Trump Officials Go on Frenzied Media Tour to Try to Stop War With Iran

It appears that Trump administration officials have embarked on a spree of interviews with major publications in order to talk their boss out of a military strike against Iran.

In the last 72 hours, several stories were published undermining narratives that the U.S. is ready for war, observed Ali Ahmadi, an executive fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, in a post on X Tuesday.

Indeed, several stories cited anonymous sources familiar with Trump’s plans for Iran who warned about the potential for the United States to be dragged into a protracted conflict in the Middle East.

Two sources told Axios Monday that Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine warned Trump and other top officials about the risks of launching a military campaign against Iran. The Washington Post cited people familiar with discussions who’d told them the same thing. CBS News cited multiple sources who said that Trump was warned that military strikes against Iran wouldn’t guarantee a diplomatic deal. And The Wall Street Journal reported on the prolonged misery of sailors traveling aboard the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, after the Navy’s top admiral pushed back on the ship’s deployment earlier this month.

Either the Pentagon was hoping to provide an off-ramp for Trump’s massive military build-up in the Middle East, or it was trying to establish some scraps of plausible deniability before the bombs started to drop. Or perhaps the narrative wasn’t intended for the public at all.

“To be clear, the Pentagon has its own press people who go behind the White House’s back all the time to shape media narratives. [It’s] often done to manipulate the President by having the press describe [him] as weak or indecisive,” Ahmadi wrote in another post, noting that this kind of strategy was not without precedent.

Trump has already pushed back on reporting that the U.S. isn’t ready to strike. In a lengthy Truth Social post Monday, the president claimed that “numerous stories” about Caine’s broad caution toward the Middle East situation were “100 percent incorrect.”

As President Trump makes his State of the Union address Tuesday night, he will have at least six Epstein survivors staring back at him.

Multiple congressional Democrats announced that they’d be inviting women who were abused by convicted sex offender and former Trump confidant Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein Transparency Act co-sponsor Ro Khanna is bringing survivor Haley Robson, who said she was trafficked by Epstein at the age of 16. Robson voted for Trump but has since called for him to be impeached.

Sky and Amanda Roberts, the brother and sister-in-law of Virginia Giuffre, will arrive with Representatives Jamie Raskin and Suhas Subramanyam. Giuffre had alleged that she was approached in 2000 by Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where she worked at the time as a pool attendant, and was subsequently abused for the next two years. Giuffre committed suicide last April.

Representative Robert Garcia will bring survivor Annie Farmer, while Representative Maxine Dexter invited Epstein survivor Lisa Phillips to take her place at the speech. Senator Chuck Schumer will be joined by survivor Danielle Bensky.

This comes as NPR reported that the Justice Department willfully obscured documents containing allegations against President Donald Trump in its recent files—all while claiming transparency.

The State of the Union will be at 9 p.m. EST on Tuesday.

The Department of Homeland Security went back on its decision to suspend TSA PreCheck as part of the partial government shutdown after the White House got involved.

The Washington Post reported Monday night that the idea to pause the program, which allows travelers who pay a fee and complete a background check to get through airport security faster, was hatched by Secretary Kristi Noem and her chief aide (and rumored boyfriend) Corey Lewandowski. DHS announced the suspension Saturday, but then the Trump administration told them to pull back. Otherwise, the pause would have gone into effect on Sunday at 6 a.m.

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson told the Post, “We decided to handle TSA pre-check on an airport-by-airport basis depending on workforce and resource strain instead of a blanket policy. If the government stays shutdown, we will be forced to implement these emergency measures nationwide to mitigate resource and workforce strain. This political game by the Democrats is putting strain on our TSA workers who are working without pay.”

The back-and-forth caused confusion at airports on Sunday, and is yet another example of chaotic decisions from Noem and Lewandowski at DHS. Noem’s decision to demolish historic buildings at DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C. has exposed DHS employees to asbestos, and a new tool to help federal agents identify noncitizens is full of bugs.

ICE, which is overseen by the department, has been exposed for drastically reducing the amount of training its agents are required to get, and the immigration agency may have also ignored warnings about the reckless use of force before two U.S. citizens were killed in Minnesota last month. Coast Guard officials are reportedly upset at how DHS is using their resources for deportations, and the agency has lost the support of most Americans, according to polls.

Noem’s personal conduct has also made the news, from her alleged relationship with Lewandowski to the fact that she fired and rehired a pilot over a missing blanket. She’s pulled P.R. stunts at a notorious prison in El Salvador and made up a crazy story about deporting a cannibal. It’s little wonder that Democrats, including Trump-friendly Senator John Fetterman, want her impeached.

Years before the FBI and the New York district attorney opened probes into Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring, the Drug Enforcement Administration was reportedly examining the glitterati socialite for suspicious money transfers they believed could be linked to illegal drug purchases.

Recently discovered documents from the DEA reveal that Epstein was a part of a sprawling investigation, referred to internally as “Operation Chain Reaction,” examining the wire transfers of 15 individuals.

“DEA reporting indicates the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City,” reads a 69-page memo dated from 2015.

The document was marked “sensitive” for law enforcement, and was a component of a request from the DEA to a drug enforcement fusion center in Virginia for more information on the investigation’s targets, the names of whom—beside Epstein—were mostly redacted.

All in all, the report depicts approximately $50 million in suspicious wire transfers between the 15 individuals. Epstein was suspected of transferring more than $5.6 million for the purpose of acquiring narcotics. The document was released by the Justice Department as part of its rollout of the Epstein files.

Just one other individual was named as a target in the memo: Mariana Idźkowska, a Polish fashion model who allegedly made $2 million in transfers, according to the DEA memo. Her name has appeared elsewhere in the Epstein files, outlining her travels through dozens of emails between herself and Epstein between 2014 and 2015. Idźkowska was 28 years old at the time, frequently called him on Skype, flew to New York on Epstein’s dime, and visited his island, according to Polish Radio.

The DEA file indicates that the drug enforcement bureau opened its investigation on December 17, 2010. At the time of its drafting, the investigation was still “judicial pending,” indicating that it was still underway five years later.

An unidentified law enforcement official told CBS News that the status could have meant agents were waiting on court approval for search warrants to proceed. Another unidentified law enforcement official told the network that it could indicate someone was arrested.

The Department of Justice withheld multiple documents including allegations against President Donald Trump from its release of files on alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, according to an investigation by NPR.

The Department of Justice failed to release documents relating to three interviews the FBI conducted between July and October 2019 with a woman who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her as a child. Only the first interview, conducted on July 24, 2019, is available to the public. In that conversation, she doesn’t mention Trump at all.

However, the woman’s allegations against the president still appeared in a 21-page slideshow included in files. “[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” the FBI said. “In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” This allegedly occurred in the mid-1980s when she was “approximately 13-15 years old.”

A record of the FBI interviews does appear in the files—on a list of discovery files given to Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell before her trial. By allowing Maxwell to retain information that the public does not have, Trump’s DOJ has enabled her to maintain potential blackmail over the president, according to independent journalist Roger Sollenberger.

The details of the woman’s story appeared to match details from a victim lawsuit from December 2019. In a publicly available interview, “Jane Doe 4” claimed that she was “brutally and forcibly battered, assaulted, and raped,” by prominent men she met through Epstein. On one occasion, one of these prominent men forcibly slapped Jane Doe 4 in the face after she was forced to perform oral sex on him. This same man forcibly raped her, penetrating her both vaginally and anally.

These aren’t the only documents mentioning Trump that went missing from the DOJ’s release.

The Department of Justice removed another interview report with a second survivor of Epstein’s abuse, in which the woman recalled meeting Trump when she was a minor. “EPSTEIN told TRUMP, ‘This is a good one, huh,’” the interview report reads. The file was removed after its initial publication on January 20, and then republished on February 19.

Multiple other interviews conducted by the FBI mention the second woman’s meeting with Trump. One interview with a brief mention of Trump was briefly removed and restored last week, and another interview with the second woman’s mother was removed and is still unavailable, NPR reported.

In that conversation, the second woman’s mother recalled hearing that “a prince and DONALD TRUMP visited EPSTEIN’s house,” which made her “think that if they are there then how could EPSTEIN be a criminal,” according to NPR’s copy of that interview.

The Department of Justice has removed and re-uploaded dozens of documents in order to redact names that were wrongly made public.

Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that the government has “released all ‘records, documents, communications and investigative materials’” related to Epstein, insisting that no records were withheld “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.” A recent analysis suggested that the DOJ has released just 2 percent of its total files on the sex offender.

Calls for the resignation of GOP Representative Tony Gonzales are growing as more details emerge regarding an ex-staffer who set herself on fire after he ended their alleged affair.

Regina Ann Santos-Aviles was a 35-year-old wife and mother who served as the regional director for Gonzales’s Uvalde, Texas, office. In 2024, just one day after Gonzales’s primary victory, Santos-Aviles made her affair known to the rest of the staff, and was seemingly punished for her admission. Meetings she set were canceled, and Gonzales stopped traveling to Uvalde—something he had previously done regularly. Santos-Aviles’s husband also became aware of the affair, adding to her distress. She spiraled into depression and started taking medication for it in the summer of 2025. In August, she self-immolated with gasoline and died a day later at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.

Gonzales skipped the funeral and consistently deflected blame when asked. But on Monday, 24SightNews revealed screenshots of Gonzales pressing Aviles for nude photos in 2024, leading to five of Gonzales’s Republican colleagues—most of them women—to call for his resignation.

“The entire Texas delegation, as well as every single other Member of Congress, should be condemning a sitting Member of Congress asking for explicit photos of their staff,” MAGA Representative Anna Paulina Luna wrote on Monday. “As a woman, this is really disgusting to see. Not to mention, it brings dishonor on the House of Representatives. I am so sick of people not calling this crap out. Again, like I’ve said before, this is not the only case of this crap up here. @RepTonyGonzales, shame on you.”

“Stop being predatory freaks and get OUT of office. YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE. This behavior is reprehensible and a poor reflection on the Republican Party, and I will not tolerate this type of moral rot in my own party,” she wrote in another post without mentioning Gonzales by name.

“.@RepTonyGonzales, RESIGN!” MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert wrote.

Representative Tim Burchett called on Gonzales to “do the right thing” and step down.

Representative Nancy Mace took it a step further.

“We’ve filed a resolution directing the Ethics Committee to preserve and publicly release records and reports on all of their investigations into Members of Congress for sexual harassment and unwelcome sexual advances. Tony Gonzales is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said Tuesday. “There is no place for sexual harassment or unwelcome sexual advances in the House of Representatives. And we won’t let the Washington establishment keep protecting its own. End of story.”

“I’m joining Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Anna Paulina Luna in calling for Representative Tony Gonzales to resign immediately,” Representative Thomas Massie chimed in. “Where are the other men in the GOP? Trump is infamous for making terrible endorsements—this is one and it should be revoked.”

Gonzales is currently running for reelection this November.

This story has been updated.

Seemingly nobody in the federal government actually received instructions to send a hospital boat to Greenland.

The Pentagon has heard no official word about sending any such sort of humanitarian aid to the Arctic island, The Wall Street Journal reported late Monday.

Donald Trump announced on Saturday that the White House would be sending a “great hospital boat” to Greenland, though exactly who would be responsible for the project—and why Greenland, which has nationalized health care, would need it—was not clear.

Trump included an AI-generated image of the USNS Mercy, despite the fact that the ship is based on the West Coast. The hospital ship situated on the East Coast is the USNS Comfort. Both are currently in the shop, with the USNS Mercy in the middle of a yearlong maintenance period and the USNS Comfort undergoing repairs that are expected to be completed in April.

Regardless, the Pentagon had not received instructions to send either Navy ship, reported the Journal.

In the days since Trump’s notice, not one agency or office potentially responsible for the unwanted project has recognized that the boat is a real thing that’s actually happening.

Pinning responsibility has been more like a game of hot potato: On Monday, the Pentagon referred questions to U.S. Northern Command, which redirected questions to the U.S. Navy, which in turn sent questions to the White House, CNN reported. The White House has so far failed to elaborate, with spokespeople pointing back to Trump’s social media post.

Greenland has expressed zero interest in Washington’s unsolicited aid package. The island currently has six hospitals that serve its 56,000 residents. Remote parts of the Danish-controlled territory have struggled with accessing specialized medical equipment—though that would hardly be addressed by a centralized boat at the coast.

Furthermore, the issue was tackled earlier this month, when the island’s capital city, Nuuk, settled on a new arrangement with Copenhagen that would allow Greenlanders to access specialized health care in Denmark.

“That will be ‘no thanks’ from us,” Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the Greenlandic prime minister, wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday. “President Trump’s idea to send a US hospital ship here to Greenland has been duly noted. But we have a public health system where care is free for citizens.”

Trump’s offer appears to be just another component to his relentless quest to annex the mineral-rich territory. Trump has claimed that America “needs” Greenland “for defense.” But what exactly the White House stands to gain from controlling Greenland isn’t clear, especially in light of the fact that myriad existing treaties already give the U.S. unfettered access to Greenland as a military base. Danish and Greenlandic officials have repeatedly insisted that Greenland is not for sale.

Donald Trump is dropping his attempt to prosecute six congressional Democrats who made a video urging federal law enforcement and members of the military not to obey illegal orders.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., led by Jeanine Pirro, had sought to indict lawmakers two weeks ago, but a federal grand jury issued a rare denial. Pirro has subsequently decided to stop pursuing the case, NBC News reported Monday night. While another federal prosecutor in a different federal court district could still try to bring a case, there’s no indication that any will.

Trump had accused Representatives Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio, and Chrissy Houlahan, as well as Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, of “SEDITION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” even suggesting that they should be executed.

It was a gross abuse of power, as none of the six lawmakers did anything except express their First Amendment rights and tell federal and military personnel not to follow illegal orders, which shouldn’t bother the White House if it doesn’t believe it’s issuing any. A federal grand jury agreed, and on some level, prosecutors in Pirro’s office must have known their effort was unfounded, as they couldn’t name any statute the members of Congress violated.

Trump’s State of the Union address will take place Tuesday night. It’s not clear how many of the six Democrats will be attending, but at least some of them will. It will be interesting to see if Trump decides to take a jab at them during his speech, or even acknowledges them at all.

The possibility of war with Iran is still very much a possibility, according to Donald Trump.

Top U.S. military officials have reportedly warned the White House against dragging the country into war with Iran, arguing that it could entangle America in a prolonged conflict.

But that is not the narrative that Trump wants circulated amongst the American public. In a lengthy Truth Social post Monday, the president claimed that “numerous stories” about Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine’s broad caution toward the Middle East situation were “100 percent incorrect.”

“General Caine, like all of us, would like not to see War but, if a decision is made on going against Iran at a Military level, it is his opinion that it will be something easily won,” Trump wrote.

“He knows Iran well in that he was in charge of Midnight Hammer, the attack on the Iranian Nuclear Development,” he continued. “It is a Development no longer, but rather, was blown to smithereens by our Great B-2 Bombers.”

Trump ordered a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites on June 22 without the express approval of Congress. The attack damaged facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan, though a postmortem battle damage assessment by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm determined that the missile barrage only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, rather than the “years” that Trump had advertised.

“Razin Caine is a Great Fighter, and represents the Most Powerful Military anywhere in the World,” Trump said. “He has not spoken of not doing Iran, or even the fake limited strikes that I have been reading about, he only knows one thing, how to WIN and, if he is told to do so, he will be leading the pack.”

“Everything that has been written about a potential War with Iran has been written incorrectly, and purposefully so,” he wrote. “I am the one that makes the decision, I would rather have a Deal than not but, if we don’t make a Deal, it will be a very bad day for that Country and, very sadly, its people, because they are great and wonderful, and something like this should never have happened to them.”

U.S. officials, including Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—Trump’s son-in-law—are expected to discuss the countries’ ongoing standoff with Iranian leadership in Geneva Thursday.

A whistleblower report revealed Monday that ICE has been cutting corners on essential training for federal agents—despite what ICE chief Todd Lyons told Congress earlier this month.  

In a lengthy memo produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations, whistleblower documents indicated that new recruits were receiving significantly less training amid a surge in hiring, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.  

The schedules included in the whistleblower documents “indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts of recruits,” the memo stated.

Earlier this month, Lyons claimed that while ICE had reduced the number of training days from 75 to 42, the organization had adjusted the schedule in order to preserve the amount of training. “Five days a week was five eight-hour days. We’ve gone to six 12-hour days,” he said.

Whistleblower documents included in the memo indicated that ICE had also made sweeping changes to its training syllabus and testing requirements for cadets. 

A syllabus from this month compared to one from before the agency’s hiring surge indicated that ICE has cut entire modules, including force simulation training, government structure, criminal versus removal proceedings, and use of force. 

The standards for testing have also been significantly reduced. ICE recruits previously needed to pass 25 practical exams in order to graduate, and now they only need to pass nine. Among the more than a dozen exams that have been eliminated were tests on “Criminal Encounters,” “Judgment pistol shooting,” and “Determine removability.”

“All of these are now instead evaluated, if at all, mainly by open-book, multiple-choice written exams and without any graded practical examinations,” the memo stated.

These changes have come as Americans have witnessed ICE agents across the country practice excessive force, warrantless searches or arrests, racial profiling, and wrongful detentions. A new report Monday revealed that an ICE agent in Minnesota had accidentally discharged his weapon in a hotel room—nearly killing the person in the room next door. 

The memo was released ahead of another congressional hearing about ICE’s apparent abuses. 

Speaking at the hearing Monday was Ryan Schwank, an attorney who served as an instructor for new ICE recruits in Georgia. He claimed that ICE had cut firearms training, as well as legal classes on the constitutional limits of ICE’s authority and protesters’ rights.

Schwank previously tipped off Senator Richard Blumenthal’s office about ICE giving itself permission to forgo a judicial warrant in order to enter people’s homes. It was unclear whether he was the whistleblower behind the documents included in the newest report.