Happy Freedom 250! Acting DNI Bill Pulte Fires More “Deep State” Intel Officials

Acting DNI Bill Pulte has fired more "Deep State" intel officials, according to MS NOW. The post Happy Freedom 250! Acting DNI Bill Pulte Fires More “Deep State” Intel Officials appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

REPORT: Acting DNI Bill Pulte Fires Dozens of ODNI Staff for Politicizing Intelligence, Insubordination, Gross Misconduct

The funniest part of the MSNBC report about the issue is their claim that Pulte has not been in office long enough to know who the Deep State embeds are. “I have a real question of how he would know this. This isn’t a guy who is familiar with intelligence,” said the former official, who […] The post REPORT: Acting DNI Bill Pulte Fires Dozens of ODNI Staff for Politicizing Intelligence, Insubordination, Gross Misconduct appeared first on The Last Refuge.

America 250: America’s Melting Pot Still Has Fire in It

Growing surveillance state under Trump admin sparks nationwide backlash

Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.

Israel Reportedly Planned to Assassinate Iranian Negotiators During Peace Talks

Israel allegedly plotted to derail talks by killing Iran's foreign minister and speaker of parliament against US wishes.

America's Grifter-in-Chief strikes again

The Trump administration concluded a recent mineral deal with Kazakhstan that, not surprisingly, enriches not only President Donald Trump’s own family but that of his secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick. Trump’s two eldest sons, part owners of Dominari Securities, are set to profit from the Kazakh tungsten deal. So is Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment firm run by Lutnick’s two sons.As The New York Times pointed out in its investigation of the scheme, “Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.”The phrases “self-enrichment” and “few precedents” are interesting ways of characterizing this latest instance of the administration’s corruption. Isn’t self-enrichment a good thing, in the sense of profiting from your own hard work? By contrast, the article doesn’t mention the word “corruption” at all. Perhaps the Times is worried about getting hit by yet another Trump legal challenge (in October last year, Trump refiled a $15 billion defamation suit against the paper for its coverage of his 2024 presidential campaign).There are indeed several precedents in American history for what Trump is doing. These previous corruption scandals—Credit Mobilier, Whiskey Ring, Teapot Dome—wrecked the reputations of presidents and cast long shadows over American politics. They also helped to produce the kind of safeguards that Trump is now destroying.Foreign policy is a tool by which the administration levies a toll on any entity that has the temerity to be a country other than the United States. As with much of Trump’s disrespect for norms, his corruption has been massive and largely in full view. The two outstanding questions are: Will Trump and company ever be held accountable for their graft and will this corruption have an enduring impact on political institutions in the United States?Tracking the DamageIf scandalous behavior unfolds in full view of everyone, is it still a scandal? “Scandal” suggests something hidden, something whispered about, something revealed. Trump’s actions are full frontal. They are both brazen and matter-of-fact.According to the Trump administration and its extended family, the money skimmed off the top of economic transactions is just smart politics. The administration has endeavored to negotiate every peace deal, trade agreement, investment arrangement, and mineral pact in such a way as to deliver Trump, his family, and their circle of close supporters a good chunk of change.This is Trump’s interpretation of the American dream: Folks would be downright foolish not to profit from their position. All the great tycoons made their money, from railroads to AI, by being in the right place at the right time with the right amount of ruthlessness. In Trump’s case, however, he is using taxpayer money to cover the risk. And most the time, given the terms of the arrangement, there is hardly any risk because Trump is using his presidential power to game the system. That’s what he really means by the “art of the deal.” Trump only deals from a marked deck of cards.The Center for American Progress runs Trump’s Take, which estimates that the president has received a little over $2.6 billion in cash and gifts since he took office in January 2025.The graft is not secret, though sometimes the actual amounts involved are obscured by layers of complex finance. Trump’s recent mandatory financial disclosure offers some details. But thanks to a number of websites, it’s become quite easy to track in real time the growing amount of Trump’s slice of the pie.The Center for American Progress runs Trump’s Take, which estimates that the president has received a little over $2.6 billion in cash and gifts since he took office in January 2025. Much of this money has come from various crypto schemes, including the Trump meme coin, but also such dubious ventures as the documentary about Melania Trump and a number of legal settlements (more colloquially known as shakedowns). Corruption Counter puts the value at $2.2 billion and includes such recent items as the $100 million savings for Trump from the recent effort to bar the Internal Revenue Service from auditing the president. (Courts blocked the overall $1.8 billion “settlement fund,” but the Justice Department is upholding the IRS amnesty.)If you want to keep track just of the crypto deals, the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee maintain the Trump Family Digital Grift Wealth Tracker. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) keeps his own list, which highlights the insider trading around the Iran War and a defense contract with Dell after the president invested in the company. David Kirkpatrick, at The New Yorker, has been keeping a running total of Trump’s ballooning assets. In January, he updated his total to $4 billion, which details, among other things, the Gulf money flowing into Trump pockets.

July 4th events threatened by heat wave. And, Russia strikes on Ukraine's capital

July 4th events for America's milestone birthday are being threatened by a brutal heat wave. And, Russia has struck Ukraine's capital, killing several people in what it calls retaliatory attacks.

Iran warns US, Israel against strikes during supreme leader's funeral

"This is not a war, per se. This is the denuking," Trump said of the ongoing US campaign against Iran.