Tag: donald trump

Trump claims Netanyahu will scale back strikes on Lebanon 

US President Donald Trump has said he asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale back the bombing of Lebanon as Gulf countries and some NATO members insisted that a ceasefire in the area must be part of a broader truce with Iran.

Despite Trump’s assertion, Lebanese media reported Israeli strikes across the country on Friday morning. An estimated 1,800 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon since the start of the escalation in the Middle East, with more than 300 dying on Wednesday alone. The attacks triggered significant public outcry, including from US allies in the EU.

Iran has insisted that fighting in Lebanon must cease as part of the two-week truce framework with the US – something Washington and the Jewish state have opposed.

The exact outlines of a potential US-Iran peace deal remain unclear, after Iranian media shared a plan envisaging non-aggression, Tehran’s control over the strategic Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of some uranium enrichment, stopping Israeli attacks on Hezbollah, and the lifting of all sanctions. The US previously opposed many of the terms.

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The War in Iran as International Terrorism

As someone born in 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, who lived through 12 other presidencies before Donald Trump took — and that word has a different meaning with him — office in 2016, the truth is that I’ve simply never experienced anything quite like this (and I know that I’m in good company). Yes, I’ve certainly lived through other wars, from the Korean War of my childhood to the nightmarish war in Vietnam of my collegiate years (though it began well before and went on long after that) to the invasion of Afghanistan (that led me to launch TomDispatch) to George W. Bush’s nightmarish war in Iraq that was a critical part of my reportorial (or at least TomDispatchian) life. And now, in my old age, yet another war! (Why is it that my country, with or without Donald Trump, just can’t seem to stop going to war?)

Iran is, of course, being trumped (or rather Trumped!). The “president of peace” was only the president of peace until he wasn’t. Ask Nicolás Maduro and his wife if you doubt that for a second. And give Donald Trump credit for his unpredictability. One moment he is indeed the president of peace and the next moment — no question about it — he’s making war like a maniac or blowing staggering numbers of boats (almost 50 as I was writing this) out of the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

You might wonder, under the circumstances, if it’s even possible to cover his presidency as a reporter the way any journalist might once have covered a presidency. The very name for his latest assault (on Iran), Operation Epic Fury, is distinctly all Trump all the time. As he told a crowd at a rally in Kentucky recently, “They gave me a list of names to choose. ‘Sir, you could pick the name you’d like, sir.’ I said, ‘The name of what?’ ‘The name of the attack on Iran, sir.’ And they gave me, like, 20 names, and I’m, like, falling asleep. I didn’t like any of them. Then I see ‘Epic Fury.’ I said, ‘I like that name! I like that name!’”

In short, the president of peace has distinctly made peace with war and, when it comes to Latin America, his version of war may just be beginning. (Watch out, Cuba!) With all of that and, sadly, more in mind, let TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson take you into a world in which reporters do indeed have to cover (whatever that may mean these days) Donald Trump making war on this world of ours.

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Is the ‘Ghost Murmur’ quantum device possible? Scientists are skeptical

On Monday afternoon President Donald Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe hinted at technology that had helped locate a downed American Air Force officer hiding in a mountain crevice in southern Iran. By Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the CIA had deployed Ghost Murmur, a device that uses vaguely described “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find signals of human heartbeats, after which artificial intelligence software isolates each heartbeat from the noisy data. An unnamed source told the Post it was like “hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert.” Another line landed like a movie tagline: “In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you.”

It’s a terrific story. It is also, according to scientists who study magnetic fields, almost certainly not true. The rescue was real—the mission involved multiple aircraft and a survival beacon carried by the airman—but Ghost Murmur, at least as publicly described, finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI, experts told me.

Quantum magnetometers are real; they are ultraprecise at, for instance, detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields (via quantum properties) produced by the cardiac muscle. The problem is that the heart’s magnetic field is weak. “At the surface of the chest, where you’re about 10 centimeters away from the source, the magnetic field is just barely detectable,” says John Wikswo, a professor of biomedical engineering and physics at Vanderbilt University. “Now, [if] instead of going 10 centimeters away—which is a tenth of a meter—you go a meter away, the amplitude of the signal has dropped to a thousandth of what it was.” The signal becomes dramatically weaker at a kilometer.

Wikswo was the first scientist to measure the magnetic field of an isolated nerve and has been measuring the heart’s magnetic field since the mid-1970s. The first such detection was done by other researchers with two coils, each containing two million turns of wire, and then with a magnetometer “cooled to four degrees above absolute zero,” Wikswo says. This magnetometer is not spy gear—it is a cryogenic instrument designed to keep the rest of the universe out.

To find a heartbeat, a quantum Ghost Murmur tool would have to contend not just with Earth’s magnetic field and magnetic noise from natural and human-made electric currents but also with “the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits—whatever else is running around out there,” says Chad Orzel, a professor of physics at Union College in New York State and author of How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog. He uses refrigerator magnets to illustrate the weakness of magnetic fields in general. “You have to get the magnet very, very close to the refrigerator before it snaps into place,” he says. “That field drops off very quickly.” Clinical sensors “are usually butted right up against your body … at a distance of centimeters,” Orzel adds. Even pattern-matching using artificial intelligence, he says, couldn’t find a magnetic signal large enough to identify the presence of a person from kilometers away in a desert. At one kilometer away, the signal would diminish to about one trillionth of the strength.

Bradley Roth, a physicist at Oakland University and author of the 2023 review Biomagnetism: The First Sixty Years, agrees. “People have been measuring the magnetic field of the heart for 60 years, and usually it’s done in a lab with shielding, and it’s done just a few centimeters or a couple inches from the heart, and even then you can barely record it.” A helicopter-borne version, he says, “would be not just a small advance, but it’d be a revolutionary advance from the state of the art.”

Orzel struggles to see how a Ghost Murmur could work. “There is really fascinating work being done using quantum magnetometry to measure heart rates,” he says, and magnetic brain scans can now catch the tiny flickers of firing nerves. “But none of that is something that works over ranges of many miles.”

So why was this a story at all? Orzel has a guess: “Somebody yanking a reporter’s chain,” he says. It could be a “snarky, clever way to say, ‘Of course, I’m not going to tell you how we figured this out’”—or a piece of disinformation “to fool somebody into thinking that we actually have this secret technology.”

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Trump Launches Federal Investigation Into “Fraudsters and Charlatans” Pushing FAKE Iran Ceasefire Letters

President Donald Trump just dropped the hammer on a coordinated campaign of fraud and deception surrounding the U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations.

President Trump announced a full federal investigation into the flood of phony “agreements,” lists, and letters being circulated by total “fraudsters and charlatans” who have absolutely nothing to do with the real negotiations.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, President Trump announced a double-sided ceasefire just yesterday, agreeing to suspend bombing of Iran for two weeks after negotiations.

And of course, Fake News CNN is right in the middle of it, just like Trump called out. They ran with a bogus “statement” from someone with zero power or involvement.

Trump wrote on Truth Social:

“The alleged Statement put out by CNN World News is a FRAUD, as CNN well knows. The false Statement was linked to a Fake News site (from Nigeria) and, of course, immediately picked up by CNN, and blared out as a “legitimate” headline. The Official Statement by Iran was just released, and posted on TRUTH, below.

“Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement, or was it a sick rogue player? CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible “reporting.” Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future.”

CNN pushed back on President Trump’s claim, asserting that the Iranian statement originated from official regime spokespeople.

“The statement in question was obtained by CNN from Iranian officials and reported on multiple Iranian state media outlets. We received the statement from specific official Iranian spokespeople who are known to us.”

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Supreme Court Reverses Former Cincinnati Councilor’s Bribery Conviction

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for a former Cincinnati City Council member convicted of bribery and attempted extortion but later pardoned by President Donald Trump to have those charges dismissed in the lower courts.

The ruling came as the high court has, in recent years, been willing to overturn corruption convictions involving public officials engaging in activities some consider normal political activity. For example, in 2016, the Supreme Court vacated the conviction of the former Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, for accepting gifts from a benefactor without actually taking action to benefit that person.

On April 6, the justices granted Alexander “P.G.” Sittenfeld’s petition in an unsigned order. The court did not explain its decision. No justices dissented. The court disposed of the case summarily without hearing oral arguments. 

The Supreme Court also vacated the convictions and sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to be reconsidered in light of a pending motion to dismiss the indictment against Sittenfeld.

The new ruling came after Trump pardoned Sittenfeld on May 28, 2025. This act of presidential clemency eliminated his 16-month sentence of incarceration after he had served almost five months of it.

A presidential pardon forgives federal criminal offenses and removes the legal consequences of those offenses, but does not change history by erasing the judicial finding of guilt.

The pardon covered Sittenfeld’s October 2023 conviction for bribery and attempted extortion related to an FBI-led sting operation that involved campaign contributions. Prosecutors said he accepted $20,000 in donations to his political action committee from undercover FBI agents who feigned interest in developing a specific property. Prosecutors also said Sittenfeld’s actions went beyond mere campaign fundraising to bribery that constituted an illegal quid pro quo for backing the development project.

A quid pro quo—from Latin, meaning “this for that”—is something given or received in exchange for something else.

Sittenfeld’s attorney said in the petition that he was considered “a rising star in Ohio politics,” first elected to the Cincinnati City Council in 2011 at age 27, making him the youngest person ever elected to the council.

“A defining trait of Sittenfeld’s political identity was his unwavering support for economic development. He voted for every economic development deal put in front of him while on the Council,” according to the petition.

In 2018, Sittenfeld approached a local developer to help raise money for his mayoral campaign, in order to match contributions from other developers, and “nothing about this was unlawful,” the petition said.

The government was informed about this, and the FBI organized a sting operation. The local developer contacted Sittenfeld about a specific project, which the then-elected official was already supporting, and offered to connect him with potential investors, who were actually undercover agents. The agents proposed a quid pro quo, saying if Sittenfeld agreed to back the project, they would donate to his campaign, the petition said.

The petition said Sittenfeld filed a motion after the conviction for post-trial relief, saying the evidence at trial was not sufficient to prove an “explicit” quid pro quo, as required by McCormick v. United States (1991). In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the receipt of a campaign contribution was not a federal crime unless the payment was part of an “explicit quid pro.”

The federal district court ruled that the evidence was “ambiguous” at best and believed that, despite that, the jury could still surmise an “explicit” exchange from the record. The court sentenced Sittenfeld to 16 months and fined him $40,000. A divided panel of the Sixth Circuit upheld the conviction, finding the jury was allowed to conclude based on the ambiguous evidence that he had accepted an illegal bribe.

In the petition, Sittenfeld’s attorney urged the Supreme Court to take up the case, saying candidates “routinely raise money based on pledges of official action: ‘Donate to me and I will vote to repeal the law my opponent supported!’ ‘Send me a campaign check and I will cut your taxes—I can’t do it without you!’”

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What Trump’s inner circle really thought of plan to go to war with Iran: CIA ‘dismissed regime-change plan as “farcical”. JD Vance said “it’s a bad idea”. But Donald went with his instinct’

Donald Trump’s inner circle’s almost all thought the Iran war was a bad idea when Israel gave a secret White House briefing that convinced him to launch Operation Epic Fury, it has been claimed.

Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to make his case for war in the Situation Room, The New York Times reports, a venue rarely used for in-person briefings with foreign leaders.

Seated across from the President on February 11, the Israeli prime minister delivered a detailed, hour-long presentation. His message was clear – Iran was vulnerable and the time was ripe for regime change. 

The Israeli delegation painted a picture of swift and decisive victory. Iran’s missile capabilities, they argued, could be dismantled within weeks.

The Strait of Hormuz would remain open, and retaliation against American targets would be minimal.

Behind the scenes, Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, could help spark an internal uprising to finish the job.

At one point, Netanyahu played a video montage highlighting potential future leaders of Iran should the regime collapse – including Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the country’s last shah.

Trump’s reaction was positive, and he appeared to be on board.

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Trump faces impeachment push over Iran conflict

Democratic congressman John Larson has filed articles of impeachment against US President Donald Trump over his actions connected with the Iran war. 

Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, said on Tuesday he had filed 13 charges, accusing Trump of waging an “illegal war” and escalating threats against Iran that endangered US security and American lives. He added that Trump is becoming “more unhinged” and “more unstable by the day.”

“Donald Trump has blown past every requirement to be removed from office. And it’s getting worse,” Larson said in a statement.

Larson also pointed to threats, including “open the Strait … or you’ll be living in hell,” saying such remarks “foreshadow war crimes.” He said Trump was “unable or unwilling” to faithfully execute his duties.

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Israeli MPs furious over Trump’s ceasefire with Iran

A ceasefire deal struck by Washington and Tehran is a “disaster” and “failure,” several prominent Israeli politicians have said. Israel was left out of the equation, they argued, calling it a strategic mistake on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

US President Donald Trump announced a two-week pause to the US-Israeli war on Iran to negotiate a long-term solution to the conflict on the basis of a 10-point plan put forward by Tehran. It reportedly includes Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of its uranium enrichment, the lifting of sanctions, and the cessation of war on all fronts, including Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday it “supports” Trump’s decision while maintaining that Israel would continue its military campaign against the Iran-linked Hezbollah group in neighboring Lebanon.

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Coming Soon – Federal Red Ink Barfing Skyward Like You’ve Never Seen

Self-evidently, the news has been overwhelmingly focused on Washington’s current endeavor to unload $200 billion of imperial destruction upon Iran and its neighbors around the Persian Gulf. Well, and also upon all other users of petroleum products, LNG, LPGs, nitrogen fertilizer, food, helium, semiconductors, manufactured goods and most everything else anywhere on the planet.

Accordingly, comparatively scant attention has been given to another recent milestone on America’s headlong dash to fiscal disaster. To wit, the public debt crossed the $39 trillion mark and nearly in the blink of an eye, too. Just four years ago, we were at the $29 trillion level and nine years ago at the $19 trillion mark.

Needless to say, the “peacemaker” in the Oval Office has played no small role in this skyward ascent of the public debt. During his first term, the public debt grew by a staggering $8 trillion and already another $3 trillion has been racked-up during his second go-round.

Stated differently, the King of Debt has surely earned his place in the history books. The $11 trillion of new debt on his watch to date already accounts for 28% of all the public debt incurred in America since George Washington!

Then again, he still has got nearly three years to go, and the debt impact of both the OBBBA and the impending financial and human bloodbath in the Persian Gulf are just getting started.

Indeed, as to the latter it’s as clear as the orange glow around his cranium that the Donald is doing another round of fake rope-a-dope negotiations with the Iranians. That’s to buy time to get the 82nd Airborne, various amphibious landing ships and other invasionary forces in place for his next “win”.

That’s right.The fool in the Oval Office is actually going to attempt to seize the Alamo Kharg Island. That will mean military chaos in the Gulf, unprecedented turmoil in the global economy and soaring military expenditures, which will make the pending $200 billion DOD supplemental look like a mere down-payment.

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AOC: Iran Deal “Changes Nothing” on Need to Impeach Trump for Genocidal Threat

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has reiterated that the call for President Donald Trump to be impeached or removed from office remains as urgent as ever after his genocidal threat toward Iran, regardless of the president’s announcement of a temporary ceasefire on Tuesday evening.

In a post on X, Ocasio-Cortez said the deal “changes nothing.”

“The President has threatened a genocide against the Iranian people, and is continuing to leverage that threat,” the lawmaker wrote. “He has launched a massive war of enormous risk and of catastrophic consequence without reason, rationale, nor Congressional authorization — which is as clear a violation of the Constitution as any.”

On Tuesday, just an hour and a half before his deadline to decimate Iran’s civilian infrastructure, Trump announced that the U.S. and Iran had agreed to a two-week ceasefire, with the potential to negotiate a long term end to the bombardments. During the pause in fighting, the U.S. would cease its bombardments of Iran, while Iran would reopen traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

The announcement came after Trump had, earlier on Tuesday, threatened to destroy all of Iran. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he said.

The statement was swiftly met with a deluge of calls for Trump to be impeached or removed via the 25th Amendment, which allows the president’s cabinet to declare him unfit. Over 70 lawmakers joined the calls, with the comment being so alarming that even far right figures like Candace Owens and Alex Jones called for Trump’s removal.

But the calls seemed to lose momentum after the threat didn’t come to pass on Tuesday, and as Democratic leaders declined to demand his removal. Some Democrats and liberal commentators even mocked Trump, taunting him with the “TACO” insult, standing for “Trump always chickens out,” or criticized him for the deal after it was announced.

Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Arizona), who is Iranian, said that it was callous to taunt Trump for not following through on his threats of genocide.

“I do not appreciate anyone — Democrat or Republican — taking this moment to make TACO jokes to say Trump ‘chickened out,’” Ansari said. “The president was threatening genocide against 90 million Iranians. I’m grateful there’s a ceasefire & scores of innocent people didn’t die tonight.”

Ocasio-Cortez said that it’s important that Democrats keep their foot on the gas. She said that Trump’s corruption and profit-seeking are also clear cases for Trump to be ousted.

“All of these incidents, and plenty more, have clearly driven our country past the threshold for impeachment or invocation of the 25th amendment. We cannot risk the world nor the wellbeing of our nation any longer,” she wrote. “Whether by his Cabinet or Congress, the President must be removed from office. We are playing with the brink.”

Ocasio-Cortez was one of the lawmakers calling for Trump’s removal on Tuesday, saying that his “civilization” threat was a “threat of genocide” that “merits removal from office.”

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