One of Trump’s Declassified Documents Raises Major Red Flags

Former intelligence officials have singled out a recently declassified memo in Donald Trump’s recent 2020 election-related document dump as warranting a deeper investigation.

The Steady State, a group of former national security and intelligence officials, has called for an independent probe into a three-page CIA note on China titled “Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020.” The document’s date and author are redacted, and it’s not clear where the memo came from within the folds of the CIA.

An analysis by the group found that it “departs in both style and format” from CIA drafting culture, and does not include the tell-tale signs of a CIA review.

Yet Trump directly quoted the file during his national prime-time address on July 16, ignoring its dubious origin.

“In mid-2018 the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election,” Trump read from the document. “Isn’t that nice?”

Over the span of his 25-minute speech, Trump repeated thoroughly debunked claims that there was interference in the 2020 presidential election, and that the intelligence community had intentionally withheld information from him during his first term about China’s attempts to undermine U.S. election integrity.

Trump leveraged the CIA memo to implore the Justice Department to “fire those involved in the cover-up” and “file criminal charges if appropriate.”

But former intelligence officials have been wary of the document’s narrow perspective and thin context, suggesting that it could be a response to a targeted request from someone within the administration, MS NOW reported Tuesday.

Steven Cash, executive director of The Steady State and a former CIA and Department of Homeland Security official, told the digital news organization that he planned to send a letter Tuesday to top lawmakers about the note’s “anomalies.”

“It is particularly dangerous when intelligence products are presented piecemeal to the American people,” Cash wrote. “Confidence in the Intelligence Community is predicated not only on what it ultimately knows, but on the integrity of how its work is produced and presented.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci started off with a good relationship with President Trump but eventually came to believe he was an “obnoxious adolescent,” according to excerpts of his diary released by Republican Senator Rand Paul, the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

The released diary entries start from December 2019, right before the Covid-19 outbreak, and continue to December 2022, when Fauci left his position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Paul released over 1,000 pages from the diary as part of an investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which Paul claims came from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.

The diary doesn’t have any kind of smoking gun on Covid’s origins, but it does show an inside view of different moments of the pandemic, as well as how Trump mishandled it. Fauci wrote glowingly about how he met Trump on January 29, 2020, in the White House Situation Room, and the president told him, “Anthony, you are really a famous guy. My good friend Lou Dobbs told me that you were one of the smartest, knowledgeable and outstanding persons he knows.”

“He then stayed for 20 minutes and asked most of his questions of me. I was surprised and very pleased and the deputies were clearly stunned and impressed,” Fauci wrote. He added that Trump thanked him after the meeting, telling him, “We are counting on you.”

Fauci’s entries show how Trump’s actions over the course of the pandemic quickly changed his mind. After a March 2020 press conference, Fauci complained about how Trump “wasted the opportunity to just focus on the relief package and went into his diatribe against previous administrations.”

Later, in August, Fauci wrote that he had a hard time explaining to Trump that increased testing did not increase Covid cases.

“All in all it was a manifestation that he is desperate and still does not understand the pandemic. Very interesting encounter,” Fauci wrote.

In November, Trump was angry at Fauci for a Washington Post report where Fauci said that Joe Biden’s campaign was “taking [the pandemic] seriously from a public health perspective,” while Trump was more concerned about the economy and reopening the country. Trump called Fauci and let loose.

“Tony, I really like you, and you know that, but what the f—k are you doing? You constantly drop bombs on me. Everybody wants me to fire you, but I am not going to fire you, you have too illustrious of a career, but you have to be positive,” Trump said on the call, according to Fauci.

“I like you but so many people, not only in the White House, but throughout the country hate you because of what you are doing.… And that f—ker Biden. He is so f—king stupid. You are 10 times smarter than he is. I am going to kick his f—king ass in this election. I will win by a landslide. Just wait and see.… Tony, you have to be positive. I do not want to keep you off TV, but when you are out there, you have to be positive.”

By March 2021, as vaccines became publicly available, Fauci called Trump an “obnoxious adolescent.”

Looking at these diary entries, it’s obvious that Fauci was simply trying to do his job in the face of an obstinate president, and wasn’t the devious or negligent mastermind that conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party make him out to be. They should be more concerned that Trump is back in power and can’t be trusted if a new pandemic arises.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino is reportedly plotting to transform the World Cup into a moneymaking scheme—so, is it any surprise he turned to these experts in corruption?

FIFA announced Tuesday that it would create the FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE, a new business entity, to raise up to $4.2 million in the next year by “carefully selecting long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests in FFE.”

Critics have decried the decision to sell stakes in the World Cup, which is managed by FIFA, a nonprofit organization. The move could potentially earn Infantino tens of millions of dollars.

To make matters worse, Infantino reportedly held investor discussions with members of the Trump administration, The Times reported Tuesday. The move comes amid mounting concerns over Infantino’s relationship with Donald Trump, after the president openly bullied FIFA into lifting a red card against a player on the U.S. men’s soccer team.

In addition, FIFA reportedly stated that once the approval was granted, the investor group would be led by Thrive Eternal, a venture capital firm run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared who is under investigation for alleged corruption.

FIFA said that it planned to expand football development funding to more than $10 billion, “subject to approval by FIFA Member Associations.”

The UEFA Europa League immediately released a statement outright rejecting the proposal.

“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” the statement said. “UEFA takes it extremely seriously. So should every National Football Association. So should every stakeholder: leagues, clubs, players, supporters, governments and everyone who cares about the future of the game. The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade—especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially.

“None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell,” the statement said.

A Guatemalan couple’s attempt to reunite following an ICE deportation ended with the two being shot to death in a sugarcane field in the country.

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and his wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, were found gagged with their hands and feet bound, showing signs of physical trauma, St. Louis Public Radio reports. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying next to her mother, with signs of dehydration. She’s now recovering in a medical center.

“I felt that they took the thing I wanted most,” Rolando Pérez Paz, Pérez Paz’s brother, told STLPR. “I felt a huge pain because it was my brother, my sister-in-law—people that wanted to work, to fight.”

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Ronaldo were driving to their roofing jobs in April 2025 near their home in Overland, Missouri, when they were stopped by ICE agents, who emerged from an unmarked car and pulled them out of their white work van. The agents told them that there wasn’t a warrant for their arrests but that they were being detained for lacking legal status.

González de la Cruz initially stayed in Overland, giving birth to their daughter last year and working two manual labor jobs to support the couple’s three children. But financial pressures mounted, and she was afraid she would be detained and separated from her children despite an active asylum case, organizers with St. Louis immigrant rights group Fuerza, which she was working with, told STLPR. So she decided to self-deport to Guatemala with her children to join her husband.

The couple was reported missing in Guatemala on July 20 after attempting to register a motorcycle in a nearby town, Rolando Pérez Paz told the radio outlet. In the last few months, the family struggled with money and had trouble with violence and the federal government—issues that had led them to seek asylum in the U.S. in the first place.

An ICE spokesperson told the radio outlet that Nixon Pérez Paz had two convictions for drunk driving, but STLPR did not find any court records to confirm that account. The spokesperson also said that Nixon Pérez Paz had an open container charge in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2010, but prosecutors had dropped that.

“If immigration hadn’t picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn’t be going through this sorrow,” Ronaldo told the radio outlet. He’s now caring for his three young nieces but doesn’t know how to explain their parents’ deaths to them.

“Unfortunately, immigration—the [U.S.] government—doesn’t see that. It makes no difference to them.”

Even Fox News is confused as to who exactly President Trump has been negotiating with in Iran. 

President Trump claimed this week that he’s talking to Iran “right now,” but Iran’s foreign ministry has fervently denied that claim, saying it’s not interested in direct negotiations. When asked about the contradiction on Fox News Tuesday, Trump struggled to explain.

“We hear that you’re talking right now with leaders on Iran,” Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said. “But Iran has come out publicly and said, ‘We’re not talking to the U.S.”

“Well, they just came out and said ‘We are talking’ a little while ago,” Trump interrupted. 

“So could you tell me who you’re talking to, Mr. President?” 

“For some reason, we can be in the midst of a beautiful discussion, and they’ll come out and say, ‘We’re not talking’ or ‘We didn’t discuss nuclear.’ Well, that’s all we discussed, because they’ll never have a nuclear weapon, they understand that,” Trump said, avoiding answering the direct question. “We’ve had some very good talks.” 

He then went on to change the subject entirely, instead discussing recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham’s insistence upon an Iran deal—surprising, if true, given the late senator’s violent, hawkish approach to foreign policy. 

“He was very much a hawk … [even] he was somebody that said it was a good time to make a deal.… Lindsey liked war, to be honest with you.”  

It does not inspire confidence when the president can’t confidently say who he has been in contact with while supposedly trying to negotiate an end to his increasingly unpopular and expensive war. This conversation came after a recent pause in violence in the region, and ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Tuesday—in which he most likely lobbied Trump to start bombing Iran again.