CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Back-to-back powerful earthquakes slammed Venezuela on Wednesday evening, collapsing buildings in the capital of Caracas and leaving residents shaken.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the first earthquake had a magnitude of 7.1 and its epicenter was west of the community of Morón, located along the country’s Caribbean coast, about 168 kilometers (104 miles) west of Caracas. The quake had a depth of 22 kilometers.
The USGS reported an even larger 7.5-magnitude earthquake just a minute later. The second quake had a depth of 10 kilometers and its epicenter was 16 kilometers (10 miles) southwest of Morón.
The quakes are among the strongest to strike Venezuela in more than a century.
The earthquakes struck shortly after 6 p.m. local time. People evacuated swaying buildings in Caracas and remained outside, many visibly shocked as they saw entire walls that had collapsed, making furniture visible from the street. Dust columns could also be seen in two neighborhoods of the capital, where restaurants and other businesses are typically busy. People remained on the streets after sunset. Some sat on the ground hugging their pets as dust gathered around them.
“It started off gently and then gradually grew, and in the end, we all had to leave our houses, go outside and gather together,” Caracas resident Hector Ricci said.
Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said the quake could be felt in several states. The Altamira neighborhood in Caracas had “alarming situations” with collapsed homes and buildings, he said, suggesting people were injured in the earthquake and asking motorists to give way to ambulances and other emergency vehicles.
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Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, has been struck by two powerful earthquakes that caused major damage at the international airport and brought several large buildings crashing down.
The quakes – among the largest in Venezuela’s history – occurred in quick succession and were felt in many parts of the country. But the worst destruction appeared to have taken place in and around Caracas where videos on social media showed scenes of panic as passengers raced through the corridors of Maiquetía airport seeking cover from falling debris.
The US Geological Survey said Venezuela had been hit by two quakes: a magnitude 7.5 “mainshock” and a 7.2 “foreshock” 39 seconds earlier. The epicentre was west of the community of Moron, located along Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, about 168 kilometres (104 miles) west of Caracas. The quake had a depth of 13 kilometres (8 miles).
“A seismic event that everything suggests was considerably above 7 points has taken place. There are several complicated areas … very alarming areas from the visual point of view, with buildings and homes that have collapsed,” the interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, told the state broadcaster VTV.
Normally this kind of event is followed by aftershocks, which could also bring down some structures that were damaged by the main event,” Cabello warned, urging citizens to remain outdoors and to stay calm.
A Guardian reporter saw at least three buildings that had collapsed in Altamira, an upmarket area of Caracas that is home to many foreign embassies, after the quakes hit shortly after 6pm on Wednesday afternoon.
Some people were reportedly trapped under the rubble although the number of victims and the death toll was not immediately clear. Outside one of the buildings a person was seen weeping and crying out the name of his grandmother who he feared was inside. Nearby rescue workers and volunteers searched for survivors.
“It was horrible,” said Olky Barrero, a 56-year-old teacher, as she joined the search effort outside one of the collapsed buildings. “We hope to God that there are as few victims as possible. We’re praying.”
“Where I was, it felt like the walls were going to fall on top of us, they were shaking back and forth, this way and that,” added Barrero as two victims, at least one of them still alive, were hauled out of the building’s ruins.
Thick columns of dust could be seen rising from the city while images showed residents fleeing badly damaged buildings with their belongings and pets.
One of the worst hit areas appeared to have been La Guaira, a port city just north of Caracas on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. La Guaira is home to Venezuela’s main international airport, the Simón Bolívar International Airport, and is also close to some of the hillside communities that came under attack by US forces, when Donald Trump ordered the 3 January attack on Venezuela this year to abduct its president Nicolás Maduro.
One large beachfront hotel in La Guaira, Eduard’s Hotel Boutique, appears to have suffered extensive damage with some videos showing parts of the building had been levelled by the quake. Nearby in Catia La Mar, Venezuela’s naval academy and a number of tall residential buildings were also severely damaged.
The US embassy in Caracas urged its citizens to avoid damaged areas, not to enter damaged buildings and to seek secure shelter.
“There are many injured people inside. It’s a disaster,” one man could be heard saying in footage shot outside a building that had collapsed in San Bernardino, an area of northern Caracas.
In Baruta, a suburb of Caracas, civil defence workers used stretchers to carry victims from shattered buildings after a landslide triggered by the earthquake.
Baruta’s mayor, Darwin González, posted social media footage of a woman being recused from the rubble. “We call on people to remain calm and civil at this time,” he wrote.
The exiled opposition leader and Nobel laureate, María Corina Machado, wrote on X: “My heart, my infinite embrace, and my prayers are with every Venezuelan home in these hours of anguish. May strength, serenity and solidarity prevail among us in the face of this difficult moment.”
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“There’s no chance I would support the Republican Party. Not going to support the Democratic Party. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson dropped a bombshell announcement last week that has sent shockwaves across the political world, with potential implications for the MAGA movement and the GOP as a whole.
During an appearance on the “Can’t Be Censored” podcast, which was released on Friday, Carlson revealed that he is done with the GOP after 35 years of support.
In his rant, he accused the GOP of putting the interests of a foreign country over its own citizens, calling it “immoral.” Any guesses which nation he is referring to?
Carlson closed by predicting that many others would soon follow him out of the Republican Party.
A pack of inexperienced communists just stole a state senate seat and two House seats from Democrats in New York, and the media claims some kind of progressive victory. But it was a blue disaster.
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! This morning’s lead stories all offered different takes on yesterday’s across-the-board socialist victories in New York City. It is now open civil war inside the Democrat tent; the lions are loose, the clowns are rioting, and the tamer is off on a bender. We have dots to connect and layers of narrative lasagna to peel away.
As you know, New York City —the Big Apple, the home of Wall Street, and America’s financial capital— has been experiencing a warm, fuzzy, collective moment. It’s ‘warm and fuzzy’ in the same sense as passing out behind an idling trash truck with a stray dog lying across your face. In other words, it’s only comfortable while you’re unconscious, and you might not wake up.
The ‘earthquake’ in Axios’ headline was that every one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s comrades —three of three Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates he endorsed— won their primary elections yesterday, booting Democrat incumbents. Two of them essentially won federal congressional seats formerly earmarked for Congressional Hispanic Caucus members. (Yesterday’s election was just a primary, but in these safe, deep blue districts, the primaries are the ‘real’ contest.)
Worse for Dems, Mamdani’s candidates were all inexperienced political newbies with tons of baggage. One of them, a self-proclaimed communist, once tweeted that she used the American flag to wipe her hands. Another called 9/11 America’s fault because of our “islamophobia.” Another called white women “ugly colonizers” and demanded defunding the police and prisons. Of course, their names cannot be pronounced correctly in English.
“It was a tough night,” complained Representative Greg Meeks (D-N.Y.), a close ally of leadership and chair of the Queens County Democratic Party. Incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman lost to a first-timer in a 30-point landslide. “The progressives beat the establishment in the heart of NYC,” crowed progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). “The energy of our party is clearly with the left.” (I bet you never realized the far-left Democrat party had its own left. It can always get worse.)
By the end of last night, as the returns came in and the outcome became painfully clear, one lawmaker told Axios there was “lots of silence” in the stunned Congressional Hispanic Caucus chatroom. Crickets.
Believe it or not, this is terrible news for Democrats. Axios asked a ‘senior House Democrat’ whether their colleagues were worried about the results: “Yes, they are,” was the answer. “Calling it a headache is an understatement,” the lawmaker said. “Holy sh*t,” said a second senior House Democrat. “Buckle up.” They called it a “huge defeat” for Democrat leadership.
A house divided cannot stand.
This story is about more than “progressives beating moderates” (or even about commies beating Democrats). It was a head‑to‑head organizational test. And last night, the DSA‑aligned, mayor‑backed network outperformed the official DNC party establishment. Establishment Democrats now recognize there are enough DSA members to create persistent intraparty turbulence.
Arguably since 2016, the factions of the Left have been in a stalemate. No clear leader with the ability to unite these blocs has yet emerged, and no faction enjoys a strong enough position to achieve control and lead the Left against the Populist Right. This relegates the Left, at least temporarily, to a reactive posture. Although a providential transformational leader or civilization-shaking crisis could upend the competitive landscape, the American Left has not confronted such challenges in decades.
That was written long before yesterday’s “earthquake” in Manhattan, making the Baron article’s third potential scenario, “Party Collapse,” seem even more likely. In this third scenario, “Through broad and sustained party primary victories and the power of deep blue cities, the Progressive bloc compels the Democratic Party to adhere to increasingly radical positions, eroding its electoral competitiveness in growing swaths of the country and putting an Electoral College majority out of reach.”
In its “Collapse” plotline, Baron explained, “The most extreme elements of the Left react with a frustration that increasingly turns into violence, discrediting the entire left-of-center cause and producing long-term dominance by the Right.” That chilling observation nicely tees up tomorrow’s Antifa segment. Mentally bookmark it.
🔥 Behold the quiet narrative or meme that won’t go away: the Democrats’ “Civil War.” Consider this string of illustrative headlines from just this month. First, the Wall Street Journal, five days ago:
“Our blockbuster report,” the article began, “exposes a billionaire-funded political machine designed to co-opt — or de-fang — a rising tide of economic and anti-corruption populism boiling up in the Democratic party.” In other words: open civil war. Except this time, it’s like the South versus the South. Cage match.
🔥 I traced the ubiquitous “civil war” narrative flag back to an op-ed that Democrat strategist James Carville published in the New York Times a year ago. Headline from July, 2025:
“The Democratic Party,” Carville wrote, “is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war.” War is inevitable. “It’s necessary to have it,” the Ragin’ Cajun allowed, but “it’s even more necessary to delay it.” War cannot be stopped. “The only thing that can save us now is an actual savior,” Carville admitted unironically. (He meant a strong presidential candidate, who can only be identified afterthe 2026 midterms.)
Democrats have no idea how to solve it. Oh, Carville offered plenty of ideas. After all, excreting advice is how he earns his weekly direct deposit. But look at the advice: his main theme was to run on a unified message blanketing all media from Summer 2025 to November 2026, calling for the repeal of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. “That single word is our core message,” he said. “We’ve never had a simpler, more unifying oppositional message,” he opined.
I am not making that up. But who’s talking about the OBBBA these days? That’s ancient history. Events have overtaken them.
They call it “civil war.” We’ve called it the Democrats’ polycrisis. The details of the disputes might be fascinating to political insiders, but are hard to differentiate if you’ve never been a liberal. Basically, the DNC Establishment (which they call the “moderate wing”) is trying to steer the party toward the center —pro-market, pro-Israel— assisted by its donor-consultant class and the blue oligarchs, aiming for practical high-tax policies and proving-by-doing that progressive ideas can actually work, notwithstanding the evidence.
Meanwhile, the DSA and aligned groups are eat-the-rich, defund-the-police, pro-Palestine, trans-everything populist progressives of the Zohran Mamdani stripe. The two sides are incompatible.
🔥 I’m far from the only one who sees the looming threat to the donkey party. For instance, Senior Claremont Institute Fellow and former Assistant Secretary of the Interior Jeremy Carl tweeted yesterday about the Mamdani-quake and, among other things, predicted, “it isn’t going to play well for the Dems in 2026 and 2028. The future of the Democrat party is radical and post-American.”
Until quite recently, we’ve only ever had oneout-and-out socialist in Congress. Adding the two new ones from yesterday’s primaries, next year Congress will now host four total— a 400% spike in far-left radicalism in the House of Representatives.
Four is not a large enough bloc to threaten Republicans. It’s just a few more Squad creatures, plus or minus. Nor are any seats being stripped from the GOP. The seats are being taken from Democrats— in their safest deep-blue districts, where patronage reigned, and the DNC was never before required to spend any real money to defend.
Saying this new challenge from the left comes at a bad financial moment for the DNC is a hilarious understatement.
In his tweet, Jeremy Carl and Axios agreed— this is an incipient migraine of epic proportions. “The radicalism of these soon-to-be Congressmen,” Carl said, “is going to be a headache for Democrat leadership in the House and a gift to the GOP.”
Every precious dollar that Hakeem Jeffries, AIPAC, Majority Democrats, or union allies spend trying, increasingly unsuccessfully, to save incumbents like the Hispanic Caucus members in New York, is a lost dollar notspent defining Trump, protecting actual swing seats, or building any case for a 2028 reset.
🔥 Obviously, outright socialists infesting Congress and occupying New York City’s offices and boards remains an appalling development demanding immediate attention. Communists in any form —including so-called “democratic socialists”— must be squashed like the horrifying insects that they are, before they spread and start breeding under the kitchen refrigerator.
But here’s the bright side, the quiet paradox: the 2026 commie eruption might overall be more positive than alarming. Every crisis produces an opportunity.
First of all, it proves Democrats are starting to crumble under the swelling burden of their polycrisis. Socialism has often been compared to a morbidly obese clown riding a capitalist unicycle and eating deep-fried Oreos. As the clown gets fatter and fatter, eventually the spokes snap, and the whole thing crashes down in a floppy avalanche of adipose tissue.
Now the humongous clown is riding an increasingly wobbly Democrat party.
Taking a brief excursion, pro-Mamdani analysts love crowing about surveys that show increasing numbers of ‘younger voters’ saying they prefer socialism. But the problem with younger voters is their incorrigible habit of growing up.
“Research suggests that there is a neglected dimension of polarization, one driven by age,” the article explained. “Younger people” —whose skulls are full of mush— “are disproportionately liberal, and then drift steadily to the right, becoming just as disproportionately conservative by retirement age.” So enjoy it while it lasts, comrades.
By large majorities, Americans detest socialists. And we really hate communists.
🔥 Which brings us to the second point: Communism is the only ideology that must pretend to be something else in order to politically survive. Exposed communism is vulnerable communism. While it is alarming that so many young Americans could support open communism, it is much easier to fight in the open than behind the scenes.
Look at it this way: It’s hard to convince uninformed citizens that a particular president (whose name might or might not rhyme with “your mama”) is actually a secret communist. People don’t want to believe it. The person himself denies it, and swears support for “fair capitalism.” The media dismisses you as a conspiracy theorist. Etc.
The truth is, if regular Democrats thought they could win elections by embracing communism, they would all be living in communes, wearing red berets, and sporting Che Guevara t-shirts. Oh, they are happy to LARP as secret commies, but the last thing they want is for anybody to call them one.
Implicitly or explicitly, Democrat base voters and donors are being asked to pick sides.And the act of making them choose their tribe-within-a-tribe is itself one more concrete block tied to the legs of the Democratic polycrisis. In other words, forcing rank-and-file Democrats to declare “I’m with the Mamdani-DSA wing” or “I’m with the donor‑backed moderates” doesn’t resolve the crisis, it piles another layer of strain onto a coalition that’s already cracking like a boiled egg.
For most blue-base voters, both sides are imperfect. They dislike corporate donors and oligarchs, but they also worry that open socialists and communists are unelectable or too extreme on crime/Israel/culture. Being pushed to pick a side heightens their cognitive dissonance instead of relieving it. That’s the migraine.
Finally, let’s connect the dots. As the Baron analysis and the Chicago Booth Review article show, the civil war started in 2016 under Trump 1.0 and was boiling by early 2020. It only grew more acute through four years of Bidenomics and lawfare. In other words, Trump ‘got lucky’ again. (TAW.)
It has become increasingly plausible to ask whether Democrats can survive as a national force at all, or if the party is destined to enter a doom loop leading to a degraded, generational wilderness exile. It’s far too soon to declare victory; polls and competitive races rest on a knife-edge. But the polycrisis and the Democrats’ civil war are growing worse, not better.
They are counting on the midterms. It will be catastrophic if they lose. Still, as the old saying goes, it’s not over till the morbidly obese clown in the Che Guevara t-shirt sings. And he is backstage, warming up.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Tune back in tomorrow morning for a special law-and-order roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. You won’t want to miss it.
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I’m still tearing my hair out over being outed from Before It’s News with no explanation, plus my computer is acting weird. Don’t know who to blame things on, so just having patience.
Be aware that my Update could stop at any time due to Internet outages and computer problems.
[OpDis Editor Note: Judy did not send her report yet which means she must be having the problems mentioned above. If Judy sends the report for June 24th, this post will be updated.]
It’s an intelligence roundup: Fauci panics and tries to withdraw offer to testify after Tulsi’s disclosures; Democrats panic as ‘mass layoffs’ begin in the IC; Trump’s pick lands on deep state turf.
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Today’s roundup ties a thread through several breaking stories: more fallout from Tulsi Gabbard’s covid disclosures, as Dr. Tony “Mengele” Fauci tries to withdraw his offer to testify in the Senate and gets subpoenaed; corporate media silence on the ODNI disclosures might be a kind of narrative-setting we didn’t expect; Acting DNI Bill Pulte tag-teams in and makes a dramatic entrance on his first day; Democrats panic over potential intelligence cuts and over potential disclosures; and so begins the final boss battle on enemy territory.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Well, well, well. Mere days after former DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified 1,600 pages of secret intelligence community emails and work product from the first months after the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci has had a sudden, but sincere, change of heart. Yesterday, SFG Media reported, “Anthony Fauci Refuses to Testify Voluntarily Before Congress on COVID-19.” It’s ironic. Having run the world’s premier allergy agency, Fauci has suddenly become allergic to testifying.
Once upon a time, Fauci was everywhere.From 2020–2024, Fauci was arguably the single most ubiquitous public‑health figure in American media. For years, he did daily White House briefings. He had endless cable hits. He got a glossy PBS “American Masters”–style documentary. He testified before Congress countless times. He wrote a book, went on Urban Hip-Hop podcasts, and had a line of bobblehead dolls.
He was universally marketed by corporate media, not to mention by himself, as the trusted narrator of the pandemic story, the sober ‘doctor’ who’d never treated a patient but who would “just follow the science” on everything from masks to six-foot distancing to school closures.
Frankly, until late last week, Fauci practically refused to shut up. Why should he? Folded in his pocket is the broadest, least specific pardon in American history. (The Autopen nearly caught fire the day it signed that one.) To remind you how grotesque the coverage was, ‘enjoy’ this supercut of media lionizing Fauci to his ratlike face:
But that was before Tulsi Gabbard declassified a five-inch binder’s worth of emails and reports showing Fauci personally misled the country over covid’s origins— right when knowing where it came from could have helped end the pandemic before it ever got started. The documents are so damning that corporate media has completely embargoed them, not even bothering to fact-check the claims— a remarkable journalistic omission that’s like the 911 call center calmly listening to phones ring without picking them up.
Amusingly, corporate media’s stubborn refusal to cover the story gave Fox News a hilarious chance to report on their non-reporting:
This is a telling reminder that “media omnipresence” is not the same as transparency. Someone can saturate corporate media while serving the narrative, but can disappear without an iota of follow-up when the inconvenient rubber finally hits the road of truth.
In case you wondered whether Fauci even noticed Tulsi’s disclosures, here is your answer. Before the document drop, he’d voluntarily agreed to testify before Rand Paul’s committee. But right afterwards, he withdrew his agreement and said he wasn’t coming (prompting Senator Paul to subpoena the former bureaucrat’s attendance).
Obviously, we can’t know what’s in Fauci’s head (nor do we want to know; yecch.) But the timing is suggestive. I can think of at least two good reasons Fauci would want to avoid testifying now that Tulsi’s evidentiary blow has landed.
First, social media is buzzing over the prospect of catching him in a new lie under oath, a delightful scenario that could result in prison, notwithstanding the Autopen pardon. So the stakes in testifying just got much higher. Second, there are now 1,600 brand-new documents that he could be questioned about, and these documents are not only inherently problematic, but they also tend to contradict the lies that Fauci’s foul face-hole has previously excreted. So the questions will be much more difficult.
Thanks to Tulsi Gabbard, who never forgot about him, Fauci is now dangling on the hook— and he knows it. But do you know what’s even more interesting than it looks on the surface? Corporate media’s utter silence.
💉 Status Labs, a brand-management consulting firm, recently published an article titled, “Why Silence Is No Longer Golden in Digital Crises.” Modern crisis‑communications theory is clear: not responding is a response. Studies of “strategic silence” show that audiences now interpret quiet as avoidance, guilt, or indifference rather than prudence. In an always-on, AI‑summarized, social‑media ecosystem, every single hour without a statement lets other actors congeal their own narratives in the public mind harder than a cheese casserole left sitting outside overnight.
Some social media consultants concede that, in rare cases, silence can still be strategically useful, such as when a story is fringe, based on weak rumors, or likely to burn out on its own if not amplified. But the consultants stress that it’s more about timing and triage, not actual neutrality. Once serious documents or whistleblower claims surface, “ignore it and it will go away” becomes a terrible strategy, because it concedes the narrative frame to adversaries.
Whenever there is actual smoke, the “silence” strategy is like trying to put out a kitchen fire by leaving the room and hoping for the best. Other consultants have concluded silence is never a valid choice, not least because it’s very hard to tell up front which stories will ultimately grow legs and become stinging centipedes of bad publicity. Article from MyJoyOnline.com, April:
If you look at it through the lens of crisis communications, the near‑blackout of the ODNI/Tulsi Fauci files (and the Rand Paul subpoena, for that matter) on major corporate media platforms isn’t just an oversight. It is actually a form of narrative framing— framing by omission.
Media‑criticism pieces point out that the lack of coverage of conflicts or scandals has long served to shape perception just as much as saturation coverage does— deciding what to leave out is also part of constructing reality for audiences.
Corporate outlets have chosen strategic silence over the detailed allegations and hard evidence that Fauci manipulated covid intelligence assessments and misled Congress. That allows social media, the podcastverse, and conservative outlets from Fox to JustTheNews to concretize a narrative.
It maps almost perfectly onto the crisis‑comms pattern where institutions stay quiet, when speaking up would either implicate them or rope them to a sinking narrative. In other words, by refusing to defend Fauci, corporate media is laying down arms and walking away. They are surrendering the narrative ground to Fauci’s enemies, allowing the anti-establishment narrative to carry the day unopposed.
Why, through their inaction, are they throwing their favorite bioweapons engineer under the bus? It could be that the Tusli disclosure documents are so incriminating that the media just cannot credibly defend them. I’m not sure, though. After all, they manage to sell all kinds of other goofy ideas to progressives, like convincing them that cow flatulence is literally destroying Planet Earth, biological sex is a social construct, and the most important thing about selecting a surgeon is whether they use the right pronouns.
No, I suspect the real reason for their reluctance is that the disclosure documents are so incriminating that corporate media can see that Fauci is going down, and it doesn’t want to go down with him. When the outlets that canonized St. Fauci in 2020 refuse to speak up in his defense now, they’re not protecting Fauci— they’re protecting themselves.
And there’s one more fascinating possibility. Corporate media’s failure to defend him also suggests that Fauci has lost his deep state plot armor. If he still had it, we’d expect to see the usual trio of tricky media moves meant to prevent a needed figure from falling:
(1) the instant fact-checking (“nothing to see here”),
(2) the nonstop ad hominem attacks framing critics as cranks, cultists, or conspiracy theorists, and,
(3) the saturation of feel‑good narratives about the protected figure.
If Fauci still retained a working set of plot armor, we would expect to see the deep‑state/media complex spend political capital to preserve the legend. The fact that they are now mostly avoiding his name suggests he’s no longer mission‑critical; perhaps he has even become expendable.
When she declassified those 1,600 pages last week, what Tulsi really disclosed was not so much Fauci’s foulness (a fact largely taken for granted), but it was the catastrophic incompetence of an 18-agency intelligence community that could allow itself to be co-opted by a single conflicted public health bureaucrat in the most important project on which its living members had ever worked.
Putting it another way: the entire apparatus of American national intelligence, with its satellites, analysts, black budgets, and approximately 97,000 people with security clearances, got played by a 5’4” guy with a bobblehead doll.
So it was unsurprising that Bill Pulte had some restructuring in mind. Pulte, you’ll recall, is the terrific Fannie/Freddie director who referred several Democrats for mortgage fraud prosecution— already quite productive. Now he is also serving as Acting DNI, replacing Tulsi Gabbard until a permanent replacement can be confirmed by the Senate. As NBC’s headline reported, Pulte didn’t waste any time.
Yesterday was his first official day, and NBC says the mass firings have already started. The horror!
For some reason, Democrats are panicking at the very thought of any intelligence agency cuts or more disclosures. Headline from Sunday night’s New York Times, practically vibrating with anxiety:
According to the Times, Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.) and Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) sent a nastygram letter to Pulte ‘welcoming’ him on his first day at work with roughly the same warmth as a cease-and-desist notice. The letter “warned him against making substantial cuts to his office or declassifying information.”
The Warner-Himes letter scolded Pulte. It didn’t even try to cushion the blow, bluntly pointing out that he lacks credentials. “Given your lack of experience within the Intelligence Community,” the Democrats wrote, “it is difficult to imagine that in such a short amount of time you have already developed fully informed views as to how to shrink ODNI without incurring risks to national security.”
This was a fascinating argument from the party that insists the intelligence community functioned perfectly during the pandemic, despite 1,600 pages of documents suggesting otherwise.
Warner-Himes also demanded that Pulte promise not to cut any spooks without Congress’s approval, since he is “just” an Acting Director. “Our expectation is that you will not take actions while temporarily serving as the Acting Director of National Intelligence that are more appropriately left to a Senate-confirmed Director.”
In other words: sit down, shut up, and sit still till we install someone we can manage.
The Democrats also warned Pulte, more than once, to preserve all his records, “including, but not limited to, any actions regarding declassification, publication, or release of classified materials, as well as any personnel actions.” It was an unsubtle threat. Keep your records, because later we are going to give you a microscopic proctological exam.(With footnotes.)
But what are they afraid he might declassify? That is no secret. Unnamed “officials” —presumably Democrats— fear he will declassify classified documents related to the 2020 election or the 2018 Russiagate scandal. “Given the extremely sensitive nature of intelligence,” Warner-Himes wrote, “we expect that you will not declassify properly classified information that would compromise intelligence sources and methods, or weaponize the declassification process for partisan political purposes.”
The word ‘weaponize,’ it should be noted, is doing a heroic amount of work in that sentence.
Ironies aside, if you’ll allow me a momentary digression, declassification is one thing that might actually benefit from weaponization. If each administration expected the next administration would declassify its secret documents, there might be a lot more transparency to start with. I say let’s trymutually assured declassification. At bare minimum it would quickly produce classification reforms, which we sorely need. But never mind.
Tulsi has already cut 40% of ODNI’s staff, reducing headcount to 1,300. But the office was so bloated that the Times admitted, “there is bipartisan support in Congress for shrinking the office further.” So … what’s the problem? The problem is that, “there is also concern about how Mr. Pulte would make those cuts.”
In DC-speak, that means, “we’re fine with cuts in theory, as long as none of ourpeople get cut.”
In an article published late yesterday afternoon, CNN quoted a source saying, “The deep state firings have begun.” The anonymous source “declined to give details on how many jobs had been cut.” Two other unnamed sources said Pulte asked “all offices to provide a list ranking their personnel by Monday.” It wasn’t completely clear whether “all offices” meant departments within the ODNI or something else.
For whatever reason, Bill Pulte is driving Democrats bonkers unlike any of Trump’s other cabinet staff pick, even including misfires like Matt Gaetz, the fiesty Florida Congressman whose nomination for Attorney General had the shelf life of below-average gas station sushi.
Pulte wants to gather no moss, hit the ground running, or however you say it. He’s moving. He is moving fast, against the deep state’s crown jewels, its final castle, its home turf.
Bill Pulte is picking the final boss fight. It is, after all, Trump’s Year of Action. Onward and upward.
Have a terrific Tuesday! Race back tomorrow morning for more essential news and caffeinated commentary. You won’t want to miss it.
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