Trump Team Gets Into Dispute Over Iran Deal Signing

Hold up—did the United States actually sign a peace deal with Iran?

New reporting from Axios Wednesday cast doubt on whether U.S. and Iranian leaders have actually signed Donald Trump’s deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

A senior administration official told reporters that the deal was signed electronically on Saturday by Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Mohammad Bagher, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. However, a diplomatic source from one of the countries who helped mediate talks told Axios that signing had never taken place.

A second source familiar with the negotiations claimed the electronic signing had taken place. It wasn’t entirely clear, though, why a second signing was necessary.

The diplomatic source’s claim directly contradicts the U.S. administration’s characterization of a done deal, and comes amid widespread confusion about what the memorandum of understanding actually says.

The Trump administration has refused to release the final MOU until a formal signing ceremony takes place. The supposedly secondary signing was originally scheduled for Friday, but now the United States and Iran are discussing the possibility of moving that ceremony up.

On Monday, Trump said that the deal with Iran was “already signed and the strait is already partially opened,” but speaking at the G7 Summit on Wednesday, he claimed the deal would be signed “shortly, tomorrow, maybe the next day.”

“We’re going to most likely sign a deal,” Trump said, but seemed less than sure.

Trump’s peace deal with Iran is increasingly reminiscent of one of his fictional trade deals, built on big loose agreements and threats that backfire on Americans. It’s gotten so bad that U.S. negotiators have even begun making efforts to downplay the actual text of the deal, claiming it was political performance more than staunch commitments.

It’s not clear whether or not the deal is signed, but that could potentially explain all the secrecy and mixed messaging.

The Trump administration is trying to get rid of the first reparations program in the U.S. for Black Americans.

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice asked a judge to end the program in Evanston, Illinois, offering $25,000 to the descendants of the city’s Black residents who experienced housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969 due to city policies and ordinances. All residents who experienced housing discrimination in the city after 1969, regardless of race, also qualified for the program, which began in 2021.

The DOJ said in its court filing that the program was “racially discriminatory, calling it unconstitutional because it doles out different benefits based on race.

“There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer,” said Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a statement.

In total, Evanston has allotted $20 million to the program, raised from a tax on legal marijuana, and $7 million has been distributed for use on down payments, home repairs, and paying interest or late penalties on property in the city.

But to the Trump administration, any acknowledgment of racial discrimination toward people of color, historical or present, is to be rejected as “wokeness” or “DEI.” If the government’s lawsuit succeeds in ending the program, it could prevent similar reparations programs from starting all over the country—regardless of whether they’re effective or not.

The Trump administration is now arguing that an alleged thwarted drone attack on the White House UFC event on Sunday was an “assassination plot,” even as charging documents indicate otherwise, in an attempt to convince America that the president really does need that ballroom.

Just four days before the UFC event, Tycen Proper, 19, of Ohio, reportedly told federal agents that he and four other people planned to bomb the event using drones and then shoot people fleeing. He was hospitalized with homicidal ideations and charged along with other members of his group. They had collected weapons and ammunition, but the status of the drones is unclear.

The Department of Justice refers to Proper’s alleged plan as an “assassination plot” in its most recent legal defense for the White House ballroom the president has been insisting on building for weeks now. But Proper was charged with conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S., attempted murder, firearm possession, and receipt or transfer of a firearm used to commit a felony—not assassination, as the DOJ claims.

“This latest assassination plot against President Trump and dignitaries at the White House demonstrates the compelling need for the East Wing Project, with a Ballroom designed to defend against just such,” the filing Tuesday reads.

This filing came on the same day that Vice President JD Vance described the planned UFC attack as “not that advanced,” placing even more doubt on the legitimacy of the administration’s filing claim.

This shameless argument also came on the same day that The Washington Post reported that half the cost of President Trump’s $600 million ballroom will be paid by U.S. taxpayers—even after promising the project would be “taxpayer free,” with no U.S. citizen paying even “10 cents.”

A woman claimed she was approached by two “recruiters” who were scouting young women at Donald Trump’s Manhattan skyscraper to have sex with him—and also tried to lure her to a party at the home of Jeffrey Epstein.

Buried in the Department of Justice’s massive trove of files on Epstein, an interview conducted by the FBI on June 19, 2020, included allegations that the president had previously used Trump Tower as a hunting ground for young women, RawStory reported Wednesday.

In the early 1990s, the woman worked at a luxury shoe store near Trump Tower, and would study in the building’s public atrium during her lunch breaks. One day, she met a colleague at the atrium who pointed out two men lurking nearby.

“[She] described one of the men was dark haired and looked like Antonio Banderas, while the other man was blonde and looked like the surfer type,” the FBI report stated. “Her colleague told her that the men constantly picked up [redacted] women.”

The woman was then approached by the dark-haired man, who struck up a conversation with her. “He asked if she knew who Donald Trump was and told her he was meeting people that day,” the report stated.

“[She] told the man that she knew who Trump was. The man asked if she wanted to meet Trump and told her that she did not need to work so hard to go to school,” the report stated. “The man winked and said he could do whatever she liked.”

“[She] felt that it was clear that sex was on the table, even though the man never mentioned sex,” the report stated. “[She] felt these men were playing the role of recruiters for Trump.”

“The man told her that if she did not want to meet Trump right then, she could go to a party. The man told her that she could bring a friend if the friend looked like her, but she could not bring a guy,” the report stated. The invitation for the party had Epstein’s address on it, the woman told the FBI.

When she declined the invites, she said she began receiving death threats. “The threats consisted of the men saying that they knew where she worked and could find her. [She] never told the police because she did not think they would believe her,” the report stated. They never approached her again.

Over the next six months, the woman saw the two men continue to approach young women in the atrium at Trump Tower. She saw “girls, usually blondes, approximately 15/16 years old with one of the two men and saw them get on an escalator,” the report stated. She never saw anyone meet with Trump.

The woman also recalled a story from another woman who worked in Trump Tower, whose daughter had been brought up to meet Trump while she waited for her mother to get off of work. Later, that second woman claimed that “something horrible happened to her daughter that day.”

“The daughter had dropped out of school, got into drugs, and committed suicide,” the woman told the FBI.

While the interview was taken in June 2020, it was not officially filed until January 2021.

This is just the latest allegation against the president to be uncovered from the Department of Justice’s massive cache of documents on Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker. Still, former Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that there was “no evidence” that Trump had committed any crime—adding to the growing pile of denials from Trump officials that constitute a sweeping cover-up of the president’s alleged wrongdoing.

Congress is finally demanding answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Iran.

Senators are threatening to cut off Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon provides more details about the deadly U.S. strike that hit a school full of children on February 28, Politico reported Wednesday.

At the time, Pentagon intel had led them to believe that the school was actually an Iranian base. It was not. The DOD initially did not take responsibility for the strike.

The vast majority of the 175 people killed in the strikes were children, according to Iranian officials.

Senators have also asked Hegseth to turn over all the video footage of his department’s bombing campaign against small boats in the Caribbean, for which the death toll recently surpassed 205 people.

The U.S. has been attacking boats off the coast of Venezuela since September 2, in what it claims is a broad effort to stamp out drug smuggling into the U.S. By December, Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio confessed during a classified meeting that there was no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela. Instead the administration had learned the boats were carrying cocaine—bound for Europe, rather than America.

“That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said at the time.

The details of Hegseth’s punishment were folded into a Senate Armed Services Committee’s defense policy bill, specifying that Congress would withhold 75 percent of his travel budget until lawmakers received adequate documentation for the aforementioned atrocities.

It’s the second such time that lawmakers have tried this gambit. Late last year, lawmakers passed defense legislation that cut a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget under similar demands. The raised stakes, however, suggest that lawmakers did not get what they asked for.

Even Trump’s MAGA allies in the upper chamber seem disgruntled with the Pentagon’s lack of transparency. They’ve complained that Defense officials have kept them in the dark about major national security decisions—a frustration only further intensified by the administration’s cloaked proceedings around the Iran peace deal.