Badlands Brief
Trump’s DOJ Gets Busy as the Boss Jets to Beijing
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.
FBI Questions CIA Officers Over Russia Assessment in Brennan Probe
The FBI has begun interviewing current and former CIA officers as part of a Department of Justice investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan’s role in the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Last week, agents from the Miami field office questioned about a dozen CIA employees who worked on the assessment at CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia; more interviews are expected in the coming weeks.
The questioning focuses on Brennan’s involvement in producing the assessment and the extent to which its conclusions were shaped by the Steele dossier.
The probe examines whether Brennan made false statements to Congress in 2023 testimony about the assessment, which concluded that Russia interfered to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.
The Steele dossier—funded by Trump’s political opponents and containing unverified claims about his ties to Russia—was briefly referenced in the assessment (a summary was attached to the classified version). Brennan has said the CIA opposed including the dossier and that it was added only as a compromise with the FBI.
The investigation was referred to the DOJ by Republican Representative Jim Jordan in October and is now overseen by Joe DiGenova after the previous lead prosecutor was removed last month.
Ashe in America: CIA officers are being interrogated about the Steele Dossier and John Brennan’s role in the treasonous grand conspiracy.
That’s encouraging, and it’s what we would expect after the previous announcements that John Brennan was under investigation.
John Brennan’s alleged portfolio of treason is extensive and spans decades. And Russia Gate was a cover up.
What was the first overt act in the conspiracy?
Drop your answer in the chat!
Media Acknowledges Iranian Knot While Fearmongering About Trump, Cuba and Beijing
President Trump’s administration is pursuing an assertive mix of pressure, military posturing, and unconventional proposals across Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, creating a mix of stalemate, escalating rhetoric, and regime-change dynamics ahead of his visit with Xi Jinping in Beijing.
In the Middle East, the U.S. and Iran remain locked in a diplomatic stalemate that is neither full peace nor renewed war. A cease-fire has now lasted nearly as long as the preceding fighting, entering its second month amid sporadic violence. President Trump dismissed Iran’s latest counteroffer as “a piece of garbage,” with neither side showing willingness to compromise or resume major hostilities.
In the Western Hemisphere, the focus has shifted to Cuba and Venezuela following the January U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Trump has floated the idea of annexing Venezuela as America’s 51st state, citing its vast oil reserves (valued at around $40 trillion) and claiming strong local support (“Venezuela loves Trump”).
Post-capture reforms have boosted oil output to over 1 million barrels per day, with new Chevron deals and a $2 billion U.S. oil-supply agreement in place; an interim government led by Maduro’s former vice president has been installed.
Pressure on Cuba has intensified in tandem, with surged U.S. surveillance flights since February, new sanctions imposed last week, and sharp rhetoric from Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Burning Bright: The untangling of the Iranian Knot represents the destabilization of, well, destabilization operations once routed through that proxy theater and many others besides.
But the development truly accelerating the Hegemon's panic is not the Iranian theater, but Trump's visit to Beijing.
Why?
Because they know that, even if they can't guess the method to Trump's madness, they have taken temporary heart in the fact that there is growing bipartisan agreement that things SEEM out of control from the perspective of the American role on the world stage at present.
JUST as they also know that a series of substantive deals between Trump and Xi Jinping leveraging the combined scale of the American and Chinese economic engines carries the latent capacity to reorder global trade flows, pricing mechanisms and market architectures in the span of a single press conference.
And that possibility alone is enough to betray their deeper fear, which is not relegated to tactical coordination, but of the formation or revelation of a Sovereign Alliance whose public recognition and political codification would render the old rules-based order they serve obsolete overnight.
In other words, they do not need to admit the Alliance exists to reveal how much its emergence terrifies them.
Meanwhile, the protectorate's coverage of Cuba betrays their same inverted logic, just as it simultaneously betrays their fear that the same process is soon to play out there, much closer to home in keeping with Trump's resurgent Pax Americana doctrine.
The frenzied speculation around military signaling and pressure on Cuba is not rooted in genuine alarm over the potential destabilization of the island nation, but rather its disentanglement from the proxy architecture of the Hegemon and its renormalization in the context of Trump's hemispheric reformation.
That process is already delivering measurable renormalization in Venezuela only four months after Trump's 2026 cycle began in earnest, and the rapidity of said renormalization is the major tell to the machine that what looks like chaos from the outside is something far more intentional than they at first believed.
Under this framing, Trump's 51st-state market testing regarding Venezuela serves as both a troll and a Narrative precision strike, underscoring who now holds the leverage, and who is really working with whom while the Regime scrambles.
A new status quo is emerging. Rather, is being revealed.
Not the one the Hegemon once dictated through cartel networks and proxy puppets, but one forged through Sovereign power projection and the amplification of a series of geopolitical pincers between the true powers on the game board, with the Sovereign Trinity at their head.
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Former Ukrainian Chief of Staff Under Investigation While ODNI Reviews Biolab Claims in Ukraine
Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities have named Andriy Yermak, former chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as the sole suspect in a major money-laundering investigation involving 460 million hryvnia (about $10.5 million) allegedly laundered through elite construction projects near Kyiv.
Yermak, a longtime trusted confidant and lead negotiator in U.S. talks, resigned in November amid the scandal — described as the biggest threat to Zelenskyy’s government since Russia’s full-scale invasion. His home was searched that month; investigators from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office have not yet filed formal charges, which could take months.
Yermak’s lawyer called the suspicion groundless and politically motivated, while Zelenskyy’s office said it is too early to draw conclusions.
In a separate development, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is leading a probe into more than 120 U.S.-funded biological laboratories abroad, located in over 30 countries — including more than 40 in Ukraine that may be at risk amid the ongoing war.
The labs have received U.S. taxpayer funding for years, often through the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, to study pathogens and improve biosecurity.
The review follows President Trump’s executive order banning federal support for gain-of-function research in high-risk nations and aims to identify exact locations, pathogens studied, and any dangerous experiments.
GhostofBasedPatrickHenry: As we have long suspected, Ukraine is a giant crime scene.
Not only do we have massive money-laundering operations occurring, but also illegal and secret bio[weapons] labs—which were explicitly denied by Tony Fauci and his staff.
The implications are massive.
Obviously, Fauci and his ilk were doing something that they knew was illegal. It isn't a stretch to speculate that they were developing weaponized pathogens, and it would seem that Putin figured this out and it factored into his decision to invade.
If this turns out to be true, then Putin and Russia will be exonerated for their special military operation. It will also mean that Fauci and the US government will be proven to be not just terrorists, but evil masterminds, as well.
A great deal of shame and contempt is about to be foisted upon America, and it is our duty as patriots to push these psychotic bureaucrats into the proverbial wood chipper. They will find no comfort or solace in the US. Nor will they be allowed to hide here behind us like they do in Israel. (In fact, I suspect many of them will flee to Israel to avoid prosecution.)
Surely, Yermak is not the only Ukrainian official guilty of money-laundering. I suspect most of the leadership was involved. I also suspect that members of the US Congress were knowledgeable, too.
Perhaps that was the reason they were so eager to send as much money to Ukraine as possible?
Ukraine is not the only crime scene. Congress is also a crime scene. It should be dismissed, indefinitely, while a full-scale investigation of every member and their staff is conducted. We need to see it turned inside out, and we need to understand the depths of depravity and criminality that has been done in our name.
No more talk of the midterms.
The GOP was a key player in sending money to Ukraine. Their headquarters should be raided—along with the DNC—and all of its staff should also be placed under investigation. No stone should be left unturned.
But we don't need to wait for the feds to investigate.
Citizen-journalists should take charge and begin organization information starting with what is already known.
This is our country, and our government.
It is past time that we take responsibility for it.
Mamdani Scraps Communist Budget Proposals Amidst New York Exodus
According to Bloomberg, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has scrapped his planned property tax hike in a revised budget unveiled on Tuesday.
The unpopular measure had been floated to help close a roughly $5.4 billion two-year budget deficit.
Mamdani presented a $124.7 billion executive budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Instead of raising property taxes on New Yorkers, the revised plan counts on revenue from second homes as an alternative funding source.
The decision marks a shift from earlier proposals and comes amid ongoing negotiations over the city’s spending plan.
Ashe in America: I’m enjoying this too much.
No offense intended to the great patriots in NYC, but yall know this has to happen. The consequences of the policies must be felt.
From ZeroHedge:
“Mamdani's preliminary budget proposal earned the city a credit rating downgrade to negative, citing the city's long-term structural problems. He also proposed raiding the city's emergency savings account for $1 billion to help close the gap.”
The Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) are rising in my state, and those guys lionize Mamdani.
Their goal is to make Denver just like NYC and move outward to infect the whole state.
“This reversal comes amid a great exodus of wealth from New York State.”
The consequences of the policies must be felt for the people to reject the ideology.
As soon as the people demand change, change will happen.
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Ukrainian Ambassador Says Ukraine and Israel Are Fighting the Same “Axis of Evil”
Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk stated that Ukraine and Israel are “fighting from a different angle against the same axis of evil.”
In an interview with Israeli outlet Ynet, he highlighted shared threats from Iranian drones and their proxies, noting that Russia has used Iranian drone variants against Ukraine while Israel has faced thousands of drone attacks from Iran and Hezbollah.
Korniychuk said Ukraine has already sent about 200 drone experts to the Middle East to assist the U.S. and Arab states in countering Iranian drones. He expressed regret that Israel has shown little interest in cooperating on anti-drone technology, despite Ukraine’s proven expertise.
The ambassador noted frustration among many Israelis that their country is missing opportunities to better protect its soldiers, and he lamented that President Zelenskyy’s recent regional visits for security cooperation have not led to deeper engagement with Israel.
Both nations are among the top recipients of U.S. military aid, yet bilateral relations remain strained.
Korniychuk emphasized his role in seeking common ground for mutual benefit on security issues.
GhostofBasedPatrickHenry: There's a reason that Netanyahu is distancing himself and Israel from Zelensky and Ukraine.
Well, multiple reasons, it would seem.
Zelensky did just publicly accuse Israel of purchasing "stolen" Ukrainian grain from Russia. (The ship in question never off-loaded its cargo, purportedly.)
The writing is on the wall, for Kiev—and for Zelensky, too, for that matter.
Surely, Netanyahu has access to better intelligence than we do. He has to know that the walls are closing in on the illegitimate Five Eyes/Mossad-installed regime. They already carry a stink that no political figure wants on them.
It is the stench of decay, as President Trump's return to the White House signals that retribution is coming to Washington, DC, and the Zelensky regime is low-hanging fruit.
The Ambassador’s comment had signal of its own: "We are fighting from a different angle against the same axis of evil."
Iran and Russia have solidified their military alliance over the past few years, so Zelensky is absolutely correct in his assertion that the current military opponents of Ukraine and Israel are deeply aligned.
Perhaps it's time that we start to consider the possibility that Ukraine and Israel are connected, and their fates intertwined.
Wait a minute...
BONUS ITEM
DOJ Subpoenas WSJ Over Iran War Leaks
The Department of Justice issued grand jury subpoenas to the Wall Street Journal on March 4 seeking reporters’ records related to leaks about the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran.
The subpoenas target February 23 reporting that detailed warnings from Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other Pentagon officials to President Trump about the risks of such an operation.
Trump launched the joint offensive with Israel five days later.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Trump administration is prioritizing the prosecution of leakers who share classified information with reporters, warning that journalists should not be surprised to receive subpoenas.
Blanche emphasized that such leaks endanger national security and soldiers’ lives.
Dow Jones, which owns the WSJ, condemned the subpoenas as an attack on constitutionally protected newsgathering and vowed to vigorously oppose them.
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BB: “A new status quo is emerging. Rather, is being revealed.” 👍
When Q appeared, with Military Intelligence communicating directly with the people, it gave us our first “narrative glimpse” of The Plan to save the world. In 2017, we saw remarkable meetings between Trump, Xi, and Putin - many of us understood that Putin and Xi were being read in on The Plan. All of the actuals since then have been the narrative coverage of exposure.
Looking back, The Plan emerges as multifaceted and brilliant.
The MSM has been exposed as the enemy of the people. Venezuela has exposed the inner workings of election fraud machines. Epic Fury has really been Economic Fury.
Putin and Xi were fairly quiet during the Venezuelan phase. And both have basically remained on the sidelines with Iran.
BB has been accurate all along, that the actuals happening are the cover for the narratives of exposure.
What an education the last 10 years have been!! ❤️🇺🇸🕊🌎🌟
In answer to your question @Ashe: I would put the decision to mirror the tactics of the German Intel Agencies (SS, et al.) within our IC as a trigger point (think operation Paper Clip).
PS - I apologize for not taking the time to identify the bureaucrat(s) directly responsible for that decision.
PPS - Operation Paperclip started on July 20, 1945 which means the decision to embrace those tactics was much earlier! It was the brainchild of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency and was influenced by Maj. Gen. H.N. Toftoy and aided by Gen. Gehlen - the former head of NAZI intelligence.