Trump Adviser Stumbles Trying to Explain How Iran Is a Nuclear Threat

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff is back showing just how clueless the Trump administration is when it comes to warmaking.

Asked Tuesday night by Fox News’s Sean Hannity to explain America’s negotiations with Iran last summer, Witkoff said the Iranians “opened up by telling us they had the unalienable right to enrich. To which we responded … that we had the unalienable right to stop them from enriching.”

Witkoff portrayed the Iranians as stubborn, alleging the country’s officials gloated about their enriched uranium. “It was a clear threat,” he said. “They were boasting about having it.”

Witkoff then added: “They said to us—and this was some challenge—‘You’re not going to get from us diplomatically what you could not achieve militarily.’ Now, yes, we had destroyed their three main enrichment and conversion centers … that was clear. They, of course, didn’t want to admit it.”

Setting aside the insinuation that Iranian officials were literally taunting the U.S. into going to war with them, Witkoff is somehow arguing that the Trump administration destroyed Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities with its June strikes but also that Iran was still actively enriching uranium, and bragging about its enrichment, after these facilities were destroyed.

Witkoff has a track record of being concerningly obtuse on Iran. Previously, experts questioned whether Iran’s nuclear reactors could even produce the type of uranium he claimed they could.

More recently, Witkoff was asked by CNBC’s Sarah Eisen how he thought the war in Iran would end. His response? “I don’t know, Sarah.”

Iran has declared that U.S. tech and banking companies are now legitimate targets.

An Iranian media outlet affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tasnim news agency, released a list of offices and infrastructure run by American companies, including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and called them “Iran’s new targets,” Al Jazeera English reports.

“As the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran’s legitimate targets expands,” Tasnim said. The offices and infrastructure on the list are located in Persian Gulf countries and Israel.

On Wednesday, Iran’s state broadcaster said that “the enemy,” referring to the United States and Israel, had declared financial institutions as targets themselves due to an Israeli attack on a Tehran bank branch, which it called an “illegitimate and unusual act in war.”

A spokesperson for the Khatam Al Anbiya Headquarters, a group described as IRGC-owned by the United Nations, also said Wednesday that “the enemy left our hands open to targeting economic centres and banks belonging to the United States and the Zionist regime in the region.”

Iran has already attacked data centers in the Gulf, striking Amazon Web Services facilities in the UAE and Bahrain and causing outages for banking, payments, enterprise, and consumer services in the region. The move threatens to upend tech companies’ investments, as well as AI expansion in the Middle East.

OpenAI is building a 10-square-mile AI campus in the UAE called Stargate, which has involvement from Oracle, Nvidia, and Cisco. Microsoft is reportedly planning to invest $15 billion in the UAE in the next three years. But if Iran steps up its attacks on these companies’ Middle Eastern assets, all of this will be in limbo.

Many of these companies have also curried favor with the Trump administration, or have extensive U.S. government contracts. Oracle’s chairman and founder, Larry Ellison, as well as Palantir founder Peter Thiel, are both strong supporters of President Trump and may not be happy if their investments are literally blown up. Did anyone in the White House foresee the possibility of attacks on tech infrastructure? It appears not, providing more proof that there was little, if any, planning for this reckless war.

Whoever replaces Kristi Noem is going to have to deal with the mountain of paperwork she’s left behind, as multiple vendors await payments from the Department of Homeland Security, Axios reported Wednesday.

“There’s a mountain of backed-up contracts and invoices on her desk that the new guy will just have to deal with,” a source familiar with the situation at DHS told Axios.

The backlog on Noem’s desk predated the ongoing partial government shutdown, as the result of the outgoing secretary’s policy to personally approve all expenditures above $100,000. Those disruptions are now exacerbated by the shutdown.

Under Noem’s tenure, multiple contracts with immigration detention facilities across the country have lapsed, according to Axios. Camp East Montana, the country’s largest immigration detention facility, had a contract with DHS that expired at the end of February. A contract with a family detention center in Dilley, Texas—which holds dozens of immigrant children—expired at the beginning of March. New Jersey’s Delaney Hall is also operating without a contract, and many small county jails are similarly awaiting payments.

Noem has also delayed distribution of disaster relief funds through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A source familiar with FEMA’s delays told Axios that DHS’s front office was a “giant shit-show.”

“The ramifications of her tenure are going to be felt for years and years and years and years,” the source said. “We’re not really going to know exactly how bad it is until we have a major hurricane that unfortunately impacts someplace in the United States.”

Another source familiar with the situation at DHS told Axios that even if Noem’s review policy was reversed and “everything goes back to the way it was … it’s going to take weeks, if not months, of constant work” to restore funding to DHS vendors.

DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski told Axios that the government shutdown limited certain spending, and he insisted that all possible funding had been distributed.

The Department of Homeland Security wants access to the Federal Parent Locator Service, which is considered to be the government’s largest, most detailed database, ProPublica reports.

The database, which Bethanne Barnes of the Administration for Children and Families called “the most powerful people-finder system that the U.S. government has,” exists so that the government can locate parents who owe child support if they move states or change their employment status. It holds the name, Social Security number, address, and pay of every single employed person in the country.

The Locator Service also holds the names of every single child involved in a child support case, along with their gender, birth date, Social Security number, and family members. It also notes if they or their mother have experienced domestic violence—something that potential abusers within law enforcement would be able to see if given access to the database.

Child support workers at the state level have expressed concern that employers will no longer report new hire information to them out of fear of DHS retribution, which in turn will bog down the child support system and hurt children and their parents in the process.

“And if we’re not learning from employers when a parent who owes child support gets a new job, who loses in that situation?” said Kate Cooper Richardson, Oregon’s former child support program lead. “The one in five U.S. children who rely on consistent and regular child support.”

It’s up to the Department of Health and Human Services to approve this access request. It has yet to comment.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has left her apartment in Washington, D.C., and moved to a military base in the area after reportedly facing threats from drug cartels and critics of her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, reports that the move took place within the last month and that federal law enforcement saw an uptick in criticism and threats against Bondi. These threats increased after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was abducted in January. Bondi joins other Trump administration officials who have moved to military housing, including Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, and Navy Secretary John Phelan.

The Trump administration has not disclosed whether any of these officials are paying for their new accommodations, although a spokesperson for Noem, the outgoing Homeland Security secretary, told the Times last year that she was paying “fair-market rent.”

Many of these officials were targeted by protesters upset with the Trump administration’s policies. At his previous residence in Arlington, Virginia, Miller was met with organized protests from a group called Arlington Neighbors United, which put up posters with his address alleging he’d committed “crimes against humanity” and wrote chalk messages on the sidewalk in front of his house saying that “Miller is preying on families.”

These moves to military bases are a hefty cost to taxpayers. Hegseth’s home on “Generals’ Row” at Fort McNair reportedly needed more than $137,000 in renovations before he could move in. Plus, military resources have to be expended to keep political appointees protected on the bases, while taking away homes from service members. If these Trump officials have angered the public enough that they can’t live among them, perhaps they should reexamine whether the administration’s policies are actually welcomed by the people they are supposed to be serving.