Trump Says He Knows Where Iran Sleeper Cells Are—But Won’t Arrest Them

Having Iranian sleeper cells floating around the country is apparently no big deal to the president.

Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday that he was well aware of the foreign chaos agents’ locations, though he didn’t express any immediate plans to do anything about it. Instead, he regurgitated his typical talking points, opting to heap responsibility for the problem onto former President Joe Biden rather than address the potentially dangerous situation directly as America’s current leader.

“Have you been briefed about how many Iran sleeper cells there could be inside the U.S. right now?” asked a journalist.

“I have been, and a lot of people came in through Biden with the stupid open border. But we know where most of them are, we’ve got our eye on all of them—I think,” Trump said.

“They came in through the open border policies of sleepy Joe Biden, one of the worst—the worst president—in the history of our country. We’ve got our eyes on all of them, but the war itself is being prosecuted at a level that nobody has seen before. It’s pretty amazing to watch,” Trump added.

Another reporter questioned Trump about a leaked FBI memo that indicated Iran could exact revenge on the U.S. by way of an offshore boat off the coast of California, potentially ushering a drone swarm to the country’s Pacific coast.

But Trump was remarkably cavalier in his reply.

“It’s being investigated, but you have a lot of things happening, and all we can do is take them as they come.”

He then took a moment to fluff himself up for wielding America’s enormous military against Iran, an act of war that has yet to be approved by Congress.

“The war itself is being prosecuted as well as anybody has ever seen, and this is other countries telling me too,” Trump repeated. “Big countries, powerful countries, they said they’ve never seen anything like it. And they also agree with what I’m doing. They say it’s an evil country, and it’s been for 47 years that way.”

Senator John Fetterman appeared not to understand why Democrats want to investigate the deadly strike that killed dozens of Iranian children. 

During an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Wednesday night, Fetterman was asked to explain why he hadn’t signed onto a letter from Senate Democrats that questioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the February 28 strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, a girls’ primary school miles from Tehran. The strike killed 175 people, many of them young girls.

“Well, because we all agree that it’s a tragedy having the school hit, and we all agree now for an investigation,” Fetterman said. “What I don’t agree with the rest of my colleagues in the House is that it’s a war of choice, or it’s dumb, or all the things my colleagues have described, you know, this operation. I think it’s a good thing, and I support that.”

Fetterman was referring to a line in the letter describing Donald Trump’s military campaign as “a war of choice without Congressional authorization.” The letter did not describe the war as “dumb.”

Fetterman noted that the Pentagon was already investigating the strike. A preliminary report determined that the deadly attack was the result of a targeting error by the U.S. military as it conducted a strike on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base next door.

“It seems that they’ve already acknowledging all those things. I think largely that letter, it was rendered moot at this point, after what has already come out,” he said.  

Fetterman added: “I would remind everybody listening right now, the United States never, ever targets civilians. Iran does.”

But that’s exactly why an investigation is necessary: to ensure that the Pentagon took all necessary steps to prevent civilian casualties. In the letter, Senate Democrats pressed Hegseth to provide details on the analysis conducted on the building before the strike, the use of artificial intelligence, the role of civilian harm mitigation, and the Pentagon’s compliance with rules to prevent war crimes. 

Fetterman is naïvely—or callously—giving the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt while the U.S. and Israel bomb schools, hospitals, cultural heritage sites, and residential areas with impunity.

Fetterman ranted that the “left media” seemed to care much more “about this hospital” than about Iran massacring “tens of thousands of their young people.” (Some of us are old enough to remember when Fetterman cheerleaded Israel killing thousands of young people in Gaza.)

“Whether it’s The New York Times, they’re making it more and more, trying to convince America that this has been a disaster or things are out of control, and that’s just categorically untrue,” he said. 

When Collins tried to explain why the media would cover a strike that killed dozens of schoolchildren, Fetterman became defensive.

“It is appropriate to cover it, you know, it’s a tragedy, absolutely. And if we were on it, it’s appropriate to apologize,” he said, looking defeated. 

Donald Trump’s call with G7 leaders Wednesday left them confused about what the president wants from the Iran war.

Trump sent mixed signals to the leaders of the world’s seven leading economies in a video call hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, unnamed sources told Axios. These sources said that Trump was “ambiguous and noncommittal,” leaving some on the call thinking that he wants a quick end to hostilities, while others thought that he was digging in for a long war.

“It will be up to the president of the United States to clarify both his final objectives and the pace he intends to give to the operations,” Macron said following the call.

Trump’s public comments on Wednesday outside of the call haven’t cleared things up. He told Axios that the war with Iran was going to end “soon,” claiming that “there is practically nothing left” to target in the country. But while leaving the White House for a rally in Kentucky, he said the U.S. was “not done” attacking Iran. When he was asked what more the military had to do, he replied, “More of the same.”

At the rally, Trump told his supporters, “You never like to say too early you won. We won. In the first hour it was over.” Minutes later, he contradicted himself, saying, “We don’t want to leave early, do we? We gotta finish the job, right?”

Yet again, the president is showing us that he is making up his plans for Iran as he goes along. Is destroying the country’s nuclear program the goal, or is it regime change? And what is he going to do about the state of oil prices now that Iran has seized the Strait of Hormuz? The rest of the world will have to keep guessing as more and more people are killed.

Former slumlord President Donald Trump reportedly told Speaker Mike Johnson that “no one gives a [bleep] about housing.”

Punchbowl News reported that Trump told Johnson this in private conversation earlier this week, and the House speaker then relayed it to a small committee of GOP leadership on Tuesday. The report was based on four sources who heard Johnson recount his conversation with the president as he tried to convey that a housing bill isn’t nearly as important as the SAVE Act, the GOP plan to force every American to prove their citizenship to vote—a blatant voter-suppression attempt.

Americans absolutely give a shit about housing. There are hundreds of thousands of people sleeping on the street every night. Many millennials and Gen Zers can’t afford to pay rent in this country, much less buy a house—making sure that the central tenet of the so-called “American dream” will never be a reality.

Trump himself campaigned on a kind of economic populism and uplifting the American working class (while blaming immigrants in the process, of course). And while his grift has been obvious to some for a while, millions of Americans actually believed in him and voted for him. At least now they have something showing them he couldn’t care less.

“Americans don’t give a shit about housing costs. They want DC to prioritize policies that actually improve their everyday lives,” Vox’s Eric Levitz wrote sarcastically. “Such as disenfranchising people who lack passports, putting a new Khamenei in charge of Iran, and making the Kennedy Center’s programming less woke.”

Jeffrey Epstein reportedly paid a settlement to a woman who also accused Donald Trump of sexually abusing her. 

Representative Ro Khanna told PBS News Hour’s Ali Rogin Wednesday that Richard Kahn, Epstein’s accountant, confirmed that the alleged sex trafficker’s estate had made a payment to a woman who accused both Epstein and Trump. Kahn did not say how much the settlement was, or when it was paid, during his deposition in front of the House Oversight Committee earlier in the day. 

“If it was fake, then why was she paid a settlement? There must be some validity to it,” Khanna said, according to Rogin. “Now, I’m not saying validity necessarily against Donald Trump. Maybe it was against Epstein. But he did confirm that there was a settlement payout.”

Khanna said that the Oversight Committee was “exploring” interviewing this woman as part of its investigation into Trump’s ties to Epstein. 

It wasn’t immediately clear which survivor of Epstein’s abuse Khanna was referring to. 

Buried in the FBI’s massive trove of documents were multiple interviews with a woman who claimed Trump had forced her to perform oral sex, punched her in the head, and raped her when she was between 13 and 15 years old. The woman, according to her testimony to the FBI, was abused by Epstein for years, and was harassed into silence for years after the abuse ended.  

The Department of Justice had previously removed the record of this woman’s FBI interviews from its Epstein database. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the rereleased testimony amounted to “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.”

Last week, the FBI released a memo detailing an interview with yet another victim of Epstein’s who claimed Trump was on speakerphone while she was being abused.