Month: November 2025

Who would have predicted that guy would be a terrible FBI director?

On Halloween morning, FBI Director Kash Patel had a big announcement to make: “The FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack,” he said in a 7:32 a.m. social-media post that referenced arrests in Michigan.

There was one problem: No criminal charges had yet been filed and local police weren’t aware of the details. Two friends of the alleged terrorists in New Jersey and Washington state caught wind of the arrests and moved up plans to leave the country, according to court documents and law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation. 

Justice Department leaders complained to the White House about Patel’s premature post, saying it had disrupted the investigation, administration officials said. 

In his nine months on the job, Patel has drawn flak from his bosses in the Justice Department and from his underlings at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he has fired dozens of agents deemed hostile to Donald Trump or to conservative ideals.

But the Halloween announcement wasn’t the biggest controversy to envelop the director that week. Patel hit the news for taking an FBI plane to attend a wrestling event where his girlfriend, a country western singer, performed, and then to her home in Nashville. A former FBI agent, Kyle Seraphin, publicized the trip and called the taxpayer funded travel in the middle of a shutdown “pathetic.”

After that, Patel visited a Texas hunting resort called the Boondoggle Ranch, according to flight records and people familiar with the trip, which hasn’t been previously reported.

Patel’s travel has frustrated both Justice Department officials, who complained to the White House about it, and the White House itself, which had told cabinet officials months ago in writing to limit their travel, particularly if it was overseas or unrelated to Trump’s agenda, according to an administration official. Details about Patel’s trips to visit his girlfriend and an August trip to Scotland have been passed around the White House in recent days, officials said.

The FBI director is required by law to take the bureau’s private plane instead of commercial flights in order to have access to secure communications. If the travel is personal, the director is required to reimburse the government for the cost of a commercial flight—typically far less than the actual costs of private-jet use.

Patel has defended his travel, dismissing his critics as “clickbait haters.” A spokesman for the bureau said the director has taken only about a dozen personal trips since assuming the role in February, and had taken steps to cut down on travel costs. In a written statement, Patel said the bureau has achieved historic success on violent crime and drug trafficking. 

He’s having the time of his life:

After Patel left government, he pounced on the man he would later succeed, Chris Wray, for using a government jet for an Adirondacks holiday. “Chris Wray, hey, you don’t need a government-funded G5 jet so you can fly off to the Adirondacks for vacation,” Patel said during a September 2023 appearance on the X22 Report podcast. 

That has fueled critics of Patel’s recent travel itinerary. The Justice Department’s Gulfstream G550 took nine trips to Las Vegas—where Patel lived before running the FBI—and seven others to Nashville, according to a Wall Street Journal review of flight records. 

On a late October Friday, he took the FBI private jet to State College, Pa., for a Real American Freestyle Wrestling event where his girlfriend, country music singer Alexis Wilkins, was performing the national anthem. The next day, the same FBI plane traveled to Nashville. 

That Sunday, the FBI jet landed in San Angelo, Texas, where Patel visited the Boondoggle Ranch, owned by the family of a Republican donor and friend of Patel’s, C.R. “Bubba” Saulsbury Jr. The plane stayed in San Angelo until Wednesday. The government was shut down, and much of the FBI workforce was working but not getting paid.

What a guy. I feel so safe.

According to the article, Trump is sometimes a little irritated but he loves the Kash loves him. So he’s not going anywhere.

This is just sad:

The BBC is prepared to formally apologise to Donald Trump as part of its efforts to resolve his billion-dollar legal threat over its editing of one of his speeches, the Guardian understands.

However, figures at the corporation are also minded to be robust in defending its journalism in the face of allegations from Trump that it made “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements” about him.

The BBC’s leadership is facing a looming deadline over how to reply to Trump’s legal threat to file a case in a Florida court. It follows the editing of a Trump speech in an edition of Panorama, which was a significant factor in the resignation of director general Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, its head of news.

Trump being the defamation king is really rich considering the trashy all, insults and defamation he hurls on a daily basis at anyone who looks at his sideways. Now he’s using his personal law firm, the Department of Justice, to harass and prosecute his enemies as well.

But here we are. He’s reaching across the pond now to try to bend the BBC to his will and it looks like he’s going to succeed:

The BBC’s top executive, Director-General Tim Davie, and its news CEO, Deborah Turness, resigned Sunday amid a growing scandal over this and other alleged editorial misjudgments.

Here’s what they did:

The issue has become a major story in the U.K. where Prime Minister Keir Starmer told lawmakers at the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions session in parliament on Wednesday: “I believe in a strong and independent BBC. Some would rather the BBC didn’t exist … I’m not one of them.” He added, however, that “where mistakes are made they do need to get their house in order.”

Starmer was responding to Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, who asked whether the government would urge the BBC to fight Trump’s lawsuit. Davey said “a great British institution is under attack from a foreign government … Trump has underlined press freedom in America and now he’s trying to do the same here.”

Asked Tuesday night whether he would sue, Trump told Fox News: “Well, I guess I have to you know, why not? Because they defrauded the public, and they’ve admitted it.”

“I think I have an obligation to do it, because you can’t get people, you can’t allow people to do that,” he said, before comparing the action to his lawsuit against CBS for a “60 Minutes” interview with his then-presidential election rival Kamala Harris. CBS paid $16 million to settle the case.

Trump complained that the BBC’s edit of his speech “made it sound radical” when it was “a very calming speech.” The saga centers on a “Panorama” documentary that aired before last year’s election. In it, two parts of the speech were edited together to give the impression that Trump said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

In fact Trump initially said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.” He said later: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

It was a bad edit but frankly didn’t change the fact that Trump pumped up that crowd, told them to go to the Capitol and said he’d be there with them. “Fight like hell” is a figure of speech but in that environment it was actual fighting words. If Trump had ever had to stand trial for his attempted coup, I think any jury would have understood exactly what happened there.

The BBC did edit it improperly although it’s very hard to say that it adds up to a billion dollars worth of damages. If the suit goes forward I’d really love to see that trial.

Meanwhile, it appears the BBC is under siege for “liberal bias” generally which just figures. That seems to be the way of things. I watch quite a bit of BBC and it does not have a liberal bias. I don’t think Britain really understands what that might look like. But with Donald Trump on their tails and people at the top resigning, it’s possible they’ll end up pushing it to become more like Fox News. The Murdochs will no doubt be pleased. So will Donald Trump.

He’s now below 40%

He’s underwater on all issues as well:

Just thought you’d like to know.

Meanwhile—

Some bizarre stuff going down in the Oval these days. After spraying the Syrian president with his Trump Fragrance he then asks him how many wives he has. pic.twitter.com/S0ywlUy7Fz

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 12, 2025

Trump said earlier that “he has a tough past, we all have tough pasts.”

Here’s Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s tough past via Wikipedia:

Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to a Syrian Sunni Muslim family from Daraa and the Golan Heights, he grew up in Syria’s capital, Damascus. Al-Sharaa joined al-Qaeda in Iraq shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and fought for three years in the Iraqi insurgency. American forces captured and imprisoned him from 2006 to 2011. His release coincided with the Syrian Revolution against the Ba’athist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. Al-Sharaa created the al-Nusra Front in 2012 with the support of al-Qaeda to topple the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war. As emir of the al-Nusra Front, al-Sharaa built a stronghold in the northwestern Idlib Governorate. He resisted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi‘s attempts to merge al-Nusra Front with the Islamic State, leading to armed conflict between the two groups. In 2016, al-Sharaa cut al-Nusra’s ties with al-Qaeda and launched a crackdown on its loyalists. 

I’m assuming he may have literally killed American troops in Iraq, something that would have had the right wing in a full blown hysteria not all that long ago. Today, they don’t care. In fact, they are happy to see their Dear Leader calling his a good friend and spraying him with perfume in the oval office.

We should never, ever, in a million years take these assholes seriously about anything except their desire for power again. It’s literally all they care about.

President Donald Trump has engaged in many televised rants since he entered politics. In fact, most of his appearances could be classified as such. But one of the most stunning he’s ever given came in his Nov. 2 “60 Minutes” interview with Norah O’Donnell. Trump spoke in his usual stream of consciousness style, but there was one extended riff that was substantially cut in the televised version and was only evident to those who read the full transcript published by CBS or watched the full interview that Trump eventually posted online. Fittingly, it focused on retribution against his enemies. 

O’Donnell barely got a word in edgewise as she tried to pin him down on one simple question: Did he order the criminal investigations into former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former National Security Adviser John Bolton? 

After minutes of obfuscation, Trump answered that he hadn’t ordered them to be investigated because their guilt was so obvious to the “honest people” he has working for him — a lie which was gently fact-checked by “60 Minutes” by showing Trump’s apparently accidental Truth Social post telling Attorney General Pam Bondi it was time to make a move. Within days, the Department of Justice indicted Comey. James and Bolton soon followed. 

Comey, of course, famously opened the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, James won a major lawsuit against Trump for business fraud and Bolton is a harsh critic of Trump’s intelligence and abilities as president. 

In the interview, Trump railed against all three, repeatedly calling Comey a “dirty cop” and James a “dishonest person,” while suggesting that Bolton is crazy. The president brought up his two impeachments, referred to Democrats as “scum” and recounted a bizarre story about then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learning that his infamous call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been taped. “She said, ‘You made me go into this mess,’” Trump claimed. “She screamed at all these people that made her do it, bad people like Schiff, et cetera, et cetera. So what happened is, she went nuts and just to conclude, and they said, ‘Let’s do it anyway.’”

In fact, Pelosi actually resisted impeaching Trump until the transcript emerged. (There was no tape of the call.) She told an interviewer that, at that point, “what the president did vis-a-vis the president of Ukraine just removed all doubt that we had to act.” 

Trump sounded like a Mafia don throughout this part of the interview, even saying that he “beat the rap.” The entire exchange was chilling, and it’s both unfortunate and telling that CBS News — now under the leadership of Bari Weiss, who is notorious for promoting right-wing views — did not air that portion. 

From the moment he announced his third presidential bid, Trump made it clear he was bent on revenge. His intentions were never secret. In fact, he famously proclaimed “I am your retribution” to ecstatic crowds throughout the 2024 campaign — and he meant it. 

Notably, though, the cases brought by his Justice Department against Comey, James and Bolton do not involve the so-called crimes Trump has repeatedly named, such as filing false changes, making up evidence and tampering with witnesses. If they are such corrupt, dishonest officials, one would have thought the department would have followed Trump’s specifications to the letter. Instead, Comey and James were indicted on picayune charges that appear to have little merit, and Bolton was charged with the crime for which Trump himself was investigated. 

Last week, MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that the department is actively investigating another of Trump’s designated enemies, former CIA Director John Brennan, over the 2017 Russia probe — which was already investigated by John Durham, a special counsel appointed in 2020 by Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr. (Durham found no wrongdoing.) Another target, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has been in Trump’s crosshairs since his first impeachment, in which Schiff served as a House manager. The senator is reportedly being investigated for mortgage fraud, but the prosecutors can’t find enough evidence to indict.

The Comey case looks to be in real trouble. The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District in Virginia resigned in protest over the pressure to indict Comey without evidence, followed by others who were either fired or resigned. Last week the judge in the case admonished the acting U.S Attorney Lindsey Halligan — one of Trump’s former personal lawyers — in what was apparently a train wreck of a procedural hearing. The government, according to the judge, appeared to be “indicting first, investigating later” — a damning assessment.

The case involving James is a similar mess, as Halligan has fumbled about with a couple of inexperienced prosecutors brought in to replace other attorneys who were fired or resigned because they believed the case was without merit. Last week, James requested the case be dismissed on the basis of vindictive prosecution. 

Bondi, though, remains determined to follow the president’s orders for revenge. 

All of this is taking place as the Justice Department is purging lawyers and FBI agents they see as enemies of Trump. Dozens of experienced prosecutors and investigators are gone, leaving the department a hollowed out shell of its former self. “The cumulative damage done to the once-respected Justice Department is so profound that it may not regain any semblance of its former self in our lifetimes, warn career law enforcement officials,” investigative journalist Carol Leonning wrote in an Oct. 30 guest essay for the New York Times. “It’s impossible to discount as hyperbole the alarm that these longtime civil servants are sounding from inside the house.”

Leonnig is the author, with Aaron C. Davis, of “Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department,” which revealed that Trump was “destabilizing the institution’s foundations — and weakening its resolve with his brand of bare-knuckle attacks” throughout his first term. During the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s gentlemanly leadership, which aimed to restore all the genteel norms and rules of the pre-Trump era, resulted in delaying necessary investigations, empowering Trump’s comeback and laying the groundwork for his ability to “beat the rap,” as well as his campaign of retribution.

The president’s enemies list grows every day. Speaking at a Federalist Society event last Friday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — another of Trump’s former personal attorneys — urged young conservative lawyers to sign up for the administration’s “war” against “rogue activist judges” who are “more political, or certainly as political, as the most liberal governor” or district attorney. Evidently, the administration would now like the purge to extend to the courts. 

Donald Trump has always sought vengeance; it’s fundamental to his warped worldview. He always believed the Justice Department should be his own personal law firm engaged in helping him do it. He’s gotten his wish.

Salon

Does Donald Trump have enough blankets for his coverup?

My first post this morning (below) already mentioned the Epstein files and Donald Trump’s efforts at coverup. But just before I posted, this dropped:

🚨BREAKING: Oversight Dems have received new emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate that raise serious questions about Donald Trump and his knowledge of Epstein’s horrific crimes.

Read them for yourself. It’s time to end this cover-up and RELEASE THE FILES. pic.twitter.com/A5XgOHj2Jq

— Oversight Dems (@OversightDems) November 12, 2025

The documents are here.

The Independent:

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released email exchanges between Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and author Michael Wolff discussing Donald Trump.

In one email, apparently sent by Epstein to Maxwell, the convicted sex offender wrote: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is [T]rump..” A victim “spent hours at my house with him, he has never once been mentioned, police chief. etc. im 75% there,” Esptein added.

In response, Maxwell wrote: “I have been thinking about that…”

Trump has repeatedly emphasized that their friendship dissolved in the early 2000s and has called the renewed interest in the Epstein files a “hoax” cooked up by the Democrats.

Trump did not send or receive any of the emails and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. The Independent has requested comment from the White House. He has said publicly that he had a falling out with Epstein because the disgraced financier “stole” young women working at his Mar-a-Lago spa too many times — including Giuffre.

But a 2019 email from Epstein to Wolff suggests that Trump knew about Epstein’s “girls.”

“Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” Epstein wrote in January before his death in August.

In a third email exchange, Wolff advises Epstein that CNN plans to ask him about his relationship with Trump. Epstein asks for advice on how to answer. Wolff replies the next afternoon:

“I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”

Settle in. This opera ain’t over by a long shot.

* * * * *

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The House to vote on releasing them in December

Speaker Mike Johnson has called members of the House of Repesentatives back to Washington. Members will vote, today if they can get there, on the budget agreement from the Senate and end the longest government shutdown in history. And then? What happens with those pesky Epstein files?

Politico:

The monthslong bipartisan effort to sidestep Speaker Mike Johnson and force the release of all Justice Department files on the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is kicking into high gear this week, setting up a December floor battle that President Donald Trump has sought to avoid.

The cascade of action is set to begin Wednesday evening, when Johnson will swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva right before the House votes to end the government shutdown, ending a 50-day wait following the Arizona Democrat’s election. Shortly afterward, Grijalva says she will affix the 218th and final signature to the discharge petition led by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to force a vote on the full release of DOJ’s Epstein files.

And then?

The completion of the discharge petition, a rarely used mechanism to sidestep the majority party leadership, will trigger a countdown for the bill to hit the House floor. It will still take seven legislative days for the petition to ripen, after which Johnson will have two legislative days to schedule a vote. Senior Republican and Democratic aides estimate a floor vote will come the first week of December, after the Thanksgiving recess.

And then?

The discharge petition tees up a “rule,” a procedural measure setting the terms of debate for the Epstein bill’s consideration on the House floor. This gives the effort’s leaders greater control over the bill, which will still require Senate approval if it passes the House.

Senate Republican leaders haven’t publicly committed to bringing up the Epstein measure if the House passes it. Republicans expect it will die in the Senate, but not before a contentious House fight.

It is more than clear that despite Donald Trump’s campaign promise to release the documents, he has no intention of letting the Epstein files see the light of day. Just as he had no intention of handing back the trove of secret documents he removed from the White House and stored unsecured in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom.

Johnson will do whatever Trump tells him. He may allow a vote as he has promised, but not before he and Trump try to strongarm Republican members into voting no. With Grijalva’s vote, Johnson has a mere two-vote margin.

Massie claims more Republicans will vote yes than signed onto the original petition. But he expects a failed, “last, desperate effort” by the White House to thwart the discharge petition. from Trump officials to undercut the discharge petition.

Johnson argues, Politico adds, that the vote is unnecessary:

“The bipartisan House Oversight Committee is already accomplishing what the discharge petition, that gambit, sought — and much more,” Johnson said at a news conference last month.

All “credible information” would be released to the public as part of the panel’s monthslong probe into the matter, he said, while precautions are taken to protect Epstein’s accusers.

And then?

Who at the Justice Department decides what’s credible or whose names are redacted? FBI Director Kash Patel? AG Pam Bondi?

We already know Trump’s name appears in the documents. Convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has already done her part from prison to exonerate Trump from participation in Epsteins’s child sex ring. During her softball interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Maxwell repeatedly insisted that she had never witnessed any sexually inappropriate behavior by Donald Trump. Given her history, Maxwell’s idea of “sexually inappropriate” may not match yours.

Her cooperation was rewarded. Someone in the DOJ subsequently authorized an unprecedented transfer for Maxwell from a maximum security prison in Florida to a “club fed” women’s facility in Texas. This week, a whistleblower revealed that there she receives extraordinary special treatment.

According to a letter directly to Trump from Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Maxwell is waited on “hand and foot.” One prison official reports being  ‘sick of having to be Maxwell’s bitch‘:

Raskin’s letter said Maxwell has received customized meals personally delivered to her cell, after-hours time in a private exercise area and access to a service puppy.

Raskin said Maxwell was also afforded private meetings with visitors arranged by the warden, complete with snacks. The guests were allowed to bring computers, which Raskin described as “an unprecedented action” that risked Maxwell having “unmonitored communications with the outside world.”

Maxwell is reportedly preparing a written request to Trump for a commutation. With her warden’s help.

Whatever is in those documents, or Trump thinks is in them, nothing about the Epstein files release is going to go cleanly. Trump is desperate to protect himself and/or others.

Given all the White House pardon activity and the concierge treatment for Maxwell, I’m not confident that reopening the House, swearing in Grijalva, and voting to release the Epstein files will actually shake them loose. I half expect a “the dog ate my homework” incident. 

In a different context, a friend the other day referenced the end of Three Days of the Condor (1975). Robert Redford’s character uncovers a secret government plot and ultimately decides that his safety lies in telling The New York Times what he knows.

Cliff Robertson asks Redford ominously, “How do you know they’ll print it?”

UPDATE: What does digital flop sweat look like?

The fact that Trump is calling Mace and Boebert today pleading with them to remove their names from the Epstein petition at the last minute tells you everything you need to know about how incriminating the info in the files is to him and his cronies.

— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2025-11-12T18:05:44.122Z

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
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Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

This interview with Laura Ingraham last night is something else. He is so out of touch these days he might as well be from Mars.

Some excerpts:

Trump: Nobody knows what a magnet is. pic.twitter.com/4a1wp14zYF

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 11, 2025

Ingraham: Is a 50 year mortgage really a good idea?

Trump: It’s not even a big deal. You go from 40 years to 50

Ingraham: 30 pic.twitter.com/W07mMUjz97

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 11, 2025

Trump on SNAP: It really puts the country in jeopardy. People who are able bodied who can do their job—they leave their job because they figure they can pick this up because it’s easier—that’s not the purpose of it pic.twitter.com/9tJJDNp460

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 11, 2025

Ingraham: "Why are people saying they are anxious about the economy?"

Trump: "I don't know that they are saying that. I think the polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we've ever had." pic.twitter.com/o2X3CCkMYr

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) November 11, 2025

Trump on affordability: It’s a con job. Costs are way down.

Ingraham: So you are saying voters are misperceiving how they feel? pic.twitter.com/Cs8s4UBoqM

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 11, 2025

Trump says that HBCUs would be "all be out of business" if fewer Chinese students were allowed to go to American universities pic.twitter.com/QWCtipwVcH

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 11, 2025

Ingraham: You said as many as 600,000 Chinese students could come to the US. Why, sir is, that a pro-maga position when so many American kids want to go to school and there are places not for them and these universities are getting rich off Chinese money?

Trump: If we were to cut that in half, which perhaps, makes some people happy, you would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business.
Ingraham: So what
Trump: I actually think it’s good to have outside countries.
Ingraham: They’re not the French
Trump: You think the French are better? I’m not so sure. Maga was my idea. It was nobody else’s idea. I know better than anybody else what Maga wants

TRUMP: If you have President Xi from China, or if you have some big state event, we have no place to have it

INGRAHAM: How about just regular people?

TRUMP: We're gonna have the best ballroom anywhere in the world pic.twitter.com/TA6bFS2QIv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 11, 2025

Trump: The east wing… looked like hell. I didn’t want to sacrifice a great ballroom for an ok ballroom by leaving it.. pic.twitter.com/yUOYdf3Mi9

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 11, 2025

INGRAHAM: A Chinese diplomat said the prime minister of Japan should be beheaded. These are not our friends are they in China?

TRUMP: Well, a lot of allies aren't our friends either pic.twitter.com/lDQeNTfZnY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 11, 2025

Hey, remember when Trump went over to the middle east so he could take a victory dance as the King who brought peace the the whole world for all time? Jared and Ivanka stood behind their friend Bibi to announce the agreement to finally end the war in Gaza?

Guess what?

Some Trump administration officials are deeply concerned that the Gaza peace deal between Israel and Hamas could break down because of the difficulty implementing many of its core provisions, as private documents obtained by POLITICO and circulating among U.S. officials underscore the lack of a clear path forward.

The compendium of documents was presented last month during a two-day symposium for U.S. Central Command and members of the newly created Civil-Military Coordination Center, which was established in southern Israel as part of the peace agreement between Israel and Hamas that went into effect Oct. 10.

Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, the United States security coordinator for Israel-Palestinian Authority, convened approximately 400 people at the event from the State Department, Defense Department, nongovernmental organizations and private companies like RAND.

The presentation surfaces a particular concern about whether a so-called International Stabilization Force — a multinational security initiative meant to keep the peace in Gaza — can really be deployed. One slide shows an arrow with a question mark on it linking the first and second phases of the U.S.-brokered peace plan, underscoring the uncertainty about its prospects.

He said it was easy.

I don’t know about you but it just shocks me to the core that Trump’s team is completely clueless and the “peace plan” is little more than a chimera to give Trump a photo op.

That ignorant, drunken, talk-show-host, rapist Sec Def is systematically purging the military of women. I’m sure he’d be fine with keeping them around to cook and clean. Maybe they can do some clerical work. But that’s about it. After all, if you don’t have a penis there’s really not much you’re good at (except for, well, you know.)

They’re just making it impossible for women to pursue their careers:

Everything was set for the Navy officer to take over a new role that would have capped an already distinguished career— and made her the first woman in a Naval Special Warfare command overseeing Navy SEALs.

Ranked the top officer for promotion in her cohort, she received a Purple Heart after being injured in an IED attack during a combat tour in Iraq. She then became the first woman to serve with SEAL Team Six in the role of troop commander, one of several senior positions within the squadrons that make up the elite naval unit.

A formal ceremony marking her new position was planned for July. Invitations went out two months in advance.

But just two weeks before the ceremony, her command was abruptly canceled with little explanation, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. The decision didn’t come through formal channels but by a series of phone calls from the Pentagon, one of the sources said. The circumstances were unusual and seemed designed to omit a paper trail, according to multiple sources.

Under the Navy’s “up or out” policy, with no command slot to take, the officer’s more than two-decade military career was effectively over.

Everybody knew it was Hegseth. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t want any women in leadership roles (or really, in the military at all.)

The Pentagon said that women are “excited” to work for Hegseth and his “strong leadership.” Sure they are. (I hope none of them are ever in a room alone with him…)

With Hegseth at the helm, many who spoke to CNN felt women are no longer wanted in uniform— a potentially seismic shift since they make up roughly 18% of the US military.

“To be quite honest, I am fearful for women in uniform right now,” said Patti J. Tutalo, a retired Coast Guard commander who served on a decades-old advisory group for women in the military before it was shut down this year.

“I definitely think there will be a retention issue for women,” Tutalo added. “I also think that you’re going to see an increase in assaults, increase in harassment, increase in bullying, hazing, and I think there’ll be a lack of accountability for those things.”

There was already a problem with harassment and assault. It’s going to grow exponentially with the drunken womanizer who follows a medieval Christian nationalist preacher who believes women should be subservient to men in all ways.

For Hailey Gibbons, an Army veteran who was among the first women to graduate from Ranger School after it was opened to women a decade ago, the idea that women aren’t meeting the same standards as men is “laughable.” Her initial physical test at Ranger School – a grueling two-month training course – was the same as her male comrades, she said: 49 pushups, 59 sit-ups, and a five-mile run in under 40 minutes, plus six chin-ups.

Hegseth is making it okay for others in the military to say, “women can’t do this,” said Gibbons, who served in the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment.

Another woman in the Army who spoke to CNN – an enlisted soldier in a combat arms unit – said that she is already feeling real-life effects of Hegseth’s September speech.

Following the secretary’s remarks, she said a male noncommissioned officer in her unit told her: “All you women are getting out now.”

“I want nothing to do with the military after this,” she said.

This lout and his buddies are making the U.S. Military a hallowed out core of wild-eyed extremists and fools. They’re not just pushing women out, they’re firing a massive number of top generals who apparently haven’t shown the proper deference to Hegseth and Dear Leader.

Meanwhile, they’re gleefully committing murder on the high seas in such contravention of international law that our allies are now refusing to share intelligence because they want no part of it.

And they are preparing to start wars. Good luck.