White House Made Disastrous Decision to Cut Ukraine’s Internet

Someone in the White House is crippling Ukraine’s access to military-grade Starlink terminals.

Leaders at the Department of Defense received an order from inside the White House to slow the Starshield satellite system that Ukraine uses for battlefield communications and drone operations, two U.S. officials and a Western official briefed on the matter told Reuters Thursday.

A Ukrainian military official claimed Wednesday that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had interrupted functioning of the country’s military-grade Starlink terminals. Presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian defense forces “did not receive warning about this limitation, and this led to the disruption of several missions.”

Ukrainian officials said that the Starshield receptors mounted on fast-moving drones stopped working altogether. The receptors were working again Thursday, but only at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, Reuters reported.

At first it seemed possible that Musk was directly behind the service disruption—but he claimed on X that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

A senior White House official denied that President Donald Trump was behind it, but did not respond to questions about whether another administration official might have made the order. “No such request was ever made by the president,” they told Reuters.

The disruption began just days after Trump publicly criticized Ukraine for continuing to attack Russian oil refineries after the U.S. lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil in a last-ditch attempt to alleviate financial strain ahead of the midterm elections. Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current commitments are only a small drop in the bucket in terms of the diesel shortage that Trump’s monthslong war with Iran has created.

President Donald Trump isn’t doing a good job of explaining why he would drop one of America’s largest bombs on Iran.

In an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty Thursday, Trump was asked about reports that he was considering dropping the “mother of all bombs,” one of the largest pieces of ordinance in the military’s arsenal, on Iranian nuclear and infrastructure sites.

“Well, the mother of all bombs is not nuclear,” Trump replied. “This is just an extremely large bomb. It’s like a tiny nuclear bomb. But the mother of all bombs is one big bomb but it’s not nuclear. No, I wouldn’t use nuclear.”

Sources told CNN earlier that day that using the 21,600-pound MOAB is unlikely to be effective in destroying any nuclear sites, nor would it tip the balance in the war, which is going abysmally as Iran has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz.

As the conflict stretches on with no clear end in sight, Republican poll numbers keep going lower with the midterms less than a month away. If Trump thinks that dropping a big bomb would allow him to declare some sort of victory in a fruitless war, he is delusional, and his other recent remarks about the war seem to prove that. Meanwhile, the economy continues to flounder, and gas prices keep going up.

White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia crashed and burned Thursday as she struggled to defend pretending to be an actual attorney.

Appearing on Fox News’s Hannity, Zacharia was forced to answer for her train wreck first press briefing. “It’s been widely panned, I’m sure you’re aware. It only lasted 14 minutes. You only took three questions,” host Sean Hannity said.

Zacharia claimed that since being tapped as secretary last week, she’d been given “very little prep time” and had only received the press briefing materials earlier that morning—which is, you know, generally how the news works.

Then Hannity pressed Zacharia to respond to revelations that she lied about being an actual attorney. The former on-air legal analyst had confirmed earlier that day that she never passed the bar exam—just days after she’d told reporters that she had.

“You said you consulted with many people and they advised you that it was okay to call yourself a lawyer but not an attorney, correct?” Hannity asked.

“Correct,” Zacharia said. Hannity pointed to a CNN report that showed 15 social media posts she’d shared in which she was identified as an “attorney.”

“I think they were retweets and I corrected the record and said that [they’re] not endorsing the title, they’re retweets of a title that had been given,” Zacharia stammered. (That doesn’t quite explain why President Donald Trump would then announce that he’d appointed “an attorney” to be his new press secretary.)

“Why not just say, ‘I went to Pepperdine Law School and then took a different career path, and I took the bar once and didn’t pass it?’” Hannity asked. “Why get into this long drawn-out definition between the difference between a lawyer and an attorney, ‘cause I don’t think people see much of a distinction. Why didn’t you just say, ‘I never practiced law?’”

“Well, Sean, when I moved back from the United States I didn’t retake the bar, I had four kids in six years. It was never my intent to go into the practice of law,” Zacharia said.

“When I was at—when I went to go engage in media and give legal analysis, I consulted attorneys and legal professionals as to whether or not they agreed that I could be labeled a lawyer both because I had a valid juris doctor from a good law school, a reputable law school, Pepperdine law school, and in conjunction with the fact that I did have actual, substantive legal experience.”

“I wasn’t providing any legal analysis, Sean—or, I’m, excuse me, legal advice. I wasn’t being paid for legal advice, I was giving a general review of the legal circumstances surrounding it,” she said.

Trump’s new press secretary better get her story straight. At best, Zacharia wildly misrepresented her credentials—at worst, she gave unlicensed legal advice. If she can’t defend her own lies, how in the world will she ever defend Trump’s?

Katie Zacharia’s long résumé includes stints as an unqualified legal commentator, an associate at a Chinese law firm, an uncredentialed general counsel, and—in her own words—a participant in “sort of a pyramid scheme.”

The 41-year-old White House press secretary told Wired Thursday that she used to be an affiliate marketer for Beachbody, a multilevel-marketing operation that sold fitness programs and supplements.

She shared that she was brought into the MLM by a friend and promoted one of the company’s nutrition shakes, labeled Shakeology. She eventually stopped drinking the shakes because of its vitamin A levels, which she told Wired concerned her while she was pregnant.

Beachbody rebranded to BODi in 2023. The company noted to Wired that Zacharia had never worked for them as an employee; she was one of Beachbody’s 300,000 “independent Team Beachbody distributors” in 2013.

A spokesperson for the company also told the magazine that it would be a “misrepresentation” to compare Zacharia’s time at Beachbody with the current iteration of the fitness brand, which has since moved away from the MLM structure in favor of a traditional direct-to-consumer pipeline.

Beachbody was the progenitor of the 90-day P90X workout regimen, an extreme home fitness DVD program that captivated the country when it first hit the market in 2005, and Insanity, another popular home fitness program that launched four years later. Since then, however, Beachbody has been plagued by a number of legal troubles, including lawsuits that accused the company of scamming coaches, lying about the benefits of an anti-aging skincare treatment, and making misleading and unscientific claims about its Shakeology products.

Zacharia, meanwhile, has faced her own mountain of problems this week. Despite her self-advertised legal credentials, it quickly became clear the Pepperdine Caruso Law graduate never actually passed a state bar exam. Zacharia fessed up on Thursday, telling Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec that she was never licensed to practice law anywhere in the country.

“A lot of the misinformation, miscommunication, Jack, is around the fact that I labeled myself ‘lawyer,’ and I consulted for a very long time many people in the field, ‘Is it OK and acceptable if I label myself lawyer? Not attorney at law … and provide legal analysis, not legal advice?’” she said. “They said ‘absolutely’ across the board.”

While some in the legal profession comprehend the semantic differences between the labels, the general public does not. Zacharia was branded as an attorney on Fox News and Newsmax dozens of times. Her P.R. campaign made a fool out of the president, revealing that Donald Trump doesn’t understand the difference, either. Announcing her hire in a statement last week, Trump similarly referred to her as an attorney. The snag: She’s not.

More than 100 letters containing an unknown white substance were mailed to election officials, state officials, and members of Congress, according to three election workers who were briefed on the investigation and spoke to Votebeat.

The FBI acknowledged an investigation into the letters on Thursday, though it did not state how many letters exactly were sent.

Election officers in Oklahoma and Louisiana reported receiving the letters in the mail, while federal officials reportedly intercepted others bound for New Hampshire, Ohio, and Connecticut. The U.S. Postal Service intercepted a letter to Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California, while fellow Democratic Senator Chris Murphy reported receiving a letter in his Hartford, Connecticut, office.

“The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are investigating a series of suspicious mailings sent to various addresses nationwide, including Secretary of State offices and their related election offices,” the FBI stated. “Some of the letters contained an unknown substance and we are working closely with our law enforcement partners to respond to each incident.”

This comes as state election offices prepare for early voting and the November midterms. It also comes just a few weeks after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11, in which infected letters were mailed throughout the country in a similar fashion.

“Election officials should never have to fear for their personal safety while performing their duties, and there is no place in a peaceful democracy for violence, threats or acts of intimidation,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said in a Wednesday statement. “We have a duty to the citizens of Ohio to deliver secure and accessible elections, and these kinds of cowardly threats will not deter us from that mission.”