It has not been a banner day for members of the Trump administration.
Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes began, have caused far more damage to U.S. military sites in the Middle East than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government have admitted.
While the damage from the Iranian strikes, which have killed and wounded servicemembers, is itself important, so is the underlying story: the U.S. government is hiding the true cost of the war in Iran from the American people. The journalists note that it is “unusually difficult” to get satellite imagery from the Middle East right now because less than two weeks into the war, the U.S. government asked two of the largest commercial providers of satellite imagery, Vantor and Planet, “to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing.”
The companies complied, forcing the journalists to turn to high-resolution satellite imagery published by Iran’s state-affiliated media, cross-checking it with lower-resolution imagery from the satellite system the European Union uses.
Global affairs journalist David Rothkopf wrote today in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”
Early this morning, Barak Ravid of Axios, who often reports information from White House insiders, wrote that the White House believed it was close to a memorandum of understanding with Iran that would end the war and lay the groundwork for future negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, although there was plenty of hedging in the article.
Once again, there were fortuitously timed trades before the story broke. Adam Kobeissi’s Kobeissi Letter, which comments on global capital markets, noted that about 70 minutes before the Axios story, someone took about $920 million worth of crude oil shorts and bet the market would drop, meaning they promised to provide about 10,000 contracts for oil at the current price. Within two hours, oil prices had fallen more than 12%, making the entity a profit of about $125 million.
On social media, Trump’s account continued to whipsaw between pressing for an end to the war and threatening apocalyptic destruction if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he wrote, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran. If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
The administration’s shifting justifications and claims about the Iran war are “dizzying,” Ben Finley, Matthew Lee, and Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press wrote today. Yesterday, after calling the war “concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent the day selling Trump’s Project Freedom to open the Strait of Hormuz, only to have Trump call Project Freedom off with a post on social media.
Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, Andrea Mitchell, Natasha Lebedeva and Daniel Arkin of NBC News reported tonight that Trump’s abrupt about-face came after Saudi Arabia told the U.S. it would not permit the U.S. military to use Saudi airspace for the operation.
This afternoon, the U.S. fired on an Iranian oil tanker as it tried to pass through the U.S. blockade, and Israel launched strikes on a suburb of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said today that China is “deeply distressed” by the conflict and called for a ceasefire. “We believe that a comprehensive ceasefire is urgently needed, that a resumption of hostilities is not acceptable,” he said. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in China today, where he met with Wang. Trump is due to visit China on May 14. Trump wants a solution to the Iran War before that meeting, and the Iranians know it, giving them leverage over a deal.
This evening, Iran’s foreign minister M.B. Ghalibaf posted: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”
Hegseth is not the only member of the administration in trouble in the news today. After journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick wrote an April 17 story in The Atlantic detailing FBI director Kash Patel’s drinking and inability to perform his job, Patel sued both The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation, asking for $250 million in damages.
The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick stood by the story, which had two dozen sources. Fitzpatrick noted that after she published the piece, additional informants came forward to corroborate her findings.
Today, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported that the FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation into who talked to Fitzpatrick. Sources told the reporters that such an investigation, called an “insider threat investigation,” usually involves government officials who may have given away state secrets or classified documents. Focusing on leaks to a reporter is “highly unusual,” they say. Although it remains unclear what steps the investigation has taken, Dilanian and Leonnig note that it could allow FBI agents to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records and examine her social media contacts.
One of the sources told the reporters that FBI agents feel ”deep concern” about the probe. “They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told the reporters. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the story, telling Dilanian and Leonnig: “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all. Every time there’s a publication of false claims by anonymous sources that gets called out, the media plays the victim via investigations that do not exist.”
Under Patel, the FBI has already investigated a New York Times reporter who wrote a story about an FBI security detail assigned to Patel’s girlfriend and searched the home of a Washington Post reporter.
Today the FBI raided the offices and business of Virginia state senator L. Louis Lucas, 82, a Black woman who led the movement to redraw Virginia’s districts after Republicans redrew districts in Republican-dominated states. The Fox News Channel was on the scene, suggesting it had been tipped off by the FBI.
Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick published a new story today in The Atlantic reporting that Patel travels with “a supply of personalized branded bourbon” with the label “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” and an FBI shield. She explains: “Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: KA$H. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with ‘#9’ there as well.”
In what sure reads like a journalist burying a subject with evidence, Fitzpatrick lists the places and occasions on which Patel has given out bottles of the whiskey and explains that he has transported the whiskey on a Department of Justice plane including to the Olympics in Milan, Italy. When a bottle went missing during a “training seminar” with Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes in Quantico, Virginia, Patel was angry enough that he threatened to make his staff take polygraphs and face prosecution.
Fitzpatrick notes that “[s]everal current and former FBI employees, including multiple senior leaders, told me that the director regularly handing out his own personally branded bourbon, including to civilians outside the bureau, was unheard-of.” They explain: “The FBI has traditionally had a zero-tolerance approach to unauthorized use of alcohol on the job and for its misuse while off duty.”
“Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency—it makes me frightened for the country,” George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told Fitzpatrick.
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “The journalist who is being sued by Kash Patel and reportedly being investigated by the FBI is out with a new story. Is there a Pulitzer for being a fearless badass? If so, she should win it.”
Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg reported today that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will ask the Supreme Court to let the Department of Justice (DOJ) intervene in the case of columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won an $83.3 million jury verdict against Trump for defamation after he lied that he had not sexually assaulted her. Although the Department of Justice is supposed to represent the American people, Trump’s appointees are using the department as Trump’s personal law firm.
If the Supreme Court allows the DOJ to step in, swapping the U.S. government for Trump in the case, the case would have to be dismissed because plaintiffs can’t sue the federal government for defamation. Judges from the appeals court have already refused to permit such a swap, but Blanche is giving it another shot.
Finally, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today for a closed-door interview about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He was not under oath for his testimony, a requirement Democrats want for those testifying before the committee and committee chair James Comer (R-KY) does not.
Lutnick had said he had cut all ties with Epstein in 2005, only to have information come out that, in fact, the two maintained contact until at least 2018, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution for a minor.
Asked why he had taken his wife and their four young children to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2012, Lutnick told the committee that he didn’t remember and that it was “inexplicable.”
