Tehran Wrote the Number, the Press Ran It
Plus: Newsom turns his wife’s tax probe into a 2028 fundraiser, the Supreme Court ducks a pro-life teenager, and the FBI says it stopped a drone attack on the White House fight.
This one is loaded. And I have thoughts.
In Today’s Read
The alleged $300 billion for Iran is real but conditioned and misunderstood, with IRGC media fueling fear. G7 leaders are aware.
Gavin Newsom claims Trump’s DOJ targets his family over his wife’s nonprofit, a probe that began under Biden; he hasn’t been subpoenaed and is fundraising from it.
The Supreme Court won’t hear a teenage pro-life free speech case; Alito dissented, raising concerns regardless of abortion views.
The FBI thwarted a drone and sniper plot at the White House UFC fight, with the suspect’s mom playing a key role.
Let’s do the news.
Three Versions of the Iran Deal, and Nobody Will Show You the Deets.
The Story.
The Story. On June 15, Trump and VP JD Vance virtually signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran. Vance says the document runs “about a page and a half.” It lifts the U.S. naval blockade, reopens the Strait of Hormuz, extends the ceasefire 60 days, and starts nuclear talks, with a formal signing set for June 19 in Geneva. The number everyone’s quoting is a $300 billion “Reconstruction and Development Fund.” Here’s the part the headlines cut: a U.S. official says it’s performance-based, meaning “Iran can only access any benefits of the MOU if they abide by all of the points they agreed to, including no nuclear weapon, neutralizing its enriched material, and not interfering with the free flow of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”
The money isn’t American. It’s Gulf states and private investors financing reconstruction of war-damaged sites, much of it loans and credit lines, and more than half is already committed by regional players. The $25 billion in “released” frozen assets that led so many stories is Iran’s IRGC claiming it gets half up front; the U.S. official says Iran gets none of it until it proves compliance.
Canada’s Mark Carney, who actually read the text, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at the G7 he’s “absolutely” on board, “as is everyone else” at the summit. Overnight, the first tankers carrying Iranian crude left the Strait of Hormuz since the blockade began two months ago, the first concrete sign the deal is doing something.
And on June 16, Bloomberg published what it says is the full 14-point draft it obtained, since neither government has released an official text. The leaked version has the war ending immediately, the blockade lifting, a 60-day window for nuclear talks, a phased U.S. troop withdrawal within 30 days of a final deal, sanctions relief on Iranian oil and banking, frozen assets released in stages, and Iran reaffirming it will never build a nuclear weapon.
The White House isn’t confirming it. It’s called the circulating leaked terms a “complete fabrication,” and Trump ripped the “dishonorable” Iranians for leaking false terms. Two regional officials told reporters the Bloomberg and Al Arabiya versions broadly match the real thing, while Iran’s IRGC-linked Tasnim says Bloomberg’s copy is missing parts.
The Left’s read. CNN ran it as hypocrisy before the text was even public: “Trump’s $300 billion problem,” the Obama comparison, the suggestion that a president who hammered Obama over $1.7 billion just blessed a payout 175 times bigger. MSNBC: “Republicans nervous Trump made a bad deal.” The New Republic: “Vance Confirms Iran Will Get Jaw-Dropping Sum.” The move is to lead with the biggest, scariest figure, frequently Iran’s own number, and treat conditional access to a Gulf fund as identical to wiring Tehran cash.
The Right’s read. Vance, on Fox and in his own feed: “Iran doesn’t get a dime of money unless they perform their obligations,” and “not a single dollar of American money will go to Iran.” Hegseth: totally different from Obama, who paid up front. The Washington Times pressed the label, it’s an MOU, not a “peace deal.” The structural case stays consistent: no U.S. money, Gulf-financed, phased on verifiable denuclearization and an open strait, Iran collects nothing until it complies.
What both sides are skipping. The caveats are the story, or at least should be. But instead, the panic coverage buried them. “Iran could access up to $300 billion if it fully denuclearizes, neutralizes its enriched stockpile, keeps Hormuz open, and stops funding terror” is a wildly different sentence than “$300 billion for Iran.” The conditions are an important detail, and most outlets cut them. The other skip: the loudest dollar figures trace back to the Iranian state and IRGC media, and a chunk of the Western press ran them straight, while the people who’d actually read the document stayed calm. The right has a blind spot too. The real question isn’t the headline number; it’s enforcement and “performance-based” with Tehran, which has a long history of Iran underperforming and getting paid anyway.
On Monday I told you the terms were a rumor until Friday. That still holds, except now there are three versions and nobody will show you what’s up.
Start with the press, because we all know they are my favorite. If we had a press that prioritized actual reporting over making this administration look incompetent, we’d all be in a better spot. Instead, they grabbed Iran’s talking points and spun the country into a panic. I’ll be fair about one thing: a void of information gets filled with whatever’s available, and the only “text” going around came from Tehran. You can’t really fault an outlet for publishing what it’s got. The fault is in the weight. Run Iran’s number as your headline, bury the caveats, quote the regime straight with no reminder that this is a government with a forty-year habit of lying, and you’re not reporting anymore. You’re laundering.
That’s the three-document problem in one sentence. There’s Iran’s state-media version, there’s Bloomberg’s leaked 14-point draft, and there’s the actual signed text nobody has published. The White House calls the leaks a fabrication. Two regional officials say Bloomberg nailed it. Iran says Bloomberg left parts out. Everyone’s quoting a document they can’t actually show you.
And no, this isn’t me running cover for the White House. The president owns a piece of this. Trump is a salesman, and a salesman sells you the best-case scenario, which, with the president, runs a few feet short of the truth. Yes, it’s his negotiation strategy, but it doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating. He swore through Vance that nobody gets a dime, confirmed the $300 billion structure by Tuesday, then called his own number “fake news” the same afternoon. When the people defending the deal can’t keep it straight for 72 hours, they hand the panic merchants the opening. Clean it up.
Here’s the bigger challenge. Iran is a fractured country that historically cannot be trusted, and every president who’s tried to take it on talked himself into believing his deal would be the different one. Trump at least has a record of making “different” actually work. Whether it works here, I don’t know yet, and neither does anybody else.
But if the MOU is what the administration says it is, look at what it actually does. It’s a step toward normalizing relations between Iran and the Gulf States. That is enormous, and it’s a completely different play than anything we’ve run before, no matter how hard the talking heads work to sell you Obama 2.0. This isn’t cash on a tarmac. It’s a conditional fund from someone else’s treasury that Iran only touches if it gives up the nuclear program, neutralizes its enriched stockpile, and keeps the strait open. A carrot Iran only eats if it does the one thing it has never once done.
The real questions start after the signing. What happens if Iran misses its benchmarks? What happens when the political state and the military state, the IRGC, keep clawing at each other, and the Guard decides to freelance? Does the U.S. step back in? Are we watching bombs drop on Iran the week after the midterms? Trump said today that if Iran doesn’t behave, he would “drop bombs right smack in the middle of their head.” So, likely since Iran never behaves.
Anybody selling you “it’s over” or “it’s a sham” has no answer, because the answer doesn’t exist yet.
I’ve got questions about the choreography, too. The MOU is already signed. They kept that quiet, and my first question is why. If it’s signed, where are the details, and why are we all waiting on a “ceremony” Friday in Geneva? Who is that ceremony for? From here, it looks like it’s for Iran, a little pageantry to keep the mullahs feeling important and on course. If buttering them up is the cost of holding the thing together, fine. Just call it what it is.
Now the good sign, and it’s a real one. Mark Carney read the actual text and signed off, and Carney is no friend of Trump. When a man who’d love to watch this president trip reads the deal and says he’s “absolutely” on board, the whole G7 with him, that tells you something the panic coverage never will.
So watch the text Friday, and check it against both the Mehr News version Tehran fed its own people and the 14 points Bloomberg ran. Watch whether Iran neutralizes its stockpile or just promises to. Watch the first dollar of frozen funds, because if money moves before Iran performs, the “no cash” line is dead. And watch the people quoting Iran straight, no caveat, propping Tehran’s word up over our own government and our allies. They’ll tell you it’s just skepticism. What it really is, is rooting for Trump to fail, and whether they’ll say it out loud or not, that’s rooting for America to fail.
ICYMI
Newsom Says Trump Is Hunting His Family. The Probe Started Under Biden.
The Story.
On June 15, Gavin Newsom posted a video claiming Trump weaponized the Justice Department against him and his wife “because I am considering running for President.” He said agents have “knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees. Not because they’ve found a crime, but because they’re trying to find one.”
Here’s the timeline he left out. The investigation into Jennifer Siebel Newsom, focused on her personal taxes and her nonprofit, The Representation Project (IRS filings show it paid her and her film company more than $3.7 million), grew out of whistleblower complaints filed in 2025 with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento, before Trump took office. DOJ headquarters in Washington wasn’t involved in opening it. A related thread runs through Dana Williamson, Newsom’s former chief of staff, who pleaded guilty in a corruption case last year tied to a probe that also began under Biden. The DOJ has not confirmed any investigation into Newsom himself, and he has not been subpoenaed.
On June 17, a source familiar with the matter told the AP flatly that there is no investigation specifically targeting the governor, only probes into people around him, including the one into his wife’s taxes. That same morning Newsom sent a fresh letter to Acting AG Todd Blanche accusing Trump of a retribution campaign and challenging the DOJ to investigate Trump’s allies instead. Within hours of his original video a Democratic strategist was calling the whole thing “rocket fuel for fundraising,” his 2028 prediction-market odds ticked up, and Newsom, who’s confirmed he’s weighing a run, had his moment.
The Left’s read. The Washington Post, NPR, CBS, NBC, and Time mostly ran Newsom’s frame as the headline: “Newsom says DOJ is investigating him and his wife, blames Trump.” The weaponization claim leads, the 2028-rival angle follows, and the qualifier, that DOJ hasn’t confirmed any of it, lands near the bottom. Time’s framing: Trump is “politically targeting” a top critic. The story becomes Trump-abuses-power, with Newsom as the brave target who won’t be silenced.
The Right’s read. Fox, the Daily Caller, American Greatness, and the Washington Examiner went straight at the timeline: the probe opened under Biden, from whistleblowers, and it’s about his wife’s nonprofit books and a chief of staff who already pleaded guilty. The Examiner’s frame is the cynical one, that Newsom is treating a real inquiry as a “gift” to elevate himself for 2028. The angle: he built a persecution story out of an investigation he inherited from his own party’s DOJ.
What both sides are skipping. The left skips the date stamp, conveniently. You can’t call something Trump’s political hit job when the whistleblower complaints were filed in 2025, and the Sacramento U.S. Attorney opened the file before Trump was sworn in, with the Main Justice not involved in launching it. The left also skips that DOJ hasn’t confirmed investigating Newsom at all; the documented inquiry is into his wife’s taxes and a former aide who’s already guilty.
The timeline is the tell. It’s also the tell the left-leaning outlets keep leaving out.
How did this actually start? Not with Trump. Not with a phone call from the White House to Main Justice. It started with whistleblowers walking into the U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento in 2025, while Joe Biden was still president, with questions about Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s taxes and her nonprofit’s books. The same office was already running the case that ended with Newsom’s former chief of staff pleading guilty to corruption. None of that is Trump. All of it predates him. And every story that leads with “Trump is investigating Newsom” and saves the date stamp for paragraph nine knows exactly what it’s doing.
Here’s my honest read, and I’ll flag it as opinion because I haven’t sat Newsom down myself. This is campaign prep. He’s been carefully building a lane as the moderate option, reasonable enough for the normies still left in the Democratic Party and the Independents who’ve drifted, while tip-toeing just enough to keep the progressive base from turning on him. A tax-fraud investigation into his wife’s charity is poison with every one of those groups. So what do you do with a story you can’t kill? You change what it’s about. You don’t let it be “the Newsoms and their nonprofit accounting.” You make it “Trump’s weaponized DOJ is hunting me, and I’ll fight them for you.” The tax problem becomes a badge. The suspect becomes the victim. And the guy who needed a reason for normies to rally to him just manufactured one.
We’ve watched this exact play run over and over, and it works every time. Cry victim of Trump, watch your profile go up.
Stephen Colbert: CBS cancels The Late Show, and the story becomes Trump silenced a critic. The quieter story is that the show was reportedly bleeding north of $40 million a year. He was winning the ratings and losing the budget, and “Trump got me canceled” is a much better exit than “I cost too much.”
Scott Pelley and 60 Minutes: a wave of firings, Pelley out, and the frame is billionaire owners bending the knee to Trump. The stated reason was insubordination. The fact is, “I was defending journalism from Trump” sands the edges right off “I was pushed out for clashing with my bosses.”
Graham Platner up in Maine: with him, it’s not the DOJ, it’s “Republican political attacks.” Same thread. Frame yourself as the target and hope nobody reads the actual list, the deleted Reddit posts, the tattoo he’s covering up, the texts he sent while married, the ex-girlfriend’s allegations. Make it about the people coming after you so it’s never about what you did.
Different scandals, identical move. And the left-leaning press is all too happy to run the cover, because “Trump’s enemy under siege” is a story they’ll print on no notice, every time.
Newsom is playing politics skillfully. Annoyingly, I have to give him some props. He hasn’t been charged. He hasn’t even been subpoenaed. By Wednesday, a source close to it told the AP there’s no investigation targeting the governor at all. He’s not the victim of a Trump vendetta. He’s a candidate launching a campaign, he just found the ad to run it on, and did some fundraising to boot.
The Supreme Court Won’t Hear the Pro-Life Teenager. Alito Wrote Down Why That Should Bother You.
The Story.
On June 15, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a former Indiana high school student who, as a freshman in 2021, founded a pro-life club and tried to hang flyers showing students at the March for Life holding “Defund Planned Parenthood” signs. The school refused to approve them. A federal judge sided with the school in 2024, the 7th Circuit agreed in 2025, and the Court’s denial leaves that loss standing. Justice Samuel Alito dissented alone, arguing the Court should “clarify the relationship” between its school-speech precedents and warning the justices need to sort out how far schools can go to silence student speech “they find politically inconvenient.”
The Left’s read. Mostly a shrug, which is its own tell. CBS and the MSNBC legal desk covered it as a routine denial, the Court declines thousands of petitions, the lower courts upheld a school’s authority over its own bulletin boards, nothing to see here. The framing is procedural: schools regulate school-sponsored speech, the student lost twice below, the Court passed. Alito’s dissent gets a paragraph as a curiosity.
The Right’s read. The Daily Signal and the pro-life press treat it as exactly the warning Alito meant it to be: a 15-year-old wanted to advertise a club meeting, the message was “Defund Planned Parenthood,” and three levels of the federal judiciary said the school could shut it down. The angle is viewpoint discrimination, that the same flyer with a Planned Parenthood logo would’ve sailed through, and the Court just declined to say schools can’t do that.
What both sides are skipping. The left’s “routine denial” frame skips the obvious test, which I’ll get to. The right’s “viewpoint discrimination” frame skips an inconvenient fact: the school-speech doctrine genuinely does hand administrators wide latitude over sponsored bulletin boards, whatever the message. That’s Alito’s actual point, the doctrine is a mess. And both sides skip the cleanest fact of all: a cert denial isn’t a ruling. The Court didn’t say the school was right. It said it wouldn’t look.
A cert denial is the Court’s way of saying, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Alito just refused to let it.
Quick context, let’s talk procedure. When the Supreme Court “denies cert,” it’s not ruling on who’s right. It’s declining to take the case at all, which leaves the lower court’s decision in place without the Court endorsing it. So every headline telling you the Court “sided with the school” is wrong. The Court did something quieter and, honestly, more frustrating. It kiboshed a fight a justice was begging it to take.
Now my read. It’s true that schools get a broad say over what gets promoted in their hallways, and they should. But that breadth is exactly the problem. It’s the same vague, sweeping authority that gets used again and again to shut down conservative viewpoints and student organizing, then dressed back up as neutral policy. A “Defund Planned Parenthood” flyer comes down. Would a “Trust Women” poster? You know the answer, I know the answer, and so do the administrators.
That uneven application is precisely what the Court exists to fix. Leave the rule vague and you’ve handed every school in the country a tool it can quietly aim in one direction. Alito said as much in his dissent: the doctrine is loose enough to launder viewpoint discrimination, and the Court keeps passing on the chance to tighten it.
I understand the instinct to stay out of the political fights. The justices don’t want to look like they’re picking a side, and I get that. But protecting speech isn’t picking a side. It’s the job. And when a pattern of abuse has taken shape, when that “broad authority” keeps landing on the same kinds of students and the same kinds of viewpoints, declining to even look isn’t neutrality. It’s permission.
So no, the Court didn’t rule against this girl. It just didn’t rule, and that’s the frustrating part, because the fix was sitting right there and the justices weren’t ready to pick it up.
This isn’t the end. A denial today doesn’t slam the door, it just means the right case, with the cleaner record, has to come back around, and that takes time. Watch for a better school-speech case next term, and watch whether the 7th Circuit’s reasoning starts spreading into other districts, because that’s how a quiet “no” today becomes the fight you actually win later.
Alito put the argument on the record. Now it waits for the case that finishes it.
DEVELOPING: The FBI Says It Stopped a Drone Attack on the White House Fight
This one is still developing. The details below come from the DOJ complaint and early reporting.
The FBI announced five arrests in an alleged plot to attack Sunday’s UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House South Lawn, with all five charged with conspiracy to commit murder. According to the complaint, the suspects planned to fly explosive-laden drones into nearby buildings to force a mass evacuation, then mount a “second wave” at a security checkpoint, with snipers positioned to fire on people as they fled. The lead suspect, 19-year-old Tycen Proper of Ohio, allegedly told investigators he wanted to “jump-start a revolution.” Two of the men, Bryan Omar Roa and Michael Alan Thomas, were arrested in California and appeared in court in Riverside; the others were taken into custody in Missouri and Nebraska. Investigators say they recovered screenshots from Proper’s iPhone showing aerial photos and maps of D.C. and the White House, notes on sniper placement and drone launch points, and an encrypted Signal and SimpleX group of roughly 19 people.
The complaint lays out the intended targets. Proper told investigators the "high value targets" were "both wealthy people and politicians," the attendees the drone blast was meant to drive toward waiting snipers. In SimpleX chats, he named Sen. Marsha Blackburn as a target because "she's taken money from the Israel pro-Israel lobby," and he circulated images of Sens. Jim Justice and Shelley Moore Capito and Reps. Carol Miller and Riley Moore that appear pulled from the site TrackAIPAC.com, listing how much each had taken "from pro-Israel PACs." The filing says the group formed on a TikTok channel called "Vanguard of the Old," believed the country "needed to be torn down so it could be rebuilt," and cited grievances including government corruption and the handling of the Epstein files. It also notes Proper had made antisemitic posts and "sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler."
Federal agents first learned of the plot on June 10, after Proper’s mother contacted local police about his recent firearm purchases and online activity. Proper was interviewed by the FBI on June 11. The event went ahead Sunday with no incident.
Coverage has split mostly on emphasis. The DOJ, FBI Director Kash Patel, and outlets on the right have framed it as a law-enforcement success, the threat identified and the “planned attacks stopped cold,” five suspects in custody and no one harmed. Coverage on the left has carried the same facts while noting the plot’s proximity to a 4,000-guest event on the White House grounds and the security questions raised by staging the fight there.
Carlson says Iran won the war. Tucker Carlson used his show to call the Iran deal a loss, arguing “Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. It did not when this war began. Now it does.” The America First wing that never wanted the war is now openly split from the Hegseth-Vance victory lap, with Trump dismissing Carlson as “low-IQ.” The Hill
Trump’s name came off the Kennedy Center. Crews stripped Trump’s name from the building around 3 a.m. on June 13, hours after the center missed a federal judge’s deadline to comply. The judge ruled the renaming illegal under a 1964 law that designates the center a memorial to John F. Kennedy and bars putting anyone else’s name on the exterior. NBC News
Eight dead in a B-52 crash at Edwards Air Force Base. A B-52H Stratofortress went down shortly after takeoff on June 15 on a routine test mission, killing all eight aboard, a mix of uniformed military, government civilians, and contractors, including two Boeing employees. The first names released are Lt. Col. Miles Middleton and Jeromy Smith, a DoD flight-test engineer whose wife had their baby four months ago. It’s the deadliest B-52 crash since 1982, and the Air Force has stood up an interim safety board to find out why. ABC7
Planned Parenthood is suing Alaska over telehealth abortion. The regional Planned Parenthood affiliate filed suit June 15 in Alaska Superior Court to strike the state’s requirement that patients seeking medication abortion show up in person, a rule that in practice limits access to Anchorage and Fairbanks. Alaska Public Media
McDonald’s is bringing back the original fried apple pie. Starting June 23, for two weeks only, the deep-fried pie McDonald’s retired in the ‘90s returns for America’s 250th birthday, 100% American-grown apples, 220 calories, that blistering-hot filling that took the roof of your mouth off in 1994. There’s a 35-foot pie parked outside Chicago to mark it. Petty nostalgia, sure. I’ll be in the drive-thru anyway. Fox Business
That’s The Read.
See you Friday.
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