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Spy versus spy at the ODNI; the Supreme Court caps a terrible year for gender-bending advocates; and a lightning round of fantastic, under-reported news.
JUL 2READ IN APP
Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your jam-packed roundup includes: the intelligence community throws a massive, leak-driven temper tantrum over DNI Bill Pulte’s demand for a master list of spies, but Trump calls their bluff; the Supreme Court hands down a massive, common-sense win for actual women’s sports, capping a terrible year for gender-bending advocates; plus a mini-roundup of excellent news corporate media is studiously ignoring, from plunging oil prices to the official end of the covid emergency, and much more.
⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️
🪖 For those of you who just can’t get enough, this month’s Code Red podcast is now live on YouTube. Link: “Fauci’s Documents, Antifa Sentences & the Iran Strategy — Jeff Childers.”
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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It’s Spy versus Spy time! Let’s connect some dots. On Monday, Mad Magazine, I mean the New York Times, ran this remarkable bit of intelligence community skullduggery masquerading as news:
It was really a Bill Pulte character assassination story, but with lipstick, earrings, and a rubber mask disguising it as noble IC resistance to the authoritarian Trump Administration. The first problem was that only Democrats buy that line anymore, because they are gullible suckers.
The first giveaway was the byline, which included long-time IC reporter Julian E. Barnes, one of the Times’s most obsequious deep-state defenders, who always writes puffy stories about heroic spies protecting Americans from themselves.
Citing only “persons with knowledge” —meaning leakers grinding their axes— the Times reported, “The Trump administration is demanding that American intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets, including suspected spies and potential recruits, to create a master list.”
That sentence, the very first sentence in the story, was an obvious lie by omission. It said “foreign” espionage targets, which is only partly true. Later the story mentioned FISA applications, which are only used when Americans are involved. So DNI Bill Pulte really wants both, foreign and domestic targets. But who, pray tell, could Bill have in mind?
The story continued by platforming all the IC’s worst fears about how Trump might misuse a “master list” of spies, targets, and recruits, but never —not once— explained why new Acting Director of ODNI Bill Pulte might reasonably want that list. That reason is painfully obvious, even to a below-average fifth grader with a sugar addiction:
TRUMP 2.0 ADMIN: “Hey, intelligence community. Are you guys spying on us AGAIN?”
COMMUNITY: “Haha, no, no. We’d never do that again. Not us. We promise. It would be illegal and stuff. Don’t worry, we learned our lesson last time.”
TRUMP 2.0 ADMIN: “Um, that’s terrific. Kudos, keep up the good work, and so on. But … just in case, let’s have a look at the list of who you are actually spying on.”
COMMUNITY: “What!?! No! Never! Only wecan safeguard that information. You might misuse it! Secrecy!”
In other words, it’s the deep‑state version of “I promise I’m not cheating; but no, you can’t look at my phone. After all, secrecy is the most important part of a successful relationship!”
“The clash,” the article explained, “reflects the strained relationship between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the F.B.I. and C.I.A.” You don’t say. But whocaused that ‘strained relationship?’
The cheaters did, that’s who.
The article continued, complaining that prior DNI Tulsi Gabbard “slashed the office’s work force and scrutinized allegations of election fraud based on flimsy or unfounded claims.” It’s like the Times has no self-awareness at all. Flimsy or unfounded claims? Like the flimsy claims that produced a multi‑year Russiagate circus over a British spy’s “pee-pee” fan fiction? Those kinds of flimsy and unfounded claims?
Late in the story, the real issue finally floated to the toilet bowl’s surface. “The reluctance by the F.B.I. and C.I.A.,” the article explained, “showed their longstanding rejection of attempts to oversee their covert or secret programs.” Meaning, attempts by their own boss —whose job it is to oversee them— to oversee their treasured and covert secret programs.
But the President is their boss. And he signed an executive order, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, requiring them to consolidate their information within Bill Pulte’s ODNI— the IC oversight and coordination agency. So the deep staters have no legal basis to resist a lawful order from their boss. What are they doing instead? Resisting. Now, publicly.
“Officials still cannot agree on the most basic details,” the article explained, “including how a list of what are known as foreign intelligence threat actors would be created, maintained and kept secure.” In other words, they are asking so many questions that it is driving their managers insane. “ Some officials said they hoped Mr. Pulte would abandon the effort,” the Times intoned. Just give up.
And guess which bureaucratic cockroach just crawled out of the woodwork to pile on, right after this insider-sourced article appeared? That’s right, the Russiagate architect herself, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Headline from Just the News, yesterday:
On the Democracy Docket podcast with host Marc “Deep State Consigliere” Elias, Hillary said, “I hope there are career and even political appointees in various of the agencies that are slow-walking or refusing to share information with Pulte.” Weird! That is exactly what they are doing.
Here’s a question to noodle over: Is the Russiagate operation really shut down? Or has it just been re-branded? How would anyone know, for certain? Especially given all the linguistic games deep staters love to play. That’s not gain-of-function, not by OUR definition.
The Russiagate operation wasn’t a single switch; it was a network of investigations, taskings, collection priorities, and narrative products spread across FBI, CIA, ODNI, the State Department, and friendly foreign services. Those agencies can rebrand, relabel, and partially close cases while continuing to track the same people, networks, and themes under new program names and different “threat actor” categories.
Without a truly centralized view of “who we’re looking at and why,” inside ODNI and —by extension— the White House, the only way to “know” Russiagate is over is to trust the same bureaucracies that ran it in the first place.
Recall the astonishing fact that Trump’s foreign policy is largely being carried out not by the State Department —whose employees are half CIA, according to at least one estimate— but by people outsidethe government, like Steve Whitmer and Jared Kushner. That’s not even close to normal. It’s a workaround.
Trump’s foreign policy now runs through guys like Steve Whitmer and Jared Kushner precisely because the State Department and intelligence bureaucracy can’t be trusted to carry it out. The deep state obviously hates that workaround. So … Is the IC spying on Whitmer and Kushner? The community would indignantly insist no.
No, they’re just spying on everyone that Whitmer and Kushner talk to, which also conveniently hoovers up everything Whitmer and Kushner say, while adding plausible deniability.
Meanwhile, those same deep state bureaucrats are resisting like Hades to keep Trump’s ODNI from seeing who they’re secretly watching.
And so we are afforded a rare glimpse into the nebulous Spy Versus Spy world and the games spooks play. But the fact that the deep state ran this narrative-shaping P.R. piece —not Trump’s team— hauling the dispute out into the open, means it is scared. Trump’s team is winning.
🔥 Which finally brings us to yesterday’s corporate media headline explosion over another offhand Trump comment. Yesterday, the Hill reported, “Trump says he told Pulte to ‘declassify almost everything’ while DNI.”
CLIP: Trump declares open season on declassification (1:03).
“Bill is there just for a fairly short period of time. But while he’s there, I said you can declassify whatever you want,” Trump told reporters before heading to North Dakota to visit the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library. It’s the human-wrecking-ball strategy. Again. I bet Bill Pulte stays at ODNI longer than anyone expects.
For years, the deep state’s position was simple: “Trust us. We’re not spying on you again. Also, you can’t see who we’re spying on, because you might misuse that information.” Now, Trump has parked Bill Pulte atop that black box and told him, in clear English, “You can declassify whatever you want.”
Suddenly, the same people who ran the Russiagate op are running to the New York Times and The Hill, hoping Pulte will “abandon the effort” before the public finds out what they’ve been up to.
Inside the murky FBI/CIA world described in the Times story, Trump’s comment will absolutely be considered a threat. The same officials who “hoped Mr. Pulte would abandon the effort” to build a master list are now watching Trump tell reporters, publicly, that the new DNI they clearly fear has carte blanche to declassify whatever he wants. Given their “longstanding rejection” of oversight, that sounds like, “If you keep stonewalling, my guy can blow your secrets right out into the open. Go ahead, make my day.”
🔥 That’s not all. When Trump goes to war, he never fights from a single front. Do you suppose it is just another “lucky” coincidence that this week also saw the House hold dramatic hearings on the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control project, with Trump-aligned congressmen claiming the CIA lied about shutting it down? Headline from the Hill, also yesterday: “Former CIA officer: ‘I don’t believe that the research stopped’ on MKUltra.”
The Hill reported that the CIA supposedly shut down the MKUltra project, not because it was wrong, but “out of fear of being exposed following the Watergate scandal.” According to a Harvard paper cited by the article, the CIA burned the records in 1973. Literally burned them, with lighter fluid and matches. Which is illegal in sixteen different ways, and hardly reinforces the IC’s “just trust us” mantra.
According to Wikipedia, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who ran MKUltra, also headed CIA assassination efforts and plotted multiple attempts on foreign leaders (Castro, Lumumba, others) during the same era. Historian and history professor John Lisle, who wrote a book about MKUltra, said this in an online interview:
One of the subprojects that I detail in this book for the first time involves a researcher who implanted electrodes into the brains of rats, cats, dogs, monkeys, donkeys, and literal guinea pigs. His goal was to steer their movements via remote control. Spoiler: it worked. According to CIA documents that I found, the CIA wanted to attach “payloads of interest” to these “guidance systems” for use in “direct executive actions type operations.”
“Direct executive actions type operations” is a euphemism for assassinations. Just saying.
This week, a CIA whistleblower, who testified under oath to the Committee, said that he believes the mind-control program was burned but never really ended.
Do you suppose anyone —anyone in the IC, at least— connected the dots between Congress’s MKUltra hearings and Trump’s casual “declassify whatever you want” remark?
Needless to say, declassification of MKUltra details —which the IC has long denied— would be catastrophic.
🔥 Not since JFK has a president publicly challenged the black heart of the Deep State. Some people think they assassinatedJFK for promising to “scatter the CIA to the wind,” and not without evidence. Certainly, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., thinks the CIA assassinated his uncle, and he tells anyone who’ll listen.
In the same news cycle where Congress held MKUltra hearings and a former CIA officer said he doesn’t believe it ever really stopped, the New York Times hastily ran a leak‑driven story about FBI and CIA officials “hoping Mr. Pulte will abandon the effort” to give Trump’s ODNI a master list. Then Trump wanders out and randomly says he told DNI Pulte, “you can declassify whatever you want.”
That’s three fronts all striking the same target: the permanent security bureaucracy that fearfully insists it can’t be supervised— and certainly not by the man voters actually put in charge of it. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Somewhere, hopefully in Heaven, John F. Kennedy is smiling approvingly.
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Now let’s have a gander at the Supreme Court’s consolation prize, the other controversial decision it dropped on Tuesday along with the birthright citizenship blowout. The Washington Post reported, “Rulings on women’s sports cap a year of setbacks for transgender advocates.”Never mind trans people. Poor advocates. They might have to get real jobs.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday upholding state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports,” WaPo began, “is prompting questions about whether trans rights litigators have made strategic missteps, saddling the ascendant legal movement with sweeping precedents that could hurt their cause for years to come.”
In short, the Court held 6-3 that states canban mentally unwell ‘women’ with stems and berries from playing with actual girls, and that does not violate the Constitution or even Title IX, for that matter.
Justice Thomas wrote a 2-page concurrence (contrast that short shrift with his 91-page blockbuster dissent in the birthright case). He succinctly explained that, “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are.” Ouch.
Cue liberal outrage. Behold how The Hill reported Justice Thomas’s “transphobic” comments. Headline from Tuesday:
It wasn’t completely wrong. Justice Thomas is clearly sick and tired of liberal word games. He wrote, “To use language to obscure reality is to show ‘indifference regarding the truth’— to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens as equals.”
“The ruling capped a year of Supreme Court setbacks for the LGBTQ+ movement,” the Hill explained. Those decisions included setbacks for gay/trans advocates regarding genital mutilation a/k/a ‘transition care,’ conversion therapy bans, parental notification, military service, passports, and parent opt-outs of LGBT school materials.
This was seen as a setback. Activists are wondering whether the whole lawfare strategy was a good idea. “The question right now is not whether transgender advocates should fight or not fight — it’s whether going to hostile courts is the most prudent move,” said Duncan Hosie, an overpaid trans activist at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center.
Chase Strangio, the ironically named co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT Project who argued most of these cases at SCOTUS (and lost), said s/he recognizes the movement needs to “adapt.” But Strangio also admitted that there are no easy answers when “you have every branch of the federal government stacked against you.”
Historians will note one of the strangest (pardon the pun) unanswered questions from the trans era: if gender is just a social construct, then why aren’t there as many biological girls trying to get on boys’ teamsas boys trying to play with the girls?
That asymmetry requires everybody to pretend that the emperor’s genitalia aren’t exposed. Reporters tie themselves in linguistic knots to avoid mentioning the disparity. That is probably why WaPo’s story is framed as a setback for advocates, rather than a setback for “male-born athletes benefitting at female competitors’ expense.”
It was as obvious as the wart on Nancy Pelosi’s nose that every plaintiff in the combined cases was a male wanting to play on girls’ sports teams. There was not one single trans male (born female) who sued to get on the boys’ team.
Even the SCOTUS majority gingerly described the laws as separating teams by “biological sex” and leaned into Title IX’s permission for sex-separated sport. But even they avoided the obvious fact that the legal pressure overwhelmingly runs in one direction —born males wanting in to female bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and sports teams— which is why the debate exists at all.
Still and all, unless the new hyper-woke movement prevails (see tomorrow’s story), this Supreme Court has quietly done more for women’s and children’s rights than any Court since the Civil Rights era. And, I might add, the reversal started after both the pandemic and the Trump 1.0 conservative majority.
Lots of progress.
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Now for a mini-roundup of six quick good-news stories that corporate media is studiously ignoring. My stack of stuff has piled to overflowing during this week’s Supreme Court extravaganza. Enjoy:
📈 Did you notice that corporate media switched off their daily gas price chryons? Headline from Al Jazeera: “Oil prices fall to levels not seen since start of US-Israel war on Iran” Specifically, they have plunged as low as $67 a barrel, down from a peak of $118. You’d think it’d be bigger news and I wouldn’t have to cite Al Jazeera for domestic news.
📈 Secretary Kennedy announced he’s finally and officially ended covid “emergency use authorizations.” Better late than never, I suppose. The practical effect is that, starting in January, covid shots will bear normal liability for injuries. They’ll still be partially protected by the 1986 law, but at least injured folks can claim real compensation. Once again, you’d think this would be bigger news. From HHS’s website: “HHS Secretary Kennedy Signs COVID-19 Emergency Use Authorization Declaration Terminations.”
📈 This week, Bloomberg Law News (again, buried in nearly invisible coverage) reported, “DOD Moves to Order Military Lawyers to Be Immigration Judges.” That’s an order, private. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized involuntary activations of military lawyers for the positions, absent enough volunteers to serve as immigration judges. Just saying, this would be a good move if they are preparing for a deportation surge.
📈 Tuesday, Fox News (and only Fox) reported, “DOJ launches grand jury probe into Marxist mogul Neville Roy Singham’s funding of leftist groups.” The grand jury is what proceeds a criminal indictment, so the leftwing billionaire Neville Roy Singham —who is closely tied to China’s communist party— is probably mopping the sweat off his bald head.
Singham, who lives in Shanghai, is thought to be one of the primary funders of the national “No Kings” protests, plus “a constellation of nonprofit organizations, media operations and activist groups pushing sectarian division, identity politics and support for socialist politicians.” In China last November, Singham openly supported a “new world order” promoted by Chinese President Xi Jinping and the CCP. During his speech, he called the United States a “fascist” nation.
He sure spends a lot of money on politics here. Fox News said it had documented $278 million that flowed directly from Singham into various organizations that “sow discord” in the U.S. According to Fox’s story, Todd Blanche’s DOJ is now all over him, issuing grand jury subpoenas for bank statements and other financial records.
Neville Roy Singham is one step beneath George Soros. Just saying.
Even without prosecution, it will likely dampen Singham’s enthusiasm for funding America’s left-wing activists. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, after all.
📈 This week, Reuters reported, “Trump signs memo making it easier for Americans to fix own vehicles.” The President’s new order backs Americans’ right to fix their own vehicles, instead of being held hostage to dealer-only software and tools. It extended his earlier right-to-repair on farm equipment, which directly challenged the “emissions” and “cybersecurity” pretexts manufacturers have used for years to lock out DIYers and independents.
📈 Finally, Iowa’s new law allowing over-the-counter ivermectin took effect yesterday, making the Hawkeye State the sixth pro-freedom state where the anti-parasitic drug is available without a prescription. The Governor signed it back in April, when Iowa Public Radio reported, “Reynolds signs Iowa ‘MAHA’ law with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
Granted, the number of states should not be six. It should be 25, at least. But we’re getting there. Slow and steady wins the race.
Have a terrific Thursday! Then get back here tomorrow for our fabulous pre-July 4th roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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Rose Rambles... 