Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears on Fox News morning program to discuss the current status of the U.S. economic targeting of Iran and the U.S. control of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.

At 05:49 of the video below, Secretary Scott Bessent outlines the hypocrisy of the EU-NATO countries as it relates to purchases of energy from Russia.  Secretary Bessent notes the same hypocrisy applies to voices in the U.S. congress who passed HR-5334, the Lindsey Graham Russian Sanctions Bill, authorizes the President to lift and/or impose sanctions related to Russia. {GO DEEP}

Many EU-NATO countries continue to purchase oil and gas from Russia, yet those same EU-NATO countries feign outrage at President Trump making a deal with President Putin to supply diesel fuel to the world market and USA to the benefit of consumers.

In fact, the EU is buying more energy from Russia this year than ever before, which is interesting because congress has authorized President Trump to deliver up to 500% tariffs against those same EU-NATO countries for purchasing Russian energy products.

EURONEWS – Europe paid around €7.88 billion for liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Russia’s Arctic energy project in the first nine months of 2026 despite Brussels’ efforts to phase out gas from Moscow, according to the campaign group Urgewald.

The figures, compiled by Urgewald using data from the market intelligence firm Kpler, expose just how reliant the EU remains on Russian energy, with a record of 12.18 million tonnes reaching European ports between January and September this year.

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President Trump eviscerated Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during remarks to the media earlier today.  Within hours, Zelenskyy ran to ABC news for support. Zelenskyy will be on American television Sunday at the request and instruction of his handlers.

Furious about Zelenskyy’s arrogance at undermining U.S. energy interests by targeting Russian energy export hubs, President Trump pointed out that it is duplicitous Zelenskyy who is the impediment to any negotiated peace agreement or ceasefire.

“We told Zelensky, ‘You can do whatever you want to Russia, but don’t hit the refineries because that’s a world problem.’ And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel. He better damn well stop.” …”I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal, because he could have made many deals that for some reason, he NEVER does.” “That’s a war that should have never started. And I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

[SOURCE]

1. In his own words Vladimir Putin explains why EU-NATO must have an expanded war with Russia. It has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do with control of money (energy price-fixing). [SEE HERE]

2. Understand how the western control of the “market price” of commodities is used to manipulate political outcomes. This ties directly into the first article about why London must control the money and combat Russia.  In this second article three weeks ago, CTH outlined a very predictable path that was most likely. The Trump-Putin strategic alliance on diesel exports is EXACTLY what we expected and predicted to happen. [SEE HERE]

3. When you combine what Putin has said with the strategic agreement with Trump now in place you can then move forward and clearly see how Lukoil is going to end up being a wedge to drive out London financial influence and free the USA from this corrupt market control system. [SEE HERE]

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Immediately after President Trump announced a strategic energy supply deal with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, Ukraine President Zelenskyy ordered drone strikes against the Russian oil/fuel export terminal NZNP.

The targeted terminal is located in the Zheleznodorozhny district of Rostov-on-Don, and it is used to transship petroleum products including diesel fuel for exports toward the west.  {SOURCE, Ukraine Today}

The intention of Zelenskyy’s targeting is obvious to anyone who has followed the conflict between Russia-Ukraine and the involvement of EU-NATO countries in keeping maximum conflict at the forefront.  They do not want a strategic agreement between Putin and Trump.

Hours before the Ukraine targeting of the NZNP export terminal, President Trump announced a strategic agreement with President Putin for refined diesel exports over the next six months.  This Trump-Putin agreement was against the interests of Zelenskyy and specifically against the interests of his benefactors in London, because Putin and Trump are working outside the “western market pricing system”.

To fully understand what is happening, I strongly suggest you spend the time to read my previous articles on the dynamic as outlined below in sequence.

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Vice President JD Vance and the federal Fraud Taskforce held a press conference today announcing their investigative findings of H1B visa abuse and manipulation of green card program by U.S. corporations who hire foreign workers over Americans.

During the press conference, JD Vance announced that Microsoft and Adobe have been suspended from the H1B visa process, as well as several other tech companies.  The taskforce also announced immediate investigations into nine major U.S. universities for J1 student visa fraud.  The entire visa program is being targeted by the fraud taskforce and DOJ in order to ensure that American students and American workers benefit from employment and college entrance opportunities.  This is well worth watching in full:

[Transcript] JD VANCE: “Yes. Good morning. Thank you all. Well, good morning to the press and good morning to all the people who’ve worked so hard on this. This is a great day for American workers because we are taking some very concrete actions to cut down on some of the H-1B and J-1 visa fraud that we’ve been tracking over the past several months.

I want to give a particular shout out to Andrew Ferguson, Stephen Miller, and of course Todd Blanche, our great Attorney General, who are standing behind me. A particular shout out to DOL Secretary Keith Sonderling, who’s been really an amazing partner in the anti-fraud Task Force. Thanks to Keith’s hard work, we’ve uncovered about $20 billion in fraud just within his, his department and secured over 200 convictions in the last five months alone.”

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You might remember the story of CIA senior officer David J. Rush, 49, of Ashburn, Virginia, who was indicted after an FBI investigation found gold bars, cash in dollars and euros as well as luxury cars and dozens of luxury watches.

Today the DOJ announced that Rush has plead guilty {pdf SEE HERE} in a deal where he will admit to one count of wire fraud, and that will permit the DOJ to finish prosecuting the case without revealing extremely sensitive information about the CIA operations Rush was involved in.

Rush stands accused of manipulating more than $195 million in wire transfers to his own accounts, after setting up covert fake CIA operations centered around unknown foreign intelligence efforts.  When you read the plea agreement that stipulates the facts of his activity, it certainly sounds like David Rush was able to execute the fraud under the auspices of Ukraine operations.

To be clear, there’s no mention of Ukraine, but the scale of the money involved, the timing of the activity, the location of the real estate and the attributes of the money and gold (as described) sound very Ukrainian-ish.

DOJ PRESS RELEASE – […] On May 19, 2026, the FBI searched Rush’s residence and recovered 298 gold bars, approximately $2,106,550 in cash, €104,795, and numerous luxury watches. Rush had obtained the gold bars at an approximate cost to the government of $46 million. Pursuant to the plea agreement, Rush has agreed to forfeit the gold bars and currency found at his home, the fraudulently obtained properties, 30 watches (many of which were Rolexes), and two 2026 BMW Alpina vehicles, at least one of which is valued at approximately $172,000. 

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The case against the former head of German Intelligence, August Hanning, is seriously sketchy.

Hanning, 80, was arrested in Bad Toelz-Wolfratshausen in southern Germany. His former Chief of Staff, Manfred D., was also arrested Tuesday in Steinfurt in western Germany and has been charged with aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous espionage.

Police were investigating Hanning in 2025 in relation to his involvement in organizing a kidnapping plot.  When police searched his residence, they found documents outlining his activity in receiving state secrets from inside German intelligence and selling classified analysis to a foreign government (not Russia).

Apparently when Hanning left as head of German intelligence, his chief of staff “Manfred” remained at work.  Manfred then continued to give Hanning information from inside German intelligence, which Hanning then used to sell his services to foreign enterprises.

The information Manfred gave Hanning related to intelligence on Russia and Iran that Germany gathered from partnerships with the USA and Israel.  In essence, Hanning was selling 5-eyes secret intelligence on Russia and Iran, to foreign interests.  Hanning was receiving the intelligence from Manfred, his former chief of staff.

GERMANY – A former German spy chief was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of espionage and treason, an embarrassing case at a time when the country is seeking to broaden the powers of its intelligence agencies.

August Hanning, who ran Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency from 1998 to 2005, is accused of espionage, treason and working for foreign intelligence services, federal prosecutors said.

They did not say which foreign powers were involved. However, AFP understands it was not Russia.

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Susan Kokinda delivers a great contextual overview for the IRGC letter to the world asking everyone, anyone, to help protect them from President Trump’s strategic operation against Iran.

Kokinda opens with the 26-page open letter Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps addressed to the American people weeks before the midterms, which the State Department dismissed as desperate and the Daily Wire read as a call to vote Democrat. She argues the letter tells a bigger story than anyone is reporting: it names the CIA, Israel and the military-industrial complex, but never once the British. After President Trump’s “easy way or the hard way” remark on Iran, and his statement at the U.N. that the election won’t influence his Iran policy, the episode revisits the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, whom the letter calls an “Americanophile,” after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, today’s BP, and cites National Security Archive documents showing the British Foreign Office approached the Truman administration in late 1952 to propose a coup.

Her review then then turns to a Foreign Affairs newsletter citing the 1956 Suez crisis as a parallel to the war with Iran, President Eisenhower’s refusal to back Britain and France at Suez, and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1955 Foreign Affairs article on how the British ran Egypt. It closes with Richard Haass on Morning Joe, the morning after Trump’s U.N. speech, calling it “the end of 80 years of American foreign policy,” Chatham House director Bronwen Maddox on Europe having to defend itself against the U.S., and Mark Carney telling the New York Times he spent the past year preparing for the “extreme tail risk” of U.S. military action against Canada.  WATCH:

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I don’t want to focus too much on this, because there are multiple angles still at work.  However, against the backdrop of the non-coincidental coincidences that followed the August 2025 Alaska Summit, the Lukoil story looks strategically interesting.

The New York Times is looking at Lukoil from the perspective of President Trump organizing financial gains for people close to his administration, specifically Witkoff and Kusher.  {GO DEEP}

That aspect is nonsense, total nonsense; however, if you pull back and look at the background story without the Trump derangement overlay, there’s a potential here for something very good to come out of it.

As the story is told, Russian President Vladimir Putin has inquired about the potential for the U.S. to remove sanctions against Lukoil, a quasi-private energy company based out of Russia.  Before, getting too weedy about it, remind yourself of the statements that surfaced during the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, August, 2025.

You might remember that both the U.S and Russia spoke of strategic partnerships surrounding the energy sector.  Obviously, this makes sense when we consider the “west” is actually fractured on the topic of energy.  There are two competing interests that overlap in the financial side of the issue, the ‘trillions at stake’ aspect.

On one side you have the “climate change” team, those who are fully invested (literally) in the financial mechanisms of the climate change, green new deal, build back better talking points.  The Green Energy team in the west.  The Paris Climate Treaty and carbon-trading proponents et al.

On the other side you have the pragmatic energy team in the west.  These are the Trump-minded and aligned western perspectives that look at oil, natural gas (LNG), clean coal and nuclear technology.  These are the “all the above” aligned voices in the more pragmatic view of low-cost energy production and development.

In the middle, between both sides of the fracture, are the banking and finance systems.  This is the BIG MONEY play, with the Climate Change team supported by banking ideology inside the city of London, while the Carbon Use team is constantly having to assemble finance and insurance from outside the banking control mechanisms.

The Climate Change team have support based on ideology within the finance system.  However, the Carbon Use team have the advantage of low-price outputs, global dependency and actual profits as leverage.  This is a fight essentially inside the larger energy sector, and we are all very familiar with it because it has been happening for decades.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is currently the main tool deployed by the Climate Change team on behalf of the London finance system.  Carney’s main opponent is U.S. President Donald Trump.

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UPDATE BELOW:

According to CNN, current Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton is likely to be appointed the AI/SI Czar.  If that is accurate, and not a leak trap – which considering the source is sketchy, then that leaves the DNI position open again.

(VIA CNN) – President Donald Trump is expected to pick Jay Clayton to be the White House’s new czar of artificial intelligence, two sources familiar with the discussion told CNN.

The president could announce his decision about Clayton, who is director of national intelligence, as early as Friday, one of the sources said.

Trump announced last month that he was planning to create an “AI Force” and name an AI czar as the government faces growing calls to impose guardrails on the technology’s rapid development.

Trump gathered several AI and technology CEOs at the White House on Tuesday for a meeting that culminated in the signing of a new commitment aimed at better “self-policing” their companies’ AI models. (read more)

If it is accurate that Clayton is going to the Super Intelligence Czar position, and considering the sudden reappearance last week at the White House, is there a possibility of someone returning to the administration as DNI?

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President Trump delivered impromptu remarks to the press today as he departs the White House for an event in Texas.  The assembled press pool asked a variety of questions based on current events.

President Trump is heading to Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Alabama and Nebraska for campaign events. WATCH:

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