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Debt Rattle October 6 2026

Oct 062026
 
 October 6, 2026  Posted by at 9:17 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  Add comments


Pablo Picasso Garcon à la Pipe 1905


• Houthis Unleash Large Missile, Drone Barrage On Saudi Arabia (ZH)
• Background Context for the IRGC Appeal to the West for Defense vs Trump (CTH)
• Trump’s Diesel Threat Worked: G7 Dumps 100 Million Barrels (Thomas Kolbe)
• German Intelligence Agency Warns of Violent Conflict With Russia (Chiem Balduk)
• Don’t Know? Blame Russia (RT)
• Orders for Legal Targeting of Trump Came From the Very Top (Robert Spencer)
• Jack Smith Team Tracked Trump Defense Lawyers’ Calls (JTN)
• Jack Smith Team Secretly Met Ex-CIA Chief John Brennan In 2023 (JTN)
• Letitia James Named Special Counsel Despite Declaring Guilt of Accused (Turley)
• Pornish Hen (James Howard Kunstler)
• Karoline Leavitt to Join Fox News as Contributor (ETM)

 

 

 

 


I’m slowly starting to get confused about who’s fighting who.

• Houthis Unleash Large Missile, Drone Barrage On Saudi Arabia (ZH)

Houthis Launch Missiles/Drones On Saudi Territory
The Houthis have announced in the late evening (local) their forces have launched a large missile and drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s territory. The group has announced it again targeted King Khalid Airport in Riyadh as well as the Aramco refinery in Rabigh. Air traffic halted at Riyadh airport due to a Houthi attack, via Sabereen


An official statement also listed that Abha Airport, Khamis Mushait Airbase and sites in Najran and Jazan provinces in Saudi Arabia were targeted in the missile and drone wave. On the other side, the Saudi coalition says it is engaged in operations across Yemen’s Hodeidah ` governorate. It has some 100 warplanes for the operation, prior Monday statements indicated. Monday witnessed Saudi coalition air strikes on Kamaran Island and al-Salif District in Hodeidah governorate, according to Al Jazeera.

Saudi Coalition Fighting to Retake Mocha, Bab al-Mandab Strait Region
Yemeni Saudi-backed forces have announced the takeover Mocha city, west of Taiz province, according to government-affiliated Saba news. While as yet unconfirmed, this would be a significant reversal as the Saudi-coalition seeks to regain the Red Sea coast, with air support from some 100 Saudi coalition warplanes operating overhead.


Coalition spokesman Maj. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki said 324 “high-value targets” had been destroyed since the operation began. “100 fighter jets participated at dawn today in Operation Dawn of Yemen,” Al-Maliki said in posts on X, adding that the coalition was providing round-the-clock air support to Yemeni armed forces on the ground.

“Saba quoted a responsible military source as saying that the joint forces engaged in clashes in a number of locations surrounding Mocha, during which various types of weapons were used, and which, according to the source, resulted in deaths and injuries among the Houthis, the capture of a number of their members and the escape of others,” a regional source writes.

On Monday reports are emerging that the Houthis may have lost Mocha, in what would be a hugely symbolic setback if accurate:


However, some prominent regional watchers are disputing this:


Meanwhile a US Embassy alert for Americans in Saudi Arabia… “Due to the ongoing security situation in Saudi Arabia and the potential for aerial drone or missile attacks on Saudi Arabia, the US Mission strongly encourages all US citizens to remain vigilant and follow the guidance of national alerts released by Saudi Arabia’s Civil Defense,” it posted on X.

Read more …

“..the IRGC Appeal to the West for Defense vs Trump.”

That is just plain weird, the IRGC talking to Americans.

• Background Context for the IRGC Appeal to the West for Defense vs Trump (CTH)

Susan Kokinda delivers a great contextual overview for the IRGC letter to the world asking everyone, anyone, to help protect them from President Trump’s strategic operation against Iran.


Kokinda opens with the 26-page open letter Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps addressed to the American people weeks before the midterms, which the State Department dismissed as desperate and the Daily Wire read as a call to vote Democrat. She argues the letter tells a bigger story than anyone is reporting: it names the CIA, Israel and the military-industrial complex, but never once the British.

After President Trump’s “easy way or the hard way” remark on Iran, and his statement at the U.N. that the election won’t influence his Iran policy, the episode revisits the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, whom the letter calls an “Americanophile,” after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, today’s BP, and cites National Security Archive documents showing the British Foreign Office approached the Truman administration in late 1952 to propose a coup.

Her review then turns to a Foreign Affairs newsletter citing the 1956 Suez crisis as a parallel to the war with Iran, President Eisenhower’s refusal to back Britain and France at Suez, and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1955 Foreign Affairs article on how the British ran Egypt. It closes with Richard Haass on Morning Joe, the morning after Trump’s U.N. speech, calling it “the end of 80 years of American foreign policy,” Chatham House director Bronwen Maddox on Europe having to defend itself against the U.S., and Mark Carney telling the New York Times he spent the past year preparing for the “extreme tail risk” of U.S. military action against Canada. WATCH:

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“In Brussels, Berlin and Paris, they had counted on the Americans shouldering the lion’s share of forcing a regime change in Moscow ..”

• Trump’s Diesel Threat Worked: G7 Dumps 100 Million Barrels (Thomas Kolbe)

In the end, Donald Trump’s threat to prohibit diesel exports apparently proved credible after all. Faced with rapidly rising prices at the pump and an emerging acute shortage of middle distillates, from diesel and heating oil to aviation kerosene, the G7 heads of government decided on Friday, under pressure from the US president, to release their own oil reserves.


For the EU, the perfect storm is brewing: a rising dollar price, the visible control of the Strait of Hormuz by the US military, as well as rising interest rates in the bond markets amid the threat of a sovereign debt crisis, have made the pressure particularly tangible for the EU states: further rising energy prices will hit the fragile eurozone industrial economy considerably harder than the essentially energy-autonomous United States.

The problems of the EU Europeans are homegrown and not the result of American special interests: completely overstretched welfare states, a self-inflicted migration crisis that can no longer simply be wished away, an economy in an atmosphere of departure – though not at home, but fleeing EU regulation, excessive energy costs and the political raid of the Green Deal. They have laid a fuse to the fragile structure of the EU, lit it and are no longer willing to recognize that this powder keg could explode at any moment.

One miscalculation is piling on top of another. In Brussels, Berlin and Paris, they had counted on the Americans shouldering the lion’s share of forcing a regime change in Moscow – cheap access to the country’s energy and resources, possibly bargaining and pricing power, have by now become indispensable to keeping the EU’s economic model alive. Energy costs have to come down, as quickly as possible. From Washington to Brussels, from Moscow to Beijing, they all understand the EU Europeans’ strategic hopelessness. In the case of Russia, instead of a triumph, the result has recently been the destruction of Russian refinery capacity, ironically by partner Ukraine – the next setback in view of the EU’s energy problems.

So now comes the first step toward alleviating the energy price crisis, merely a fight against symptoms that will solve none of the EU’s structural problems. French President Emmanuel Macron explained the strategy, which essentially consists of three steps:

“First, 100 million barrels will be released from strategic reserves in a coordinated manner over a period of four months. A substantial quantity of diesel is supposed to reach the market within the first 20 days. Second, the maintenance schedules of the refineries in the participating states are to be better coordinated. The aim is to prevent several facilities from being shut down at the same time – the throughput is above all intended to help reduce the diesel shortage.

Where possible, refineries are to temporarily increase their utilization rates. Obviously, this does not resolve the contradiction of how, in the face of destructive climate policy, new refinery capacity could possibly be conjured up in Europe. These projects take long periods of time and, given CO2 certificates and climate regulation, are simply no longer profitable. In the CO2 frenzy, more than 20 percent of refinery capacity had already been destroyed in recent years. This madness is now coming back to haunt them.

As a third measure, the G7 states committed themselves not to impose any export restrictions on energy and petroleum products among themselves. This is precisely where the geopolitical background to the release of these reserves becomes apparent: the conflict between Washington and the EU had recently shifted from trade policy issues to the energy market and has now reached a temporary climax with the release of the reserves.

In addition to the measures mentioned above, the International Energy Agency is to monitor their implementation and propose a further package of measures within 20 days. All in all, the action was an act of desperation that is likely to lose its effect in the markets after a few weeks.

These weeks are exposing the economic-policy sins of a policy that was, on the one hand, driven by the understandable desire to achieve an energy-autonomous situation – Europe still obtains around 60 percent of its energy requirements from abroad. Added to the desire for autonomy were eco-socialist forces that saw their opportunity in the fight against fossil fuels not only to eliminate parts of refinery capacity and fossil energy production, but also to establish their own political center of power with the help of climate policy.

With overregulation, a CO2 extraction economy and a green patronage economy designed to enrich political friends, greater damage is being left behind than anyone is currently willing to admit. Ultimately, it was trillions spent on the green transformation, on von der Leyen’s Green Deal, that were simply burned and produced no positive effect whatsoever.A few have made themselves rich, while what remains are industrial wastelands and a slowly rotting continent in unchecked decline.

What awaits the EU Europeans who are still dreaming green is a brutally hard emptiness, delivered straight to their door by reality: The global economy still operates to 87 percent on the rails of fossil fuels and the resurgent power of nuclear energy. Everything else is propaganda.

Read more …

Translated from Dutch.

How Europe blachmails its people by making up Russian threats from whole cloth.

• German Intelligence Agency Warns of Violent Conflict With Russia (Chiem Balduk)


Martin Jäger

Germany is at risk of becoming embroiled in a violent conflict with Russia. Martin Jäger, head of the German intelligence agency BND, has issued this warning. “We are not seeking this confrontation; Russia is forcing it upon us. They view us as their primary adversary.” According to Jäger, Germany is the greatest obstacle to Russian President Putin’s expansionist ambitions. Germany is Ukraine’s most important ally in terms of military support and also maintains a military presence in the Baltic states. “That makes us a target for Russian actions.”


The failed attack at Leipzig Airport—in which drones carrying explosives were intended to blow up a transport aircraft—was just one example of such actions. The BND chief expects further attacks on targets in Germany, particularly against military shipments. Assassination attempts are also part of the threat. “Russian agencies operate professionally and ruthlessly.” Jäger made these remarks during the annual hearing on intelligence agencies in the Bundestag. The warnings were more serious than those of recent years.

According to the BND chief, Russia has been escalating tensions since this summer, launching attacks against both Ukraine and its allies. Through hybrid attacks and threats, Russia is attempting to undermine German support for Ukraine. This strategy is working: fear of a military conflict is causing a significant portion of the German population to turn against military aid to Ukraine. While a majority still supports the policy, that support is slowly eroding. Four out of ten Germans feel that the provision of military aid goes too far.

There is a prevailing sentiment, particularly in the east, that Germany is actively seeking confrontation with Russia. Parties opposed to the aid, such as the AfD and Die Linke, made significant gains in state elections last month. This view is also voiced within the governing parties. For instance, Saxony’s state premier Kretschmer (CDU) recently described the military aid as a “huge mistake.” He argued that by providing it, Germany has effectively made itself a party to the war—a conflict that, in his view, is “not our war.” According to Kretschmer, this is fueling public anxiety.

BND chief Jäger observes that Russia is exploiting this German anxiety. “Any sign of hesitation encourages Russia to ramp up the pressure on us.” He therefore expects Russia to increasingly threaten Germany with nuclear attacks. While there is no immediate threat of war at present, Jäger considers small-scale military actions in the Baltic states a real possibility. He cites the “little green men” scenario—similar to the events on the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula in 2014—where unidentified troops appear and subsequently occupy territory.

Undermining trust
In recent months, Germany has witnessed a series of incidents attributed to Russian intelligence services. In addition to the attempted attack in Leipzig, these include arson at a defense company in Munich, the discovery of a weapons cache near Berlin, and the use of drones around critical infrastructure. Martina Rosenberg of the military intelligence agency MAD warned that these actions are intended not only to stall military aid but also to stoke fear. “It is intended to undermine citizens’ confidence in the state’s ability to defend itself.” Ultimately, this leads to societal division, according to Rosenberg.

This explains why intelligence chiefs are so explicitly issuing concrete warnings. The aim is to convey the gravity of the Russian threat so that support for German policy remains intact. The attempted attack in Leipzig appears to mark a turning point in this regard: Russian hostility toward Germany is being taken more seriously.

For Chancellor Merz, support for Ukraine is a key priority. During a visit to Kyiv this weekend, Merz announced a new aid package. Berlin has pledged €11.5 billion to Ukraine this year.

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Europe gambles Russia won’t dare.

• Don’t Know? Blame Russia (RT)


Finnish President Alexander Stubb

Finnish President Alexander Stubb has blamed Russia for a wide range of security concerns facing the EU, including the influx of migrants over the summer into Ceuta, Spain’s enclave in Morocco. He later admitted that he did not know the situation in Ceuta “well enough to take a position.”


Stubb made the remarks in an interview with Spanish newspaper El Mundo over the weekend. Asked about potential hybrid threats posed by Russia, Stubb said the country would try to interfere with the upcoming Spanish election. Madrid “should expect some form of sabotage or hybrid attack. It could be related to information warfare or a campaign that threatens their democracy,” he claimed.

The president went on to allege that Russian-backed cyberattacks are “happening as we speak against Spanish banks and other targets,” without citing specific evidence. “They send asylum seekers to our border, as we have also seen in Ceuta,” he said, accusing Russia of committing acts of sabotage throughout the EU.

He also mentioned cases in which Russian-linked ships were accused of cutting undersea telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea and the recent incident at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle Airport, where explosives-laden drones were found near Ukrainian cargo planes. Germany blamed Moscow and ordered the closure of a Russian consulate in Bonn and a Russian cultural center in Berlin. Russia dismissed the accusations as “nonsensical” and denied any involvement.

Pressed further about Russia’s alleged role in the Ceuta crisis in late July, when more than 70,000 migrants crossed into the enclave, Stubb admitted that he did not “know the matter well enough to take a position.” Reuters reported at the time that migrants had been encouraged by viral videos and misleading claims about Spain’s asylum and migration rules. Spain later accused Russian- and Israeli-linked networks of spreading disinformation regarding the crisis, which both countries denied.

Stubb’s interview came after NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte encouraged members of the bloc to attribute incidents to Russia whenever they are sure or “almost sure” that Russia is responsible. “When able, when you are sure it is the Russians, or almost sure it is the Russians, attribute it to the Russians,” Rutte said this week.

Direct conflict unlikely
Asked about the possibility of a direct conflict between NATO and Russia, however, Stubb dismissed it as negligible. “Do we expect Russia to attack? The answer is no. We have no evidence of that,” he told El Mundo. According to the Finnish president, EU leaders have a “communication problem,” as some have been “acting in an alarmist way and conflating [hypothetical] scenarios with the perception of the threat.”

Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius urged officials this week not to “exaggerate” when making alarmist statements about Russia and said there is no evidence that the country is planning to attack NATO. Rutte has also said there is “no imminent threat to NATO territory.”

Nevertheless, EU officials have argued that the bloc, as well as NATO, should be prepared for a potential clash with Russia. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said the country must be ready for a conflict by as early as 2028. The German government amended its constitutional debt brake to fund military spending and passed a 2026 budget allocating a record €108.2 billion ($121.5 billion) to defense and €11.5 billion in military assistance for Ukraine.

Russia has stated that it would not attack any NATO country unless attacked first – warning, however, that Western military aid to Ukraine makes a dangerous escalation more likely. President Vladimir Putin has argued that European politicians are stirring tensions with Russia to distract voters from problems at home.

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Letitia James Jack Smith, John Brennan, Christopher Wray.

Names from dark times in which Trump was targeted.

Names you would think are now in jail or under investigation.

But instead most are still in their jobs and “functioning”.

As if nothing happened.

• Orders for Legal Targeting of Trump Came From the Very Top (Robert Spencer)

On Monday morning, the indefatigable investigative journalist Catherine Herridge posted a series of newly declassified FBI memos dating from 2022 and 2023, and demonstrating definitively that the left’s lawfare campaign against President Donald Trump was carried on with approval from the very top.


In the Biden White House, the very top didn’t necessarily mean Old Joe Biden himself. While all this was going on, the putative president of the United States was busy demonstrating that he did not possess the cognitive faculties necessary to discharge the duties of his office.

Instead, the memos show that top FBI and Justice Department officials signed off on this cynical and dishonest operation, which from beginning to end was designed to cobble together something that would appear as if Trump had engaged in wrongdoing serious enough to prevent him from running for president again, or, failing that, would so discredit him in the eyes of the American people that he wouldn’t be reelected anyway.

The operation failed. Trump became president again, and only the bitterest hardliners buy into the “34 felonies” nonsense. Nevertheless, the new memos’ evidence that the lawfare operations against Trump proceeded with approval of top Biden regime officials points to the power of the deep state, the deeply rooted corruption and politicization of agencies that should be apolitical, and the left’s willingness to destroy our free republic in order to gain control of the government.

One memo, dated March 24, 2022, is heavily redacted, but damning enough anyway. FBI Director Christopher Wray wrote to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco “to obtain your signature authorizing the Washington Field Office (WFO) to open a full sensitive investigative matter.” Wray noted that “this request is based on the recommendation of the Deputy Director, Executive Assistant Director National Security Branch, and the Assistant Director in Charge, WFO.”

What the sensitive investigative matter exactly was is redacted, but Herridge states that the memo adds: “Although members of the 45th Presidential administration are no longer in office, the DOJ Memo states that the scope of this policy should be broadly construed to ensure that Department leadership is made aware of the opening of matters that could potentially be disruptive to the democratic process if publicly disclosed prior to an election….”

These hard-left anti-Trump officials were almost certainly referring to Trump being “disruptive to the democratic process.” After all, the Democrats posed as the guardians of “our democracy” all through the 2024 campaign, falsely charged that Trump had engineered an “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, and to this day, still insist that the president is an incipient fascist dictator who is still bent on destroying “our democracy.”

Monaco sent Wray’s memo on to Garland with the note: “Merrick, I recommend you approve, Lisa 3/25/22.” And so the initiative to frame and destroy Trump proceeded with approval at the highest levels. A second memo notes on Nov. 3, 2023, the Marxist, Trump-hating former CIA top dog John Brennan met at CIA headquarters with FBI and “Special Counsel personnel.” This memo states that the “purpose of the meeting was to discuss expert testimony to National Defense Information in the forthcoming trial.”

Herridge asks: “Was Brennan being prepped as potential ‘expert witness’ in Trump classified documents case?” Maybe, but the FBI record about the meeting is completely blank. Herridge suggests “at least three potential scenarios”: “FBI agents took no notes, violating long standing Bureau procedures,” or “FBI agents took notes which were intentionally withheld so ‘Brennan conversation’ was not discoverable for President Trump’s lawyers,” or “FBI agents’ original notes were ‘electronically buried’ in a restricted file.”

Any of these possibilities only reinforces the impression that these leftist officials were busy framing Trump, and trying to cover their tracks. And not only Trump. According to Herridge, a third memo, dated March 24, 2023, “appears to use FBI investigative tool known as a ‘Pen Register’ to target phone calls of then campaign manager @SusieWiles47,” one of Trump’s closest aides.

The feds also “allegedly tracked nearly two dozen defense attorneys, five journalists, @FLOTUS, political advisers including @FBIDirectorKash.” Herridge notes that special counsel Jack Smith employed “intrusive tactics” to prepare his classified documents case against Trump, potentially violating both “First (Freedom of Speech) and Fourth Amendments (unreasonable search and seizure).”

Herridge adds that a “former Senior FBI agent says it looks like a classic FBI ‘tickle the wire’ operation. After FBI agents contact Wiles, the bureau tracks phone calls to identify who she immediately contacts. ‘On 10 April 2023, FBI WFO (Washington Field Office) reviewed WILES’s telephonic activity to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview.’” Hey, you can’t catch any fish if you don’t put your line into the water.

The overall impression that these memos give is that the Biden regime was more corrupt than any administration in American history, and that it was bent on destroying Biden’s principal opponent in a manner that previous presidents and their staffs never even would have contemplated. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if at least some of the ringleaders of this disgraceful, anti-American operation faced justice?

Read more …

“Declassified memos reveal that Jack Smith’s secret dragnet, codenamed “Plasmic Echo,” monitored senior Trump associates and staff’s contacts with lawyers, staff, and journalists during the 2024 campaign. “

• Jack Smith Team Tracked Trump Defense Lawyers’ Calls (JTN)

Already in the crosshairs for spying on Congress, ex-prosecutor Jack Smith and his team monitored the activities of President Donald Trump’s legal defense team, journalists and campaign advisers using a pen register device that tracked the calls coming to and from his chief of staff Susie Wiles’ phone, according to newly declassified memos that reveal some of the FBI’s invasive tactics used to target Trump.


Just the News reported last week that Smith obtained the phone records of several senators through a subpoena and secured a non-disclosure order from the court preventing the mobile carrier from notifying the lawmakers affected. One of those senators, Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., filed a lawsuit against Smith arguing his spying constituted an unauthorized intrusion into her civil rights.

The latest memos, released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force on Monday, show FBI agents assigned to Smith’s team in a probe codenamed Plasmic Echo used a dragnet of data gathering tactics in the midst of the 2024 election to monitor phone calls, social media, political endorsements and other constitutionally protected activities in the name of determining whether Trump broke any laws when he brought classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after his first term.

The three-year probe of the ex-president — which put Joe Biden’s administration in charge of the legal fate of his GOP rival in the 2024 election — was approved at the highest levels of the Biden Justice Department, including by Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and FBI Director Christopher Wray, the memos show.

In March 2022, Wray sent a memo to Garland and Monaco, seeking the attorney general’s approval to open a “Sensitive Investigative Matter” that would become Plasmic Echo. “I recommend you approve,” Lisa Monaco wrote at the end of the memo, leaving her initials “LM.” Days later, Garland signed the memo with his initials, giving his approval.

Field agents raised concerns that top brass disregarded
The probe also made FBI agents at times uncomfortable, with a senior official at the bureau’s Washington, D.C. Field Office (WFO) counterintelligence unit and his team raising concerns that they did not have a justification to raid Trump’s Florida home and wanted to use a less invasive solution than a search warrant, the documents show.

“WFO does not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. DOJ has opined that they do, requesting a wide scope including residence, office, storage space,” one Assistant Special Agent in Charge wrote in a July 13, 2023, update on the Plasmic Echo probe.

In that same memo, the agent laid out alternative methods for resolution, rather than executing a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida estate, including by asking “to speak with” the former president and his counsel directly.

“A reasonable step would be to recontact the attorney and inquire about any further documents. WFO has made numerous suggestions to DOJ over the course of this investigation that the most expedient way to ensure recovery of all classified documents would be to go through [redacted] DOJ has persistently disagreed,” the agent also wrote.

Smith has denied wrongdoing and last week in congressional testimony suggested he would pursue Trump all over again, denying politics was ever involved in his probe.“Anybody who has worked with me and knows me during the course of my career knows that I would not let politics play a role,” he told the Senate Judiciary Commitee. “And I would just add that if you knew the people I worked with, they would not either.”

The newly released memos show an intense focus on two constitutionally protected activities — Trump’s right to a legal defense and the normal activities of a presidential campaign. After the Justice Department and the FBI began their investigations into the then-former president, Trump announced his third campaign for the Oval Office in November 2022 and appointed Wiles to serve as co-campaign manager.

Smith had agents track Wiles’ phone calls and text messages in secret
The memos released Monday by the White House show that FBI investigators were tracing Wiles’ phone calls and text messages with at least 21 lawyers affiliated with Trump, numerous campaign staff, political advisors, and at least five journalists from at least February to May 2023.

The lawyers’ names and the journalists’ identities were redacted except for current FBI Director Kash Patel and Just the News founder John Solomon.

For example, on March 24, 2023, one FBI employee wrote: “Good afternoon, WFO is continuing to review the PR/TT on Wiles’s phone number and observed that [Lawyer 7] called Wiles at 2:04pm this afternoon for 41 seconds. [Lawyer 7] first called Wiles at 2:10pm EST on March 21, and Wiles returned his call for 1 minute and 34 seconds later that day at 2:59pm. These are the only contacts we have observed between the two of them since the PR/TT’s inception.”

PR/TT is an acronym for pen register and trap and trace, the mechanisms used to track phone calls.

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“.., but FBI agents left notes blank..”

• Jack Smith Team Secretly Met Ex-CIA Chief John Brennan In 2023 (JTN)

Doesn’t democracy die in darkness anymore? Nothing about the substance of the meeting was recorded in the notes even though the U.S. Attorney’s Manual requires agents in important cases to confer about notetaking ahead of time, memorialize that discussion and then take substantive notes of contacts with witnesses. Smith’s team did neither.


Then-Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team secretly met at the CIA in late 2023 with former Director John Brennan to discuss “expert testimony” in the classified documents prosecution of President Donald Trump, and the FBI agents who attended the interview left blank their notes of what transpired, according to bombshell memos released Monday.

The autumn 2023 interaction with Smith’s team occurred just months after Brennan testified before the House Judiciary Committee about the now-discredited Russia collusion case. Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, alleged in an October 2025 criminal referral to the Justice Department that Brennan’s testimony was false.

“On 3 November 2023, FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) and Special Counsel personnel met with former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John BRENNAN at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia,” a typed FBI summary of the meeting states.

“The purpose of the meeting was to discuss expert testimony to National Defense Information in the forthcoming captioned investigation,” the summary written five days after the Brennan interaction added. “No documents were shown in this meeting. The original Agent notes will be maintained in the attached IA.” Two agents’ notes are attached to the memo, but they are entirely blank except for the date of the meeting, the location, Brennan’s name and the government attendees.

The memos were released Monday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force. You can read them here.

Nothing about the substance of the meeting was recorded in the agents’ notes even though the U.S. attorney’s manual (formally named the “Justice Manual”) requires agents in most cases to take substantive notes of contacts with witnesses. In standard FBI practice, agents typically take rough notes by hand during an interview and later convert them into an official FD-302 Interview Report Form.

“Although not required by law, generally speaking, witness interviews should be memorialized by the agent,” the manual states, “Agent and prosecutor notes and original recordings should be preserved, and prosecutors should confirm with agents that substantive interviews should be memorialized.”

The interaction with Brennan was part of the FBI code-named investigation “Plasmic Echo,” which later became the genesis of Smith’s charges accusing Trump of mishandling classified information taken to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after his first term ended. Those charges were dismissed after a federal judge ruled that Smith was not legally appointed as a special counsel because he was not confirmed by the Senate as required by the Constitution’s Appointments clause.

The timing and nature of Smith’s contact with Brennan is likely to generate intrigue in Washington, first because he was a vociferous critic of Trump on television, a status which would make him an unusual neutral expert for a Florida jury to hear from in a case against the president.

And secondly, Brennan’s interaction with prosecutors and agents occurred just a few short months after the ex-CIA boss gave testimony in Congress that has generated widespread controversy and a criminal referral. Brennan recently got a grand jury subpoena over that matter.

In a contentious Senate hearing last week, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., tore into Smith’s perceived partisanship in launching two anti-Trump investigations and indictments. At that hearing, Hawley ridiculed Smith’s claims to non-partisanship, asserting — supported by unearthed memorandums and emails — that Smith’s actions “were in fact all about politics from day one […] it was an nothing other that an attempt to interfere, politically in a presidential election.”

Brennan accused of false testimony and obstruction of justice from different quarters The House Judiciary Committee last year formally referred Brennan for prosecution, alleging he gave false testimony in 2023 about his role in trying to bring the discredited Steele Dossier into the assessment. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe also sent a criminal referral about Brennan to the FBI following his CIA “lessons-learned” review earlier in July.

After his tenure as CIA director, Brennan continued to stand by the Intelligence Community conclusions over which he presided, even as evidence emerged that called into question the basis for the investigation into the president. He continues to be a paid “Senior National Security and Intelligence Analyst” for left-leaning MSNOW and charges tens of thousands of dollars in speakers’ fees.

At the height of Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian collusion, for example, Brennan wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which he said President Trump’s claims of “no collusion” were “hogwash.” The retaliatory screed came after the president revoked Brennan’s security clearance.

Brennan’s role in the ginned up “Russian Collusion” hoax: “The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted a criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of ‘Trump Incorporated’ attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets,” Brennan wrote, arguing Trump’s revocation of his security clearance was designed to silence those who dared to challenge him.

Brennan’s actions at the beginning, middle, and end of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and narrative are likely to feature prominently in the questions prosecutors will want him to answer in front of the grand jury.

 

 

You can read the filing here: gov.uscourts.dcd_.294102.32.0.pdf

Editor’s Note: John Solomon is working as an unpaid Special Government Employee as the chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force and has taken a leave of absence as Editor-in-Chief of Just the News while he serves in that role.

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How does this woman still have a job?

• Letitia James Named Special Counsel Despite Declaring Guilt of Accused (Turley)

“Seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman.” That verdict in the alleged Cornell rape case was delivered by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has joined a chorus of others in pronouncing the guilt of Cornell students accused of raping a fellow student. Mind you, not a single witness has testified under oath publicly and not a single charge has been brought. However, guilt is now being collectively declared from the usual figures and outlets who have never been late to mob justice.


Ocasio-Cortez declared, “I want to be clear that the culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia is protected in elite institutions across the United States and including Cornell University in this instance. It has got to stop.” We have been here before. Twenty years ago, Duke students were accused of gang raping a stripper at a campus party. The media quickly lionized Durham District Attorney Michael B. Nifong as he pandered to the media in portraying the students as personifying a racist rape culture in the United States.

The problem is that, from the start, the facts did not fit the allegations and there was a total lack of forensic evidence to support the claim. Crystal Mangum later admitted that she had lied.Nifong was disbarred and Mangum, who was still not prosecuted for lying about these students, later went to jail for murder. All the politicians and pundits who declared the Duke students guilty simply shrugged and moved on to the next scandal, demanding instant, uninformed judgments.

Conflicts in testimony, as there is in the Cornell case, does not mean that there was no rape. Indeed, this is a stronger case than Duke in my view. However, there is ample reason to withhold judgment until more is known. Much of what we know comes from a 101-page civil complaint filed by Doe against Cornell, fraternity-related entities, seven individual defendants and other defendants.

The alleged rape occurred on the night of Oct. 19, 2024. Doe admits that she drank heavily at a sorority house and then, despite being underage, drank more at a couple of bars before, around 11 pm, going to the Chi Phi fraternity house to meet a friend. It was there that she claims to have been drugged and gang raped. The Snapchat messages sent after 1 am from the fraternity brothers are disgusting and horrifying. Frat brothers announce that there was “free” sex with a woman upstairs, and one later asked, “Shop still open?”

Yet the case also includes countervailing statements from the alleged victim herself, including suggestions that the sex with the first couple of men was consensual.Friends recounted that Doe later laughed about the incident and said, “Oh my goodness, isn’t that crazy?” (Notably, some also added that they believed Doe was still traumatized by the experience and had not fully processed it). She also later told her sorority “big sister” that “You may hear some rumors about me, and unfortunately they are true.”

On October 22 and 23, Doe exchanged messages with one of the men who expressed regret about “how things went down.” Both said that their memory of what occurred was cloudy because they were intoxicated. However, she told him “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal.” She reportedly added that she liked being with him and another man and wanted to come over and smoke more “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.” On Oct. 22, Doe did go to Cornell Health and was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection and tested positive for sexually transmitted diseases.

On October 28, Doe reportedly wanted to go to the fraternity’s Halloween party, and her frat friend said she was welcome because “chi phi is your house and you are welcome here.” She responded with “thank u i really appreciate … i’ll bring my cigs tomorrow.” Later, the president of the fraternity contacted her to rescind the invitation and she responded angrily to her friend that “I knew this was going to happen. The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your asses.”

On Nov. 7, Doe did seek a rape kit test (which was not useful after the passage of so much time). The next day, she reported the alleged rape to the Cornell University Police Department. Cornell then moved quickly that day to suspend the Xi Chapter of Chi Phi and temporarily suspended the seven men later named in her civil lawsuit.

In her later accounts, Doe admitted to heavy drinking and drug use. She also reportedly told investigators that she was okay with the initial sex, adding, “Yeah, as much as I can be because, again, I was super drunk when I got there … But I was pretty OK with all of this.” However, she also said “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.”

Legally, the extreme intoxication and drug use undermine claims of consent. While she admits that her memory was “super clouded,” it is hard to imagine anyone believing that a student in her condition was capable of giving knowing consent. However, there are obvious problems with the case, which likely contributed to the decision not to bring criminal charges or make a criminal referral.

In New York, one threshold issue will focus on her voluntarily drinking to excess. Like other states, a mentally incapacitated individual cannot legally consent to sex but there is an exception for those who voluntarily consumed alcohol to the point that they became incapacitated. Roughly 20 states have the same exception — where an accuser must show that her incapacity by intoxication was involuntary due to being drugged or brought to intoxication without knowledge or consent.

Faced with a prosecutor who had previously declined charges (but was reopening the case), Gov. Hochul condemned the university and played to her base. She promised her own prosecutor. She then picked the one prosecutor who surpasses Nifong in the Duke case in her reputation for putting politics ahead of prosecutorial integrity: Attorney General Letitia James.

James was elected on a pledge to weaponize the legal system against President Donald Trump, promising that she would prosecute Trump without specifying any crime. She is known as one of the most political prosecutors in the country, using her office to pursue groups and individuals on the right. Former staffers recently condemned her for converting them into “Tish’s personal attorneys … targeting her political enemies.” Hochul’s appointment of James maximizes the chances of a criminal charge in the case. James has always followed the policy of the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: “Sentence first, verdict afterward.”

Read more …

“[NY Attorney General Letitia] James has always followed the policy of the Queen of Hearts in ‘Alice in Wonderland’: Sentence first, verdict afterward.”

• Pornish Hen (James Howard Kunstler)


A group of young men standing side by side stared up at the house, yelling and cursing at the defunct fraternity and the seven former members whom Jane Doe accused of assault. One of the men threatened to throw a rock through a window before his companions hustled him away. (Credit: The New York Times)

You can be certain that nobody involved in the Cornell U fraternity gang-bang circus is going to come out looking good, not the frat boys, not the girl, not the county DA, not New York AG Letitia James, and not NY Governor Kathy Hochul. The latter two have decided to showboat what has become a rape case in an election year when both are up for another four-year term.


First, the incident itself: October 19, 2024, a Saturday night when upstate New York is at its fall color peak and the campus is jumpin’, 20-year-old “Jane Doe” starts drinking at her sorority, Delta Delta Delta, Triple Delt, whose motto is Let Us Steadfastly Love One Another. Around eleven o’clock Jane goes into downtown Ithaca to do more drinking at a bar. She’s legally underage, but manages to get served.

Meanwhile, messages are zinging around on social media, Snapchat, etc. There’s a party going on at the Chi Phi fraternity Jane communicates with one of the members there. He cordially invites her over for “a threesome.” Jane apparently has a reputation as a lively girl around campus. She accepts and heads over to Chi Phi with a load on, “five out of ten” on the intoxication scale, she later writes in a nine-page statement she gave to campus police.

She arrives at Chi Phi around midnight. More drinks. Pretty soon she’s in that threesome in a bedroom. The frat boys are also pretty hammered. Things get even wilder. Four other frat boys enter the picture. On top of the alcohol, they start doing ketamine, known to produce a dissociative “floaty, out-of-the-body feeling.” One’s judgment is not too good on it, even worse when mixed with booze. The scene at Chi Phi is Animal House plus. Various shenanigans ensue. Eventually, Jane Doe gets home.

Jane makes a whole lot of statements to her friends and sorority sisters after the incident. Law analyst Jonathan Turley tells The New York Post, “Friends recounted that Doe later laughed about the incident and said, ‘Oh my goodness, isn’t that crazy?’” She also “later told her sorority ‘Big sister’ that ‘You may hear some rumors about me, and unfortunately they are true.’”

Three days later she exchanged messages with one of the frat boys who expressed regret over “how things went down.” Jane reportedly texted back, “I really liked being with you,” and “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal.” She added that she wanted to come over and smoke more “but, like, leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.”

Five days after that, she got wind that Ch Phi was throwing a Halloween party, and asked to be invited. The threesome boy replied, “Chi Phi is your house and you are welcome here.” She texted back “thank u i really appreciate. . . i’ll bring my cigs tomorrow.” Did she mean cannabis? Shortly, the president of Chi Phi chapter texted her to cancel the invitation. Jane, pissed off, texted back, “I knew this was going to happen. The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your asses.” A woman scorned. . . .

A week after that — it’s November now — she reported the incident to campus police, but gave a muddled statement saying, she consented to the initial threesome, “Yeah, as much as I can because, again, I was super drunk when I got there. . . But I was pretty OK with all of this,” adding, “I can say with one hundred percent confidence I was raped.” You can suppose this was so, too, insofar as the ketamine she took probably launched her into a semi-hallucinatory state. Due to that muddle of intention and action in Jane Doe’s statements, the Tompkins County (NY) District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to prosecute the frat boys.

Anyway, that was then, 2024. Since then, Chi Phi’s chapter at Cornell was shut down. Fast forward two years. Jane Doe has now brought civil lawsuits against Cornell U and the seven Chi Phi frat boys, plus the Chi Phi national org, plus the Tri-Delt sorority, plus the bar in downtown Ithaca where Jane got hammered, plus unnamed faculty, alumni, and executive-board members. She alleges severe physical and psychological injury and says she later left Cornell.

A week ago, Tompkins County DA Van Houten reopened the criminal investigation. Then Governor Hochul stepped in and appointed AG Tish James “special prosecutor” for the state, taking the case away from DA Van Houten. Tish James, you might recall, initially ran for AG in 2022 by promising to go medieval on Donald Trump.

There’s a bit of a problem with the case: under New York State law, voluntary drinking and drug use that impairs judgment does not legally constitute and inability to consent to sexual activity. But leave it to Tish to figure out some way to skin this cat. She made good on her promise to haul Donald Trump into court in 2023 on a civil fraud rap (Judge Arthur Engoron presiding in the New York County (Manhattan) Supreme Court. It resulted in a roughly half-billion-dollar judgment. In August, 2025, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division tossed the half-billion-dollar judgment.

The New York Times has commenced its own inquisition against Cornell U. The coverage is essentially free campaign advertising for the unpopular Governor Hochul and for AG “Big Tish” James, who proudly presides over a New York State legal system that releases indicted violent repeat-offender felons with no bail so they are free to push people in front of on-rushing subway trains. Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff has made the requisite, weepy, handwringing statement, promising to do better. Everyone must now play his and her assigned roles in this psychodrama.

You wonder if it will turn out anything like the Duke U Lacrosse team rape case twenty years ago, where the DA who brought the case was disgraced and disbarred, the students implicated were all let off, and the girl who made the rape complaint admitted she lied and was later convicted on a murder rap. But not until after racking up millions in legal fees for the attorneys of all concerned. Our country. . . .

Read more …

She misses it.

• Karoline Leavitt to Join Fox News as Contributor (ETM)

Former press secretary Karoline Leavitt has joined Fox News as a contributor. She will start providing on-air commentary and analysis on Nov. 1. “I am grateful for the opportunity to continue appearing on FOX News Channel as an official member of the extraordinary team at FOX News Media,” Leavitt said in a statement. “I look forward to bringing my unique perspective from my experience as White House Press Secretary, along with the same energy and candor that defined my tenure, to Fox’s millions of viewers across their many platforms.”


Leavitt gave birth to her second child, Viviana, in May. She returned as press secretary in June and stepped down in August. Leavitt was the youngest press secretary in history. She told reporters she would return to working for President Donald Trump’s super PAC MAGA Inc. after leaving the White House.

“The truth is since returning to the White House after the birth of my daughter, I have felt in my heart that I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary–and that is why I have ultimately made the bittersweet decision to depart the White House and embark on a new chapter in my life,” Leavitt wrote on X at the time.

“Our country is facing an existential threat from an increasingly extremist Democrat Party that seeks to destroy everything great about America, and I believe it is incumbent upon all of us who care about this country to fight back against that threat,” she added. Trump will likely welcome Leavitt’s addition as a strong voice for his administration on TV, as he has complained that Republicans are doing a “poor job of promotion” of his policies.

“I’m going out because nobody’s selling it,” he said. “The only thing we’re doing badly at is public relations,” he has also said. Leavitt ran as the Republican candidate for congress in her home state of New Hampshire’s first Congressional District in 2022. She served as national press secretary for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and as an assistant press secretary in Trump’s first term.

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Home › Forums › Debt Rattle October 6 2026

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  • October 6, 2026 at 9:17 am #252043
    Raúl Ilargi Meijer
    Keymaster

    Pablo Picasso Garcon à la Pipe 1905 • Houthis Unleash Large Missile, Drone Barrage On Saudi Arabia (ZH) • Background Context for the IRGC Appeal to th
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle October 6 2026]

    October 6, 2026 at 9:22 am #252045
    Germ
    Participant

    Another ‘rare’ SCAD. Montana. Three miles into a bike ride.

    Chest pain.
    Short of breath.
    Extreme nausea.
    Dizziness. SCAD.
    A spontaneous coronary artery dissection.
    A piece of the artery peeled off the wall and blocked the blood.

    She says she’s okay.
    Three to five months of recovery.

    She can’t get a cardiologist who specialises in it in under two months.

    Grateful it wasn’t worse.
    Grateful she saw Montana.

    That’s the line.
    Fit enough for a bike ride.
    No name for it among the doctors she knows.

    Another woman.
    Another “rare” tear in an artery.
    Another post asking if anyone else has had this.

    TVASSF

    October 6, 2026 at 9:37 am #252048
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Oil at $90 while straits are free-fire zones and Trump is bombing B1s. Discuss? Because it sure looks like the world thinks he won and oil is going to plummet soon.

    “Lingering Iranian Diplomats In New York ‘Kicked Out’ By Rubio

    Trump begging for an offramp. This is only because Trump surrendered. After landing a million men. After nuking them. When the Straits are wide open near 100% is the time that we nuke people.

    Pentagon Raises Combat Pay For First Time Since 2002 As Iran War Persists

    That’s odd: Congress raised their own pay every year during those 20 years. Maybe they were letting soldiers make up the difference with Insider Trading?

    “the official explanation for the sudden withdrawal of U.S. strategic bombers from RAF Fairford is **incomplete**.
    The speed, scale, and messaging discipline surrounding the evacuation strongly suggest that **a deeper, more complex threat picture** was involved — likely one that governments chose not to disclose.”

    I have a bad one: That we’re leaving because of a real, credible possibility Russia wants to nuke them. We don’t want to be in the European war of European maniacs. But if Russia nukes Fairford, you can imagine the U.S. reaction of attacking “Us.”

    That it’s MI6 arranging a fake “Attack” doesn’t seem to be enough to evacuate the base. Or not like this.

    “TAE has a mix of sharp observers, ex‑military, ex‑intel, and people who track aircraft movements obsessively.”

    Actually, no, you brown-nosing suck-up. But it reminds me that people who ARE like that DO see things: They spotted a F-15 with a Sub-sinking score mark on the side. So they may be claiming they sank an Iranian sub.

    What happens when you’re “taken over by America”?

    Brazil Just Became The Hottest Trade In EM
    Brazil just broke out of a multi-year range on monster volume.

    So everyone has belief and trust in them, money pours in, they get rich and use the money to do what they want. This is a bad thing. That money should be going to European Globalists and the people crushed.

    Watch: UK Police Clear Streets Of Entire Town So Migrant Boat Can Offload

    This is how badly they want this. If they have to lock up and kill every Englishman to do it… Explain?

    They are put up in 5 star hotels for free. Your kids starve in Blackpool and pursued by street gangs in Scotland.

    European Utopia Burns: Far-left Riots Spread Like Cancer From France To Belgium

    Enriched by the Diversity. It is the Oligarchs’ strength.

    France’s 200bp Nightmare Is No Longer Unthinkable
    The guillotine is back in France. This time, it’s hanging over the bond market.

    Yes, there IS a bond market crisis. It IS in government bonds. …Just not in the U.S. The U.S. will be LAST to fall. Being the core currency. Worse for their story, we are becoming definitively strongest of all nations worldwide, in economy as well as otherwise.

    “Guinness Pulls Plug On Baltimore Brewery As Costs Soar In Democrat-Run State

    And not any Blue State. Only the Red ones. Even Flagship NY, in Prime NYC: Nope! Not even once. Going to Miami. Flagship California, Paramount: everyone leaving. Whole cities, 200k people, Billions of dollars. The Trillion of Tesla could be there and was only a few years ago. …And Just as in Canada, a “Blue” nation. 40% of manufacturing closing and leaving there, again for Redder places. Anywhere but here! Anywhere but Socialism! …Which is why they had a Berlin Wall: to keep people IN. Not have voluntary choice.

    “What nobody is saying is that before the first humans are sent to live on Mars, it will/could be AI mechanical Avatars sent to build a living environment for the survival of selected humans.” -Zerosum

    I think everybody’s saying this. But maybe we haven’t been saying this part directly enough. It’s a really good idea! …However building this means we also have tech to control, repress, and murder, everyone back on earth.

    That is an extremely, very bad deal. That will almost certainly kill all of us for Elon’s entertainment.

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