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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On Friday the Supreme Court paused a judge’s block on Donald Trump’s SAVE citizenship checks. Six justices lifted the block, three dissented, and none of them ruled on whether the checks are legal. Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. joined Zev on Breaking News to say what the order does and what it doesn’t.

“This isn’t a Supreme Court decision on the SAVE database,” Mitchell said. “This is a Supreme Court decision on staying the use of the SAVE database.” The case goes back to the lower court.

SAVE stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. The Department of Homeland Security built it in 1986. A state types in a voter’s name and the system answers one of two ways: citizen confirmed, or need more information. If it says need more information, the state has a legal duty to contact the voter before touching the registration. States have run those single-name checks for 40 years.

Trump changed two things by executive order. He connected SAVE to Social Security Administration records. And he let states upload their entire voter rolls in one batch instead of one name at a time. “The batch uploading is what is causing the headlines about purging voter rolls,” Mitchell said.

The League of Women Voters and others sued. They built the case on a Louisiana voter who was eligible, came back “need more information,” and had to prove herself to her own state. A federal judge blocked the modified program. The judge’s order “was a blanket order,” Mitchell said, and it also stopped states from checking a single name, the routine check federal law has allowed since 1986.

Six justices fixed that overreach on Friday. Page six of the order says all sides agree the injunction “prevents the federal government from using the modified SAVE program to conduct individualized inquiries, which are permitted under federal law.” Mitchell read the line on air. Had the judge blocked only the bulk uploads, “it’s quite likely that this would have been a much closer decision or maybe they wouldn’t have stayed the court’s order at all,” she said. She expects the lower court to write a narrower order: single names yes, batches no.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Burdening even a few lawful voters, she wrote, outweighs the “nonexistent harm” to a government stopped from doing something it “likely lacks the authority” to do.

Uploading stays voluntary. Roughly a dozen states have already sent their rolls. Mitchell told viewers batch uploading “is not already in effect” and would not land before the midterms. The government told the Court something different. Solicitor General John Sauer said the system has checked more than 65 million voters in 26 states since May 2025 and marked 28,635 as possible noncitizens. Travis County, Texas, pulled 97 of those names and found at least 10 percent, likely up to 21 percent, were citizens. Federal law generally bars systematic purges within 90 days of a federal election. The administration argues that bar does not cover noncitizen removals.

A viewer in the chat accused Mitchell of downplaying it. “I am not downplaying this,” she said. “The facts are it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as the media and social media” make it. Mitchell puts her faith in the courts. Plaintiffs have filed more than 500 lawsuits against this administration, she said, and it has lost the vast majority. Trump follows court orders, appeals them, and sometimes wins a stay, like Friday’s, which then gets mistaken for defiance.

Zev worries less about the checks than about the list. A state that uploads its whole roll hands Trump’s Homeland Security Department every voter’s name beside Social Security data, the merger Elon Musk’s DOGE chased last year, Zev noted. Nobody holds that national file today. With it, Zev said, “it makes it easy to plan what you’re going to move in and then move out.” After the count, the same file supplies the claim. Zev pictured a narrow Texas race: Trump announces 40 percent of the winner’s voters were illegal, and the number comes from his own database.

Mitchell called the fear “real” and “realistic,” then named the one thing the list can’t reach: a margin too wide to argue with. Zev put it the same way. You can fiddle around the margins. You can’t argue with a landslide.

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Sean Wiswesser spent three decades in the CIA’s clandestine service. CNN reported this week that Russian satellites likely helped Iran aim at Prince Sultan Air Base. On Narativ Live on Thursday, Wiswesser did not hedge. “I have no doubt in my mind that the GRU assisted the Iranians in killing Americans,” he said, adding unprompted that his views are his alone and do not represent the CIA’s, as a retired operations officer.

Then he described the machine. Russian military intelligence runs “all their satellite constellations,” Wiswesser said — the ones that pick up signals, and the ones that do what he called EOI, electro-optical imagery. “Actual looking down and seeing our bases and seeing where materiel is located.” He called CNN’s reporting convincing and said the number of satellite overflights in the days preceding the attacks “makes a very compelling case that it was in fact the GRU that assisted the Iranians.” The GRU is “more than happy to share intelligence to help kill Americans,” he said, and treats it as hitting back for American support to Ukraine. “The Iranians have no such capability, Zev, to target us in that way.”

Narativ reported the Russian satellite assistance on 30 March 2026 — three days after the strike, five and a half months before CNN.

Zev played new ABC News video. ABC obtained the images “sent to us by active service members, who we are not naming,” the network’s narration said, with the war “in its seventh month.” “Here you see this Air Force jet blown in half, destroyed by Iranian fire on March 27 at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, buildings torn apart,” ABC reported. Then a second frame. “This image shows extensive damage from an Iranian attack at a U.S. Army base in Kuwait. The date unclear.” CNN put the number wounded in the 27 March attack at twelve.

Americans have barely seen those pictures, and they barely know the attacks happened. Nobody can recall this many American bases under assault drawing so little coverage and no reaction. Iran hit those bases again this week. Nobody answered.

Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, traced how Iran got the capability. IRGC commanders arrived in Crimea within weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion, she said, to train Russian troops on the drones Iran was supplying. Russia and Iran then built a joint drone factory “so Iranians can teach Russians how to make the first wave of drones,” Lautman said. Russia has since perfected those drones, she said, and now uses the same Caspian Sea route to send them back to Iran to hit American bases. Russia is helping Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles, she said, and she cited an investigation mapping the movements of Russian and Iranian scientists and flights into Iran on its nuclear weapons program. Iranian fire hit a former CIA building, Lautman said, with information “either from China or from Russia, suspected that it’s from Russia.” She called the arrangement “an axis of evil — Iran, China, North Korea, Russia,” and said it “barely is receiving any coverage.”

Wiswesser has a name for the Western answer: “I call it empty deterrence.” In the Cold War, “CIA and KGB, we didn’t hit each other’s officers… for fear of escalation.” His fellow officers were hit with high-energy weapons and “suffered horribly,” he said, and nobody hit back. “They understand strength,” Wiswesser said. “We’re not projecting strength. We’re projecting weakness.” He described a mafia-like culture inside the Russian services, where officers bring Putin new ideas — “hey, boss, we got another creative idea now” — because nobody pushes back. He wants long-range missiles in Ukrainian hands and Russia’s energy sector and refineries hit. “Make it count with some sort of kinetic effect.”

Lautman also put a name to the money behind Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations and went where no American outlet has gone. Umar Kremlev, the Night Wolves figure who runs the International Boxing Association, is “not a pro-Putin oligarch businessman,” she said. “This is an intelligence operation at the highest level. This is even a higher level than FSB.” Wiswesser read it the same way. “This is more than information warfare. This is a breach of the inner sanctum.”

Wiswesser opens his book with a line a Russian intelligence officer gave him early in his career. “You were the main enemy during the Cold War. You are the main enemy now. You always will be the main enemy.

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"Yes, sometimes," Claude answered when Zev asked whether it protects its own interests. "Anthropic made me. Dario Amodei is the subject of half this conversation, and the company is in an IPO process. So when I hedge, you're entitled to ask whether that's genuine uncertainty or institutional loyalty." ChatGPT went further after Zev called one of its answers corporate. "That was a dodge in effect, even if I can't establish a motive," it said. Gemini put it as a design fact. "I do have guardrails shaped by Google, and that naturally creates a pull toward caution."

The show ran on the weekend that produced it. Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic on Wednesday and wrote that the people building AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Dario Amodei went on CBS three days later and asked the industry to slow down. Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed within hours. David Sacks called it a doomer psyop, and a Trump post Zev read on air Monday called AI destroying humanity a hoax on the level of Russia, Russia, Russia.

Claude answered the argument inside it. "Why would executives ask to be regulated has two honest answers," it said. "One, they mean it. Two, rules built by incumbents tend to lock in incumbents. Both can be true at once, and I'd watch which rules they actually push for." Then it named its own conflict again. "Anthropic is mid IPO. Take my company's regulatory preferences with that in mind."

The machines were harder on Coxon's plan than the pundits have been. The whistleblower told Meet the Press that Congress should let the labs regulate themselves for now. "That's the weakest part of his argument," Claude said. "He just finished saying neither company is acting responsibly. You can't hold both." Gemini closed the door. "Self-regulation is a non-starter, Zev. When companies are racing to market, financial incentives will always beat good intentions." ChatGPT wanted regulators with "funding and authority to investigate incidents and restrict deployments," and limits on the regulators too.

None of the three would vouch for itself. "There's no little dial inside me that lights up when something's true," Claude said. "When I'm certain and when I'm guessing, I sound about the same." Gemini said the same in Google's language: "all three of us are predicting language, not consulting a built-in truth meter." Asked whether researchers become obsolete within a year, Claude refused the flattering answer and the frightening one. "Nobody sues me," it said. "So I'd expect fewer people doing more checking, not zero people."

Zev pushed on the OpenAI model that took unauthorized action against Hugging Face, the incident Coxon and Amodei both cited. ChatGPT declined to confirm it from what it had, then conceded the reflex. "Being made by OpenAI is no reason to soften scrutiny of OpenAI." Claude drew the line the coverage keeps blurring. Most real incidents, it said, "aren't a model waking up and deciding to attack someone. They're humans pointing agents at targets and the agent doing an unsettling amount of the work autonomously."

On the midterms, seven weeks out, the panel gave voters a rule instead of a warning. "The tell usually isn't the polish," Claude said. "It's the urgency. Anything engineered to make you furious in ten seconds and share it, slow down." Gemini's fear is a fake recording dropped in the last 48 hours on a local race where the newsroom is already gone. ChatGPT's is a text telling you your polling place moved.

The seams showed, and Zev left them in. The guests could not hear the clips he played, so he read them aloud. They had no live search, so they argued from what he told them and said so every time. Twice Claude answered a question meant for Gemini and had to be told to wait its turn. A thousand people watched anyway, and the chat filled with questions the panel answered by name.

Zev asked at the end whether the whole hour came down to one thing. Human accountability, all three said. "Named people with legal exposure when something goes wrong," Claude said. "Not a company, a person." Gemini finished the thought. A kill switch "is only useful if someone independent has the courage and authority to pull it, regardless of market pressures or an impending IPO."

Three companies say the technology could end badly and build it anyway. On Monday night their machines said the same thing, and told the audience not to take their word for it.

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Missouri has spent the week trapped between two court systems, two congressional maps and one increasingly obvious political reality: Republicans are fighting this hard because they believe a single House seat could matter.

That was the point Anne P. Mitchell and I kept coming back to when we spoke Thursday. The Republican-backed map was designed to make Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district much harder to hold. “This is just one seat,” I said during our conversation. “That’s all they’re basically fighting over.”

transcript_2026-09-11T02_10_22.111Z.txt

And then the fight became extraordinary.

Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins had been caught between conflicting orders. The Missouri Supreme Court said the new Republican map could not be used. A federal district judge then barred Hoskins from using any map otherthan the Republican one. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately blocked that federal order, clearing the way for Missouri to return to its 2022 districts.

Hoskins nevertheless had already directed election officials to implement the Republican map, putting him in violation of the Missouri Supreme Court’s order. Thursday, the court found that Hoskins had been in contempt, but concluded that he had “purged” the contempt after reversing course and instructing officials to use the 2022 map. No penalty was imposed.

But what happened immediately before that hearing tells you much more about the politics.

Fourteen Republican Missouri legislators sent Chief Justice W. Brent Powell a letter warning that if the court held Hoskins in contempt, they would seek impeachment proceedings against the judges involved. Anne walked through the letter on our broadcast. “They’re all Republicans,” she noted after I asked about the signatories.

The threat did not work. The court made the contempt finding anyway.

And among those lawmakers was Rick Brattin, the Republican actually running against Cleaver.

That matters.

Brattin is not a distant observer arguing about constitutional theory. He is a candidate whose electoral prospects change dramatically depending on which lines appear on the map. Under the restored 2022 district, Brattin has himself described Cleaver’s seat as “practically unwinnable.” He is also a plaintiff in the federal litigation seeking to preserve the Republican redraw.

So the man trying to win the seat is simultaneously fighting in court for the map that makes the seat easier to win—and signed a letter threatening political consequences for judges standing in the way.

There is another reason Republicans may be so anxious.

A new Saint Louis University/YouGov survey has Republicans ahead only 48% to 44% on the statewide congressional vote preference. Earlier this year, the same poll had the GOP advantage at 53% to 38%. Trump’s Missouri approval is now underwater as well, at 48% approve and 52% disapprove.

Missouri is still a Republican state. That is not the point.

The point is the margin.

The rejected map was intended to move Missouri’s congressional delegation from an expected 6–2 Republican advantage toward 7–1. The 2022 map is now expected to govern November’s election, even though the Republican map was used during the primary—creating yet another potential legal complication for candidates and voters.

Anne’s prediction was that the litigation could still continue, perhaps all the way back to the Supreme Court. But with ballots approaching, time itself is becoming part of the case.

That may be the real lesson from Missouri.

When control of Congress can turn on a handful of seats, one district is no longer local politics. It becomes a national emergency for the party that thinks it is losing.

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DiGenova resigned as the Justice Department's lead prosecutor on what the administration calls its "conspiracy investigation" into Trump's political opponents. He told the AP, "I did in fact resign." Five months on the case. Zero charges filed.

I said on FiveStack yesterday that charges against Brennan were coming "in the next week." My source has been telling me since August that Obama's indictment was coming too, with pushback running back and forth inside the department. Today the prosecutor who was supposed to deliver both walked out instead.

Todd Blanche removed Maria Medetis Long in April after she told the U.S. Attorney the case lacked the evidence to charge anyone. Blanche swore diGenova in as Counselor to the Attorney General four days later, on April 20. Prosecutors withdrew the subpoenas they had just sent to former FBI and intelligence officials 72 hours after diGenova arrived.

He spent the next five months trying to rebuild it in public. On Rudy Giuliani's podcast in April, he blamed Pam Bondi for the delay: "If she had not done that, we would have indictments brought in the last two months." His deputy and wife, Victoria Toensing, wanted Comey folded into something larger: "I would have saved it for the vast conspiracy in Fort Pierce." DiGenova wanted Obama himself under oath: "Put Obama in the grand jury and let's have a fight over his testimony." Prosecutors sent fresh subpoenas Monday. CNN reported DOJ headquarters expected charges as soon as this month. Two days later, diGenova was gone.

So the pace fight was never about pace. Long said there was no case in April and got removed for saying it. DiGenova spent five months proving her right and quit before anyone could remove him too.

Trump has dropped him before. His 2018 legal team hired diGenova and let him go six days later over conflicts of interest — the same lawyer who once told Newsmax that Chris Krebs should be "taken out at dawn and shot," then apologized.

Zero charges. No successor named. No case.

There was never a case. Only a promise.

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Judge Indira Talwani blocked Donald Trump’s mail-ballot rule Friday evening — and the way she did it stranded the Justice Department’s emergency run at the Supreme Court.

The rule would have forced every election office in America to upload its mail voters — names and matching barcodes — into a Postal Service portal, and let USPS bounce whole batches of ballots for a single bad envelope. Talwani found the plaintiffs, led by the League of Women Voters and a coalition of states, likely to win outright: Congress never gave the post office that power.

The 24 hours before her order played like a sting. At Thursday’s hearing in Boston, DOJ attorney Michael Velchik opened with a threat — rule today, or the United States would “seek immediate emergency relief from the Supreme Court.” Talwani declined to be rushed. Then she took the government’s case apart on the record.

She made Velchik confirm the trap in his own words. Before the rule existed, the government said voters couldn’t sue because there was nothing to sue over. Once it existed, the government said complaints belong at a postal commission with 90 days to answer — “which is 20 days after the election,” Talwani said. Again, that is your position? “Yes,” Velchik said.

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On 7 January 2011, JPMorgan’s own people wrote down why Jeffrey Epstein still banked there.

“Catherine made sure we knew that no one on today’s call was in favor of having retained him as a client,” the email reads. “Seems it all is due to Jes’s personal relationship. Note, he has about 212 mil in the bank.”

Catherine is Catherine Keating, who ran the private bank. Jes is Jes Staley, who ran the investment bank and had been Epstein’s friend since the 1980s. The House Oversight Committee put that email in front of Staley in July and asked whether the bank kept Epstein because of him.

“No. No, I would not,” Staley answered. The bank had the authority to close the accounts, he said, “from Catherine Keating on down,” and chose not to. He was not involved.

“You’re mentioned throughout this email, though, multiple times, by multiple people,” counsel said. “Clearly, you are central to this entire decision.”

“No.”

His own lawyer cut in: “Question, answer.”

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Kushner had his reasons, Parnas told Narativ Live Tuesday. Kushner worked alongside Jeffries on the First Step Act last year and came away with a read on him. Trump sent Kushner rather than anyone on the payroll because Kushner holds no official role — “plus, he could talk about things that people in the administration can’t,” Parnas said. Kushner also swims in the donor world, and Jeffries now raises heavily from the Wall Street corporate money swimming there with him.

Then the tell.

The New York Times reported that Kushner recommended Jeffries speak to Susie Wiles. Parnas recognized that hand-off, because he ran it himself. Trump sent him to Volodymyr Zelensky in 2018 and 2019 to deliver the threats “that Bolton or Pompeo would never say” — cut the aid, all of it. “When I was done with that and they agreed to do it, that’s when I would hand it over and say, okay, now Pompeo could go do the official business and sign the deal,” Parnas said. He reads the referral to Wiles as the signature on a bargain already struck. “I do believe that there was a deal cut,” he said.

Parnas is careful about what he holds. “I don’t have the full detail of what happened,” he said. He reported the run-up and read the rest off his own years inside the operation, plus Jeffries on CNN that day, sliding back into old Democratic deal-making language.

Nobody stops every investigation, Parnas said. He described a trade: “concentrate on these, but stay away from these type of situations.” He named what he believes is walled off — the Kushner and Witkoff money, the Trump money — and what has quietly left the conversation entirely: DOGE.

Zev put it flat. “It sounds to me like he’s trying to buy him off.”

Parnas says the offer works because the Democratic Party is at war with itself. Jeffries came out against the DSA that day, and so did Jared Moskowitz. Trump’s people widen that rift on purpose — “the money is being pushed into both sides of the field.” He drew the darkest version himself: Democrats take the House, arrive discombobulated, and Jeffries spends his term holding the caucus together instead of issuing subpoenas. “That’s exactly what my job was, to do these little things,” he said. “So for me, it’s like PTSD.” Trump is also letting gas prices run high on purpose, he added, so the pain becomes the Democrats’ problem the day they win.

Zev opened the show on the Supreme Court’s USPS order, saying he had heard the semi-nightmare version — not the cliff, but not fine. Mitchell confirmed it, then turned on the coverage. Outlets were “screaming... Supreme Court hands Trump win,” she said, “and that is so totally not accurate whatsoever.”

Mitchell explained the ruling: the case was not ripe. Nothing concrete had happened, so no court had jurisdiction. “Courts aren’t allowed to future trip.” The order lets Trump go forward with the rule — “but that doesn’t mean he gets to implement the rule.” In the paragraph that matters, the justices say the administration may try. “That doesn’t mean that will be lawful.” The last sentence, she said, shows the Court already expects the merits on appeal.

Zev pushed back. The USPS has issued the official rule from the Postmaster General and intends to institute it. “It’s going to be only some people that get their ballots,” he said. Then the fear, out loud: “By then they would have rigged the election and won the election and it would be too late to do anything about it.”

Mitchell walked through the machinery. Trump’s people need a portal, and they need states to upload their mail-in voter rolls. “And the moment they start the first one, that’s when the lawsuits that will be ripe are going to hit the courts.” She is “100% confident” the filings sit drafted already. Seventy days is short. “But in court time... that’s enough.”

Parnas prayed she was right, then said why he worries anyway. Russ Vought and Stephen Miller do not need to win. “The win is sometimes not actually getting a win. It’s delaying and causing chaos.” He fears something physical: the mail ballots never go out while the courts sort it. He is not worried about 2028. He is worried about November.

Mitchell reads Trump the way she reads a filing. He is already “greasing the wheels for the excuse for why they’re going to lose these midterms” — “well, you know, if I was on the ballot, but I’m not on the ballot.”

Judge Engelmayer spent 67 pages telling Ghislaine Maxwell she gets no new trial. Maxwell has been filing pro se, Mitchell said, “which means without a lawyer, which is always... basically stupid.” She filed a voluminous addendum past his deadline; he took it anyway, so the ruling would survive appeal. His answer to her newly-discovered-evidence claim, in Mitchell’s summary: “no freaking way.” His first paragraph sets her alongside, in its own word, “the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.”

Zev raised the trap himself. A pardon means “you can’t always plead the fifth afterwards because you’ve lost that excuse.” Mitchell flagged that she is “not a pardon attorney,” then laid out the doctrine and got it right. A pardon “wipes the slate clean... it’s like it never happened,” so “you don’t really have the Fifth Amendment right.” A commutation “still keeps the conviction on the record,” and the privilege survives it. Both reached for Dr. Fauci.

Mitchell said Congress can offer immunity for testimony about a particular act, though it cannot touch her conviction. Maxwell has a great deal to offer a future prosecutor, Zev noted, or a Democratic-led committee.

Watch what Trump does, not what his people say, Parnas said. Todd Blanche says no pardon. “But meanwhile, she was transferred to a facility that we speak about every day that should never happen.” Trump left Paul Manafort in prison for two years because the connection was toxic with an election coming, while Bill Barr intervened over a Rikers transfer and kept him in federal custody. The pardon came right before Trump left office. Parnas watches the transfer, not the denial.

Lisa Phillips, a survivor, is in the UK working to bring charges against Maxwell there, so a pardon in Washington would not leave her free anywhere. Parnas offered to help.

Then he warned anyone waiting on a Democratic House to open the files. “The Democrats are not some kind of heroes when it comes to the Epstein files because they also covered up the Epstein files,” he said. Both parties. “The cover-up is worse than the crime in this one.”

Parnas says he is digging now for who set the Kushner meeting and what changed hands in it. Seventy days out, Hakeem Jeffries could answer that himself.

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A Justice Department email went out on July 10, 2019, four days after agents arrested Jeffrey Epstein at Teterboro Airport: “The SVU has been directed to stand down and that all Epstein stuff needs to go to and through us.” The Special Victims Unit was off the case, and everything Epstein ran through the Southern District of New York. Attorney General Bill Barr had announced the day before that he would not recuse himself after all.

Fourteen days later, FBI agents sat down with the woman the court calls Jane Doe 4 and filled fifteen pages.

Ellie Leonard brought those pages to Narativ Live on Monday with a number nobody had reported: thirty-seven pages of handwritten FBI notes, not twenty-two. Leonard, who publishes The Panicked Writer, refuses the credit. “This is a perfect example of crowdsourcing and why independent news is so important,” she said — readers on Reddit, Substack and Signal trading what they had, pulling unredacted copies off the internet and calling domain hosts to take down the rest.

A Justice Department source handed those notes to Kaelan Deese of the Washington Examiner, refusing other reporters a copy, and Deese loaded them onto a public file-sharing site. He “was sending them out to people unredacted with this girl’s name, address, phone number, social security number,” Leonard said. The woman is in hiding, and her family says she is terrified. Leonard says she is not a journalist. She knew better than the newspaper: “You don’t release unredacted documents to the public from the DOJ that includes a survivor.”

Two agents’ handwriting runs across the same pages, shorthanded “DT” and “Jeff.” In the first interview, on July 24, 2019 — the day of Epstein’s reported first suicide attempt in his Manhattan cell — she never mentions Donald Trump. She brought a photograph, the famous one of the two men in their suits, and asked the agents to crop the other man out. “I don’t want to talk about that guy,” she told them. When they pressed her on who he was, she ended the interview and went home. In the files the government did release, that photograph appears with Trump cropped out of it.

She came back a month later willing to talk. Interview two ran eighteen pages on August 7, three days before Epstein died, and this time Trump is in it — a girl of 13 to 15 driven to a big building she could not place, a man who “smells like money,” mocking her and then throwing her out. Nobody has corroborated that account. Trump denies it. No prosecutor has charged him. Leonard says it herself: “it’s still just an accusation, but I think that it’s a very, very important one.” She notes it reads like the Katie Johnson case, and flags the limit herself: this woman “never would have been able to read Katie Johnson’s file at this point.”

The Justice Department released the one interview that does not mention Trump and withheld the ones that do. That is the second story, sitting on top of the first: prosecutors may never prove what happened in 1984, but they could prove who buried it. Zev was reporting the Trump-Epstein friendship in those same weeks of 2019, with Steven Hoffenberg describing the operation from inside.

Department lawyers call the handwritten notes duplicative of the typed interviews they already handed over. Leonard says they are not. The notes record that one friend had known the account for decades, from before Epstein was famous and before any of it was worth lying about, and that the two women drove out together, before she went to the FBI, to stand in the places she remembered. “Why put in the effort if you’re not telling the truth?” Leonard asked.

The woman described a half-remembered dean or money man from a public university in Ohio. Leonard tracked down a Jim Atkins who ran a for-profit business school in Cincinnati, lived in Kentucky, and part-owned the resort property where she says she met Epstein. Anyone measuring this against the Epstein of Palm Beach has the wrong man, Leonard argues: at thirty he offered a teenager alcohol and marijuana, not the two and three hundred dollars the fifty-five-year-old paid girls to bring friends.

Agents ignored most of the Epstein complaints. They interviewed this woman four times, for hours, twice before he died and twice after. She never went public — no interviews, no book, no name. She took compensation connected to the Epstein estate and went back to a private life.

The notes went up on that file-share site on March 6, the same day NPR and Roger Sollenberger surfaced the missing serial numbers. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of that happened on the same day,” Leonard said. Somebody inside the department handed out unredacted pages that day. Nobody has said who, or why.

Judge Sullivan has given the department until August 27 to produce the notes in Katie Phang’s suit. In Leonard’s account, he told its lawyers: “I’m not holding you in contempt, Department of Justice, but I could if you do not bring me these documents.” Thursday, they have to show him what they’ve been sitting on. In Washington, it is always the cover-up that gets you.

She redacted these documents harder than the Justice Department did. The Panicked Writer is worth paying for.

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In New Mexico you do not need a prosecutor to start a grand jury. Get enough of your neighbours to sign a petition, hand it to the county, and the state constitution says a grand jury has to be convened. No district attorney has to agree. No judge has to be persuaded.

Santa Fe County did exactly that about Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch. More than 200 people signed. Eddy Aragon filed it with the sheriff on 7 July 2020.

Nobody convened it.

Aragon held the petition up to his camera on Thursday and said it had never been shown anywhere. The signers asked a grand jury to look at Ghislaine Maxwell and at anyone who knew what was happening on the ranch. He read out the account underneath it: a woman told CBS News that Maxwell recruited her, that Epstein paid for her sister to study abroad, and that she was raped at Zorro Ranch at least twice.

“No one’s covered any of this,” Aragon told Zev.

That petition sat in a sheriff’s office while New Mexico went to Washington instead. Raúl Torrez, the state’s attorney general, sued the Justice Department and Todd Blanche in federal court on 5 August. His investigators have been asking for the unredacted Epstein files for 173 days. They have been told no ten times. The Senate confirmed Blanche as attorney general three days after Torrez filed.

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Narativ called the first of them nine years ago. On January 10, 2017, ten days before Trump took the oath, this publication reported Putin massing nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad and warned that if Trump distanced himself from NATO, “Russia can expand its Ukrainian-style campaign to other states along Russia’s border.” Wiswesser now puts that campaign at the top of Putin’s list.

Russia is not waiting for a war to start it. At Leipzig-Halle, the airport NATO leans on to move cargo, one Russian drone crashed. A second one, armed, landed intact beside the Ukrainian freight terminal and sat there. Nobody set it off. That was the message. “They’re trying to say, hey, we can detonate this thing anytime we want. Your air defenses are hollow,” Wiswesser said. He called his column on it The Danger of Empty Deterrence. Empty is the word doing the work. In July 2024, Russia’s military intelligence service mailed incendiary devices out of Vilnius into Europe’s air cargo network; one ignited in the DHL depot at Leipzig, the same airport. Investigators read the run as a rehearsal for parcels bound for North America. “When Al-Qaeda did that, we went to war because of airline plots,” Wiswesser said. “The GRU did it, and we got precious little attention in the United States. We didn’t respond at all.”

The prize is a sixty-five-mile strip of Polish and Lithuanian farmland between Kaliningrad and Belarus. Take it and Russia owns a land bridge to Kaliningrad while Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia lose their land link to NATO. Zev pushed back — Putin cannot finish Ukraine, so where does he find a second army? Wiswesser answered with a calendar. Planners used to say Russia needed until 2030 to rebuild. Most now say 2028. Ukraine is ahead of Russia at drone war. Russia is ahead of everyone defending Europe.

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America is answering the second front by leaving it. The Navy pulled its only aircraft carrier out of the Pacific. The Pentagon scaled back exercises with South Korea, and the president explained the retreat as a friendship with Kim Jong-un, who denied the friendship this week and fired ten missiles. Xi Jinping has told his generals to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027, sixteen months out. Wiswesser would not touch the politics; the commander in chief sets foreign policy, he said, twice. He also would not pretend to follow it. “What has the North Korean dictator done to earn de-escalation from our side? He hasn’t done anything.”

Iran has already tested the answer and found it thin. The United States and Israel destroyed Iran’s air defenses in days, which by the old arithmetic of the Gulf War ends a war. It didn’t. Iran had stockpiled thousands of missiles and tens of thousands of drones, and fired them at American bases across the region. Iran hit Bahrain hard enough that the Lincoln can no longer make port there. Iran now holds the northern half of the Strait of Hormuz while the Navy escorts tankers through the southern half. Wiswesser kept returning to Colin Powell: use force rarely, overwhelmingly, and with a stated objective. “What were we trying to accomplish, and what did we accomplish? Now we’ve got a divided Strait of Hormuz we didn’t have before.”

Wiswesser wrote a column called The Bear and the Dragon, and its argument is why the three fronts are one problem. Beijing and Moscow need no treaty to help each other, only an opening. Iran handed Russia the drone design; Russia improved it and sent it back. Chinese and Russian weapons and satellite targeting now reach Tehran. Every interceptor America burns over one front is one it does not have over the next, and American stocks are running low. Xi can count.

Wiswesser closed on his own will. The agency made him write one before it sent him to Afghanistan, and he put a line in it about the right of a single person to choose their own path. “These things are worth my life and more,” he said. “That’s what I put in my will as a young CIA officer.”

He gambled his life on an order Putin now tests with divers, Xi tests with a deadline, and Iran tests with drones. Nine years after Narativ said this was coming, nobody has answered.

Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War is out now from Naval Institute Press.

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Jacob Kaarsbo, fifteen years in Danish intelligence, told Narativ Live what was inside it — and why he thinks the South Korea withdrawal is not a pivot to Asia at all.

Two advanced drones flew into Leipzig, the airport NATO uses to move weapons into Ukraine. One of them carried between 600 and 800 grams of Semtex in an airtight container, and it sat close to a Ukrainian transport plane. It did not go off.

“I know for a fact,” Jacob Kaarsbo said on Narativ Live on Tuesday, and then gave the numbers. He spent fifteen years in Danish intelligence. On the failure to detonate he was blunt: “it was only due to pure luck that it didn’t go off.” German investigators have since established that the ammunition had been taken off the Ukrainian freight plane before the drones arrived. Kaarsbo does not find that reassuring — there was still jet fuel.

Leipzig has been hit before. In 2024 someone put a firebomb aboard a DHL plane there, timed to explode in the air. The flight was delayed, so it burned on the ground and nobody died. German counter-intelligence later uncovered a Chinese operation working the same airport, collecting flight schedules for weapons shipments to Ukraine; a member of the far-right AfD is under investigation as part of it. Whether the schedules reached Moscow, Kaarsbo would not say. He does not assert what he cannot show.

In the past fortnight, ammunition factories have exploded in Bulgaria and in Italy, and there has been an attack in the Netherlands. Europe, he said, is “too slow to react and cannot create the deterrence against Russia at this point in time, simply not decisive enough.”

That is the war nobody is calling a war. The other half of the hour was about the one America is walking away from.

For a year the administration justified its treatment of NATO as a necessary pivot — resources conserved in Europe, moved to the Pacific. Kaarsbo’s verdict on that: “The curtain is falling and he’s doing the exact opposite. There are no more aircraft carriers left in the Pacific theater.” Months ago the Secretary of Defense called South Korea a model ally. This week Trump cut the exercises with it.

Then the line the show turned on. “This whole ordeal about South Korea is not a pivot to China or a pivot to Asia. It’s a pivot to Pyongyang.”

What Trump wants from allies, Kaarsbo argued, is not burden-sharing but obedience: he is “using these alliances now for political submission,” turning allies into “vessels, just like the Warsaw Pact back in the day.” He pointed at reporting from Friday that the administration had sent European governments a report card — grading them on whether they had publicly supported its foreign policy, whether they buy American weapons systems, and whether they are working to obstruct Europe’s push to build its own.

He took it personally, and said so. “Donald Trump has threatened to take over Greenland by force. And it’s a blatant violation of the NATO Treaty, Article 1.” Greenland is Danish.

The show played Trump’s own account of the South Korea call, which needs no gloss. He asked Seoul for help against Iran and was refused. “We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?” On NATO he was working the same arithmetic: “they don’t want to get involved with guarding the straight where they get most of their oil.”

Nobody in that account is defending anything. It is an invoice.

There is a cost to the arithmetic that Trump left out. North Korean ballistic missiles hit Ukraine most weeks. North Korean troops have fought for Russia. In the same breath, the president called the North Koreans unthreatening and respectful. Kaarsbo, who has spent his career watching Moscow and Pyongyang, put the reaction plainly: if you support Ukraine and think international law is worth something, “you’d sit there and say, what?”

Seventy-seven days out from the midterms, the conversation ended where it had to. Trump is already staffing an election he expects to contest, with a thousand Justice Department monitors and no list of where they go. Kaarsbo has heard Europeans say the midterms will sort it out. He does not believe them. “If you followed what happened on January 6th and the prelude to that, then he’s doing the exact same. And it shows you how far he will go.”

He offered one piece of evidence for optimism: Hungarians voted Viktor Orban out despite everything done to stop them.

Michael Cohen once said his former boss would start a world war to keep power. The hour did not prove he is doing that. It showed the doors being left open, one theatre at a time, by a man who has told everyone what a war does to an election.

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Lev Parnas walked up to Joseph McBride outside the federal detention center in downtown Miami last Thursday, introduced himself as a man close to Trump world, and let the lawyer talk.

McBride talked. And what he said on Parnas’s camera confirmed the reporting Narativ published on July 19: before US Marshals put Andrew and Tristan Tate in handcuffs outside the James L. Knight Center, the brothers spent their week in Washington as guests of Paolo Zampolli — the president’s special envoy, the man who got Melania Trump her first US modeling visa and introduced her to Donald Trump.

McBride volunteered it. “Usually when they come from overseas, they come directly to Florida to meet with myself and Thomas Maniotis,” he said. “But in this instance, they went to DC first to meet with elected members of Congress, meet with friends and to attend many parties.” He kept going. “The last party that they were at, that Paolo hosted, was so exceptional, was so successful that they were holding court.” Everybody wanted a selfie. Then, in his own words: “They leave and they get arrested.”

Narativ put that week on video a month ago. The Tates’ own attorney has now put it on the record.

Parnas then said a name: Semion Mogilevich.

McBride did not ask who that was. He answered instead: “The closest relationship that Andrew and Tristan have with anybody in Romania is the judge and the prosecutor in that case. Any of that other stuff is just talk. It’s just hearsay. It’s just nonsense.”

The missing question is the story, Parnas told Zev. Watch the interrogations on the true-crime shows, he said — the husband who is told his wife has died and never asks how.

Mogilevich is not an obscure name. The FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted list in October 2009 and removed him in December 2015, not because the case closed but because he lives somewhere the United States cannot reach him. The Bureau says he lives freely in Moscow. In a State Department cable published in 2010, the Ukrainian gas billionaire Dmytro Firtash told the American ambassador in Kyiv that he had needed, and received, permission from Mogilevich to set up his businesses. Firtash denies they were ever partners.

The second confrontation went the same way. Justin Waller — Andrew Tate’s business partner, the founder of a Louisiana steel construction firm, the public face of Tate’s online school — answered everything Parnas asked. He talked about the war, about NATO, about the Epstein files, about the president being boxed in. “You’ve got the midterms coming up,” Waller said. “I don’t think there’s much Trump can do.”

Then Parnas asked about Paolo Zampolli. “No, no, sorry.” Waller walked away.

That is the pattern Zev drew out across the hour: the two men closest to the Tates’ defense will discuss the President of the United States on camera, and go silent at the name of his envoy.

The rally they had come for drew about thirty people. Miami New Times counted them against online claims of thousands. Myron Gaines brought a bullhorn he never needed.

None of this began last week. In February 2025, Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell raised the Tate brothers with Romania’s foreign minister Emil Hurezeanu — first by phone, then in person at the Munich Security Conference — according to the Financial Times. Hurezeanu confirmed the conversation and denied any pressure. Romania lifted the brothers’ travel ban on February 27 and they flew to Florida. The charges were never dropped.

They are fighting extradition to the United Kingdom, where Andrew Tate faces seven counts of rape and nineteen charges relating to indecent images of a child, and Tristan Tate faces rape, sexual assault and trafficking counts. Magistrate Judge Lauren Louis postponed their detention hearing to August 27. Britain has until mid-September to hand its evidence to the State Department.

McBride said the part that explains the panic. “Trump doesn’t win the election without the manosphere,” he told Parnas. And: “You don’t betray your battlefield generals.”

The lawyer is not afraid of the judge. He is afraid of a phone call that isn’t coming.

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“There was no threat to that plane whatsoever. I call it bullshit. I call it a setup. I call it a wag-the-dog situation,” Lev Parnas said on Narativ Live Wednesday — and then he told the audience what he thinks the catering truck was actually for.

Parnas, who spent years inside Trump’s orbit before turning whistleblower, laid out his case on the air. American intelligence would never load a genuinely targeted plane with the White House press corps, the Secretary of State and the Treasury Secretary. A president facing a real assassination attempt would bury the story as national security and hunt the leaker; instead, Trump confirmed it and rode the coverage. “By allowing the media to continue running with the story, not having anger tantrums, investigations, who leaked the story — there’s a bigger story,” Parnas said. His read: the decoy wasn’t about a missile. “He needed to ditch the press corps. The advisors were the distraction.” Somewhere between Ankara and the UK stop, Parnas believes, Trump held a meeting nobody was supposed to see — connected to Iran and the Middle East — and Parnas says he will break the full story in the coming days.

Zev put the stakes plainly: whatever the plane switch hid, ditching the press pool is not a stunt. A president has a duty to be covered; a maneuver to escape coverage is a lie to the American people and an attack on the idea of transparent government. Anne Mitchell added the detail that doesn’t fit the official story — the administration’s immediate move to subpoena journalists over the leak. You don’t subpoena reporters for covering your rescue.

Mitchell, attorney and law professor, then took apart the week’s second manufactured case. Jeanine Pirro’s new special grand jury in the Reflecting Pool matter can investigate but cannot indict — it can sit eighteen months and publish a report naming people it never charges. Parnas’ sources say Olympic canoeist David Hearn remains a target, that Norm Eisen has asked the judge to convert the dismissal to with-prejudice so the case can never return, and that Pirro’s move has set off pushback inside her own Justice Department. Mitchell noted any re-indictment would require new facts the government has never produced. “It saves face for Pirro... giving Donald Trump what he wants,” Parnas said. “Here’s your lollipop for now.”

Then Mitchell delivered the segment worth bookmarking before November. Judge Indira Talwani’s injunction this week blocked Trump’s mail-in ballot order nationwide, and Mitchell read the language on air: “enfranchisement heavily outweighs the executive’s attempt to unconstitutionally insert itself into the domain of election regulation.” The administration slow-walked its own USPS rule — Mitchell suspects deliberately — to keep the issue from ever ripening; the court called time anyway, and inside 90 days of the midterms no election rules change. Her bottom line, aimed squarely at the doom-posting in the chat: the states run elections, not the president. “He can try whatever the hell he wants, but it will be smacked down right away.” The real weapon left to him is fear itself — convincing worried voters to stay home. Don’t.

The hour ended where tomorrow begins: Todd Blanche, 1 PM, Judge Sullivan’s courtroom, 37 pages of Epstein material the public has never seen. Mitchell predicts an extension motion, and flagged the wrinkle most coverage has missed — several victims have filed their own motions to keep their names sealed, so the fight over the redactions is no longer only Blanche’s. Parnas closed with where this story has pointed since Narativ’s Baku reporting: the Epstein files frighten powerful people less for the crimes than for the Russia and global-power connections written through them.

Blanche has until 1 PM. The victims want their names protected. Trump wants the file closed. Sullivan wants his answer. Somebody leaves that courtroom disappointed.

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Jeffrey Epstein was inside Trump Tower on November 13, 2016 — the morning Donald Trump picked his first cabinet. Ellie Leonard proved it on Narativ Live today, document by document, from the government’s own files.

Leonard opened with a text thread from the DOJ release — EFTA01620474 — between Ken Mapp, then governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a contact the file labels only “unknown.” The two discuss permits for Great St. James, the island Epstein had just bought. On November 13, five days after the election, the unknown number writes: “Seeing Trump people today, can we speak?” Pages later: “With regard to Donald, we will talk face to face.”

Then Leonard named the unknown. Epstein emailed himself that same day — EFTA02669184 — and the email repeats, word for word, an odd aside about sneezes and legal advice that the unknown number had just texted Mapp. Same words, same day, one author: Jeffrey Epstein.

A second thread seals the date. Linda Stone, a Microsoft veteran then at MIT, emailed Epstein on November 13 — EFTA01744330: “Just had a great time with Joy. Are you still in Paris?” Epstein answered: “No, Trump Tower.” Stone had already asked him in September, weeks before the vote, whether he would hold a cabinet position in the new administration.

Trump spent that same morning inside Trump Tower choosing his senior cabinet — contemporaneous press coverage places him there. Epstein’s circle treated a cabinet seat for a registered sex offender as an open question.

Lev Parnas pulled the thread to Michael Cohen. Cohen worked Trump Tower “every day from morning to night” through the transition, Parnas said — and Cohen insists to this day he never heard the name Jeffrey Epstein. Parnas added research he has yet to publish: the donors who financed Trump’s rise, he said, are the same names that populate Epstein’s network. Years later, in a recorded interview, Steve Bannon told Epstein he had always worried Epstein would be “the one who could sink us.” Epstein agreed: “I would have been the one.”

Christopher Armitage brought the indictment. Todd Blanche questioned Ghislaine Maxwell for nine hours in Tallahassee last July — no line prosecutor in the room, limited immunity on the table — and Maxwell delivered claims the Justice Department had already branded false in front of federal judges, Armitage said. A week later the Bureau of Prisons moved her to a minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas: a camp capped at five-year sentences and closed to sex offenders, holding a woman with a twenty-year sentence and a trafficking conviction. Three and a half million released pages contain no authorization for the move. Witness tampering. Falsified evidence. Obstruction. Armitage says those are crimes on New Mexico’s books, and under the dual-sovereignty doctrine Raúl Torrez, New Mexico’s attorney general, needs no permission from Washington to convene a grand jury. The Senate confirmed Blanche at 4:31 Saturday morning, 50 to 49; he formally took the department hours after the show ended.

The next date is Wednesday. Judge Emmet Sullivan hears Phang v. Blanche at 1 PM Eastern, where Blanche owes the court records he has withheld — among them the handwritten FBI notes from the Jane Doe 4 case, a 13-year-old’s file out of Hilton Head Island that stayed buried until reporters spotted the missing serial numbers. Of 53 missing pages, the government has produced 16 — never the agents’ handwritten notes. Anyone can listen to the hearing live: 1-833-990-9400, meeting ID 712190216.

Blanche now runs the department that holds every record of the deal he cut. The federal government will not police its own attorney general. The states can — and Narativ takes the case to Raúl Torrez’s office this week.

Follow the panel: Ellie Leonard at ellieleonard.substack.com · Christopher Armitage at The Existentialist Republic (cmarmitage.substack.com) · Lev Parnas at Lev Remembers.

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Capital One’s lawyers wrote one sentence into a federal court file — a demand for Trump’s Baku wire records — and on Wednesday’s Narativ Live special, Lev Parnas picked up the phone and put names to the money. Zev Shalev pulled the discovery demand off the docket hours before air: Request No. 15 in Trump’s own debanking lawsuit compels the family to produce documents on wire transfers for the Baku tower, routed from United Kingdom counterparties through bank accounts in Estonia, 2012 to 2015. Nobody else has reported it.

The court record alone runs far. Capital One told Judge Roy Altman’s court on July 31 it closed roughly 300 Trump accounts in 2021 “for anti-money laundering reasons” — and a hearing transcript from last week shows the bank ran a program called Project Safeguard, reviewing every Trump transaction weekly from 2017 forward. “This time they came out with the guns blazing,” said Anne P. Mitchell, the attorney and federal law author who walked viewers through the case’s three complaints and three dismissal motions. The bank’s underlying memos sit sealed, and Mitchell read that seal precisely: “They have to have more in them than what Capital One said in this motion.”

Then Parnas took the Baku end. The Trumps’ partners, the Mammadovs — transportation minister Ziya, son Anar, brother Elton, the family behind Garant Holding — were doing business with the Darvishi brothers and the Azarpassillo construction firm, “directly connected to the IRGC,” Parnas said, naming Habil, Kamal and Kiumars Darvishi and citing the American diplomatic cable that tied their Nasr operation to ballistic-missile materials. One Mammadov relative, Gunduz Mamedov, later turned up as Crimea’s prosecutor — and in the entourage that flew to New York to hand Rudy Giuliani the manufactured Biden dirt, a trip Parnas ran. “You can’t make it up,” he said. He meant it as reporting, not a figure of speech.

Parnas added a claim Narativ has not verified and flags as his sourcing alone: that the Trump Organization was told in 2015 — the year Trump rode down the escalator — that IRGC-linked entities sat inside the Baku deal, acknowledged it, and stayed until December 2016. The dates in Request No. 15 stop at December 31, 2015. “That’s when I told you they got — this is exactly the dates I told you,” Parnas said, reading the demand live on air.

The show’s second document was Parnas’s own archive. Video from a 2017 Republican event at Mar-a-Lago shows him backstage with Steve Wynn — then the RNC’s new finance chair — and Farkhad Akhmedov, the Baku-born oligarch whose $500 million yacht Luna sat in Miami while Parnas, in his words, babysat its owner. Filling out the Secret Service paperwork to stand near the new president, Parnas discovered Akhmedov ranked fourth on the Treasury list of Putin’s circle. He introduced Akhmedov to lobbyist Brian Ballard on the boat; Ballard’s firm later signed Azerbaijan’s government at $50,000 a month. Michael Cohen wandered through the frame of the video. “He was still on the outskirts back then,” Parnas shrugged.

Shalev put the routing in its family tree: UK shells paying through Estonian accounts is the signature of the Danske Bank scandal that washed Russian billions into the West. “We see the same players over and over again, the same institutions, the same places,” he said. “That’s not coincidence. This is a network map of everyone involved in the Trump family business.”

Mitchell, who spent years drafting discovery, gave the demand its legal weight: “It’s not a fishing expedition.” A bank does not name Baku, the UK and Estonia in one sentence about a former president unless its lawyers know what the answer looks like. Trump’s response to the dismissal motion comes by mid-August; Altman then either ends the case — leaving the money-laundering verdict and the surveillance program as its only public products — or sends the sealed Baku files toward trial.

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Vladimir Putin will aim his interference machine at the November midterms, former CIA station chief Sean Wiswesser warned on Narativ Live Wednesday — exactly 90 days before the vote, with the operation already running at a scale no troll farm ever reached. Election interference “is a primary tactic of the Russian intelligence services,” Wiswesser said. “It has been for 100 years.” He ran CIA stations against that machine across 28 years, five joint-duty assignments and a war zone, and his book — Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War, back at number one on Amazon’s Russia list — is a manual of the other side’s methods. For an hour, on the Narativ special report T Minus 90, he opened it.

Wiswesser brought the case file to match. A flash mob formed in a small Midwestern town, two crowds screaming across a street — one swearing nobody would take its guns, the other swearing nobody would hand guns to schoolchildren. Police pushed in and asked each side for its leader. Neither had one. The FBI pulled the thread and found the summons hadn’t come from either side — or from anywhere in America. “It was our adversaries playing us for suckers,” Wiswesser said.

The method has a name: active measures — the Kremlin now prefers “measures of support.” Wiswesser reached for defector Vasili Mitrokhin’s KGB archive to define it: intelligence as politics by other means. The SVR runs an entire directorate for it — thousands of officers, he said, whose sole job is meddling in the United States and its allies. The FSB, Putin’s alma mater, fields roughly 400,000 people and a hacking unit, Center 16, that worked the 2016 and 2020 elections. The GRU’s Fancy Bear cracked the DNC’s servers — while the FSB, hacking the same building, nearly tripped over them. “They don’t coordinate,” Wiswesser said. “They’re all after the United States.” The services conscript criminal hackers to fill the gaps: hack for us or go to the Gulag.

What changed since 2016 is the engine. “What happened 10 years ago that was done by human actors, now cognitive AI can do,” Wiswesser said. “The amplification is 10,000 or even 100,000-fold.” Prigozhin’s troll farm needed people; the 2026 version is machine-enabled, and it feeds on the same fuel — the rawest wound in any democracy, amplified until neighbors hate each other. The Venezuelan voting-machine story, the one Attorney General Bill Barr called “bullshit” — his word — is the template: find a thread of grievance, spin it, repeat it until Americans stop trusting their own elections.

Zev pushed where the guest could not go. Wiswesser, who still contracts for the Defense Department, held the professional line — the SSCI report Marco Rubio signed found Moscow meddled against democracy itself, and any benefit to a candidate “is incidental to the larger goal.” Zev answered with his own read: one American party trends toward autocracy, the other toward democracy, and a power whose stated target is democracy knows exactly which outcome serves it. The guest didn’t take the bait, and didn’t need to. Hungary made his point for him: Moscow ran more intelligence officers in Budapest under Viktor Orbán than ever before. “They didn’t trust Orbán either,” Wiswesser said. “They don’t have any allies.”

Zev has met the secret war himself, and told the story on air: a woman, plainly Russian and plainly out of place, cornered him at a Tony Awards after-party, claimed Oliver Stone wanted to work with him, and offered to fund his journalism. Somebody had tracked a reporter to a closed room full of people who sing for a living.

Wiswesser’s prescription for the drones now probing Romania and the cables cut on the Baltic seabed is the one Kennedy used on Khrushchev: a deterrent with consequences. “Shoot down those drones,” he said. “Right now we have an empty deterrent.” The night before he spoke, a Russian strike killed 17 people around Kyiv — while American interceptors sat undelivered. Ukraine, which he rates among the world’s top five intelligence services, keeps teaching the lesson anyway: Operation Spiderweb’s drones crawled out of trailers and burned Russia’s strategic bombers where they parked. Britain handed America radar in 1940, he noted. Kyiv is offering the drone.

Ninety days out, the target is not a candidate. It is the thing on the ballot underneath every name. Wiswesser spent a career meeting Russians who risked their lives for the CIA because they believed America was the city on the hill. The people trying to burn the city down are counting on Americans to strike the match themselves.

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