation Room, MS NOW’s Sam Stein singled out a proposal about Ghislaine Maxwell that he found beyond the pale.Speaking with Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire about the report from the Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Stein noted, “There's one anecdote in there where they talk about whether they should give a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, and the response inside the room has nothing to do with the morality, ethics or legality of it. It's ‘Oh no, that would create a real PR problem for us if we were to do that.’”“And I was blown away by how cynical that was,” he admitted. “But really, I think the most interesting and most troubling element of this, well, there's a lot of troubling elements of this, is Todd Blanche,” he said of the current acting attorney general. “Todd Blanche, at the time, is the deputy AG, okay? He is ostensibly part of the Justice Department and therefore should have some sort of separation from the White House. And yet he's sitting in the Situation Room throughout this, plotting ways to shield the president of the United States from public scrutiny and legal scrutiny.”“He is not acting as a part of the Justice Department. He's acting as Trump's defense lawyer, and he's intimately involved in all the decision-making,” he observed. - YouTube youtu.be
Google held at least 34 meetings with top German government officials - including the Chancellor - to discuss suppressing
President Donald Trump is apparently tampering so thoroughly in elections that even a staunchly MAGA official is raising alarms about it.“[Maricopa County Attorney Rachel] Mitchell garnered national attention after Senate Republicans tapped her to question Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process after Ford alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a teenager,” wrote MS NOW’s Ja'han Jones on Wednesday. “Kavanaugh has flatly denied the allegation.”Yet despite Mitchell’s impeccable MAGA credentials, including endorsing Trump’s 2024 campaign, Jones reported that she has filed a lawsuit against America First Legal, White House adviser Stephen Miller’s right-wing activist group that is trying to make sure Trump does not lose control of Congress during the 2026 midterm elections.“The office is led by Justin Heap, who has egged on the Trump administration’s push to acquire sensitive voter data in Arizona,” Jones reported. “And the disturbing context to all this is Trump has openly declared that Republicans should nationalize voting processes and ‘take over the voting’ in several cities — like Phoenix, perhaps.”Jones added, “In a June 8 legal filing, Mitchell’s lawyers asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney to rein in Recorder Justin Heap’s politically connected firm, the America First Legal Foundation, which it said has undertaken ‘an unprecedented power grab.’” Her lawyers argued that “the Recorder lacks any explicit or implicit statutory authority to hire outside counsel — let alone a partisan organization — to serve as in-house counsel on ‘all’ matters under his ‘purview.’”Overall Jones concluded, “The fact that even conservative officials are sounding the alarm here shows how extreme, unprecedented and potentially threatening to democracy this situation could prove to be.”Speaking with AlterNet earlier this month, Common Cause Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation Dan Vicuña said that Trump’s various voter repression policies — including trying to stop mail-in voting, demanding voter files, gerrymandering, supporting voter ID laws and stating he will deploy law enforcement to voting places — are all part of a larger plan to steal the midterms. Common Cause is a nonprofit good government group with a distinguished pedigree tracing back to 1970.“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
A billionaire running as a progressive failed to defeat Steve Hilton, a Republican who will face Democrat Xavier Becerra in November. The post In California, a Former Biden Official Will Face Fox News Personality for Governor appeared first on The Intercept.
President Donald Trump warned that U.S. forces were preparing to take control of Kharg Island in a major escalation of the war in Iran, and a national security expert denounced his statements as "unhinged" and unnecessarily risky.The 79-year-old president posted on Truth Social that U.S. forces would be "hitting Iran ... very hard tonight" and seizing the country's oil and gas markets on the Persian Gulf island. Former Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told CNN's "The Situation Room" that his statements were reckless."This post is incredibly unhinged and incredibly dangerous," said Singh, the former deputy press secretary for the Defense Department. "It is previewing U.S. military action before it actually takes place, which puts the lives of our pilots at risk, our Navy and Marines, our sailors and Marines who are operating in that area of responsibility just outside of Iran. So previewing military action before it's actually happened, one, you're losing the element of surprise, and two, you're putting our troops at risk.""You'll remember just a few weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the war has concluded," she added. "This is clearly not the case, as we're seeing the ceasefire is not holding – we're back at kinetic action. So, I think, you know, to say that the war is even concluded back then was was a silly statement, and now it's proven so even more so."Singh suggested the president didn't appreciate what a massive undertaking the operation would be."Taking Kharg Island would require so many capabilities and resources that the U.S. is continuing to draw down every single day, including long-range capabilities, and it's not just taking Kharg Island, which we know is the crown jewel of Iran's oil hub and exporting. It's also holding Kharg Island. Essentially, our military would have to hold that, and it would require an incredible ground force that would basically be sitting ducks for Iran to target if they have to. For how long? For however long they have to hold that island."The president is allowed under the law to declassify information as he sees fit, but Singh said Trump's statements would have been problematic for anyone else in government to make."I would have probably been fired," the former Pentagon official said. "I think, you know, we would always have issues when it came to, you know, media outlets reporting on actions that hadn't been taken, even though we were, you know, leaning in that direction. It's incredibly dangerous to signal to the enemy that one when you're going to conduct strikes and potential targets, and so the fact that it's the president of the United States doing that not only just puts our men and women in uniform at risk. It is just so unprecedented. I could not imagine Secretary [Lloyd] Austin or President [Joe] Biden doing something like this and not having just such tremendous bipartisan blowback, and I'm not really seeing that today from the Republican Party right now."In fact, Singh said, she would have probably faced criminal charges for making the same statements as Trump."I would have faced charges," she said. "Yeah, definitely." - YouTube youtu.be
President Donald Trump is spiraling over Iran’s latest military strikes, which undermine his claims that their military has been obliterated. Hours after the United States and Iran exchanged their latest series of military strikes Tuesday night, Trump insisted yet again that Iran’s military was all but destroyed. “Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess. Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore—They have been completely defeated. Iran is all talk and no action,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday morning. “The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!! They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!” It’s not evident that Iran’s military has been defeated. U.S. officials said Iran downed a U.S. Army Apache helicopter Monday using a drone. It is not clear if the drone attack was deliberate, as Iran has not yet claimed responsibility for the strike. Tehran said it responded to U.S. retaliatory strikes with 21 attacks against American military targets in the Middle East. Trump has been insisting for weeks that Iran’s military capabilities have been obliterated—despite reporting suggesting Iran has been rebuilding its arsenal. Now even Fox News is starting to doubt the president’s word about Iran’s military capability.Trump’s warning that Iran would “pay the price” caused the price of oil to rise 2 percent, after the strikes had already caused stock futures to slide sharply. In a subsequent post, Trump touted the effectiveness of the U.S. military blockade and insisted that energy was flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. “The Fake News Media refuses to report how EFFECTIVE the U.S. Naval BLOCKADE is, the most successful Blockade in the history of Naval Warfare. NOTHING GETS THROUGH unless we want it to. IT IS A STEEL WALL! Iran is doing ZERO business, not paying their military, or any of their bills, and quickly becoming a FAILED NATION! Lots of oil is getting out.” Trump wrote. But it seems that the president’s lies about the war may be finally catching up to him.
Former Defense Department official Ariane Tabatabai responded to some of President Donald Trump's strangest comments coming out in the past few days. In a press availability on Wednesday, Trump made a comment that left experts scratching their heads. After saying he "loved" inflation, he immediately pivoted to claim that the U.S. was somehow stealing oil from Iran. It was announced that inflation ballooned to 4.2 percent, up from 3.8 percent in April. The New Republic's Greg Sargent spoke to Tabatabai for the Thursday morning podcast, saying that it's clear that Trump is trying to make it appear as though he's in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait is not open, regardless of Trump's claims. "But what I’m having trouble understanding is what he means," said Sargent. "He is saying — with total, well, clarity’s obviously the wrong word — he is saying what he thinks he means, to be that this is actually happening, that a hundred million barrels of oil have been transported out of Iran through the strait because the U.S. is escorting them and that oil has gone onto the open market. Does the U.S. control the Strait of Hormuz? How real is any of this?"Tabatabai made it clear, "It doesn’t."Sargent asked, "I mean — is the oil being transferred? Is it happening? Do we know?""I don’t know. And if it is happening, is it happening on the scale that he says it is? I don’t know," Tabatabai said. "Again, this is somebody who talks about drug prices going down 600 percent. So if you’ve bought any Advil recently, you should really be getting some money back."Tabatabai went on to question whether Trump was being hyperbolic about what he meant. "So there might be that there is some oil that is making its way into the market. We’ll see that in the days to come, we’ll be able to fact-check that. I don’t have that information. The piece where he talks about the control of the Strait of Hormuz is clearly not real. Because if it were real, then we would not be in this situation to begin with," she said. Trump has frequently claimed Iran's military has been destroyed and the nuclear program has been obliterated. "And that was not the case, because we are here again," said Tabatabai. "And by the way, Iran still has several hundred kilograms of highly enriched uranium on its soil. That is very troubling. Iran still has military capabilities. It’s not 100 percent of what it had at the beginning of this conflict. But it’s not nothing, which is why they’re able to shoot down an Apache just a couple of days ago."Tabatabai explained the U.S. is spending billions of dollars daily using "very expensive, sophisticated weapon systems, munitions, missiles, platforms to fight what was, even before this war, not a particularly sophisticated military."Meanwhile, the Trump team is doing little more than "putting a Band-Aid on one of the many issues that is cascading out of this conflict. And it is not a sustainable Band-Aid. It is one that we can maybe continue for a bit, but ultimately there needs to be a more sustainable solution here," said Tabatabai. So, Iran has created more problems for the U.S. in the meantime. "And we’re here several months later when the president had said that this would be a war that would be over pretty quickly. So all of this to say, this is just another one of these statements in this conflict that I think are probably not going to stand the test of time," she said. Trump appears to be discovering that "once you start a conflict, you don't always end it on your terms. In fact, you rarely end it exclusively on your terms," she explained All of this comes as Trump is having difficulties selling the war to Americans who were told "no more foreign wars." Meanwhile, Trump's allies are having difficulty trying to be "yes-men" while also disagreeing with what he's doing. Tabatabai criticized the congressional officials who refuse to stand up to Trump despite "bad decision after bad decision on a host of issues. And for things that we’re going to be really, frankly, paying the price for for years to come."Ultimately, she anticipates that things will escalate and even though Trump wants to end the war to start a new one with Cuba, he's "stuck," Tabatabai closed.