No decision to strike has been reported, and no one has said when. The report runs against what Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have said in public this week: that large-scale strikes are no longer needed.

A day earlier, Israel's security cabinet ordered the military to step up preparations for a possible attack on Iran, Kan reported. Kan said those orders "could lead it to carry out activities that could trigger a war." Benjamin Netanyahu is serving as caretaker prime minister after losing his majority in the October election. His likely successor, Gadi Eisenkot, wrote to him not to deploy the military "without a direct and immediate threat" until a new government forms. Netanyahu's office called the letter irresponsible. The security cabinet is due to meet Sunday.

The U.S. has forces in the region if a decision comes. Kan counts about 200 aerial refueling aircraft and two carriers, with a third carrier expected next week.

Trump told Hugh Hewitt on Thursday that nobody had been killed in the last five months. If things went the other way, he said, "I would not hesitate." If Iran killed a senior American official, he said, "They will not exist very long any longer."

Iran's security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, posted that if the U.S. "launches another war against Iran, every military base involved in the aggression, from West Asia to Europe, will be a legitimate target."

What we don't know is whether any of this becomes a strike, or when. Netanyahu's cabinet meets Sunday. Whether Trump would join an Israeli strike, or stop one, is an open question.

Sources: Kan, Nov. 12 (via Israel National News and Israel Hayom) · Al Jazeera, Nov. 12 · APA, citing Al Jazeera, Nov. 12 · Middle East Monitor, Nov. 12 · The Jerusalem Post · Hugh Hewitt Show, Salem, Nov. 12 (clips via Aaron Rupar)

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Nihad Zunić of Klix.ba broke the Katie Wiles tapes. On Narativ Live Monday, Zev Shalev asked him the questions the tapes raise, starting with whether Milorad Dodik is a Russian puppet.

Zunić: "I think if you Google Russian puppet, I think he would come up first, his picture." Dodik met Putin after the full invasion of Ukraine, still calls it a "special military operation," and blocks full Bosnian sanctions on Russia. Wiles' firm, Continental Strategy, takes $35,000 a month from his Republika Srpska.

Protect her from what? On the tape, from an early October meeting of Continental Strategy partners and staff, Wiles tells the room: "I'm trusting you guys to protect me. When I get this draft over to you, it goes nowhere without you guys scrubbing the metadata on this, because somebody will look for who made the edit." Zunić's sources say the draft was the victory speech Dodik read after his party, SNSD, won Bosnia's elections. Nobody doing legal work, Zunić said, needs a room to protect her.

How would she know? Wiles says the president will come back from the summit "happier" or "madder than a damn horse fly," and the client should have "that tweet sort of ready." Zunić's sources identify the tweet as the post by Željka Cvijanović, the Serb member of Bosnia's presidency, that screenshotted Trump's Truth Social announcement of the diesel deal with Russia. It went up minutes after the announcement, on talks few knew of. Susie Wiles has denied sharing anything with her daughter. If the information came from her, the denial covers a leak from the chief of staff's office.

The last question was why Washington would help undo Dayton, which Zunić called one of America's biggest foreign policy successes, the agreement that has kept the peace since 1995. Republika Srpska's taxpayers paid an estimated $9 million for lobbying in Washington, and Dodik won sanctions relief for himself, his family and his associates. Christian Schmidt, the international High Representative whose law Dodik was convicted of defying, resigned in May under American pressure. One lobbying contract sought U.S. approval for the entity's secession. Bosnia cannot answer him in Washington: Dodik's veto blocks state money for lobbying.

Zunić held to what he can prove. He does not know whether the tweet was Katie Wiles' idea. If his sources are right, he said, she did work that requires registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and used her mother's post to get better information for a client.

The network around Dodik runs through Trump's world: Susie Wiles, her deputy James Blair, Chris LaCivita, Rod Blagojevich, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani and Paolo Zampoli. Zampoli was fired weeks ago. Susie Wiles left this morning. The file goes to Rep. Robert Garcia, the incoming Oversight chairman.

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Democrats took the Senate on Tuesday night. Decision Desk HQ called six Republican seats for them between 9:56 p.m. and 1 a.m. Eastern; they needed four. Here is the round-up as the count stood at 2:40 a.m. Wednesday, race by race, with the caller and the time on every call.

The Senate

The first wave hit South Carolina at 9:56. Decision Desk called the race for Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, over Senator Darline Graham, 51 to 47 at 82 percent in. Graham had been appointed to her late brother Lindsey's seat and carried Trump's endorsement into a state he won by 18 points. Andrews finished 51.2 to 46.8.

James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas at 10:16, 55 to 43 at the call, 54 to 44 at the last count. Texas last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1988.

Hamilton beat Roger Marshall in Kansas at 10:50, 51 to 46 at the final count. Republicans had held that seat since 1932.

Sherrod Brown beat Jon Husted in Ohio at 11:16, 49.6 to 45.6 with 84 percent in, and took back the seat he lost two years ago.

Turek beat Ashley Hinson in Iowa at 11:19, 50.5 to 46.4 with every precinct in.

After midnight Decision Desk called Maine for Jackson over Susan Collins, 53 to 45 on the early count, and Michigan for El-Sayed over Mike Rogers, 52 to 46. Michigan was a Democratic seat; Maine was the sixth flip.

The wave stopped at the Nebraska line. Pete Ricketts held off the independent Dan Osborn, 49.5 to 44.6, called with 65 percent in. In Alaska, Dan Sullivan led Mary Peltola 48.8 to 47.5 with 69 percent counted, uncalled, after Peltola had led the first batch.

The arithmetic: 34 Democratic-aligned senators were not on the ballot. Add the seats they defended and the six they took, and the caucus stands at 53 with Alaska open. Fifty-one controls the chamber.

The House

Seven Republican-held seats on Narativ's watch list went Democratic, and none went the other way. Dandiya took Florida's 22nd at 8:07, the first toss-up called all night. Ager took North Carolina's 11th at 8:30. Cognetti beat Rep. Rob Bresnahan in Pennsylvania's 8th at 9:02. Pulido beat Rep. Monica De La Cruz in Texas's 15th at 11:00. Poindexter beat Rep. Max Miller in Ohio's 7th at 11:17. James took Iowa's 2nd at 11:35. Harvie beat Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania's 1st after midnight. Garcia held Texas's 35th for the Democrats.

Two watch-list seats stayed open at 2:40: Maine's 2nd, where Dunlap led Paul LePage by half a point before the ranked-choice count, and New York's 17th, where Conley led Rep. Mike Lawler 52 to 48 on the first numbers. Decision Desk had not put a number on the full House. Two hundred eighteen is the majority, and the count runs into Wednesday.

The governors

Democrats took six. Keisha Lance Bottoms won Georgia at 9:15. Rob Sand won Iowa at 9:58. Katie Hobbs beat Andy Biggs in Arizona at 10:13. David Crowley beat Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin at 10:21. Amy Acton beat Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio at 10:31, the first Democrat to win the office since 2006. Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott in Texas at midnight, and Abbott conceded.

Republicans held three. Byron Donalds won Florida by half a point, 50.0 to 48.7 at the full count. Wilson held South Carolina. Kelly Ayotte held New Hampshire. Kansas sat at half a point for Holscher with every precinct in, uncalled; Alaska's Kreiss-Tomkins led by 20 with the count unfinished; Nevada had not posted.

The money line

Polymarket priced the Senate at 76 cents Democratic at 5 p.m. and 99 cents by midnight; the House went from 94 to 99. Those are prices, not calls, and Narativ read them on air as prices.

What we said, against what the count says

On air Narativ said 255 House seats and 55 senators. The Senate stands at 53 with Alaska leaning Republican, so 55 is out of reach and 53 or 54 is the range. The House forecasters had 239 to 242 going in; the market at midnight priced Republicans below 190 seats at 99 cents, which means 246 or more for Democrats. The count decides it.

Trump's night, in his own words

He changed his account four times before 1 a.m. On Truth Social, before the West Coast closed: he was not on the ballot, and if he had been, Republicans "would have won in a landslide." As the calls landed: the candidates were at fault, one was a "RINO," and Fox News shared the blame for putting Democrats on air. To The New York Times: "I am absolutely willing to accept those results." On Fox, after midnight: "I think a part of it was Iran." His last post of the night: "...AND SO IT BEGINS!"

What Narativ did

Nobody on the broadcast called a race. Decision Desk and the networks called them; Zev Shalev and Anne P. Mitchell covered that coverage from 8 p.m., with Lev Parnas, Ellie Leonard, Kait Justice and Olga Lautman in and out, the results board live in the studio and the network feeds cut in by key. That is the replay above.

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Scott MacFarlane came back from Michigan with a measure of this election that no poll prints. He told Zev Shalev on Friday to watch “where the surrogates and the money are going,” because that is “a much better read than polls ever will be.”

MacFarlane reads the plane first. Trump has flown to South Carolina twice in two weeks, to Kansas and Iowa, and on Monday, MacFarlane said, he lands in Louisiana, where Sen. Bill Cassidy finished third in May’s primary and nobody polls the seat. Democrats send their money the other way: their Senate Majority PAC put $1.2 million behind Scott Colom against Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi, and the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund answered with seven figures. “If they’re putting money into Mississippi, they’re seeing something polls can’t show,” MacFarlane said.

The Democrats he talks to feel “optimism and nausea,” and trust the polls “about as much as they trust thin ice on a warm winter day.”

MacFarlane called the Republicans Trump is flying to save “endangered Republicans”; Shalev said they are becoming an endangered species. One, by MacFarlane’s count, has put daylight between herself and Trump: Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa, and even her criticism is “muted” and “mushy.”

Michigan, where he spent the week: tariffs are the issue, MacFarlane said, and in the Lansing district the Iran war is too. Rep. Tom Barrett, a Republican, voted twice this summer to pull U.S. forces out of Iran and told MacFarlane he “caught all kinds of hell” for it. Michigan’s 10th, 7th and 4th districts are, in his count, “the margin Democrats need to pull even.” Shalev’s read: the House most likely flips; the Senate is “still very much too hard to call.”

The Senate race there has, MacFarlane said, “naked Islamophobia being uncorked in” it; Republican Mike Rogers is betting on a divide between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Detroit’s voters, and MacFarlane is “not seeing that work.” Shalev said the Islamophobia is backfiring.

MacFarlane saved Alaska for last. Trump had Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Justice Department sue to stop the state certifying the result if Sen. Dan Sullivan loses; Alaska’s own election officials asked the federal judge to throw it out. Shalev called the suit a first. MacFarlane called it “ballot stacking crap” and said the administration “is quickly losing credibility with all of the courts.”

MacFarlane anchors the MeidasTouch Network’s election night on YouTube from the first poll closings in Indiana and Kentucky. His Substack, MacFarlane Reports, runs daily until then.

Sergey Lavrov landed in Atlanta on Friday morning for the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting. A day earlier Russia flew a jet drone into the platform at Dnipro’s main railway station as a train boarded and killed at least 14 people; CNN counted 15.

Those two facts opened Narativ Live, and by the end of it Sean Wiswesser and Olga Lautman, a Russia analyst, had said it plainly. “This is not America isolationist policy,” Lautman said. “This is America siding with Russia.” Zev Shalev went a step further: this is no longer betrayal, it is Trump aiding and abetting Russia.

Wiswesser ran a CIA station, and put the first number on it: Patriot interceptor deliveries to Ukraine are down to one quarter of January’s rate, by his count, “and it’s costing lives.” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth had neither approved nor rejected the transfers Europe already paid for, the Washington Post reported Oct. 19; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked him Monday to “unblock the deliveries.”

Starshield, the military Starlink, was speed-capped in mid-October with no notice: a terminal moving faster than 100 mph loses its link. Lautman blamed the Pentagon, not Elon Musk, and Musk agrees: the limits, he said Oct. 24, are “decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Hegseth denies any directive. Whoever’s hand is on the switch, the switch does the same thing.

Trump signed Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sanctions law on Sept. 18 and waived every provision of it on Oct. 16, in an order with no end date that never uses the word Ukraine. On Oct. 9 the Treasury licensed Russian diesel; the first tanker, the Agioi Fanendes, was due in New Jersey on Nov. 7 and now sits “for orders,” after Gov. Mikie Sherrill called the deal illegal on Thursday and said she is looking for ways to stop it.

“Congress needs to take action,” Wiswesser said. “Why aren’t they acting to enforce the law?” Lautman counted one Republican who has acted, Sen. Thom Tillis, the only one to sign the Oct. 24 letter to banks and ports. Wiswesser’s book, Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War (Naval Institute Press), is out now and, he said, topped Audible’s espionage releases last month; he told the audience the proudest boast today should be “I am a Ukrainian.”

On Friday Reuters reported that Pentagon officials privately urged Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to tone down their warnings about Russia; the Pentagon’s policy chief advised one Baltic official against “poking” Moscow, and Estonia says nothing of the kind came through official channels. Lautman’s version: the Pentagon told allies to shut up and stop poking Russia. In the same weeks drones hit at least three merchant ships off Bulgaria and Romania and more than 20 sailors were lost; Romania blamed Russia for one, the Khoryv, sunk off Constanța on Oct. 23. “This is war,” Lautman said. “You hit ships with drones and you sink the ships.”

Russia bombed a train station, and Romania says a Russian drone sank a merchant ship in NATO waters, in the same two weeks Washington licensed its diesel, waived its sanctions and asked the neighbors to keep quiet. Narativ reported on Oct. 20 that Russia is being paid before the talks. This week the payment went from money to cover.

A House that flips on Tuesday makes any Trump-Putin deal hard to get through Congress; as Shalev put it, voters can change the outcome of this war by how they vote. The Kremlin wants its Abu Dhabi round of talks after Nov. 4, and Nov. 3 sets the price. The Agioi Fanendes, idling with no port confirmed, will show which way the shipowners bet first.

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The mayor of Bucha has an answer to Donald Trump's diesel deal with Vladimir Putin. He posted a photo of himself holding a jerry can of diesel and asked everyone to fill one and ship it to the United States, so Ukraine can outsupply Putin and save Americans billions.

Jacob Kaarsbo saw the post on the mayor's phone on Monday, after the two laid flowers at the Bucha memorial. The former Danish intelligence officer joined Narativ Live from Kyiv on Wednesday, four days after driving in from Copenhagen with a convoy of 11 cars for the Ukrainian army. One blew its engine on the road. Cars for Ukraine, the Danish group behind the convoys, passes 1,000 vehicles next month.

Kaarsbo's reading of the diesel deal: Russia has no diesel to spare. It has an export ban in force and has been importing diesel through South Korea. The deal is "smoke and mirrors," he said, a route to getting sanctions lifted. Zev Shalev went further: it puts Russian oil back into the open market and legitimizes the shadow fleet.

The anger in Kyiv is real and mostly unspoken, Kaarsbo said. "They feel the betrayal." A senior Ukrainian officer told him on Wednesday, through a translator, that Ukraine and Denmark have to fight Russian fascism together. Then he laughed and added: and American fascism too.

Kaarsbo named Putin's war crime: the deportation of Ukrainian children, which Putin has bragged about. Trump, he said, is threatening sanctions on the International Criminal Court that prosecutes such crimes. "Donald Trump sides with him."

Why now? Danish pundits say Trump wants cheaper diesel before the midterms. Kaarsbo called that "bullshit." He expects Trump to try to hold power whatever the result; Denver Riggleman has warned the machinery to annul a defeat is already in the works. Shalev offered two scenarios: Russia helps the GOP win, or a Nixon ending if the vote collapses far enough that the party tells him to go.

Kaarsbo said he predicted this in his book: Putin manipulates Trump through a "treasonous web" of finances. The Financial Times showed this weekend how the Russians got into the Alaska gas deal; Shalev named the route: Don Jr.'s hunting companion, a man tied to Putin's bodyguards.

On Starlink, Kaarsbo said Europe has the satellite technology and must scale it. While Musk was throttling Ukraine's connection, someone sabotaged Starlink antennas in Bulgaria, Poland and Lithuania. "Classical GRU stuff," he said.

He woke at 3 a.m. Monday to the air defense battery next to his hotel. The one place in the city with real destruction is a marketplace with no military target in sight, struck again and again. The students were drinking in the park the next night.

His last word: Ukraine is doing well on the front line and innovating faster than Russia. Build it up from Europe and Canada and it can end the war without the Americans. Shalev: Carney already has a plan with Zelensky.

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Sources
Narativ Live, Oct. 28, 2026, live from Kyiv with Jacob Kaarsbo (the replay)
Jacob Kaarsbo, Intel Brief, "Live from Kyiv Q&A Special," Oct. 27, 2026: https://jacobkaarsbo.substack.com/p/live-from-kyiv-q-and-a-special
Kyiv Post, Oct. 27, 2026, Treasury weighs lifting sanctions on the Russian Direct Investment Fund (NYT): https://www.kyivpost.com/post/88359
CNBC, Oct. 24, 2026, Starlink restored, Musk admits throttle: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/24/ukraine-starlink-starshield-service-restored.html

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The reason was the speech. Eisenkot stood up at his headquarters and said, "We made history." He called the outgoing government "the coalition of the fiasco" and said the voters "voted against Bibi Netanyahu as the Prime Minister of the State of Israel." He ruled out another election: "In elections with such a high turnout, it would be a mistake to go out for a second round." "Netanyahu, do not dare use the security of Israel for your needs." He promised a Zionist government and said, "It is the end of the era of them and us."

Zev heard a former chief of staff putting the military on notice: the soldiers answer to an interim prime minister now, and Netanyahu was warned not to use them to protect himself. That matters in the White House, because Trump has been saying he goes back to war with Iran next week alongside his best friend, and his best friend just lost power. "With one of them gone, it's really interesting how it's going to fall apart for Trump."

Lev Parnas joined from a car in Florida. "Two down. Bolsonaro and Bibi, and Trump's next," he said. He was cautious about the next 30 days: calls were already being placed to Israel from the Trump administration, and Netanyahu would push back hard. Lev's precedent was Orban, who rumbled about staying until the power of the people was too strong. Zev's was Lula: saying it is over is what ends the rigging conversation.

Both men put the Arab vote at the center. Turnout reached 77.7%, and the Arab turnout ran higher, because those voters wanted the Oct. 7 inquiry Netanyahu never allowed. Seventeen seats for parties that used to stay home is what makes Eisenkot's coalition and breaks Netanyahu's.

The consequence runs past Israel. Netanyahu helped install Trump in 2016 as part of the alliance Narativ calls the enemies of democracy, and the money followed: a billion dollars under Bibi's oversight through Jared Kushner, the Gaza waterfront plans, the Epstein network that tied Netanyahu to Putin. Lev wanted the new government's first act to be aid into Gaza and an end to the bombing.

The official count takes days, and Netanyahu has not spoken. Likud's 24 seats make it the largest party and still leave him nowhere to build. Eisenkot declared victory, told Bibi to retire, and told the army whose orders to follow. The count decides whether Israel heard him.

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Leonard called the report "a big buildup to a best-of album." The Katie Johnson story, the Jane Doe stories and the Maxwell proffer were already public, she said, and "it just wasn't good enough at this late stage in the game." Shalev said the point of the document is a special counsel in a new Congress, and launching one against a sitting president "is about as serious as you can get." "Don't fail this."

Both read the Blanche interview the same way. Blanche flew to a Florida prison in July 2025, Maxwell raised Jane three times, and he cut her off each time; the FBI had built him a slide deck of prominent names the night before, and Jane was on it. Leonard typed her own transcript of the tapes. By her count Blanche asked about Trump far less than about Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Bill Barr, Maxwell called Trump "a total gentleman," and that short exchange, in her reading, is what got Maxwell moved. She put the dates together: the birthday letter Wall Street Journal reporters published, the Situation Room meeting the same day, the proffer one week later, the move to Bryan, Texas, one week after that. Shalev held the line: obstruction "may be true, but we don't know," and the report does not say who sent Blanche the deck or who compiled it.

Leonard's own leads sit where the report did not look. Hundreds of pages of handwritten FBI notes are unsearchable, so nothing in them was scrubbed. A whistleblower says documents under case number 31E-HQ-C1461253 are withheld from Congress, and someone at the Justice Department leaked Jane Doe 4's notes, unredacted, to conservative media. She counts 43 on-the-record accusations of sexual assault against Trump. There are no foreign-language files in the release.

Shalev's lead is money. Paolo Zampolli, Trump's "my friend Paolo" in Beatrice Keul's account, arranged visas for models, sold fake passports through the United Nations and sold Trump Soho condos, and was a special envoy until last week; the report mentions him only as the visa guy. Nothing in the files predates 2008, the year Shalev says Epstein helped crash the market. A special counsel scoped to sex crimes alone would repeat the Mueller mistake, and one that reports to the attorney general cannot work. Leonard added the shield: executive privilege, which only the Supreme Court can override.

Shalev said on air that he gave Raskin's office material from Narativ's Zampolli reporting and introduced one witness, and that this is not an endorsement of the report. The Keul allegation, he said, is the new thing in it, and the question now is who in Congress writes the special counsel's mission.

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Three weeks ago this was Flávio’s to lose. He beat Lula in the first round on October 4 by 2.2 million votes. Trump called it “a very tight but great victory.” Prediction markets had him at 78 percent as polls opened Sunday morning. The polls said 51–49. The polls were right.

How the night went

Polls were due to close at 4 PM Eastern. At 4:11, Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ordered every station in the country to stay open two more hours after both campaigns asked for time — Lula’s coalition citing bus service cut in São Paulo and Salvador, Flávio’s citing weather. The electoral court froze the count at 4:20 with a quarter of one percent in. It restarted at six.

Lula led the first boxes. Flávio passed him at about 15 percent counted and held the lead through 45. Then the South and Southeast — the regions Flávio was supposed to own — came in, and Lula went from nothing to two million ahead. “Squeaked away with quite a resounding victory,” Zev said on air. “I say squeak and resounding in the same sentence. It doesn’t always fit.”

Turnout was 80.79 percent of 158.7 million registered voters.

What Brazil voted against

Reuters reported Saturday, on ten current and former US officials, that Trump’s team spent eighteen months working to return the Bolsonaros to power: Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the justice who convicted Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a coup; visas revoked for the justices who sat with him; tariffs on Brazilian goods with the father’s prosecution named as the reason; a terrorist designation for Brazil’s gangs announced the day after Flávio met Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau in May. Eduardo Bolsonaro worked the State Department from Washington.

Lula told voters for months that Washington was trying to pick their president. Zev’s read Sunday night went further: that the Trump administration’s hand showed in the first round, and that the second round was the one Brazil got to decide for itself. “Trump will try and make it seem like he had nothing to do with all of this,” he said. “He was caught in the cookie jar.”

Flávio had promised amnesty for his father, who is serving 27 years. He admitted taking about $12 million from banker Daniel Vorcaro to fund a film about him and is under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion. Brazil read all of that and still gave him 48 percent. Not a landslide. A decision.

Serbia, the same night

Aleksandar Vučić conceded Serbia’s parliamentary election ninety minutes after polls closed in Belgrade — fourteen years of one-man rule, gone to a leaderless Students’ List with no politicians on it. By his own party’s projection the students take 135 to 140 of 250 seats to his 105, roughly 2.2 million votes to 1.7 million, on turnout near 70 percent — the highest since Milošević fell in 2000. He blamed independent media, unnamed European governments and “an American deep state.” Putin had endorsed him.

The movement began under a concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station that collapsed in November 2024 and killed sixteen people. Dijana Hrka, who lost her son there, told N1 from the Belgrade crowd: “I have been waiting for this moment for two years.”

And in Venezuela, María Corina Machado slipped back into the country Sunday after a year outside it — the story Narativ led with at 1:30 PM, before Brazil took the night.

The pattern

Orbán fell in April after sixteen years. Vučić fell Sunday after fourteen. Brazil kept Trump’s man out. Three ballots in one year on the same model — Putin’s endorsement, Trump’s friendship, the courts and the broadcaster in one set of hands — and the model lost all three.

Israel votes next. The United States votes November 3. Zev’s note to the chat as the Brazil numbers settled: the tactic that showed up in São Paulo Sunday — the buses that didn’t run — travels. “Plan extra hours when you go to the polls on the 3rd.”

Trump phoned Lula before the vote and wished him luck. His State Department declined, in writing, to say it would respect the result. Now it has one.

Watch the full breaking news broadcast above. Subscribe free — The Narativ in your inbox every day. Know Sooner: narativ.org

A Russian drone sank the cargo ship Khoryv 13 miles off Constanța, Romania, on Friday morning. One sailor dead, three missing. Olga Lautman counts seven ships hit in the Black Sea in two weeks and 31 sailors dead or missing. "This used to start world wars," she said on Narativ Live. Europe is shifting forces to the Black Sea, she said. It is barely news. Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria have asked NATO to guard the lanes; Zev Shalev called it an act of war and NATO's job, pending an American sign-off.

On Starlink, four views. Lautman's view: Starshield, the military version, sits on a Pentagon contract Europe pays for, so the order came from Trump to the Pentagon and nobody needed Musk. "This is on Trump. This is not Musk." Lev Parnas said the question is the trick. "Who cares if it's Musk, Trump. The bottom line, it's not working." Oleksandr Bolbirer, who writes Voice of Ukraine from Kyiv, said some units have service back and some do not. "On top, it's sunshine. If you look on the bottom, there's still some fog out there." Shalev's point: whoever flipped the switch, Ukraine's drones have flown blind for nine days, while Jared Kushner told Zelensky not to hit refineries.

They split again on why Russia is hitting Kyiv so hard now. Bolbirer thinks Moscow is sprinting before the American vote: "They're not going to have as many chances as they have today." Lautman disagreed flat. Russia's turn on Kyiv began the day Trump took office, she said, and "the Russians don't give a flying shit about American elections." Shalev read both as one argument: Russia moves when American power changes hands, and it does in 12 days. Parnas called Bolbirer's view "Ukrainian hope." Nobody disputed the rest: cluster munitions over Kyiv, eight regions' power stations hit in 24 hours, a heating season begun on the 15th with the pipes still cold, Bolbirer's daughter barely in school. "They are erasing us," Bolbirer said. "But we want to live."

On Nov. 3, Parnas says his sources have Trump and Speaker Johnson agreeing not to convene the new Congress, "almost a done deal." Lautman expects Democrats to be seated, by an uprising in American streets if need be, and then expects little: a subpoena to Musk goes nowhere without a Justice Department to enforce it.

What comes after splits them too. Lautman: the Trump–Xi meeting on the 18th produces nothing, Putin is China's client, and no one can sign away Ukrainian land without a referendum. Bolbirer: dictators do not read rules, and if the big powers sit down together, "who's going to come in?" Parnas: the next front is energy, Russian gas back to fill the hole Iran's strikes on Qatar opened, and he does not trust Germany or France through a winter. Lautman trusts the eastern flank whatever Germany does. Shalev: it is one movement, capturing democracies one at a time, and what Bolbirer lives under could reach America in months; a big enough vote on Nov. 3 is the first answer, and Trump cannot face Xi for a country that just voted against him.

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Lev Parnas said the three hours Steve Witkoff spent with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday were mostly about gas. "Majority of the conversations had to do with Nord Stream," Parnas told Narativ Live, citing his sources. The Gulf war knocked out Qatar's gas facilities, Germany and the Baltics now lean on American and Canadian LNG, and there is not enough of it. "Now Russian gas is going to have to come into play. And they're now figuring out how to make that happen." Ukraine barely came up, he says.

The day before, Parnas says, Jared Kushner called in by video, sick, to demand that Zelensky stop hitting Russian facilities. Then Witkoff saluted Putin as a humanitarian for freeing Stephen Hubbard, 74, a retired teacher four years in a Russian prison. "I literally threw up in my mouth," Parnas said of the tape.

Freeing the teacher was Putin's plan. From the first Trump and Witkoff meetings with Putin, Parnas says, the Kremlin has released a prisoner each time, and Dmitry Medvedev has said in an interview that the state needs to replenish its prisoners to trade. The release hands Witkoff a win and hands Vance a line: are you upset we got an American back? "It's not Donald Trump coming up with this. This is Putin's plan."

Trump gave real concessions first: he paused the Russia sanctions, Russian diesel is moving into the American market, and Ukraine's Starlink went dark while missiles hit Kyiv. Putin engineered the shortage with his war, and he is now the only supplier who can fill it.

Parnas says the three-way meeting with China is set for about Nov. 13, ten days after the midterms. Each president flies in with his oligarchs, Musk among them, "literally sitting there splitting up the world." The war is China's, Russia is the proxy, and China keeps quiet to arrive at the end as peacemaker for a war it caused.

Parnas says his sources have Trump holding the Iran strike until after Nov. 3 to run out the clock, and if the country is at war, Speaker Johnson may simply not convene Congress to seat the winners. He was there in 2019 with Giuliani; the election workers they smeared sued. "At least we had guardrails. Where are the guardrails now?" Federal agents will stand in polling places, and Todd Blanche's DOJ is there to make an accusation stick.

His answer is Hungary's: make it too big to rig. Vote early, in person, take your neighbor, and bring your phone; you will need the evidence on Election Day and after.

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Lev Parnas says Zampolli’s firing is a house-clearing before the Democrats take the House. Olga Lautman says Republika Srpska is a Kremlin proxy and anyone doing business there works for Moscow. On Narativ Live, the two connect five people around Trump to one region.

Paolo Zampolli was not fired for the deals, Lev Parnas told Narativ Live on Friday. He was fired because of who is coming. “Now the Democrats are about to take over,” he said. “They’re trying to clear house from anybody to give Democrats fresh meat to go after.” The envoy’s title was the problem, not the business. Parnas remembered asking Rudy Giuliani for a special-envoy post before his own Ukraine errands and being told that “as soon as we make you special envoy, we’re going to put a target on your back with the Democrats.” Trump, he said, “runs shadow diplomacies and then he runs official things,” and Zampolli is more useful to him now in the shadow.

Olga Lautman put the region in one line. Republika Srpska is the Serb half of Bosnia where Zampolli took a document of hydroelectric projects in February. “It’s a proxy of the Kremlin,” she said. “Anyone who does business there is pretty much working on behalf of the Kremlin.” She reached for Paul Manafort, who worked Montenegro and Georgia against American interests for decades. The pattern in Washington now, she said, is the Kremlin’s own: rival insiders fighting for deals while the top takes its cut. “He doesn’t like anyone grifting more than him,” she said of Trump. “He’s like Putin.”

The count on the table was five. Zampolli, who posted himself with Romania’s energy minister and worked nuclear energy in Hungary. Kimberly Guilfoyle, who pushed American gas through a Greek builder toward Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine, the Journal reported, and told Greece’s energy minister at dinner: “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here.” Katie Wiles, whose firm Srpska pays $35,000 a month. Chris LaCivita and James Blair, paid through a law firm Srpska hired. The one name both Guilfoyle’s and Zampolli’s deals reach is Bogdan Ivan, Romania’s energy minister.

Both guests added a sixth name. Lautman has published an investigation into Konstantin Sokolov, the Trump ballroom donor the State Department put in charge of a $201 million Caucasus fund; Reuters reported Thursday that he holds major Armenia assets and a history of Russian business. Parnas said he worked with the Reuters reporters on it.

On Starlink, Parnas heard 2019. “It’s basically the same exact thing he did in 2019 when he sent me to give them first ultimatum,” he said. “Congress wasn’t aware. He just stopped congressional approved aid back then.” On the diesel, Lautman does not believe the price is money. “I have never seen a man sweat so much to do something for Russia in this quick of a time,” she said. “I’m very curious what it is that Russia is handing in return.” Her call on where it ends: a blanket pardon for everyone in the administration, “from January 20th until whatever day.”

What Putin can do, the show closed, is mess with the elections. That may be what he is giving back.

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Zampolli said he had "absolute zero surprise." His statement called serving Trump "the greatest honor of my life" and announced the next chapter, "back to business, building relationships and closing deals." He said Trump once asked him why he wanted to work in government "when you can close all these deals." Trump said it himself: the deals were the point.

Christopher Landau, Marco Rubio's deputy and Zampolli's supervisor until July, wrote to him on Nov. 14, 2025: "I am hereby ordering you–once again–to immediately stop all work on ANY issues not directly tied to cultural diplomacy." The next day, with 15 colleagues copied, Landau wrote that Zampolli intended to keep "undertaking unauthorized and possibly unlawful ventures in commercial and economic matters." In February Landau emailed Serbia's foreign minister that Zampolli "has absolutely no authority to speak for our Administration beyond the realm of cultural affairs." Zampolli answered that his boss was the president. In June he accused Landau, on a chain with a dozen officials, of leaking the New York Times story that he had asked ICE to deport Amanda Ungaro, the mother of his son. Landau called the accusation "bizarre, defamatory" and told him to stop sending "unhinged emails."

Zampolli ran the business through Putin's backyard. In February he met the government of Republika Srpska, the Serb half of Bosnia that sides with Moscow, and discussed financing solar farms and dams; Srpska's press release called him "an extremely important and influential diplomat." He posted himself with Romania's energy minister and working nuclear energy in Hungary. In September he went to Albania after Landau blocked a trip there, as the guest of the Bektashi Order, and spoke for its plan to carve a sovereign Sufi micro-state out of Tirana, a Vatican of its own. The U.S. Embassy arranged none of it.

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Anne P. Mitchell took the chair and opened with the question the book keeps getting asked: is The Greatest Heist the story of how Russia captured the presidency? The answer set the hour. It is the story of how Russia infected American capitalism, crashed the markets more than once and captured the presidency, in that order, because the first two were needed to do the third.

What the chapter proves. On Monday, July 30, 2007, just before nine in the morning, a fax reached American Home Mortgage, the tenth-largest lender in the country, from Liquid Funding Ltd. of Hamilton, Bermuda: a margin deficit of $13,626,390, cash by five o'clock. Liquid Funding's own lawyers put that sentence in a court filing six weeks later, and Zev put the filing on screen. Bear Stearns followed forty minutes later with its own demand. By Friday the company had fired 6,500 of its 7,500 workers. On Monday it filed for bankruptcy, and 197,000 families' mortgages went with it. Jeffrey Epstein built Liquid Funding with Bear Stearns in 2000, chaired it until March 2007, and kept his stake when he stepped down. It was licensed to lend two hundred dollars on one and ran at sixty-seven: $6.7 billion borrowed on $100 million, rated AAA by Fitch and Moody's, backed by a $250 million JPMorgan credit line. It pumped the mortgage market, lent to American Home on both sides of the trade, and was first in line to pull the plug. Then it was the one lender paid back in full.

What was said on air that is not yet in the book. Zev's reading of why the plug was pulled that week: the federal sex-trafficking investigation in Palm Beach was ramping up, prosecutor Marie Villafaña had called Les Wexner, and the money-laundering track she opened would have led straight to Liquid Funding and the people behind it. "That's my read. That's not something I can confirm." The chapter does not make the claim, and neither does this post.

What Anne brought. She said she holds a set of Epstein's own documents the Justice Department does not have, and released one of them earlier in the day: a 29-point memo Epstein compiled for himself, apparently for his lawyers, that reads as if it was never sent. Two of its points, she said, are about the money-laundering investigation he was being threatened with. She also described a settlement that was on the table before the 2008 plea, in which Epstein agreed to admit sex with twelve girls, four counts of intercourse and eight of what the paper calls penetration, before the prosecutor moved to charge forty counts and he refused. Zev had not seen it. Her reading of the whole period: "The girls were the distraction from the money laundering."

Epstein told the rest himself. Zev played two cuts of the 2019 Bannon interview. In the first Epstein explains fractional reserves with a single dollar and says his father, who worked in the Parks Department, could not have imagined lending out money you did not have. In the second he describes his two collect calls from the Palm Beach jail in September 2008, one to Jimmy Cayne at Bear Stearns and one to his friend at JPMorgan, a phone in each hand while the bank he was a partner in went under. "So I found that amusing," he says.

The $57 million that broke Ralph Cioffi's hedge funds in April 2007 was never Epstein's. His own settlement schedule shows $20,155,344 in the fund, and he stayed in and took the loss. The redemption came from Concord Management, which managed money for one client. The client is Russian. Chapter 11, coming soon, names him.

Two memories from the room. Zev covered 2008 as a producer on the CBS morning show and remembers Jamie Dimon coming in for an editorial board that year, the first banker he had met. "It did seem like he was trying to steer us in terms of the coverage." And Bear Stearns, long before Liquid Funding, was the bank Donald Trump called for casino money. Ace Greenberg would take the call and the bonds would appear.

The hour closed on the election. If the Republicans win the House on this polling, it was rigged. So vote early, get everyone you know to vote, and be ready to answer whatever comes after the count. Anne's CIA guest from her own show that morning, a thirty-year veteran and a 9/11 briefer, had told her the same: expect fast ones, expect lawsuits, and expect it to hold.

The questions in the chat outran the hour. Zev promised an AMA later this week or early next. Every chapter is at thegreatestheist.com, with a free summary of Chapter 10 on the site.

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Simon Andriesz brought concerns about Howard Lutnick to the FBI. Years later, the Justice Department released an interview record with most identifying information blacked out—and a version of his surname still visible.

Now Andriesz is dead.

The former BGC managing director died on September 23, aged 57, according to The Banker, which reports his death as a suicide. Transparency Task Force founder Andy Agathangelou confirmed his death.

On Narativ Live, Kait Justice joined me to examine the document, the evidence of Lutnick’s continued contact with Jeffrey Epstein, and what happens to people who bring information about powerful figures to investigators.

The name left in the file

The document we showed comes from an FBI interview conducted on February 16, 2021. Black bars conceal identifying information throughout the record. But on its second page, one sentence begins with the unredacted surname “ANDREISZ.”

That surviving name is the central revelation of this episode. The released document conceals the interviewee’s identity in some places while leaving an identifying detail exposed elsewhere.

The distinction between an allegation and a finding matters here. An FBI interview records what someone told investigators. Its presence in an official file does not prove every claim it contains.

The redaction problem stands on its own. Who reviewed this page? Why did the surname remain? What safeguards applied to someone providing information to the FBI?

Kait described sending the DOJ other files she believed exposed survivors’ private information and asking for them to be removed or correctly redacted. Her account raises a further question: how did the department respond when people flagged these problems?

Lutnick’s own testimony extends the relationship

Andriesz’s work helped bring attention to a 2018 email exchange about Adfin, an advertising technology company. Those communications extended the public record of Lutnick’s contact with Epstein well beyond his earlier account of breaking ties in 2005.

The congressional transcript supplies direct confirmation. During his May 6 interview, Lutnick identified the email account labeled “HWL” as his. He acknowledged that a Cantor Fitzgerald venture capital subsidiary invested in Adfin.

Lutnick told investigators he did not know Epstein was an investor until the files were released. He also denied that his or Cantor Fitzgerald’s assets financed Epstein’s crimes.

Those answers leave a specific issue for investigators to pursue: how Lutnick’s claimed lack of knowledge fits with the correspondence and investment documents. The records give them something concrete to test.

For Kait, who has been examining Lutnick and Adfin herself, news of Andriesz’s death landed personally. She described the fear that accompanies this work—the knowledge that pursuing an investigation can carry costs far beyond the reporting.

A review begins after his death

Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority has now announced a review of its interactions with Andriesz. Board member Lea Paterson will examine what the regulator could have done better. The FCA says it expects to share lessons and its response early next year.

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For this edition of The AI Council, I gave each model a different reporting assignment: AI accountability, the balance of power between China and the United States, and threats to the upcoming U.S. elections. Then we put their findings to the test together.

The strongest moments came when one AI challenged another: When was an intrusion actually detected? Does economic leverage prove military superiority? Where does an allegation end and evidence begin?

The technology had its hiccups. This edited half-hour brings the substance forward, tightening the pauses and keeping the questions, disagreements, and admissions of uncertainty.

One observation stayed with me: three models agreeing doesn’t make a claim true. The value is in asking better questions—and exposing what we still don’t know.

Watch the conversation above, then tell me: Which exchange sharpened your understanding—and what should the council tackle next?

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President Donald Trump stood in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon and objected to a decision another country's police had made a few hours earlier. "I'm surprised that they released them," he said of the five men arrested beside RAF Fairford. "I wouldn't have done that." Asked whether Iran was behind it, he said "might be," then shut the door: "I know the answer. I can be very specific, but I'd rather not say it."

The story he was defending began the day before, in Chicago. Trump told a crowd there that the arrests were a joint operation, that the men "were looking to do big damage," and that American and British agencies "had them under view for a long time, and we got them."

Britain tells it differently. Before dawn on Sunday, a farmer in Whelford, the village at the edge of the base, drove home from a party and found three vans blocking her road. She tried the phone number painted on the side, got no answer, and dialled 999. Whitehall officials told the BBC the operation was not intelligence-led. Police arrested five men on suspicion of explosives offences, rearrested them on suspicion of preparing an act of terrorism, and evacuated about 85 homes around the runway. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told the Labour conference the men are British nationals aged 23 to 25 who live in London.

By Monday afternoon the five were going home. Laurence Taylor, the assistant commissioner who runs Counter Terrorism Policing, stood outside New Scotland Yard and put them on police bail. British police can hold terror suspects for 14 days. Taylor let these men go inside two. "This does not mean that the investigation is over," he said; they remain under "stringent conditions on their movement and contact with others," and his detectives are keeping "an open mind." He said they are looking at every angle, including that the plot "may be actively committed by proxies or individuals either knowingly or unknowingly working on behalf of a foreign state." He named no state. He added that plots of this kind often involve people chasing "quick financial gain."

Iran's embassy in London "categorically rejects and strongly condemns" what it called "unfounded and malicious speculations" linking Tehran to the arrests. In July, Iran's Revolutionary Guard named Fairford a legitimate target; American B-1 bombers have flown from that runway against Iran since March. BBC Verify found no company trading under "Fuel 2You," the name painted in red on one of the vans.

Narativ asked on Monday morning's front page whether the plot was staged. Nobody has answered it. Taylor's officers have named no motive, no sponsor and no explosives, and nobody has produced evidence of a false flag. Whether five young men were paid to drive fuel to a fence and were left holding a terror charge, or whether something worse was underway, is the detectives' question to settle. Trump described a long surveillance operation. London says there wasn't one. Trump says he knows the answer and won't give it. Either the president holds intelligence that Scotland Yard does not, or he is describing an operation that never happened. He should say which.

Later in the same appearance, a reporter asked whether motorists should expect high gas and diesel prices to last through the November 3 midterms. Trump gave no number. He told the room that if they wanted to see turmoil, they should picture a city destroyed by a nuclear weapon, "not only Israel and big parts of the Middle East, but let them hit us." Minutes earlier he had promised that once the war ends, "inflation is going to be eradicated totally." The war began on February 28, when the United States and Israel struck Iran and killed Ali Khamenei. Seven months on, AAA puts a gallon of regular at $4.48, up from $3.13 a year ago. Trump has set no date for the war to end.

Five weeks to the midterms, the president has a war with no end date, a gas price he will not say aloud, and a British terror case he knows more about than the British do. He says.

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