Badlands Brief
The Bibi Break-Up Begins, As Does The IC Purge...
The Badlands Brief is your daily drop of Badlands’ takes on the narratives dominating the info war. Read on, and join the conversation in the comments section.
Netanyahu Defies Trump; Strikes Iran to Restart War
President Donald Trump urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate against Iran following an Iranian missile attack, according to Axios, which cited a senior U.S. official and an Israeli source. Trump separately told the Financial Times that Netanyahu would have “no choice” but to accept any agreement the United States negotiates with Iran and said he “calls the shots” in the talks.
The diplomatic pressure came as regional tensions escalated. Iran launched 11 ballistic missiles toward Israel on June 8, according to Israeli officials cited by Axios, marking the first direct Iranian attack since an April 8 ceasefire.
In response, the Israeli Air Force carried out strikes against military targets in central and western Iran, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter said the operation focused on missile launch sites and related infrastructure and did not target energy facilities. Explosions were reported in multiple Iranian cities.
A U.S. defense official told Axios that American forces did not participate in the Israeli strikes. Iran has warned that further Israeli attacks could prompt additional responses, raising concerns about broader regional escalation.
GhostofBasedPatrickHenry: And here we have yet another phone call between President Trump and Israeli journalist Barak Ravid. These are now happening every few weeks.
There isn’t another journalist with that level of access to President Trump; nor is there another journalist to whom Trump has expressed anti-Netanyahu sentiments.
Pattern recognition.
Here’s what Ravid posted following his phone call with the President.
President Trump then did a phone interview with the Financial Times of London. When asked whether he thought Netanyahu would accept the deal Trump was negotiating with Iran, Trump replied: “He won’t have any choice. I call the shots. I call all the shots. He [Netanyahu] doesn’t call the shots.”
More from the Financial Times article:
The president separately told Fox News that he would instruct Netanyahu to refrain from taking retaliatory action against Iran — a position at odds with statements from the Israeli military.
Trump said that Iran’s strikes had not changed his desire to conclude US-Iran negotiations. “It’s not going to have any impact on the deal,” he told the FT.
“We’ll see how it ends up. But they [the missile strikes on Israel] were attacks that did not kick at all. It’s one of those things that’s been going for 3,000 years, or 47 years, depending on how you count.”
So Trump just straight up said that Iran attacking Israel would not deter his pursuit of peace. That it would not deter his pursuit of making a deal with Iran.
Perhaps that is why Netanyahu pursued war in defiance of President Trump.
Exactly one month ago, on May 9th, Netanyahu spoke at the Yad Vashem—the World Holocaust Remembrance Center—in Jerusalem. He said, “If Israel is forced to stand alone - Israel will stand alone.”
That is exactly what President Trump has baited Netanyahu into doing, using Game Theory. Because it is election season, the knives are out for Bibi. All of his political opponents are now calling him weak for capitulating to Trump, and failing to finish the job with Hezbollah and Iran.
Even Israeli mouthpieces are seeing the writing on the wall. They finally understand the trap that I saw being set years ago.
The impetus for Iran’s attack on Israel was retaliation to Israel’s strike on Beirut (the capital of Lebanon). While many speculated that the US played a hand in this operation, it was this attack that provoked President Trump into chewing out Netanyahu last week. Barak Ravid reported yesterday that two separate sources at the White House confirmed that the US played no part, and did not give the blessing to do it.
Anshel Pfeffer from The Economist summarized the situation:
These are the circumstances that will drive Israel deeper into war, as Netanyahu clings to power, and President Trump negotiates peace with Iran and exits the stage. This is everything that we have been anticipating ever since we started studying Israeli domestic politics in the News Brief over two years ago.
And now we are watching it unfold.
Accelerate.
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Trump Urges New DNI Pulte to Fire Intel Community Employees
President Donald Trump said he wants acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte to begin firing a large number of employees as part of an effort to reshape the U.S. intelligence community. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump said he had privately instructed Pulte to “start the process” of reducing personnel within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Trump told the newspaper that he believes the ODNI, which oversees 18 U.S. intelligence agencies and units, is “unnecessary and/or too big.” He said he would like to see the organization reduced in size and argued that some employees should no longer be in their positions. Reuters separately reported Trump as saying, “I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there.”
Pulte was selected by Trump to serve as acting Director of National Intelligence following the announced departure of Tulsi Gabbard, which is scheduled to take effect June 30. Trump has also indicated that he does not plan to nominate Pulte to hold the intelligence post on a permanent basis after the acting appointment concludes.
Burning Bright: Whether or not one perceives a method to the apparent madness of these appointments depends entirely on whether one believes Donald Trump operates with a coherent plan for the institutions he is reshaping.
Surface readings that register only disruption, inexperience or personal score-settling will always conclude that such moves are reckless. Yet the same moves, viewed through the lens of intended end states resolve into something far more precise.
Furthermore, whether any given appointment registers as prudent or dangerous cannot be separated from the question of what the architect believes the institution in question is ultimately for.
If the projected end state for the intelligence community is a restored, professionalized and essentially-unchanged apparatus—cleansed of its most obvious abuses, but still operating within the post-9/11 architecture—then Pulte’s selection appears destabilizing.
To wit, those who read Trump’s project as one of restoration will experience ongoing confusion and discombobulation at each unorthodox selection, with the pattern registering as erratic rather than strategic, because the underlying assumption is that the existing structures are basically sound and require only better management or marginal reform.
It looks a lot different for those who recognize in these moves the architecture of a controlled demolition and constitutional reset.
The ODNI was never a neutral coordinator of foreign intelligence; it emerged as a post-9/11 layer that concentrated power and, over time became a node in a narrative war for domestic political enforcement.
An acting director drawn from outside the intelligence guild, given explicit license to reduce headcount and operating scope before a permanent hand takes over is not a bug in Trump’s restoration. It is the feature required when the institution itself has become part of the problem it was meant to solve, or was from the start.
The shock of Trump’s picks is often the point.
The intelligence community, like so many other layers accreted during decades of supranational drift and domestic bureaucratic expansion was never designed to serve as an independent power center or an instrument of consensus narrative enforcement ...
And if it was, then it needs to be dismantled entirely, from the inside out.
Blanche Complaint to End Bar Associations? -Ed Martin
A public interest group filed an ethics complaint against Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche after a federal judge dismissed the Tennessee criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, according to a May 31 commentary by Jonathan Turley. The underlying complaint PDF could not be accessed in-browser and was not used to establish independent facts.
U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw dismissed the human-smuggling case May 22, 2026, after granting Abrego Garcia’s motion alleging vindictive prosecution, ABC News reported. ABC reported Crenshaw found the government had not rebutted a presumption of vindictiveness.
A May 21, 2025, indictment in the Middle District of Tennessee alleged Abrego Garcia and others conspired from about 2016 to about 2025 to bring undocumented immigrants into the United States. The indictment also alleged Abrego Garcia was an El Salvador citizen, not a U.S. citizen, and a member or associate of MS-13.
Ashe in America: Ed Martin says the Bar Associations are ending themselves.
“The Bar Associations are ending themselves. Soon, they will be like the Guilds of Florence.”
The Guilds of Florence were abolished by decree in 1770 after the people rose up against them.
I’m down.
The professional associations are entirely unaccountable to anyone or anything, and they enjoy enormous powers to affect change. As a shorthand, this is your “expert class.”
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Bar Associations, which are considered authorities over the legal profession — see Jeff Clark, John Eastman, Rachel Alexander, Brian Blehm, etc.
But in my experience, they act more like unions when the attorney or law firm conduct confirms their political biases — and they do have political biases.
Recall the DOJ letter from Pam Bondi stating the position of the administration on the ABA:
“Accordingly, while the ABA is free to comment on judicial nominations along with other activist organizations, there is no justification for treating the ABA differently from such other activist organizations and the Department of Justice will not do so.”
The whole diseased temple includes its state vassals.
Accelerate.
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Pentagon Boosts Israeli Spying Threat to “Critical”
NBC News and The New York Times reported that the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency recently elevated its assessment of the threat posed by Israeli espionage to a “critical” level. The reported assessment consisted of a seven-page document and accompanying chart evaluating Israeli intelligence-gathering capabilities.
The assessment allegedly identified concerns about Israeli efforts to gather information regarding U.S. administration deliberations on Iran and Lebanon. The reports, citing unnamed sources, named Steve Witkoff, Elbridge Colby and Michael DiMino among officials allegedly targeted by intelligence collection efforts.
The Pentagon declined comment. A White House official told NBC News that “the entire story is false,” according to the article. A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington dismissed the allegations as politically motivated and said Israeli intelligence activities are directed at adversaries rather than allies.
The reported assessment surfaced amid broader tensions between the Trump administration and the Israeli government over Iran and developments in Lebanon.
GhostofBasedPatrickHenry: This is is an interesting narrative deployment. Being that it comes from NBC News and The New York Times, it is possible—if not likely—to be Fake News. However, the story is more than plausible.
What makes the report particularly compelling is the inclusion of Michael DiMino as a target of the espionage.
DiMino is somebody who we took interest in when he was sworn in at the Pentagon on January 20, 2025. His formal title is Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for the Middle East, with his role being principal policy advisor on all defense and security issues pertaining to the Middle East and is responsible for more than a dozen countries.
DiMino became the target of scrutiny by the Israeli press upon his hiring, due to his past rhetoric and position that Israel is a security liability for the US, and that the US should abandon it as an ally and withdraw all support.
So it makes perfect sense that Mossad would want to spy on this guy.
Whether this report by the MSM is true is secondary to the fact that it is now in the public zeitgeist. The public believes this reporting, and it’s possible that it was a narrative deployment seeded by the Trump administration in order to further exacerbate tensions with the government of Israel.
The timing of this deployment cannot be ignored. If it is a Fake News story fabricated by Trump’s enemies in an attempt to further damage his reputation, then their plan has backfired tremendously. The public is turning on Israel at a rate that is increasing exponentially; And coming at a moment when President Trump is ostensibly turning against Netanyahu.
For these reasons, it is difficult for me to see this as a coincidence or enemy deployment. I think this is Game Theory in motion.
Trump Walks Out on Kristen Welker Over Fake News About Fake Elections
President Donald Trump said June 4 that the United States does not need a formal agreement with Iran to obtain the country’s enriched uranium, asserting that the US could get access to it if it chose to, but adding there is currently “no need” because the material is effectively “entombed” at damaged nuclear sites. Trump also said the US is closely monitoring the sites and claimed any recovery operation would be difficult and risky.
The comments mark a notable shift from earlier negotiations, in which transferring or surrendering Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile had been reported as a central element of a potential agreement between Washington and Tehran. US officials previously indicated that Iran giving up enriched uranium was a key objective of the talks.
Trump also struck a conciliatory tone toward Iran’s leadership. While saying he is not currently seeking a meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Trump indicated he would consider one if a deal is reached and said he would approach such a meeting respectfully. He has also recently stated that Iran has already agreed not to obtain nuclear weapons, describing that commitment as the central issue in the ongoing discussions.
Ashe in America: In a viral moment Sunday, President Trump walked out on Kristen Welker of Meet the Press following a heated exchange about elections being fake.
It’s discombobulating when so-called Trump supporters tell us to stop talking about fake elections or we will harm President Trump’s agenda — The Midterms™️! — but then oppose the President’s agenda when it comes to real vs. fake elections.
It’s almost like it isn’t about supporting the President at all, but rather about preserving and protecting fake elections.
Actually, continuing to pretend elections are real harms the President’s — OUR — agenda.
It’s our agenda to put America First and Make America Great Again. Our ability to execute that agenda inside the system requires real elections, which we don’t have, so everything the President said to Welker is true and justified.
Trump has all the evidence. I have no doubt. @canncon and I have a lot of it as well. We’ve presented it for three years on Why We Vote, with witnesses and expert analysis.
Now “the left” has an election denier movement going — the “Election Truth Alliance — and Brian and I think these guys should come on Why We Vote.
We’re going to try to get them on… why would they say no when “truth” is in the name of the entity?
No one has covered election integrity in greater depth or with more integrity than Badlands Media across shows; and Brian and I have done a dedicated weekly show on it for three years, plus special coverage, and many of us have written extensively on the topic since 2020.
We talk to everyone, and our only allegiance is to the truth. We get a lot of pushback for not trusting an obviously rigged system enough, but clearly our position is aligned with the President’s.
So why would the “election truth alliance” say no to coming on Why We Vote?
I wonder if they’ll agree and then bail while the intro is playing. Classic earmarks…
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I am an attorney. Yes, eliminate bar associations. They are all completely woke and corrupt.
What that guest on The Left Hook is saying is EXACTLY what happened in the 2020 election !!! It would be MUST WATCH to have them on Why We Vote! I'm already sensing fireworks, appropriate as July 4th approaches!