Tag: wapo

WaPo Satellite Analysis: Iran Hit More Than 225 U.S. Military Assets Across Region Through Mid-April

Iranian airstrikes that were launched to retaliate for the unprovoked U.S.-Israeli attack on the country have hit almost 230 U.S. military assets across the region, a review of satellite imagery by The Washington Post shows.

The damage, the Post reported, exceeds that reported by the Defense Department.

The report comes a week after the department’s head bean-counter low-balled the cost of the war during testimony before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee.

In late March, The New York Times revealed that Iranian strikes had wrecked 13 military bases across the Middle East.

But this latest report suggests that Iran hit back hard. And, it shows, Trump’s war planners underestimated Iran’s ability to defend itself and inflict costly damage.

The airstrikes “have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment,” the imagery showed:

The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported.

The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of the range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.

While imagery of the region is difficult to obtain, the newspaper scrutinized more than 100 images that Iran released. It validated 109 against the European Union’s low-resolution Copernicus system and the Planet system’s high-resolution imagery. While the Post excluded some images, none was manipulated.

“In a separate search of Planet imagery, Post reporters found 10 damaged or destroyed structures that were not documented in the imagery released by Iran,” the newspaper continued:

In all, The Post found 217 structures and 11 pieces of equipment that were damaged or destroyed at 15 U.S. military sites in the region.

In other words, Iran had no trouble hitting targets:

“The Iranian attacks were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel, who reviewed the Iranian images at The Post’s request. The Post previously revealed how Russia provided Iran with intelligence to target U.S. forces.

Some of the damage may have occurred after U.S. troops already left the bases, making protection of the structures less vital. Cancian and other experts said they do not believe the attacks have significantly limited the U.S. military’s ability to conduct its bombing campaign in Iran.

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Deep State Leaks CIA Iran War Dossier to WaPo

The Deep State leaked a CIA Iran war dossier to the Washington Post that refutes Trump’s claims that the Iranian Regime’s missiles are mostly decimated.

On Wednesday, President Trump sparred with a reporter in the Oval Office during a meeting with UFC fighters.

The reporter asked Trump about his decision to pause Project Freedom amid a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump told the reporter that the US military has decimated Iran’s missile capabilities and they probably only have about 18 percent left.

“You’re facing an opponent right now in Iran that has refused to submit. You seem optimistic announcing you may be closer to a deal – but what’s different now?” a reporter asked Trump about his latest decision to pause Project Freedom.

“Well, why do you say they refused to submit? You don’t know that! You don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors,” Trump said.

The reporter tried to interject: “They were firing on US troops a few days ago…”

“Yeah, a few days ago is a long time ago. You know, in the world of war, a few days ago, no, they want to make a deal badly. And we’ll see if we get there,” Trump said.

“If we get there, they can’t have nuclear weapons. You know, it’s very simple. But what’s not to submit? So they had a Navy with one hundred and fifty nine ships and now every ship is blown to pieces and lying at the bottom of the water,” Trump added.

“They had an air force, lots of planes, and they don’t have any planes. They don’t have any anti aircraft. They don’t have any radar left,” the president said.

“Their missiles are mostly decimated. They have some. They have probably 18, 19 percent, but not a lot by comparison to what they had,” he said.

“And their leaders are all dead. So I think we won. Now it’s only a question of, look, if we left right now around, it would take them 20 years to rebuild!” Trump said. “We’re in good shape.”

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WaPo Admits Many Democrat Voters Can’t Prove They’re Citizens

Not a single Democrat in the Senate is willing to support the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, and a new op-ed from The Washington Post might just explain why.

The SAVE America Act would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter ID to cast a ballot in federal elections. The current “safeguard” preventing noncitizens from registering to vote and voting is a tiny square box on the federal registration form asking applicants to attest they are telling the truth about their citizenship status. In other words, the honor system.

The legislation passed the House (with a single Democrat voting alongside Republicans) but has stalled in the Republican controlled Senate, with a few RINOs and the entire Democrat apparatus opposing the election integrity legislation.

But perhaps Democrats are opposed to the common sense election integrity measure because the legislation would endanger New Mexico and turn the battleground of Nevada into a solid Republican state, according to analysis from Yale Law School Professor Ian Ayres and Yale research fellow Jacob Slaughter.

The two explain in their op-ed that they estimate at the national level, “89 percent of Democrats and 90 percent of Republicans hold qualifying citizenship documents, a difference that is not statistically significant.”

That seemingly meaningless 1 percent difference, however, would actually be state-flipping, according to Ayres and Slaughter.

“But because the composition of the electorate varies across states, national parity masks meaningful state-level variation — and what we find, looking state by state, is that the bill may significantly advantage Republicans in a few key ones.”

Ayres and Slaughter estimate that Democrats are 13 percentage points “less likely than Republicans to hold qualifying registration documents” in New Mexico. And while Ayres and Slaughter estimate the passage of the SAVE America Act would only have “modest” consequences for the midterms because those currently registered to vote would be “unaffected,” “as more people would need to register after moving, changing their names or reaching voting age, this document shortfall could flip New Mexico to an electorate where Republicans have a 3.3-percentage-point advantage.”

Ayres and Slaughter see the GOP having a similar advantage in the battleground state of Nevada. Their research shows that Democrats are 5.3 percentage points less likely than Republicans to have the required documents, and they project that passage of the legislation “would push [Nevada] from battleground to comfortably Republican.”

“Nationally, the overall effect leans Republican: Eight of 15 swing states show rightward shifts, and the only statistically significant results favor Republicans,” Ayres and Slaughter wrote.

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Washington Post Journalist Pleads Guilty In Child Porn Case

United States Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced Friday that a video editor for The Washington Post pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography.

Federal authorities arrested Thomas Pham LeGro in June 2025 for possessing child pornography after executing a search warrant at his home and seizing his personal electronic devices. LeGro worked for the Post for 18 years in two stints since 2000, according to the outlet.

Agents discovered a fractured hard drive hidden under a rug of LeGro’s basement during the search, according to the DOJ’s press release. They found a folder on his laptop that contained 11 videos depicting child sexual abuse, which depicted adult men sexually abusing prepubescent children and forcing them to engage in sexual acts.

The FBI Washington Field Office’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force is investigating the case, according to the DOJ. Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Burrell is prosecuting the case for the District of Columbia.

LeGro rejoined the Post as an editor on the breaking news desk after previously working part-time for the outlet during graduate school, according to the Mason Spirit. He later became a senior producer for the Post’s International, Style and Technology teams in 2015.

In 2018, LeGro and the staff won a Pulitzer Prize for “purposeful and relentless reporting that changed the course of a Senate race in Alabama,” which exposed former Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore’s alleged sexual harassment of underage girls in 2017.

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Judge Rejects DOJ’s Request to Search Washington Post Reporter’s Electronic Devices in Leak Investigation

A judge on Tuesday denied the Justice Department’s request to search a Washington Post reporter’s electronics for sensitive documents as part of its investigation into national security leaks.

As previously reported, the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter who obtained classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.

Feds executed a search warrant at the Alexandria, Virginia, home of WaPo reporter Hannah Natanson last month as part of an investigation into a Maryland system administrator who has a top security clearance.

The contractor who stashed the classified documents at his home, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, is currently in jail.

FBI agents reportedly found classified intelligence reports in Perez-Lugones’ lunchbox and basement.

Rubio said the Pentagon contractor leaked the Maduro capture plans.

The US Army’s Delta Force captured Maduro last month. The leaked plans could have put the special operators in harm’s way.

On Tuesday, a federal magistrate judge rejected the Justice Department’s request to search Natanson’s electronics.

“Accordingly, the Court rejects the government’s request to conduct an unsupervised, wholesale search of all Movants’ seized data using a government filter team. To gather the information the government needs to prosecute its criminal case without authorizing an unrestrained search and violating Movants’ First Amendment and attorney-client privileges, the Court will conduct the review itself,” judge William Porter wrote.

“No easy remedy exists here. Movants’ First Amendment rights have been restrained. The government seized all of Ms. Natanson’s work product, documentary material, and devices, terminating her access to the confidential sources she developed and to all the tools she needs as a working journalist. The government’s proposed remedy—that she simply buy a new phone and laptop, set up new accounts, and start from scratch—is unjust and unreasonable,” the judge wrote.

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So, Is That Why the Washington Post Isn’t Covering DC’s Raw Sewage Nightmare?

It’s a total s**t show in Washington, DC. For those not following, four weeks ago, an underground sewage line failed, and the Potomac, which is already disgusting, has been flooded with hundreds of millions of gallons of human waste. If it hasn’t taken the title, it will soon for being the worst wastewater spill in US history. 

To boot, it won’t be fixed for another 10 months. It should be covered, in The Washington Post of all places, but it isn’t. Maybe that’s because there’s a Joe Biden connection: the CEO and general manager of DC Water is David L. Gadis, who the former braindead president picked to serve on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council to “serve with distinction as the sole expert on the Council from the wastewater utilities sector” in 2022.

DC Water says the underground sewer line that burst and began spewing wastewater into the Potomac River four weeks ago could take another 10 months to repair. 

Although DC Water crews continue to successfully divert the majority of the sewage away from the river, officials say more than 240 million gallons of sewage has made its way into the Potomac. 

In the latest spillover, a mass of flushed wipes clogged the utility company’s temporary pumps, releasing an additional 600,000 gallons of sewage water into the Potomac. 

“The risk of flow entering the Potomac River exists until we can get the flow back into the Potomac Interceptor. Right now, it’s bypassed through the C&O Canal and then routed back into the Potomac Interceptor,” DC Water COO Matthew Brown said. 

“And so that is our goal. That is what we are working towards. And there are people on site 24 hours a day working to make this happen,” he said. 

Brown is the first high-level DC Water official to have spoken publicly about the incident. 

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WaPo Journalist Fired For Justifying Charlie Kirk’s Killing Calls New Firings at Paper Akin to ‘Colonial Press Censorship’

Karen Attiah didn’t stick around to get fired this week by The Washington Post. She’d already been dismissed, for cause, and a good one: She’d effectively spent the period following Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September taking quotes wildly out of context to effectively justify the murder.

You probably haven’t heard much from Attiah unless you’re a real devotee of hers or of Bluesky, the ersatz X alternative for people who can’t handle opinions that aren’t their own.

She posts quite freely over there, and she had some thoughts about the layoffs this week at her former paper: specifically, they’re all part of the white colonialism baked into the free press from before America was founded!

As for the Post employees not fired for cause: The paper announced earlier this week that it was slashing a third of its workforce and cutting entire sections, including sports, in a major shake-up.

While the paper’s financials aren’t publicly aired due to the fact that it’s a private concern — owned by Jeff Bezos — reports are that it lost $100 million alone in 2023, about 40 percent of the paper’s estimated value.

Furthermore, competitors like The New York Times have made a successful transition to covering news and being a general lifestyle outlet, while niche publications like Politico and The Hill have sucked up much of the Capitol Hill staffer/political junkie audience the paper used to garner.

In mid-2024, publisher Will Lewis fired executive editor Sally Buzbee and replaced her with Matt Murray, and warned staff that their product wasn’t influential or widely read. This caused much discord but apparently, no real change in direction, either politically or in the quality of the paper.

Whether or not the “firings will continue until standards improve” approach will work is anyone’s guess, although I don’t know anyone outside the liberal media sphere who believes Wednesday’s move made the Post any less readable or valuable.

Inside that sphere, however, there was much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, and even gnashing of hands and wringing of teeth. That’s how upset everyone was that Jeff Bezos wasn’t running the Post as if it were a charity cause — which would make it one of the least successful charities in Washington, it must be noted, and that’s an accomplishment.

There were no shortage of bad takes on this, particularly from former Post employees. However, Attiah’s is really something to behold, for more reasons than one.

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DELUSIONAL: Former Washington Post Editor Suggests Paper’s Problems Come From Going Too Soft on Trump

The total meltdown of the left over the recent layoffs at the Washington Post continue to prove that the media class just doesn’t get what’s happening.

On PBS, they brought on former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron to analyze the paper’s problems. To hear Baron tell it, the paper’s problem is that they just haven’t been hard enough on Trump, which is laughable.

Over the last decade, the paper has gone from being just plainly liberal to downright bonkers. They have embraced and promoted every anti-Trump story they could, no matter how unfounded. They destroyed their own reputation.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

BARON: And then I think he really became — took a real turn after it looked like Trump was going to be elected president yet again. And that was in 2024. And 11 days before the presidential election in 2024, they killed an editorial for — that was endorsing Kamala Harris. He said the paper wouldn’t endorse ever again for president.

And hundreds of thousands of subscribers canceled at that time, aggravating the financial problems that they had. Subsequent to that, he did all sorts of things that made things even worse, appearing at the inauguration on the stage with Donald Trump, buying the Melania so-called documentary for an exorbitant price, buying the right — Amazon buying the rights to The Apprentice.

And Amazon had bought the rights to Melania’s documentary as well. And then completely changing the opinion pages so that essentially they have no columnists who are really left of center. And they’re very deferential to Trump. And I think they lack a moral core.

And so all of that has driven subscribers away. And so for every subscriber that they get coming in through the front door because of the high-quality news coverage, I think they’re losing maybe two subscribers out the back door. Of course, I don’t know the numbers exactly, but clearly they have been losing a lot of subscribers.

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Magistrate Judge Blocks FBI From Accessing Devices Seized From Washington Post Reporter Who Obtained Illegally Leaked Information From Pentagon Contractor

A federal magistrate judge on Wednesday blocked the FBI from accessing devices seized from the Washington Post reporter who obtained illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.

Among the items seized from Natanson: 2 silver MacBook Pros and a Pink iPhone.

As previously reported, the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter who obtained classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.

Feds executed a search warrant at the Alexandria, Virginia, home of WaPo reporter Hannah Natanson earlier this month as part of an investigation into a Maryland system administrator who has a top security clearance.

The FBI seized Natanson’s cell phone, two laptops (one personal and one work-related), and a Garmin watch.

Natanson is not the subject of the investigation.

According to The Washington Post, Natanson was at home at the time of the raid.

The contractor who stashed the classified documents at his home, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, is currently in jail.

FBI agents reportedly found classified intelligence reports in Perez-Lugones’ lunchbox and basement.

According to The Washington Post, Natanson was at home at the time of the raid.

The contractor who stashed the classified documents at his home, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, is currently in jail.

FBI agents reportedly found classified intelligence reports in Perez-Lugones’ lunchbox and basement.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said the search was conducted at the Pentagon’s request.

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FBI Raids WaPo Reporter’s Home In Classified Docs Case

The FBI executed a search warrant on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson as part of a probe into “a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials,” the paper announced Wednesday. 

Natanson, was at her Virginia home when the agency showed up with a warrant. According to the outlet, “law enforcement was investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top secret security clearance and has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and his basement.” The journalist’s home and devices were search. 

According to her X bio, Natanson covers “the Trump administration’s reshaping of the government and its effects.”

Perez-Lugones is a US citizen who was born in Miami and now resides in Laurel, Maryland according to the FBI’s criminal complaint. He has been a government contractor since 2002 and holds top secret security clearance. 

According to the complaint, at least one document found in Pererz-Lugones’ basement was related to national defense. WaPo reports that Natanson has been part of its most sensitive coverage in the 2nd Trump administration. She told WaPo that the FBI seized a phone and a Garmin watch. 

According to AG Pam Bondi: “his past week, at the request of the Department of War, the Department of Justice and FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. ” 

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