Kash Patel Enlists UFC Fighters to Train the FBI

FBI Director Kash Patel announced on Wednesday that his agents will be training with UFC fighters, further solidifying the sport’s connection to the right wing and raising more questions as to what exactly Patel does all day.

“I’m thrilled to announce this historic seminar between the FBI and the UFC at Quantico,” Patel said in a statement. “This is a tremendous opportunity for our FBI agents to learn and train with some of the greatest athletes on earth—helping the world’s premier law enforcement agency be even better prepared to protect the American people.”

The training will occur this weekend at the FBI Academy in Quantico, after Patel proposed the collaboration last year. UFC CEO Dana White has also been a vocal supporter of President Trump, and there is set to be a UFC event on the White House lawn this summer.

The news follows a rough news cycle for Patel, in which he came under scrutiny for downing beer with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team while the FBI was in the middle of the missing persons search for Savannah Guthrie. This UFC training session, his frequent jet flights on the taxpayers’ dime, his jacket meltdown, and his girlfriend’s security detail all suggest that Patel is more concerned with the perks of the job than the actual job.

Having Iranian sleeper cells floating around the country is apparently no big deal to the president.

Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday that he was well aware of the foreign chaos agents’ locations, though he didn’t express any immediate plans to do anything about it. Instead, he regurgitated his typical talking points, opting to heap responsibility for the problem onto former President Joe Biden rather than address the potentially dangerous situation directly as America’s current leader.

“Have you been briefed about how many Iran sleeper cells there could be inside the U.S. right now?” asked a journalist.

“I have been, and a lot of people came in through Biden with the stupid open border. But we know where most of them are, we’ve got our eye on all of them—I think,” Trump said.

“They came in through the open border policies of sleepy Joe Biden, one of the worst—the worst president—in the history of our country. We’ve got our eyes on all of them, but the war itself is being prosecuted at a level that nobody has seen before. It’s pretty amazing to watch,” Trump added.

Another reporter questioned Trump about a leaked FBI memo that indicated Iran could exact revenge on the U.S. by way of an offshore boat off the coast of California, potentially ushering a drone swarm to the country’s Pacific coast.

But Trump was remarkably cavalier in his reply.

“It’s being investigated, but you have a lot of things happening, and all we can do is take them as they come.”

He then took a moment to fluff himself up for wielding America’s enormous military against Iran, an act of war that has yet to be approved by Congress.

“The war itself is being prosecuted as well as anybody has ever seen, and this is other countries telling me too,” Trump repeated. “Big countries, powerful countries, they said they’ve never seen anything like it. And they also agree with what I’m doing. They say it’s an evil country, and it’s been for 47 years that way.”

Senator John Fetterman appeared not to understand why Democrats want to investigate the deadly strike that killed dozens of Iranian children. 

During an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Wednesday night, Fetterman was asked to explain why he hadn’t signed onto a letter from Senate Democrats that questioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the February 28 strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, a girls’ primary school miles from Tehran. The strike killed 175 people, many of them young girls.

“Well, because we all agree that it’s a tragedy having the school hit, and we all agree now for an investigation,” Fetterman said. “What I don’t agree with the rest of my colleagues in the House is that it’s a war of choice, or it’s dumb, or all the things my colleagues have described, you know, this operation. I think it’s a good thing, and I support that.”

Fetterman was referring to a line in the letter describing Donald Trump’s military campaign as “a war of choice without Congressional authorization.” The letter did not describe the war as “dumb.”

Fetterman noted that the Pentagon was already investigating the strike. A preliminary report determined that the deadly attack was the result of a targeting error by the U.S. military as it conducted a strike on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base next door.

“It seems that they’ve already acknowledging all those things. I think largely that letter, it was rendered moot at this point, after what has already come out,” he said.  

Fetterman added: “I would remind everybody listening right now, the United States never, ever targets civilians. Iran does.”

But that’s exactly why an investigation is necessary: to ensure that the Pentagon took all necessary steps to prevent civilian casualties. In the letter, Senate Democrats pressed Hegseth to provide details on the analysis conducted on the building before the strike, the use of artificial intelligence, the role of civilian harm mitigation, and the Pentagon’s compliance with rules to prevent war crimes. 

Fetterman is naïvely—or callously—giving the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt while the U.S. and Israel bomb schools, hospitals, cultural heritage sites, and residential areas with impunity.

Fetterman ranted that the “left media” seemed to care much more “about this hospital” than about Iran massacring “tens of thousands of their young people.” (Some of us are old enough to remember when Fetterman cheerleaded Israel killing thousands of young people in Gaza.)

“Whether it’s The New York Times, they’re making it more and more, trying to convince America that this has been a disaster or things are out of control, and that’s just categorically untrue,” he said. 

When Collins tried to explain why the media would cover a strike that killed dozens of schoolchildren, Fetterman became defensive.

“It is appropriate to cover it, you know, it’s a tragedy, absolutely. And if we were on it, it’s appropriate to apologize,” he said, looking defeated. 

Donald Trump’s call with G7 leaders Wednesday left them confused about what the president wants from the Iran war.

Trump sent mixed signals to the leaders of the world’s seven leading economies in a video call hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, unnamed sources told Axios. These sources said that Trump was “ambiguous and noncommittal,” leaving some on the call thinking that he wants a quick end to hostilities, while others thought that he was digging in for a long war.

“It will be up to the president of the United States to clarify both his final objectives and the pace he intends to give to the operations,” Macron said following the call.

Trump’s public comments on Wednesday outside of the call haven’t cleared things up. He told Axios that the war with Iran was going to end “soon,” claiming that “there is practically nothing left” to target in the country. But while leaving the White House for a rally in Kentucky, he said the U.S. was “not done” attacking Iran. When he was asked what more the military had to do, he replied, “More of the same.”

At the rally, Trump told his supporters, “You never like to say too early you won. We won. In the first hour it was over.” Minutes later, he contradicted himself, saying, “We don’t want to leave early, do we? We gotta finish the job, right?”

Yet again, the president is showing us that he is making up his plans for Iran as he goes along. Is destroying the country’s nuclear program the goal, or is it regime change? And what is he going to do about the state of oil prices now that Iran has seized the Strait of Hormuz? The rest of the world will have to keep guessing as more and more people are killed.

Former slumlord President Donald Trump reportedly told Speaker Mike Johnson that “no one gives a [bleep] about housing.”

Punchbowl News reported that Trump told Johnson this in private conversation earlier this week, and the House speaker then relayed it to a small committee of GOP leadership on Tuesday. The report was based on four sources who heard Johnson recount his conversation with the president as he tried to convey that a housing bill isn’t nearly as important as the SAVE Act, the GOP plan to force every American to prove their citizenship to vote—a blatant voter-suppression attempt.

Americans absolutely give a shit about housing. There are hundreds of thousands of people sleeping on the street every night. Many millennials and Gen Zers can’t afford to pay rent in this country, much less buy a house—making sure that the central tenet of the so-called “American dream” will never be a reality.

Trump himself campaigned on a kind of economic populism and uplifting the American working class (while blaming immigrants in the process, of course). And while his grift has been obvious to some for a while, millions of Americans actually believed in him and voted for him. At least now they have something showing them he couldn’t care less.

“Americans don’t give a shit about housing costs. They want DC to prioritize policies that actually improve their everyday lives,” Vox’s Eric Levitz wrote sarcastically. “Such as disenfranchising people who lack passports, putting a new Khamenei in charge of Iran, and making the Kennedy Center’s programming less woke.”

Jeffrey Epstein reportedly paid a settlement to a woman who also accused Donald Trump of sexually abusing her. 

Representative Ro Khanna told PBS News Hour’s Ali Rogin Wednesday that Richard Kahn, Epstein’s accountant, confirmed that the alleged sex trafficker’s estate had made a payment to a woman who accused both Epstein and Trump. Kahn did not say how much the settlement was, or when it was paid, during his deposition in front of the House Oversight Committee earlier in the day. 

“If it was fake, then why was she paid a settlement? There must be some validity to it,” Khanna said, according to Rogin. “Now, I’m not saying validity necessarily against Donald Trump. Maybe it was against Epstein. But he did confirm that there was a settlement payout.”

Khanna said that the Oversight Committee was “exploring” interviewing this woman as part of its investigation into Trump’s ties to Epstein. 

It wasn’t immediately clear which survivor of Epstein’s abuse Khanna was referring to. 

Buried in the FBI’s massive trove of documents were multiple interviews with a woman who claimed Trump had forced her to perform oral sex, punched her in the head, and raped her when she was between 13 and 15 years old. The woman, according to her testimony to the FBI, was abused by Epstein for years, and was harassed into silence for years after the abuse ended.  

The Department of Justice had previously removed the record of this woman’s FBI interviews from its Epstein database. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the rereleased testimony amounted to “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.”

Last week, the FBI released a memo detailing an interview with yet another victim of Epstein’s who claimed Trump was on speakerphone while she was being abused. 

Journalists are getting better at asking an aging Donald Trump hard-hitting questions, and the man is starting to get truly ticked off.

A few days after New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh went semi-viral for confronting Trump about his assertion that Iran had possibly used a Tomahawk missile to bomb its own school, the president snapped at PBS News Hour reporter Liz Landers on Wednesday after she dared to push back against his false claims about the 2020 election.

After Landers asked Trump why the FBI had seized records related to the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, on Monday, he replied, “Well, they probably thought the election was rigged, right?”

“It wasn’t rigged, though,” Landers shot back.

“Oh really—how do you know?” Trump said.

“Your own attorney general in 2020 said there was no measurable voter fraud to change the outcome of the election,” Landers said.

“You don’t think it was rigged?” Trump said. “I think it was rigged.”

“Sir, where’s the evidence of that?” Landers pressed.

“You say it wasn’t rigged, you’re a rotten reporter,” Trump said, before walking away from Landers to take another question.

A plethora of lawsuits, audits, and internal reviews have concluded that there was no systemic voting fraud in the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden by 38 electoral votes. As Landers noted, even Bill Barr, a Trump-appointed attorney general, concluded there was no widespread fraud after an investigation by the Department of Justice.

In fact, the closest thing to fraud in the 2020 election was a Trump-supporting Colorado county clerk named Tina Peters, who allowed a shady third party access to state voting machines. (Peters was eventually sentenced to nine years in jail, though Trump is now trying to get her clemency.)

But of course, Trump threw a massive hissy fit after losing power, to the point of kinda-sorta trying to stage a coup, so many MAGAcolytes in office and in the media continue to parrot his false claims today.

Donald Trump’s war on Iran is backfiring in a critical area: Iran is exporting more oil through the Strait of Hormuz than before.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Iran has taken control of the key waterway and effectively shut out the rest of the oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf. Since the war began February 28, Iran has loaded seven tankers, and in the past week, tankers have loaded an average of 2.1 million barrels of oil each day, more than its 2.0 million barrel average in February.

China, one of Iran’s biggest oil importers, appears to be taking most of the oil. And almost all ship traffic moving across the strait is “linked to Iran or China,” Christopher Long, head of intelligence at U.K. maritime-security company Neptune P2P Group, told the Journal.

Trump has claimed that it’s safe for ships to traverse the strait and tried to bully oil companies into challenging Iran, to no avail. He hasn’t followed up on his offer to use the U.S. Navy to escort ships, and even if he did, there are now more stopped ships than the Navy can handle. And now, Iran has reportedly begun laying mines in the strait, complicating naval traffic further.

“If for any reason mines were placed, and they are not removed forthwith, the Military consequences to Iran will be at a level never seen before. If, on the other hand, they remove what may have been placed, it will be a giant step in the right direction!” Trump angrily posted on Truth Social Tuesday. On Wednesday, the U.S. Central Command said it had destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying ships.

But none of that seems to have affected Iran’s control of the strait, and its ability to export oil. It’s a scenario that the U.S. should have seen coming, considering that closing off the strait has been threatened by Iran before and is a long-standing pillar of Iranian defense strategy. To make matters worse, the U.S. decommissioned four anti-mine ships stationed in the Persian Gulf in January. Right now, Iran is controlling one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes for oil, and is exposing Trump’s lack of planning for this war.

We’re almost two weeks into the Iran war, and President Donald Trump still isn’t sure what his goals are.

Asked on Wednesday whether he would be able to declare victory in the Middle East if Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—becomes the new supreme leader of Iran, Trump balked.

“I don’t want to comment on that,” the president said.

Trump then changed the subject, launching into one of his patented rambling monologues: “I spoke with various countries, the leaders of various countries. You’ll have a list. And they said they’ve never seen anything like it.… We have the greatest military in the world by far.”

In comments given just a few hours later, Trump added that the U.S. “knocked out, twice, [Iranian] leadership. Now they have a new group coming up. Let’s see what happens to them.”

While Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a brutal ruler, quashing local dissent and sometimes executing citizens who defied his regime, Mojtaba Khamenei may be even worse for regular Iranians. A report from the Atlantic Council noted that Mojtaba is close with the “most ideologically extremist clerics” in Iran, and some experts say he is more likely to sink resources into building nuclear weapons than his father. Mojtaba was closely involved in his father’s decision-making throughout the latter’s time as supreme leader.

Trump said he was “not happy” with the Iranian Council of Experts’ decision to appoint the younger Khamenei as supreme leader last week. “I have to be involved in the appointment,” he told Axios at the time.

By not answering what should be an easy question, Trump is continuing what seems to be his Cabinet’s prevailing strategy surrounding the war: Be as unclear and disorganized as possible. Trump and his officials have not been able to decide whether the Iran war is a war or not, whether it’s over or just getting started, what caused the U.S. to get involved, and what exactly our demands for the people we’re bombing should be.

The Iran war ending would obviously be a good thing. But if all that changed is that we assassinated the ayatollah and now have his even crazier son in charge of the country, then what the hell was all this for?

President Donald Trump has doubled down on playing dumb about killing dozens of school-age girls in Iran.

Outside the White House Wednesday, a reporter asked Trump about a new U.S. military report that found the United States was responsible for a deadly missile strike on a girls’ primary school miles from Tehran. The strike killed 175 people, many of them young girls.

“As commander in chief do you take responsibility for that?” the reporter asked.

“That is—what? What did you—? For what?” Trump said, as a helicopter whirred loudly behind him. The reporter repeated the question.

“I don’t know about it,” Trump said before moving on.

Earlier this week, Trump spoke at length about a report that the strike had involved a Tomahawk missile—a weapon primarily used by the U.S. military—and claimed Iran could be behind it. When pressed on his accusation, he admitted: “I just don’t know enough about it.”

Trump said Saturday that it was his “opinion” that the strike was done by Iran. “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said while on Air Force One. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who stood lurking behind the president, had done his best to dodge the question, saying that the strike was under investigation, “but the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”

The New York Times reported that the February 28 strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, a girls’ primary school in Minab, was due to a targeting error by the U.S. military as it conducted a strike on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base next door.

U.S. Central Command determined the target using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, people briefed on the investigation told the Times. Satellite images from 2013 showed that the school was previously connected to the IRGC naval base, while more recent satellite images from 2016 showed that the school had been separated from the base by a wall.

Unesco condemned the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh as a grave violation of international law, which prohibits attacks on schools. But evidently Trump is uninterested in taking responsibility—or accountability—for the brutal war crime.