This post is focused on major developments in Trump’s war and his seeming lack of concern about them.
While the situation in the Middle East was spinning out of control, Trump was partying at the “midterm convention” in Dallas. Today, as the Saudis are forced to shut down a vital oil pipeline, Trump is in Ireland to watch a golf tournament at his own property in Doonbeg.
In order to justify spending millions in taxpayer money for a pleasure trip, Trump met briefly with Irish politicians and addressed a group of business leaders and embassy employees at the U.S. embassy. Of course, he managed to embarrass himself (and us). And guess who accompanied Trump to the Emerald Isle? No, not Melania. Natalie Harp.
But first, the war. Attacks by the Houthis have led to the shutdown of Saudi Arabia’s main pipeline for moving their oil.
The desperate pleas for air cover from Yemeni generals started coming mid-morning on Thursday. An advance by the Iran-backed Houthis toward Yemen’s strategic port city of Mocha was in full swing, and backup support from chief ally Saudi Arabia was nowhere in sight.
“The Houthis committed everything they had – waves upon waves of fighters … along with their available ballistic missiles and weapons,” a senior Yemeni source attached to their military forces told CNN. The source said he contacted the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) and was assured the US was “watching the situation closely and that Saudi air support was coming.”
“But the air support never came,” the source said. “And Mocha has now fallen.”
Hours later, on Friday, the Houthis captured another key coastal asset, Perim Island, at the mouth of the Red Sea. The island splits the Bab al-Mandeb Strait in two, giving Tehran de facto control over another key shipping route.
The Houthis’ rapid advance amounts to an extraordinary 36 hours in a conflict that had been largely on ice for years. But the kindling for renewed fighting had been laid for months amid the conflict between the United States and Iran, as Tehran seeks to use oil prices – and their impact on the global economy – as leverage.
Now, Yemen and the Red Sea have the potential to become a true second front in the Iran war.
A bit more detail:
Iran’s effective control of the Strait of Hormuz plus its tightening grip on the Bab al-Mandeb Strait threatens to push oil prices even higher, weeks before November’s midterm elections in the United States.
Young Woman with Cats, by Lovis Corinth (German artist)
While the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the gateway to the Suez Canal shipping route, is less critical to global energy markets than Hormuz, it still carries essential goods worldwide, including millions of barrels of oil every day. The strait has become increasingly important since the start of the Iran war, as Saudi Arabia has re-routed some exports through the waterway to bypass Hormuz.
“(The Houthis) don’t need to use advanced weapons to close Bab al-Mandeb. They can just use a cannon on a car,” said Amr Al-Bidh, the top official of Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council (STC). The STC has fought both the Houthis and Saudi-backed forces in the past, and wants an independent state in the south.
“It’s a leverage that they have without using advanced weapons,” Al-Bidh told CNN in an interview. “And they will keep it.”
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) called President Trump twice Thursday, urging him to launch strikes against the Houthis as the Iran-backed group closed in on a vital Red Sea chokepoint, two U.S. officials told Axios.
Trump declined, and U.S. officials stressed the administration has no plans to intervene directly against the Houthis for now.
Why it matters: Oil prices surged Thursday as the Houthis seized a strategic coastal city in Yemen, pushing them closer to the Bab al-Mandab Strait — a vital artery for global trade and Saudi oil exports.
With Iran already disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Houthi control of Bab al-Mandab could give Tehran a powerful new point of leverage over the U.S. and its Gulf allies.
The latest: Reuters reported Friday morning that the Houthis had taken control of a key island in the strait.
They also reported that smoke was seen over the key east-west Saudi oil pipeline, though the source was not clear.
Driving the news: The U.S. is concerned about the rapidly escalating fight in Yemen and is stepping up support for Saudi Arabia while trying to avoid direct military involvement.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of U.S. Central Command, traveled to Saudi Arabia on Thursday for urgent coordination meetings, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.
I’m not a military expert; but from what I’m reading, Trump’s war is rapidly getting bigger and more uncontrollable.
Nearly 50,000 people have fled a sudden advance by Houthi forces in western Yemen, with entire villages emptied and families trapped near frontline fighting with depleting food supplies, according to aid workers.
Nora Heysen (Australian, 1911-2003) – A Boy with his cat
Civilians in the Middle East’s poorest country have found themselves victims of a global struggle for control over one of the most important shipping routes in the world, which threatens to turn Yemen’s on-off conflict into a forever war.
In a lightning advance this week, the Iran-backed Houthi militants have seized a string of towns along the Red Sea coast from forces aligned with the US- and Saudi-backed Yemeni government. Hundreds of people are reported to have been killed. Many fear a return to the full-scale civil war that killed 150,000 and brought many others to the brink of famine….
The UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Friday that 46,000 people had been displaced across the governates of Taiz and Hodeidah, where steep verdant mountain ridges give way to arid coastal plains. For many families, this was their second or even third time they had been forced out of their homes.
A significant number of people were observed to be leaving the city with their belongings. Fighting has cut key roads, while phone lines are down in some areas. “The scale of displacement is increasing rapidly,” said Joe Lowry, IOM’s Middle East and north Africa spokesperson in Cairo.
The Saudis have shut down a pipeline after an attack that originated in Iraq.
Saudi Arabia has closed a critical oil pipeline after it was struck by drones launched from Iraq, with the latest squeeze reverberating through the region Saturday as attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels threatened to deepen the world’s energy crisis.
The 745-mile pipeline had helped Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, bypass the blocked Strait of Hormuz, through which some 20% of the world’s oil used to pass before the U.S. and Israel waged war on Iran in late February.
The Saudi Energy Ministry confirmed the shutdown of the East-West pipeline on Friday, adding that drone attacks had resulted in a number of injuries and that its teams were “taking the necessary measures to secure the pipeline and assess its safety.”
By Zoya Scholis
Saudi Arabia said that, following a request from Iraq’s prime minister, it would not retaliate for now but reserves the right to take all necessary measures to protect its sovereignty, security and critical facilities, according to a Saudi Foreign Ministry statement.
An Iraqi military commander was dismissed early on Saturday after investigations confirmed the latest drone attacks targeting Saudi Arabia originated from Iraq, according to a statement by Iraq‘s prime minister’s office. An umbrella group of Iran-backed militias in Iraq denied its involvement.
Iraq also closed two key border crossings with Iran, Iraq’s state-run news agency reported Saturday.
Kuwait, a U.S. ally in the region, warned that the pipeline attack was a “dangerous escalation that undermines the security and stability of the region” while Bahrain stressed Saudi Arabia’s right to “take all necessary measures to protect its sovereignty.”
Meanwhile, In Ireland Trump seemed unconcerned:
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that everything would “work out just fine” when asked about the region on a visit to Ireland. He also said, without providing evidence, that Iran was “probably” behind the pipeline attack.
The pipeline strikes came as rebel Houthi forces in Yemen captured Perim, an island in the middle of the vital Bab el Mandeb Strait that serves as a gateway to the Red Sea trade route that links Europe and Asia.
Trump also said the Iran War would most likely end after the midterm elections.
The war in Iran will likely end soon after November’s mid-term elections, President Donald Trump said Saturday, and predicted that energy prices would fall sharply once that happens.
“I think very soon, I think it’ll be right after the mid-terms, actually,” Trump said on a trip to Ireland when asked by reporters when the Iran war is likely to end. “I would say shortly, and oil will come tumbling down when that happens,”
Hans Heyerdahl, Girl with a Cat (Norwegian artist)
Oil prices retreated on Friday, but notched sharp weekly gains after soaring above $100 a barrel for the first time in months.
Brent crude oil futures, the global benchmark, settled down 2.8% at $104.61 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate was down 2.4% to settle at $100.05 per barrel. On Thursday, Brent crude peaked at around $108 a barrel, while WTI hit more than $104.
The price decline came after Iranian state media said Tehran will meet with Gulf states in Oman to discuss the Strait of Hormuz, indicating some diplomacy is taking place despite a week of sharp escalation.
MS NOW quoted a senior government official and a Gulf diplomat as saying that Iranian and Gulf officials will meet in Oman’s capital, Muscat, on Monday to sign an agreement that will establish an Iran-Oman shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz.
But Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said his country will not surrender, adding that it has resisted aggression from the U.S. and Israel.
“Iran has successfully stood against Israel and the U.S.,” Pezeshkian said late Friday as he addressed a gathering of Indian religious leaders in New Delhi. “Since we are seeking truth and justice, we will not yield in front of bullying arrogance.”
The world’s most valuable energy corridors are pinching shut.
On Friday, Houthi militants backed by Iran expanded their control of the Red Sea, threatening a critical route for Persian Gulf crude. That left the region with few alternatives, since shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — once the world’s primary oil transit point — remains significantly constrained and far below what it was before the war.
A Girl with a Black Cat by the Dutch artist Frida Holleman (1908–1999)
And oil exports from Saudi Arabia, long the most important producer in the Middle East, plunged last month to their lowest point in at least 13 years.
The U.S. Navy has been able to keep oil flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz on sea paths close to the coast of Oman, the opposite side from Iran. But that has required an extensive and dangerous operation.
For shipping companies, the once routine operation of navigating the strait has become a high-risk endeavor. At least 23 ships were hit in the waterway near Oman in July and August. Since the war began at the end of February, at least 22 sailors have been killed in the Middle East.
“These waters aren’t safe,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, an analyst at Windward, a maritime intelligence company.
As the war in Iran nears its seventh month, it appears to be spinning out of control, analysts said. With no diplomatic end in sight, the Middle East, the epicenter of energy production, is facing its most severe supply crisis in decades.
The Trump administration “has been using a variety of tools very effectively to keep the oil price and the gasoline price at bay,” said Amos Hochstein, who served as a foreign affairs and energy adviser in the Biden administration. But now, he said, fewer options are available to President Trump and his team. “They’re “stuck.”
You can use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.
Trump was in Dublin this morning to justify spending taxpayer money on his golf trip. Natalie Harp was was there, lined up with the Trump family on the receiving line.
U.S. President Donald Trump held talks Saturday in Dublin with his Irish counterpart Catherine Connolly during a weekend visit that’s more about a major golf tournament hosted on a course he owns on the country’s Atlantic coast. He also met with Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheál Martin.
Trump will address the U.S. and Irish business leaders at the U.S. ambassador’s official residence in Dublin before traveling to his oceanfront golf club in Doonbeg, on the other side of the country, to watch the Irish Open.
Connolly is a left-wing politician who was among those who protested when Trump visited Ireland in 2019 during his first term in office. She is now Ireland’s elected, largely ceremonial head of state. A supporter of the Palestinian cause, she in the past has criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East and called Trump a “bully.”
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This morning The Atlantic’s Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg released the full Signal text exchange that was the top news story all day yesterday. I’m sure you’re familiar with the story, but in case you missed it (unlikely), Goldberg was sent an invitation to a Signal group that included top administration officials. He accepted out of curiosity. Here is the original story published two days ago in The Atlantic (gift article): The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.
On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”
These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.
Pete Hegseth
The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.
Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security. As a case in point, Goldberg received information on the attacks two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of Houthi positions. If this information—particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face. The Trump administration is arguing that the military information contained in these texts was not classified—as it typically would be—although the president has not explained how he reached this conclusion.
Karoline Leavitt
The Atlantic approached multiple people in the Trump administration, asking if they had objections to the publication of the entire Signal chant. Only press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded:
“As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release.” (The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.)
Here is the relevant part of the text chain:
At 11:44 a.m. eastern time, Hegseth posted in the chat, in all caps, “TEAM UPDATE:”
The text beneath this began, “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. The Hegseth text continues:
“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
“1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”
“1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
“1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
“We are currently clean on OPSEC”—that is, operational security.
“Godspeed to our Warriors.”
Read the whole article at The Atlantic. It isn’t very long. Those certainly look like war plans to me. This is a great opportunity for Democrats to fight back against Trump’s rapidly advancing coup. They did an excellent job in the Senate hearing yesterday.
Senate Democrats on Tuesday hammered the Trump administration’s top intelligence officials on how and why the vice president, defense secretary, national security adviser and other top Cabinet members made the “reckless” decision to use a commercial messaging app to discuss secret war plans for Yemen — while also inadvertently including a journalist in the group chat.
The Senate hearing, which featured five of the nation’s top intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe — both of whom were involved in the group chat over the Signal messaging app — was meant be a forum for the nation’s spy chiefs to offer their assessments of the top national security threats facing the nation.
Instead, the routine annual hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence became a staging ground to interrogate the kind of “mind-boggling” behavior that the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark R. Warner (Virginia), said would easily have gotten a lower-ranking military or intelligence officer fired.
Mike Waltz
In the Signal group chat, convened by national security adviser Michael Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others reportedly detailed the targets, the attack sequencing and the weapons they would use in a U.S. air attack on Yemen’s Houthis, before the Pentagon launched the strikes on March 15, according to a bombshell report published Monday by the Atlantic.
“If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer, and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired,” Warner said in his opening remarks at Tuesday’s hearing, noting that in addition to the targeting information, the text chain included the identity of an active CIA officer. “This is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly toward classified information,” exhibited by the Trump administration, Warner said. “This is not a one-off.”
How is it that “nobody bothered to even check? … Who are all the names?” Warner added.
Gabbard, Ratcliffe and the other government witnesses provided few answers.After Gabbard at first declined to say whether she was involved in the group chat at all, she and Ratcliffe then told senators that the information shared over Signal was not classified. At other times, they denied the details contained in the Atlantic’s reporting or said they could not recall the exact contents of the messages. They repeatedly deferred to Trump’s defense secretary and national security adviser to answer for them.
The deflections triggered an incredulous and angry backlash from the committee’s liberals.
Warner, who accused Gabbard of “bobbing and weaving and trying to filibuster,” demanded repeatedly that she reconcile her conflicting assertions that the information in the text chain was not classified, but also that she was not at liberty to talk about it. “If there are no classified materials, share it with the committee. You can’t have it both ways,” he said.
Well, now it has been shared with everyone, and the Trump officials look exactly as incompetent as we assumed they were. On top of everything else, one of the participants in the Signal chat, special envoy Steve Witkoff, was actually in Moscow waiting to speak to Vladimir Putin, while using his personal cell phone.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify about global threats facing the U.S. However the annual hearing, which typically focuses on threats posed by China, Russia, Iran, largely concentrated on the lapse.
FBI Director Kash Patel, National Security Agency Director Gen. Timothy Haugh and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse also appeared, but received few questions.
Senator Mark Warner
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, addressed the controversy at the top of the hearing, calling it “mind-boggling” that none of the intelligence officials in the chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal thought to check who else was included.
“Are these government devices? Were they personal devices? Have the devices been collected to make sure there’s no malware?” Warner said in his opening remarks. “There’s plenty of declassified information that shows that our adversaries, China and Russia, are trying to break into encryption systems like Signal.”
Gabbard and Ratcliffe both denied that classified information was shared in the group chat in a feisty exchange with Warner. Confronted by Warner, Gabbard initially declined to say whether she was part of the chat….
Ratcliffe confirmed to Warner that he was a participant in the message thread, but pushed back on whether the decision to use Signal to communicate was a security lapse. Ratcliffe said Signal was on his CIA computer when he was confirmed as director earlier this year….
Ratcliffe confirmed to Warner that he was a participant in the message thread, but pushed back on whether the decision to use Signal to communicate was a security lapse. Ratcliffe said Signal was on his CIA computer when he was confirmed as director earlier this year. “As it is for most CIA officers,” he said, adding that the agency considers the commercial app “permissible” for work use.
The spy chiefs also denied that the conversation included information on weapons packages, targets or timing of the strikes, as Goldberg reported.
“Not that I’m aware of,” Ratcliffe said, with Gabbard adding “same answer.”
I guess they weren’t paying attention. There’s more at the CBS link.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe are back on Capitol Hill to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday after new text messages came to light from a group chat in which top Trump officials discussed sensitive plans to strike targets in Yemen.
Shortly before the hearing began, The Atlantic published additional messages showing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth provided detailed information to the group of senior Trump officials about the strikes, including a timeline of when fighter jets would take off and what kind of weapons would be used. The group inadvertently included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic who revealed the first batch of texts earlier this week….
Gabbard and Ratcliffe are appearing Wednesday alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, National Security Agency Director Gen. Timothy Haugh and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse at a hearing ostensibly focused on the global security threats facing the U.S. But the Signal leak and its fallout dominated the early portions of questioning.
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the committee, chastised the intelligence leaders at the start of the hearing, saying they put the lives of troops at risk.
“Everyone here knows that the Russians or the Chinese could have gotten all of that information, and they could have passed it on to the Houthis, who easily could have repositioned weapons and altered their plans to knock down planes or sink ships,” Himes said.
Gabbard acknowledged that the conversation was “sensitive” but again denied that classified information was shared in the chat.”There were no sources, methods, locations or war plans that were shared,” she told lawmakers, echoing the defense from the White House that “war plans” were not discussed, despite the detailed guidance for an impending attack.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s texts to a Signal group chat about military operations against the Houthis almost certainly contained classified information, according to current and former Pentagon officials.
The Atlantic on Wednesday released excerpts of a conversation among top national security leaders to which a journalist had accidentally been invited. Hegseth and the White House have denied sharing classified information or war plans.
“This information was clearly taken from the real time order of battle sequence of an ongoing operation,” said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant Defense secretary under the first Trump administration. “It is highly classified and protected.
Hegseth identified the aircraft used and the precise timing of the attacks, according to texts from the group chat, which was started by national security adviser Mike Waltz. That information, if obtained by adversaries, could put U.S. troops in danger.
Kash Patel
A current defense official and former Air Force official both said that any forecasting of future operations and planned weapons are almost always classified information. The former and current officials were granted anonymity to speak about a sensitive issue.
Details about future airstrikes and the timing of launches is tightly controlled and usually provided only through classified documents, conversations and in secure email traffic. Few outside of top leadership and those involved usually know about the plans.
“The information that you have fighter aircraft launching off of an aircraft carrier, flying over enemy territory and impending combat operation is the most sensitive information we have at the federal government,” said Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a former Navy pilot, who added it was likely classified.
“Mike Waltz did a boneheaded thing. It was careless. I think what Pete Hegseth did was reckless and dangerous.”
Hegseth should be fired, but Waltz is more likely to be the scapegoat.
President Donald Trump was upset when he found out that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally included a journalist in a group chat discussing plans for a military strike. But it wasn’t just because Waltz had potentially exposed national security secrets.
Trump was mad — and suspicious — that Waltz had Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number saved in his phone in the first place, according to three people familiar with the situation, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. A fourth person said the president was also particularly perturbed by the embarrassing nature of the episode.
“The president was pissed that Waltz could be so stupid,” the person said. (A “Mike Waltz” invited Goldberg to the chat, according to The Atlantic).
But by Tuesday afternoon, the two men had made a show of smoothing things over and the White House was closing ranks around Waltz. Trump conducted brief interviews with both NBC News and Fox News pledging to stand behind his national security adviser. Two top Trump spokespeople suggested in posts on X that national security hawks were colluding with the media to make the issue bigger than it actually was. And Waltz attended a meeting of Trump’s ambassadors Tuesday afternoon.
Tulsi Gabbard
“There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves making up lies … This one in particular I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with, and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” Waltz said during the meeting.
Trump followed up by calling Waltz “a very good man” and suggested he had been unfairly attacked. Yet the president also said he would look into government officials’ use of Signal, the app used in the chat with Goldberg that could have resulted in a security breach as top U.S. officials discussed plans to launch strikes in Yemen.
Still, several Trump allies cautioned this may not be the end of Waltz’s troubles. One of them, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, said the incident has strained Waltz’s relationship with Trump’s inner circle.
A public watchdog group sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a slew of other Trump administration officials Tuesday after a journalist revealed he was inadvertently added to a text chain discussing U.S. war plans.
The lawsuit, brought by the watchdog group American Oversight and first reported by HuffPost, requests that a federal judge formally declare that Hegseth and other officials on the chat violated their duty to uphold laws around the preservation of official communications. Those laws are outlined in the Federal Records Act and, according to lawyers for American Oversight, if agency heads refuse to recover or protect their communications, the national archivist should ask the attorney general to step in.
On Monday, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported that national security adviser Michael Waltz inadvertently added him to a Signal group chat with more than a dozen Trump administration officials and aides including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, homeland security adviser Stephen Miller and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. CIA Director John Ratcliffe told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that he was also in the Signal chat. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard would not admit whether she was a participant, though Goldberg reported she was; instead, she said the matter was “still under review.”
As American Oversight lawyers pointed out in their lawsuit Tuesday, Rubio is also the acting archivist of the United States and, as such, “is aware of the violations” that allegedly occurred.
He is also “responsible for initiating an investigation through the Attorney General for the recovery of records or other redress,” the lawsuit said.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently offered a chilling glimpse into the Trump administration’s indifference to Social Security’s importance. “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month,” Lutnick said, according to Axios. “My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain.”
Perhaps the commerce secretary’s mother-in-law wouldn’t call. But millions of other Americans would—and not just to complain. They would call because they couldn’t pay rent, buy food, or refill essential medications. Lutnick’s casual comment downplayed the gravity of a missed Social Security check.
The comment also exposed the distance between elites and others. Elites may not care if they miss a Social Security check, but for a typical Americans a missing check is a gut punch. Calls to the Social Security office would be pouring in. But no one may answer.
Howard Lutnick
Lutnick’s remarks come during a time when the Social Security system faces record demand and historic strain. And the remarks come during a month of extreme alarm and confusion about the system. Elon Musk demeaned the system publicly, calling it “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” the New York Post reported. Field offices are overrun, wait times are spiking, and staffing levels have been slashed by 12% since 2020, notes The Washington Post. The very system that ensures timely payments to 73 million Americans is being stomped on, and senior citizens and families are feeling anxious and worse.
To be clear, Trump and DOGE have not cut or delayed Social Security checks—yet. The Social Security Administration does not miss checks. In 80 years, it never missed payment….
While Lutnick and others suggest that delays wouldn’t matter, the data tell another story. Social Security is the foundation of retirement security for most American seniors.
According to the Social Security Administration, nearly 90% of Americans over age 65 receive benefits, and those benefits make up an average of 31% of their income. But for many, the reliance is much deeper: 39% of older men and 44% of older women count on Social Security for more than half their income. Even more sobering, 12% of older men and 15% of older women rely on it for at least 90% of their income.
Older women, in particular, are at risk. They tend to earn less over their lifetimes, outlive their spouses, and have less saved for retirement. For them, Social Security is often not just the main source of income—it’s the only source.
The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones in place of receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. Amid all this, the agency no longer has a system to monitor customer experience because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.
And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.
The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining the already struggling organization’s ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security.
Frank Bisignano, nominee for Social Security chief
Financial services executive Frank Bisignano is scheduled to face lawmakers Tuesday at a Senate confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the permanent commissioner. For now, the agency is run by a caretaker leader in his sixth week on the job who has raced to push out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000. He has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge, pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that the problem is overstated.
The turmoil is leavingmany retirees, disabled claimants, and legal immigrants needing Social Security cards with less access or shut out of the system altogether, according to those familiar with the problems.
“What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said in an interview. “I have people approaching me all the time in their 70s and 80s, and they’re beside themselves. They don’t know what’s coming.”
The Trump administration has installed a DOGE operative as the new Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Social Security Administration (SSA) in an apparent effort to evade a federal court order blocking DOGE affiliates from accessing databases containing the sensitive personal information of millions of Americans.
Popular Information obtained an internal memorandum from Acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek announcing Scott Coulter, a DOGE operative previously assigned to NASA and the SSA, as the SSA’s new CIO.
The move, which was not announced publicly, seems related to a federal lawsuit filed by a coalition of labor unions — including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), AFL-CIO, and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — on February 21. The lawsuit alleged that DOGE officials were accessing “personal, confidential, private, and sensitive data from the Social Security Administration” in violation of federal law, including the Privacy Act. The labor unions sued the SSA, Dudek, and then-CIO Michael Russo to stop the disclosure of the data to DOGE.
On March 21, the federal judge overseeing the AFSCME case, Ellen Lipton Hollander, granted the plaintiffs a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) which prohibited SSA, Dudek, and Russo from “granting access to any SSA system of record containing personally identifiable information” to DOGE or any “members of the DOGE team established at the SSA.” The order defined the DOGE team at SSA as “any person assigned to SSA to fulfill the DOGE agenda.”
Read the rest at the link.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
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I can’t wait for spring flowers and warmer weather, can you tell? I have all the symptoms of Spring fever, including inability to concentrate on anything serious, like politics or plane crashes. But I’ll do my best to give you some interesting links on this lazy late March Saturday.
Amanda Knox, who maintained that she and her former Italian boyfriend were innocent in her British roommate’s murder through multiple trials and nearly four years in jail, was vindicated Friday when Italy’s highest court threw out their convictions once and for all.
“Finished!” Knox’s lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova exulted after the decision was read out late Friday. “It couldn’t be better than this.”
The surprise decision definitively ends the 7½-year legal battle waged by Knox, 27, and co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, 31, to clear their names in the gruesome 2007 murder and sexual assault of British student Meredith Kercher.
The supreme Court of Cassation panel deliberated for 10 hours before declaring that the two did not commit the crime, a stronger exoneration than merely finding insufficient evidence to convict. Instead, had the court-of-resort upheld the pair’s convictions, Knox would have faced 28 ½ years in an Italian prison, assuming she would have been extradited, while Sollecito had faced 25 years.
“Right now I’m still absorbing what all this means and what comes to mind is my gratitude for the life that’s been given to me,” Knox said late Friday, speaking to reporters outside her mother’s Seattle home.
This case has made me grateful that in the U.S. Constitution contains a double jeopardy clause.
BEIRUT — The meltdown in Yemen is pushing the Middle East dangerously closer to the wider regional conflagration many long have feared would arise from the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring revolts.
What began as a peaceful struggle to unseat a Yemeni strongman four years ago and then mutated into civil strife now risks spiraling into a full-blown war between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran over a country that lies at the choke point of one of the world’s major oil supply routes.
With negotiators chasing a Tuesday deadline for the framework of a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program, it seems unlikely that Iran would immediately respond militarily to this week’s Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, analysts say.
But the confrontation has added a new layer of unpredictability — and confusion — to the many, multidimensional conflicts that have turned large swaths of the Middle East into war zones over the past four years, analysts say.
The United States is aligned alongside Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and against them in Yemen. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who have joined in the Saudi offensive in Yemen, are bombing factions in Libya backed by Turkey and Qatar, who also support the Saudi offensive in Yemen. The Syrian conflict has been fueled by competition among all regional powers to outmaneuver one another on battlefields far from home.
Scary. All this because George W. Bush lied us into two needless, unwinnable wars.
Although Saturday’s Arab League summit was due to cover a range of regional topics, the ongoing crisis in Yemen took the lead spot as the summit opened with speeches from Arab leaders.
A Saudi-led military offensive is underway against targets held by Houthi rebels in the turmoil-hit country, with the backing of a number of Arab states.
In his opening speech, Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said that military action was “inevitable” to restore legitimate rule in Yemen.
El-Sisi also said that Egypt has accepted a proposal by a meeting of Arab foreign ministers to form a joint Arab military force to counter the “unprecedented threats” facing the region’s stability.
Arab foreign ministers agreed on a draft resolution to form a joint Arab military force to counter growing security threats in the region. The proposal requires the endorsement of the Arab leaders during the two-day summit this weekend.
Saudi’s King Salman vowed in his opening speech that the military intervention will not stop until Yemen is stable and safe. The monarch said that Saudi Arabia supports the Hadi government’s legitimacy in Yemen and wants stability for the Yemeni population.
He further stated that the situation in the region necessitates an Arab coalition to fight terrorism.
BERLIN—Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings co-pilot who crashed an airliner into a French mountainside, was being treated for depression, a fact he concealed from his employer, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
Mr. Lubitz had been excused from work by his neuropsychologist for a period that included the day of the crash, this person told The Wall Street Journal, but he decided to ignore the advice and reported to work.
The Germanwings tragedy highlights a broader industry dilemma: reliance on pilots themselves to disclose serious physical or psychological ailments to their employer—and what can happen when secrecy urges or privacy considerations trump full disclosure, safety and medial experts say.
Despite mandatory, regular medical exams—supplemented by company-specific safeguards intended to periodically check on aviators’ skills and psychological state—airlines ultimately depend on employees to honestly assess and report when they shouldn’t be flying.
In return, Germanwings, a unit of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, and many other airlines around the globe promise to avoid punishing pilots who comply with that guiding principle.
Read more at the WSJ. As Dakinikat wrote yesterday, this guy could have just shot himself or jumped out of a high window, but instead he decided to take 149 other people–including babies and high school kids–with him when he committed suicide.
A few stories on the terrible explosion in NYC’s East Village:
An explosion in Manhattan’s East Village on Thursday injured an estimated 25 people and destroyed a row of landmarked buildings that have held meaning for generations of New Yorkers. At one time the mayor’s residence was there, and another building housed an iconic vintage-clothing store made popular in the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan.
“It’s a real tragedy. It was scary,” says Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council. “It’s shocking when this happens in an area that’s so close-knit. People really live on the streets here, in a good way. There’s a real community.”
City officials say the March 26 explosion happened at 121 Second Avenue and also damaged the neighboring buildings at 119, 123 and 125. The buildings all were awarded landmark status in October 2012 as part of a designation of an East Village/Lower East Side Historic District. The buildings in that district date mostly to the mid- to late 1800s, a time when wealthier New Yorkers started moving uptown and selling off their properties, which were often turned into tenement housing.
European immigrants began moving into the area in large numbers in the second half of the 19th century. An early influx consisted mostly of Germans, and the area became known as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany. Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe moved there too and established a vibrant theater district.
“The East Village and the Lower East Side are remarkable in that they’ve seen successive waves of immigrants and new populations coming in and really shaping and affecting the physical environment, bringing with them their social clubs, their gathering places,” Bankoff says.
By the middle of the 20th century, the Village became an epicenter for artists and bohemians.
The historic district, one of 114 in the city, runs north-south from around East 7th Street to East Second Street and east-west from First and Second avenues to the Bowery.
The staff at the Cafe has a small clock in one particular booth. The booth is reserved for Senator Rand Paul, whenever he stops by for a quick lunch, for which he invariably undertips, when he doesn’t try to beat itout the back door.
Time was when Senator Aqua Buddha entertained us all — five minutes at a time — about how the country was wasting its money on a whole mess of sophisticated boom-boom. The staff knows when to begin the countdown and they begin invariably to whisper again…
Continue reading at the link.
Atheist Ayn Rand must be spinning in her grave over this from TPM.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Thursday told a group of pastors and religious leaders that the debate over gay marriage was a symptom of a “moral crisis” in America and said he hoped for “another Great Awakening.”
“Don’t always look to Washington to solve anything,” Paul said during a private prayer breakfast at the Capitol Hill Club.
“In fact, the moral crisis we have in our country — there is a role for us trying to figure out things like marriage — there’s also a moral crisis that allows people to think that there would be some sort of other marriage.”
“The moral crisis we have in our country — there is a role for us trying to figure out things like marriage — there’s also a moral crisis that allows people to think there would be some other sort of marriage, ” he explained. “I think the exhortation to try and change people’s thoughts has to come from the countryside.”
The libertarian lawmaker then took a slightly religious turn, saying “You know, I’ve said this before, we need a revival in the country.”
“We need another great awakening with tent revivals of thousands of people saying, you know,’reform or see what’s going to happen if we don’t reform’.”
In a recent interview with Brett Baier of Fox News, Paul admitted that the use of the term ‘marriage’ for same sex couples offends him.
Watch the video at Raw Story. Honestly, I think that cartoon JJ post last night is beginning to make sense. Someone must have put LSD in Rand’s grits when he was a kid. Why would anyone vote for this wacko?
I’d write about the latest “revelations” about Hillary’s emails, but I don’t want to completely depress myself. I have to believe this will all die down before the 2016 primaries.
What have you been hearing and reading? Let us know in the comment thread and enjoy the rest of March. April is coming soon!
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This is a live blog to discuss President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University. The speech is scheduled for 2PM Eastern time. As I wrote in the morning post, Obama is expected to propose limits to the use of drones to assassinate suspected “terrorists” in places like Pakistan and Yemen.
Obama’s speech is expected to reaffirm his national security priorities — from homegrown terrorists to killer drones to the enemy combatants held at the military-run detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — but make no new sweeping policy announcements. The White House has offered few clues on how the president will address questions that have dogged his administration for years and, critics say, given foreign allies mixed signals about U.S. intentions in some of the world’s most volatile areas.
Obama will try to refocus an increasingly apathetic public on security issues as his administration grapples with a series of unrelated controversies stemming from the attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups and government monitoring of reporters. His message will also be carefully analyzed by an international audience that has had to adapt to what counterterror expert Peter Singer described as the administration’s disjointed and often short-sighted security policies.
“He is really wresting with a broader task, which is laying out an overdue case for regularizing our counterterrorism strategy itself,” said Singer, director of the Brookings Institution’s 21st Century Security and Intelligence Center in Washington. “It’s both a task in terms of being a communicator, and a task in term of being a decider.”
The White House said Obama’s speech coincides with the signing of new “presidential policy guidance” on when the U.S. can use drone strikes, though it was unclear what that guidance entailed and whether Obama would outline its specifics in his remarks.
Do we really need to keep using the word “decider” now that Dubya is gone? Oh well…Time’s description of Obama’s remarks makes it sound like he’s not really going to make any real changes–just say some words. I hope that’s wrong.
The White House said Obama “will discuss why the use of drone strikes is necessary, legal and just, while addressing the various issues raised by our use of targeted action.”
Obama has also approved new “policy guidance” that sets out “standards under which we take lethal action,” the White House said.
The president “will also discuss how to balance securing our country and protecting our civil liberties at home,” said the statement.
That includes new steps Obama plans to take to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, a frequent target of criticism from civil libertarians. Some detainees at the prison are in the midst of a hunger strike, protesting their conditions.
Obama had pledged to close the facility during his first year in office. But his efforts ran afoul of congressional Republicans who opposed trials of terrorism suspects in the United States, and other countries that refused to take some prisoners.
A White House official, per NBC’s Shawna Thomas, says that the president’s speech also will discuss better securing U.S. diplomatic facilities (after the 2012 Benghazi attack), balancing security while protecting civil liberties at home (see the leak investigations), and stating his desire to close the Guantanamo Bay prison (an action which Congress opposes). Don’t be surprised if Obama says something along the lines of, “We will never send another detainee to Gitmo” as a way to express his willingness to close the facility. And don’t be surprised if he addresses — head on — the Justice Department’s seizure of reporters’ phone records in its prosecution of national security leaks. Obama delivers his remarks at 2:00 pm ET at the National Defense University in DC.
“To say that the President has the right to kill citizens without due process is really to take the constitution and to tear it up into as many little pieces as you can and then burn it and step on it.”
What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process. Remember all that? Yet now, here’s Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President — even Barack Obama — vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process.
As Dakinikat posted in the comments to Minx’s evening post, a second U.S. citizen who was not on Obama’s assassination list was also murdered along with al-Awlaki. From bmaz at Emptywheel:
Awlaki was killed by a drone delivered Hellfire missile, via a joint CIA and JSOC operation, in the town of Kashef, in Yemen’s Jawf province, approximately 140 kilometres east of Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. But not only Awlaki was killed, at least three others, including yet another American citizen, Samir Khan, were killed in the strike.
That’s right, not just one, but two, Americans were summarily and extrajudicially executed by their own government today, at the direct order of the President of the United States. No trial, no verdict, just off with their heads. Heck, there were not even charges filed against either Awlaki or Khan. And it is not that the government did not try either, there was a grand jury convened on Khan, but no charges. Awlaki too was investigated for charges at least twice by the DOJ, but non were found.
But at least Awlaki was on Barrack Obama’s “Americans That Are Cool to Kill List”. Not so with Samir Khan. Not only is there no evidence whatsoever Khan is on the classified list for killing (actually two different lists) my survey of people knowledgeable in the field today revealed not one who believed khan was on any such list, either by DOD or CIA.
So, the US has been tracking scrupulously Awlaki for an extended period and knew with certainty where he was and when, and knew with certainty immediately they had killed Awlaki and Khan. This means the US also knew, with certainty, they were going to execute Samir Khan.
I can’t even begin to describe how sickened I am by these murders of American citizens. President Obama is a murderer and a tyrant who is destroying the last vestiges of the Constitution of the United States. At least I don’t have to live with the horror of having voted for this evil man.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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