Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed on CBS News’s Face The Nation Sunday that the United States has controlled the Strait of Hormuz during the entire Iran war, despite the U.S. still having to negotiate for Iran to re-open the strait.
“You had 45 days of overwhelming combat, which Iran could not manage,” Hegseth said. “Their navy is gone, air force gone, air defenses. It led to a blockade, which was impenetrable for a couple of months. Now you have the underground Project Freedom, which allowed 25 million barrels of oil to transit the strait, to show that we control the strait. And then we did two more days of bombing, because they weren’t really coming to the table. So it’s been military pressure and strength from President Trump that has compelled Iran to this deal, which will be performance-based when it’s signed shortly.”
“Right, but we are not at that deal yet,” said moderator Margaret Brennan. “We are not even at the memorandum. That’s what we are waiting on being signed today.”
Trump has claimed repeatedly
that the U.S. and Iran would sign a Memorandum of Understanding Sunday
to pave the way for future talks on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
The M.O.U. also calls for a 60-day ceasefire and for Iran to immediately
reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“So, tomorrow you will end the blockade?” Brennan asked.
But apart from extending the ceasefire and pledging to begin talks, the memorandum of understanding (MOU) supposed to be signed in the hours ahead does not actually address any of the key objectives laid out by the president, Hegseth and other U.S. officials for the war effort beyond re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. The two sides are set to continue negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, while other stated objectives like seeking out regime change or ending Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities remain unachieved.
Adding to the issue for the White House is the fatigue many Americans and many especially in Washington are feeling as countless promises from top officials that the war will end in days or weeks have fallen by the wayside and the Iran War approaches the end of its fourth month as a conflict.
Reports indicate that the deal will not be signed at a signing ceremony, but rather over a digital meeting.
Other reports indicated Sunday that Iranian officials had not committed to signing the agreement. Iran’s foreign minister also insisted on Friday that dissolution of Iran’s nuclear material would have to occur within Iran’s borders.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic with no background in public health administration, now runs the nation’s health agencies.
Kash Patel, who lacked any senior law enforcement experience and vowed to “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one,” heads the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The same pattern recurs throughout the executive branch.
Trump chose Steve Witkoff, a golf buddy and real estate developer with no diplomatic experience, to manage a huge portfolio: negotiations with Russia, Iran and the Middle East. Even administration insiders were appalled to learn that Witkoff held high-level meetings with Russian officials by himself, sometimes relied on Kremlin translators, and apparently coached a senior Russian official on how best to manage Trump.
A member of Trump’s first administration described Witkoff as “a bumbling f—ing idiot” who “should not be doing this alone.” Two weeks ago, Russia made clear it was tired of Witkoff’s periodic visits and preferred a diplomatic process with knowledgeable working groups and regular meetings.
After forcing out a career prosecutor who found insufficient evidence to indict former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Trump installed Lindsay Halligan — a 36-year-old insurance lawyer with no prosecutorial experience — as the interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan quickly indicted Comey and James but made “fundamental misstatements of the law” in presenting the Comey case to the grand jury. A federal judge appointed by Trump ruled her appointment unlawful and dismissed both cases. When she refused to leave office, a second judge ordered her to stop “masquerading as the United States Attorney.”
Last June, Trump named Paul Ingrassia, a 30-year-old activist who graduated from law school in 2022 and was admitted to the New York bar in 2024, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — the agency charged with protecting government whistleblowers and enforcing restrictions on partisan political activity by government employees.
By law, that position must go to someone “especially qualified.” Ingrassia’s apparent qualifications included serving as a far-right podcast host and a brief stint as White House liaison to the Justice Department, where he pushed to hire only candidates showing “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. After it emerged that Ingrassia had made a series of racist remarks and admitted to having a “Nazi streak,” Republican support evaporated and Ingrassia’s nomination was withdrawn. Trump then appointed him acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, an organization with more than 10,000 employees.
These are not isolated examples. Although he claims to appoint only “top, top people,” Trump has set modern records for withdrawn nominations, turnover among senior officials, and appointments of judges the American Bar Association deems unqualified.
But even though most Republicans have quietly moved on, Vance is still hoping to get enough juice out Kirk’s death to sell books. In early June, the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Vance’s latest memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” which is officially released tomorrow. In it, Vance credits Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk — who is even more hated than her dead husband — for convincing his wife, Usha Vance, to have a fourth child. No, it’s not as a response to the embarrassingly intimate hug Erika Kirk and JD Vance shared at a TPUSA event last November, despite online gossip speculating otherwise. Instead, the vice president claims “Erika told Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two kids with Charlie,” and that’s what changed his wife’s mind.
It’s hard to oversell how nauseating the entire excerpt is, especially since it’s replete with Vance’s overbearing efforts to inject religious language into every beat of his story about his allegedly great friendship with Kirk. It’s hard to read sentences like, “Charlie taught me to love all parts of our Christian communion,” while imagining Vance’s voice, especially as his only gear as a public speaker is to use a snide tone, even when talking about his supposed higher aspirations. But these are granular annoyances. The real question is why did Vance choose a passage about Kirk, who is beyond old news, as a represenation of a book people are supposed to want to buy now?
The 41-year-old Vance makes great hay out of his relative youth on Capitol Hill, right up to bragging as often as possible about his pregnant wife. But this opening to his book tour has reflected how out-of-touch Vance actually is, not just with young people, but with Americans generally. He’s a fuddy-duddy, and he only makes it worse his habit of making bad jokes and then reacting petulantly when people don’t laugh at them. As Donald Trump’s vice president, Vance enjoys the presumption that he’s a shoo-in to be the next Republican nominee for president. But he’s so bad at politics that it increasingly seems he will get trounced in the primary, even as his potential challengers are also sorely lacking in charisma.
The book tour for “Communion” is already showcasing Vance’s incompetence as a politician. He sat for a telephone interview with USA Today last week that was clearly meant to read as “heartfelt,” but only makes him sound like a phony. He tries to cast his days of “blindly chasing ambition” behind himself, insisting now that his conversion to Catholicism has changed him into a man who tries to “focus on the good.” He swears to USA Today that he tries to “make wise decisions and moral decisions.”
Sadly for Vance, that interview was overshadowed by a New York Times story revealing how devoted Vance was to minimizing the relationship Trump had with deceased sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. The story, written by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, relies heavily on sources — possibly Vance himself — who are doing their level best to make him seem like the adult in the room, as the White House top staff convenes to cover for a boss who is cagey about his reasons for wanting to bury documents collected by the FBI on Epstein, who called himself “Don’s best friend.”
But while Vance is portrayed as wanting to release the files, it’s not for noble reasons, but in hopes that the illusion of transparency would prevent people from asking further questions about Trump and Epstein’s long and deep friendship. Vance also floated the idea of letting Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, out of prison for a day to sit in an interview with Tucker Carlson, having set the expectation that she would say Trump did nothing wrong. The fact that she would be contradicting credible sources, including another ex-girlfriend of Epstein’s who says Trump assaulted her, didn’t matter to Vance.
In an article in The Times based on reporting for their upcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan conjured a story that sounds like a farcical fable. It limns a group of stupid, craven, power-hungry people who inflame a panic about pedophilia among the elites, propelling Trump forward, before it all goes sideways and comes back to bite them.
Many in the White House, including the president and Pam Bondi, “had either grossly underestimat The authors reveal the stunning scene where Trump advisers met clandestinely one July day last year to figure out how to get control over the Epstein story.
JD Vance, Susie Wiles, Todd Blanche, Steven Cheung, Karoline Leavitt and others gathered, blasphemously, in the Situation Room — a place designed to steer combat operations, not political rescue missions. Bondi and Kash Patel joined via speaker phone.
Talk about a situation! The vice president was panicky, the authors wrote. He seemed to subscribe to “the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class.” He had been pushing for the release of all the files.
“Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in prison,” Haberman and Swan wrote. “It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.”
Even as Trump used the government to exact petty revenge, Epstein was posthumously getting revenge on Trump for trying to shake him off and claim they weren’t that close and that he was “not a fan.”
“Behind the scenes,” Haberman and Swan wrote, “the Epstein crisis was paralyzing the Trump administration to a far greater extent than the public knew.” (After their article ran, 19 Epstein survivors came out against Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general over his participation in the secret meeting.)
In the Situation Room, someone mentioned an uncorroborated accusation about Trump and a girl in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring named Jen, who told another victim that she had sex with Trump and that he had a predilection for nipples, aggressively sucking and flicking hers. (This was surprising since Trump’s previous comments had him focused on grabbing another part of women’s anatomy.)
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) called Wednesday for former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers to testify before the House Oversight Committee about his relationship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.
Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the panel, told MSNow after a lengthy session with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on Wednesday that he believed Summers was “someone that needs to be in front of the Oversight Committee and that we need to hear from directly.”
Summers faced public and professional backlash after a November release of documents revealed that he maintained an intimate, longstanding relationship with Epstein. Shortly after, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Epstein’s relationship with Summers and other high-profile figures.
His name surfaced again during Gates’ Wednesday interview. Midway through Gates’ testimony, Garcia stepped out to tell reporters that Gates had cited Summers as someone involved in meetings or other activities with Epstein.
“Mr. Summers is someone that we as a committee have not had the chance to speak with, that we would like to speak with,” Garcia said at the time. “It seems that his name continues to come up.”
Summers declined to comment, through a spokesperson, on whether he had been formally asked to testify.
The House Oversight Committee formally requested Friday that Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz testify about his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein, marking the latest step in the panel’s widening investigation into Epstein and his associates.
In a letter to Dershowitz, Rep. James R. Comer (R-Ky.), who chairs the committee, asked him to appear on July 9 for an in-person, videotaped transcribed interview in Washington, D.C.
The committee wrote that it believes Dershowitz has information that would assist its investigation because of his role as Epstein’s attorney, public reporting, documents released by the Department of Justice, and records obtained by the committee.
Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, "Regime Change."
Why it matters: Such a taped leak would be a shocking breach of one of the most secure settings on Earth. Independent recording devices in the Situation Room are forbidden.
- "We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded," an administration source told us. "And we have no idea which ones."
Verbatim accounts of several Situation Room meetings were included in excerpts about the Iran war and the Epstein files that The Times posted ahead of the book's June 23 publication. The authors conducted more than 1,000 interviews for "Regime Change," which covers Trump's second term.
- Tellingly, White House officials haven't disputed verbatim dialogue from the top-secret Sit Room talks, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying about Bibi's regime-change scenarios for Iran: "In other words, it's bullshit."
President Donald Trump blurted a dead-of-night attack on “The Dumocrats” just hours after his Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) birthday bash on the White House lawn.
After being delayed by some nasty weather, the Trump-backed “Freedom 250” organization’s UFC fight at the White House to celebrate Flag Day/Trump’s birthday finally got underway.
The event lasted until well after 1 a.m., with Trump taking to the stage to congratulate the winner of the final bout, Justin Gaethje, at 1:15 after he defeated Ilia Topuria in the final event to take the UFC lightweight title
But Trump was still up at 4 a.m., posting on Truth Social — but not about the fight, his birthday, or the Bicentennnial-plus-50.
Adani hired President Trump’s personal lawyer and reportedly offered to invest $10 billion in the United States to persuade the DOJ to drop its case
“DOJ’s actions doubly undermine global efforts to combat bribery: they appear to reduce accountability for the crime of bribery while also suggesting that quid-pro-quos can successfully undermine the enforcement of our laws.”
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) pressed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for answers following the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) request to drop its criminal case against billionaire Gautam Adani after he hired President Trump’s personal lawyer and reportedly offered a quid-pro-quo deal to invest $10 billion in the United States in return.
“Mr. Adani appeared to engage in transparent influence-peddling to avoid accountability,” wrote the senators.
In its 2024 indictment, the DOJ alleged that Adani knowingly participated in a scheme to bribe Indian government officials and mislead investors to secure billions of dollars in investments—including at least $175 million from U.S. investors, per the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Adani hired a new legal team led by Robert J. Giuffra Jr., one of President Trump’s personal attorneys. In April, Mr. Giuffra reportedly met with prosecutors at DOJ headquarters to try and convince them to drop the charges. As part of his pitch to prosecutors, Mr. Giuffra reportedly included a highly unusual offer that the tycoon would invest $10 billion in the U.S. economy if prosecutors dropped the charges against him. While prosecutors reportedly “told Mr. Giuffra that the $10 billion investment would play no role in the resolution of the criminal case,” the offer reportedly “received a favorable response from at least one senior Justice Department official at the meeting.”
The DOJ then sought to dismiss the charges against him without any substantive rationale beyond the decision to not “devote further resources” to the case. This dismissal would prevent the DOJ from bringing the same charges against him again in the future.
“The DOJ’s decision gives the appearance that Mr. Adani – with the help of one of the President’s personal lawyers – bought his way to criminal immunity, trading the promise of an investment in the United States for immunity from an alleged multi-billion dollar bribery scheme,” wrote Senator Warren.
Within weeks of the DOJ's move to drop criminal charges, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sought to settle its parallel civil case against Adani for $6 million without an admission of wrongdoing, while the Treasury Department settled allegations of sanction violation with an Adani subsidiary.
The senators note that the DOJ's abandonment of the Adani case fits a pattern of favorable treatment for Trump’s allies, pointing to pardons granted to major Trump donors and the DOJ’s decision to decline to prosecute over 6,000 white-collar crime cases in the first six months of this administration, a 59% increase from the last three administrations.
“This refusal to prosecute those accused of white-collar crimes allows guilty parties to get off scot-free, keeping their ill-gotten wealth earned by cheating hard-working Americans,” wrote the senators.
“The reports of Mr. Adani’s offer to the DOJ last month appear to represent an egregious quid-pro-quo offer and a blatant attempt by a wealthy individual to buy his way to leniency – and the DOJ’s decision to seek to drop all criminal charges against him weeks later gives the appearance that the DOJ is an equal partner in corrupt behavior,” concluded the senators.
Senators Warren and Blumenthal asked the DOJ to explain how the DOJ came to the decision to seek to drop the charges against Adani; if Adani, or his representatives, made an offer, implicitly or explicitly, to invest $10 billion in the United States if the DOJ dropped its prosecution of him; and if anyone from the White House communicated with the DOJ regarding Adani’s case by June 25, 2026.
Senator Warren has led the fight to root out corruption and hold the Trump administration accountable:
- In June 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), along with Representatives Jason Crow (D-Colo.) and Mike Levin (D-Calif.), pressed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles following reports that the White House interfered to deliver a lucrative Department of Defense (DoD) contract to Vulcan Elements, a key Trump Jr.-linked company.
- In May 2026, Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed the Acting Director-Designate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), David Venturella, on his decades-long revolving door career between ICE and the private prison industry and his reported use of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel and resources for personal or political favors.
- In May 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) introduced the Banning Lobbying And Safeguarding Trust (BLAST) Act, a bipartisan bill to impose a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress.
- In February 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.), along with Representatives Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) and Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) pressed the Inspectors General (IGs) of 16 key agencies to open investigations into senior Trump officials who were recently lobbyists or “shadow lobbyists” and may be using their roles to benefit their former employers and clients.
- In January 2026, Senators Warren (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Andy Kim (D-N.J.), pressed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on potential conflicts of interest surrounding the awarding of multiple lucrative Department of Defense (DoD) contracts and loans to companies associated with President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
- In December 2025, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) pressed the Trump administration to follow through on promises to limit defense companies' stock buybacks and incentivize them to increase research and development spending.
- In December 2025, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called for then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to recuse herself from the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s review of any Warner Bros. merger due to potential conflicts of interest related to her former employer, lobbying firm Ballard Partners.
- In September 2025, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to Donald Korb, nominee for Chief Counsel for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), ahead of Korb’s confirmation hearing, pressing him on his stark conflicts of interest and urging him to make ethics commitments to mitigate these conflicts.
- In July 2025, Senators Warren (D-Mass.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) wrote to former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin seeking an explanation and further information on his recent decision to start a strategic advisory firm. Austin had publicly promised Senator Warren during his 2021 confirmation process that he would not become a lobbyist after his government service ended.
- In July 2023, United States Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Personnel, and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and United States Representatives Jason Crow (D-Colo.) and Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) introduced the Retired Officers Conflict of Interest Act – a bill that would require public reporting on retired service members working on behalf of foreign governments and creating civil penalties if they break the law.
- In December 2020, Senator Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) reintroduced the Anti-Corruption & Public Integrity Act to strengthen ethics laws and crack down on government officials’ conflicts of interest across the government.
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