The Brief | While Iran Pretending to Make Peace, Trump Was Getting the War Briefing
Also: Bill Clinton is under oath right now, Cuba can't keep its own story straight, and Tim Walz's party is actively blocking his anti-fraud bill. It's a Friday.
Hey, hey — happy Friday!
You made it through another week of this, and so did I. Yay for us!
As soon as I hit send on this edition of The Brief, I will head to my office to prep it for paint. I mentioned my plans for my office in my last Sunday Desk. I will be sharing the progress of my office redo on the Sunday Desk, and you might catch a glimpse of it in my podcast background.
Anyway, there is a lot of news, so let’s do this.
In today’s Brief:
While Iran Talked, Trump Got the War Briefing — The Geneva talks wrapped up with “significant progress.” Simultaneously, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East was in the White House briefing Trump on strike options. China is telling its citizens to evacuate Iran. So. That’s where we are.
Tim Walz’s Own Party Is Blocking His Anti-Fraud Bill — He held a press conference about fighting fraud. His House Democrats killed the inspector general bill. Twice. This week.
Cuba Can’t Keep Its Own Story Straight — The communist government that shot four people — at least two of them Americans — quietly admitted it misidentified one of its own alleged detainees. He was calling reporters from Miami the whole time.
The Epstein Circus Came to Chappaqua — Hillary spent six hours saying “ask my husband.” Congress spent part of that time asking her about UFOs. And as you read this, Bill Clinton is under oath for the first time a former president has ever been compelled to testify before Congress. In history.
While Iran Talked Peace in Geneva, Trump Was Getting the War Briefing
You guys things are getting hot: on Thursday, while U.S. and Iranian diplomats were wrapping up what Iran’s foreign minister called their “most intense and longest” round of nuclear negotiations in Geneva, Admiral Brad Cooper — the commander of U.S. forces in the entire Middle East — was at the White House briefing President Trump on military options for striking Iran.
At the same time. Same day. Both are happening simultaneously.
According to Axios, this was the first time Cooper has briefed Trump since the Iran crisis began in December. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine was also in the room. Axios reports the Geneva talks were seen inside the Trump administration as “a last chance for diplomacy before Trump decides whether to launch a war.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. demands on the table include the complete destruction of Iran’s three main nuclear sites — Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan — and delivery of all enriched uranium to the United States. Iran has rejected both conditions flatly. Their position: they’ll pause most enrichment for three to five years under international monitoring, keep limited medical-use enrichment, and they will not ship a gram of uranium out of the country or dismantle a single site.
That is not a small gap to bridge by Vienna next week. And worth noting: this is almost exactly what the Obama administration agreed to in the 2015 JCPOA — temporary limits, enrichment stays in Iran, no dismantlement. Iran took the sanctions relief, funded its proxies, and kept building. By the time these Geneva talks happened, they were sitting on hundreds of pounds of near-weapons-grade uranium. So when Trump's team says they want the sites destroyed and the uranium shipped out, that's not maximalism for the sake of it — that's what happens when you've watched the more trusting version of this deal already played out.
Meanwhile, Times of Israel reported that new satellite images show U.S. F-22 jets repositioning at the Ovda base in southern Israel. The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group departed Crete and is heading toward the Israeli coast — marking the largest U.S. military presence in the Middle East in over two decades, since before the Iraq War. And China, which tends to have pretty good intelligence about these things, told its citizens in Iran to “evacuate as soon as possible.”
To his credit, VP Vance told the Washington Post there is “no chance” the U.S. ends up in a drawn-out Middle East conflict — he’s a Marine vet who was lied to about Iraq and says he hasn’t forgotten the lesson. The Omani foreign minister, who mediated the Geneva talks, is flying to Washington today to meet with Vance. The fourth round of technical talks is scheduled in Vienna next week.
So maybe this is all pressure tactics, and the deal gets done. Or maybe the Geneva talks were the last round, and nobody’s ready to say it out loud yet.
I don’t know which it is. Apparently, neither does anyone else, including people in the building. What I do know is that “significant progress” announced by a mediator while your top general is briefing the president on strike options is not the same thing as progress.
Tim Walz’s Own Party Is Blocking His Anti-Fraud Bill
After the Trump administration froze $259.5 million in Minnesota Medicaid funds on Wednesday — citing fraud through VP Vance and Dr. Oz — Governor Tim Walz held a press conference on Thursday, unveiling a new anti-fraud legislative package. Eighteen proposals. Inspector General’s office. Higher penalties. Extended statutes of limitations. He called the funding freeze “targeted retribution” and “absolutely not serious.”
Here’s the part Walz didn’t lead with: a bill to create a state Office of Inspector General — the exact centerpiece of his new package — passed the Minnesota Senate on a bipartisan basis last year. It has now stalled in House committees twice this week. House Democrats are blocking it because they don’t think a new enforcement agency is necessary.
Speaker Lisa Demuth, the Republican House Speaker, called the whole thing “indignation theater.” Which, based on the timeline, is not an unfair read.
For context: this $259.5 million freeze isn’t even the first federal action. The NYPost reported the Trump administration already moved to withhold more than $2 billion in annual Medicaid funding back in January. The new freeze is on top of that. Minnesota has 60 days to defend the flagged claims. And a federal prosecutor in Minnesota estimated last year that fraud across 14 high-risk Medicaid programs could exceed $9 billion — more than half the $18 billion that went to those programs since 2018.
Walz’s answer to all of that is a press conference about retribution. His party’s answer is to block the inspector general bill. And Vance’s answer is to freeze the money until they show some receipts.
Let's be clear about who actually gets hurt in all of this. The fraud isn't abstract — every dollar stolen through fake daycare claims, phantom meal programs, and fraudulent Medicaid billing is a dollar that doesn't reach the veteran who needs home care, the kid who needs a wheelchair, the disabled adult who needs a caregiver. The people Democrats say they're fighting for are the same people getting robbed by the fraud Democrats spent years not seriously preventing. And now that the federal government is finally forcing the issue, the response is to block the inspector general bill and call it retribution. The cruelest irony here isn't the politics — it's that the people most harmed by Minnesota's fraud epidemic and the funding freeze are the exact same people. Vulnerable Minnesotans are being squeezed from both ends: by fraudsters who looted the system for years and by politicians more interested in protecting their narrative than in fixing the problem. The taxpayer funded it. The fraudsters took it. And the people who needed it most got left holding nothing.
Cuba’s Story Keeps Falling Apart — And That’s the Point
Here’s an update that got almost no play yesterday but matters: one of the men Cuba identified as “injured and detained” in the boat shoot-out — Roberto Azcorra Consuegra — called reporters from South Florida to say he had no idea what they were talking about and was not in Cuba. Cuba subsequently issued a quiet correction, calling it a case of “mistaken identity.”
So the communist government that shot four people — at least two of them U.S. citizens or residents — and claimed it had the full list of who was on that boat, got at least one name wrong. And Rubio is supposed to just take Havana’s word for everything else?
To recap what we know, sourced strictly from U.S. investigations: a 24-foot Pro-Line boat was stolen from a Florida Keys dock by Hector Duardy Cruz Correa, a tile worker with two daughters still in Cuba. The boat was carrying 10 people — at least two U.S. citizens, at least one K-1 visa holder, and others likely legal permanent residents. Four were killed, six were detained. Cuba says they opened fire first. The U.S. is running its own investigation and isn’t accepting that at face value.
The son of Conrado Galindo Sariol — a man who was identified as being on the boat, a former Cuban political prisoner and longtime regime critic — told CNN: “I’m proud of what my father just did. I expected nothing less from him.”
This incident is drawing comparisons to the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down, when Cuba downed two unarmed U.S. civilian planes in international airspace and killed four people. That incident led to the Helms-Burton Act — the toughest U.S. sanctions on Cuba in decades. The Trump administration is already squeezing Havana harder than it’s been squeezed in years. The question is whether this gives them the justification to go further.
The investigation is active. The FBI has already interviewed the boat owner.
The Epstein Deposition Circus Came to Chappaqua — And It Did Not Disappoint
Let’s start with Hillary. Yesterday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat for a closed-door deposition with the House Oversight Committee at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center — a six-hour marathon that somehow managed to include questions about UFOs, Pizzagate, and Lauren Boebert's alleged rules violation, with a side of performance art.
The substance first. Per CBS News, Clinton’s opening statement was unambiguous: “I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes or offices. I have nothing to add to that.” She said she knew Ghislaine Maxwell “casually as an acquaintance” — Maxwell attended Chelsea’s wedding as someone else’s plus-one, apparently — and denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. She answered every question from every member on both sides. The whole thing was videotaped, and Comer has promised to release it as quickly as possible.
Her editorial framing, predictably, was that the entire investigation exists to protect Trump. “You have compelled me to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and cover them up,” she said in her opening statement. She also called for subpoenas on Elon Musk — citing a 2012 email where Musk asked Epstein “what day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk has denied ever attending any Epstein event. The email exists. Both things can be true.
The New York Post reported that by the end, Republicans were asking Clinton about UFOs and Pizzagate. Clinton herself confirmed it: “It then got quite unusual.” Look, I get it. You finally have a Clinton in the chair, under oath, about the biggest alleged sex trafficking scandal in modern history. You have one shot. The camera is rolling. The whole country is watching. So obviously — obviously — you use your precious time to ask about UFOs and Pizzagate.
I genuinely cannot. You have Hillary Clinton, sworn in, on the record, in a room full of lawyers, about Jeffrey Epstein — a man with documented ties to presidents, prime ministers, and billionaires — and someone on that committee decided the move was UFOs?
And honestly? It perfectly set up what happened next. Because if you’re already not taking the proceedings seriously, why not just text a photo to your favorite influencer mid-deposition? That’s the vibe Boebert was apparently reading when she snapped the picture of Clinton and fired it off to Benny Johnson like she was sending a friend a meme. The deposition paused. Democrats erupted. And Boebert, asked to account for herself when proceedings resumed, delivered what I will admit is an objectively excellent line: “I just returned to my hotel room and installed the BleachBit software. So I guess in regards to taking photos, I do not recall.”I’m not going to pretend I didn’t laugh but this is not it Lauren.
The Democrats take? Rep. Wesley Bell, a former prosecutor, put it plainly during the break: “We have not learned one new thing. What we’re seeing is folks that are looking for headlines and tweets as opposed to doing the business of going about getting justice for the victims.”
Now — today. As you are reading this, former President Bill Clinton is under oath at the same Chappaqua Performing Arts Center. This is, per CBS News, the first time a former president has been compelled to testify before Congress under subpoena in American history. Not in recent memory. In the entire history of the republic. Comer warned it would be “even longer” than Hillary’s six hours, because she deflected substantive Clinton Global Initiative questions more than a dozen times with some variation of “you’ll have to ask my husband.” Well. They are asking the husband today.
Unlike Hillary, Bill Clinton has a documented relationship with Epstein that goes well beyond casual acquaintance. He rode Epstein’s private jet at least 16 times. His name appears hundreds of times in the Epstein files. DOJ-released photos show him with Epstein and women whose faces are redacted. He has not been accused of wrongdoing. But the questions that couldn’t get answered yesterday are getting asked today, under oath, on camera, and Comer said in advance that this one will be even longer.
Related:
While the committee was busy asking Hillary Clinton about UFOs, Steve Bannon has been sitting on roughly 15 hours of footage he personally filmed interviewing Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 — originally pitched as a documentary to rehabilitate Epstein's image. The DOJ's January files dump ended up releasing portions of it before Bannon did, including a clip where Bannon asks Epstein if he sees himself as "the devil himself." Epstein's answer: "No, but I do have a good mirror."
The January document release also revealed extensive written exchanges between the two as Epstein mounted a political influence campaign across Europe. Bannon has called for an independent investigation into the Epstein files. He has said considerably less about why he was helping the man build a comeback tour. I would like to see him before the House Oversight Committee.
Quick Rundown
Walz and AG Keith Ellison are due before House Oversight next Wednesday on the Medicaid fraud question — which means the governor who just watched his own party kill his anti-fraud bill will have to explain Minnesota’s record to the same committee currently deposing the Clintons. The calendar is not being kind to him.
While the Geneva talks were happening, Witkoff and Kushner took a break from Iran negotiations to meet with Ukrainian officials. One building, two wars. The Trump foreign policy operation is apparently running parallel tracks simultaneously — whether that’s strategic genius or a very crowded waiting room remains to be seen.
Some Trump loyalists are quietly nervous about the Clinton subpoena precedent. The thinking: a future Democrat-controlled Congress now has a cleaner path to compelling Trump family members to testify. Comer got what he wanted. Whether the party fully thought through what they handed the other side is a different question.
Let’s Talk About It
Republicans packed the room for Hillary and skipped Les Wexner entirely. The committee asked about UFOs. Steve Bannon has 15 hours of Epstein interview footage and nobody’s hauled him in. Does the way this investigation is being run make you more or less confident it will produce anything meaningful for the actual victims?
The fraud is real. The freeze is real. And the people caught between them — veterans, kids, disabled adults — didn’t cause either problem. At what point does “retribution” stop being a political talking point and start being an excuse that everyone in the room is hiding behind while the most vulnerable people pay the price?
Drop it in the comments. The conversation down there is genuinely one of my favorite parts of the week.
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