5️⃣ Clinton Auditions On Morning Joe

Hillary Clinton went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday and delivered the line of a candidate testing the room. “I love Israel, and I hate Netanyahu’s government and his policies. I love America, and I hate Trump’s government and policies,” Clinton said. “She’s running. I’m pretty convinced that she’s running,” Zev said. Dean called it disqualifying anyway: “They’re married. He knew. She knew. It’s disqualifying,” he said — and, of her age, “she is not a young person.”

4️⃣ Kimmel Interview Bullied Off TV

Jimmy Kimmel pulled his interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico off ABC Wednesday night. “His FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations,” Kimmel said. “My interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television,” he said. On YouTube instead. Dean traced the pressure to Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general Talarico is running to unseat — “the worst attorney general in the United States of America,” Dean called him. “You’ve never had in America the government dare to intervene on a guest booking,” Zev said.

3️⃣ Envoy Sued For Rape, Epstein Warned First

Victoria Drake says in her complaint that Paolo Zampolli — Trump’s Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, the man who introduced Trump to Melania — drugged and raped her in his Manhattan townhouse on October 7, 2023. Zampolli has called it an extortion attempt and has not answered the summons. Epstein wrote about Zampolli in 2011: “Be careful. He is trouble. Lots.” Zev put up a graphic on air, “people around Trump accused of rape” — Trump, Zampolli, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, then Pete Hegseth and Brett Kavanaugh. “This is a rogue gallery of people who are hostile to women … and they are leading our government right now,” Zev said.

2️⃣ Carney And Zelensky Sign A Hundred-Year Pact Without America

Mark Carney and Volodymyr Zelensky signed a Canada–Ukraine declaration in Ottawa Thursday: a hundred-year partnership on defense and security, with Ukraine helping Canada build up to a million drones a year within two years. “It’s intentional as to why it doesn’t include the United States,” Dean said. “When Russia began its illegal, barbaric, full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin made a series of rash predictions,” Carney said. “It’s been four years, 198 days of courageous resistance. Ukraine will never submit.” “It’s not happening because they need the weapons. It’s happening on ideological grounds,” Zev said, and asked what a million drones a year are for. “To protect ourselves,” Dean said — from Russia, from China, “and to protect ourselves from Donald Trump.”

1️⃣ Trump Promises $5,000, Vance Won’t Say The Number

Trump told the Republican midterm convention in Dallas Wednesday night, “I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” then promised every adult American a $5,000 dividend if Republicans hold Congress. Dean counted the prior cash promises — a 2018 tax cut, 2020 drug cards, a stimulus, a $2,000 payout that became $600 — each paying zero. “Over the past 17 months, six times,” Dean said. Bret Baier put the number to Vice President J.D. Vance: “So you do the quick math, that’s about $1.3 trillion,” Baier said, then, “the president is bribing voters.” Vance called it “fundamentally a dividend for American workers” and never said $5,000. “It’s not only a bad idea, it will never fucking happen. It’s pure fantasy,” Dean said.

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Dean spent eleven days in Bavaria with Steve Schmidt and their sons, Jake and Joey, both twenty, walking the road the Nazis took and the road the Allies took back. They drank in the Hofbräuhaus under the bullet hole Hitler put in the ceiling in 1923. They stood in Dachau, where the Nazis killed about 60,000 people. "Hauntingly quiet and very fucking real," Dean wrote from the car. They stopped at Dürnbach, where 484 Canadians lie; the oldest headstone he found was 27. They rode Hitler's brass elevator up to the Eagle's Nest, which he used fourteen times. Dean went to answer one question: how long does it take to get a country back once you hand it to a strongman. His answer is 75 years. "We're at the beginning of that, again," he wrote.

5️⃣ Merz Hangs Up on Trump for Cheering the AfD

Dean Blundell landed from eleven days in Bavaria hours before Friedrich Merz cancelled his call with Donald Trump. Trump had called the AfD's Saxony-Anhalt win a "really big night"; Merz scrapped the call and told the Bundestag the party's migration policy is "ethnic cleansing." Dean walked the show through Dachau, where 60,000 died, and Dürnbach, where 484 Canadians lie. Hitler took the oath and opened the camp seven weeks later. "That is how you deal with fascism. You do not fucking entertain it," Dean said. "The United States is at the gates of Dachau right now. And that is not a fucking exaggeration." How long does it take to get a country back? Seventy-five years. "You've got 53 days," Dean said.

4️⃣ Anthropic Researcher Quits and Says AI Could Kill Everyone

Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic Tuesday and posted why: the people building AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Evan Hubinger, who runs alignment at Anthropic, puts the odds above 10 percent, and the New York Times reported a hacking tool that rides in on a WeChat call and hits millions of phones in hours. Trump said on tape "we'll have a little gear." "They're warning him. And he's saying, ah, we've got a gear. What gear?" Dean said. Nobody knows what happens once AI becomes its own teacher, Zev said.

3️⃣ Trump Hands Three Aides $45,000 Each in Cash

Trump gave three aides $45,000 each in cash. Natalie Harp, Chamberlain Harris and Margo Martin each disclosed it as "Cash gift for holidays"; the Washington Post found the forms Wednesday. Each earns about $150,000. Walt Nauta got $20,000. Harp is "very much a trained propagandist," Zev said, and the money is "completely unethical, probably illegal, and no one's going to do anything about it because no one cares." "This is no different than what he did with Jeffrey and Ghislaine," Dean said.

2️⃣ Trump Answers Carney's Tariffs With a Whisky Ban

Mark Carney put C$27.6 billion of counter-tariffs into force Tuesday: 50 percent on American steel, aluminium and furniture. Trump signed five proclamations that evening banning Canadian alcohol, motorcycles over 800cc and whey from 29 September. He bans because he has hit the 1930 Tariff Act's 50 percent ceiling, Dean said. "He tariffed wigs and ice cream sticks. He didn't tariff potash. He didn't tariff critical minerals," Dean said. "We are in a fully functional trade war with our closest ally. And it's not going to end," Zev said; it looks like intentional weakening of the American economy.

1️⃣ Trump Sinks Five Iranian Tankers and Promises $2 Gas After the Election

US forces sank five Iranian tankers Tuesday. Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired missiles at the US base in Jordan; Dean counted 60 Patriots fired to stop them. Trump keeps promising gas in the $2 range once the election is past. Americans pay $4.22 a gallon with Brent past $100, and CNBC counts nine oil and gas stocks in Trump's disclosures up $1.5 to $4.4 million since the war began. "Dean, this is looking like a war," Zev said. "Yeah, it's a war. It never ended. It doesn't matter what Trump says," Dean said. Trump has declared victory in Iran 66 times, Dean counted. "Let's go, America. Get it together," Dean said.

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American forces destroyed five Iranian tankers Tuesday after the Revolutionary Guard fired missiles at a US warship twice in two days and missed. Iran claims it hit the American base at Al Azraq, Jordan; neither Jordan nor the Pentagon has confirmed it.

5️⃣ Carney Charges Americans, Trump Swings at Kansas

Mark Carney started charging Americans at one minute past midnight Tuesday: C$27.6 billion of American goods. Trump answered on Truth Social: “NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!” Bombardier builds for the Pentagon in Wichita, Kansas, so Kansas’s two Republican senators objected first. Carney is an economic whiz and Trump is an idiot, Zev said. Trump posted a still of himself thrashing Carney in a cartoon hockey fight, fans animated the rest, and to Zev’s eye the jersey looks Russian.

4️⃣ Putin Bombs Kyiv Once Trump’s Envoys Leave

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent the weekend in Moscow, then Kyiv, and Putin held his fire while they were in Kyiv. They left Sunday; at 3:30 Tuesday morning Russia fired 32 cruise missiles and 166 drones at the city, killing five, and at midday flew a drone into a newsroom mid-broadcast. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign-policy aide, told reporters the two sides discussed “major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects.” Trump’s people are doing business with the men bombing Kyiv, Zev said.

3️⃣ Trump’s 9/11 Firemen Now Carry Him

Trump stood on the Ellipse Tuesday, FDNY firefighters around him, and told them two of their own carried him out of Ground Zero: “big, strong guys… they literally lifted me up.” He was never on the pile. He was four miles north, on the phone, telling a New Jersey TV station 40 Wall Street was now the tallest downtown. Newsday found him there two days later in a black suit, not a speck of dust on it. He sends JD Vance to Ground Zero on Friday and keeps the Pentagon for himself.

2️⃣ Huckabee Threatens Britain, Netanyahu Shuts Its Consulate

Ed Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, told the Commons as “a proud British Jew” that the West Bank settlers are carrying out ethnic cleansing, and banned their goods. Gideon Sa’ar, Netanyahu’s foreign minister, closed Britain’s East Jerusalem consulate by afternoon. Trump’s ambassador Mike Huckabee told the BBC British companies “will not be able to do business in Florida”; Rubio softened it within hours. Britain wrote the Balfour Declaration; Britain set up Israel. Netanyahu punished Britain for naming a crime, and Trump let his man threaten it for him.

1️⃣ Iran Holds a US Robot Sub and the Left Press Looks Away

This week’s Ground News Blindspot. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it captured one of America’s newest robot submarines in the Strait of Hormuz — an Anduril Dive-LD: Palmer Luckey’s machine, Peter Thiel’s money, JD Vance’s stock. A US official told Reuters an older drone malfunctioned a day earlier, nothing classified aboard. Iran didn’t capture it. Iran found it. Iran did the same with a CIA drone in 2011 and flew a copy into Israel in 2018; Zev expects the parade, then the copy. Ground News counts 67 outlets on it; of the 30 it rates, four lean left — 13 percent.

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5️⃣ Gloria Steinem, 1934–2026

Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at her home in New York, at 92, and Zev opened on what she actually invented: an arithmetic. People outnumbered on their own stop being outnumbered together. He first met the idea in a Sociology 101 lecture hall in South Africa, where it became scaffolding for a new constitution — and the reason that country wrote women’s rights and gay rights into law while others did not. Dana DuBois, who stepped out of her workday for the top of the show, said she had never known a world without Steinem’s influence, and called losing her nine days after Dolly Parton a devastating doubleheader. Ellie Leonard went to the 1963 Playboy Club exposé — Steinem in the costume, taking notes, later describing the operation as one run by an eight-year-old child.

4️⃣ Sanders Moves to Ban the AI the Pentagon Buys

Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar called for an outright ban on artificial superintelligence, with a corporate death penalty for any company that builds it. Zev broke with them. Ban it here and the work moves rather than stops — the other side builds it anyway, and America loses both the race and any say in taming it. What July’s OpenAI breach argues for is regulation: safety vetted before a product ships, harms monitored after. Leonard, who lost her own job to the technology, took it to ground level. No person sits behind the report button any more when someone is threatened online, only an algorithm hunting keywords.

3️⃣ Leon Black Sues Congress, Then Skips His Deposition

Leon Black asked a federal judge to stop the House Oversight Committee enforcing two subpoenas, then failed to appear for the deposition they demanded. Leonard walked the sequence: Black was offered a voluntary interview, not under oath, walked out of it, and got subpoenaed twice — once for sworn testimony, once for the nondisclosure agreements he insists have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. He says he is protecting women’s privacy. Zev put the $158 million in context. Epstein was no accountant; he ran an art scheme through a trust, moving works between entities Black controlled to dodge tax under a loophole since closed. The pattern runs deeper. Black sat inside the firm that helped blow up 1987, then bought the wreckage cheap and built Apollo from it — an insider on both sides of the collapse, the same shape as 2008.

2️⃣ Lutnick Campaigns for Canada’s Breakup

No American cabinet secretary has done what Howard Lutnick did this week: campaign in public for a neighbouring country to come apart. He blamed Mark Carney for trade talks his own last-minute demands killed, then told Ontario on television it does not measure up as a fifty-first state — while the State Department heard out the Albertans who want to leave. Trump followed on Truth Social, promising Carney’s economy would collapse. Reverse it, Zev noted, and there would be war. Canada is meanwhile growing on new partners in Europe and Asia, and the tariffs land on American buyers.

1️⃣ A Whistleblower Says the Postal Service Kept Building

Judge Indira Talwani has not ruled on the Postal Service’s mail-ballot screening system, and the show went to air without her decision. What did land is worse: a whistleblower says USPS kept building the voter portal after the court ordered it stopped, and the site may appear within days. Members of Congress want closed-door hearings. Set that beside ICE offering $5 million for a file of every American voter’s name, address and voting history. The file does not have to be accurate to work — Leonard described neighbours with passports and visas in order who now walk their documented children to school holding papers, and who will think twice about a polling place. Her advice for November: vote early, and confirm the ballot arrived.

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5️⃣ TARRANT CUTS THE BOOTHS, THE POST OFFICE SLOWS THE MAIL

Tarrant County’s Republican commissioners closed 92 Election Day polling places on Tuesday and cut early voting from 50 sites to 47, over a room that shouted them down. Zev named the only explanation for closing polls in a county that is growing: somebody knows who votes there. Behind the county sits the same crew — Kash Patel, who helped organise January 6, now runs the FBI and its election-crimes work; Heather Honey, of the Cyber Ninjas recount, now sets state voter-roll and mail rules at Homeland Security; Natalie Harp, who urged that day’s crowd on, now works in the White House. Anne P. Mitchell, the lawyer sitting in for Dean Blundell, brought the whistleblower who says the Postal Service built its ballot portal anyway, under a judge’s restraining order, and that one bad barcode rejects a whole batch of ballots back to the states. She filed the report with the court, which hears the injunction Thursday at 9 a.m. “The only way we lose is if you don’t vote,” Mitchell said.

4️⃣ MAPQUEST REFUSED, AND WENT TO NUMBER ONE

Apple and Google renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” on the president’s demand. MapQuest refused, and Americans made it the number one app in the country. Zev read the poll under the joke: 38 percent of Republicans now call Canada unfriendly or an enemy, per Axios — the price of a trade war fought over a name. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has since stepped into Alberta’s secession fight, a domestic Canadian matter no American cabinet officer has touched before. Mitchell explained why he would: Trump is the only thing standing between Lutnick and the Epstein file.

3️⃣ DENMARK ARMS GREENLAND — AND ONLY ONE SIDE COVERED IT

This week’s Ground News Blindspot found Denmark sending conscripts to Greenland, with 56 percent of the coverage on the right and 13 percent on the left. As the ice melts, Zev explained, the polar route cuts roughly 35 percent off China’s shipping costs to America and runs down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes — which is why Trump, Putin and Xi all want the Arctic, and why Canada and Greenland keep coming up. Mitchell named the arrangement on air: the axis of grift. Ground News gives Fivestack viewers 40 percent off the Vantage plan at groundnews.com/fivestack.

2️⃣ HEGSETH CLEARS OUT THE OFFICERS WHO COULD REFUSE

Pete Hegseth struck seven more officers from the Army’s two-star promotion list, and the Army secretary who objected is gone. Dan Driscoll resigned to the president’s face and told him Hegseth is unqualified. Mitchell, an Army veteran, said the ranks will remember it: when a respected leader walks out on principle, the next illegal order gets a second thought. Zev tied it to Quantico, where Trump proposed American cities as training grounds, and asked whether a thinner officer corps is the point. The Navy supplied the picture — the USS Abraham Lincoln pulled into Thailand this week, rusted.

1️⃣ AN AMERICAN MISSILE HIT A WEDDING

A missile hit a wedding party in Sirik county, southern Iran, late Tuesday. At least four people are dead — two of them children, aged four and sixteen — and 68 are wounded, the Iranian Red Crescent says, and it has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate. The American military says it never targets civilians. Nobody has established what the missile was aimed at. Zev noted this is the second such account of this war, after the strike that killed schoolgirls, in a conflict Washington keeps calling finished. Iranian hackers reached American infrastructure this week, water systems among them, exactly as Iranian commanders promised on camera three weeks ago.

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Lev Parnas told The Fivestack his sources expect indictments in two to three weeks, an October surprise before the midterms, and that Trump is adamant he wants Barack Obama charged with conspiracy, with Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Miles Taylor. Parnas says the Ratcliffe and Kash Patel Moscow trips feed the material: “Which I wouldn’t call evidence. I would call misinformation.”

Dean is currently on assignment in Europe

5️⃣ Lake Ontario

Doug Burgum, at Interior, says Trump is pressuring Apple to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America”; Google switched it on American phones over the weekend. Parnas typed it into his phone live on air and got back Lake America. What Trump is really after is in the order: the cooling water, the drinking water, the Welland Canal trade route, and behind it the Arctic.

4️⃣ Welker, the FCC, and a letter

Trump asked the Federal Communications Commission to rebuke or punish NBC’s Kristen Welker for calling his endorsement record mixed. NBC had counted it eleven days earlier: 67 wins, six losses. “That’s not how dictators work. They need to go after the top, because if they shut down the top, the bottom fall,” Parnas said. He also said CNN cut him off last week when he mentioned Trump, Cohen and the Epstein files. “Even like yourself, that are being threatened by Melania for writing a true story,” Parnas said. Melania Trump’s lawyers sent Narativ a demand letter over its Amanda Ungaro reporting. Trial means discovery. The letter is aimed less at a courtroom than at every other newsroom, warning them off a story that is accurate, with more to come.

3️⃣ Venezuela

Trump announced the biggest oil deal in history on Truth Social Friday, then “a Gift from Venezuela” Sunday. The desk searched the White House, State, the Federal Register, Energy. No paperwork. Alejandro Betancourt López is assembling it. Switzerland has him under investigation — not charged, not prosecuted. Todd Blanche asked the Swiss for leniency before taking over the Justice Department. “I know Alejandro and his family very well,” Parnas said.

2️⃣ Dark money

The New York Times counted at least $1 billion in midterm spending with hidden donors, and calls that a floor. Sixty-four days out. “When you talk about dark money, when you talk about super PAC money, the same money goes to both sides,” Parnas said. It reaches low-polling Democrats in tight districts who can split a vote. Name a donor. Nobody can.

1️⃣ The Pentagon

Hegseth ordered forces held in place for a longer war with Iran. Three combatant commands — European, Pacific and Southern — and the Navy’s top admiral filed a non-concur: they disagreed, and said they would follow the order anyway. Sean Parnell, hunting the leaker, called publication a crime while writing in the same post that “non-concurs are standard.” A community note on X cited the Pentagon Papers ruling. “It’s going after the whistleblowers... the people trying to warn our country,” Parnas said. Trump posted an AI video of Kharg Island “blown to smithereens,” a place never struck. Reuters ran it through detection software: most likely synthetic. JD Vance, on camera, did not deny it was fake.

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He signed the order on camera. His negotiators gave up the demands the same morning, in the room where the money actually moves.

5. LAKE AMERICA

Trump signed an executive order Thursday afternoon renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” effective immediately, with Doug Burgum beside him. “All it takes is a good pen and some intelligence,” he said. Fifty-seven percent of that lake is in Canada. “They want to be treated like a state, but they’re not a state,” he said.

His negotiators folded the same morning, in the room where the money actually moves: they dropped the demands over how Canadian platforms rank and label American content, Dominic LeBlanc thanked them and asked for more, and Canada gave up nothing. Howard Lutnick denied ever raising the French language: “If you think I ever said the words French.” Dean Blundell, who broke the withdrawal at 10:28, expects Ottawa to cancel its F-35 order next week.

Canada is the number one export market for 27 states, six of them swing states — Michigan 39 percent of everything it exports, Wisconsin 31, then Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota and North Carolina. Two years ago it was 36.

4. TWO THEATRES, ONE EMPTY MAGAZINE

John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow to tell the Russians not to attack NATO, and Sergei Naryshkin, Putin’s foreign intelligence chief, confirmed the meeting himself on Russian state television at 6:31 Thursday morning — hours before any American official said a word. AP and Reuters then reported American Patriot interceptor stocks in Europe are “beyond critical,” burned through in the Iran war. Ratcliffe delivered his warning the same day his own government called the magazine empty.

Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration counted 244 Chinese vessels around the island in July, a third straight record month. No exercise, no drill, nobody announced it. Romania’s president Nicușor Dan condemned Russian drones over his own gas field on 20 August. Naryshkin counts interceptors too.

3. THE BLINDSPOT: ZELENSKYY WORKS THE SENATE

Volodymyr Zelenskyy lobbied senators directly on the Russia sanctions bill — the act named for Lindsey Graham, who died in July — and Ground News reported at 12:06 Thursday afternoon that it helped shake the bill loose. Fifty-three percent of the coverage came from the left, 47 percent from the centre, and from the right, nothing. Not thin. Zero.

The editors who spiked Zelenskyy working the Senate are the editors who spiked the CIA director in Moscow.

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2. OSSOFF GIVES COLLINS A DEADLINE

Jon Ossoff stood in Macon on Thursday morning and gave Mike Collins until the afternoon to answer for Preston Parra, who worked for him and posted a swastika, “White Power,” racial slurs and an image of himself in Klan robes. Parra says he made that image with Grok, the AI generator. It is not a photograph.

Collins’s leadership PAC paid Parra $7,700; the watchdog’s own report puts the pay at $10,288.44, twice the figure the Washington Post reported. “It is the year 2026 in the state of Georgia. It’s not 1935. It’s not 1958,” Ossoff said. Collins leaves the House at noon on January 3, 2027, win or lose, and House Ethics loses jurisdiction the same minute. He only has to last until January.

1. BANK OF AMERICA PAYS $72.5 MILLION

Judge Jed Rakoff approved Bank of America’s $72.5 million settlement with Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers at 12:42 Thursday afternoon, clearing the way to pay roughly 90 women. Six outlets had touched it by air time. House Oversight released 201 pages of Jes Staley’s closed-door interview the same week.

Asked flatly whether he shared JPMorgan’s confidential information with Epstein, Staley answered “Yes.” Page 175: “I’ve got the right to use confidential information where I think it’s appropriate.” Page 179, asked whether he regretted any of it: “No.”

Second bank, second check, and no individual has ever been charged. Shareholders write it, the executives keep their money, and the accusers get a settlement instead of a defendant.

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DEVELOPING….Kash Patel ran the leak hunt out of the White House this week — three Secret Service communications staff on leave, four New York Times reporters subpoenaed, the agency that guards the president investigated from the building it guards. Dean Blundell disputed that on air: nobody has confirmed the Secret Service leaked anything, he said, calling it a purge of people not loyal to Trump and putting the catering-truck leak on Karoline Leavitt, 48 hours before she quit — Narativ has not verified that, and our reporting cuts against the purge: nobody fired, no target list.

5️⃣ Nepal — the wall of water

In the video Zev played, birds lift off before the water arrives, people run because they can hear it, and a building Nepal and China built together is gone. Ninety-five dead by Wednesday night, more than a hundred now — thirty-three in Chitwan, 150 kilometres downstream, one in the district that touches China. Nepal got no warning because no mechanism exists. Both sides agreed in principle to share flood data after the same river flooded in July 2025. Nobody signed it.

4️⃣ Meta buys its way out

Mark Zuckerberg sat through part of the trial, saw where it was going, and paid up to seventeen billion dollars. Forty state attorneys general took the deal mid-trial, and the money comes with rules — two hours a day for teenagers, teen accounts locked overnight. Meta admits nothing. Zev signed up for the last Meta settlement to see what his privacy was worth, and collected 18 cents. Congress passed nothing. The states did this.

3️⃣ The CIA director in Moscow

John Ratcliffe spent eight hours at Vnukovo on Tuesday and nobody in Washington announced it. Flight trackers caught the plane. Dmitry Peskov gave the readout: contacts through the security services, no meeting with Putin, Putin kept informed without delay. Trump called it “very sort of semi-routine.” Zev: “The CIA director does not semi-routinely head over to have conversations with the FSB.” His read: Russia is preparing something against a NATO neighbour, with the Army down to five four-star generals.

2️⃣ Canada hits back

Doug Ford told Trump to kiss his ass, then declined on CBS to take it back. “I stand by those comments,” Ford said, before turning conciliatory. Canada’s retaliation lands September 8: 15 to 50 percent on more than 700 American products, steel and aluminium doubled to 50, $7.5 billion behind Canadian business. Dean read Mark Carney’s target list as surgical — Maine lobster, Alaska, Michigan, Wisconsin dairy, Pennsylvania appliances — aimed at the midterms. American toilet paper is climbing. The pulp is Canadian.

TODAY’S NUMBER 1 STORY BROKE LIKE THIS ON GROUND NEWS: The ballot-rule story pulls 67 percent left, 33 percent centre, zero from the right. Ground News lets you see what both sides cover.

1️⃣ The ballot rule

Judge Indira Talwani lifted her own injunction against Trump’s mail-ballot rule Wednesday, and the panic started. Anne P. Mitchell read the order. The Supreme Court had tossed the case as unripe — no final rule existed when the states sued — so Talwani lifted an injunction she issued too early, and told the plaintiffs to amend and come back. “She’s going to slap an injunction on that complaint so fast that the USPS heads will spin,” Mitchell said. Sixty-nine days out, her advice: drop box, not mailbox.

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5️⃣ Dolly Parton Dies at 80

Dolly Parton died at 80. Her family announced it on her own verified accounts, in a video her nephew Bryan Seaver recorded years ago at her request. “Sadness lies with us, not with Dolly,” Seaver said in that announcement. The family released no cause. Zev met her once on the Oprah set, where she sang “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers. Blundell counted what she did with the money: Dollywood turned not-for-profit, 300 million books mailed to kids who had none.

4️⃣ Ratcliffe Flies to Moscow and Tells Nobody Why

John Ratcliffe landed in Moscow. No announcement, no readout, no press pool — the trip surfaced only because trackers followed a U.S. military plane in. Blundell said it was a C-17. Zev granted the obvious: CIA directors run these missions — Ratcliffe’s last took him to Cuba to tell Havana it was on the list. Moscow is not Havana. Trump’s presidency runs on Russia, Zev said.

3️⃣ DHS Admits the Voter-Fraud Numbers Were Inflated

NPR reported at 2:15 p.m. that the Department of Homeland Security admitted the non-citizen voter-roll figures it had been touting were inflated, on an audio call with a Nevada official. The Supreme Court handed the administration a preliminary win on the new mail-ballot order a day earlier, on numbers DHS now concedes were wrong. Blundell asked why nine justices can’t fact-check what two broadcasters check every afternoon.

2️⃣ Graham’s Sister Faces South Carolina

Darline Graham Nordone, sister of the late Lindsey Graham, carried Trump’s endorsement and, by Blundell’s count, $830,000 of his money into Tuesday’s South Carolina vote. Blundell said she answered a foreign-policy question by admitting she didn’t know much, but she liked the army. Polls closed at 7 p.m., after the show. Trump bought her a floor, Blundell said, and it may not hold.

1️⃣ Canada Matches Trump, Dollar for Dollar — This Week’s Ground News Blindspot

François-Philippe Champagne announced $27.6 billion in Canadian tariffs on roughly 700 American products — 50, 25 and 15 percent, matching Trump rate for rate, effective September 8. Energy and potash stay off the list. Mark Carney did not attend. Champagne paired them with a $7.5 billion support package: $3 million non-repayable grants, $2 million interest-free loans. Dean Blundell named the contrast: Trump has never once offered a package to the people his tariffs hurt. “This is war,” Blundell said, and aimed it carefully — not at Americans, at the Trump regime. Trump spent the day on Truth Social professing his love for French Canadians, calling Carney weak and ineffective, and floating a rename of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” Blundell countered with Lake Michigan: call it Lake Epstein, “because we don’t do business with pedophiles either.” Zev took it past the trade math — Putin wants the Arctic passage, and a compliant Canada hands it to him. And the American right is not covering any of it: Ground News scores the story 65 percent left, 35 percent centre, zero percent right, at 100 percent high factuality. The bill lands on American buyers on September 8, and half the country meets it with no warning, because the outlets their voters trust won’t call a trade war news until the checkout counter does.

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5️⃣ Carney Walks Out, and Canada Starts Fighting Back

Trump’s negotiators handed Ottawa a replacement draft on Friday night, hours before the deadline, and Mark Carney walked. Dean Blundell, who has sources on the Canadian side, read out the demands: an American veto over Canada’s deals with anyone else, price caps and first refusal on its critical minerals, Quebec’s French-language protections eliminated, and Washington deciding how much Canadian energy it takes before anyone else gets a drop. Mark Wiseman, Canada’s ambassador in Washington, had one description for it. “This is an annexation document,” Dean quoted him. “There’s no other way to put it.” Nobody could sign that, so Trump sank his own deal, then spent the weekend blaming Ottawa for last-minute demands. Fifty percent tariffs on about twenty billion US dollars of Canadian goods landed Saturday. Carney matched them dollar for dollar from September 8, called EU leaders, and sits on $460 billion of American debt he can sell whenever he likes.

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4️⃣ Points at Trump’s Human Printer

Jon Ossoff noticed how much time Natalie Harp spends beside the president, said so, and Washington started asking who she is. Harp carries a printer for Trump and hands him what she finds online, which means she decides a fair share of what he believes. When Trump slipped out of Turkey on a catering truck last week, she is the aide he took. She came out of One America News, and she spent January 6th posting for him more than a hundred and fifty times, CNN reported over the weekend. Harp screens what reaches the president, which is exactly the access any foreign service would pay for.

3️⃣ Leonard Publishes All Thirty-Seven Pages

Ellie Leonard verified and published the full set — thirty-seven handwritten pages of FBI notes, not the twenty-two she put out five days ago. Todd Blanche has told a federal judge those pages cannot come out. They had in fact been sitting in the open since March, when a Washington Examiner reporter posted them to a public document site and never wrote a word about them. The FBI interviewed Jane Doe 4 four times. Blanche released the one interview in which Donald Trump’s name never appears and withholds the three in which it does. Katie Phang is suing for them, and Blanche’s answer is due August 27. The allegations describe the abuse of a girl aged thirteen to fifteen; nobody has corroborated them, Trump denies them, and no prosecutor has charged him. She is in hiding and, Dean said, still terrified. Bill Barr ran the Justice Department through every one of those months, and Trump sat in the White House — the same months Narativ published The Secret Life of Jeffrey Epstein. A cover-up at the arrest, another at the death, and now a third.

2️⃣ Trump Explains to Cohen Why He’s Talking to Him

Michael Cohen put Trump on his Sunday radio show and let the president write his script for him. “You told stories in order to get out of trouble,” Trump told him. “And you thought about it and you recanted your testimony. And most people don’t have the guts to do that.” Cohen has recanted nothing. He does have a clemency application sitting at the White House, and Trump signs those. “It was like watching someone beat a dog into heeling that he already beat,” Dean said, before apologising to his audience for ever having worked with him.

1️⃣ Bessent Declares Economic War on Iran

Scott Bessent stood at a Treasury podium and declared economic war on Iran — its oil, its economy, and sanctions on anyone anywhere still trading with it. He would not say which leaders Trump has been calling or what he asked them for. “We’ve already seen some results,” Bessent said, and, “we do not have infinite patience here.” Bessent is threatening China, which takes no instruction from Washington and answers sanctions with sanctions. Isolate Iran’s remaining partners and China collects them. Bessent brought a press release to a war, and Americans pay for it at the pump.

Dean caught the timing. Trump picked his fight with Canada in the week the thirty-seven pages came out, and it is taking every minute of network airtime. Americans vote in seventy-one days.

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This is the smoking gun. Twenty-two pages of handwritten FBI notes the Justice Department told a federal judge were duplicative turned up on Reddit, and what they show is a conspiracy to defraud the American people of justice — a cover-up of what the Epstein files say about Donald Trump and the crimes he is alleged to have committed. The DOJ and AG Todd Blanche have proven they can’t be trusted to administer justice on behalf of the American people. Congress should appoint an independent special counsel to investigate Trump, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, and everyone else who took part in this obstruction of justice.. broke the story on her Substack a couple of hours ago and she joins us, as does , who had a big exclusive of her own.

5️⃣ NATO Rings Kaliningrad and Won’t Say Why

Olga Lautman was the only reporter in the West to catch it: NATO put roughly twenty-five aircraft over northern Poland and the Baltic in a ring around Kaliningrad, unannounced. The silence is the story. NATO exercises constantly but always announces first — “you don’t want to send the wrong signal by suddenly having sophisticated aircraft,” Lautman said. This time nobody was told. She traced it to warnings from American, British and Lithuanian intelligence that Russia may be preparing a limited ground incursion to test Article Five. Washington has issued that warning twice now, something it last did in the months before the full invasion of Ukraine. Her sharper worry is a false flag staged inside Russia and blamed on a NATO member. On Wednesday the flights expanded to Moldova.

Unmasking Russia

Why Was NATO So Active Around Kaliningrad Today?

For several weeks, U.S. and European officials have been sounding the alarm over intelligence that Russia could be preparing to test Article 5 with a military attack against a NATO country, possibly even a ground incursion from Belarus or Kaliningrad. These warnings have me particularly worried about the Suwałki Corridor, which I have been warning about for years. The narrow stretch of NATO territory between Belarus and Kaliningrad connects Poland to Lithuania and the Baltic states and has long been considered one of NATO’s most vulnerable points…

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24 days ago · 316 likes · 19 comments · Olga Lautman

4️⃣ Trump Says There’s a Deal. Canada Says There’s a Text.

Trump stood outside the White House and declared it finished: “we’ve come to a deal with Canada,” and “basically, we have no tariffs going into Canada anymore.” Dean Blundell, who has sources on the Prime Minister’s trade council, walked through what actually exists — a framework of an understanding that might lead to a deal, with Dominic LeBlanc and Janet Charette both saying so on the record the same day. Carney corrected Trump’s Truth Social post himself. What Trump wants is not dairy or lumber but critical minerals, energy, and ownership of Canadian geology for his donors, and Carney has told him the sovereignty of Canada’s supply chains is not for sale. The fifty percent tariffs Trump imposed under a 1930 law no president had ever used still land Friday. Carney has run two countries’ central banks. Trump has not run one.

Details of the deal came from the BlindSpot from groundnews.com. Read it here

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3️⃣ Trump Demands Prison for the Man Who Testified Against Him

Alex Vindman lost Florida’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday to Angie Nixon, a state legislator who raised $975,000 against his $16.3 million and bought no television at all. Hours later the President called him a treasonous creep and demanded he be prosecuted. The voters had already finished with Vindman; the prosecution was never about winning anything.

2️⃣ Alaska Turns Into a Coin Flip

Dan Sullivan finished five points behind Mary Peltola in his own primary, in a state Trump carried by thirteen. The Cook Political Report moved the seat to toss-up back on July 1 — not on polling, but on the ballot, after Alaska’s Supreme Court ruled that a second Republican named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. could stay on it. In November that second Sullivan appears with no party beside his name. Control of the Senate now runs through Alaska.

1️⃣ Twenty-Two of the Thirty-Seven Missing Pages

Ellie Leonard spent her birthday publishing them. A tipster reached her on Signal at eleven at night pointing to a Reddit thread with four pages; a direct message produced eighteen more. The serial numbers match the FBI interviews already released. She sent them to someone who had read the originals in person, who told her: “I don’t think these are the notes that I’ve seen, but I saw about half of the notes and this looks to be about the other half” — which points to a second agent taking notes in the same room. She sat up all night waiting for legal clearance and got it at half past eight in the morning. The pages arrived with nothing redacted: the survivor’s name, her school, her friends, the prison her mother went to. Leonard redacted them herself, published no links, and reported the Reddit post so it would come down. The interviews were taken by FBI agents under the Biden administration, most of whom have since been fired. And in one of them the woman asks the Bureau to crop a second man out of her photograph of Jeffrey Epstein. The uncropped version is the picture of Epstein and Trump that everyone has now seen.

A department that told a federal judge those pages were duplicative spent Wednesday watching strangers on Reddit read them. That is not a filing error. That is the cover-up, in the open, and it will take a special counsel to prise it apart.

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5️⃣ Trump Says Kim Answered Him, Then Can’t Say If They Spoke

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that Kim Jong Un has responded to his request for a conversation. “Yeah, he has.” Asked whether the two had actually spoken, he said, “I don’t know.” On Sunday he ordered Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce the joint exercises with South Korea, citing “my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.” The grievance underneath came out in the same session: he called Seoul’s president for help against Iran and got “no thanks,” after asking $10 billion a year for the 39,000 American troops posted there. Seoul is running Ulchi Freedom Shield anyway. The Navy has already sailed the USS George Washington out of Yokosuka for the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a carrier.

4️⃣ Iran’s Guard Goes Offensive as the Deadline Dies

The sixty-day memorandum expired at 2:55 Tehran time. The Revolutionary Guard announced it is finished playing defense, promising “powerful offensive operations,” and its new commander vowed to bring “the most heavily-armed army in world history” to its knees. Trump spent the morning threatening to bomb Oman — the country mediating his deal — and the afternoon on the Strait of Hormuz: “We control it with the blockade... I like the idea of declaring it a territory.” Take Tehran at its word, Zev said on air. American economic interests worldwide are what they have named as targets.

3️⃣ The Ballroom Is a Five-Story Bunker With a Drone Port

Trump explained what sits under his 90,000-square-foot ballroom, and nobody in the room followed up. The military, he said, asked to “go down deep into the ground and build a military facility to go with the White House” — then “came up with a drone port on top.” Five stories down. Bulletproof windows, bulletproof sides, “drone proof.” He needs the room because Xi Jinping arrives September 24 and the current one seats 89. The people suing to stop it, he said, are “very, very disloyal to our country.”

2️⃣ Trump Answers a War Charge With a Children’s TV Name

Jon Ossoff said in Atlanta there is “something uniquely despicable about lying a nation into war,” and called Trump a “crook president” whose family “raked in billions.” Asked about it, Trump replied: “You mean Pee-Wee Herman? Pee-Wee Herman lookalike?” He tried the same joke at a Georgia rally and garbled it into “Pinky Herman.” The White House called Ossoff a theater kid. The same morning, the Supreme Court refused to rehear the E. Jean Carroll case. Five million dollars, final.

1️⃣ A General Says America Cannot Stop a Drone Swarm

Lieutenant General Joseph Jarrard, deputy commander of US Northern Command, was asked last Thursday whether he could defend the homeland against a drone swarm. He said no. “We don’t have the sensors... we are ill-equipped right now to handle something like that.” His boss told senators in March they defeat about a quarter of the drones they detect. Meanwhile the USS Benfold, escorting the carrier out of Asia, spent four days adrift in the South China Sea with no power, water or toilets, and the Lincoln is coming out of the Strait after 265 days at sea. Americans vote in 78 days.

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Judge Emmett Sullivan gave Attorney General Todd Blanche ten days to explain, in a sworn declaration, why the Justice Department still hasn’t produced the Epstein documents the court ordered released — then closed the hearing with a story about the one prosecutor he ever held in contempt, case citation included, so Blanche’s lawyers could look up how that ended.

Thursday’s Fivestack convened minutes after the hearing ended. Zev, Dean Blundell, attorney Anne P. Mitchell and Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer had all listened in live — and Zev read the hearing’s defining exchange straight from the transcript. It deserves to run in full:

THE COURT: Give me a date. I’m willing to work with you. Give me a date when this can be accomplished.

DOJ: I don’t have a date … it’s a little bit out of my control.

THE COURT: But you knew this was going to be discussed today, though.

DOJ: I’m not able to give you a date because, quite honestly, that date is out of my control.

THE COURT: You can’t give the court a time frame — 30 days, 60 days, whatever?

DOJ: I’m not able to, Your Honor.

THE COURT: Is there someone at the Department of Justice who can do that? … Pass the microphone to that person.

DOJ: It is forthcoming.

THE COURT: This much is forthcoming. Let’s be realistic … the public demands the time frame, not just me.

The department that indexed millions of pages in weeks cannot name a month.

The date fight was about the Epstein Files Transparency Act’s plainest requirement: every redaction gets a written justification, published in the Federal Register. Seven months after Sullivan’s injunction, the department has published none.

The day’s other fight was 37 pages of handwritten FBI notes — the agents’ original interview notes underlying the typed 302 reports in the Jane Doe 4 case. The department withheld them as “duplicative.” Sullivan wanted proof:

THE COURT: Just to take us at face value that the notes are substantially similar doesn’t really address it … All I need is proof … I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I’m just trying to do my job.

DOJ: I guess — is that an order?

“When a lawyer asks if that’s an order, it’s because if it’s an order, they can appeal it,” Mitchell said.

Leonard walked through the department’s logic until it fell over. “It’s duplicative — but also it’s under seal. Which doesn’t make any sense, because if it’s copies of stuff we already have, it wouldn’t be under seal,” she said. The department also argued handwriting is too hard to redact. “This is 37 pages. We could redact it before lunch,” Leonard said. This is the same review team that redacted “Lion King” from a released document because King is somebody’s name.

Then there are the files nobody has ever sees. “They left everything out of the files that wasn’t in English,” Leonard said. “That leaves out anything Russian. That leaves out the bank accounts.” The FBI employs linguists. An iPhone translates. The excuse doesn’t survive contact with a phone.

Mitchell compared a DOJ-redacted email Epstein sent himself against the unredacted original she already held: 30 names blacked out, and not one belongs to a victim. “The point isn’t who the names are. The point is the DOJ illegally redacted them,” Mitchell said. One name escaped the redaction team entirely — Epstein had spelled it “Donaldo Trupp.”

Why no contempt today, then? Mitchell, the panel’s lawyer, laid out the mechanics: contempt is a judge’s last resort, and Sullivan spent the day appeal-proofing it. A 15-minute recess stretched to nearly an hour while he skimmed the new binder Blanche’s team handed up — documents the plaintiff, in this unusual case, has never seen. Then he returned, told his contempt story, and put the citation on the record. “Judges don’t care if you appeal, because the trial still goes on,” Mitchell said.

Blanche will likely appeal the ten-day order. The department will keep moving the cups — Blundell called the whole performance “bullshit three-card monte.” But the delay is doing something the department didn’t intend. In six months, Jeffrey Epstein has moved from dead tabloid billionaire to Donald Trump’s intimately linked associate — in the public’s settled understanding, not on the conspiracy fringe. Every stall confirms it: an innocent department would have ended this by producing the files.

Blanche has ten days — and one case citation to read first.

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Before the countdown, Dean broke the day’s business story: DOJ and SEC investigators had opened a probe into Mark Walter’s sports-empire loans — and weeks after Walter handed Trump a World Series ring at the White House, he sold the Lakers to Jared Kushner’s brother Josh and Bob Iger for a record $12.5 billion. “This is straight-up mobbery,” Dean said.

5️⃣ THE ECLIPSE

The moon slid exactly over the sun and switched off the daylight from Iceland to Spain — Spain got the rarest cut, totality at sunset. The Assyrians read eclipses as a change of kings coming. Dean isn’t superstitious. Zev counted the omens anyway.

4️⃣ HEGSETH BROKE THE CARRIER

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln are trying to go over the side — six or seven attempts, by Dean’s reporting from crew families, some of them fatal. The ship is at week 37 of a deployment that should have seen port at week six: no toothpaste, no soap, protein slop, mold in the HVAC, mail sanctioned, family rations never delivered, casualties from Iranian strikes unacknowledged. The Pentagon answered with a shrug and a stand-down while Pete Hegseth asks for $67 billion. Then the IRGC adviser told PBS the other half: Iran builds missiles faster than it fires them — and if Congress wants a real investigation, compare Trump’s assets before the war to after.

3️⃣ THE PLOT TO STEAL 2026

Trump told our cameras he won’t rule out a federal takeover of the midterms — “stranger things have happened.” Wisconsin answered overnight: Democrats refused Francesca Hong, the socialist the RGA spent $3.6 million elevating, and picked David Crowley by half a point — who promptly announced a unity tour WITH Hong, aimed at one target. The electorate is more switched on than the men buying its primaries. Also new: $20 million in electrified ICE gloves — twenty million dollars, for gloves that shock the person you grab.

2️⃣ PIRRO’S PAPER CASE

Jeanine Pirro convened a special grand jury over the Reflecting Pool — a case her own office already admitted was empty, against people who stopped to pick litter out of a public monument. A special grand jury cannot indict; it can investigate for 18 months and keep Trump’s story alive while a judge weighs killing the case for good. Trump’s pool guy remains uncharged.

1️⃣ THE DEATH-PLANE MANIFEST

Now we have the manifest. In the catering truck: Dan Scavino, Natalie Harp, and Walt Nauta — the Mar-a-Lago documents co-accused. On the decoy the White House said was targeted: Rubio, Hegseth, Bessent, and the entire press corps, told the president was aboard. Trump read the coverage and blamed the Secret Service. Lev Parnas told Narativ Live an hour earlier there may have been no threat at all — a side meeting he’s still running down. And the IRGC adviser answered the only question that matters: why would Iran kill him? “He’s busy destroying the United States of America. We’re enjoying this.”

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5️⃣ The Catering Cart Caper

A White House official confirmed the ruse on camera: Trump boarded Air Force One in Turkey for the cameras, slipped out the far side into a catering truck, and flew home on a second jet — while his press corps and most of his cabinet rode the decoy, some told mid-air they were on “a dangerous flight.” Dean noted the one exception: personal aide Natalie Harp rode out with the boss. He also pulled the Clinton precedent — a credible threat once moved a president to a private jet, and every passenger was told. Nobody told this press corps anything. No reporting yet shows the Iranian threat was real, and a president who brags he is winning this war hid from it behind the submarine sandwiches. “Truly spectacular selfishness,” Dean called it — and that was the charitable reading.

4️⃣ Republicans Bankroll The Socialist

Six states voted Tuesday, and in Wisconsin the biggest spender in the DEMOCRATIC governor’s primary was the Republican Governors Association — nearly $3.6 million in “attack” ads that every Democrat in the state read as a boost for democratic socialist Francesca Hong, the opponent Republicans believe they can beat in November. Dean called the whole practice, run by both parties, “a race to the bottom.” T extremes don’t legislate — you govern from consensus or you don’t govern — and a party that pays to nominate its opponent’s fringe has stopped trying to win arguments at all.

3️⃣ “Stranger Things Have Happened”

Wayne Allyn Root — who has spent a year begging Trump in print to seize the 2026 elections — pitched him a “national-security emergency” takeover of the midterms on Real America’s Voice after midnight. Trump answered: “Let me just say stranger things have happened. I will leave it at that.” Dean stacked the paper underneath the three words: NSPM-7 already lets Trump label opponents national-security threats, the Iran war supplies a standing emergency, and 2024’s “vote for me this one time and you will never have to vote again” supplied the intent. Cancel the elections and there is no way back. Dean’s count: 83 days to stop it at the ballot box.

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2️⃣ This Week’s Blindspot: The Quiet Iran Deal

Pakistan’s defense minister says the US and Iran are near “some sort of an arrangement” — and only 13 percent of left-leaning outlets have touched the story, this week’s Ground News Blindspot. Narativ’s Baku reporting sits directly underneath it: the hardline Revolutionary Guard wing that just took over Iran’s top security council is the same network that moved money through Trump’s Baku tower and into his Las Vegas condos. Maybe Tehran doesn’t want him dead. He’s their business partner. Dean answered the money trail with his grandfather, who walked into Berlin with the RAF in 1945: “We didn’t know how bad it was until we got there.”

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Breaking off the top: Tyler Boebert — Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s 21-year-old son — faces five new felony counts in Garfield County, Colorado: three for sexual exploitation of a child, two for contributing to the delinquency of a minor; he posted $10,000 bond Sunday, the affidavit is sealed, and he is presumed innocent. The math that matters: he faces sentencing on his 2024 deferred deal September 4 and 10, and new felonies four weeks out can turn “stay clean” into a felony record.

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5️⃣ The Chair

Megan Romer co-chairs the Democratic Socialists of America — the movement whose label keeps winning Democratic primaries — and Zev and Dean played her New Yorker Radio Hour interview: she believes in owning the means of production, kept the DSA’s ground game home rather than turn it out for Kamala Harris, said she would probably have attended the October 8 rally, and called October 7 “largely inevitable.” Dean’s verdict landed hardest: she handed back every inch her movement won, a nightmare for Democrats 85 days from the midterms — while Zev counted the cost of a chair who keeps arming the other side’s red-scare machine. Paid subscribers can watch the full broadcast below.

4️⃣ Epstein Was in the Building

Ellie Leonard joined live with the document chain she built from the DOJ files: a text thread (EFTA01620474) where an “unknown” contact tells Governor Kenneth Mapp “Seeing Trump people today, can we speak?” on November 13, 2016 — matched to Epstein by his own same-day email to himself repeating its “if I feel a sneeze coming on, I ask for legal advice” line — and Linda Stone’s thread, where Epstein answers “No, Trump Tower.” That is the day Trump sat in Trump Tower picking his first cabinet, five days after the election, with Michael Cohen — who says he never knew Epstein — working the building. Steve Bannon told Epstein on tape he was the one who could sink the campaign; Michael Wolff still holds those recordings.

3️⃣ Bibi Says No

Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Donald Trump’s Gaza plan to his face — no dodge, no diplomatic hedge, just no. An ally has concluded that defying this president costs nothing, and the art-of-the-deal presidency keeps failing to close.

2️⃣ Iran Writes the Terms

Day 162 of the Strait of Hormuz closure, and Iran’s top security official put the price in writing: lift the blockade, drop sanctions, pull US forces, pay reparations, release the frozen assets. Trump’s answer — America is “semi-negotiating,” plus a post demanding Iran pay reparations. Narativ’s Baku Files investigation, published Monday morning, explains the mumble: the Capital One filing on Trump’s Baku tower alleges laundering linked to the same Revolutionary Guard now across the table in Muscat — you don’t talk tough to a partner.

1️⃣ Trump’s Lawyer Takes the Files

Todd Blanche was sworn in as Attorney General while the show was on the air — Trump’s own defense lawyer, confirmed 50-49 with Bill Cassidy casting the deciding vote, now controls the Epstein files. Wednesday at 1 PM, Judge Sullivan makes him answer for the Jane Doe 4 handwritten FBI notes his department still withholds — and Chris Armitage’s case that New Mexico can charge Blanche over the Maxwell interview is already moving.

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5️⃣ Someone Is Paying Toronto Teens to Shoot at America

Toronto police arrested a 19-year-old and a boy of 15 for the July 27 shooting attack on the US Consulate — Chief Myron Demkiw said someone offered them payment over encrypted apps to pull the trigger. Dean Blundell has owned the story since dawn: two seized guns trace to 27 shootings across the GTA, Jewish institutions among the targets, and US prosecutors allege a Kata'ib Hezbollah commander bragged, "in Canada, we have our guys." Dean's read: two explanations survive — an Iranian proxy network hiring Canadian kids by app, or a false flag built to look like one.

Dean Blundell

BREAKING: Toronto Police Arrest Two Accused Of Shooting Up US Consulate in Toronto With Possible Ties To Iran

Let’s start with what happened this morning, because it’s a lot…

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a month ago · 265 likes · 15 comments · Dean Blundell

4️⃣ Carr Hands Local TV to Nexstar and Sinclair

Brendan Carr overrode Congress. His FCC voted 2–1 to scrap the 39 percent cap — Congress's 2004 law against one company reaching more than 39 percent of American homes — and replaced it with case-by-case review his own commission controls. Zev produced local TV for years: the 6 PM local newscast, not the networks, is where America gets its news, and Sinclair and Nexstar now get to buy the dial. Anna Gomez dissented: "unlawful on its face."

3️⃣ Senators See Potential Bribery in Trump's Korean $2 Million

Korea's Base Group paid Donald Trump's business $2 million while its affiliate fought his Commerce Department over aluminum tariffs — Trump logged the money in his own June disclosure as a "nonrefundable development fee." Elizabeth Warren's Senate Democrats demanded answers Thursday: the payment "raises significant concerns about pay-to-play politics and the potential for bribery." Dean's Canadian precedent: Brian Mulroney took $300,000 and his majority party lost nearly every seat.

2️⃣ Paul Refers Pardoned Fauci to Trump's DOJ

Rand Paul's committee voted 8–7 to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt and referred a pardoned man to Todd Blanche's Justice Department — the same day as Blanche's first Senate floor vote. Fauci pleaded the Fifth 111 times by Paul's count; Paul's pardon-voids-the-Fifth theory stands untested in any court, and Dean's sources called the referral a headline with no legal lever behind it. Zev named the play: scapegoat the scientist, and nobody asks about the president who ran the response while 1.2 million Americans died.

1️⃣ Trump Hunts Leakers Who Counted His Missiles

Iran and Oman announced their Strait of Hormuz deal an hour before air — a 60-day transit corridor negotiated around Washington that, Dean reported, excludes American and Israeli vessels by name. Trump claims control of the strait; the deal's authors didn't invite him. The Washington Post reports Trump berated Pete Hegseth at Camp David over "dangerously low" missile stocks — the White House insists the clash "literally never happened" — and Trump vows "long term jail sentences" for the leakers. Zev's math: sixty days of open water puts cheap gas on election day — the only win this war has left to sell.

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5️⃣ Blanche Trades the Fund for the Gavel

Todd Blanche killed Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion fund in writing on Sunday night. By Tuesday morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee paid him for it — twelve to ten, party line, and his nomination for attorney general goes to the Senate floor. Zev and Dean played Sheldon Whitehouse’s markup statement at length, because Whitehouse prosecuted the case his own committee wouldn’t: the FBI took four 302s from a woman who said Trump sexually assaulted her at 13 or 14, and the Justice Department released one — “the one that did not mention Donald Trump,” Whitehouse said. “Only because they got caught were those 302s produced.” Dean priced the two Republican flips that advanced the nomination: “All he had to do to get those two cuck votes was put out two graphics of, I swear to God, the slush fund’s dead. It’s not.” Blanche stays acting attorney general until the full Senate votes.

4️⃣ Cori Bush — This Week’s Ground News Blindspot

Tuesday’s Ground News Blindspot: Cori Bush. The progressive the Squad lost in 2024 stood on Tuesday’s ballot to take her St. Louis seat back from Wesley Bell — the same AIPAC-backed money that beat her is back in the race — and the right wing isn’t covering it. Zev called it a bellwether: a progressive comeback running through the night’s primaries, straight at pro-Israel lobby money. What gets covered decides what exists — Ground News shows you both the story and the silence.

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3️⃣ Wyden Catches the Banks

Ron Wyden dropped a 67-page report Tuesday morning: JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America watched Jeffrey Epstein’s money move for two decades and sat on the paperwork the law required — Deutsche Bank on more than $250 million, including wires paying women in Russia and Eastern Europe; Bank of America on $170 million in Leon Black-linked reports. Wyden gave 60 Minutes an interview on the money in March. The story never aired. “Bari Weiss, in firing Sharyn Alfonsi, also killed the story about Jeffrey Epstein’s money,” Zev said, and set the report inside the decade he has spent on the same ledger: “It’s all the same network because it really is the Russian network.”

2️⃣ Trump Turns on Pirro

Trump spent Monday trashing his own U.S. attorney. Jeanine Pirro “folded like an umbrella,” the president said — she “choked.” Her offense: she stopped prosecuting four people for Reflecting Pool vandalism that never happened. All four defendants walked, and DOJ’s own filing blames contractor error — a botched, no-bid paint job whose price climbed from $1.8 million to $13.1 million, tracked by Narativ since June. By Tuesday, the Washington Post reported, Trump wanted the new helipad ripped up too; he doesn’t like the presidential seal. “We’re quickly approaching a Marie Antoinette moment,” Dean said. Both hosts gave Trump’s Oval Office defense of the case the same review: “Come on, bro.”

1️⃣ Michigan Decides What the Party Is

Michigan carried the close. Abdul El-Sayed — Bernie Sanders, AOC, an army of volunteers — against Haley Stevens and the biggest bet AIPAC has ever placed on a single race; polls close at 8 p.m. Eastern. And there the show turned. Dean had spent the hour declaring the patient dead — “The United States of America is a fraudulent country,” he said, reaching for The Big Short — and Zev wouldn’t sign the certificate: “I struggle when you say things like that.” His counter was on the ballot. “This is democracy, folks. This is what it looks like. You elect the people who represent the views of your people,” Zev said. Dean set a deadline anyway. Ninety days. “You have 90 days to send a message to this prick.” The money moved first all day — the fund, the wires, the invoice, the AIPAC millions. At eight o’clock, the voters answer.

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Zev opened Thursday’s special report with a warning and a promise. “Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the water,” he said. “Trump Russia is back.”

Lev Parnas corrected him inside ten seconds. “Never left, Zev.”

Fivestack didn’t run — Dean Blundell was out. What replaced it was eighty minutes with the man who spent years inside the world Narativ has been reporting on from the outside, and it started with a letter.

Shalev told viewers what he has now said publicly: Melania Trump’s personal lawyer demanded he retract Narativ’s reporting on Paolo Zampolli, apologize, and pay damages. No suit has been filed. Today Shalev’s attorney, the trial lawyer John B. Williams, answered Alejandro Brito on the record.

Shalev read it on air. The demand, Williams wrote, is “defective under the Florida Retraction Statute,” which requires a claimant to specify the statements alleged to be false and defamatory, and to do it with particularity. “You do not identify what specifically is false,” the letter reads, “nor do you provide any hint as to what the true facts may be.”

Shalev’s own summary was shorter. “They don’t actually allege that I’ve done anything that is defamatory at all,” he said. “There is no maligning here. This is just truth.”

Then he mentioned Zampolli’s 40th birthday party, with a toast from former Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin.

Then he showed the emails.

Zampolli wrote to a Russian diplomat at the UN in September 2012 thanking him for a meeting with Ambassador Vitaly Churkin and asking that Moscow — “capital,” in his phrasing — send materials for a tiger-conservation event, Vladimir Putin’s pet cause. He asked that both Churkin and Sergey Kislyak be informed. He wrote to Prince Bandar offering Trump SoHo units while, by Shalev’s reporting, brokering Caribbean votes at the UN General Assembly. He told Ambassador Churkin’s private Gmail that Churkin’s attack on Christiane Amanpour’s Crimea coverage was “fantastic.”

And on March 5, 2014, he wrote to the billionaire Ron Burkle: “I know you have been taking good care of 67. We are all working hard for 2016 election.”

That was written more than a year before Donald Trump announced he was running.

“Unless Paolo knew,” Shalev said.

Then the charts went up — two of them, built between Narativ and Parnas over the past several days. “We’ve been connecting dots the past couple of days,” Parnas said.

The first put Vitaly Churkin at the centre and Narativ’s own reporting around him: Donald Trump, Paolo Zampolli, Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel, Sergei Lavrov. “These are not sideline characters who elected Donald Trump,” Shalev said. “These are the people who did it.”

The second started with a question Parnas had been chewing on about the Tate brothers — why Romania, of all countries. “Eastern Europe is my back,” he said. “I know all the major players over there.” His sources, he told viewers, place the Tates in Romania under the protection of Semion Mogilevich — the man the FBI has called the boss of bosses of the Russian mob, and, Parnas said, the partner of the Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Parnas has sat with both. “I remember going back to 2010 or 2011, sitting in Kyiv and having coffee with Mogilevich and Firtash together.”

Run the two charts against each other and a name sits on both: Sergey Belyakov, the FSB Academy graduate Jeffrey Epstein introduced to Peter Thiel in 2015 without mentioning the FSB Academy. Belyakov, Parnas said, is close to Kirill Dmitriev — the Putin envoy now conducting American diplomacy alongside Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. “When I saw that,” Parnas said, “I basically realized that it never ended.”

Shalev supplied the join. Svetlana Pozhidaeva got her US visa on a Belyakov recommendation, went to work for Jeffrey Epstein, and when she was finished there went to work for Paolo Zampolli at the Dominica mission to the United Nations. Epstein held Russian visas for sixteen straight years — one sponsored by Belyakov’s ministry, one by the FSB’s own veterans’ fund.

And behind all of it, Shalev pointed at the oldest relationship on the board. Mogilevich and Robert Maxwell were business partners moving billions out of the collapsing Soviet Union. Epstein is widely regarded as Maxwell’s heir apparent, and met Ghislaine Maxwell while her father was still alive. “You have to ask the question,” Shalev said. “What is the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Semion Mogilevich?” He said the answer is coming.

Parnas closed on what he thinks the demand letter was really about. The Epstein files, he said, are missing the one thing that should be everywhere in them. “Where’s all the Russian money in the Epstein files? Where are all the Russian involvement of the Epstein files? Because that’s the part that they’re not releasing.”

Somewhere in the last twenty minutes, Shalev looked down at a number. The legal defense fund he had launched a few hours earlier had passed $7,800. As we post this it was nearing $10,000.

“I actually can’t tell you the sense of relief,” he said, “knowing that I don’t have to find $10,000 right now to pay just the retaining fees.”

Parnas had the last word on the letter. “Melania Trump and Donald Trump made a big mistake by going after Zev Shalev.”

Shalev gave the last word to Nancy Pelosi who famously told Donald Trump, “With you, all roads lead to Russia.”

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Dean Blundell missed Wednesday’s Fivestack for a meeting and Lev Parnas took the chair.

1️⃣ Cornyn Won’t Vote Yes on Blanche

John Cornyn told NBC News at 1:14 that he is not prepared to vote yes on Todd Blanche, and the meeting the two men were meant to hold never happened. Chuck Grassley gave every Republican on Judiciary until four o’clock — thirty minutes after the show came off air. Cornyn wants one thing in writing: that the administration will abandon the $1.778 billion fund a federal judge has already found was assembled without any real settlement between Trump and the IRS. Blanche says his word should be enough. “Blanche is basically taking a bullet for Donald Trump,” Parnas said, comparing him to Michael Cohen, and said a source told him before air that Cornyn is not getting his letter — he is getting phone calls. Parnas made the point that gets lost: Trump never needs the confirmation. Blanche can stay acting attorney general as long as Trump wants him there.

5️⃣ Bari Weiss Picks Five People Who Will Never Cost Trump a Settlement

Weiss named her 60 Minutes bench Wednesday morning — Ross Douthat, Trevor Phillips, Norah O’Donnell, Sebastian Junger and Gianna Toboni. Zev has interviewed Junger on Narativ and said so, and still called the roster what it is. Douthat writes opinion on Catholic questions for the New York Times. “To suggest that he could be taking Scott Pelley’s chair at 60 Minutes is astonishing,” Zev said. Days earlier the former 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega said the head of CBS News told her to report events that never happened in her coverage of the Minneapolis shootings. She refused.

3️⃣ Fauci Took the Fifth 106 Times, and Paul Threw His Lawyer Out

The show ran the tape — Rand Paul refusing to recognize Fauci’s attorney, then “Security, please remove him from the room.” What the lawyer was trying to say, Zev explained, is that Paul’s theory has never been tested: that a pardon cancels a witness’s Fifth Amendment protection. Zev called the proceeding baseless and vindictive, then declined to leave it there. The public still deserves to know why gain-of-function research was greenlit, and why it happened in Wuhan without better controls. It also deserves to know why Fauci alone sits in the chair when Trump’s own mismanagement of COVID cost millions of lives. Parnas, who ignored his own lawyers and went on Maddow rather than take the Fifth, put it plainly: two things can be true at once.

2️⃣ China Is Guiding Iran’s Missiles, and Trump Says He Bombs Tonight

Zev confirmed what he flagged earlier in the week — Chinese satellite technology is guiding the Iranian missiles now finding their targets — and reported that man-portable air defense systems are being delivered to Iran to bring down aircraft. Trump is threatening another assault tonight, which depletes American stockpiles further and makes the next fight harder. Zev returned to a rule he applies to Putin: he likes to own both sides of a war, because then he picks the winner. Parnas said he is reporting out more than 30,000 North Korean troops moving to fight in Ukraine.

Melania Trump’s demand letter came up early. Zev noted the letter names nothing inaccurate — it says the reporting is inaccurate and asks for it to come down. Narativ’s response goes back Wednesday.

Parnas closed on a tease rather than a story. He asked himself why Romania, made calls, and came back with Semion Mogilevich — one of the most wanted men in the world, and the godfather of Vladimir Putin’s first election campaign. Parnas says Mogilevich “might be linked” to Paolo Zampolli. Both men stopped there. It gets its own show.

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