Spencer Pratt’s lead over Nithya Raman nearly vanishes in bombshell ballot drop
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Spencer Pratt’s once-comfortable lead in the Los Angeles mayoral primary has been slashed yet again — as a fresh batch of ballots delivered another major boost to progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman in their race to the November runoff. New results released Saturday show Pratt’s advantage over Raman shrinking to just 7,494 votes, down from...
Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt expressed his frustration at the slow pace of vote counting Saturday as he saw his once-commanding lead in the primary take a sharp hit in the lates ballot drop. The former reality star posted a photo of Russell Crowe from the film “A Brilliant Mind,” in which he portrays...
The release of heavily redacted FBI records showing that a sheriff's deputy exchanged emails with would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks before the July 13, 2024 shooting — as Raw Story reported — sent MAGA world into overdrive this weekend, with commentators across the political spectrum demanding answers about what those emails said and why the documents remain concealed.MeidasTouch, the liberal political media outlet, reached nearly 500,000 views with a post summarizing the Judicial Watch release, noting that "the records remain heavily redacted, concealing the nature of the communications."Kaelan Deese, a political reporter, called it "a bombshell in their Thomas Crooks FOIA fight," and flagged the recovery of the gray remote device with an antenna from Crooks' pocket as a detail warranting further scrutiny.Sara Gonzales, a conservative commentator at The Blaze, kept her focus on the emails: "The public deserves to know why and when Crooks contacted law enforcement."Not everyone agreed the word "exchange" was warranted. Heather Champion, a conservative social media personality, urged precision: "I don't know if 'exchange' is correct but they did receive emails from Thomas Crooks before the July 13 Trump rally."Left-wing podcaster Jimmy Dore, who has previously raised questions about the official account of the shooting, used the records to revisit a string of unresolved details. "So you're telling me there's some nefarious stuff surrounding the supposed assassination attempt of Trump?" he wrote. "You mean the one where the cops admitted to seeing him THREE TIMES in a restricted area with a scope and a backpack and yet never did anything? The one where a bunch of people in the crowd saw the shooter on the roof but no cops or secret service officers or sheriff's deputies or State troopers saw him?"Shane Cashman, a journalist, offered the most pointed response, cataloging the same unanswered questions in a sardonic thread while warning against the leap to conspiracy. "There's literally nothing weird about Thomas Matthew Crooks emailing a deputy from Butler, PA before the assassination attempt," he wrote, before listing item after item: that Crooks practiced at the same range Homeland Security used, that local police and Secret Service spotted him with a rangefinder and texted about him for over an hour before he climbed the roof, that no Secret Service drones were flying that day while Crooks allegedly had one, that his house had no trash or silverware and his body was cremated ten days later before Congress could view it. "This is like when people say the CIA was shadowing Oswald before he, and he alone, shot JFK."What nobody knows, still, is what those two emails said.
The White House dismissed a report published Friday night in which two U.S. officials claimed that the Pentagon had raised its counterintelligence threat level from a top U.S. ally to “critical,” the “highest level,” according to NBC News.Two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official, speaking with NBC News under the condition of anonymity, claimed that the Pentagon had grown “increasingly concerned about Israel ramping up its spying on the U.S.,” the outlet reported, and that in “recent weeks,” the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had increased Israel’s threat level to the highest level.“The designation stems from concerns within the Pentagon that Israel is making a particular effort to surveil top U.S. officials to get information on the Trump administration’s internal deliberations and decision-making on the conflicts in the Middle East, the officials said,” NBC News’ report reads.“The DIA assessment includes a seven-page document and features a chart, according to one of the current U.S. officials. The document says the assessment of Israel is that its ability to conduct human espionage and technical collection is at a ‘critical level,’ according to the official.”While the Pentagon declined to respond to NBC News’ request for comment, the White House dismissed the outlet’s reporting entirely.“This entire story is false and sourced to someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of what’s going on,” a White House official told NBC News.Israel also fiercely denied the allegation, with a spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. telling NBC News that Israel “does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone US government officials.”Despite Israel’s claim, numerous reports have suggested Israeli operatives have engaged in “widespread surveillance” of American entities. In 2025, the scale of Israel’s alleged surveillance on U.S. service members at a U.S. military base in southern Israel had grown so expansive that U.S. Lt. Gen. Patrick Frank summoned an Israeli official for a meeting and told them that the “recording has to stop here,” The Guardian previously reported.
Former U.S. Army Major and Intelligence Officer Harrison Mann issued a grave warning Saturday over a “ticking time bomb” he argued President Donald Trump was ignoring, one that if not addressed would undoubtedly lead to an “unmistakable recession” – or worse.“At this point, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that Trump’s lack of urgency to sign a deal with Tehran is in part because he’s been very slow to understand the actual situation on the ground,” Mann wrote in an analysis published Saturday in Zeteo.“Trump’s trusted advisers – both in the Situation Room and on Fox News – rarely if ever deliver bad news about the war, whether out of ideological desire to see the president 'finish the job,’ or because they’re afraid he’ll shoot the messenger.”The United States and Iran remain in a fragile ceasefire, and despite countless reports of a deal to end the conflict between Washington and Tehran being near, no such deal has materialized.Trump's failure to close a deal with Tehran, Mann argued, stemmed not only from a steady diet of briefings that 'minimize bad news' about the conflict, but from a personal failing of the president himself – one who Mann said would “rather forget” the potentially catastrophic consequences of a prolonged Middle East war.“The problem is that Trump apparently views today’s pseudo-ceasefire double-blockade impasse as a satisfactory solution to a problem he’d rather forget, instead of a ticking time bomb,” Mann wrote. “Unfortunately, it may take a new crisis within this crisis – an unmistakable recession or more U.S. troops killed in the Gulf – to change his mind.”