U.S. Embassies Tell Americans in the Middle East They’re on Their Own

The State Department has urged all Americans  in the Middle East to leave immediately, but U.S. embassies in the region are telling people trying to flee that they are on their own. 

U.S. allies within the region are at high risk of being targeted by Iranian missiles, with Iran strikes already occurring across Israel, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, after the joint attack by the United States and Israel last weekend. Meanwhile, Israel has bombed Lebanon. American civilians currently in those areas are being told that they’ll need to figure out their own evacuation plans without any help from their home country. 

On Tuesday, the U.S. shut down its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after Iranian attacks. 

“The U.S. Embassy is not in a position at this time to evacuate or directly assist Americans in departing Israel,” the U.S. Embassy in Israel posted Tuesday on X, instead telling them to check out the Israeli Ministry of Tourism’s shuttle. “The U.S. Embassy cannot make any recommendation (for or against) the Ministry of Tourism’s shuttle. If you choose to avail yourself of this option to depart, the U.S. government cannot guarantee your safety. The information is provided as a courtesy to those wishing to leave Israel.” 

The U.S. Embassy in Qatar said the same, stating that Americans there “not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation.” This has only increased the frantic nature of these evacuations, as demand for transportation skyrockets, prioritizing only those with enough funds and/or status to get out. 

“Called the State Department emergency number because the advisory said ‘depart via commercial means’ and to call if you need assistance arranging departure,” one X user wrote. “Airspace is shut. Airports aren’t functioning. Airlines can’t be reached. After 30 minutes on the line, they read back the same security update posted online.”

Americans from across the political spectrum sounded off on the abandonment of their fellow citizens in an active war zone.

“All those years demagoguing Benghazi and pretending to give a shit about Americans overseas, and now the White House starts a reckless war with Iran and tells everyone trying to escape the chaos that you’re on your own,” liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor said. 

“American tax payers are forced to give Israel $3.8 BILLION every single year, and here is our own U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem telling Americans good luck getting out, you are on your own,” former MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote. “The betrayal is unbelievable.”

President Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran is so unpopular, his own former spokesperson is calling him out.

During an appearance on Fox News Monday night, Caroline Sunshine pointed to a statement from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine, who said that the United States could “expect to take additional losses” as it engaged in ongoing “major combat operations” in Iran.

“I voted for President Trump, and I worked for President Trump because I didn’t want to hear statements like that from my government again regarding American involvement in the Middle East,” Sunshine, who previously served as Trump’s deputy communications director, said.

Sunshine urged the Trump administration to be clear about their objectives for the military campaign, arguing that the president’s supporters did not support intervention in Iran.

“Are any of those objectives in the direct national interest of the United States and of the American people, or is this going to be another regime-change war that the American people rejected and did not vote for?” Sunshine said. “If they wanted that, they would not have voted for Donald Trump as many times as they have and put him in the Oval Office.”

She also called out the administration’s flimsy rationale for launching the strike in the first place.

“Six months ago, the American people were told that we used B2 bunker-buster bombs to completely obliterate and destroy Iran’s nuclear program, and anybody who said otherwise was fake news,” she said. “Now we’ve been told that we’ve—somehow in those six months they were able to restart the program—now we’re told that we’ve completely destroyed it again.”

The White House claimed to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities in June, and as recently as last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that Iran was not currently enriching uranium. Meanwhile, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff claimed last month that Iran’s enrichment level had reached “60 percent.”

Sunshine noted that in addition to assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, the U.S. and Israeli strikes had wiped the chessboard of potential replacements and that Trump had indicated he was ceding power back to the people.

“If all of that has been done, why are we still there?” Sunshine asked. “Because we’ve lost six U.S. service members at our bases in the Middle East, and I don’t think the American people are going to have a very high tolerance for losing more U.S. soldiers unless those objectives are very clear, and those timelines are very clear, and it’s made clear how it is in the direct interest of the American people.”

A total of six U.S. military service members have died in a suspected drone strike on their makeshift operations center at a civilian port in Kuwait. There was no warning or siren to warn the officers of the oncoming attack, CNN reported Monday.

Meanwhile, the number of civilian deaths in Iran has surpassed 700, including dozens of school-age girls.

The Iran war could go on “forever”—if Donald Trump wanted it to.

In an ominous Truth Social post late Monday, the president suggested that U.S. munitions stockpiles could allow the fighting to stretch into eternity.

“The United States Munitions Stockpiles have, at the medium and upper medium grade, never been higher or better—As was stated to me today, we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons,” Trump wrote. “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries finest arms!).

“At the highest end, we have a good supply, but are not where we want to be,” he added.

But that is not the Pentagon’s analysis. Speaking to The Washington Post Monday under the condition of anonymity, military officials stressed that just two days of fighting Iran had already drastically depleted America’s missile defense systems.

“There is concern about this lasting more than a few days,” one source told the Post, adding that it often takes several air defense interceptors to stop an incoming missile. “I don’t think people have fully absorbed yet, like, what that has done with stockpiles.”

Trump acknowledged the diminished reserves in his post, but claimed that there was “additional high grade weaponry … stored for us in outlying countries.” He also blamed the loss on former President Joe Biden and his decision to transfer military equipment to Ukraine, derisively referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as “P.T. Barnum.”

In the weeks leading up to the explosive hostilities, Trump’s top military adviser—Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine—warned the White House against such an attack, arguing that it could entangle America in a prolonged conflict. But the Oval Office disagreed.

“The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight—there is no chance that will happen,” Vice President JD Vance told the Post late last month.

Despite his criticism of the offensive, Caine acquiesced to the president’s whims. Over the last month, he assembled the largest military presence in the Middle East since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a hardware collection across a web of U.S. bases that includes numerous ships—including naval destroyers and aircraft carriers—and more than a dozen jets in the region, reported CNN.

So far, six U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Eighteen American soldiers have also been seriously injured. More than 700 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 176 children, dozens of whom were at a girls’ school in the country’s south.

Former President Bill Clinton may have just put a massive hole in President Donald Trump’s claims about how he and deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein ended their friendship.

In video testimony released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday, Clinton claimed that Trump told him exactly what happened between him and Epstein at a golf tournament for Major League Baseball executive Joe Torre’s Safe At Home Foundation, “20-something years ago.”

“It was designed to combat domestic violence, of which Joe Torre had been a victim as a child. And so I wanted to support it.… Donald Trump gave him the golf course in New York to have a tournament on, and I played in it a couple times,” Clinton said. “Donald Trump would come out and play a few holes with us. And he somehow knew I had flown in Jeffrey Epstein’s aircraft, and he said, ‘You know we had some great times together over the years, but we fell out. All because of a real estate deal.’ And he said that ‘I’m sorry it happened.’ That’s all.”

This completely contradicts Trump’s story that he made the valorous decision to kick Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club.

“And as far as you recall, President Trump characterized the nature of the ending of their friendship as being solely due to the real estate bidding?” an official clarified.

“That’s what he said.”

Clinton’s testimony confirms previous reporting that the two men really fell apart over a 2004 bidding war over a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Jeffrey Epstein was a member at Mar-a-Lago until Trump kicked him out, because Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and he was a creep,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last November.

Clinton’s deposition states otherwise. You can view his full testimony below.

Local authorities in Minnesota are investigating former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino and other federal agents for potentially breaking the law during Operation Metro Surge in the Minneapolis area.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced in a news conference Monday that her office is already looking into 17 instances of “potential unlawful behavior” and asked local residents to submit any potential evidence of federal agents committing illegal activity through an online form at the new Transparency and Accountability Project. Minneapolis is the county seat of Hennepin County, where Border Patrol and ICE agents focused much of their activity.

Citizens will be able to upload video and audio evidence of agents breaking the law, and they can send descriptions if they saw anything illegal from ICE and Border Patrol, Moriarty said, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

“I want to be clear with our community about the challenges these investigations entail, because the federal government has refused to provide us information about the actions of their officers in Minnesota,” Moriarty said.

One of the 17 instances under investigation includes Bovino throwing a gas canister into a park full of residents in south Minneapolis on January 21. The incident occurred just two weeks after Renee Good was shot and killed, and three days before Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents. Another incident under investigation concerns Border Patrol agents confronting protesters outside of Roosevelt High School on January 7, also in South Minneapolis.

“There are many victims whose stories need to be told,” Moriarty said. “We will investigate and pursue charging where appropriate.”

The Trump administration effectively made Bovino its scapegoat for the horror in Minneapolis, reassigning him to his old office in California (and possibly retirement after that) after mass protests in the city. But he has largely escaped criminal charges, even from previous misdeeds in Chicago.

That could soon change. A local jurisdiction taking steps to investigate and even charge ICE and Border Patrol agents over illegal actions as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda is a big step. These agents have rarely been held accountable, and have in fact been protected from prosecution, as White House officials such as Stephen Miller have gone as far as to claim that they have “federal immunity.” Hennepin County is about to test that, and if it’s successful, may inspire other localities.

A federal judge has revoked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s ability to restrict members of Congress from entering ICE facilities. 

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb ruled that Noem’s requirement that members of Congress give her a week’s notice before entering an immigration facility is illegal, given that it relies on funding Congress warned could not be used to block oversight from lawmakers.

“The Parties’ arguments on this point raise complex questions regarding the technical details of DHS budgeting and the application of appropriations law that the Court finds difficult to resolve on this preliminary factual record,” Good wrote. “Luckily, the Court does not need to fully address those disputes to resolve the present motion, because Defendants’ proposed solution suffers from a fatal flaw: It assumes that [One Big Beautiful Bill Act] funds are available for all of the costs necessary to promulgate and enforce the policy.” 

While DHS appealed immediately, others hailed the ruling as a tribute to common sense.  

“Despite the Trump administration’s unlawful attempts to block Members of Congress from conducting oversight, a federal court just affirmed in Neguse et al. v. ICE et al.—ONCE AGAIN—our clear right to conduct unannounced oversight visits,” Democratic Representative Joe Neguse wrote on X. “We will keep fighting to ensure the rule of law prevails.”

Multiple Democratic politicians have been denied entry, roughed up, or outright arrested trying to enter ICE facilities since President Trump returned to office last year. 

Last May, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Representative LaMonica McIver were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement while trying to gain entry to Delaney Hall. Last June, Senator Alex Padilla was literally dragged out of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference in Los Angeles while trying to ask a question. That same month, New York City comptroller and then–mayoral candidate Brad Lander was taken from the hallways of a Lower Manhattan immigration court and detained by masked ICE agents. 

Yet another Republican is calling it quits on his congressional career.

Montana Representative Ryan Zinke announced Monday that he will not seek reelection, ending his time in Washington.

In a letter to his constituents, Zinke said that the decision was predicated on recent health issues, writing that he had undergone “multiple surgeries” since 2023 to correct injuries he sustained while serving as a Navy SEAL.

“The injuries sustained from a career in Special Operations are not immediately life threatening, but the repair cannot be deferred any longer and recovery will require considerable time,” Zinke wrote. “My judgement and experience tell me it is better for Montana and America to have full-time representation in Congress than run the risk of uncertain absence and missed votes.”

The Whitefish native has represented Montana since 2014, when he garnered national attention on the campaign trail for referring to Hillary Clinton as the Antichrist. Between stints on Capitol Hill, Zinke was tapped by Donald Trump to serve as his first-term interior secretary. Zinke worked in that job for just two years, from 2017 to 2019, but nonetheless racked up 18 federal investigations into his behavior, ranging from probes into numerous alleged Hatch Act violations to misuse of public funds.

Zinke’s decision further imperils the Republican House majority, which currently has 218 Republicans to 214 Democrats. The lower chamber also has three vacancies due to the November resignation of Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill, now New Jersey governor, as well as the January resignation of Representative Majorie Taylor Greene and the passing that same month of Representative Doug LaMalfa.

All 435 House seats will be contested in the upcoming midterm elections, a reality that has Republicans fretting, as preceding elections have suggested that the cycle could be overtaken by a tsunami-esque “Blue Wave.” At least three Republican districts are confidently expected to flip (they include two districts in California and another in Utah), while the Nebraska race to replace retiring Republican Representative Don Bacon is likely to go to Democrats as well, according to the Cook Political Report.

Four Democrats had already filed to run in their party’s primary to replace Zinke before he announced his retirement.

Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer is under investigation after having been caught using taxpayer funds for personal reasons, including to throw herself a birthday party.

Last year, shortly after Chavez-DeRemer was sworn in, she and her senior staff wanted to have a birthday party at the Department of Labor’s headquarters at the Frances Perkins Building, The New York Times reports. But when staff worried about using the department’s funding, DeRemer and her staff decided to call it a swearing-in celebration.

The party went ahead with dozens of political staffers as guests, who sang “Happy Birthday” to Chavez-DeRemer, who then blew out the candles on a birthday cake. After the party, her chief of staff, Jihun Han, sent a memo to the entire department threatening “serious legal consequences” against any staffers who spoke with the press.

Weeks afterward, Chavez-DeRemer told the House Appropriations Committee, “I did not have a birthday party.” Ultimately, though, the Times obtained a photo from a party guest showing Chavez-DeRemer blowing out the candles on her birthday cake.

The party is just one glaring example of alleged misconduct by Chavez-DeRemer. She is now under investigation by the department’s inspector general, former Republican Representative Anthony D’Esposito, for misusing department funds, including to travel around the country on personal trips, and other misconduct, such as an alleged affair with someone on her security team.

Thanks to her jet-setting, the secretary herself doesn’t spend much time at the office, with Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling running the department day-to-day. Han and her deputy chief of staff, Rebecca Wright, have been placed on leave during the investigation. On top of that, Chavez-DeRemer’s husband is barred from Labor Department headquarters for allegedly sexually harassing female staffers.

When Donald Trump nominated Chavez-DeRemer for the post, she was a controversial pick for Republicans, who saw her as too pro-labor for a GOP congresswoman from Oregon, and some Democrats were cautiously optimistic. But now, it seems she fits into the endemic corruption of Trump’s White House, and should consider herself lucky her own misdeeds went unnoticed until now.

The state of New Mexico attempted to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s state residence in 2019. Then the Trump administration got involved.

Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, located roughly 30 miles south of Santa Fe in the high desert, was rumored to be a hotbed of illicit activity. Some of the notorious child sex offender’s victims, including Virginia Giuffre, claimed they were trafficked at the New Mexico estate, and emails issued by ranch staffers allege that at least two girls were killed and buried under the building by Epstein’s order, according to documents made public by the Justice Department via the Epstein files. Epstein even contemplated turning the estate, which he purchased in 1993, into a headquarters for genetic engineering experiments.

Yet somehow, the property—dubbed “Playboy Ranch” among locals—has never properly been investigated, according to New Mexico officials.

A report by The New York Times, published Monday, revealed that state officials had every intention to do so—until the first Trump administration intervened in 2019. The government ordered New Mexico to turn over its probe to federal prosecutors, but then they closed the case, according to recently unsealed records obtained by the Times.

Last month, New Mexico lawmakers voted unanimously to pursue another investigation into Zorro Ranch, creating a bipartisan “truth commission” to examine the site’s history. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez also ordered his office to reopen the criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch, demanding “immediate access to the complete, unredacted federal case file.”

“We need to find out how he was able to operate without any accountability,” Andrea Romero, the leader of the truth commission, told the Times. “We have to understand what allowed this to happen.”

The sequence of events isn’t too dissimilar to what occurred between FBI agents and New York detectives in the immediate aftermath of Epstein’s death. Five days after the sex trafficker was arrested at a New Jersey airport in July 2019, the FBI “directed” New York law enforcement to cease its Epstein investigations, including the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit, according to FBI emails recently released by the Justice Department as part of the congressionally mandated disclosure of the federal government’s Epstein investigation.

That directive was allegedly an attempt to prevent “competing cases” and quell internal anxieties that the public—and the FBI’s international partners in the U.K.—would be mixed up by news reports of multiple investigations from different agencies. But as evidenced by New Mexico’s Zorro Ranch predicament, not every lead was fully inspected by Donald Trump’s first administration.

In contrast to President Donald Trump’s vacillating rationale, it appears the United States did not go to war with Iran to wipe out its nonexistent nuclear program, respond to a nonsensical threat to American elections, or implement a poorly conceived regime change.

We did it because Israel asked us to.

In retracing Trump’s unilateral (and illegal) decision to go to war, it’s clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent months lobbying the White House, and Trump’s aides did little to dissuade the president from joining in on the attack, The New York Times reported Monday.

Netanyahu knows a lot about illegal wars. The Israeli military’s American-backed genocide in Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 70,000 Palestinians. Now the two superpowers have launched a new campaign that has already killed more than 550 people in Iran, including dozens of school-age girls.

Discussion about a military strike on Iran began in December, when Netanyahu visited the president’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. Netanuyahu asked Trump’s permission to launch strikes on Iran’s missile sites in the coming months.

In January, Trump threatened to strike Iran in order to stop the government’s massacre of protesters, promising that help was “on the way!” But Netanyahu reached out to Trump asking him to delay the strike until the end of the month. He argued that the U.S. wasn’t ready to go to war, and Trump agreed.

As January crept on, Netanyahu kept regular contact with the White House, including Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and special envoy Steve Witkoff. Eventually, the U.S. military presented an expansive list of options for military action.

Netanyahu visited Trump again on February 11, as the U.S. was set to resume negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. But the prime minister was there to ensure the president was ready to go to war, the Times reported.

There was little pushback among White House officials.

During a meeting in the situation room on February 18, Vance—who had previously spoken against U.S. intervention—said that if the U.S. did launch a military campaign in Iran, it should “go big and go fast,” people familiar with his remarks told the Times. The same day, Israel raised its alert level, indicating that a joint attack was imminent.

In that same meeting, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that a larger effort to topple the regime could lead to significant American casualties, an argument that was widely circulated to the press. Trump claimed that reports of Caine’s reluctance were “100 percent incorrect.”

Diplomacy, it seems, was never really an option. Negotiations spearheaded by Witkoff and Jared Kushner presented a kind of ruse to give Trump time to oversee a massive military buildup in the Middle East.

Speaking to Times Sunday, Trump said, “Toward the end of the negotiation, I realized that these guys weren’t going to get there. I said, ‘Let’s just do it.’”

After the U.S. and Israel launched their initial volley of strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, Netanyahu gushed that Trump had helped him realize his dream: “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years,” he said.