Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”
For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.
It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.
Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”
Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.
In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”
This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”
There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.
After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”
On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”
At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”
On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”
What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”
The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.
One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.
Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.
Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.
“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”
Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”
But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.
In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”
Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.
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In a timeline of Trump’s decision to drop 12 of the reportedly 20 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs the U.S. military possessed on Iran, New York Times reporters confirmed what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo judged from the beginning: Trump wanted in on the optics of what seemed to be Israel’s successful strikes against Iran.
Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported conversations with administration officials who confirmed there was no new intelligence to suggest Iran was on the brink of producing nuclear weapons.
Mark Mazzetti, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper reported yesterday in the New York Times that Trump had warned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu against striking Iran but changed his mind after seeing how Israel’s military action was “playing” on television. The reporters write: “The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved.”
Trump began to hint he had been part of the operation, and military advisors began to draw up plans for a strike. According to the reporters, by June 17—three days after his military parade had fizzled and more than 5 million Americans had turned out to protest his administration—Trump had decided to bomb Iran.
Rather than keeping the mission quiet, Trump issued increasingly aggressive social media posts appearing to hint at a strike. David E. Sanger of the New York Times cited reports from Israeli intelligence saying that Iranian officials had removed 400 kilograms (about 880 pounds) of enriched uranium from the Fordo enrichment plant to another nuclear complex, although at least some equipment and records would likely have remained there.
Republicans have talked about bombing Iran to stop its nuclear aspirations since the early 2000s, but the relationship between the U.S. and Iran relating to nuclear technology actually reaches back to 1953. In that year, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom supported a coup against the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he called for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which British interests controlled a majority stake.
In his place, the former leader of the country, Mohammad Reza Shah, retook power. In 1954, Iran accepted a 25-year agreement that gave western oil companies 50% ownership of Iran’s oil production.
At the same time, President Eisenhower proposed trying to defang international fears of nuclear war by shifting nuclear technologies toward civilian uses, including energy. On December 8, 1953, he spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City on how atomic energy could be used for peaceful ends. The initiative, known as “Atoms for Peace,” provided reactors, nuclear fuel, and training for scientists for countries that promised they would use the technology only for peaceful civilian purposes.
In 1967 the U.S. supplied a nuclear reactor and highly enriched uranium to Iran, and trained Iranian scientists in the United States. In 1974, according to Ariana Rowberry of the Brookings Institution, the shah announced he intended to build 20 new reactors in the next 20 years.
Then, in 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran forced out the shah and put Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in power. In 1980, after the U.S. admitted the shah into the country for cancer treatments, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy, taking 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Iran, imposed sanctions, froze Iranian assets in the U.S., and ended the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran.
Iran turned to Pakistan, China, and Russia to expand its nuclear program. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased until Republican politicians talked about bombing the sites of Iran’s nuclear program. Famously, Arizona senator John McCain joked about bombing Iran in 2007 when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bBomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ classic song “Barbara Ann.”
McCain lost the 2008 election to Democratic president Barack Obama, and in 2013 at the beginning of his second term, Obama began high-level talks to cap Iran’s enrichment of uranium that could be used for weapons. In 2015, forty-seven Republican senators, led by then freshman senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, tried to blow up the talks, sending an open letter to Iranian officials to put them on notice that “the next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”
This was an astonishing breach of the longstanding U.S. tradition of presenting a united front in foreign negotiations. Nonetheless, in 2015 the U.S., Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the European Union signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s enriched uranium in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
At about the same time, negotiators settled an unrelated case between the U.S. and Iran at The Hague, involving the return of American prisoners to the U.S. and Iranian assets frozen in the U.S. to Iran. Since Iran was cut off from international finance systems at the time, the U.S. returned some of those assets in 2016 as Swiss francs, euros, and other currencies. Donald Trump, who was then running for the presidency, insisted that the Obama administration had sent “pallets of cash” to Iran as part of a deal to free the prisoners. “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power,” Trump told reporters.
Then, in 2016, voters put Trump in the White House. Although the nuclear deal appeared to be working, Trump left it in 2018, calling it a “horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” Without the U.S. the agreement broke down. Iran resumed its program for enriching uranium.
A week and a half ago, on June 12, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched strikes against Iran, and on June 21, Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, claiming that after 40 years of Iranian hostility, “Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
In fact, the effect of the strikes is not at all clear, although Trump insisted yet again this afternoon that “[o]bliteration is an accurate term!... Bullseye!!!”
Trump’s strikes on Iran underscore how Republican leaders see governance. They seemed to see the careful negotiations under Obama and the international inspections that certified Iran’s adherence to the JCPOA as signs of weakness, preferring simply to use American military might to impose U.S. will. Trump has combined that dominance ideology with his enthusiasm for performances that play well on television.
This afternoon, Iran responded to the U.S. strikes with its own missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, after warning of the upcoming attack to enable Qatar to intercept the missiles.
Trump posted on social media: “Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired—13 were knocked down, and 1 was ‘set free,’ because it was headed in a nonthreatening direction. I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”
Ten minutes later, he posted: “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!”
Republican dominance politics began in the 1950s as a way to prevent the federal government from protecting Black and Brown civil rights. Since then, it has reinforced the idea of asserting power through violence. And it has always reinforced the power of white men over women and racial and gender minorities.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration's request to allow it to deport migrants to places other than their country of origin, often to countries plagued by violence. The administration has claimed this power as part of its campaign to scare immigrants from coming to the U.S. by demonstrating that they could end up in a third country with no recourse. The court majority did not explain its reasoning; the three liberal justices—Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—dissented sharply.
“In…earlier rulings, the court cleared the way for the government to treat as many as a million migrants as removable who previously weren’t,” legal analyst Steve Vladeck told Angélica Franganilla Díaz and John Fritze of CNN. “And today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them—without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries.”
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At 6:02 last night, President Donald Trump announced on his social media account that Israel and Iran has agreed to “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” that would lead to “an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR.” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that the announcement took some of Trump’s own senior advisors by surprise. Since then, Trump’s social media feed has been unusually active, posting claims that his approval rate is soaring, that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, that “for the first time ever [a] majority of Americans believe the United States is on the right track,” and that “Trump was right about everything.”
"THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!” Trump’s social media feed posted at 1:08 this morning. But within hours, Israel had struck Iran again. At 6:50, Trump’s social media feed posted: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” At 7:28 it posted: ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
After Israel struck, Iran retaliated. This morning, Trump accused both countries of violating the ceasefire agreement—although, to be sure, there has been no published confirmation that any such agreement exists. Sounding angry, Trump told reporters: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*ck they’re doing.” At 11:17 the account posted: “Both Israel and Iran wanted to stop the War, equally! It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!” It also attacked Democrats, especially women of color, at length, saying they were stupid and “can’t stand the concept of our Country being successful again.”
The account also said: “Now that we have made PEACE abroad, we must finish the job here at home by passing “THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” and getting the Bill to my desk, ASAP. It will be a Historic Present for THE GREAT PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, as we begin the Celebration of our Country’s 250th Birthday. We are finally entering our Golden Age, which will bring unprecedented Safety, Security, and Prosperity for ALL of our Citizens.”
In fact, Trump’s victory lap seems designed to be the finale to a triumphant storyline that can convince his loyalists he has scored an enormous victory before reality sets in. According to a new CNN poll, Americans disapprove of the U.S. military strikes against Iran by a margin of 56% to 44%.
Further, Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that according to early assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the damage caused by the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the strikes did not destroy the main parts of the Iran’s nuclear program and probably set it back by only a few months. The DIA is the intelligence arm of the Pentagon.
The White House called the DIA assessment “flat out wrong.”
Later today, the New York Times confirmed CNN’s reporting.
Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky suggested today that the Obama administration had the right approach when it negotiated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s nuclear program. Paul said: “I’m arguing that the intervention, the military intervention, may not have been successful, as people are saying, and also that there may not be a military answer to this, that ultimately the answer to the end of the nuclear program is going to involve diplomacy.”
A video on Trump’s social media feed posted at 7:15 tonight recalled Senator John McCain’s 2007 call to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Trump’s version used McCain’s “bomb Iran” chorus but was longer and had visual imagery of planes dropping bombs. In Trump’s version, the soundtrack to the video used the melody of Barbara Ann to say things like: “went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, tell the ayatollah gonna put you in a box,” and “old Uncle Sam, getting pretty hot, gonna turn Iran into a parking lot.”
It is a truism that, like other authoritarians, Trump tries only to appeal to his supporters, but I confess this video, from the president of the United States, left me aghast. It seems to me long past time to question the 79-year-old president’s mental health.
Tonight, Trump’s social media feed posted: “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”
Trump’s posts sound panicked, and even aside from the strikes against Iran there is reason for his loyalists to be concerned about political events. On Saturday, masked agents from Customs and Border Patrol were caught on video chasing Narciso Barranco, a 48-year-old undocumented landscaper who has lived in the U.S. for decades, down a street with guns drawn, pinning him to the ground, and hitting him as they handcuffed him. Barranco’s oldest son, Alejandro, served in the Marines for four years and is a veteran. Barranco’s two younger sons are active-duty Marines. There has been a popular outcry over Barranco's arrest.
Barranco’s son Alejandro told Jacob Soboroff, Julia Ainsley, and Suzanne Gamboa of NBC News that his father is being held with at least 70 other people with one toilet and no privacy and that he has received very little water and even less food.
ICE's detentions continue to create a backlash. Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported that the number of migrants detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities across the country has reached a record high of more than 56,000, leading to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Federal law permits members of Congress to make unannounced visits to ICE facilities to inspect them, but officers at the Department of Homeland Security last week said members of Congress needed to give at least 72 hours notice before an inspection.
ICE claims the power to “deny a request or otherwise cancel, reschedule or terminate a tour or visit” by lawmakers or by members of their staff if “facility management or other ICE officials deem it appropriate to do so.”
Inspections will be hard to conduct at the newly approved detention facility deep in the Florida Everglades designed to house up to 5,000 migrants. Members of the state legislature say they were not consulted about the plan. Florida says the new facility will cost about $450 million a year to operate. The federal government will reimburse that money through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
News broke today that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, widely believed to be the individual responsible for the administration’s draconian immigration policies, owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, the data and intelligence software company owned by Peter Thiel. Palantir has a number of valuable contracts with ICE to track undocumented immigrants.
Ken Dilanian of NBC News reported today that concern about retaliation from Iranian sleeper cells has made the FBI return agents who had been pulled from their normal duties to focus on immigration issues back to their usual focus on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity.
One source told Dilanian, “Guess they are realizing this whole national security thing is important, after all.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 43,424
In the comments, she said something like, "Maybe wait until morning to read this one". I don't know why. I read it and actually found it a bit encouraging.
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Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”
For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.
It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.
Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”
Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.
In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”
This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It's way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it's way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”
There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.
After Trump announced the strikes, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.” He added: “We know—for certain—there is a diplomatic path to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Obama agreement was working. And as late as a week ago, Iran was back at the table again. Which makes this attack—with all its enormous risks—so reckless.”
On Friday a reporter asked Trump, “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community had said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump answered: “Well then, my intelligence community is wrong.” He added: “Who in the intelligence community said that?” The reporter responded: “Your director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.” Trump answered: “She’s wrong.”
At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”
On June 17, Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen of CNN noted that while U.S. intelligence says Iran was years away from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel has insisted Iran was on the brink of one. A week ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Fox News Channel: “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working, in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly.”
What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Iran’s parliament says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, sending oil prices upward, but that decision can be overruled by the country’s Supreme National Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister announced today he was on his way to Moscow for urgent talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote this afternoon that “A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”
The Department of Homeland Security has warned that “[t]he ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States.” It linked those threats to the antisemitism the Trump administration has used as justification for cracking down on civil liberties in the United States.
One pattern is clear from yesterday’s events: Trump’s determination to act without check by the Constitution.
Democrats as well as some Republicans are concerned about Trump’s unilateral decision to insert the United States into a war. The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to declare war, but Congress has not actually done so since 1942, permitting significant power to flow to the president. In the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Congress limited the president’s power as commander in chief to times when Congress has declared war, Congress has passed a law giving the president that power, or there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
That same resolution also says: “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” If an emergency appears to require military action without congressional input, the president must brief the Gang of Eight—both party leaders in each chamber of Congress, and both party leaders of each chambers’ intelligence committee—within 48 hours.
Democrats and some Republicans maintain that while no one wants Iran to have nuclear capabilities, the strikes on Iran were not an emergency and the president had no right to involve the U.S. in a war unilaterally. Administration officials’ insistence that the attack was a one-shot deal is designed to undercut the idea that the U.S. is at war; Trump’s call for regime change undermined their efforts.
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a statement: “Trump said he would end wars; now he has dragged America into one. His actions are a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war. While we all agree that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon, Trump abandoned diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal and instead chose to unnecessarily endanger American lives, further threaten our armed forces in the region, and risk pulling America into another long conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. There was more time for diplomacy to work.
“The war in Iraq was also started under false pretenses. It’s clear that President Trump has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who opposed the JCPOA negotiated by President Obama and has long favored drawing America into a war against Iran. The United States has rightly supported Israel’s defense, but it should not have joined Netanyahu in waging this war of choice. Instead of living up to his claim that he’d bring all wars to an end, Trump is yet again betraying Americans by embroiling the United States directly in this conflict.”
Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) posted on social media: “This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach,” he added. “I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if [Speaker Mike] Johnson [R-LA] doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk.”
But Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel that Trump did not have to notify Congress because “[w]e do not have trustworthy people in Congress especially on the left side of the aisle.” If you give information to Democrats and those Republicans who oppose the president, he said, “you might as well put the [ayatollah] on the phone as well.” There is no basis for this statement.
In a quirk of timing, the satirical media outlet The Onion took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today that looks like a newspaper with the headline: “Congress, now more than ever, our nation needs your cowardice.” Journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket got an exclusive look at the insert and reproduced its front page. It read in part: “Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero actions as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.”
Congress members will have a copy of the ad in their mailboxes tomorrow when they get back to work on the Republicans’ enormously unpopular budget reconciliation bill.
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In a timeline of Trump’s decision to drop 12 of the reportedly 20 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs the U.S. military possessed on Iran, New York Times reporters confirmed what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo judged from the beginning: Trump wanted in on the optics of what seemed to be Israel’s successful strikes against Iran.
Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported conversations with administration officials who confirmed there was no new intelligence to suggest Iran was on the brink of producing nuclear weapons.
Mark Mazzetti, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper reported yesterday in the New York Times that Trump had warned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu against striking Iran but changed his mind after seeing how Israel’s military action was “playing” on television. The reporters write: “The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved.”
Trump began to hint he had been part of the operation, and military advisors began to draw up plans for a strike. According to the reporters, by June 17—three days after his military parade had fizzled and more than 5 million Americans had turned out to protest his administration—Trump had decided to bomb Iran.
Rather than keeping the mission quiet, Trump issued increasingly aggressive social media posts appearing to hint at a strike. David E. Sanger of the New York Times cited reports from Israeli intelligence saying that Iranian officials had removed 400 kilograms (about 880 pounds) of enriched uranium from the Fordo enrichment plant to another nuclear complex, although at least some equipment and records would likely have remained there.
Republicans have talked about bombing Iran to stop its nuclear aspirations since the early 2000s, but the relationship between the U.S. and Iran relating to nuclear technology actually reaches back to 1953. In that year, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom supported a coup against the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he called for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which British interests controlled a majority stake.
In his place, the former leader of the country, Mohammad Reza Shah, retook power. In 1954, Iran accepted a 25-year agreement that gave western oil companies 50% ownership of Iran’s oil production.
At the same time, President Eisenhower proposed trying to defang international fears of nuclear war by shifting nuclear technologies toward civilian uses, including energy. On December 8, 1953, he spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City on how atomic energy could be used for peaceful ends. The initiative, known as “Atoms for Peace,” provided reactors, nuclear fuel, and training for scientists for countries that promised they would use the technology only for peaceful civilian purposes.
In 1967 the U.S. supplied a nuclear reactor and highly enriched uranium to Iran, and trained Iranian scientists in the United States. In 1974, according to Ariana Rowberry of the Brookings Institution, the shah announced he intended to build 20 new reactors in the next 20 years.
Then, in 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran forced out the shah and put Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in power. In 1980, after the U.S. admitted the shah into the country for cancer treatments, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy, taking 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Iran, imposed sanctions, froze Iranian assets in the U.S., and ended the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran.
Iran turned to Pakistan, China, and Russia to expand its nuclear program. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased until Republican politicians talked about bombing the sites of Iran’s nuclear program. Famously, Arizona senator John McCain joked about bombing Iran in 2007 when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bBomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ classic song “Barbara Ann.”
McCain lost the 2008 election to Democratic president Barack Obama, and in 2013 at the beginning of his second term, Obama began high-level talks to cap Iran’s enrichment of uranium that could be used for weapons. In 2015, forty-seven Republican senators, led by then freshman senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, tried to blow up the talks, sending an open letter to Iranian officials to put them on notice that “the next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”
This was an astonishing breach of the longstanding U.S. tradition of presenting a united front in foreign negotiations. Nonetheless, in 2015 the U.S., Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the European Union signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s enriched uranium in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
At about the same time, negotiators settled an unrelated case between the U.S. and Iran at The Hague, involving the return of American prisoners to the U.S. and Iranian assets frozen in the U.S. to Iran. Since Iran was cut off from international finance systems at the time, the U.S. returned some of those assets in 2016 as Swiss francs, euros, and other currencies. Donald Trump, who was then running for the presidency, insisted that the Obama administration had sent “pallets of cash” to Iran as part of a deal to free the prisoners. “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power,” Trump told reporters.
Then, in 2016, voters put Trump in the White House. Although the nuclear deal appeared to be working, Trump left it in 2018, calling it a “horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” Without the U.S. the agreement broke down. Iran resumed its program for enriching uranium.
A week and a half ago, on June 12, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched strikes against Iran, and on June 21, Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, claiming that after 40 years of Iranian hostility, “Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
In fact, the effect of the strikes is not at all clear, although Trump insisted yet again this afternoon that “[o]bliteration is an accurate term!... Bullseye!!!”
Trump’s strikes on Iran underscore how Republican leaders see governance. They seemed to see the careful negotiations under Obama and the international inspections that certified Iran’s adherence to the JCPOA as signs of weakness, preferring simply to use American military might to impose U.S. will. Trump has combined that dominance ideology with his enthusiasm for performances that play well on television.
This afternoon, Iran responded to the U.S. strikes with its own missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, after warning of the upcoming attack to enable Qatar to intercept the missiles.
Trump posted on social media: “Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired—13 were knocked down, and 1 was ‘set free,’ because it was headed in a nonthreatening direction. I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”
Ten minutes later, he posted: “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!”
Republican dominance politics began in the 1950s as a way to prevent the federal government from protecting Black and Brown civil rights. Since then, it has reinforced the idea of asserting power through violence. And it has always reinforced the power of white men over women and racial and gender minorities.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration's request to allow it to deport migrants to places other than their country of origin, often to countries plagued by violence. The administration has claimed this power as part of its campaign to scare immigrants from coming to the U.S. by demonstrating that they could end up in a third country with no recourse. The court majority did not explain its reasoning; the three liberal justices—Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—dissented sharply.
“In…earlier rulings, the court cleared the way for the government to treat as many as a million migrants as removable who previously weren’t,” legal analyst Steve Vladeck told Angélica Franganilla Díaz and John Fritze of CNN. “And today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them—without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries.”
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At 6:02 last night, President Donald Trump announced on his social media account that Israel and Iran has agreed to “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” that would lead to “an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR.” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that the announcement took some of Trump’s own senior advisors by surprise. Since then, Trump’s social media feed has been unusually active, posting claims that his approval rate is soaring, that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, that “for the first time ever [a] majority of Americans believe the United States is on the right track,” and that “Trump was right about everything.”
"THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!” Trump’s social media feed posted at 1:08 this morning. But within hours, Israel had struck Iran again. At 6:50, Trump’s social media feed posted: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” At 7:28 it posted: ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
After Israel struck, Iran retaliated. This morning, Trump accused both countries of violating the ceasefire agreement—although, to be sure, there has been no published confirmation that any such agreement exists. Sounding angry, Trump told reporters: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*ck they’re doing.”
At 11:17 the account posted: “Both Israel and Iran wanted to stop the War, equally! It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!” It also attacked Democrats, especially women of color, at length, saying they were stupid and “can’t stand the concept of our Country being successful again.”
The account also said: “Now that we have made PEACE abroad, we must finish the job here at home by passing “THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” and getting the Bill to my desk, ASAP. It will be a Historic Present for THE GREAT PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, as we begin the Celebration of our Country’s 250th Birthday. We are finally entering our Golden Age, which will bring unprecedented Safety, Security, and Prosperity for ALL of our Citizens.”
In fact, Trump’s victory lap seems designed to be the finale to a triumphant storyline that can convince his loyalists he has scored an enormous victory before reality sets in. According to a new CNN poll, Americans disapprove of the U.S. military strikes against Iran by a margin of 56% to 44%.
Further, Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that according to early assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the damage caused by the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the strikes did not destroy the main parts of the Iran’s nuclear program and probably set it back by only a few months. The DIA is the intelligence arm of the Pentagon.
The White House called the DIA assessment “flat out wrong.”
Later today, the New York Times confirmed CNN’s reporting.
Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky suggested today that the Obama administration had the right approach when it negotiated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s nuclear program. Paul said: “I’m arguing that the intervention, the military intervention, may not have been successful, as people are saying, and also that there may not be a military answer to this, that ultimately the answer to the end of the nuclear program is going to involve diplomacy.”
A video on Trump’s social media feed posted at 7:15 tonight recalled Senator John McCain’s 2007 call to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Trump’s version used McCain’s “bomb Iran” chorus but was longer and had visual imagery of planes dropping bombs. In Trump’s version, the soundtrack to the video used the melody of Barbara Ann to say things like: “went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, tell the ayatollah gonna put you in a box,” and “old Uncle Sam, getting pretty hot, gonna turn Iran into a parking lot.”
It is a truism that, like other authoritarians, Trump tries only to appeal to his supporters, but I confess this video, from the president of the United States, left me aghast. It seems to me long past time to question the 79-year-old president’s mental health.
Tonight, Trump’s social media feed posted: “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”
Trump’s posts sound panicked, and even aside from the strikes against Iran there is reason for his loyalists to be concerned about political events. On Saturday, masked agents from Customs and Border Patrol were caught on video chasing Narciso Barranco, a 48-year-old undocumented landscaper who has lived in the U.S. for decades, down a street with guns drawn, pinning him to the ground, and hitting him as they handcuffed him. Barranco’s oldest son, Alejandro, served in the Marines for four years and is a veteran. Barranco’s two younger sons are active-duty Marines. There has been a popular outcry over Barranco's arrest.
Barranco’s son Alejandro told Jacob Soboroff, Julia Ainsley, and Suzanne Gamboa of NBC News that his father is being held with at least 70 other people with one toilet and no privacy and that he has received very little water and even less food.
ICE's detentions continue to create a backlash. Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported that the number of migrants detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities across the country has reached a record high of more than 56,000, leading to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Federal law permits members of Congress to make unannounced visits to ICE facilities to inspect them, but officers at the Department of Homeland Security last week said members of Congress needed to give at least 72 hours notice before an inspection.
ICE claims the power to “deny a request or otherwise cancel, reschedule or terminate a tour or visit” by lawmakers or by members of their staff if “facility management or other ICE officials deem it appropriate to do so.”
Inspections will be hard to conduct at the newly approved detention facility deep in the Florida Everglades designed to house up to 5,000 migrants. Members of the state legislature say they were not consulted about the plan. Florida says the new facility will cost about $450 million a year to operate. The federal government will reimburse that money through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
News broke today that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, widely believed to be the individual responsible for the administration’s draconian immigration policies, owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, the data and intelligence software company owned by Peter Thiel. Palantir has a number of valuable contracts with ICE to track undocumented immigrants.
Ken Dilanian of NBC News reported today that concern about retaliation from Iranian sleeper cells has made the FBI return agents who had been pulled from their normal duties to focus on immigration issues back to their usual focus on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity.
One source told Dilanian, “Guess they are realizing this whole national security thing is important, after all.”
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