Trump Cabinet Appointments

[Winehole23]

Patel keeps jumping the gun to hog the glory

This time he might have screwed up a hitherto secret investigation

Secret Service officials are angered that FBI Director Kash Patel prematurely announced on Tuesday the details of a largely sealed and ongoing criminal investigation into an alleged plot to attack Sunday’s White House UFC event with drones, according to three people familiar with the incident.


Secret Service and FBI agents had been partnered on the investigation into a group of individuals discussing plans for a drone attack at the White House in the last week, and had discussed unsealing the case and making a joint announcement Tuesday afternoon, according to sources.


The problem with Patel’s social media announcement, the sources say, was that the case had been sealed in court and roughly 10 suspects had not yet been arrested and placed in custody at the time Patel shared his post. The people said Secret Service and FBI officials were surprised by Patel “jumping the gun.”


“We all woke up this morning to see this on Twitter,” said one administration official, who, like others, asked to speak confidentially to discuss sensitive matters.

https://www.ms.now/news/kash-patel-w...secret-service

[Winehole23]

Matt Quinn, the Secret Service’s deputy director, appeared to allude to Patel’s premature announcement in a Tuesday news conference but did not use his name and said the Secret Service made a conscious decision not to reveal the existence of the probe prematurely.


“I’ll tell you a phrase I learned early in my career in the New York field office and that’s ‘Don’t choke on your own smoke,’” he said. “I’ll tell you the Secret Service led that investigation from the beginning. I’ll tell you that case is ongoing. In order to maintain the integrity of the investigation and the security plan, we chose not to leak it.”

[Winehole23]

Kratom investor Markwayne Mullin, pressing for official actions that benefited him

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/u...istration.html

[Winehole23]

GOP intramural scrum over ODNI

Trump wants to shoehorn Bill Pulte back in after pushing (about equally unqualified, imho) Jay Clayton forward

[Winehole23]

OMB nominee won't rule out impoundment

President Donald Trump’s pick for deputy director of the White House budget office told lawmakers Tuesday he can’t promise the administration won’t unilaterally cancel funding later this year without Congress’ consent.


Hal Duncan, the nominee to serve in the No. 2 position at the Office of Management and Budget, defended the controversial “pocket rescission” maneuver during his first of two confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill this week.


“Pocket rescissions have been executed by previous administrations, notably the Ford administration,” Duncan said during testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. “I can’t commit to any of the fiscal tools the administration may or may not use in the future.”

https://www.eenews.net/articles/omb-...t-rescissions/

[Winehole23]

Rep Raskin accuses Kash Patel of improper payments to FBI agents

FBI Director Kash Patel may have authorized taxpayer-funded special payments to his inner circle of FBI executives and agents on his protective detail, according to the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.


“We have been receiving troubling reports that you may be using part of the budget of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a personal slush fund to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful ‘bonus’ payments to loyalist MAGA henchmen who have engaged in misconduct,” says a letter from Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to Patel, obtained exclusively by MS NOW.


Committee Democrats have information that Patel has issued more than $1 million in awards, the letter says. The letter says the money went to special agents serving on his Director’s Advisory Team, which Raskin’s letter describes as “a curated group of agents who are willing to carry out your unlawful partisan and personal orders.” It also went to agents on Patel’s security detail, “cir venting the mandatory maximum pay caps established by statute,” the letter says.


“By issuing these side payments, your office may be knowingly breaking federal law,” the letter says. “In some cases, nearly $8,000 payments have been made to multiple individuals every two-week pay period despite many of the beneficiaries of your selective generosity already maxing out on a federal employee’s salary.”


The letter says it is unclear exactly how much each of the agents has received, but “we can confirm that numerous loyalist employees have received at least five such payments in consecutive pay periods, amounting to nearly $40,000 per agent. We can also confirm you have depleted this reserve at such a frenzied rate that some of the payments have bounced back from exhausted accounts.”

https://www.ms.now/news/kash-patel-m...ts-says-raskin

[Winehole23]

Thune’s low-key pragmatism and efforts to preserve the Senate’s prerogatives in the face of the president’s demands have been particularly infuriating to Trump, standing in stark contrast to what he has encountered in the House, where Speaker Johnson takes pains to do whatever the president asks

[Winehole23]

Pulte shows up to his Acting DNI job a day early, surprising outgoing DNI. Wants to fire 100s. Also asks if he has TS clearance, for a security detail, for the PDB at his house, and -- repeatedly -- if he has access to a gov't plane so he can travel between his homes.

www.cnn.com/2026/06/19/p...

[ChumpDumper]

We've all known this for about a decade but it's good to have receipts.

https://x.com/mffisher/status/2068663525476544874

[Spurs Homer]

Shocker about tulsi…

who would have ever known and why were we never warned that tulsi is a two-cult member and a double- traitor…

oh yeah…everyone knew and MAGAT cultists were warned…

it was impossible to be double-brainwashed and taking orders from two cult leaders…but she pulled it off…

where is that tulsi lovin kunt? hater?

[Winehole23]

according to rumor

totally unqualified Trump flunky Bill Pulte is purging the Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Firings at the Office of the Director of National intelligence started today, a source familiar with the matter said.

Sources had previously said that Bill Pulte was looking at cutting hundreds of jobs.

[Winehole23]

https://www.odni.gov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct...l_Intelligence

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

^^^ underrated counterintelligence threat

[Winehole23]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/u...core-ios-share

[Winehole23]

Marco Rubio on why Trump's son in law, Michael Boulos, who has no government role, was in his official meetings in Kuwait: "He was just here because his brother lives here and I'm a good friend of Michael's, so we had a chance to catch up"

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mp4g6ktqti2c

[Winehole23]

A top FEMA official who had drawn scrutiny for bizarre past remarks — including claiming he teleported to a Waffle House — has been pushed out of the agency, four sources tell CNN.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/25/polit...-ousted-agency

[Winehole23]

"pulty" promotes kooky personal lickspittle

Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, has stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.

“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”

https://www.ms.now/news/pulte-odni-s...ction-midterms

[Winehole23]

The ODNI official SpyTalk talked with declined to elaborate on Norton’s remarks or why her past experience as a Republican “election integrity” official qualified her to serve as chief of staff for an office that oversees the work of the entire U.S. intelligence community’s 17 agencies. The official did say that both Pulte and Norton have full security clearances, “which are not interim,” but declined to explain where or how they got them so quickly

https://www.spytalk.co/p/party-time-at-the-odni

[Winehole23]

Blake Masters and Theo Wold are hilarious picks for the Defense Policy Board

[Winehole23]

"Pulty"

[Winehole23]

Bill Pulte is there to dig dirt for Trump so Jay Clayton can keep his hands clean

President Donald Trump said acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte would be in his role for “a month or two months or something” and is empowered to “declassify almost everything,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

In the meantime, Jay Clayton, the president’s nominee for the full-time DNI post, will have his confirmation hearing in two weeks, Trump said.

“Bill is there just for a fairly short period of time,” he told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. “But while he’s there, I said you can declassify whatever you want.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/0...ation-00983648

[Winehole23]

Todd Blanche failed immediately as AG in one of the most ironic ways

The DOJ accidentally emailed copies of Volume II of Jack Smith's final report to the lawyers representing a woman they charged with obstruction of justice for emailing [to herself] Volume II of Jack Smith's final report.

https://www.rawstory.com/doj-release...-smith-report/

[Winehole23]

per msnbc

Dozens of intel officials have started receiving notice of their terminations under Trump's unqualified acting DNI, Bill Pulte.

The individuals are officials "who they believe are deep state" and whom leadership claims have not provided complete pictures of available intel.

https://www.ms.now/news/pulte-firing...ep-state-trump

[Winehole23]

waste and abuse

Patel is milking the federal government for personal perks

FBI Director Kash Patel has been demanding special perks from bureau employees during his taxpayer-funded travels throughout the country, including helicopter tours and jet ski excursions, according to whistleblower accounts given to Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees and obtained exclusively by MS NOW.


But the Democrats are not alone in their concerns about Patel’s use of public resources; MS NOW has also viewed a letter to Patel from Republican Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley demanding that Patel turn over information about his flights on FBI aircraft and about the FBI’s purchase of BMW vehicles, which was first reported in December by MS NOW.


“For each trip where you used an FBI aircraft for personal travel, have you reimbursed the FBI as required by law? If yes, please provide the records,” the Grassley letter says.


Grassley acknowledged that FBI policy requires the director to fly in the FBI jet even when traveling for personal reasons, but he said Congress deserves an accounting of the director’s use of FBI aircraft to conduct an “independent and objective review.”


Grassley, who has consistently defended Patel publicly, asked the director in the letter to “please explain why you decided to purchase BMW vehicles instead of Chevy Suburbans.”


MS NOW reported in December that Patel directed the FBI to purchase several BMW x5 SUVs for the director’s use despite a long-standing policy of purchasing Chevrolet Suburban SUVs for that purpose. Patel’s spokesman said at the time that the move saved the government money, but he declined to release do ents substantiating that claim.

https://www.ms.now/news/house-democr...eyre-not-alone