Renewed cease-fire talks between US, Iran see ‘significant’ progress, mediators say
Source: New York Post · Bias: Right
Summary
Talks to establish a full cease-fire between the US and Iran made "significant" progress on Monday, mediators said — with President Trump optimistic but warning that war could reignite if the negotiations fail.
Renewed cease-fire talks between US, Iran see ‘significant’ progress, mediators say
Right
Talks to establish a full cease-fire between the US and Iran made "significant" progress on Monday, mediators said — with President Trump optimistic but warning that war could reignite if the negotiations fail.
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...
Senate conservatives, led by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), are calling on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to cancel the August recess so they can debate the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, a sweeping election reform bill that President Trump has made his No. 1 legislative priority. Lee warned in a social media…
The Senate GOP is offering new guidance to party lawmakers on how to rhetorically juggle Donald Trump’s second term agenda with the public furor it has caused.Internal party messaging reviewed Monday by Politico indicates that Republican leadership is still trying to salvage public perception of the president, on issues ranging from the Iran war to the SAVE America Act.“On Iran, directly connect the President’s negotiations and strikes to keeping the Strait open and keeping prices low,” one line item read, according to Politico reporter Jordain Carney.The internal memo also warned Republicans that the “media will try to divide Republicans by asking your boss to pick a ‘side’ in any given question.”“It’s crucial to reject these false choices. Reject the false choice between the President and Senate leaders: express support for both,” the memo reads.The memo advised Republicans on how to handle the ongoing drama between Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who last week snapped at White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for suggesting that the president’s patience was “running out” with the conservative senator’s inability to force the SAVE Act through the upper chamber.Offering potential responses, the memo suggests that Republicans nonetheless claim that Trump and Thune are “united and doing an excellent job.” It also recommends that Republicans claim the duo have made American life “affordable,” and have worked together to make Americans “safer by closing our border, deporting violent criminals (Laken Riley Act), cracking down on fentanyl, and strengthening our military.”“And we all agree that we have to defeat the radical Democrat socialists, who are threatening to undo our progress,” it added.Meanwhile, the White House seems content with quietly advising midterm-bound Republicans to distance themselves from the president’s talking points as his popularity plummets.“The understanding is pretty damn implicit: The president is going to say what the president is going to say,” a Republican operative working on the party’s midterm races told MS NOW Monday on the condition of anonymity. “You’re not going to have candidates or lawmakers running out to defend the president’s handling of the economy or the war—polling shows that most people don’t agree with his handling.”
The Pentagon quietly updated its war casualty database over the weekend to account for American fatalities and injuries sustained in the Iran conflict since the collapse of a ceasefire, after a discrepancy in numbers sparked confusion and controversy. The Department of War oversees the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks American casualties in conflicts dating […]
President Donald Trump remained adamant that he has not considered replacing Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) as the pair clash over the president’s demands that the Senate pass the SAVE America Act. “I haven’t even thought of it,” Trump told reporters Monday when asked if he wants to see Thune replaced. Earlier Monday, Trump […]
