NEWS REVUE

U.S.-Ukraine a-twist! A Rolling Stone on Epstein's List! Bob Woodward Dissed!

This was published earlier today in Santa Barbara Current.

U.S.-Ukraine-a-Twist! Rolling Stone on Epstein's List! Did Second Shooter Really Exist? Bob Woodward Dissed!

“Zelenskyy Says He’ll Sign Minerals Deal And Urges US To ‘Stand More Firmly’ For Ukraine After Oval Office Clash” (Forbes)

Histrionics aside (where they belong), here is the Trumpian stance in a nutshell:

1. Ukraine is not a member of NATO and should be grateful NATO countries rose to its defense and provided weaponry at the risk of it seeming like a proxy war between NATO and Russia.

2. Under current circumstances, Ukraine cannot gain entry to NATO without the likelihood of their conflict with Russia leading to World War III.

3. As Ukraine cannot become a member of NATO, the next best option for Ukrainians is for the USA have a significant, specified financial interest in Ukraine.

4. A U.S. financial interest in Ukraine’s rare earth minerals would naturally be protected by the U.S. military.

5. Russia would thereafter be compelled to respect whatever new boundaries are negotiated in a peace settlement or risk war directly with the USA (and NATO, by extension) for messing with their rare earth minerals— essentially rendering Ukraine a de facto member of NATO.

6. Such a situation checkmates Putin’s imperialist ambition to resurrect the old Soviet Union.

7. You can bet British PM Starmer and French President Macron (having met with Trump last week) fully comprehend the above and are advising Zelensky to get his butt back to DC ASAP to sign the mineral deal.

“Dems lead Zelensky, Ukraine off a cliff with pressure to reject mineral deal” (NY Post)

Before meeting President Trump, Zelensky met with anti-Trump Democrats who advised him to reject the terms of the mineral deal that the president was offering, according to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).

The Dems did Zelensky no favors by pep talking him to sabotage a fundamental element of the peace deal.

“New Jeffrey Epstein contact list includes Alec Baldwin, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and RFK Jr.’s mom” (NY Post)

Add disgraced former NY Gov Mario Cuomo to the motley mix, according to this news item.

Alec will punch a photographer. Cuomo will blame Trump.

And Jagger? He’ll insist he got no satisfaction.

The Stones’ nickname for Mick: “Needy Whiny Brenda”

“Fired CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge reveals photos of files on Hunter Biden, COVID origins seized by network: ‘Attack on investigative journalism’” (NY Post)

In October 2020, Herridge uncovered materials from Hunter Biden’s laptop, including a million-dollar retainer from a Chinese energy firm and business communications involving Hunter Biden.

She presented this evidence to CBS News executives, including then-Senior Vice President Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews and then-“CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell.

Her reporting was never aired.

Which means that CBS stands for…

“Nostradamus' terrifying 2025 'plague' prediction that may be coming true” (Daily Mail)

Here we go again:

Trump’s back in the Oval, let’s throw another plague at him. (China, garnished with WHO and CDC, add a pinch of spider legs—Institutional Washington—to a poisonous vat of bat soup.)

Won’t work, no one’s drinking it, not even the sheeple from last time round.

“Mass firings across National Weather Service, NOAA ignite fury among scientists worldwide” (LA Times)

As DOGE slashes waste and weeds, scaremongering from mainstream media continues to reach manic heights.

And this…

“Overcrowding and piles of rubbish: Elon Musk’s Doge cutbacks plunge America’s parks into crisis” (The Telegraph)

Quick, someone call Chicken Little… because… THE SKY IS FALLING!

(As I wrote a few items ago, even sheeple aren’t buying it.)

“Would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks may have had accomplice, data shows, as investigators say FBI suppressing info” (NY Post)

A veteran private investigator from Erie, Penn., who was hired shortly after the fateful July 13 event at Butler Farm to look into Crooks by a private client, believes a “criminal network” was operating with him at the time of the assassination attempt, is still in existence and still wants to kill President Trump.

Doug Hagmann’s team of six other investigators have interviewed more than 100 people.

“We don’t think he acted alone,” said Hagmann. “This took a lot of coordination. In my view, Crooks was handled by more than one individual and he was used for this [assassination attempt]. And I wouldn’t preclude the possibility that there were people at the rally itself helping him.”

Crooks used encrypted messaging apps that link to Belgium, New Zealand and Germany.

The consensus among those (teachers, fellow students) who knew Crooks: The narrative about Crooks in the media in the first days after the shooting — that he was a troubled loner, wore military fatigues and camo clothing, threatened to shoot up his high school in 2019 and was rejected by his school’s rifle club — were all lies.

A troubled loner.

Where have we heard that one before?

“The JFK assassination was an inside job with TWO shooters” (Daily Mail)

Duh.

Does anyone still believe otherwise?

And finally…

“Bill Murray Says Bob Woodward’s ‘Criminal’ Book About John Belushi Made Him Wonder if ‘They Framed Nixon’” (The Wrap)

Bill Murray slammed Bob Woodward’s 1986 book “Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi” as “completely inaccurate” to the point that he began to wonder if “they framed Nixon” during an interview with Joe Rogan published on Saturday.

“All of a sudden, I went, ‘Oh my God, if this is what he writes about my friend that I’ve known, you know, for half my adult life, which is completely inaccurate, talking to the people of the outer, outer circle, getting the story — what the hell could they have done to Nixon?’”

It was Woodward, of course, who produced “Deep Throat,” the secretive source who turned out to be W. Mark Felt, an embittered senior FBI official.

Before becoming a reporter for the Washington Post, Woodward was part of Institutional Washington as an officer in the U.S. Navy, assigned to naval intelligence.

A product of Whittier, California, Richard Nixon never signed onto the Eastern Establishment, whose members felt entitled to ownership rights over foreign policy—and U.S. policy in general. (President Lyndon Johnson, half a decade earlier, had not signed on either, but LBJ’s concession was retaining “the best and the brightest”—JFK’s so-called crowd of Harvard intellectuals, the worst and the dimmest—to steer his presidency though an unjust war in Vietnam.

Tricky Dick Nixon looked straight at me (Oxford, England, 1978)

In his quest for intelligence that might aid his 1972 election campaign in 1972, President Nixon had already dispatched snarling Rottweilers H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and John Ehrlichman on a fishing expedition to Langley, try to hook CIA files on the Kennedy Administration’s attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro (an operation still hush-hush back then—along with assassinations in general).

Moreover, Nixon was convinced DNC chairman Larry O’Brien had information about bribes paid to himself and his younger brother, Donald, by reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, who’d been trying for several years to quash the Atomic Energy Commission’s underground nuclear testing in Nevada (where he lived) due to (valid) concerns about radioactive contamination.

When news reached Nixon about what Larry O’Brien possessed, he may have panicked, leading to irrational behavior—and rendering him easy prey for a trap.

Enter Henry Kissinger, assigned to the White House (through New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller) from what Nixon called “the Pratt House crowd,” to keep the White House in check and, as national security adviser (back then a lowly position Dr. K elevated into the stratosphere), and shape foreign policy, especially after he became secretary of state. (Pratt House, in New York City, is home to the Council on Foreign Relations, a private entity known as “the brain trust of the establishment.”)

Kissinger, who privately referred to his boss as “meatball mind” and “that madman,” fed Nixon’s madness, his paranoia, and insisted White House leaks be plugged, whatever laws might be broken in the process.

Hence, at Henry’s direction, a “Plumber’s Unit” was created under John Ehrlichman (run by an operative who liaised between Dr. K and Ehrlichman) to investigate and patch leaky pipes.

Enter E. Howard Hunt (ex-CIA), G. Gordon Liddy (ex-FBI), Frank Sturgis (ex-CIA asset) and James McCord (ex-CIA official likely reporting back to CIA)—and their team of Cubans (ex-CIA assets) who had assisted with another rogue operation nine years earlier.

Thus began a series of illegal break-ins that foreshadowed Watergate, including the psychiatric practice of Dr. Lewis Fielding to steal his medical file on Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon bureaucrat who had blown the whistle on the Vietnam War by exposing “The Pentagon Papers,” which caught the government in multiple lies and failures—and severely embarrassed Dr. K.

The real objective of the Watergate break-in may have been for the Plumbers to get caught red-handed, set up by their own superiors. An anonymous telephone call to the on-duty security guard was all it would have taken.

Well, not entirely. It needed a push to launch it from the back pages of The Washington Post to page one.

Enter Mark Felt, Associate Director of the FBI, who, as “Deep Throat,” provided Woodward with tidbits about Nixon Campaign slush funds that paled in comparison to those maintained by Lyndon Johnson and others before him. (Felt believed he should have been chosen to succeed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who passed away six weeks before the Watergate burglary.)

In desperation, Nixon sent new emissaries to Langley to solicit their assistance for countering the onslaught against him. CIA refused to get involved, so Nixon fired its director, Dick Helms.

In retaliation, the agency found a way, through Alexander Butterfield, to reveal the existence of a White House tape-recording system. Nixon’s attempted cover-up of those recorded conversations is what got him fired.

What a week—whew!

And so should you.