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American forces destroyed five Iranian tankers Tuesday after the Revolutionary Guard fired missiles at a US warship twice in two days and missed. Iran claims it hit the American base at Al Azraq, Jordan; neither Jordan nor the Pentagon has confirmed it.

5️⃣ Carney Charges Americans, Trump Swings at Kansas

Mark Carney started charging Americans at one minute past midnight Tuesday: C$27.6 billion of American goods. Trump answered on Truth Social: “NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!” Bombardier builds for the Pentagon in Wichita, Kansas, so Kansas’s two Republican senators objected first. Carney is an economic whiz and Trump is an idiot, Zev said. Trump posted a still of himself thrashing Carney in a cartoon hockey fight, fans animated the rest, and to Zev’s eye the jersey looks Russian.

4️⃣ Putin Bombs Kyiv Once Trump’s Envoys Leave

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent the weekend in Moscow, then Kyiv, and Putin held his fire while they were in Kyiv. They left Sunday; at 3:30 Tuesday morning Russia fired 32 cruise missiles and 166 drones at the city, killing five, and at midday flew a drone into a newsroom mid-broadcast. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign-policy aide, told reporters the two sides discussed “major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects.” Trump’s people are doing business with the men bombing Kyiv, Zev said.

3️⃣ Trump’s 9/11 Firemen Now Carry Him

Trump stood on the Ellipse Tuesday, FDNY firefighters around him, and told them two of their own carried him out of Ground Zero: “big, strong guys… they literally lifted me up.” He was never on the pile. He was four miles north, on the phone, telling a New Jersey TV station 40 Wall Street was now the tallest downtown. Newsday found him there two days later in a black suit, not a speck of dust on it. He sends JD Vance to Ground Zero on Friday and keeps the Pentagon for himself.

2️⃣ Huckabee Threatens Britain, Netanyahu Shuts Its Consulate

Ed Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, told the Commons as “a proud British Jew” that the West Bank settlers are carrying out ethnic cleansing, and banned their goods. Gideon Sa’ar, Netanyahu’s foreign minister, closed Britain’s East Jerusalem consulate by afternoon. Trump’s ambassador Mike Huckabee told the BBC British companies “will not be able to do business in Florida”; Rubio softened it within hours. Britain wrote the Balfour Declaration; Britain set up Israel. Netanyahu punished Britain for naming a crime, and Trump let his man threaten it for him.

1️⃣ Iran Holds a US Robot Sub and the Left Press Looks Away

This week’s Ground News Blindspot. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it captured one of America’s newest robot submarines in the Strait of Hormuz — an Anduril Dive-LD: Palmer Luckey’s machine, Peter Thiel’s money, JD Vance’s stock. A US official told Reuters an older drone malfunctioned a day earlier, nothing classified aboard. Iran didn’t capture it. Iran found it. Iran did the same with a CIA drone in 2011 and flew a copy into Israel in 2018; Zev expects the parade, then the copy. Ground News counts 67 outlets on it; of the 30 it rates, four lean left — 13 percent.

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5️⃣ Gloria Steinem, 1934–2026

Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at her home in New York, at 92, and Zev opened on what she actually invented: an arithmetic. People outnumbered on their own stop being outnumbered together. He first met the idea in a Sociology 101 lecture hall in South Africa, where it became scaffolding for a new constitution — and the reason that country wrote women’s rights and gay rights into law while others did not. Dana DuBois, who stepped out of her workday for the top of the show, said she had never known a world without Steinem’s influence, and called losing her nine days after Dolly Parton a devastating doubleheader. Ellie Leonard went to the 1963 Playboy Club exposé — Steinem in the costume, taking notes, later describing the operation as one run by an eight-year-old child.

4️⃣ Sanders Moves to Ban the AI the Pentagon Buys

Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar called for an outright ban on artificial superintelligence, with a corporate death penalty for any company that builds it. Zev broke with them. Ban it here and the work moves rather than stops — the other side builds it anyway, and America loses both the race and any say in taming it. What July’s OpenAI breach argues for is regulation: safety vetted before a product ships, harms monitored after. Leonard, who lost her own job to the technology, took it to ground level. No person sits behind the report button any more when someone is threatened online, only an algorithm hunting keywords.

3️⃣ Leon Black Sues Congress, Then Skips His Deposition

Leon Black asked a federal judge to stop the House Oversight Committee enforcing two subpoenas, then failed to appear for the deposition they demanded. Leonard walked the sequence: Black was offered a voluntary interview, not under oath, walked out of it, and got subpoenaed twice — once for sworn testimony, once for the nondisclosure agreements he insists have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. He says he is protecting women’s privacy. Zev put the $158 million in context. Epstein was no accountant; he ran an art scheme through a trust, moving works between entities Black controlled to dodge tax under a loophole since closed. The pattern runs deeper. Black sat inside the firm that helped blow up 1987, then bought the wreckage cheap and built Apollo from it — an insider on both sides of the collapse, the same shape as 2008.

2️⃣ Lutnick Campaigns for Canada’s Breakup

No American cabinet secretary has done what Howard Lutnick did this week: campaign in public for a neighbouring country to come apart. He blamed Mark Carney for trade talks his own last-minute demands killed, then told Ontario on television it does not measure up as a fifty-first state — while the State Department heard out the Albertans who want to leave. Trump followed on Truth Social, promising Carney’s economy would collapse. Reverse it, Zev noted, and there would be war. Canada is meanwhile growing on new partners in Europe and Asia, and the tariffs land on American buyers.

1️⃣ A Whistleblower Says the Postal Service Kept Building

Judge Indira Talwani has not ruled on the Postal Service’s mail-ballot screening system, and the show went to air without her decision. What did land is worse: a whistleblower says USPS kept building the voter portal after the court ordered it stopped, and the site may appear within days. Members of Congress want closed-door hearings. Set that beside ICE offering $5 million for a file of every American voter’s name, address and voting history. The file does not have to be accurate to work — Leonard described neighbours with passports and visas in order who now walk their documented children to school holding papers, and who will think twice about a polling place. Her advice for November: vote early, and confirm the ballot arrived.

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5️⃣ TARRANT CUTS THE BOOTHS, THE POST OFFICE SLOWS THE MAIL

Tarrant County’s Republican commissioners closed 92 Election Day polling places on Tuesday and cut early voting from 50 sites to 47, over a room that shouted them down. Zev named the only explanation for closing polls in a county that is growing: somebody knows who votes there. Behind the county sits the same crew — Kash Patel, who helped organise January 6, now runs the FBI and its election-crimes work; Heather Honey, of the Cyber Ninjas recount, now sets state voter-roll and mail rules at Homeland Security; Natalie Harp, who urged that day’s crowd on, now works in the White House. Anne P. Mitchell, the lawyer sitting in for Dean Blundell, brought the whistleblower who says the Postal Service built its ballot portal anyway, under a judge’s restraining order, and that one bad barcode rejects a whole batch of ballots back to the states. She filed the report with the court, which hears the injunction Thursday at 9 a.m. “The only way we lose is if you don’t vote,” Mitchell said.

4️⃣ MAPQUEST REFUSED, AND WENT TO NUMBER ONE

Apple and Google renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” on the president’s demand. MapQuest refused, and Americans made it the number one app in the country. Zev read the poll under the joke: 38 percent of Republicans now call Canada unfriendly or an enemy, per Axios — the price of a trade war fought over a name. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has since stepped into Alberta’s secession fight, a domestic Canadian matter no American cabinet officer has touched before. Mitchell explained why he would: Trump is the only thing standing between Lutnick and the Epstein file.

3️⃣ DENMARK ARMS GREENLAND — AND ONLY ONE SIDE COVERED IT

This week’s Ground News Blindspot found Denmark sending conscripts to Greenland, with 56 percent of the coverage on the right and 13 percent on the left. As the ice melts, Zev explained, the polar route cuts roughly 35 percent off China’s shipping costs to America and runs down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes — which is why Trump, Putin and Xi all want the Arctic, and why Canada and Greenland keep coming up. Mitchell named the arrangement on air: the axis of grift. Ground News gives Fivestack viewers 40 percent off the Vantage plan at groundnews.com/fivestack.

2️⃣ HEGSETH CLEARS OUT THE OFFICERS WHO COULD REFUSE

Pete Hegseth struck seven more officers from the Army’s two-star promotion list, and the Army secretary who objected is gone. Dan Driscoll resigned to the president’s face and told him Hegseth is unqualified. Mitchell, an Army veteran, said the ranks will remember it: when a respected leader walks out on principle, the next illegal order gets a second thought. Zev tied it to Quantico, where Trump proposed American cities as training grounds, and asked whether a thinner officer corps is the point. The Navy supplied the picture — the USS Abraham Lincoln pulled into Thailand this week, rusted.

1️⃣ AN AMERICAN MISSILE HIT A WEDDING

A missile hit a wedding party in Sirik county, southern Iran, late Tuesday. At least four people are dead — two of them children, aged four and sixteen — and 68 are wounded, the Iranian Red Crescent says, and it has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate. The American military says it never targets civilians. Nobody has established what the missile was aimed at. Zev noted this is the second such account of this war, after the strike that killed schoolgirls, in a conflict Washington keeps calling finished. Iranian hackers reached American infrastructure this week, water systems among them, exactly as Iranian commanders promised on camera three weeks ago.

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Lev Parnas told The Fivestack his sources expect indictments in two to three weeks, an October surprise before the midterms, and that Trump is adamant he wants Barack Obama charged with conspiracy, with Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Miles Taylor. Parnas says the Ratcliffe and Kash Patel Moscow trips feed the material: “Which I wouldn’t call evidence. I would call misinformation.”

Dean is currently on assignment in Europe

5️⃣ Lake Ontario

Doug Burgum, at Interior, says Trump is pressuring Apple to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America”; Google switched it on American phones over the weekend. Parnas typed it into his phone live on air and got back Lake America. What Trump is really after is in the order: the cooling water, the drinking water, the Welland Canal trade route, and behind it the Arctic.

4️⃣ Welker, the FCC, and a letter

Trump asked the Federal Communications Commission to rebuke or punish NBC’s Kristen Welker for calling his endorsement record mixed. NBC had counted it eleven days earlier: 67 wins, six losses. “That’s not how dictators work. They need to go after the top, because if they shut down the top, the bottom fall,” Parnas said. He also said CNN cut him off last week when he mentioned Trump, Cohen and the Epstein files. “Even like yourself, that are being threatened by Melania for writing a true story,” Parnas said. Melania Trump’s lawyers sent Narativ a demand letter over its Amanda Ungaro reporting. Trial means discovery. The letter is aimed less at a courtroom than at every other newsroom, warning them off a story that is accurate, with more to come.

3️⃣ Venezuela

Trump announced the biggest oil deal in history on Truth Social Friday, then “a Gift from Venezuela” Sunday. The desk searched the White House, State, the Federal Register, Energy. No paperwork. Alejandro Betancourt López is assembling it. Switzerland has him under investigation — not charged, not prosecuted. Todd Blanche asked the Swiss for leniency before taking over the Justice Department. “I know Alejandro and his family very well,” Parnas said.

2️⃣ Dark money

The New York Times counted at least $1 billion in midterm spending with hidden donors, and calls that a floor. Sixty-four days out. “When you talk about dark money, when you talk about super PAC money, the same money goes to both sides,” Parnas said. It reaches low-polling Democrats in tight districts who can split a vote. Name a donor. Nobody can.

1️⃣ The Pentagon

Hegseth ordered forces held in place for a longer war with Iran. Three combatant commands — European, Pacific and Southern — and the Navy’s top admiral filed a non-concur: they disagreed, and said they would follow the order anyway. Sean Parnell, hunting the leaker, called publication a crime while writing in the same post that “non-concurs are standard.” A community note on X cited the Pentagon Papers ruling. “It’s going after the whistleblowers... the people trying to warn our country,” Parnas said. Trump posted an AI video of Kharg Island “blown to smithereens,” a place never struck. Reuters ran it through detection software: most likely synthetic. JD Vance, on camera, did not deny it was fake.

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He signed the order on camera. His negotiators gave up the demands the same morning, in the room where the money actually moves.

5. LAKE AMERICA

Trump signed an executive order Thursday afternoon renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” effective immediately, with Doug Burgum beside him. “All it takes is a good pen and some intelligence,” he said. Fifty-seven percent of that lake is in Canada. “They want to be treated like a state, but they’re not a state,” he said.

His negotiators folded the same morning, in the room where the money actually moves: they dropped the demands over how Canadian platforms rank and label American content, Dominic LeBlanc thanked them and asked for more, and Canada gave up nothing. Howard Lutnick denied ever raising the French language: “If you think I ever said the words French.” Dean Blundell, who broke the withdrawal at 10:28, expects Ottawa to cancel its F-35 order next week.

Canada is the number one export market for 27 states, six of them swing states — Michigan 39 percent of everything it exports, Wisconsin 31, then Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota and North Carolina. Two years ago it was 36.

4. TWO THEATRES, ONE EMPTY MAGAZINE

John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow to tell the Russians not to attack NATO, and Sergei Naryshkin, Putin’s foreign intelligence chief, confirmed the meeting himself on Russian state television at 6:31 Thursday morning — hours before any American official said a word. AP and Reuters then reported American Patriot interceptor stocks in Europe are “beyond critical,” burned through in the Iran war. Ratcliffe delivered his warning the same day his own government called the magazine empty.

Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration counted 244 Chinese vessels around the island in July, a third straight record month. No exercise, no drill, nobody announced it. Romania’s president Nicușor Dan condemned Russian drones over his own gas field on 20 August. Naryshkin counts interceptors too.

3. THE BLINDSPOT: ZELENSKYY WORKS THE SENATE

Volodymyr Zelenskyy lobbied senators directly on the Russia sanctions bill — the act named for Lindsey Graham, who died in July — and Ground News reported at 12:06 Thursday afternoon that it helped shake the bill loose. Fifty-three percent of the coverage came from the left, 47 percent from the centre, and from the right, nothing. Not thin. Zero.

The editors who spiked Zelenskyy working the Senate are the editors who spiked the CIA director in Moscow.

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2. OSSOFF GIVES COLLINS A DEADLINE

Jon Ossoff stood in Macon on Thursday morning and gave Mike Collins until the afternoon to answer for Preston Parra, who worked for him and posted a swastika, “White Power,” racial slurs and an image of himself in Klan robes. Parra says he made that image with Grok, the AI generator. It is not a photograph.

Collins’s leadership PAC paid Parra $7,700; the watchdog’s own report puts the pay at $10,288.44, twice the figure the Washington Post reported. “It is the year 2026 in the state of Georgia. It’s not 1935. It’s not 1958,” Ossoff said. Collins leaves the House at noon on January 3, 2027, win or lose, and House Ethics loses jurisdiction the same minute. He only has to last until January.

1. BANK OF AMERICA PAYS $72.5 MILLION

Judge Jed Rakoff approved Bank of America’s $72.5 million settlement with Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers at 12:42 Thursday afternoon, clearing the way to pay roughly 90 women. Six outlets had touched it by air time. House Oversight released 201 pages of Jes Staley’s closed-door interview the same week.

Asked flatly whether he shared JPMorgan’s confidential information with Epstein, Staley answered “Yes.” Page 175: “I’ve got the right to use confidential information where I think it’s appropriate.” Page 179, asked whether he regretted any of it: “No.”

Second bank, second check, and no individual has ever been charged. Shareholders write it, the executives keep their money, and the accusers get a settlement instead of a defendant.

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DEVELOPING….Kash Patel ran the leak hunt out of the White House this week — three Secret Service communications staff on leave, four New York Times reporters subpoenaed, the agency that guards the president investigated from the building it guards. Dean Blundell disputed that on air: nobody has confirmed the Secret Service leaked anything, he said, calling it a purge of people not loyal to Trump and putting the catering-truck leak on Karoline Leavitt, 48 hours before she quit — Narativ has not verified that, and our reporting cuts against the purge: nobody fired, no target list.

5️⃣ Nepal — the wall of water

In the video Zev played, birds lift off before the water arrives, people run because they can hear it, and a building Nepal and China built together is gone. Ninety-five dead by Wednesday night, more than a hundred now — thirty-three in Chitwan, 150 kilometres downstream, one in the district that touches China. Nepal got no warning because no mechanism exists. Both sides agreed in principle to share flood data after the same river flooded in July 2025. Nobody signed it.

4️⃣ Meta buys its way out

Mark Zuckerberg sat through part of the trial, saw where it was going, and paid up to seventeen billion dollars. Forty state attorneys general took the deal mid-trial, and the money comes with rules — two hours a day for teenagers, teen accounts locked overnight. Meta admits nothing. Zev signed up for the last Meta settlement to see what his privacy was worth, and collected 18 cents. Congress passed nothing. The states did this.

3️⃣ The CIA director in Moscow

John Ratcliffe spent eight hours at Vnukovo on Tuesday and nobody in Washington announced it. Flight trackers caught the plane. Dmitry Peskov gave the readout: contacts through the security services, no meeting with Putin, Putin kept informed without delay. Trump called it “very sort of semi-routine.” Zev: “The CIA director does not semi-routinely head over to have conversations with the FSB.” His read: Russia is preparing something against a NATO neighbour, with the Army down to five four-star generals.

2️⃣ Canada hits back

Doug Ford told Trump to kiss his ass, then declined on CBS to take it back. “I stand by those comments,” Ford said, before turning conciliatory. Canada’s retaliation lands September 8: 15 to 50 percent on more than 700 American products, steel and aluminium doubled to 50, $7.5 billion behind Canadian business. Dean read Mark Carney’s target list as surgical — Maine lobster, Alaska, Michigan, Wisconsin dairy, Pennsylvania appliances — aimed at the midterms. American toilet paper is climbing. The pulp is Canadian.

TODAY’S NUMBER 1 STORY BROKE LIKE THIS ON GROUND NEWS: The ballot-rule story pulls 67 percent left, 33 percent centre, zero from the right. Ground News lets you see what both sides cover.

1️⃣ The ballot rule

Judge Indira Talwani lifted her own injunction against Trump’s mail-ballot rule Wednesday, and the panic started. Anne P. Mitchell read the order. The Supreme Court had tossed the case as unripe — no final rule existed when the states sued — so Talwani lifted an injunction she issued too early, and told the plaintiffs to amend and come back. “She’s going to slap an injunction on that complaint so fast that the USPS heads will spin,” Mitchell said. Sixty-nine days out, her advice: drop box, not mailbox.

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5️⃣ Dolly Parton Dies at 80

Dolly Parton died at 80. Her family announced it on her own verified accounts, in a video her nephew Bryan Seaver recorded years ago at her request. “Sadness lies with us, not with Dolly,” Seaver said in that announcement. The family released no cause. Zev met her once on the Oprah set, where she sang “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers. Blundell counted what she did with the money: Dollywood turned not-for-profit, 300 million books mailed to kids who had none.

4️⃣ Ratcliffe Flies to Moscow and Tells Nobody Why

John Ratcliffe landed in Moscow. No announcement, no readout, no press pool — the trip surfaced only because trackers followed a U.S. military plane in. Blundell said it was a C-17. Zev granted the obvious: CIA directors run these missions — Ratcliffe’s last took him to Cuba to tell Havana it was on the list. Moscow is not Havana. Trump’s presidency runs on Russia, Zev said.

3️⃣ DHS Admits the Voter-Fraud Numbers Were Inflated

NPR reported at 2:15 p.m. that the Department of Homeland Security admitted the non-citizen voter-roll figures it had been touting were inflated, on an audio call with a Nevada official. The Supreme Court handed the administration a preliminary win on the new mail-ballot order a day earlier, on numbers DHS now concedes were wrong. Blundell asked why nine justices can’t fact-check what two broadcasters check every afternoon.

2️⃣ Graham’s Sister Faces South Carolina

Darline Graham Nordone, sister of the late Lindsey Graham, carried Trump’s endorsement and, by Blundell’s count, $830,000 of his money into Tuesday’s South Carolina vote. Blundell said she answered a foreign-policy question by admitting she didn’t know much, but she liked the army. Polls closed at 7 p.m., after the show. Trump bought her a floor, Blundell said, and it may not hold.

1️⃣ Canada Matches Trump, Dollar for Dollar — This Week’s Ground News Blindspot

François-Philippe Champagne announced $27.6 billion in Canadian tariffs on roughly 700 American products — 50, 25 and 15 percent, matching Trump rate for rate, effective September 8. Energy and potash stay off the list. Mark Carney did not attend. Champagne paired them with a $7.5 billion support package: $3 million non-repayable grants, $2 million interest-free loans. Dean Blundell named the contrast: Trump has never once offered a package to the people his tariffs hurt. “This is war,” Blundell said, and aimed it carefully — not at Americans, at the Trump regime. Trump spent the day on Truth Social professing his love for French Canadians, calling Carney weak and ineffective, and floating a rename of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” Blundell countered with Lake Michigan: call it Lake Epstein, “because we don’t do business with pedophiles either.” Zev took it past the trade math — Putin wants the Arctic passage, and a compliant Canada hands it to him. And the American right is not covering any of it: Ground News scores the story 65 percent left, 35 percent centre, zero percent right, at 100 percent high factuality. The bill lands on American buyers on September 8, and half the country meets it with no warning, because the outlets their voters trust won’t call a trade war news until the checkout counter does.

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5️⃣ Carney Walks Out, and Canada Starts Fighting Back

Trump’s negotiators handed Ottawa a replacement draft on Friday night, hours before the deadline, and Mark Carney walked. Dean Blundell, who has sources on the Canadian side, read out the demands: an American veto over Canada’s deals with anyone else, price caps and first refusal on its critical minerals, Quebec’s French-language protections eliminated, and Washington deciding how much Canadian energy it takes before anyone else gets a drop. Mark Wiseman, Canada’s ambassador in Washington, had one description for it. “This is an annexation document,” Dean quoted him. “There’s no other way to put it.” Nobody could sign that, so Trump sank his own deal, then spent the weekend blaming Ottawa for last-minute demands. Fifty percent tariffs on about twenty billion US dollars of Canadian goods landed Saturday. Carney matched them dollar for dollar from September 8, called EU leaders, and sits on $460 billion of American debt he can sell whenever he likes.

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4️⃣ Points at Trump’s Human Printer

Jon Ossoff noticed how much time Natalie Harp spends beside the president, said so, and Washington started asking who she is. Harp carries a printer for Trump and hands him what she finds online, which means she decides a fair share of what he believes. When Trump slipped out of Turkey on a catering truck last week, she is the aide he took. She came out of One America News, and she spent January 6th posting for him more than a hundred and fifty times, CNN reported over the weekend. Harp screens what reaches the president, which is exactly the access any foreign service would pay for.

3️⃣ Leonard Publishes All Thirty-Seven Pages

Ellie Leonard verified and published the full set — thirty-seven handwritten pages of FBI notes, not the twenty-two she put out five days ago. Todd Blanche has told a federal judge those pages cannot come out. They had in fact been sitting in the open since March, when a Washington Examiner reporter posted them to a public document site and never wrote a word about them. The FBI interviewed Jane Doe 4 four times. Blanche released the one interview in which Donald Trump’s name never appears and withholds the three in which it does. Katie Phang is suing for them, and Blanche’s answer is due August 27. The allegations describe the abuse of a girl aged thirteen to fifteen; nobody has corroborated them, Trump denies them, and no prosecutor has charged him. She is in hiding and, Dean said, still terrified. Bill Barr ran the Justice Department through every one of those months, and Trump sat in the White House — the same months Narativ published The Secret Life of Jeffrey Epstein. A cover-up at the arrest, another at the death, and now a third.

2️⃣ Trump Explains to Cohen Why He’s Talking to Him

Michael Cohen put Trump on his Sunday radio show and let the president write his script for him. “You told stories in order to get out of trouble,” Trump told him. “And you thought about it and you recanted your testimony. And most people don’t have the guts to do that.” Cohen has recanted nothing. He does have a clemency application sitting at the White House, and Trump signs those. “It was like watching someone beat a dog into heeling that he already beat,” Dean said, before apologising to his audience for ever having worked with him.

1️⃣ Bessent Declares Economic War on Iran

Scott Bessent stood at a Treasury podium and declared economic war on Iran — its oil, its economy, and sanctions on anyone anywhere still trading with it. He would not say which leaders Trump has been calling or what he asked them for. “We’ve already seen some results,” Bessent said, and, “we do not have infinite patience here.” Bessent is threatening China, which takes no instruction from Washington and answers sanctions with sanctions. Isolate Iran’s remaining partners and China collects them. Bessent brought a press release to a war, and Americans pay for it at the pump.

Dean caught the timing. Trump picked his fight with Canada in the week the thirty-seven pages came out, and it is taking every minute of network airtime. Americans vote in seventy-one days.

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This is the smoking gun. Twenty-two pages of handwritten FBI notes the Justice Department told a federal judge were duplicative turned up on Reddit, and what they show is a conspiracy to defraud the American people of justice — a cover-up of what the Epstein files say about Donald Trump and the crimes he is alleged to have committed. The DOJ and AG Todd Blanche have proven they can’t be trusted to administer justice on behalf of the American people. Congress should appoint an independent special counsel to investigate Trump, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, and everyone else who took part in this obstruction of justice.. Ellie Leonard broke the story on her Substack a couple of hours ago and she joins us, as does Olga Lautman, who had a big exclusive of her own.

5️⃣ NATO Rings Kaliningrad and Won’t Say Why

Olga Lautman was the only reporter in the West to catch it: NATO put roughly twenty-five aircraft over northern Poland and the Baltic in a ring around Kaliningrad, unannounced. The silence is the story. NATO exercises constantly but always announces first — “you don’t want to send the wrong signal by suddenly having sophisticated aircraft,” Lautman said. This time nobody was told. She traced it to warnings from American, British and Lithuanian intelligence that Russia may be preparing a limited ground incursion to test Article Five. Washington has issued that warning twice now, something it last did in the months before the full invasion of Ukraine. Her sharper worry is a false flag staged inside Russia and blamed on a NATO member. On Wednesday the flights expanded to Moldova.

4️⃣ Trump Says There’s a Deal. Canada Says There’s a Text.

Trump stood outside the White House and declared it finished: “we’ve come to a deal with Canada,” and “basically, we have no tariffs going into Canada anymore.” Dean Blundell, who has sources on the Prime Minister’s trade council, walked through what actually exists — a framework of an understanding that might lead to a deal, with Dominic LeBlanc and Janet Charette both saying so on the record the same day. Carney corrected Trump’s Truth Social post himself. What Trump wants is not dairy or lumber but critical minerals, energy, and ownership of Canadian geology for his donors, and Carney has told him the sovereignty of Canada’s supply chains is not for sale. The fifty percent tariffs Trump imposed under a 1930 law no president had ever used still land Friday. Carney has run two countries’ central banks. Trump has not run one.

Details of the deal came from the BlindSpot from groundnews.com. Read it here

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3️⃣ Trump Demands Prison for the Man Who Testified Against Him

Alex Vindman lost Florida’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday to Angie Nixon, a state legislator who raised $975,000 against his $16.3 million and bought no television at all. Hours later the President called him a treasonous creep and demanded he be prosecuted. The voters had already finished with Vindman; the prosecution was never about winning anything.

2️⃣ Alaska Turns Into a Coin Flip

Dan Sullivan finished five points behind Mary Peltola in his own primary, in a state Trump carried by thirteen. The Cook Political Report moved the seat to toss-up back on July 1 — not on polling, but on the ballot, after Alaska’s Supreme Court ruled that a second Republican named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. could stay on it. In November that second Sullivan appears with no party beside his name. Control of the Senate now runs through Alaska.

1️⃣ Twenty-Two of the Thirty-Seven Missing Pages

Ellie Leonard spent her birthday publishing them. A tipster reached her on Signal at eleven at night pointing to a Reddit thread with four pages; a direct message produced eighteen more. The serial numbers match the FBI interviews already released. She sent them to someone who had read the originals in person, who told her: “I don’t think these are the notes that I’ve seen, but I saw about half of the notes and this looks to be about the other half” — which points to a second agent taking notes in the same room. She sat up all night waiting for legal clearance and got it at half past eight in the morning. The pages arrived with nothing redacted: the survivor’s name, her school, her friends, the prison her mother went to. Leonard redacted them herself, published no links, and reported the Reddit post so it would come down. The interviews were taken by FBI agents under the Biden administration, most of whom have since been fired. And in one of them the woman asks the Bureau to crop a second man out of her photograph of Jeffrey Epstein. The uncropped version is the picture of Epstein and Trump that everyone has now seen.

A department that told a federal judge those pages were duplicative spent Wednesday watching strangers on Reddit read them. That is not a filing error. That is the cover-up, in the open, and it will take a special counsel to prise it apart.

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.

Thank you Lev Parnas, Uncomfortable Truth by Monica, Amy Gabrielle, ShelbyRae Lane, Dr. Eric Lullove, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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5️⃣ Trump Says Kim Answered Him, Then Can’t Say If They Spoke

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that Kim Jong Un has responded to his request for a conversation. “Yeah, he has.” Asked whether the two had actually spoken, he said, “I don’t know.” On Sunday he ordered Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce the joint exercises with South Korea, citing “my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.” The grievance underneath came out in the same session: he called Seoul’s president for help against Iran and got “no thanks,” after asking $10 billion a year for the 39,000 American troops posted there. Seoul is running Ulchi Freedom Shield anyway. The Navy has already sailed the USS George Washington out of Yokosuka for the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a carrier.

4️⃣ Iran’s Guard Goes Offensive as the Deadline Dies

The sixty-day memorandum expired at 2:55 Tehran time. The Revolutionary Guard announced it is finished playing defense, promising “powerful offensive operations,” and its new commander vowed to bring “the most heavily-armed army in world history” to its knees. Trump spent the morning threatening to bomb Oman — the country mediating his deal — and the afternoon on the Strait of Hormuz: “We control it with the blockade... I like the idea of declaring it a territory.” Take Tehran at its word, Zev said on air. American economic interests worldwide are what they have named as targets.

3️⃣ The Ballroom Is a Five-Story Bunker With a Drone Port

Trump explained what sits under his 90,000-square-foot ballroom, and nobody in the room followed up. The military, he said, asked to “go down deep into the ground and build a military facility to go with the White House” — then “came up with a drone port on top.” Five stories down. Bulletproof windows, bulletproof sides, “drone proof.” He needs the room because Xi Jinping arrives September 24 and the current one seats 89. The people suing to stop it, he said, are “very, very disloyal to our country.”

2️⃣ Trump Answers a War Charge With a Children’s TV Name

Jon Ossoff said in Atlanta there is “something uniquely despicable about lying a nation into war,” and called Trump a “crook president” whose family “raked in billions.” Asked about it, Trump replied: “You mean Pee-Wee Herman? Pee-Wee Herman lookalike?” He tried the same joke at a Georgia rally and garbled it into “Pinky Herman.” The White House called Ossoff a theater kid. The same morning, the Supreme Court refused to rehear the E. Jean Carroll case. Five million dollars, final.

1️⃣ A General Says America Cannot Stop a Drone Swarm

Lieutenant General Joseph Jarrard, deputy commander of US Northern Command, was asked last Thursday whether he could defend the homeland against a drone swarm. He said no. “We don’t have the sensors... we are ill-equipped right now to handle something like that.” His boss told senators in March they defeat about a quarter of the drones they detect. Meanwhile the USS Benfold, escorting the carrier out of Asia, spent four days adrift in the South China Sea with no power, water or toilets, and the Lincoln is coming out of the Strait after 265 days at sea. Americans vote in 78 days.

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