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Two reigning British monarchs have addressed a Joint Meeting of the United States Congress: Queen Elizabeth II in 1991, at the dawn of an American century she still believed in, and King Charles III on Tuesday, April 28, 2026, watching America combust under the weight of a president whose compounding failures have led him to the lowest favorability ratings in his two presidential terms.

Thirty-five years between the two speeches. The chamber was unchanged: Freedom overhead, the flag behind the Speaker, the 119th Congress filling the seats. Both parties were present, the cabinet and diplomats in place, the Joint Chiefs in dress blues.

Howard Lutnick beamed in the front row.

Donald Trump was left to watch the whole thing from the White House, unmentioned even once. Whether he grasped the speech’s carefully coded critique is anyone’s guess.

But it was the speech we’d all longed for — one denied by Trump’s mob-land version of democratic government.

The King took no direct shots — he’s too smart for that — instead grounding his speech in the founding documents his nation bequeathed to America at our founding.

He cited Magna Carta. He named the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances. He invoked the Declaration of Rights of 1689, the Bill of Rights of 1791, and the Spirit of 1776. He reminded Congress that America’s founding principle came from a fundamental disagreement with Britain — a disagreement that forged a lasting partnership.

He condemned the recent perimeter skirmish at the White House Correspondents Dinner, declaring, “Such acts of violence will never succeed.” He praised diversity, faith, the climate, the rule of law, and the independent judiciary.

He invoked support for Ukraine, earning bipartisan applause from a Congress bitterly divided on the issue.

He closed on Lincoln, quoting the Gettysburg Address:

“May little note what we say, but will never forget what we do.”

Lincoln invoked; Trump never mentioned.

He blessed both nations.

The joint session sprang to its feet for several ovations. For a brief moment, sense and sensibility were restored to the chamber. It was a gentle reminder of what it means to be a parliamentarian and of who we used to be.

Some might call it routine — a state visit, a ceremonial address. But Charles spoke of grounding principles: liberty, equality, justice, democracy — that Trump views as impediments, not virtues.

“Whatever our differences, whatever disagreements we may have, we stand united in our commitment to uphold democracy, to protect all our people from harm…”

It was the type of blunt message only a friend can deliver to the representatives of the American people - while hoping it skates over the head of the man who inspired it. The King put the United States on notice — you can only meddle with democracy so much. And no more. After that, you lose your connection to your roots.

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5️⃣ Carr Comes For Kimmel And Disney

FCC chair Brendan Carr opened an investigation into ABC and Disney on Tuesday, threatening eight broadcast licenses over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue delivered three days before the Washington Hilton incident. Kimmel had quipped that Melania Trump carried “the glow of an expectant widow.” Carr’s office is folding the line into the administration’s case that critics of the president are inciting violence. Shalev framed the move alongside the Comey indictment as one signal repeating in different rooms. “We live in this time when everything this man says is designed to protect the Epstein class and treat him and everybody in it as if they are the victim class,” Shalev said. The license threat lands the same week the Justice Department began treating opposition speech as criminal conspiracy.

4️⃣ UAE Walks Out Of OPEC

The United Arab Emirates announced it will leave OPEC on May 1, ending nearly 60 years inside the cartel that has set global oil prices since 1960. The exit removes 13% of OPEC’s production capacity and lets Abu Dhabi price its own barrels. Blundell called it “devastating for oil barons, robber barons around the world.” The timing matters. May 1 is also the day the 60-day War Powers resolution comes due in the Senate with the Iran war still unresolved, and Iran sits inside OPEC. Shalev noted the Trump-floated rescue mechanism for Gulf finances may have collapsed inside the same conversation. The cartel that priced the world for sixty-five years is cracking on the day the Senate has to vote on the war.

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3️⃣ Comey Indicted Over Seashells Photo

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche filed a second indictment against former FBI director James Comey on Tuesday, this one built on an Instagram post in which Comey arranged seashells on a beach into the numbers 8647 — shorthand for 86 the 47th president. The first indictment collapsed when prosecutors admitted they had nothing. Blanche’s office is now charging Comey as a criminal conspirator in what the administration is calling the fourth assassination attempt on the president, the Saturday-night magnetometer breach at the Washington Hilton. The theory of the case is that an Instagram post months ago helped produce a man rushing the Secret Service line on Saturday night. “Cash Patel is cosplaying,” Shalev said, “and the fact that Patel feels like he can arrest Jim Comey is ludicrous.” The indictment turns critic speech into a federal felony.

2️⃣ Senate Sends GAO Into The Epstein Files

A bipartisan group of senators announced Tuesday that the Government Accountability Office will investigate the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and a New Mexico colleague signed the request. The GAO is the legislature’s independent watchdog, and its findings carry weight in both chambers. Shalev called it “the first trustworthy official investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and the Justice Department’s handling” of the documents. The timing was not accidental. Epstein survivors held a separate event in Washington on Tuesday demanding to meet King Charles, who declined. The Senate moved while the world watched.

1️⃣ King Charles Puts Trump On Notice In Congress

King Charles III addressed a joint meeting of the United States Congress on Tuesday, the second reigning British monarch to do so after his late mother in 1991, and methodically dismantled the Trump regime’s worldview without naming the president once. Trump was absent by protocol. Charles cited Magna Carta on “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” He described the Saturday Hilton incident and said “such acts of violence will never succeed.” He named Ukraine — “that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people” — and both parties stood and applauded. He praised diversity, interfaith respect, climate stewardship, and the rule of law. He closed on Lincoln’s Gettysburg line that the world “may little note what we say, but will never forget what we do.” Blundell called it “the greatest repudiation of Donald Trump in modern history.” Shalev described what he had just watched. “The king of England put Donald Trump on notice.”

The pattern across Tuesday is one signal repeating in five different rooms. The bipartisan GAO move, the cartel exit, the indictment of a former FBI director over a beach photo, the FCC threats against a comedian, and the king of England standing in the chamber where the laws are made and reading the founding documents back to the people who wrote them. The institutions that survived the last century are deciding what to do about this one.

History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.

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1. Allen chose the only door he could not get through.

The Washington Hilton has at least four other paths into the International Ballroom. Only one had a secret service-manned magnetometer screener. According to Aaron Parnas, a Hilton guest reported that the elevator key card system was disabled the evening of the dinner — any guest could ride to any floor unscreened. Despite these other options, Allen took the staff stairs down from his tenth-floor room and walked past every unguarded route to the only entrance with armed Secret Service agents standing in front of it. A Caltech-trained engineer who built drone targeting systems for the Pentagon does not pick that door if he intended to kill the president.

2. Allen Wasn’t even on the same floor as Trump

The dinner was on the Concourse Level. Allen ran at the magnetometer line on the Terrace Level — at least one floor up. Between him and the President: a bank of escalators, a thousand people, and several feet of concrete. There was no line of sight. There was never going to be a line of sight.

3. He exempted nearly everyone in the building.

Allen’s Rules of Engagement: hotel security, not targets unless they shoot at him. Capitol Police, same. National Guard, same. Hotel employees, not targets at all. Hotel guests, not targets at all. Buckshot, not slugs — in his own words, “to minimize casualties. There’s less penetration through walls.” Real assassins do not exempt the room.

4. He carved out law enforcement explicitly.

The email names FBI Director Kash Patel as the one administration official written out of the target list. As internet-law attorney Anne P. Mitchell put it on Narativ Live this afternoon, Allen “obviously thinks law enforcement is to be respected.” A man trying to assassinate the President does not write a respect-for-law-enforcement clause into his own document.

5. Trump used a secure route Allen never came near.

Since the Reagan attempt outside the Hilton in 1981, presidential visits to the venue go through a hardened entrance — drive into the garage, then directly up to the ballroom through an internal corridor sealed off from the public. Trump entered that way Saturday night. Allen approached a public stairwell on a different floor. The two routes never crossed.

6. Trump told the agents to wait.

He told Norah O’Donnell on Sunday’s captured 60 Minutes that he asked Secret Service to “wait a minute” so he could “see what was going on.” Vice President JD Vance was escorted out before him. Trump stayed seated for roughly eight seconds. Real Secret Service does not ask permission to move a protectee. A real protectee does not refuse to move. The detail behaved like a detail that knew the situation was contained.

7. He has demanded no investigation.

Survivors of assassination attempts demand accountability. They demand firings. They demand Senate inquiries. They demand audits of the security plan. Trump has demanded none of that. He has called the people asking these questions “conspiracy theorists.” He has demanded one thing: that taxpayers pay to build his stalled White House ballroom. Senator Lindsey Graham introduced the bill today.

A man who has just survived an attempt on his life — and on his wife’s — would ask “how did this happen?”. He isn’t pushing a doomed ballroom build.

The Conclusion

He was not in the same room. He was not even on the same floor. He had four other paths into the ballroom and chose the hardest. He fired one round, hit a ballistic vest, and fell to the ground. He was nowhere near Donald Trump.

The Trump regime continues to frame him as an assassin. He was not. At best, Cole Tomas Allen was a politically frustrated American who chose a public act as his expression of that frustration — a statement made at the potential cost of his own life, not the president’s.

The federal government’s charging document does not survive that read. Allen’s assassination charges will not hold up, and neither will the regime's use of Allen’s words to brand its political opponents as accomplices to an assassination that was never going to happen.

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Why was security so lax Saturday night? America’s power brokers, all in one room. A President with cratering approval, the media he hates, key card system disabled, doors left open—anyone could walk in.

Cole Tomas Allen: engineer, church-goer, broke, checks in at the Hilton, cases the hotel for two days, then picks the hardest route into the event. He takes the stairs, armed with a long gun, handgun, knives. He’s worried about collateral lives—expects to die or end up in the ER. Allen charges the magnetometers, fires a single bullet—hits an agent in a vest. That agent fires five times, misses every shot. Allen drops for reasons no-one explains.

The President hears gunfire, waves off the Secret Service for eight seconds. Moments later, at the White House, he calls the shooter a whack-job. The next day, his press secretary reads out a list of Democrats “indistinguishable from the shooter’s manifesto.” No investigation. Instead, Trump demands his stalled ballroom be built. He goes on a captured 60 Minutes, denies being a pedophile—no follow-up. A false flag doesn’t require the shooter to be in on it; just that the action is staged for a political purpose or military outcome while waving the enemy’s flag.

WHAT THE AFFIDAVIT REVEALS

Cole Tomas Allen last known full-time job was at a defense contractor making military drones. Allen appeared in federal court in Washington on Monday, charged with attempting to assassinate the President, transporting a firearm and ammo across state lines, and discharging a weapon during a violent crime. The FBI affidavit and Allen’s full manifesto dropped the same day.

Allen graduated Caltech in 2017 with a mechanical engineering degree. A year at IJK Controls building gimbal systems—tech the US military uses to track targets from the air. In 2020, IJK was scooped up by General Atomics, the Predator and Reaper drone company, owned by Republican mega-donor Linden Blue. In January 2026, Blue lobbied for fewer export bottlenecks on drones. Trump slashed the red tape weeks later.

Trump publicly announced he’d attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on March 2. Five weeks later, on April 6, Allen booked his Hilton room for three nights, under his own name. Seven weeks of premeditation.

On April 21, Allen boarded an Amtrak train in Los Angeles, embarking on a four-day train ride that’s not within the typical expenditure for someone like Allen. He told his parents he had a job interview. It’s unclear how he paid for the trip.

He checked into the Hilton with two firearms — both legally bought, both registered to his name. The FBI affidavit cites Amtrak’s travel records as evidence. It does not list a firearms-declaration form. Either Allen traveled four days unscreened, or the federal government left the paperwork out.

Allen flagged the security vacuum himself. In his e-mailed ‘manifesto’: “I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet… What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.” This is a guy who built drone surveillance for the military. He knew what real surveillance looked like—and saw none of it. Why would he think he was being pranked, and by whom?

The dinner was in the International Ballroom—deep underground, multiple service entrances. The main lobby and elevators stayed open. Reporters called the place wide open. Allen, up on the tenth floor, took the staff stairwell down with his guns in a black bag. But instead of any number of unscreened paths, he walked straight to the magnetometer line—the only screened entrance—and charged, openly, long gun in hand. That’s not a plan of a man intending to commit murder. It’s a plan that almost certainly guarantees his own death.

What makes his decision to access via the magnetometer even weirder is that he didn’t need to. According to Aaron Parnas, a Hilton guest reported that the key card system was disabled the evening of the dinner and the hours leading up to it. Anyone could ride to any floor unscreened. Parnas tested the elevator key cards the next day — and it functioned as expected.

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5️⃣ DC Rolled Its Eyes And Wolf Blitzer Lost A Shoe

The first thing the room did when the shots rang out was nothing. Wajahat Ali was outside the Hilton when it happened, held back by police as the perimeter went up. “Everything was chill,” Ali said. “The residents of D.C. just rolled their eyes. People are like, did someone try to shoot this mother effer? You think it’s real? You think it’s staged? No one cared.” Inside, Lev Parnas described after-parties continuing as the cops shut down every intersection. Steve Schmidt giggled. Dean Blundell, also inside, said the suspicion was universal. “It was, give me a fucking break.” The corporate-media reaction broke the other way. Wolf Blitzer told viewers he lost a shoe. He told viewers he thought the shooter was coming for him. “I said, just watch,” Ali said. “One of these corporate media reeks is going to make it all about themselves and talk like they’re in Fallujah. And right on cue, Wolf Blitzer.”

4️⃣ MAGA Got Its Threads

Within twenty-four hours, every right-wing influencer was on the same line. Rudy Giuliani, Jack Posobiec, Libs of TikTok, GOP lawmakers — we need the ballroom, in unison, before the ballroom had been cleaned. Ali pointed to Ashley St. Clair, the Elon Musk associate who has gone public about how the messaging works. “All these influencers are on the same threads, and they get told to do this, and it’s like pay for play. You do this, you’ll get rewarded. You’ll be a good soldier.” On Saturday it was the ballroom. On Sunday it was the ballroom and DHS funding. By Monday afternoon, Karoline Leavitt was at the lectern naming Hakeem Jeffries, Josh Shapiro, Alex Padilla, Elizabeth Warren, Adam Schiff, Ed Markey, JB Pritzker, Ayanna Pressley, Monica McGyver, and Jimmy Kimmel — declaring their words “indistinguishable from the manifesto.” The threads, in real time. “Donald Trump talks about the ballroom,” Ali said. “They all talk about the ballroom.”

3️⃣ Cole Allen Was A Hotel Guest

Cole Tomas Allen never reached the ballroom. The Washington Post reported Sunday he was on an upper floor of the Hilton, four locked doors and a flight of stairs away from where Donald Trump was speaking. He had been booked into a hotel room that night. “He’s a resident of the hotel that night,” Shalev said. “That gives you all sorts of access.” Allen has a Caltech mechanical-engineering degree, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory fellowship, a master’s in computer science, and a Teacher of the Month award from C2 Education in Torrance. He is described, in Ali’s words, as “a brilliant guy, Caltech, makes video games on the side for fun, a Christian, a teacher, very smart, very kind, very nice.” Lev Parnas allowed that radicalization explains some of it. Dean and Zev pushed back. “Why would he bother going all the way upstairs to the actual main entrance to get his way in when he was already inside?” Shalev asked. “The whole thing just reeks.”

2️⃣ Lev Said Butler Was Staged

Lev Parnas, who spent the first hours of the WHCD aftermath defending against staging conspiracy theories, said something different on the show. “After a lot of investigative work, a lot of listening and watching what transpired, I truly will say that I believe that the Butler assassination attempt was staged.” He said the same kind of operation had been planned for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and “didn’t work out.” He cited the survival of Cole Allen as evidence that this one was different — “they do not leave witnesses.” But on Butler, where Thomas Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper and Corey Comperatore was killed in the crowd, Parnas’s position is now on record. The first three armed men to come for Donald Trump in twenty-one months were, according to Wajahat Ali, all former Trump voters in their twenties who had been radicalized. The pattern is starting to settle into a sentence Parnas will say out loud.

1️⃣ The Crackdown Has Begun

Narativ predicted this morning, in The President Who Cried Wolf, that the manifesto framing would be deployed against the broader Epstein-investigative and political opposition.Hours later, Karoline Leavitt named the list at the lectern. Eight Democratic elected officials and one late-night host whose statements were, in her construction, “indistinguishable from the manifesto.” Trump on Truth Social demanded ABC and Disney fire Jimmy Kimmel for an “expectant widow” joke about Melania that ran four days before the shooting. The political product extracted from one Saturday night now stacks: the ballroom, DHS funding, the Kimmel scalp, the named list. Each new day produces another. “If indeed this was not staged, it is incredibly convenient,” Blundell said. “If there’s one thing the Trump regime knows how to do, it’s to take stuff like this and turn it into leverage, turn it into political capital.”

The Saturday-night security failure at the Washington Hilton became a Monday-afternoon target list. The list will widen.

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Three armed men tried to kill Donald Trump in twenty-one months. Thomas Crooks fired eight rounds from a Pennsylvania rooftop and grazed Trump’s right ear on July 13, 2024. Ryan Routh waited in a sniper’s hide at the Palm Beach golf course on September 15, 2024. Cole Tomas Allen charged the magnetometer line at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night, fired, and put a round into a Secret Service agent’s bullet-resistant vest. Three armed attempts on one man inside twenty-one months.

Statistically speaking that’s a 1-in-60 year phenomenon repeating itself 3 times in less than two years.

The only president to come close in the two hundred and thirty-seven years of American presidency was during the Civil War. Lincoln faced the Baltimore Plot in February 1861, a sniper’s round through his hat at the Soldiers’ Home in August 1864, John Wilkes Booth’s kidnapping plot in March 1865, and Booth’s bullet at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865 — but Lincoln’s attempts unfolded across more than four years of presidency inside an active civil war. Gerald Ford came closest to Trump’s compression — Lynette Fromme on September 5, 1975, and Sara Jane Moore on September 22, 1975 — and then no more, ever. Four sitting presidents have been killed across those two hundred and thirty-seven years.

Trump told the country Saturday night it was “a dangerous profession.” He compared himself to Lincoln. Booth shot Lincoln over the Civil War and abolition. Charles Guiteau shot Garfield in 1881. Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley in 1901. Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy in 1963 in disputed circumstances. The Lincoln comparison the President drew is the closest match in the historical record — and Lincoln’s attempts spread across four years of war. Donald Trump’s three have come in twenty-one months of peacetime, by three different men, in three different states.

This president’s chaotic tenure may echo the tumult of the Civil War, but it is in no way as bloody, and considering the advancement in our security posture, the compression is unprecedented. It begs the question: why would anyone attempt such a foolhardy assassination that would likely end in the assailant’s death well before he got anywhere near his target?

Saturday night just after 8:30 Eastern, Allen carried a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives into the Washington Hilton. He assembled a long gun in an unsecured back room. He fired. Officers tackled him at the magnetometer line and took him into custody. Donald Trump and Melania Trump left the stage with their detail. Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon left the room with theirs. Allen wounded only the agent who wore a vest. Doctors expected him to recover. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche promised federal charges within hours. None of those facts are in dispute. Within hours a manifesto “surfaces,” although it is only partially released, claiming the attack was inspired by claims the president is a pedophile as alleged in the FBI’s publicly released Epstein files.

Donald Trump entered Saturday night with the lowest favorability rating of either of his terms. His approval rating had fallen to thirty-three percent in the AP-NORC poll. His net approval had collapsed to negative eighteen — the lowest of his two terms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapproved of his handling of inflation. Trump walked into the Hilton on Saturday holding the worst political hand of his presidency.

Administrations under that kind of poll pressure had pulled rally-round-the-flag moves before.

As is often the case, it’s Trump’s over-reaction to the events. His desire to paint himself as the central hero of every narrative makes those of us who spend all our time analyzing the Trump presidency see the whole night as if it was fabricated in a darkened room in a long-forgotten Kremlin hallway that has never been reached by daylight, or the truth.

This president claims he ordered Secret Service to slow down so he could observe the room, he issued two Truth Social posts which painted an unrealistic picture of his command, and then returned to the podium at the White House drawing a direct link to the night’s events and his own desire to build a fancy ballroom for his presidential fetes. That’s not what happens when a real president or vice president faces an actual physical threat. Mike Pence was scurried away to a secure location on Capitol Hill and then shunted quietly off the scene in what was by all accounts a terrifying sequence. He didn’t show up on national TV at the VP’s residence within an hour demanding an election recount.

The fact that Pence was targeted by a mob inspired by the president is not lost on me. How many presidents stage the lynching of their VP, and are also themselves the targets of 3 assassination attempts? What are the odds of that?

Trump, whose poker game is notoriously poor, revealed his own hand on national TV when he described what he saw as an outcome of the day’s events. A scenario so far from the truth, it could make you laugh out loud, if it weren’t so serious. Trump told the country he saw a room “totally unified.” He said he saw “a tremendous amount of love and coming together.” He must have been in shock because neither of those assessments cuts close to any truth.

Then he spent two minutes on his East Wing ballroom — the $300 million boondoggle of an homage to Hitler which is also a not-so-secret privately funded construction of an uber-bunker from which Bibi Netanyahu’s friend Larry Ellison can control the world by monitoring your every move. He’s been pushing this crusade for months and the courts have been halting his efforts.

Here’s Trump’s reasoning, hours from coming within 50 feet of mortal danger. He told the country the Hilton was “not a particularly secure building” — true because it’s a publicly accessible hotel — but his ballroom would be more secure — also true, as no one can book a room at the White House using their Hilton rewards card. He rattled on about drones and a bulletproof roof which is completely irrelevant to the night’s events which feature a lone gunman on an apparent suicide mission. “Secret Service and the military are demanding it, for 250 years,” he said.

The Secret Service was founded in 1865 to fight counterfeit currency, and did not protect presidents until 1901 — 125 years, not 150. The Secret Service does not lobby for White House construction projects, and never has.

Within hours, the President’s social echo chamber began chanting in unison about the ballroom. Rudy Giuliani told his followers, “Maybe the haters can begin by supporting the WH much larger and more secure ballroom.” Jack Posobiec wrote, “Thank God President Trump is building a ballroom at the White House.” GOP lawmakers repeated the line. The MAGA media universe lined up behind one talking point — we need the ballroom — predictable. Like clockwork. Nothing about the president’s alleged pedophilia, ties to Epstein, or the tanking economy, all of which gives the entire sleaziest of presidencies a Marie Antoinette vibe.

Trump’s eagerness to steal the limelight showed itself in another oft-questioned assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. He raised a bloody-eared fist on stage seconds after Crooks fell. Three days later he raised that same fist at the Republican National Convention. Trump had constructed a narrative so unlikely it can’t be true, well before a shot was fired.

Trump’s Norma Desmond-like desire to be the star doesn’t seem in touch with a world where independent media outlets like this one are calling balls and strikes about Trump’s truths in real-time. Even before his late-night tuxedoed press conference, I warned Narativ’s viewers to question what they were about to hear. “We must be skeptical,” I said. The times — no, this presidency — demands it.

Saturday night, Trump told reporters he had heard “either a tray or a bullet.” He said the noise was “quite far away.” He said his wife Melania had been “very cognizant” it was a shooting. Allen fired a shotgun at the magnetometer line — thirty to fifty feet from the lectern. A shotgun fired inside a hotel ballroom does not sound far away. It does not sound like a tray. Anyone who has fired a shotgun knows the difference. Trump has fired guns publicly. The “tray or bullet” anecdote covered the multiple seconds his detail took to move him.

By Sunday afternoon, on 60 Minutes, Trump had a different account.

Cole Tomas Allen did not match the profile of a man who runs at a presidential perimeter with a knife collection and no plan. He earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Caltech in 2017. He held a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2014. He earned a master’s in computer science from California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025. C2 Education in Torrance named him Teacher of the Month in December 2024. This doesn’t sound like a man who wouldn’t plan for any possibility, let alone one that would normally lead to almost certain death — most likely, his own.

If you want to know what assassination attempts at public events look like, consider Charlie Kirk.

Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy from a sixth-floor sniper’s perch he had spent days selecting. Cole Tomas Allen ran at a magnetometer line where Secret Service stood with rifles between him and the President. He had no upstairs window. No line of sight. No escape route. A Caltech engineer with a NASA JPL fellowship calculates risk and reward for a living. Saturday’s run did not look like a calculation. The probability of Allen’s survival is almost as absurd as the night’s preposterous ballroom subtext.

Allen fired five rounds. None hit Donald Trump. The only round that connected with anyone struck a Secret Service agent in his bullet-resistant vest at the magnetometer line. Trump was inside the ballroom, behind a wall, on a stage. Allen had no line of sight to the lectern. Five rounds discharged inside the building, none landed on the man the administration is calling the target. They landed on the perimeter — where the agent was.

Then came the predictable narrative shifts. Allen told investigators after his arrest he wanted to shoot "administration officials" — a motive framed as "administration officials, as a class." By Sunday, officials had adjusted the talking point, claiming Trump was the intended target all along.

A man who travels to Washington with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives, and assembles a long gun in a back room, is not a man who intended to shoot a president. The night’s events prove how foolhardy an exploit that would be. He intended to do what he did: run a magnetometer and not die doing it. No one died. That’s not miraculous; that reeks of planning.

The Secret Service reactions did not match either. Vance’s detail had the Vice President out of the room within a micro-second. Vance’s team behaved like professionals who knew their principal was a target. Trump’s team sauntered in seconds later, chatting with agents while they tried to move him.

Trump told CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell why. He said he had not been worried during the shooting. He said he had not made it easy for the Secret Service to move him. He told her he had asked the agents to “wait a minute” so he could “see what was going on.” Trump’s detail had moved slowly because, by Trump’s own Sunday account, Trump had made them.

Saturday Trump heard “either a tray or a bullet” from “quite far away.” Sunday Trump was unworried and resisting evacuation in real time to “see what was going on.”

Anyone who has ever been near the Secret Service knows they do not ask for permission if they perceive a real risk to their target. They do their job, and they get their protectee to safety.

So why create such an outlandish spectacle no one can believe? The regime needs a way to escape Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost who looms over every move the president makes. Epstein was conveniently the main reason Allen used to justify his public act of near suicide. This was the exact framing the regime would need to justify a crackdown on the broader political opposition.

His appearance on the captured CBS News investigative series 60 Minutes underlined Trump’s personal preoccupation with his former best friends and their shared proclivities for young girls.

O’Donnell read from Cole Tomas Allen’s manifesto. She read first: “administration officials, they are target.” Then she read: “I’m no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Trump’s reaction was prepared. “I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re horrible people,” he told her. “Horrible people.” He confirmed the words. “Yeah. He did write that.” He defended. “I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.” O’Donnell asked if Allen had been referring to him. “Me? Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person.” He admitted he had read the manifesto already. “I read the manifesto, you know, he is a sick person.” His Epstein deflection arrived in the same breath. “Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let’s say Epstein or other things.”

The faux outrage at O’Donnell, who is currently being held in captivity by Bibi Netanyahu’s friend Larry Ellison and his son David, reveals itself. If it were real, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss would not have aired the clip. You can just hear the architects of this so-called assassination attempt congratulating themselves on this two-for-one attempt at a brand clean-up. They must have believed they could bury Epstein’s ghost and save CBS News’ disastrous ratings plunge in a single weekend.

Trump knew the question was coming. He had read the manifesto. He had a prepared answer for the question, a prepared deflection on Epstein, and a prepared insult for O’Donnell — horrible people — ready before she finished the sentence.

Within hours of Allen’s arrest, partisan platforms had a finished suspect frame: “left-wing teacher,” “Harris donor,” “lefty terrorist whackjob.” Mainstream outlets had not yet confirmed the name. Real reporting took longer than the political characterization. A suspect identity that arrived ready-made was the kind a crackdown on opponent groups required.

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A false flag is a covert operation in which a state or its agents stage an attack — often on their own citizens — and attribute it to a different actor in order to justify a political response. The term comes from naval warfare, when warships flew the colors of another nation to mislead an enemy ship into the wrong fight.

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CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell read aloud, on 60 Minutes Sunday, from a manifesto authored by Cole Tomas Allen — the man who charged the magnetometer line at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night and put a round into a Secret Service agent’s vest. Allen’s manifesto, in O’Donnell’s reading, declared that he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Here are the key moments of the episode. Paid subscribers can access the full segment below.

Donald Trump erupted. He told O’Donnell she was “disgraceful.” He said she should not be reading the manifesto on 60 Minutes. He told her, “I’m not a pedophile.”

The manifesto matters for two reasons. Allen named Trump in writing. That contradicts what Allen had told FBI investigators after his arrest — that he wanted to shoot “administration officials,” not the President specifically. The motive a federal officer described to reporters Saturday night now sits beside a written motive that names Donald Trump in language the President could not publicly accept being read.

The interview also produced a contradiction. Saturday night at the White House Briefing Room, Trump told reporters he had heard “either a tray or a bullet” and that the noise had been “quite far away.” Sunday on 60 Minutes, Trump told O’Donnell he “wasn’t worried” during the shooting and that he “wasn’t making it easy” for the Secret Service to evacuate him. He said he had told the agents to “wait a minute” so he could “see what was going on.”

Cole Thomas Allen’s accusations against Trump in the manifesto — pedophile, rapist, traitor — track the public allegations against Trump documented across the Epstein record, Maxwell’s deposition. Years of civil testimony. The thousands of pages Narativ has reported on for nearly a decade. Narativ is not endorsing the manifesto or adjudicating its accuracy, but when the president has to go on 60 Minutes to declare he is not a pedophile, then the public deserves a full accounting of what’s in the Epstein files, and if what Trump is saying is true, so should he. Trump lost his composure on the biggest scandal of his presidency.

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Just after 8:30 Saturday night, Secret Service officers pulled Donald Trump and Melania Trump off the stage at the Washington Hilton. Five shots rang out at the magnetometer line outside the ballroom of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A 31-year-old man from Torrance, California — identified in reports tonight as Cole Tomas Allen — charged the security checkpoint with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. He had assembled a long gun in an unsecured back room of the hotel. He fired. A round struck a Secret Service officer in his bullet-resistant vest. The officer is alive and, in Trump’s words, “in great spirits.” Allen is in custody. He is alive too.

Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon were in the ballroom. None were injured. The Hilton went on lockdown. The dinner was canceled. Trump said it will reschedule within thirty days. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said charges will follow shortly. FBI Director Kash Patel said the Bureau is examining ballistics, the long gun, and shell casings, and is interviewing witnesses. Trump described Allen as a “lone wolf” and “a sick person.” This is the third time in under two years that Donald Trump has been the target of a confirmed attempt — Butler, Pennsylvania, July 2024; the Palm Beach golf course, September 2024; and the Hilton tonight.

Three things from the night sit uneasily next to those facts. Hours before the dinner, on Fox News, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt previewed the evening with these words: “It’ll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room. So everyone should tune in. It’s going to be really great.” Ninety minutes after Secret Service pulled him from the stage, Trump returned to the White House and framed the night as a unification — “I saw a room that was just totally unified,” “a tremendous amount of love and coming together” — and pivoted to his East Wing ballroom project, calling the Hilton “not a particularly secure building” and saying Secret Service and the military “are demanding” the new ballroom. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told viewers on air he watched a gunman fire a “very serious weapon” at least six times from a few feet away. Blitzer was inside the ballroom. The shooting was at the magnetometer line outside.

The facts are not in dispute. The officer was hit. The suspect was real. The weapons were real. The President was rushed off a stage by Secret Service for the third time in twenty-one months. The unease is in the speed and the polish of the framing around the facts. Butler is still unresolved for many. The same questions follow this president time and time again. Real events do not unfold this swiftly and coherently. Narativ will follow the investigation.

History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.

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The operation to free Ghislaine Maxwell has been running since the day she was jailed. This week three separate doors swung open at once — a presidential pardon, a congressional immunity grant, and a motion to vacate her sex-trafficking conviction. Each remedy is being built around one outcome. Maxwell walks. Trump stays cleared. The public never gets the witness under oath.

Lev Parnas, who spent years inside the Trump circle as a cooperating witness during the first impeachment, said there has been a direct call between Donald Trump and House Oversight Chair James Comer on the Maxwell question. “There has been a call between Comer and Trump directly where Trump is basically putting pressure on where not for them to give,” Parnas said on Narativ Live. Comer, who wants to run for governor of Kentucky next year, is personally against a pardon and has called Maxwell “other than Epstein, the worst person in this whole investigation.” His caucus is split. Parnas said Trump is laying track for a narrative that gives him cover — “if you want it, you know, Congress is asking, and we need her to come out and testify” — and is even floating “names dropped of some dead people” as the fresh testimony Maxwell would supposedly provide.

The operative running the play inside DOJ is Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Parnas, who said Blanche was once on his own legal team, described a man doing “everything in his power” to hold the job Pam Bondi lost three weeks ago. Blanche interviewed Maxwell for nine hours in Tallahassee last July. He has since publicly declared DOJ’s releases under the Epstein Files Transparency Act complete. Maxwell’s attorney David Oscar Markus is a close friend of Blanche, Parnas said, and the arrangement between them was worked out behind the scenes. Maxwell “is not planning on sitting in prison while everybody’s getting pardons,” Parnas said. Her offer to the administration, in Markus’s own words: grant her clemency and she will testify “openly and honestly, in public, before Congress” that Trump did nothing wrong.

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5️⃣ The Soldier Who Bet On His Own Mission

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment overnight charging a U.S. special forces soldier with using classified information about the Maduro raid to place cash bets on the outcome. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who reports to the Joint Special Operations Command and helped plan and execute the operation, placed 13 Polymarket bets between December 27 and January 26, turning $33,000 into more than $409,000. “That’s 13 bets because the operation kept moving,” Shalev said. “So he had to keep moving. It’s pretty obvious what he did.” Trump, asked about it from the Oval Office, called prediction markets “somewhat of a casino” and said he was “never much in favor of it.” Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket’s advisory board. A $500 million oil futures bet minutes before the Maduro raid forced the former SEC watchdog to resign weeks ago after she pointed at the Trump family. “These predictive market people,” Blundell said, “obviously have a very close relationship with trend-setting, news-making people who understand when and how some of the world’s worst or best events are going to happen.”

The Polymarket story is a n example of a story we only found on GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.

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4️⃣ Ellie Leonard Transcribes The Wolff-Epstein Emails And Exposes The PR Man

Ellie Leonard, a Narativ contributor who publishes at The Panicked Writer, has transcribed 1,800 pages of emails between Michael Wolff and Jeffrey Epstein — believed to be the only complete read of the entire correspondence. Her reporting establishes that Wolff was Epstein’s paid reputation repairman, writing clean-up pieces including a 7,000-word whitewash for The New Yorker after Epstein’s conviction for procuring an underage prostitute. Shalev noted Wolff’s email volume to Epstein spiked the moment Virginia Giuffre surfaced her Prince Andrew and Epstein allegations, as Wolff worked to discredit her and the journalists covering the story. “He looks like the biggest weasel and leech in the entire Epstein files now,” Blundell said. Leonard has been harassed by Wolff and Michael Cohen for the reporting. The publishing houses that kept handing Wolff book deals, both hosts said, knew exactly what they were buying.

3️⃣ The White House Scraps The Records Law And Clears The Filing Cabinets

The Washington Post reported at 5 a.m. Friday that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional on April 1, and the next day White House Counsel David Warrington sent every Executive Office staffer a memo rewriting the rules. Mandatory became “should.” Prohibited became “whenever possible.” The 2017 version required staff to use official email; the new version suggests they do. “He’s doing something really bad right now,” Shalev said of the timing. Blundell added that the memo lets the administration “hide all the records, delete whatever they want” with no paper trail once they leave office. The post-Watergate law was written to stop exactly this. The White House just walked away from it.

2️⃣ GOP and Dems split On A Maxwell Pardon And Ehud Barak’s Cousin Runs The Operation

House Oversight Chair James Comer said yesterday his committee is split on pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for testimony — testimony that Shalev forecast will clear both Trump and Clinton. Two additional exit ramps are active: a direct pardon from Trump and a motion to vacate the charges at the Southern District of New York. Shalev’s Narativ.org reporting this morning names Daphne Barak — cousin of Ehud Barak, himself accused by Virginia Giuffre — as the operator of a four-year PAC campaign to spring Maxwell, hiring operatives to harass survivors on social media. “Half the committee facilitated the rape and the abuse and possibly the murder of hundreds, maybe thousands of children from around the world,” Blundell said. “And half of them are split.” Marjorie Taylor Greene said publicly that Trump himself ordered Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche to bury the Epstein files. Blanche, now the attorney general, ran Maxwell’s interview before her transfer to a minimum-security camp.

1️⃣ Trump Sinks To 33 Percent And The Women Are Gone

AP-NORC has Trump at 33 percent approval, his second-term low, and the internals show the floor caving. Women: 28 percent. “When everyone realized Nixon was done was when he hit 25 percent,” Shalev said. “And women right now are trending three points above that.” Hispanic approval 25 percent. Black 14 percent. Independents have collapsed from 60 percent to 23. Even the Republican base has softened to 68. The Iran war is the accelerant, with Brent crude at $107 and gas above $4 heading into the midterms. The White House Correspondents Dinner lands tomorrow — a staged victory lap as the numbers say the opposite. “These numbers are the real indicator of how much America hates the president of the United States,” Blundell said.

A soldier bets on his own mission while Polymarket quotes odds on the Maxwell pardon, the records law goes dark, and the 33 percent president walks into a correspondents dinner built to look like a victory. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.

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This is how justice is meted out in Trump’s America.

Ghislaine Maxwell has three doors out of federal prison, and all three are opening this week. Donald Trump is weighing a pardon. House Oversight Republicans are floating immunity. The Southern District of New York is holding her amended motion to vacate her conviction. Never before have the forces of injustice been marshaled with such force for such a clearly immoral outcome as Ghislaine’s freedom.

On April 17, her attorney, David Oscar Markus, told Politico there is “a good chance” Trump will pardon her. On April 23, MSNBC’s Katie Phang broke that Oversight Republicans are openly trading votes on a pardon-for-testimony deal Comer’s caucus rejected nine months ago. CNN’s Jake Tapper aired an Epstein-survivor attorney calling it “deeply offensive.” Maxwell’s amended Section 2255 motion to vacate — shipped by FedEx USB drive from her Tallahassee cell — sits on Judge Paul Engelmayer’s docket. Trump’s U.S. Attorney for SDNY, Jay Clayton, filed a letter calling it “meritless.” Fourteen pages went missing from her December original. The DOJ Inspector General also announced an audit of DOJ compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The IG reports to the Acting Attorney General. The Acting Attorney General is the man who interviewed Maxwell in her cell.

Everyone working towards freeing Ghislaine Maxwell. Absolutely no one working towards justice for the survivors.

The cousin in the White House line

The only journalist Maxwell’s family has ever let into the prison is Daphne Barak — cousin of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Her own biography lists the relationship. Haaretz has reported it for years. Her 2022 prison interview aired on Paramount+, CBS Mornings, and TalkTV. Maxwell told her Epstein was “the greatest mistake of my life” — the line that softened her case for public consumption.

Four years later, Barak is still Maxwell’s chief public advocate — an August 2025 podcast with Roseanne Barr titled “Ghislaine’s Trump Card,” a documentary Ghislaine: Partner in Crime on her own site, and a 2025 YouTube arguing “No Judge in America Would Overturn” the conviction. She owns the narrative. She is the narrative.

Ehud Barak is the man Virginia Giuffre accused of raping her. In 2020 court filings and her posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl (Knopf, October 2025), Giuffre wrote that Barak beat and raped her on Little St James at eighteen, choking her unconscious. Barak denies. He has acknowledged his Epstein ties and apologized. No prosecution has followed.

Virginia is dead. Maxwell is alive. Her accused rapist’s cousin runs the only live communication line to the co-conspirator

What Narativ has on record

Ehud Barak was not just the Prime Minister of Israel. He was likely the man who recruited Epstein into Israeli military intelligence. Two named sources have told Narativ, on the record, that Epstein’s operation was Israeli intelligence. Others have confirmed it off the record.

Ari Ben Menashe — senior Aman executive from 1977 to 1987 — told Narativ that Epstein and Ghislaine were working for Israeli intelligence in the 1980s. He said Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s father and a confirmed Mossad asset, recruited Epstein personally. Ehud Barak ran Aman from April 1983 to January 1986. Ben Menashe places the recruitment inside that window.

Steven Hoffenberg — Epstein’s Wall Street partner in the Towers Financial Ponzi — said Epstein told him directly: “Ghislaine Maxwell would be his passport to the Israeli agency.” He said by 1983 Epstein was selling Chinese weapons to Iran. Hoffenberg died in 2022. The record is on the page.

Two men. One from Israeli military intelligence. One from Epstein’s accounting. Same conclusion.

The money flow

Daphne Barak runs Fighting 4 One America Super-PAC with her partner Erbil Gunasti, a Turkish-American operative who previously represented eight Turkish prime ministers. Tony Lyons — Skyhorse Publishing founder, publisher of Alan Dershowitz’s Guilt by Accusation — put $75,000 into the PAC. Lyons also chairs the MAHA Super-PAC that raised roughly $50 million for RFK Jr.’s campaign. Both PACs co-hosted RFK Jr.’s January 22, 2024 birthday fundraiser in Indian Wells. RFK Jr. sits in the administration now weighing the pardon.

Jessica Reed Kraus — 1.3 million Instagram followers, wore a “Free Ghislaine” shirt to the August 2024 DNC, tells her audience Maxwell “trafficked nobody” — was listed by Fighting 4 One America on its own website as social-media director. Kraus has publicly denied being paid; FEC disbursement records have not been matched to her name. She received Pam Bondi’s Epstein Files Phase 1 binder in February 2025 and a White House press pool pass in March. In April 2025, she joined Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Sean Spicer at Blair House for a briefing with Benjamin Netanyahu — Jewish Insider confirmed attendees.

A Super-PAC run by Maxwell’s prison interviewer. Funded by Dershowitz’s publisher. Built around the survivors’ loudest attacker. Feeding the campaign of the man now at the pardon table. Four years in the making.

The sycophantic DOJ

On July 24 and 25, 2025, Deputy AG Todd Blanche met Maxwell for nine hours in Tallahassee. Maxwell initiated. Per ABC News, she told him Trump “never did anything in her presence that would have caused concern.” Within days she was transferred to the minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas — a placement BOP policy does not allow for a convicted sex offender. Senator Whitehouse demanded documents on the transfer. None produced.

On April 2, 2026, Trump fired Pam Bondi over her handling of the Epstein files. Blanche took her chair the same day. The man who took Maxwell’s statement runs the department now auditing itself.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has told IBTimes UK and others that Trump “flat out” told Bondi: “do not release the Epstein files. My friends will get hurt. People at Mar-a-Lago, they’re going to get hurt.” Bondi has not confirmed. No one has subpoenaed Greene.

The victims, as usual, left in the cold

Maxwell has cleared Trump in the DOJ record. Her lawyer will ask for a pardon. Republicans are trading votes on immunity. Her motion to vacate is before Engelmayer. The IG audit reports to Blanche. The survivor attorneys on CNN are “deeply offensive,” and nothing follows. Democrats are unanimous against the pardon and outnumbered. The woman who reported Epstein first — Maria Farmer — wrote in her April 20, 2025, FBI filing: “Do your jobs, everyone. Before I’m murdered by this gang. Please do your jobs.”

Five days later, Virginia Giuffre was dead.

Justice in Trump’s America.

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5️⃣ Laura Loomer Loses

A federal judge in Florida, a Clinton appointee, granted summary judgment to Bill Maher and HBO, killing Laura Loomer’s $150 million defamation suit before it reached a jury. “Summary judgment, which means the judge laughed at it,” Blundell said. The suit targeted a September 2024 Real Time bit in which Maher named Loomer as the president’s likely mistress. Her own deposition sank the case — her income went up in 2024, she still flies on Trump’s plane, she still gets into the White House, and she could not name one person whose opinion of her had changed. Witnesses testified she had told them she “gave Trump the best blowjob of his life,” and her father, Jeff Loomer, reportedly declined to rule out another involuntary psychiatric hold for her, saying he could not deny the claim. “Laura Loomer is the president’s mistress,” Shalev said. “That’s why she has access to the president. In this case, these blowjobs are a national security risk.”

4️⃣ The New Navy Secretary Is Interesting

On day 55 of the Iran war, Trump ordered the US Navy to “shoot and kill” any Iranian boats laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. In the same 24 hours, Pete Hegseth fired Navy Secretary John Phelan 13 days into the job and installed Undersecretary Hung Cao as acting. “It is stunning that in the middle of a war, this guy has been on the job for 13 days, has now been ousted because essentially he disagreed with what the president was asking him to do,” Shalev said. Cao, a Christian nationalist with a documented record of evangelical-cult rhetoric and race-based KKK jokes on The War Room, once warned that Monterey, California, was becoming a witchcraft capital. “The guy who thinks Monterey is going to become the witchcraft capital of the world is now in charge of the United States Navy,” Shalev said. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has already seized two commercial ships and left a third stranded, and Trump says there is “no time frame” on ending the war.

3️⃣ Lutnick Continues Epstein Cover-Up

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testified at House Appropriations this morning. Rep. Madeleine Dean confronted him directly — “Why did you lie to the New York Post about your relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?” — then laid out the Lutnick family tariff-refund scheme Rep. Jamie Raskin is now investigating. Lutnick deflected every Epstein question to his May 6 House Oversight interview, the same line he used on Sen. Chris Van Hollen in the Senate the day before. “Let the record reflect,” Dean said. “You’re dodging the question. The cover-up continues.” Dean closed by calling on him to “resign before you are fired.” Nobody on the committee asked about Tether — Cantor Fitzgerald, now run by Lutnick’s son Brandon, custodies the $132 billion in Treasuries backing the stablecoin, took a $600 million stake that Tether itself financed through a loan to the Lutnick family trust, and is now reserve custodian for USAT, the new GENIUS Act stablecoin. “Tether is a crypto company that owns Lutnick’s family fortune and owns Cantor Fitzgerald and has it rigged,” Shalev said.

2️⃣ Senate OKs Ice Surge In Pre-Dawn Vote

Trump reposted Michael Savage’s Newsmax segment to Truth Social — a screed calling India and China “hellholes,” attacking ACLU attorney Cecillia Wang by ethnicity, and invoking Andrew Jackson’s defiance of the Supreme Court on Cherokee removal, misattributed as “Stonewall Jackson.” “It’s the most racist thing I’ve ever read in my life that a president has ever put out,” Shalev said. The SCOTUS majority signaled on April 1 that it will strike down Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, with a ruling by end of June, and Savage’s Jackson reference is the framework: if the Court rules against him, ignore it. In the same overnight cycle, the Senate cleared S.Con.Res.33 at 3:49 AM, 50-48 party-line, setting the framework for ICE and Border Patrol funding through FY2035. “They are moving at lightning speed before the next 195 days to take control of the United States elections,” Blundell said. ICE staffing announcements are expected inside 72 hours.

1️⃣ Eric Trump, Pentagon Robotics Manufacturer

Eric Trump went on Fox Business this morning to celebrate a $24 million Pentagon contract awarded to Foundation Industries, a robotics firm where he serves as Chief Strategic Adviser and investor. The product is Phantom 2, a humanoid robot to be deployed to Ukraine to inspect and transport weapons on the frontlines. Maria Bartiromo congratulated him on air. Combined with Donald Trump Jr.’s $620 million Pentagon loan in December and the brothers’ stakes in drone maker Powerus, rare earth magnets, and related plays, the family has now collected “about $770 million now that they’ve made from government contracts in the last 12 months,” Blundell said. Scott McFarlane’s reporting catalogs the parallel bucket list — Trump pushing to replace Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill, mint a new $250 note with his own face, rename Dulles Trump International, rebrand the Washington Metro “WMAGA,” and fund NIH research into “Trump derangement syndrome.” “He wants the world to look like his brain,” Blundell said.

Loomer sued herself out of court, the Navy Secretary got purged mid-combat, the Commerce Secretary ran out the clock, the president pre-positioned defiance of the Supreme Court, and the president’s son rolled up $24 million of the Pentagon on live TV. Corrupt administration, top to bottom. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.

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💣 LUTNICK DODGES CRYPTO AND EPSTEIN

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick walked out of House Appropriations this morning without a single question about Tether or his Epstein ties. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) pressed him on Epstein and the administration’s tariff agenda — Lutnick deflected Epstein to his scheduled May 6 House Oversight interview, the same line he used yesterday against Sen. Chris Van Hollen at Senate Appropriations. No member asked about crypto. Cantor Fitzgerald — Lutnick’s former firm, now run by his son Brandon — holds custody of the $132 billion in US Treasuries backing Tether, took a 5% stake for $600 million via convertible debt that Tether itself financed through a loan to the Lutnick family trust, and is now reserve custodian for Tether’s new GENIUS Act stablecoin USAT, launched in January. Tether’s documented client base includes North Korean nuclear procurement, Mexican cartels, Russian arms firms, Middle Eastern terror finance, and Chinese fentanyl precursor labs. Lutnick still refuses to recuse from Trump’s Digital Asset Markets Working Group. The committee had the chance to force answers under oath this morning and let the gavel close on him. The May 6 interview is 13 days away - but it’;s behind closed doors and not under oath so it’s functionally meaningless

🎖️ SHOWDOWN AT THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ

Day 55. Trump ordered the US Navy to “shoot and kill” any Iranian boats laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard seized two ships yesterday — MSC Francesca and Epaminondas — and left the Greek-owned Euphoria stranded. Thousands more US forces are rolling into the region. The Strait — 20% of the world’s crude — is effectively shut. Trump says “no time frame” on the war: the ceasefire is a holding pattern. The first destroyed Iranian boat detonates the next phase.

⚖️ TRUMP RACIST POST IS A SIGNAL

Trump reposted Michael Savage’s Newsmax segment on Truth Social — Savage calls India and China “hellholes,”targets ACLU attorney Cecillia Wang by ethnicity, and invokes Andrew Jackson’s defiance of the Supreme Court on Cherokee removal, misattributing it as Stonewall Jackson. The SCOTUS majority signaled at April 1 oral arguments it will strike down Trump’s birthright citizenship order. A ruling lands by end of June. The Jackson reference is the framework: if the Court rules against him, ignore it — the move that produced the Trail of Tears.

📉 TWILIGHT VOTE TO SURGE ICE

Senate cleared S.Con.Res.33 at 3:49 AM — 50-48, party-line — setting the framework for ICE and Border Patrol funding through FY2035. No Democratic support, no floor scrutiny, no daytime cameras. Watch for ICE staffing announcements within 72 hours.

🌍 PHELAN OUT MID-COMBAT

Navy Secretary John Phelan was ousted yesterday. Hung Cao is acting — civilian head of the service swapped while the guns are hot. Cao says he’s believes witch craft is sweeping the nation and holds extreme right wing beliefs.

🎯 THE PATTERN

We’re at another point of inflection. The commerce secretary skates by on two huge scandals. The Senate funded an Ice surge in the middle of the night. The Navy Secretary is fired for disagreeing with Trump’s orders. Trump appears ready to defy Scotus. Trump is in a lethal stand off over Hormuz. This is anything but business as usual - democratic oversight and the traditional guardrails are being shunted out of the way by a POTUS hell-bent on global conflict and an economic collapse.

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Leonard and Lev Parnas joined Narativ Live tonight for a special report on what the emails actually show. The friendship did not begin in 2009 with a casual note to Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff. Wolff flew on Epstein’s plane to a TED conference as early as 2001. In 2003 Wolff tried to facilitate the sale of New York Magazine to a consortium that included Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Donnie Deutsch. The paper record picks up in 2009, goes silent for a year, then comes roaring back in February 2011 with Wolff writing, “Have been defending you to the world’s press.” That email is the moment the relationship becomes commercial. “He is now being paid by Jeffrey Epstein for a PR operation, a reputation cleanup of Jeffrey Epstein,” Shalev said. “Their friendship is not really a ‘friendship’. It’s a service agreement between a client and a PR guy that was masquerading in front of everybody else as a friendship and as an author-subject relationship.”

Leonard catalogued the mechanics. Wolff worked with British PR operative Ian Osborne and five other publicists over the course of the correspondence. An Osborne and Partners memo recovered in the files lays it out in bullet points: “clean up Google,” retain search engine optimization firms, hire “Israeli experts” to scrub the internet, target a specific list of journalists — Gerald Baker, Lionel Barber, Andrew Sorkin, John Micklethwaite, Josh Tyrangiel — who between them ran the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times DealBook, and Bloomberg Businessweek. The Gates Foundation relationship was the planned vehicle for rehabilitation. When Virginia Giuffre named Prince Andrew in January 2015, Wolff drafted a seven-thousand-word New York Magazine feature built around the Gates angle. Epstein’s lawyers killed it. Wolff kept working. He did not believe Giuffre. He defended Prince Andrew. He treated the #MeToo movement, in Leonard’s words, as “absolute bunk” while simultaneously finding graduate-student assistants for Epstein to hire.

On October 22, 2017, Wolff brokered the first meeting between Epstein and Steve Bannon at the Gramercy Park Hotel. By January 2018 Fire and Fury was the number one book in America and Epstein was hosting a theatrical “Fire and Fury birthday party” for himself with Bannon, Tom Barrack, Woody Allen and Obama’s former White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler in the room. By February 2019, Wolff was forwarding early drafts of Siege to Epstein for editing. “Epstein was editing, helping him write and edit his books too,” Leonard said. “The Trump books, they were editing Trump’s book together.” The hundred hours of recorded interviews Wolff has been selling on Substack as his insider archive are not journalism. They are the raw material of a nine-year fixer operation. Wolff himself told Epstein in writing that he used the existence of the tapes as leverage — if a source refused to cooperate, “remind them that I have these tapes and I have these interviews.”

Parnas flagged the part that does not sit right. Donald Trump has not sued Michael Wolff. He does not treat Wolff the way he treats other reporters who claim to have evidence against him. “The relationship, there’s something about it that doesn’t smell right,” Parnas said. “Wolff talks about Donald Trump. I have the goods on Trump. Trump is everything, but he never produces it.” If Wolff sold Epstein a liberal-media-guy-who-understands-you reputation fix, the question is whether he sold Trump the same package. The pattern in the emails — saying one thing to Epstein and the opposite to Bannon, saying one thing publicly and the reverse behind closed doors — does not rule it out.

History rhymes. Narativ wrote on March 30 that Wolff was Epstein’s fixer (narativ.substack.com/p/michael-wolff-was-epsteins-fixer), working from the first pass through the files and Leonard’s early transcription. Tonight’s show is the full receipt. The cross-reference map of all 533 exchanges, the eight chapters of the friendship, the peak months that line up exactly with Epstein’s legal crises — it all sits in a single fact sheet now. What looked like a prolific journalist covering the powerful was a paid reputation manager working inside Epstein’s defense for the entire decade Wolff was also writing America’s definitive books about Donald Trump.

Thank you to and . Leonard writes The Panicked Writer on Substack and is continuing the Hilton Head investigation. Parnas is a Narativ regular and a congressional candidate who lived inside Trump’s orbit during the years Fire and Fury and Siege were being written. The Wolfpack — the viewers crowdsourcing this investigation in real time — earned their name tonight.

History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.

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5️⃣ Patel’s “Never Intoxicated” Presser — And Who Trump Hires On Purpose

The FBI Director of the United States of America stood at a DOJ podium yesterday and told a room of reporters he has “never been intoxicated on the job.” That’s the sentence. That’s what we’re doing now. Acting AG Todd Blanche stood beside him — Patel’s boss, for those keeping score — and told reporters he hadn’t read The Atlantic story he was there to dispute, but assured everyone parts of it were “blatantly false.” Reporting he hadn’t read. Blatantly false. Sure, buddy.

Patel’s response to the allegations that he’s had “bouts of excessive drinking” and unexplained absences from the Bureau? A $250 million defamation lawsuit, a rant about the “fake news mafia,” and a cute line about being “an everyday American who loves his country [and] loves the sport of hockey” — that last one a reference to video of him chugging beers with the US Olympic gold medal hockey team in February. An everyday American. Running the FBI.

Zev’s point cut to the bone: this is who Trump hires on purpose. Not despite the red flags — because of them. Compromised people are controllable people. Patel was put there to do two things: protect Trump and punish Trump’s enemies. Everything else — the Atlantic reporting, the 700 agents reassigned, the unexplained absences, Jamie Raskin launching a House investigation today and demanding Patel submit to an alcohol test under penalty of perjury — is noise around the core function.

As I said on the show: “He’s doing the job he was hired to do. The drinking is the side quest. The Bureau being hollowed out is the main quest.”

Dean Blundell

VIDEO: Piss Drunk Kash Patel Hits the Podium, Hits the Wall, Hits Himself in Unhinged Press Conference, Because Hangovers Are Hard.

April 22, 2026…

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6 days ago · 810 likes · 30 comments · Dean Blundell

4️⃣ Lutnick Calls Canada “Insulting.” Shaheen Tells Him Why.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick walked into a Senate Appropriations hearing today to defend the 2027 budget and instead got handed his ass by Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Last Friday at a Semafor event, Lutnick’s assessment of Canada’s trade negotiating strategy was, and I quote, “They suck.” Today he doubled down, calling it “outrageous” and “insulting and disrespectful to America” that Canadian provinces won’t stock American spirits on their liquor shelves.

Howard. Buddy. My guy. You want to know why they won’t stock your bourbon?

Shaheen laid it out plainly: Canadian tourism to New Hampshire is down 30% year-over-year. Tourism is the second-largest industry in her state — 70,000 jobs. Small businesses on both sides of the border are cratering. Her question, which Lutnick could not answer: “How does insulting our closest ally and neighbor help the businesses in my state of New Hampshire, and states all across this country, who are hurting because of the loss of Canadian business and tourism?”

Lutnick’s response was to lecture her about how Canada “leans on” the $30 trillion US economy, as if that was the gotcha. Shaheen came back with the line of the day: “When we have allies and partners, we should try and work with them — not insult them.”

As a Canadian, let me translate for Howard: we’re not buying your liquor, we’re not visiting your states, we’re not signing your deals, and we’re not going to. You called our Prime Minister a governor. You called our country the 51st state. You tariffed us for fun. We have long memories and short tempers and we are done. The Carney government said today they’re in no rush. Why would they be? Every day Lutnick opens his mouth, Canada’s leverage goes up.

Dean Blundell

BREAKING: Trump Just Demanded Canada Pay an 'Entry Fee' to Talk To Him. LOL.

April 22, 2026…

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6 days ago · 1357 likes · 65 comments · Dean Blundell

3️⃣ MTG: Trump Personally Told Bondi To Bury The Epstein Files

Marjorie Taylor Greene went on the Shannon Joy Show yesterday and said the quiet part on a megaphone: Donald Trump “flat out” told then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, “Do not release the Epstein files.”

Per Greene, Trump was “blocking everybody” — Bondi at DOJ, Speaker Mike Johnson in the House, Majority Leader John Thune in the Senate. His stated reason, in Greene’s telling of their final conversation before he branded her a traitor and she resigned from Congress: “My friends will get hurt. People you know, Marjorie. People at Mar-a-Lago.”

Let me say that part again, slowly. The President of the United States told his Attorney General to suppress federal evidence in a child sex trafficking investigation because his friends at his private club might get hurt.

Greene is not a credible narrator on most days. On this one, the corroboration is doing the work. She said essentially the same thing to The New York Times in December. Bondi reportedly told Trump in May that his name is “all over the files.” The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Bondi for a deposition on the redactions and the 53 pages of FBI interviews NPR confirmed were scrubbed — she didn’t comply, claiming the subpoena doesn’t apply because she’s no longer AG. And the “client list” Bondi vowed to release in February 2025? Suddenly didn’t exist by July.

Zev connected it to a pattern we’ve tracked for two years: the Epstein story is not a sex scandal. It’s a compromise operation. Seventeen or eighteen countries now have open Epstein investigations. London is dismantling the network in real time. The question is no longer what was on Epstein’s island. It’s who got put where because of what was on Epstein’s island — and whether the sitting President of the United States is one of them.

2️⃣ Mask Off — China Is Arming Iran. The Touska Is The Proof.

On Sunday, the USS Spruance fired on and boarded the Iranian-flagged container ship MV Touska in the Gulf of Oman as it tried to run the US naval blockade into Bandar Abbas. Six hours of warnings ignored. Rounds into the engine room to disable the propulsion. Marines on deck. The ship is part of the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines — IRISL — which the US sanctioned in 2019 as “the preferred shipping line for Iranian proliferators.”

Here’s the part that matters. The Touska‘s last stops before Iran: Gaolan port in Zhuhai, China, and Taicang port north of Shanghai, per satellite analysis. Gaolan is known — per The Washington Post — for shipping sodium perchlorate, a key precursor for solid rocket fuel that Iran needs to rebuild its missile program. US security sources say the cargo is “dual-use”: metals, pipes, electronic components consistent with ballistic missile manufacturing. Nikki Haley — and I cannot believe I am about to favorably cite Nikki Haley — said it on X: the ship “was headed from China to Iran and is linked to chemical shipments for missiles.”

This is not speculation anymore. This is a boat. With a captain. Loaded in a Chinese port. Pointed at Iran. Full of missile-grade chemicals. In the middle of a ceasefire the United States is trying to negotiate.

China’s response: “concern” over the “forcible interception” and a demand that everyone honor the ceasefire. Last week they denied arming Iran and threatened “countermeasures” if Trump imposed a 50% tariff over it. Today the Touska is sitting in US custody like a subpoena with an anchor.

The mask is off. China is the quartermaster. The war Trump says he won is being resupplied in real time by the country he’s flying to meet with next month.

1️⃣ Trump Loses Iran. Ceasefire Goes Indefinite. London Meets Without Him.

And here it is. The top story. The one that reframes everything below it.

Trump announced yesterday afternoon — on Truth Social, of course — that he’s extending the Iran ceasefire indefinitely. No end date. No deadline. Until talks “are concluded, one way or the other.” This from the man who said four days ago an extension was “highly unlikely.”

What actually happened: the talks collapsed. Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Islamabad for a second round of negotiations — with Witkoff and Kushner in tow, the same geniuses who brought you the Gaza disaster — was scrapped. Iran’s Foreign Ministry said there were no negotiations to attend. Tehran wants the naval blockade of Hormuz lifted before they’ll even sit down. Trump refuses. Khamenei hasn’t signed off on anything. The Iranian government, per Trump himself, is “seriously fractured.” He’s not wrong. But neither is he winning.

Meanwhile, in London and Paris, the grown-ups are meeting. Forty countries on a UK-chaired call earlier this month — France, Germany, Canada, UAE, India — planning a neutral multinational mission to secure the Strait of Hormuz. The United States was not invited. France and Britain have explicitly framed the initiative as separate from Washington’s blockade policy. Macron and Starmer co-chaired. Merz said Germany would contribute mine-clearing. Meloni showed up in person.

And — the part that should end careers if journalism still existed — the UK is set to announce legislation next month moving Britain closer to the European Union, explicitly because the Iran war has soured the “special relationship” with the United States. The war Trump started. The ceasefire he can’t close. The allies he insulted. The strait he can’t reopen. London is quietly de-coupling from Washington and re-coupling to Brussels, and the American press is covering Kash Patel’s bar tab.

On Chinese social media, they’re already calling Beijing the real winner of the Iran war. A Weibo user’s line of the week: the White House’s “credit score” wouldn’t be enough “to unlock a shared bike.”

The Throughline

Five stories. One spine.

Trump hires broken people on purpose (Patel). He insults the allies who’d bail him out (Canada). He protects the network that compromised him (Epstein). The adversary arming the enemy he’s “at war” with is the same country he’s flying to see next month (China/Touska). And while he loses the war, the allies he mocked are quietly building the post-American order without him (London).

This is not five stories. This is one story told five ways. And the story is: the American presidency is being run by a compromised man, staffed by compromised people, losing a war to a coalition of compromised states, while functional democracies quietly step around him.

Zev’s closing line on the show: “The adults are meeting in London. The drunks are at the podium in Washington. Pick a side.”

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🛢️ IRAN WINS

Donald Trump didn’t extend the Iran ceasefire, he surrendered, but he thinks we won’t notice. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy seized the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas in the Strait of Hormuz at dawn, and fired on a third vessel off Oman. Mahdi Mohammadi, advisor to chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Wednesday: “Trump’s ceasefire extension means nothing. The losing party cannot impose conditions.”

Fifty-three days into the war Donald Trump started, Iran has won, and the allies are planning the day after without the United States in the room. Military planners from more than 30 nations convene today at the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, North London, for a two-day conference on reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Britain and France are co-leading. The United States is not at the table.

Iran is in charge.

🇨🇳 CHINA’S MASK-OFF MOMENT

Iran’s victory is China’s doing. Beijing has delivered loitering munitions and HQ-16 air defense to Tehran and is in advanced talks on CM-302 anti-ship cruise missiles and DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicles — carrier-killer class, Mach-5 class. The US Treasury has sanctioned Chinese entities for shipping chemical precursors into the IRGC’s ballistic missile program. Xi Jinping hosts Trump at the rescheduled May summit in Beijing.

🗂️ MTG CONFIRMS TRUMP ORDERED COVER-UP

Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump personally blocked the Epstein files and told then–Attorney General Pam Bondi "flat out" not to release them, warning privately that "my people are going to get hurt. My friends will get hurt. People at Mar-a-Lago — they're going to get hurt"” Trump fired Bondi April 2 and installed his defense lawyer Todd Blanche as acting AG. Senator Ron Wyden says Blanche blocked the DEA from handing Senate Finance the unredacted 2015 OCDETFmemo on Operation “Chain Reaction” — the Epstein task force dismantled this year. Wyden: “covering up for pedophiles.”

🏛️ BILL GATES UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT

The Gates Foundation confirmed Tuesday it commissioned an independent review of Bill Gates's past interactions with Jeffrey Epstein and the foundation's due-diligence protocols. CEO Mark Suzman assigned the review earlier this year. The board expects a report this summer

⚖️ THE SUBPOENAS, WITHDRAWN

DOJ withdrew the Brennan grand jury subpoenas seventy-two hours after issuing them — four days after Joe DiGenova was installed. Maria Medetis Long is still out. The charging posture on Friday was gone by Tuesday night.

🎯 THE PATTERN

Not just another TACO Tuesday, Trump has lost. From Tehran to Beijing to Brussels to the Rayburn Building, the answer to Tuesday’s pressure was the same: Washington could not hold the line. Trump met the world this week. The world answered.

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Donald Trump told CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning that an extension of the Iran ceasefire was “highly unlikely.” By three this afternoon he had posted to Truth Social that he was extending it after all, citing a “seriously fractured” Iranian government. Between those two statements, Iranian negotiators refused to meet with the American peace envoy in Pakistan. Their reason, repeatedly reported and acknowledged on tonight’s broadcast, was direct: the peace envoy represents Israel, not the United States.

The peace envoy is Jared Kushner.

Kait Justice, writing at Downwind of Truth, has been tracing the Kushner thread for over a month. Tonight she laid the pieces out together. In 2021, at the close of Donald Trump’s first administration, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund put two billion dollars into Kushner’s newly formed Affinity Partners. The fund’s own board advised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman against the investment — Kushner, the board said, had neither the experience nor the track record for the money. The Crown Prince overrode the board. Affinity Partners now reports six billion dollars under management, up from four-point-eight billion in 2024. The mission of the firm, Justice said on air, is to create an investment channel between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

That mission has a paper trail that runs through Jeffrey Epstein. In emails surfaced in Justice’s reporting, Epstein wrote to a Qatari royal that “if the people would allow your country to recognize Israel, it could be interesting to discuss.” The email predates the Abraham Accords — Kushner’s signature first-term diplomatic achievement — by two years. In a parallel thread, Epstein pitched the Saudi royal court on an oil-backed currency and a compliant cryptocurrency, claiming on the page that he had already spoken to the founders of Bitcoin. Kushner’s network picked up the pieces Epstein left behind, and built the firm Riyadh now writes the checks to.

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5️⃣ Vance Off The Plane, China On The Board

Vice President JD Vance didn’t even bother traveling Islamabad for talks on Iran, trump claimed it was for security concerns but no Iranian delegation had left for Pakistan. On CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump described intercepting an Iranian vessel carrying “things on it, which wasn’t very nice,” calling the cargo “a gift from China, perhaps” — the first time a sitting U.S. president has described Beijing rearming Tehran’s air defenses. Former Iranian negotiator Mohammad Marandi posted a public warning telling Iranians to leave the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait immediately, and said ships near the Strait of Hormuz should prepare to abandon. A direct threat to US vessels who have been blockading Iranian ports. Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Tehran has “new cards on the battlefield,” language Blundell read as confirmation of the Chinese systems. A Daily Mirror report said Trump asked Joint Chiefs chair Dan Caine for a full ground invasion of Iran and the nuclear codes over the weekend, and that Caine walked out of the meeting. The ceasefire ends tomorrow night.

4️⃣ Ukraines Counter-Offensive

Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Tuesday that the Druzhba pipeline, the Soviet-era crude artery Ukrainian drones knocked offline in January, is repaired and ready to resume. The restart unlocks the €90 billion EU loan that Budapest had been blocking and releases the next Russia sanctions package Hungary had vetoed. Overnight, Special Operations Centre Alpha of the Security Service of Ukraine hit the Samara line dispatch station — the mixing point where high- and low-sulfur crude becomes the Urals export blend — cutting Russian production by as much as 40 percent. In the same window, Peter Magyar won Hungary’s election on a platform of forcing Viktor Orbán out and redistributing Orbán’s captured media licenses. Ukraine now runs 85 percent self-sufficient on munitions and air defense and has signed production deals with the same Gulf states that stopped buying drones from the Trump crime family. Two levers on one pipeline of money: Washington squeezes Iran’s barrels off the market and lifts Russia’s ledger; Kyiv cuts the ledger at Samara and drops Budapest’s veto.

3️⃣ Palantir Puts It In Writing

Palantir Technologies posted a 22-point manifesto to X over the weekend — billed as a summary of CEO Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic, co-authored with head of corporate and legal affairs Nicholas Zamiska. The planks include “hard power in this century will be built on software,” a call for universal national service and an end to the all-volunteer force, a claim that “the question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose,” a line that “the post-war neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone,” and the assertion that “some cultures have produced vital advances. Others remain dysfunctional and regressive.” Blundell’s piece, which went viral within hours of publication, called Palantir the first private corporation in recorded history to fuse four powers civilizations had kept apart: the surveillance apparatus of the state, the targeting engine of the military, the ideological machinery that decides what information travels, and the patronage of Jeffrey Epstein — who put $40 million into the company and corresponded with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Elon Musk for five years after his conviction. Blundell called it “the digital East India Trading Company,” the private corporate army that ran sovereign states for 150 years until the Crown absorbed it into the Royal Navy. The current Vice President is funded by Thiel; the man behind the manifesto is Karp.

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2️⃣ The Epstein Test

Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve, told the Senate Banking Committee he would not be “a sock puppet” and vowed independence from the White House. Elizabeth Warren raised Warsh’s pre-disclosure holdings in Jeffrey Epstein-era financial vehicles during the hearing. Mark Carney endorsed the nomination on the basis of having worked with Warsh years earlier. Blundell’s read on air: Warsh may be a technocrat of some narrow competence, but any confirmed business with Epstein after the 2008 conviction is a single disqualifier Warsh has not yet answered. “Would he be a puppet? No one knows,” Blundell said. “But if he did any business with Jeffrey Epstein post-conviction, he should be kept as far away from America’s leading financial regulatory body as humanly possible.” Republican Senator Thom Tillis has a separate hold on the nomination tied to the Justice Department’s criminal inquiry into Jerome Powell. Republicans hold a 12–10 margin in committee; one Republican no-vote ends the nomination.

1️⃣ Hegseth Kills The Flu Shot

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that the United States military will no longer require any service member to take the flu vaccine — effective immediately, voluntary for all active duty, reserve, and Department of Defense civilians. Hegseth framed the reversal in religious terms: “Your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable,” and told the force that “that era of betrayal is over.” The Department of Defense has required the flu vaccine for 77 years, since the late 1940s. Blundell’s on-air read: the order is not a health policy — it is a loyalty transaction aimed at the 19 to 20 percent of service members who swear evangelical allegiance alongside their oath to the Constitution. “Pete and Donnie are trying to carve away a certain group by giving them what they want,” Blundell said. “I did this for you. You need to do something for me when the time comes.” Context: the same weekend, Joint Chiefs chair Dan Caine refused Trump’s request for the nuclear codes and walked out of a meeting about a 200,000-soldier ground invasion of Iran. Hegseth is buying a cohort because Caine is not.

Washington’s oil blockade lifts Russia’s ledger while the Vice President is funded by the company writing the next regime’s playbook; the same week, the Secretary of Defense trades a 77-year military vaccine mandate for a loyalty cohort while the Joint Chiefs chair walks out on a ground-invasion briefing. The pieces are moving in the same direction.

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🛢️ BACK TO WAR

Donald Trump told CNBC’s Squawk Box Tuesday morning he has “very little appetite” for extending the Iran ceasefire past its Wednesday-night expiration, that an extension is “highly unlikely,” and that he is “ready to go” back to war if no deal lands in the next thirty-six hours. JD Vance and Steve Witkoff have pushed back their departure for a second round of Islamabad talks. Iran’s state broadcaster told the region no Iranian delegation has departed for Pakistan. Iran’s parliamentary speaker said Tehran has prepared “new cards on the battlefield.” Does this mean Chinese made air defenses?

⚖️ PERVERSION OF JUSTICE

Joe DiGenova, the Trump 2020 election-overturn lawyer, was sworn in Monday in Florida as special counselor to the attorney general, with the Brennan file in front of him ands he is wasting no time. Former senior intelligence and FBI officials cooperating with the Justice Department’s probe of former CIA director John Brennan received subpoenas over the weekend; they are scheduled to appear in person at the DC grand jury starting Today. The move — pulling cooperators into the grand jury room instead of continuing voluntary interviews — is the procedural jump prosecutors make when they intend to charge. The prosecutor who had been running the case, career national-security attorney Maria Medetis Long, was removed last week after, according to the reporting, expressing doubts the case held up.

🏛️ LUTNICK: CANADIANS ‘SUCK’

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick arrived at the Tuesday Senate hearing with a bipartisan pile of resignation calls in front of him. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie told reporters Sunday Lutnick should “make life easier on the president” and step down. Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said he “must resign or be fired.” Senator Adam Schiff and Senator Jacky Rosen have both filed formal calls. Public Citizen and Democracy Defenders filed their own last month. The Science Committee Democrats sent a letter.

The Commerce Secretary called Canada’s trade strategy is “the worst strategy I’ve ever heard,” that the country’s negotiators “suck”. Lutnick is four days away from a Senate appearance.

🛰️ THE DRUZHBA OPENING

While the Islamabad clock runs down, Ukraine is cutting the other lever. Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Tuesday that the Druzhba pipeline — out since January’s Russian strike — is repaired and ready to resume; the restart unlocks the €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine and the next Russia sanctions package Hungary had been vetoing. Kaja Kallas expects the veto gone within twenty-four hours. Overnight, Ukrainian drones struck the Samara dispatch station that mixes crude for the Urals export blend. Reuters reports Russia is cutting production.

🏛️ THE LABOR EXIT

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned Monday amid a Labor Department Inspector General probe into an alleged sexual relationship with a security-team member, drinking on the job, and personal travel booked under business-trip cover.

🎯 THE PATTERN

The White House is squeezing Iran’s oil to force Iran back to a table Iran has not arrived at — and every pull on that lever lifts the price of a barrel, and the price lifts Russia’s ledger. Ukrainian drones are cutting that same ledger at the other end. The Druzhba restart drops Hungary’s veto on the €90 billion the EU is about to wire Kyiv. Two levers, one pipeline of money. In Washington, the prosecutor who doubted the Brennan file was pulled, the Commerce Secretary publicly insulted the Prime Minister on the other side of the USMCA table, and the Labor Secretary was out by Monday. Will Lutnick follow?

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Jeffrey Epstein claims New Mexico drew him after 1990 — not for the land itself, but for the knowledge clustered there. The valley between the Sangre de Cristo and Sandia mountains is the birthplace of the atomic age. Physicists and mathematicians drift out of Los Alamos into private startups and the Santa Fe Institute. Zorro Ranch, he says, was no accident; he places it 23 miles from the Institute and 50 miles from Los Alamos.

He endows a chair at the Institute, named for Robert Maxwell.

Nuclear weapons are designed not to be used - built on the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Every warhead in a Wyoming silo, every Trident missile under the Pacific, every gravity bomb on a B-2 — none are meant to be used. They are meant to be feared.

As in, “You’d be MAD to use them.”

The Soviets understood by the mid-1970s that they could not out-build, out-miniaturize, or out-submarine America. The gap was unbridgeable but as long as each side had enough to destroy the other, a peace of sorts would prevail.

What they feared is what they couldn’t see.

Nuclear secrets were always the game. It was Robert Maxwell’s first assignment

In the Spring of 1945 in a German interrogation room - a 22-year-old Czech Jewish officer — brave, brilliant, family lost to the Nazis — was handed a dossier: Alsos. The order: find out what Heisenberg knew.

Six years after Alsos, Maxwell pitches British intelligence. The Soviets are flooding the world with physics and engineering journals. Nobody in the West is translating them. Maxwell offers. MI6 signs off. In 1951 he takes Pergamon Press, flies to Moscow, signs an exclusive copyright deal with VOuAP, and secures the right to translate Soviet science into English. The deal gives him decades of cover to sit inside rooms with Soviet nuclear physicists.

If you're asking the right question: the answer is a triple agent. His loyalty tree was Russia, Israel, and only then, British.

It was enough to catch the attention of the FBI. On December 9, 1953, J. Edgar Hoover signs a memo on Maxwell. Four words headline the page.

INTERNAL SECURITY — R & GE

R is Russia. GE is General Espionage. The case file is 105-25063.

“Bureau files contain no information identifiable with subject,” Hoover writes. “It is desired that you obtain through your sources identifying data and information concerning subject’s travels to the United States.”

By the end of 1953, the FBI has classified Maxwell as a Russian espionage subject moving toward the American atomic establishment.

Maxwell lands at Idlewild on April 1, 1954, on Pan American Flight 101. The FBI has asked Customs and Immigration to flag him at every East Coast port of entry. Pan Am treats him like a prince — the London cable reads

“GIVE HIM THE BEST OF SERVICE AS HE IS FREQUENT PAN AMERICAN AIR LINE TRAVELER.”

The customs lookout fails. He catches his 7:15 connection to Toronto.

Seven months later, he is back. This time the FBI listens in real time through the Atomic Energy Commission’s switchboard.

“ON OCTOBER TWENTYSEVEN LAST SUBJECT TRIED TO REACH DR. ALVIN WEINBERG, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR OF OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY, AND DR. L. HAWORTH, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR OF BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY. ON OCTOBER TWENTYEIGHT LAST SUBJECT CONTACTED BY TELEPHONE DR. WALTER ZINN, DIRECTOR OF ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY, LEMONT, ILLINOIS.”

Weinberg runs Oak Ridge, where uranium for the Hiroshima bomb was enriched. Haworth runs Brookhaven, the AEC’s flagship Long Island research facility. Zinn runs Argonne, where Enrico Fermi built the world’s first reactor. Inside forty-eight hours Maxwell reaches all three of them, plus John von Neumann, newly appointed to the AEC itself.

A McGraw-Hill editor named J. H. Luntz lays out Maxwell’s pitch to an FBI agent a few days later:

“MAXWELL’S plan is to have ZINN or HAFSTAD to be Editor in Chief of the American atomic energy magazine and planned that the Directors of the AEC National Laboratories would be Editors. MAXWELL would set up a fifteen man Editorial Board of American scientists… No renumeration would be involved… MAXWELL’S company would cover the entire costs on a monthly basis.”

A fifteen-man editorial board of every AEC national-lab director. Writing for free. In a journal owned by a Czech-born British publisher who has just signed an exclusive copyright deal with Moscow.

An access list.

On October 29, 1954, Maxwell sits for an interview at AEC headquarters. He confirms the pitch in writing:

“MAXWELL INDICATED HE WAS IN US ON BEHALF OF THE ABOVE JOURNAL… SUBJECT IS WORKING WITH DR. J. V. DUNWORTH OF HARWELL, ENGLAND.”

Harwell is the British equivalent of Oak Ridge. Dunworth is the deputy to Cockcroft, the Nobel laureate who runs it.

The FBI writes it all down. Then closes the case. File 105-25063 goes to storage for thirty years.

But the operation endures. Through Maxwell’s daughter, and her partner Jeffrey Epstein. Pergamon is gone but the funding of scientists - that persists through the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, through Martin Nowak, through MIT Media Lab via Marvin Minsky, through dinners at Zorro halfway between Los Alamos and Sandia, and through a chair at the Santa Fe Institute that he endows and names for Robert Maxwell.

Epstein’s hat tip to the past leaves Robert Maxwell’s name on the door. The scientists change as the decades pass. The operation does not.

I ask Ari Ben-Menashe in 2019 when he first met Jeffrey Epstein.

Ben-Menashe: “It was 1981. Maxwell had to introduce him to us. He wanted us to accept him as part of our group.”

The group is a cell of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. Ben-Menashe is a senior operative. The press has always said Mossad. Ben-Menashe corrects me on tape.

Ben-Menashe: “I was in this group of military intelligence. They keep on saying Mossad — that’s not it.”

I ask what Maxwell said when he pushed Epstein in.

Ben-Menashe: “Your Israeli bosses have already approved. It came down from up above.”

Ben-Menashe did not think Epstein was competent for arms work. But Maxwell, he says, had a different reason.

Ben-Menashe: “He was a good-looking guy. And Miss Maxwell — she fell for him.”

I ask about Ghislaine directly. Was she an agent too?

Ben-Menashe: “Oh, definitely. Military intelligence as well.”

A senior Israeli Directorate of Military Intelligence operative, on video, identifying Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell as assets of the same service he worked for. Why would Israeli intelligence want to blackmail Americans?

Ben-Menashe: “These guys were seen as agents. They found the niche for themselves. Blackmailing American and other political figures. It was quite their M.O.”

Then he laughs.

I bring up PROMIS in the first hour. The DOJ’s case-management software walked out of the Justice Department in 1982 and ended up running, bugged, inside central banks and nuclear facilities on every continent. No convictions. No names.

Ben-Menashe: “Yes. We were the ones that gave it to him, and he gave it to the Russians. And sold it to everybody else around the world.”

I press on the theft. Two people went in. Who was the second? Ben-Menashe won’t say his own name, but drops the name of the man who wrote it: “I know Hamilton. I know Hamilton. I know what I’m doing.”

Later, over the phone, Ben-Menashe admits he was the second man. He went, under cover, into a building of the United States Department of Justice. He came out with the software. He handed it to Robert Maxwell.

Maxwell put a backdoor into it.

Ben-Menashe: “The PROMIS was sold to the GRU. And sold to everybody else around the world.”

One PROMIS installation Maxwell sold was in New Mexico.

Ben-Menashe wasn’t the only Israeli spy working on nuclear secrets.

Arnon Milchan’s office is on Sunset Boulevard. He is producing Brazil for Terry Gilliam and preparing Once Upon a Time in America for Sergio Leone. To everyone who calls him, he is Hollywood’s rising producer.

The calls that matter come from Richard Kelly Smyth, an engineer in Huntington Beach who runs a small company called MILCO International. MILCO ships electronic components through Heli Trading — a front for the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

The components are krytrons. A krytron is about the size of a pen cap. Under high voltage, it’s the fast-firing switch that detonates the plutonium implosion lenses inside a nuclear warhead.

Between 1980 and 1983, MILCO ships 810 krytrons to Israel.

Smyth’s contact at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, during the shipments, is the deputy chief of mission. His name is Benjamin Netanyahu.

Federal prosecutors indict Smyth in 1985. He flees to Spain. Netanyahu is never charged.

November 2013: on Israeli television program Uvda, Arnon Milchan confesses that the entire krytron operation was run by him, for Israeli military intelligence, under cover of a Hollywood production company. The confession appears in his 2011 authorized biography two years earlier.

Then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears on the same broadcast.

“Arnon is a long-time intelligence asset,” Netanyahu says. “He contributed enormously to the security of the state.”

The security of the state, in diplomatic Hebrew, means the bomb.May 25, 1984. The FBI’s San Francisco field office opens and closes an investigation into a Berkeley, California information firm called Information On Demand, Inc. Its new owner, as of 1982, is Robert Maxwell, through Pergamon International.

Two weeks later, employees of the National Security Agency walk into the FBI’s Albuquerque field office and describe the same company. The Albuquerque SAC cables FBI Headquarters in a SECRET airtel:

“The information provided by [REDACTED] was received from employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) and has to do with the purchase of Information On Demand, Inc., by one ROBERT MAXWELL, the owner of Pergamon International, a British information firm.”

The NSA employees have flagged the acquisition as connected to “various available means of tapping government information data bases.”

Tapping government information data bases.

This is June 1984. Two years after Ben-Menashe walked PROMIS out of the DOJ. One year after Maxwell sold the backdoored software to the GRU.

On July 19, 1984, the FBI Director cables both offices and connects them as the same target.

Then Headquarters supplies Albuquerque with the reason to close:

“this might be dated information which relates to the data furnished by FBIHQ concerning the severing of the rights to the data base by Pergamon and the breaking of the data exchange agreement.”

In other words, Washington has told Albuquerque the problem is already solved. The tip is dated.

Albuquerque accepts the framing. Closes the case.

“Until such time as NSA re-establishes contact and expresses further interest in this matter, Albuquerque is taking no further action and this matter is being placed in a closed status.”

And:

“The personnel at Sandia National Laboratories were told that if NSA has a desire to establish contact with the FBI in this matter, a logical step would be to contact FBIHQ and pursue it through that channel.”

The Sandia personnel are told, in writing, that the National Security Agency is no longer welcome to walk into the local FBI field office about a British publisher tapping American databases. Any NSA contact must route through Washington.

“There is a chance they will come to Albuquerque in September,” the cable adds. “If this occurs, FBIHQ will be apprised of any pertinent data received.”

If the NSA shows up again, Washington is notified.

The American intelligence apparatus raised the alarm. Washington buried it, and then Washington surveilled the alarm-raisers.

While the FBI closes the Maxwell case, a U.S. Navy civilian analyst named Jonathan Pollard photocopies 800,000 pages of classified material and hands them to a handler at the Israeli Embassy. The material includes the acoustic signatures of American nuclear submarines.

American boomer submarines — the Ohio-class Trident platforms — are the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad. They exist to be undetectable. Hand an adversary their acoustic signatures and the deterrent collapses.

Pollard delivers. The embassy sends to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv, multiple U.S. inspector general reviews later conclude, sends onward to Moscow.

The Soviets already have PROMIS.

Now they have the noise profiles of the submarines carrying the warheads PROMIS is helping them map.

1986. Maxwell is in the Mirror building on Holborn when his secretary tells him the Israeli Embassy is on line two.

His editors at the Sunday Mirror have been fielding an approach for three weeks from Mordechai Vanunu, a former Dimona technician who worked for a decade inside Machon 2, the underground plutonium-production building. Vanunu has photographs and diagrams.

Maxwell picks up. He tells the Embassy what the Sunday Times has, what the Mirror has been offered, and when the material will publish.

Within days, a Mossad honeypot named Cindy meets Vanunu in London and lures him onto a flight to Rome, where Israeli security ties him to a stretcher and flies him home. He will spend eighteen years in Ashkelon prison, mostly in solitary.

Maxwell protects the warhead program.

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