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.
Following a combative vote last week to allow controversial U.N.
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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...
Over the course of his war with Iran, President Donald Trump has made inflammatory remarks that many have suggested implied his intention to use nuclear weapons. Now a whistleblower from his first term warns that he “watched Donald Trump talk about nuclear weapons like they were presidential toys,” and that “he may be closer to playing with them than you think.”This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as deputy chief of staff at the Department of National Security during Trump’s first administration, at the time famously penning an anonymous article revealing the existence of a resistance movement working within the White House. On Monday, he published a new piece explaining why Trump has a “fixation” with using nuclear weapons. “Last week,” writes Taylor, “the president told Axios he was ‘close’ to ordering a ‘massive attack’ on Iran … The threat had the same ominous feel of his April comments that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight.’ It was an insinuation that he possessed super powers — and might break the world’s nuclear taboo to end the stalemate.” The pause didn’t mean the war was off, however, and Trump told Axios why he thought the war had to continue: “They haven’t received enough pain yet.” “Not enough pain,” notes Taylor. “I’ve heard rhetoric like that from him before. And it wasn’t about Iran.”“Back in 2017,” Taylor explains, “Trump judged that the only way to bring North Korea to heel was to make it suffer. He tweeted furiously at ‘Rocketman’ Kim Jong-un and promised ‘fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before’ if the hermit kingdom didn’t meet his demands. That was Trump’s first wink-nod to the fact that he possessed an arsenal of nuclear bombs and was ready to use them. Kim answered by threatening to fire missiles at Guam and testing a nuclear-capable missile that could strike the U.S. mainland.”Taylor says the situation escalated so rapidly that Defense Secretary James Mattis began preparing DHS officials for an all-out nuclear war. “For the first time in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, we ran exercises for a potential real-life nuclear strike on American soil, because frankly, we couldn’t rule out that our own president might take us into such an apocalyptic situation.”According to Taylor, the president’s motivation was simple: “Trump wanted to see something blow up, and the rest of us built contingency plans around that desire. Thankfully, he didn’t launch nukes at North Korea. But General Mattis also isn’t at the Pentagon anymore. ‘Pistol Pete’ Hegseth is.”Taylor asserts that “Trump’s nuclear fantasies go way back. When he was a candidate in 2016, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said a foreign policy adviser had come away from a briefing with Trump rattled, because Trump asked, three separate times, some version of the question: ‘If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?’ Candidate Trump also told The New York Times he wasn’t sure it ‘would be a bad thing for us’ if Japan built its own nuclear deterrent against North Korea, and he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Saudi Arabia should have nukes, too, ‘absolutely.’” And “since then, Trump has toyed with nuclear weapons more openly and more recklessly than any American president ever entrusted with the stewardship of the bomb.”Now, amid an “unresolved war with Iran,” warns Taylor, “you get the picture of a president who’s just one mood swing away from putting his finger on the proverbial red button.”Taylor says that Trump’s motivation is not difficult to grasp, writing, “Donald Trump has spent his entire presidency on a power quest, always hunting for the next most powerful thing he can do. And nuclear weapons are at the top of that list. To say that he’s ‘toying’ with extreme powers is probably the wrong phraseology. He’s addicted to power. Very much like it’s an intoxicant. When his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told The Atlantic that her boss had an ‘alcoholic’s personality,’ it wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue. That’s how everyone who’s served the man has come to see him … He has an uncontrollable, pathological, junkie-like urge to power.”“If deploying troops to seize foreign leaders and raining missiles on other nations isn’t cutting it anymore,” Taylor concludes. “I worry about where the quest leads next. I’ve written before about how close Trump got to using the bomb the first time. Let’s not forget what Trump reportedly absconded with after he left the presidency: U.S. nuclear secrets. Back in office, the fixation has returned.”
President Trump still won’t say where exactly the $13 billion of Venezuelan oil revenue that his administration collected has gone.“There’s some reports that the United States has taken in $13 billion from Venezuela,” a reporter asked Trump at the Air Force One press gaggle on Monday afternoon. “Where is that money going?”“Thirteen billion from Venezuela? I think even more than that,” Trump replied. “Venezuela, we paid for that war many times over. And that’ll happen with Iran also. We paid for the war many times over.”“But where’s that money going?”“No other president can say that for a long time,” Trump continued, ignoring the question. “We had a cost.... We paid for it many many times over. And now, as you know, we have a very good relationship with Venezuela.”“But where is the money going?” the reporter asked yet again.“It goes toward running the country.”“No … the money that the U.S. is taking in, where is that money going?”“From Venezuela?”“Yes.”“Towards running the country. It can go to the military. Congress has to approve it.... We’re taking in a lot of money. Billions and billions of dollars from Venezuela.”The president couldn’t offer anything close to a straight answer on where those billions went. First, the story was that it’d go back to the Venezuelan people, whom Trump pretends to care about very much. But last week, the Financial Times reported that after six months and two devastating earthquakes, the money is still nowhere to be found. The publication reported that the Trump administration must have collected an estimated $13 billion, though Trump’s statement on Monday is the first hint at an actual number.The last solid lead we had on that money was when Semafor reported that Trump would be keeping proceeds from the first sale in an offshore bank account based in Qatar. Maybe that has something to do with his nonanswer. Q: There's some reports that the United States has taken in $13 billion from Venezuela. What where is that money going?Trump: That will happen with Iran also. Q: Where is the money going?Trump: Running the country. pic.twitter.com/yGvQDtGQJj— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2026
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…
Salamanca City Central says it is pausing project with Realbotix as it addresses concerns including data privacyA New York school district has walked back plans to introduce a humanoid robot at its high school after the proposal sparked backlash from educators and community members.The Salamanca City Central school district announced on 24 July in a social media post that its pilot project with Toronto-based tech company Realbotix had been put on hold “while we work through enhanced student data privacy agreements with the New York State Education Department and continue engaging with our community and stakeholders”. Continue reading...
