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Debt Rattle July 22 2026

Jul 222026
 
 July 22, 2026  Posted by at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Michelangelo Pietà 1498


• Trump Weighs Massive Escalation in Iran (Rick Moran)
• The Perfect Metaphor for What’s Happening to the Democrat Party (Margolis)
• The Revolutionary Upside to Arresting Netanyahu (Scott Pinsker)
• The Democrats’ Financial Situation Appears To Be Worse Than We Knew (ZH)
• Democratic Leaders Join Socialists in Criticizing Capitalism (Turley)
• Trump Admin Slaps 50% Tariffs On Wide Range of Canadian Goods, Imports (CTH)
• An Uncomfortable Change in Perspective (CTH)
• Darrell Issa Wants Both of Trump’s Impeachments Expunged From The Record (JTN)
• US Intel Views Targeting of Voter Data As Election Interference (JTN)
• Court: ‘Smithers, Release The Biden Tapes!’ (Stephen Green)
• Rand Paul Discloses Evidence FBI Blocked CBP Interview Of Fauci Ally (JTN)
• The Great American Demographic Shift (Eric Florack)
• What Happens Next in Venezuela Could Define Rubio’s Legacy (Sarah Anderson)

 


 

 


 


Trump is like Putin: doesn’t want to, but can’t escape it.

• Trump Weighs Massive Escalation in Iran (Rick Moran)

Iran has escalated attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, putting three tankers out of commission while continuing to attack U.S. and allied bases in the region. Meanwhile, the U.S. delivered several massive strikes on Iranian infrastructure on the 10th consecutive day of retaliatory attacks.


Now, Iran’s tribal Houthi allies in Yemen have announced a blockade on Saudi Arabia’s oil shipments through the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The Saudis were using the Red Sea to ship some of their oil, avoiding the mess in the Strait of Hormuz. Located at the southern end of the Red Sea, it connects the Gulf of Aden (and the broader Indian Ocean) to the Red Sea.

If the Houthis are successful (most analysts don’t think they have the capability to blockade the Strait), it would cut world oil supplies by an estimated 7%. According to the Washington Post, “Already, 10 percent of global oil shipments are halted by disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, which has been largely shut by Iranian threats and mines since the U.S. and Israel launched the war five months ago.”

The strategic situation facing the president is extremely tricky. His options have been shrinking since the end of the ceasefire two weeks ago. Iran’s riverboat gamble in closing the Strait, hoping the pressure on the U.S. from allies to open the Strait would give them ceasefire terms better than they deserve, would require a capitulation from the U.S. that President Donald Trump can’t accept. Meanwhile, Iran is hurting itself more than the U.S. in closing the Strait, as the halt to Iranian imports of fertilizer and refined oil products is making a collapse of the Iranian economy imminent.

Trump knows this and is increasing the pressure on Tehran by a series of escalating attacks on Iranian infrastructure. Now that the Houthis have all but joined the war, the situation threatens to spin out of control and war could engulf the entire region. One option Trump is reportedly considering involves “a massive joint military campaign with Israel to force Tehran’s capitulation,” according to Axios. This “all in” option has been urged by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for some weeks, and given the strategic choices facing the president, it might be his best option. But not quite yet. Trump appears to be giving diplomacy one last shot.

Axios: “Qatar, Egypt, Pakistan and other regional mediators have presented the U.S. and Iran with a proposal for a 10-day ceasefire, two regional sources with direct knowledge of the effort told Axios. The Trump administration is exploring the proposal and has urged Israel to avoid steps that could close the diplomatic window, U.S. officials said. But Washington is simultaneously preparing for the talks to fail. The U.S. military has sent dozens of fighter jets and refueling aircraft to the region in recent days, assembling the forces needed for a major escalation.

Israeli sources said the IDF is on high alert and preparing for a possible expansion of the war into a full-scale, coordinated campaign within days.Ten straight nights of U.S. bombing have failed to break Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz, dragging Trump deeper into a war he has repeatedly declared won. At least three U.S. service members have been killed in the renewed fighting. Trump said Monday he had ordered the Pentagon to make Iran pay “many times over” for every American death.

“As long as American hostilities in the region continue, the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed,” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said in remarks carried by the semiofficial Tasnim News Agency. This adds a sense of real urgency to the talks. It also makes a massive military action by the U.S. more likely. Iran is still trying to find a way to collect “reasonable service fees” for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. It’s hard to overstate how terrible that would be, not just for Hormuz but for international shipping around the world.

Iran has no legitimate claim to ownership of the Strait. The tankers would not be crossing in their sovereign waters. Accepting Iran’s claim that it can legally charge ships for using the Strait of Hormuz is tantamount to piracy. The best outcome of the war at this point is to inflict so much damage on Iran that it is forced to drop its silly notion of collecting tolls and other ludicrous stipulations regarding its claims of sovereignty over the Strait and adopt a reasonable negotiating posture.

Iran has not yet adopted anything “reasonable” in negotiating with the U.S., so the next best option is to force the Iranian economy to collapse. The fallout from that — including a nation of 90 million people starving and flooding neighboring countries with refugees — would be unacceptable in the short term. That leaves forcing Iran to the negotiating table to sign a deal beneficial to the U.S. and our allies in the region.

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“..eliminating the U.S. Senate outright, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with executive and judicial bodies that Congress picks, granting mass amnesty to every illegal alien currently in the country, and defunding the Department of War…”

• The Perfect Metaphor for What’s Happening to the Democrat Party (Margolis)

Democrats have spent months trying to convince voters that theirs is a “big tent” party with a coalition roomy enough for everyone from suburban moderates to democratic socialists. It is a nice story. It also is not true. There is far less diversity of thought on the left right now than there is on the right, and the gap is only getting wider as the socialist wing tightens its grip on the party’s machinery.


Fox News host Kennedy captured that dynamic perfectly on Monday’s episode of The Five. She compared the Democrat Party’s “big tent” to a Trojan horse, except for the fact that the socialists riding it aren’t hiding inside waiting to be let in. They are already sitting on top, reins in hand, openly announcing what they plan to do once they’re through the gate.

“Talk about a fort, and all these people, from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), all the establishment Democrats are talking about this, the idea of a big tent,” Kennedy said. She pointed to the Trojan horse from Homer’s The Odyssey (oh yeah, I guess it’s a movie now, too) as the perfect visual. “The Trojan horse, they built it, but they’re riding on top of it, they’re not even inside of it.”

From there, Kennedy laid out exactly what the socialist left intends to do once it has full control of the party. “The commies have a giant saddle, and they’re on the horse, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, we’re coming in to take your party. And we’re burning the fort down. We’re burning all of it down,'” she said. The goal, as she described it, is not incremental reform. “That means that the Constitution, as we know it, does not exist; nor does capitalism,” Kennedy said.

That’s the whole plan.

The Democratic Socialists of America unveiled a new platform earlier this month that has some of the most insane, woke policies you could imagine. It calls for eliminating the U.S. Senate outright, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with executive and judicial bodies that Congress picks, granting mass amnesty to every illegal alien currently in the country, and defunding the Department of War. It wants deportations ended entirely and migration between countries left unrestricted. It would also extend voting rights to noncitizens and violent criminals, mandate a 32-hour workweek with no cut in pay or benefits, enact Medicare-for-All, cancel all student loan debt, eliminate cash bail, and impose universal rent control.

That platform is real, and it is precisely the kind of agenda establishment Democrats keep insisting their party doesn’t actually stand for.

This is why the socialist insurgency in the Democrat Party is a real problem for them. The Democrats don’t have a substantial lead in the generic congressional ballot, which means they may not win the House, despite everything that should be working in their favor. The bottom line is that the Democrats had every historical advantage walking into this midterm. Voters usually punish the party in the White House. Instead, the Democrat Party is handing persuadable voters a reason to vote Republican.

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For one thing, the UN would no longer be in New York.

• The Revolutionary Upside to Arresting Netanyahu (Scott Pinsker)

Conventional wisdom says that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is bluffing. After all, that’s what a normal, typical politician would do. The United States isn’t a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Neither is Israel. There’s no legal standing for an American politician to order the arrest of a foreign head of state based on an ICC ruling. (In fact, it would directly conflict with established international law, including the United Nations Headquarters Agreement and the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations.)


Which is why, conventional wisdom says, Mayor Mamdani is merely virtue-signaling to his left-wing base. One of the mayor’s more memorable 2025 campaign promises was pledging to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “war crimes” in Gaza. From the New York Times (Sept. 12, 2025): Mr. Mamdani had said earlier in the mayor’s race that he would arrest Mr. Netanyahu. In the interview on Thursday, he did not back down and offered new specifics, affirming that he would order the police to make the arrest upon Mr. Netanyahu’s arrival in the city. “This is something that I intend to fulfill,” Mr. Mamdani said.

Mr. Mamdani, a state assemblyman who leads in the polls ahead of the November election, said that state and local Democrats needed to show that they would take action where the federal government will not. He cited a decision made by Gavin Newsom, now the governor of California, in 2004, when, as mayor of San Francisco, he defied federal law and issued marriage licenses for same-sex couples. “This is a moment where we cannot look to the federal government for leadership,” Mr. Mamdani said. “This is a moment when cities and states will have to demonstrate what it actually looks like to stand up for our own values, our own people.”

So Mamdani catered to the anti-Israel crowd by promising to arrest Netanyahu. Big freaking deal! Hey, he’s certainly not the first politician who won an election by promising something unrealistic and undeliverable. You kiddin’ me? Broken campaign promises are a dime a dozen. They’re practically an American tradition! And that’s why conventional wisdom assumes Mayor Mamdani is going through the motions right now. When reality forces a politician to abandon a memorable-yet-undeliverable campaign promise, he finds an excuse/legal pretext and moves on. That’s how you’re supposed to play the game! If that’s your assumption, Mayor Mamdani’s recent New York Times interview makes all the sense in the world:

”Mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration was still discussing whether to arrest the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, if he comes to New York City as expected for the U.N. General Assembly in September. “I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mr. Mamdani told Lulu Garcia-Navarro this week on “The Interview,” a New York Times show, referring to the home of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice. “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” Mr. Mamdani added. “And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.”

The mayor said it was unclear to him whether he has the legal authority to order the Police Department, which he oversees, to detain a foreign leader like Mr. Netanyahu. He said he was in “an active conversation” with the city’s Law Department about the matter. On the surface, it’s the perfect fig leaf: Mamdani didn’t break his campaign promise because he wanted to. But golly gee — curses and drat — his city’s Law Department (which, y’know, is probably controlled by AIPAC and Zionist Jews) wouldn’t give him permission. And since Mamdani — unlike that “war criminal” Bibi Netanyahu — is such a stickler for following the rule of law, his hands are tied. “I tried my best, guys!”

Not only would this get him off the hook for his (absurdly) undeliverable campaign pledge, but it also establishes a political pretext for Mamdani’s next act: After he “saves” New York City from capitalism with the warmth of collectivism, voters must send him to Washington, D.C. so he can rewrite federal law — and hold Netanyahu accountable for his horrible “genocide.” This will be the dominant theory between now and September. Conventional wisdom will recite it, chapter and verse. Netanyahu won’t be arrested. The mayor is paying lip service to a broken promise. Trouble is, this theory assumes that Zohran Mamdani is a normal, typical politician. But what if he’s not?

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No-one gives money to a lost cause.

• The Democrats’ Financial Situation Appears To Be Worse Than We Knew (ZH)

The Democratic Party’s money problems have been an open secret for months. Federal Election Commission filings from around six months ago showed the Democratic National Committee entering the final stretch of last year with barely $12 million in its campaign account and nearly $16 million in debt, most of it stemming from a loan the committee took out the previous month. Donations had slumped just as the party needed them most.


Since then, the political environment has arguably been extremely beneficial for Democrats, with President Donald Trump’s low approval ratings, the war with Iran, and high gas prices. Any one of those should have been enough to give the party the momentum necessary to get them out of their financial slump. Now, instead of turning the financial picture around, the DNC appears to be doing something stranger: hiding it.


According to a report from Axios, DNC officials required senior leadership to sign non-disclosure agreements before a private meeting on the party’s finances, a departure from the committee’s usual practice. Two people familiar with the conversations said the DNC requested the NDAs ahead of the recent finance meeting. The DNC asked its officers, high-ranking members of chair Ken Martin’s own team, to sign the agreements, the kind of people who typically never sign confidentiality paperwork before sitting down to talk numbers.

The senior officers’ meeting took place on June 25, five days before the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that upended the rules governing how parties fund their candidates. The timing alone tells its own story about how the DNC is managing its message heading into a midterm cycle it can’t afford to fumble.

Martin has spent months fending off a quiet but persistent crisis of confidence among Democratic donors, operatives, and even members of his own committee, all of them watching the Republican National Committee build a fundraising advantage heading into the Nov. 3 midterms that keeps getting harder to explain away. The numbers through the end of May make the gap plain. The DNC held just under $15 million on hand against $18 million in debt, while the RNC sat on $125 million with no debt at all.

The DNC declined to comment on why it required only its officers to sign confidentiality agreements before the finance meeting, and they’re trying to pass it off as inconsequential. Chris Lowe, the committee’s national finance co-chair, claimed that requiring officers and board-meeting attendees to sign NDAs is standard practice in the corporate world. Lowe added that senior DNC staff already operate under confidentiality agreements and argued it would be poor practice to discuss finance and political strategy at the highest levels without them in place.

A DNC official claimed that Martin’s committee has raised more money this cycle than the DNC did in 2017 and 2018, the last time Democrats headed into a midterm without the White House; however, it’s not clear whether that accounts for inflation.

Ultimately, the NDA strategy will not keep the party’s finances hidden, since those numbers will become public through Federal Election Commission filings. The agreements clearly exist for other reasons, such as protecting the internal deliberations, party infighting, donor threats, doubts about Martin’s leadership, and any strategic response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in NRSC v. FEC. The financial numbers clearly aren’t good, but what the party plans to do about them is likely what they’re really trying to hide.

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Look at me! I’m so modern!

• Democratic Leaders Join Socialists in Criticizing Capitalism (Turley)

“Imagine the end of capitalism.” Those words in the Democratic Socialists of America manifesto offer Americans a world without landlords, debt, mandatory work hours, and “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation… are common goods and utilities.” The left often refers to radical changes as “reimagining” everything from police to the Supreme Court to prisons to borders. However, the rise of socialists in the Democratic Party has moved such claims from the merely rhetorical to the outright revolutionary.


The release of the DSA platform on Bastille Day, July 14, was fitting since the Jacobins pushed for the same unicameral system that the socialists are now advocating.The platform promised to change the constitutional system and end the rule of “the same criminal class of billionaires and war profiteers.” The DSA, which counts various Democrat figures such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, includes a plan to eliminate the Senate, the Supreme Court, the presidency and other institutions in remaking the American constitutional system.

In my new book “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” I discuss the rise of socialism and the move among professors and pundits to scrap key aspects, or the entirety, of our constitutional system on the 250th anniversary of the republic. The book compares many of these proposals to identical policies of the Jacobin movement in the French Revolution. It is a book about revolutions and how they can consume those who start them. Both the American and French revolutions arose during the same period, but one became the world’s oldest democracy while the other became a blood-soaked tyranny known as “The Reign of Terror.”

Notably, the Jacobins pushed for the same unicameral system that the socialists are now advocating. Even figures such as Thomas Paine (one of two figures who played a significant role in both revolutions) supported such measures to allow for more direct democracy. It was an approach that the Framers expressly rejected. Great students of history, they did not want to replicate the elements that led to the destruction of past democracies going back to ancient Athens. Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, referred to it as democracies becoming “mobocracies.”

The DSA is the direct descendant of the Jacobins in seeking to tear down moderating institutions and replace the president and justices with democratically elected figures by a Congress composed only of the House of Representatives. However, many of these suggestions are also found among leading academics and influencers. As with the original Jacobins, those demanding these changes are not the working class but professors, pundits and young college-educated voters. Mainstream figures such as Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law School, have published books such as “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”

The media eagerly publishes these radical views, such as the New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” in which Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale call for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” It was an approach that the Framers expressly rejected. Great students of history, they did not want to replicate the elements that led to the destruction of past democracies going back to ancient Athens. As discussed in “Rage and the Republic”:

“Those who want to remain in favor often pander to the extremes. Radical leftist sites like the Jacobin have grown in popularity… They use some of the same words and symbols but still seem improvisational and inauthentic, like a child’s game of dress-up with oversized outfits. Indeed, that is precisely the danger.

“There is little knowledge, let alone memory, of what such radicalism became under the real Jacobins. There is the same blissful ignorance that allowed Rousseauian dilettantes to mutate into monsters, escalating radical agendas with every failure… As the popular slogans became disastrous policies, the momentum would carry them beyond any point of recognition or return. The new Jacobins show the same blind ambition and abandon in striking out at institutions and the Constitution itself.”.

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Playing around with SCOTUS.

• Trump Admin Slaps 50% Tariffs On Wide Range of Canadian Goods, Imports (CTH)

It is very obvious from the construct and details of this announcement that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has completed a comprehensive review of the retaliatory action by Canada that followed the U.S. Section 232 tariffs on Steel and Aluminum. Last year two countries retaliated against the U.S. for the 232 (steel and aluminum) tariffs, China and Canada. The USTR office has now quantified the tariff and non-tariff barriers triggered by Canada in 2025 and provided President Trump with a financial quantification of the trade impact.


The three Canadian retaliatory sectors highlighted include: (1) Alcoholic Beverages, (2) Motor Vehicles, (3) Dairy Products. These are the three segments quantified by USTR Greer that form the baseline for the U.S. to retaliate with countervailing duties. Effective 30 days from now, August 16, 2026, President Trump has established a 50% tariff rate against a wide variety of Canadian imports. Essentially three major Annexes: under the authority of Section 338.

Section 338 authorizes the President, if he determines it will serve the public interest, to offset any burden or disadvantage placed on the commerce of the United States by an unequal imposition or discrimination by a foreign country by specifying and declaring additional duties not to exceed 50 percent ad valorem (or its equivalent) and not to take effect earlier than 30 days after the President’s proclamation finding that a foreign country imposes an unreasonable charge, exaction, regulation, or limitation that is not equally enforced on the like articles of every foreign country, or discriminates in fact against U.S. commerce in a way that places the commerce of the United States at a disadvantage compared to the commerce of any foreign country.

Section 338 also authorizes the President to suspend, revoke, supplement, or amend any proclamation under section 338 whenever the President deems that the public interests require such action. Further, section 338 authorizes the President to exclude products of the foreign country if the foreign country maintains or increases the discrimination against the commerce of the United States and the President deems the exclusion to be consistent with the public interests and the interests of the United States.

The 50% tariffs apply to food, alcohol, beer, clothing, chemicals, electronics, flowers, fragrance oils, chemical raw materials and importantly wood products.mThe wood products are a big hit to the Canadian export sector. This includes paper goods, cardboard, plywood and fabricated pulp wood derivatives like particle board (MDF). This is a huge export sector for Canada that will now trigger a 50% tariff rate. Essentially, the list is very long and includes almost every assembled component part created by Canadian manufacturing.

We can surmise the baseline is part of the non-negotiable trade calculation done by President Trump and USTR Greer, that will carry forward into any further trade agreement inside or outside the USMCA construct. Meaning if the trilateral agreement holds (USMCA), these valuation targets will be part of the expectation from the USA side of the discussion toward Canada. However, in the more likely scenario a bilateral trade agreement is preferred, this now quantifies the tariff reciprocity anticipated by the USA, in addition to the elimination of non-tariff barriers

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“Do we really think valid and secure elections are in the interests of a corrupt FBI organization?”

• An Uncomfortable Change in Perspective (CTH)

I would strongly suggest interested readers or researchers to go back and look carefully at the very public comments from Senate Intelligence Community Vice-Chairman Mark Warner, as they relate to the seizure of Fulton County, GA, election records. What you might notice forms the background of an uncomfortable change in perspective. In nearly all of Warner’s remarks, his main argument centered on opposing DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County election records warehouse. He wasn’t worried about the FBI seizing the records; rather, he was deeply concerned about Gabbard observing the seizure.


Here’s part of the bigger problem. When wrongdoing, fraud, corruption, or criminal activity occurs within a federal agency, including the Intelligence Community, the FBI is the institution tasked with investigating it. That’s the problem. People ask repeatedly, why has there been no accountability for the obvious corruption? Perhaps we really don’t want to accept the obvious answer. The FBI is doing corrupt, criminal and fraudulent stuff because the institution of the FBI is comprehensively corrupt. As a consequence, they are allied -directly or through willful blindness- with operatives in other agencies doing criminal, corrupt and fraudulent stuff.

Think about “security clearances.” Which agency or institution determines the outcomes of Security Clearance reviews or investigations? Who is responsible for approving or denying security clearances? The same FBI. The same FBI agency who took possession of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner’s laptop and Hunter Biden’s laptop. The same FBI agency who took custody of Jeffrey Epstein’s safe contents. The same FBI agency who raided James O’Keefe to retrieve the Ashley Biden diary. That’s the same FBI agency now with custody of the Fulton County election evidence.

The same agency who investigated the J6 pipe bombing, the Las Vegas mass shooting, the various Trump assassination attempts and even the TWA-800 explosion. That’s the same agency that seemingly cannot stop Antifa terrorist attacks yet can pour over 1,500 agents into a J6 investigation. The FBI now has the physical ballots and machines from the Fulton County election offices. Do we think the FBI wants honest elections?… that could result in larger ranks of honest, elected officials?… that could then hold oversight over the FBI? Do we really think valid and secure elections are in the interests of a corrupt FBI organization?

While leading the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and overseeing the revocation of security clearances from dozens of career intelligence operatives, Tulsi Gabbard was in a unique position to uncover the motives and intentions of the FBI as a governmental institution. FBI agents and analysts were assigned to desks inside the ODNI. Do you remember the leaks against Tulsi Gabbard?

Perhaps now we can contextualize why Tulsi Gabbard was in Fulton County, GA. And, more importantly, why the SSCI was going bananas when they found out she was there. Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chairman Mark Warner was not apoplectic the FBI was in Fulton County, Georgia, taking control of election machines and ballots. Warner likely already knew what the FBI was doing there. The same motive and intent behind all the mysteriously missing laptops (Clinton, Abedin, Weiner, Awan, Biden) of evidence that seemingly vaporized from the public psyche. No, Senator Mark Warner was apoplectic because Tulsi Gabbard followed the FBI to Fulton County, to watch them take custody of evidence with the motive to watch their intent.

The FBI was forced into action because Garland Favorito was annoyingly and methodically winning the painstakingly slow legal arguments, and there was a full summer of concern before the next election was scheduled. Someone was going to be looking at those raw election ballots, those physical receipts, records and factual tabulation outcomes. The FBI took over.

Do you remember when Fulton County commission chair, Robb Pitts, said at a press conference he received a phone call –two days before the FBI served a criminal warrant to seize 2020 election documents– to warn that he, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, former Raffensperger deputy Gabriel Sterling and others in the state were at risk of imminent arrest by federal agents. {SOURCE} Robb Pitts was tipped off by someone in DC.

DNI Tulsi Gabbard said she went to Fulton County, to watch events as approved by the White House. There is every reason to believe her statement. Recently, there was a reported considerable disparity between what Acting DNI Pulte wanted President Trump to outline in his speech on election manipulation, and what the White House insiders were comfortable with {SOURCE}. The final outcome within the Trump speech was ‘smoothed’ by the Intelligence Community.

If we modify our perspective to consider the DNI was not a participant to law enforcement activity, but rather the DNI was bearing witness to a crime taking place; then suddenly, Senator Mark Warner’s apoplexy makes a lot more sense.

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“.. making sure that we recognize and validate that false information and withheld information caused a Congress to think they could vote to impeach him,”

• Darrell Issa Wants Both of Trump’s Impeachments Expunged From The Record (JTN)

Republican allies hoping to erase Trump impeachment votes including California’s Darrell Issa California GOP Rep. Darrell Issa said he is pressing ahead to have President Donald Trump’s two impeachments expunged, arguing Democrats wouldn’t have voted so easily had the evidence of falsehoods been public. “I intend on doing just that, making sure that we recognize and validate that false information and withheld information caused a Congress to think they could vote to impeach him,” Issa told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Monday.


“Knowing what we know now, even many of the Democrats would have had a much harder time facing the voters, knowing that they had willfully used false information.” Trump is discussing plans to seek to have Congress pass a resolution to expunge both of his impeachments from his first term and his allies want to help him do so. Trump told the Wall Street Journal on June 11 that the expunging “should be done because I did nothing wrong.” In 2019, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. These charges were based on his alleged withholding of military aid to Ukraine to pressure the country into investigating Joe Biden.

Trump was impeached a second time in February 2021 on an article of incitement of insurrection following the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.In both impeachments, the Senate fell short of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict Trump.Issa, who represents San Diego and Riverside counties, is a former U.S. Army Captain and successful businessman. He stands with other congressional leaders who agree with expunging the Trump impeachment votes. Mike Johnson, R-La., told the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s impeachments should be erased.

“I think it makes a lot of sense. The more the evidence comes out, the more we know they really were sham impeachments,” Johnson told the Journal. “We were saying it at the time, now we know. And they make a very compelling case that it should be expunged from the record, because it was a hyperpartisan attack job.”

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“Passing the Save Act would certainly make a big difference,” [..] “At the end of the day, there will be no question at all elections, the outcome, will be in doubt unless we pass it.”

• US Intel Views Targeting of Voter Data As Election Interference (JTN)

President Trump presented evidence last Thursday night that China had compromised and obtained 220 million American voter registration files but media have been downplaying it ever since. When the Biden Justice Department announced that Chinese hackers had gotten their hands on Great Britain’s publicly available voter files in 2024, American news media clamored with stories claiming it was a “dangerous” breach. The same, too, when U.S. officials announced Russia and Iran had hacked small numbers of U.S. voter files in 2020 and 2021. The reason was simple: U.S. intelligence agencies believe the targeting and acquisition of voter registration files is an act of election interference.


“Election interference is a subset of election influence targeted at the technical aspects of the election, including voter registration, casting and counting of ballots and reporting of results,” an October 2020 National intelligence Council report on election interference explains. In other words, the compromising of election voter registration data, is, by the definition of intelligence agencies, an act of election interference.

Nothing to see here, move along, legacy media now says
When President Donald Trump presented confirmed evidence last Thursday night that China had compromised and obtained 220 million American voter registration files, the news media swung 180 degrees in the opposite direction. They argued it was old news (it was not) and not a big deal because you can buy limited data in America related to voter registration commercially. According to security experts, that limited data accessibility is not the same thing. The intelligence agencies in the very documents that Trump declassified and made public for his announcement show the voting integrity and security concerns.

In 2022, the National Security Agency became especially concerned that China had escalated its exploitation of voter data by assigning a “CNE.” That’s a person or unit who are hackers and cyberthieves. Legacy news media have ignored this fact, while center-right-leaning publications were not as quick to dismiss the accuracy or impact of the data breach.

The Washington Times reported that “Trump said during his primetime address on Thursday that the People’s Republic of China acquired 220 million U.S. voter files containing names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive information. Shortly after the speech, the White House released to the public dozens of declassified documents containing partially redacted findings, including data showing nearly 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections and details over a “slow-walked” 2020 FBI investigation in Michigan.”

Great Britain’s voter files are commercially available in limited form like America’s. But China got versions of the British that caused the Biden administration to indict China for hacking 40 million British voter files. According to the BBC, the British government called it “malicious” interference in their election. In 2021, the Biden Justice Department indicted two Iranian hackers for accessing just 100,000 voter files from a single state where it is also commercially available. They were charged with criminally interfering in the 2020 election even though voter files are commercially available in limited form.

If China’s acquisition of 40 million files in Great Britain and Iran’s acquisition of 100,000 files in America were both charged as criminal election interference, it would seem the acquisition of 220 million voter files almost certainly would be considered by the intelligence community to be an act of interference.

At this point, what difference does it make?
Whether the data breach would have or could have flipped the election is beside the point. Experts interviewed by Just the News agreed. Former CIA operations officer Rick de la Torre called the news media’s dismissal of Trump’s claims “absurd.” “Of course, this is election interference,” he added. “With that information, with that data, you know the Chinese government can exploit it. They can target specific individuals. They can do all kinds of things. They could request ballots. They could change people’s identifications. They know now how they vote. They know what their political parties are. They know how often they vote.”

“Imagine if China hacked into the Pentagon and stole every military service member’s personnel file,” he told Just the News. “You know, you wouldn’t say, ‘Oh well, that’s not really a big deal. That’s not a threat from a national security standpoint.’ You know, that’s absurd. Mike Davis, a former top lawyer for the Senate Judiciary Committee, which dealt with major data breaches in the past, said the media is disserving the public by downplaying or ignoring what Trump reported and that the intelligence analysts who hid the data breaches from Trump and Congress years back could be prosecuted.

“They obstructed, and they conspired to provide doctored evidence to the President of the United States about a foreign invasion of our elections, and they must be held accountable. They must be arrested. They must be charged,” Davis said. Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla., was Secretary of State of Florida from 2019 to 2022 and said she was never notified as the election chief in one of the largest battleground states about China’s acquisition of voter files. She said Trump’s revelation was “a big deal.”

“There are a number of different components to conducting good elections,” she told the Just the News, No Noise television show on Monday evening. “Of course, we have our voting tabulation systems, but we also have to maintain voter rolls, public information, public-facing websites. And all of these things are things that can be targeted by our foreign adversaries in their attempt to either interfere with our process and procedure or affect voter belief and confidence in our system.” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., agreed and said Trump’s rush to better secure voter data is essential.

Restoring confidence in an honest democratic process
“There is still a lot of work to be done. Passing the Save Act would certainly make a big difference,” he told Just the News. “At the end of the day, there will be no question at all elections, the outcome, will be in doubt unless we pass it.

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Robert Hur.

• Court: ‘Smithers, Release The Biden Tapes!’ (Stephen Green)

“The US Appeals Court for DC has DENIED Joe Biden’s emergency request to block the release of his FIVE HOUR interview with Special Counsel Hur in 2023,” Nick Sortor posted late Monday night, finally giving the public a good, hard look at Biden’s fitness. “In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Biden’s attempt to stop the Heritage Foundation from getting the material,” CBS News reported through clenched teeth Tuesday morning. The majority wrote, “We conclude that Biden has not shown a likelihood that the requested materials must be withheld from disclosure.”


Prepare yourself for the Mother of All I-Told-You-Sos. If you’ll recall, the interviews were held way back in 2016 and 2017, when Biden’s Promise Me, Dad biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, conducted hours’ worth of interviews with the former veep. This was years before Biden even entered the 2020 Democrat primaries, and decades after anyone with eyes and ears had concluded that the Delaware senator was about as sharp as an over-boiled turnip. The recordings “gained interest from the Heritage Foundation several years later following an investigation by former special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s handling of sensitive government records after his vice presidency,” as CBS put it.

You know, the exact same thing that the Biden cabal would later dispatch armed FBI agents to Mar-a-Lago for. The White House was doing a pinky-swear investigation of itself because of that time when the former Obama veep accidentally left boxes and boxes of classified docs in his garage with his Corvette. At first, Biden was prompted to tell people that his garage is a secure location because, unlike the Trump compound on many well-guarded acres at Mar-a-Lago, Biden’s garage door has one of those twisty lock handles on it. That garage was practically a SCIF, they claimed. But flash forward again to February 2024, when Hur declined to press charges in the most damning way possible.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur concluded at the time. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” Translation: The President of the United States is too senile to be held accountable.

More from CBS: The special counsel’s report, released in 2024, included passages that referenced Biden’s conversations with Zwonitzer. The special counsel wrote the recordings showed the former president’s “diminished faculties and faulty memory,” and said his conversations with Zwonitzer were “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” Which, of course, raises once again the question conservatives have asked since roughly Jan. 21, 2021: Who was running the country while Presidentish Joe Biden slurped his ice cream, slurred his words, and auto’d his pen?

Democrats and the Complicit Media spent years covering up Biden’s lack of fitness for office, and only his incoherent performance at his June 2024 debate with Donald Trump broke the spell. That’s when conservatives shouted, “THIS IS WHAT WE’VE BEEN TELLING YOU FOR YEARS!” Has there ever been a Democrat former president that Democrats have tried so hard to ignore? Jimmy Carter, probably… and even him they did their best to rehabilitate after he’d been out of office long enough. But Biden? There’s no rehabilitation for our first (and hopefully last) Zombie President, thanks to a federal appeals court and the video interviews we should have seen years ago.

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Peter Daszak. Remember Him?

BTW, CBP=Customs and Border Patrol

• Rand Paul Discloses Evidence FBI Blocked CBP Interview Of Fauci Ally (JTN)

Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul released new documents Monday that he said revealed the FBI stopped Customs and Border Patrol from searching and questioning Peter Daszak upon his return to the United States from China. The latest documents come just over a week before former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci is set to testify in front his panel on whether he lied to Congress during the pandemic about whether his office had funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.


Paul said that CBP was prepared to stop Daszak, who was the president of EcoHealth Alliance at the time, when he landed in New York in February 2021, but was told by the FBI days before Daszak landed not to question him and the inspection never took place. CBP was reportedly expected to ask Daszak about his contacts at the Wuhan lab, whether he collected or transported biological samples, and what happened during his trip to China. Paul said the documents can be found on a new database his team has put together called the “Reading Room,” which is now accessible to the public so they can review the documents themselves. The database will be updated as the investigation continues.

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“Nobody’s forcing the melting pot to melt anymore—it just sits there, lukewarm, while everyone pretends it’s still working.”

• The Great American Demographic Shift (Eric Florack)

Are culture and demography destiny? I say yes, and suggest that it’s hard to argue otherwise. A nation isn’t lines on a map or a stack of statutes. It’s the people who live there, the values they bring, and the institutions they either sustain or slowly gut. Swap enough of a population—say, trade native-born Americans steeped in the country’s traditional culture for large numbers of newcomers from, say, Islamic cultures—and you swap the politics, the economy, and the outcomes that follow. That’s not a hot take. That’s arithmetic, and arithmetic doesn’t negotiate.


Import the third world’s populations without assimilation, and you import the third world’s problems along with them. Nobody should clutch his or her pearls over this. Countries differ wildly in educational attainment, institutional trust, corruption, civic participation, family structure, and cultural expectations—and none of that magically dissolves the moment someone crosses a border. Some immigrants assimilate fast and become genuine assets to the country. Others don’t bother trying. Either way, that’s a choice the immigrant makes, not a mystery anyone needs to solve.

Push migration past the speed a society can actually absorb, and the receiving country doesn’t just gain people. It inherits the statistical baggage those populations carry with them, whether anyone wants to admit it over dinner or not.

America has run one of the largest demographic experiments in its own history over the last 50 years, and nobody put it on a ballot. Census data shows non-Hispanic whites made up roughly 83 percent of the country in 1970. By 2022, that number had cratered to about 59 percent, while the foreign-born share hit nearly 14 percent—the highest in over a century. Pew Research Center’s breakdown lays out the same trend in granular detail, for anyone who wants the receipts instead of the vibes. Outside of literal territorial conquest, this country has never reshuffled its population this fast, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make the numbers move back. Nor does it negate the effects of those changes.

Institutions feel it whether pundits admit it or not. Schools scramble to teach in a dozen languages instead of one. Public services stretch to cover populations growing faster than anyone planned or budgeted for. Communities that once shared a civic backbone now can’t agree on what “American” even means anymore. National identity, once assumed, gets litigated at every dinner table and school board meeting in the country—which is exactly the kind of national pastime nobody asked for.Numbers matter for assimilation, too, and not in the feel-good way.

It’s quite true that in the past, we have had many years of success with immigration in large numbers, Thing is, those earlier immigrants landed in a country whose culture dominated without apology. English wasn’t optional. American customs won by default, and schools, churches, neighborhoods, and workplaces that all pulled in the same direction reinforced them. Today’s migration levels, paired with smartphones, satellite TV, and neighborhoods that never require anyone to leave their home language at the door, let newcomers stay culturally untethered for generations. Nobody’s forcing the melting pot to melt anymore—it just sits there, lukewarm, while everyone pretends it’s still working.

The fallout doesn’t stop at language. Social trust erodes when communities fragment along cultural lines instead of knitting together. Political fights increasingly split along ethnic and cultural interest groups, instead of shared national priorities. Public schools burn resources on remediation instead of excellence. Cities buckle under the fiscal weight of rapid growth, housing shortages, and social services stretched thinner every year. Ask yourself honestly: were these problems anywhere near this bad before the border opened under President Biden?

None of this means every immigrant is a problem—plenty succeed, build businesses, wear the uniform, and become model citizens, and good for them, and us. But nobody builds sound public policy on anecdotes, heartwarming or otherwise. The truth is, policy runs on aggregate effects, and large-scale demographic change moves every statistical needle there is: education, income, welfare participation, language proficiency, incarceration, health outcomes. When those numbers move, asking why isn’t bigotry. It’s the due diligence this country apparently forgot how to do, and I believe that to the largest of degrees it was a conscious choice on the part of the left.

Critics love to slap the “xenophobia” label on this conversation and call it a day—case closed, argument won, no further thinking required. Funny though, how demographics matter in literally every other policy discussion. Governments track age, education, family structure, employment, and income because all of it predicts future strain on schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and budgets. Population composition matters everywhere except, apparently, the one place it’s most politically inconvenient to admit it. That’s not principle. That’s a dodge dressed up as compassion.

The real question was never whether immigration changes a country. Of course it does—only a fool, or someone trying to hide something from you, argues otherwise, and fools, as I’ve often noted, are in no short supply these days. The real question is how much change a nation can absorb before it loses the institutions, culture, and social cohesion that made it worth immigrating to in the first place. Every nation gets to ask that question out loud, and asking it isn’t a crime. Pretending arithmetic stops working because the topic makes people uncomfortable isn’t compassion. It’s cowardice with somewhat better PR.

I have said this before and it’s still important: The primary task of any government that has any ideas of lasting, is to support, nurture and where possible, extend the influence of the culture that gave it life. So, then, what we are seeing is a failure of government in that primary task. The Brits are an example of what happens when government intentionally chooses not to fulfill that responsibility. They are the coal mine canary. The alarming thing is, we’re not far behind them. I have long since begun to wonder if we actually have the courage to address these issues head-on.

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This is a book, not just an article. Good luck. Take the day off! Bring lunch! Dress well!

• What Happens Next in Venezuela Could Define Rubio’s Legacy (Sarah Anderson)

My point is that Rubio, going into this situation, started out with a really bad hand. And, fortunately, no one in our government knew that better than him. He’s built his entire political career around attempting to remove tyranny and corruption from the Western Hemisphere, and in 2025, when he became Donald Trump’s secretary of state, he finally had the tools — and a boss — that would allow him to make that happen. Rubio has said from the beginning that the goal was stabilization first. Would there be a civil war? Mass migration? That didn’t happen.


Goal two was recovery of the oil industry and other resources to help the country have an economy once again. “Their natural resources are going to allow Venezuela to be stable and prosperous moving forward,” Rubio said in January at a congressional hearing. “And so we created the – what we hope to do is transition to a mechanism that allows that to be sold in a normal way, a normal oil industry – not one dominated by cronies, not one dominated by graft and corruption.” The final goal was — and still is — the transfer of power to fairly elected leaders, a “friendly, stable, prosperous Venezuela.”

While the process was never meant to be easy, it was going pretty well. Commercial airlines now fly from the U.S. to Caracas for the first time since 2019. Oil exports are on the rise, and revenue is held in a U.S. Treasury account, not in regime pockets and bank accounts. Investment opportunities have been opened up to private companies from the United States and other countries. Hundreds of political prisoners were released from detention centers. The U.S. reestablished diplomatic relations and reopened our embassy. Some opposition figures were able to return, and their parties’ offices reopened.

College students and workers have marched largely without fear, demanding freedom and a real government. The flow of cheap oil to Cuba stopped, and there’s been a visible reduction in Iranian, Russian, and Hezbollah operations within the country. High-profile criminals have been taken out or extradited to the United States. That’s a lot for six months, and Rubio should be commended. We’ve known from the beginning that he’s running the show. No one else could do it so well. If the New York Times and its sources are to be believed, you don’t just have to trust my intuition:

Mr. Rubio now effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and people close to both governments in Washington and Caracas, who provided details about his involvement in steering the country’s policies. Many spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private interactions and internal discussions.

While he has not visited Venezuela in person since the U.S. took over, the secretary of state is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations, keeping in close contact with Delcy Rodríguez, who was Mr. Maduro’s vice president and now leads her country on an acting basis, with the imprimatur of the United States. The two exchange messages in Spanish on WhatsApp, trading gossip, birthday greetings and selfies. Despite the banter, the relationship between Mr. Rubio and Ms. Rodríguez is far from a partnership. It is a manifestation of Trump-era American power, in which the winner takes all regardless of sovereignty and international law.

Rubio reportedly tells the regime how to spend its money — the Times compares it to a parent handing out allowance. He oversees sanctions, decides who can do business in Venezuela, and approves Delcy’s government appointments, etc. According to the article, shortly after Maduro’s capture, “Rubio told her that she had a choice between working with the United States or witnessing a broader attack targeting Venezuela’s infrastructure, military bases and senior officials.” She agreed to the former.

I was almost positive that the newspaper meant this to be a hit piece, but it actually painted Rubio as a powerful and competent figure, even if it didn’t mean to. A newer article in The New Yorker goes even further. It claims that Trump officials regularly tell Delcy, “Don’t get too comfortable, because at any moment I can send María Corina after you.'” It’s referring, of course, to María Corina Machado, beloved opposition leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the most popular politician in Venezuela — the country’s “Iron Lady” and the woman who would be, should be president right now. But we’ll get back to her in a second.

So Rubio’s the “viceroy,” as the media now wants to call him. He’s making some progress, but for the people on the ground who were thrilled when Maduro was gone, it was not visible enough. The oil is moving faster, the money is coming in, but where are the jobs and living wages? Where is the food and medicine? Hundreds of political prisoners were released, but why weren’t all of them freed? Delcy praises Trump and the United States one day, but brings back her anti-democracy and imperialism rhetoric the next. Trump praises Delcy, even though she was literally Maduro’s vice president. And why in the hell is Cabello, potentially the biggest crook of them all, still in charge of anything?

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