Report Reveals White House Winging It on Iran War as Death Toll Rises

The Trump administration seems to have been caught off guard by Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, once again showing a glaring lack of planning.

CNN reports that President Trump’s national security team wasn’t prepared for a worst-case, but somewhat predictable, scenario for the war. Analyses from the Treasury and Energy Departments forecasting economic and oil market impacts also weren’t prioritized like they were in previous administrations, unnamed sources told the news outlet.

Meanwhile, four U.S. service members were confirmed dead after a refueling plane crashed in western Iraq Thursday, with two others missing, bringing the official death toll of U.S. military personnel to 11 since the war began on February 28.

Trump depended on a small circle of close advisers in deciding to attack Iran, which effectively marginalized discussion and debate within the government over what could happen if Iran took action to close the strait. Now the White House could spend weeks trying to mitigate the shock to the U.S. and international economy. Oil tankers are stuck in the Persian Gulf, and using the U.S. Navy to escort them out is considered too risky.

Shipping companies have requested naval escorts from the U.S., which has so far turned them down. Diplomats from other countries, business executives, and former government officials are reportedly confused and stunned at the White House’s failure to account for the strait’s closure.

“Planning around preventing this exact scenario—impossible as it has long seemed—has been a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades,” said one former U.S. official, who has served Democratic and Republican administrations. “I’m dumbfounded.”

White House officials have even tacitly admitted to members of Congress that they didn’t plan for Iran possibly closing the strait as retaliation for U.S. and Israeli airstrikes, sources told CNN. These officials reportedly thought Iran would think closing it would hurt them more than the U.S., especially considering Iran didn’t close the strait during last year’s U.S. strikes.

Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said in a statement Thursday that the strait will remain closed as a “tool of pressure.” At the same time, Iran is successfully destroying U.S. missile defenses in the region, and American missile stockpiles are dwindling. Trump’s lack of planning is not only causing ongoing damage to international markets and the U.S. economy but is putting U.S. troops and interests in harm’s way as this war continues.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was abruptly yanked out of a Thursday interview with Sky News’s Wilfred Frost after President Trump demanded his presence in the Situation Room. 

Frost and Bessent were on camera and already into the interview when a staffer interrupted, telling Bessent, “The President wants you right away.” Bessent, seeming surprised, left immediately. 

“This is totally wild. I’ve never seen anything like this on television,” NBC News’s Matt Bradley wrote.  

Bessent returned around two hours later and was visibly flustered. 

“Mr. Secretary, I have to say—this is a first … that an interviewee’s been pulled away to go to the Situation Room,” Frost said upon Bessent’s return. “How’s the president, was he stressed?” 

Instead of a simple “Yes, he’s fine,” Bessent began to rave about how great the war on Iran is going, and how one of his own children is considering joining—details he offered completely unprompted. 

“No, the president is in great spirits. The Iranian mission is proceeding well ahead of schedule,” the secretary replied. “And I have to tell you, Will, that I have a teenage—teenager who’s considering military service. And I could give this team my highest compliment, from President Trump to the head of Joint Chiefs, to the secretary of war. I would say that I would trust my child’s life in their hands.” 

It is unclear what exactly Trump and Bessent spoke about in the Situation Room—although the Trump administration removed sanctions on Russian oil Thursday evening to counteract the skyrocketing oil prices caused by the Iran war. Regardless, Bessent’s rushed reassurance and his random aside about sending his child to possibly die in Iran do not instill confidence in everything being A-OK.

The man accused of stealing sensitive social security data didn’t just potentially commit a massive security breach that could affect millions of Americans—he also has a serious conflict of interest.

Earlier this week, it became clear that the Social Security Administration’s inspector general was looking into a whistleblower complaint about a former software engineer who worked under Elon Musk in the Department of Government Efficiency. The complaint claimed the unidentified man had access to two sensitive SSA databases he maintained on a thumb drive, and had intentions to hand that data over to a private employer.

That ex-DOGE staffer has since been identified by others in Washington, and his name is John Solly, multiple sources told WIRED.

Since October, Solly has been the chief technology officer at Leidos, a career pivot that could pose a major problem for the executive branch, according to the résumé on his personal website (Solly has since taken the site offline).

Leidos’s website boasts enormous contracts with the Social Security Administration, including a five-year deal totaling up to $1.5 billion.

Solly—through his legal counsel—denied any wrongdoing, reported WIRED. “A spokesperson for Leidos also said the company found no evidence supporting the whistleblower’s claims against Solly,” the magazine noted.

All in all, 70 million Americans rely on the Social Security Administration and its services, but hundreds of millions could be affected by the purported theft.

According to his résumé, Solly supported other DOGE engineers on projects including “Digital SSN,” “SSN verification API (EDEN 2.0),” and “Death Master File cleanup,” the last of which refers to an SSA database that contains millions of Social Security records for deceased Americans. The purpose of maintaining the database is to limit the potential for fraud, blocking would-be thieves from stealing the identities of those who have died.

The application programming interface, or API, meanwhile, could be used to allow different software programs to communicate with one another, sharing data between them.

“In this case, it could allow Social Security data to be accessed by agencies and institutions outside of SSA,” reported WIRED.

Solly also may have had access to SSA’s numerical identification system, also known as NUMIDENT, according to an earlier report from The Washington Post that identified the whistleblower complaint but did not name Solly as the accused offender. NUMIDENT hosts even more sensitive data, cataloguing all the information included in a Social Security number application, such as full name, birth date, race, and other personally identifiable information.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice spent weeks emailing its request for Oklahoma’s voter rolls to the wrong email address. Then it sued Oklahoma for not complying. 

It began in December, when Department of Justice officials wrote a letter demanding that Oklahoma Secretary of State Paul Ziriax turn over the state’s voter registration lists, Democracy Docket reported Thursday.  

There was already a problem: Paul Ziriax isn’t Oklahoma’s secretary of state, and never has been. He is actually the secretary of Oklahoma’s State Election Board. And somehow, that isn’t even the DOJ’s biggest blunder in this tale. 

The agency didn’t hear back, so it sent another email, and then another. Nothing.  

In late January, DOJ officials finally got a response from Oklahoma election official Misha Mohr, who said that her office had only just received the previous emails. 

“The email address was misspelled on the previous correspondence,” she wrote. Instead of sending messages to “info” at the Oklahoma State Election’s office, the government had addressed their demands to “ifo” at the same mail server. 

This gaffe is part of a wider trend of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps by Trump’s Department of Justice, undermining numerous civil and criminal cases. A recent filing included misspelled versions of “voters,” “emergency,” and “United States.” Another filing repeatedly misspelled the name of an elected official. 

The federal government has sued Washington, D.C., and 29 states—including Oklahoma—for not complying with its demands to turn over voter registration forms. Twelve states have provided or pledged to provide the government voter registration lists, with information including license plates and Social Security numbers. Federal judges in California, Michigan, and Oregon have rejected the federal government’s claim to the troves of voters’ personal data. 

Improper disclosure of this highly sensitive information could violate state and federal laws, and raises concerns about risks to Americans’ security and privacy. And clearly, the Trump administration has been less than careful with Americans’ Social Security information. 

Republican Senator John Cornyn got a firsthand lesson in why the SAVE Act, backed by President Donald Trump, would suppress votes if passed.

At a Senate Judiciary hearing Thursday, Cornyn said, “I don’t understand how [the SAVE Act] could disenfranchise millions of Americans. Maybe you could explain.” His Democratic colleague, Dick Durbin, was happy to oblige. After thanking Cornyn for his question, Durbin explained that the voter ID requirements of the bill are not satisfied by a driver’s license, but only a passport.

“Fifty percent of Americans do not have a passport. Those who want to obtain it so they can vote will pay $186 and wait three or four weeks for that to happen,” Durbin said. “Secondly, you can use a birth certificate, but any person who has changed their name as a result of a marriage … has to find not only their birth certificate but some correction of it to prove that they are eligible to register to vote.

“It’s estimated that 9 percent of the voters in America do not have the identification required by this bill. It means that, ultimately, those people will not be voting. And I think that is the ultimate goal of this administration,” Durbin continued. This was news to Cornyn, who asked if these concerns could be addressed by the amendment process. Durbin responded, “When’s the last time we amended a bill?”

Durbin is correctly pointing out that the SAVE Act seems designed to make it harder to vote—particularly for lower-income Americans and married women who change their names—rather than to tackle voter fraud, which is practically nonexistent anyway. Trump administration officials, such as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, have admitted as much. Meanwhile, Trump has made it his priority over everything else, even stuff Americans want, because he wants to rig elections in his favor.

The White House is weighing in on the internal affairs of private business—again.

Trump administration officials are reportedly seething that CBS News hired Jeremy Adler, a communications executive who previously worked for former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, according to insiders that spoke with Axios Thursday.

Cheney, a lifelong Republican and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, stood out among her caucus for her unrelenting critiques of Donald Trump’s performance during his first term. She was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, repeatedly rejected Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy, and served as the vice chair of the House committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol riot.

Exactly how Adler’s affiliation with Cheney would prevent him from functioning as a communications executive for the news network is not clear, but nonetheless, the decision did not sit well with the people surrounding the president.

Further, the administration’s public derision at Adler’s appointment once again flouts the free-market philosophy that Republicans have championed for decades, highlighting the growing differences between Trump’s MAGA agenda and the larger conservative party.

“The idea CBS would hire Liz Cheney’s flack who has worked to jail President Trump and make it impossible for anybody who supported the president to get hired is insanity. What the hell is Bari Weiss thinking?” a White House official told Axios.

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped as the newsroom’s newest chief late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcasting, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had never run a major news operation.

In a few short months, her business decisions atop the network have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit.

What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on a 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who had been deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT megaprison.

The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, whom Weiss replaced with the likes of Peter Attia (who was ousted from his role as an on-air contributor shortly after his hiring was announced due to his various ties to Jeffrey Epstein).

Yet Weiss’s appointment was merely the cherry on top of a large portion of recent chaos at CBS. In the last year, parent company Paramount undermined itself by settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Trump over CBS’s fair and accurate coverage (in an apparent bid to butter up the administration ahead of a multibillion-dollar merger with SkyDance). That resulted in the loss of two storied showrunners, including 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, who rejected Paramount’s approach to handling the groundless lawsuit.

The highest-ranking U.S. commander in Europe told Congress what has been obvious for decades—that bombing civilians is an evil and inhumane tactic that only leads to more long-term problems.  

“What I’ve observed over the course of studying air power in history is that anytime you attack a civilian population, you usually end up finding that it just hardens their resolve,” Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich told the Senate Armed Services Committee at a Thursday hearing regarding Russian assistance to Iran. “We take this all the way back to the London Blitz in World War II. The Brits just had a stiff upper lip and kept on fighting, and I think that’s what we’ve seen in Ukraine, as well.”

While Grynkewich was referring to Russia’s bombing campaign in Ukraine, his statement could be applied to any American act of aggression over the past 20-plus years, from the Iraq War to U.S. support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, to the Iranian elementary school bombing that killed more than 100 children. 

Hundreds of Iranian civilians have died in the ongoing war. The same administrations that chastise Iran for chanting “Death to America” are the same ones with no qualms about using American weaponry to kill hundreds of normal people just trying to lead normal lives. If anything, their killings will only lead to further anti-American sentiment and radicalization. You don’t need to be some scholar of military history to recognize that. 

The global trade crisis sparked by Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran may soon become a global food crisis, as farmers facing surging fertilizer prices warn they won’t be able to plant their crops, according to a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Fertilizer prices are rising due to the halt of trade through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been essentially closed since the United States and Israel launched their first wave of attacks on February 28. This abrupt stoppage comes as farmers in the northern hemisphere would typically order fertilizer to arrive next month for the upcoming planting season.

The Trump administration has pushed to resume the flow of energy through the Persian Gulf, but oil wasn’t the only export trapped at sea. One-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and Gulf countries are responsible for producing 13 percent of the world’s fertilizer exports.

Another commodity trapped at the Strait of Hormuz is liquefied natural gas, which is used in the production of nitrogen fertilizers. Twenty percent of all natural gas exports travel through the Persian Gulf’s essential passageway. As a result, the benchmark price of urea, the most common variety of nitrogen fertilizer, surged 30 percent in the last month.

The U.S. produces three-quarters of the fertilizer it consumes, but farmers are concerned about the already record-high prices of materials, which could continue to climb.

In a letter sent to President Donald Trump Monday, the American Farm Bureau Federation warned that the shock to the fertilizer supply chain would drive prices even higher.

“Not only is this a threat to our food security—and by extension our national security—such a production shock could contribute to inflationary pressures across the U.S. economy,” wrote AFBF President Zippy Duvall.

Economists and fertilizer experts anticipate that the disruptions to global trade will further drive up inflation, and the South Carolina Farm Bureau publicly fretted that farmers “are not going to be able to finance planting their crop.”

It appears that Trump’s frivolous military campaign in Iran is threatening to upend the entire northern hemisphere’s food system. That not only includes the United States but also Mexico, Canada, and the European Union, which are the largest agricultural exporters to the United States.

If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for much longer, it could threaten the entire global agriculture cycle. Smaller agrarian countries that do not produce their own fertilizer would be the first to see widespread crop failures.

The Senate passed a landmark housing bill Thursday with a rare show of bipartisan support, but one Democrat still voted “no.”

Brian Schatz of Hawaii was the lone Democrat to vote against the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which would create incentives to build new homes, launch a program to turn abandoned buildings into housing, and ban Wall Street from purchasing single-family homes, among other long overdue reforms.

Co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Tim Scott, it passed 89–10, with all of the “no” votes coming from Republicans except Schatz. Why? Schatz gave a clue that he wasn’t happy with the bill Wednesday, claiming on the Senate floor that “there is a problem” with the bill.

“It was written in such a way that it was trying to capture the hedge fund problem, but they wrote it wrong,” Schatz said, citing a provision in the bill that requires large institutional investors to sell their rental properties to families after seven years. He claimed that the legislation defines such investors as for-profit organizations that own ​​over 350 single-family homes, not just hedge funds.

Warren disagreed, and said Schatz was mischaracterizing the kind of businesses that own more than 350 homes, and that they could still build as much as they want.

“Private equity can build as many multi-family homes as they want, as many apartment buildings as they want, and as many single-family buildings as they want,” the Massachusetts senator told HuffPost. “They can suck up all of the tax benefits that they’re currently entitled to, with the one exception that after seven years of benefits, private equity has to take those single-family homes and make them available for families to buy.”

Evidently Schatz’s concerns were enough to get him to vote against the bill, which now heads to the House with its narrow Republican majority. The fact that so many Republicans supported it in the Senate is a good sign, but it still faces an uncertain future in the House and with President Trump, who reportedly told Speaker Mike Johnson that “no one gives a [bleep] about housing” earlier this week. But either way, Schatz appears to be in a very small minority allied with Wall Street, one even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent isn’t a part of.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is demanding that ABC News retract reporting on a potential Iranian retaliatory attack on California because it was based on an “unverified” tip—even though the FBI alerted law enforcement to it in the first place.

“This post and story should be immediately retracted by ABC News for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people,” Leavitt wrote on X on Thursday. “They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single, unverified tip. The email even states the tip was based on *unverified* intelligence. Yet ABC News left out this critical fact in their story! WHY? TO BE CLEAR: No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did.”

But if the tip was as inconsequential and unreliable as Leavitt claims it to be, why did the FBI even pass it on in the first place?

“We recently acquired information that as of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United States Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran,” the FBI’s announcement read. “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.”