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State Department cries false over WSJ report claiming US offered Venezuela’s Maduro amnesty

The State Department on Monday denied a Wall Street Journal report that claimed the Biden administration had offered Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro amnesty in exchange for him stepping down from his 11-year reign.

‘That is not true,’ Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters during the question-and-answer portion of a press briefing Monday. ‘We have not made any offers to Maduro or others since this election.’

Patel’s comments were in stark contrast to claims made by ‘three people familiar with the Biden administration deliberation[s]’ regarding secret meetings held in Doha, Qatar in June and September 2023 between the U.S. and Venezuela, according to the Wall Street Journal report.

Details following the meetings have been scarce, though reports released last year indicated that chief adviser to Maduro, Jorge Rodríguez, and the White House National Security Council’s former senior director for the Western Hemisphere, Juan González, met at least twice to discuss an array of issues on top of the alleged amnesty proposal, including sanctions relief, according to a document posted by Maduro to X. The U.S., however, has never verified this information. 

The Wall Street Journal report further suggested that Maduro’s top officers facing judicial indictments over offenses relating to charges of conspiring to export cocaine to the U.S., could also see amnesty agreements. 

The State Department did not return Fox News Digital’s questions regarding the Wall Street Journal report, though a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council echoed the department’s claims.

‘Since the July 28 election, we have not made any specific offers of amnesty to Nicolás Maduro or others,’ Director of Strategic Communications and Assistant Spokesperson to the National Security Council Vanessa Vidal Castellanos told Fox News Digital.  

‘In coordination with our partners, we are considering a range of options to incentivize and pressure Maduro to recognize the election results and will continue to do so, but the responsibility is on Maduro and the Venezuela’s electoral authorities to come clean on the election results,’ she added. 

According to the report, an amnesty proposal was allegedly floated as a way to incentivize Maduro to step down before his term was set to end.

But Maduro was reportedly unwilling to ‘discuss arrangements where he would have to leave office’ — a position he has only doubled-down on since the national election last month.

Despite international calls for the Venezuelan president to step aside amid mounting evidence that shows he lost to opposition leader Edmundo González, Maduro has refused to relinquish his power. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed those calls last week and said, ‘In the days since the election, we have consulted widely with partners and allies around the world, and while countries have taken different approaches in responding, none have concluded that Nicolás Maduro received the most votes this election.’

‘Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.’

The UN General Assembly has offered to mediate the election results as a third party to resolve the growing unrest in Venezuela.

Despite mounting pressure to step down, Maduro’s regime has arrested thousands of protesters and dissidents, maintained military loyalty and has elected the pro-Maduro Supreme Court to resolve any election disputes. 

Maduro’s position on leaving office is reported to be ‘unchanged.’

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Dems hitting Vance with debunked vulgar claim ‘undermine’ their anti-Trump credibility, strategist says

Democrats have continued to push a vulgar falsehood about former President Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, despite the claim being debunked weeks ago.

‘It undermines their moralizing about Trump’s falsehoods and gives Trump an opportunity to say it’s ‘the pot calling the kettle black,’’ Democratic strategist Julian Epstein told Fox News Digital.

Epstein’s comment comes as Democrats show no signs of ditching the Vance ‘couch meme,’ a vulgar rumor that originated on social media last month that Trump’s running mate described a sex act he performed on a couch in his 2016 memoir, ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’

Despite the claim being quickly debunked, its viral spread was picked up by Democrats and spawned jokes and memes across social media.

The falsehood even made its way to the top of the Democratic ticket, with Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, cracking a joke about the rumor during a speech in Philadelphia the same day Harris announced he was joining the ticket.

‘I got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate [Vance]. That is if — if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up,’ Walz said during the remarks as Harris smirked behind him, according to a recounting of the event on NBC News. ‘You see what I did there?’

The moment went viral on the Harris campaign’s TikTok account, named Kamala HQ, garnering 5.3 million views, NBC reported, noting that Democrats have continued to use the joke despite the release of fact-checks debunking the rumor by several media outlets.

In one such example, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent a news release on July 26 targeting Trump’s decision to pick Vance, joking that Republicans are ‘couching their public praise of Trump’s vice presidential nominee with private criticism.’

On July 27, the Kamala HQ X account shared a screenshot of Vance’s moments on ‘cat ladies’ with the caption that the Ohio senator ‘does not couch his hatred for women.’

A day later, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, long believed to be a potential candidate to join Harris on the ticket, joked on ABC News that while Trump ‘talks about all kinds of crazy stuff,’ Vance is ‘getting known for his obsession with couches.’

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., has also leaned into the joke, responding to Vance’s post asking why Harris had not been taking questions from the media.

‘I’ve been on Air Force 2 JD, there is a great couch on it,’ Moskowitz said in an August 7 post on X.

The continued veiled jabs at Vance over a debunked rumor seemingly fly in the face of one of the main Democratic criticisms of Trump, who the party has long claimed peddled misinformation and false claims for political benefit.

That criticism of Trump took center stage during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, when then-first lady Michelle Obama famously declare ‘when they go low, we go high,’ in reference to the attacks on her and her family.

‘More than anything else, Democrats want to memory-hole the Biden/Harris record of the last four years. They want to memory-hole Harris’ fringe left views from just five years ago.’

Obama doubled down on the theme during the 2020 convention in support of President Biden, declaring that ‘going high is the only thing that works.’

Moskowitz has nevertheless defended his party’s apparent double standard, arguing on social media that continuing the spread of the rumor is just jokes and does not compare to the lies spread by Trump.

‘For 2 years we had to hear that Joe Biden was an international super criminal mastermind from Despicable Me 3. You will listen to couch story,’ he said last month.

Moskowitz’s office did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.

However, Epstein believes Democrats are making a ‘mistake’ by continuing to lean into the falsehood, though she argued getting into a ‘tit for tat campaign of insult comedy’ would also be a ‘trap for the Republicans.’

‘More than anything else, Democrats want to memory-hole the Biden/Harris record of the last four years,’ Epstein said. ‘They want to memory-hole Harris’ fringe left views from just five years ago.’

The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.

This post appeared first on FOX NEWS

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Biden-Harris appeasement didn’t delay Iran retaliation against Israel. Here’s what really happened

On Wednesday, July 31, 2024, at 2 a.m., the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Tehran, just a day after Fuad Shukr, the most powerful military commander of Hezbollah, was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut, Lebanon. 

Shukr was wanted by the U.S. for 41 years, with a $5 million ‘Rewards for Justice’ bounty for any information about him due to his central role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 U.S. military personnel and wounded 128 others. Haniyeh also directed and celebrated the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the killing of 1,200 people and over 300 days of hostage-taking of hundreds, including Americans, by Hamas.

Adding to the shock, Kuwait’s Al-Jarida newspaper, citing an unnamed source in Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, reported that a high-level American security delegation, brokered by Oman, secretly traveled to Tehran. 

Their mission was to deliver a ‘calming and cautionary’ message to deescalate the situation and ensure the supreme leader of Iran understood that the Biden-Harris administration was ‘kept in the dark’ by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the killing of two major terrorist leaders last week. 

The detailed report stated that the American delegation, arriving on a private plane from Turkey, landed at Payam-e-Khorram Airport in Karaj on Thursday and held a two-hour meeting with Iranian officials before returning to Ankara. 

According to the same report, ‘the delegation presented a list containing the names of ten Mossad agents inside Iran, whom the Americans believe were involved in the assassination, directly or indirectly. This was intended as a good faith initiative in response to the Israeli state’s stunning strike, which was carried out without coordination with Washington.’ It could be one of the most valuable souvenirs given to the Iranian mullahs lately.

Although the U.S. State Department rejected the report on Sunday, later in the week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted that to deescalate the conflict, the Biden administration had ‘engaged in intense diplomacy with allies and partners, communicating that message directly to Iran,’ which largely confirms the Kuwaiti newspaper’s report. 

Additionally, immediately after the reported visit by the U.S. delegation, ‘more than two dozen people, including senior intelligence officers, military officials, and staff workers at a military-run guesthouse in Tehran,’ were arrested in response to the assassination of the Hamas leader, according to the New York Times based on reports from two Iranians familiar with the investigation.

Iran delayed its retaliation attacks on Israel, a move for which some in the Biden administration claimed credit. However, on Monday, Aug. 5, 2024, two major events clearly demonstrated that the supreme leader of Iran did not respect the Biden administration’s pleas for deescalation and did not appreciate the American overtures. On that day, Iran-backed militias in Iraq attacked an American Army base, injuring five U.S. troops and two contractors.

Simultaneously, a high-ranking Russian delegation, led by Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council and a senior ally of Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, visited Iran. The delegation included Russia’s defense ministers and several Russian army generals, who met with Tehran’s top leaders.

They delivered Putin’s direct message to his minion the Comrade Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him not to act recklessly by attacking Israel with outdated missiles as they did on April 13, an act that resulted in humiliation. Putin promised to soon deliver advanced weapons, including air defenses, to Iran.

Additionally, the Islamic regime of Pakistan announced plans to provide Iran with advanced ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, in case the supreme leader decides to launch a nuclear attack on Israel.

It is clear that it was not U.S. diplomacy that worked but rather Russian military and intelligence advice/orders that influenced Iran’s decisions. 

We are on the brink of World War III. Russia and China’s Communist Party are setting their war chessboard. Iran’s regime is likely to attack Israel with a nuclear bomb soon unless Israel, with the help of America, destroys all nuclear and missile facilities of Iran, thereby giving the Iranian people an opportunity to overthrow the weakened regime of the mullahs.

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Fox News Power Rankings: Voters’ appetite for ticket-splitting will decide the Senate

Republicans have a favorable map, but Democratic candidates are on top in several battleground states. It is anyone’s game in the first Fox News Power Rankings for the Senate this cycle.

If you know one fact about the 1984 presidential election, it’s that Ronald Reagan won in a landslide. With wins in 49 states and a total of 525 electoral college votes, no candidate has ever pulled off a larger victory.

You might not remember that in the same election, Republicans lost two Senate seats, leaving them with a total of just 53 in the upper chamber.

Outcomes like these used to be normal. Voters have opted for different party winners in more than a hundred races with a presidential and senate election on the same ballot in the postwar era, with the practice reaching its peak in the 1970s and 1980s.

Today, voters are much more loyal to their party. In the last presidential cycle, the electorate only chose different party winners in one out of the 35 states with presidential and senate races (Maine, where Susan Collins held on for a fifth term).

Calculated another way, Democratic and Republican senate candidate vote-shares each differed from the top of the ticket by an average of 2.4 points.

The outcome of the presidential race will therefore heavily influence the result of most of the 34 senate seats up for election this year. In fact, the Power Rankings have the same party winning the presidential and senate races in every state where one party has an edge in both forecasts. 

However, the exceptions to this rule will determine who takes control of the upper chamber.

Republicans are chasing wins in two Trump-leaning states that have held on to moderate Democratic incumbents.

Nearby, a handful of Democratic candidates have been outperforming their presidential counterpart, even after the party’s last-minute candidate switch.

The performance of the top of the ticket will be important in those races, but candidate quality, efficient campaigning and a message targeted to local voters will make all the difference.

The Reagan era can feel long forgotten in America. This year, we find out if ticket splitting is a distant memory too.

Republicans have a head start on their road to a Senate majority thanks to a favorable map. The GOP has a clear advantage in all the seats they will defend this year, whereas Democrats must defend eight seats that are hotly contested.

Democrats will also kick off the night with a very likely loss in West Virginia. 

The seat is currently held by Sen. Joe Manchin, who decided not to run for re-election earlier this year. The senator’s enduring relationship with West Virginians helped him eke out a 3-point win in 2018, but with Trump’s nearly 39-point win in the last presidential race, this is deep red territory. Democrats needed Manchin on the ballot to put up a good fight.

That victory alone would give Republicans 50 senate seats, or one short of a majority. (If Trump wins the presidential race, the GOP would rule the senate even without a majority because the Vice President breaks ties.)

To guarantee control, Republicans are looking for victories in Montana and Ohio.

Some of the dynamics in these races are similar to West Virginia. In 2020, Trump won Montana by 16 points and Ohio by 8 points. Two years earlier, Democratic incumbent Sens. Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown won the same states by nearly four and seven points, respectively.

Republicans are optimistic that victories in both races are within reach. Tester and Brown have mostly voted in line with the Biden administration’s priorities, and the GOP has fielded capable candidates in both states, including retired Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy in Montana and businessman Bernie Moreno in Ohio.

At the same time, the Democrats’ sitting senators have bucked their party on the items that matter most to their voters. Tester is a key proponent of the Keystone XL pipeline, for example, and Brown has pushed his party to support more tariffs on Chinese imports.

Montana and Ohio are toss-ups.

Despite a challenging Senate map, Democrats have been buoyed by strong polling in most of the seats they are defending. 

That includes Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three famously swingy rust belt states at the heart of the presidential race. Recent Fox News surveys for each of these three races show more than 50% of voters supporting the Democratic candidate.

  • In Michigan, congresswoman and former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin (D) is ahead of former congressman and former FBI agent Mike Rogers (R) by a 51-46% margin, or five points.
  • In Pennsylvania, third term Sen. Bob Casey (D) leads businessman and Bush administration official Dave McCormick (R) by a 55-42% margin, or 13 points.
  • In Wisconsin, second-term senator and presumptive nominee Tammy Baldwin (D) leads banker and likely nominee Eric Hovde (R) by a 54-43% margin, or 11 points (Wisconsin’s primary takes place tomorrow).

Slotkin, Casey and Baldwin are all experienced politicians. They are running well-funded campaigns and hoping that focusing on local issues like infrastructure, child safety and health care funding will get them over the line.

These races are far from settled. Republicans will look to build more name awareness for their candidates as their races heat up, and hope to remind voters that their opponents have been supportive of the Biden administration’s economic and immigration policies.

However, these polling leads give the Democrats an advantage today. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin’s senate races are rated Lean D. 

In the southwest, Republican and former local news anchor Kari Lake is running her second statewide race in Arizona after an unsuccessful bid for governor in 2022. 

Lake ran very close in that election, but her 17,117 vote loss was nearly double that of former President Trump’s in 2020, and in the 2022 Fox News Voter Analysis, she ran 28 points behind her Democratic opponent with independents.

This time, she faces Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ-3), an Iraq War veteran, progressive and critic of retiring independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. With the border a top issue, Lake and allies have hit Gallego on his support for sanctuary cities, among other liberal immigration policies.

Gallego has an edge on Lake in recent polls and more than triple her cash on hand. A strong Trump showing in Arizona may be enough to give Lake a victory, but this race begins at Lean D.

The most competitive swing state race is in Nevada, where Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen is seeking a second term. She is up against Republican and Afghanistan War veteran Sam Brown.

Rosen is running the same kind of small target campaign as her fellow incumbents in the rust belt, while Brown is leaning on his military experience and a Trump endorsement.

Nevada is one of the closest states on the board in the presidential race, and neither candidate has a consistent polling lead. Rosen ended June with triple Brown’s cash on hand, but that is not enough to give an edge to either party yet. This race is a toss-up.

In the races discussed in this forecast so far, Republicans are chasing wins in either very competitive or right-leaning presidential states.

In Maryland, the GOP is looking for an upset in deep blue territory.

The Old Line State voted for President Biden over Trump by a whopping 33 points in 2020, and its high proportion of Black voters and college-educated voters gives Democrats an advantage right out of the gate.

If anyone can challenge this script, it is former Governor Larry Hogan. 

Hogan governed as a moderate and a Trump skeptic in his eight years in office. That is the recipe the GOP needs for a shot here, and so far, voters say they like Hogan. He started the race with a 64% favorable rating among Maryland registered voters.

The challenge will be convincing Democratic voters who liked Hogan for governor that they should back him in the Senate too. Pro-Roe and anti-Trump positioning will help him with moderates, just as Trump’s surprise endorsement will keep rancor among ‘MAGA’ voters at bay.

Democrats still have an edge. Not only is the electoral math in their favor, but candidate Angela Alsobrooks has raised more money and is leaning effectively on her experience as a county executive and prosecutor. 

Endorsements from Vice President Harris and the Washington Post will be helpful. Maryland starts at Lean D.

Power Rankings mania continues tomorrow with the first U.S. House forecast. Check back here and watch America’s Newsroom to see predictions for all 435 districts.

On Wednesday, come back again for a first look at the 11 governor’s races up for grabs in 2024. An all-new Power Rankings Issues Tracker caps off the week as Democracy 24 special coverage for the Democratic National Convention begins.

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Conservative watchdog notches win in court as CDC ordered to stop deleting emails

A conservative government watchdog group secured a legal victory against the Biden-Harris administration by compelling the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to stop deleting employee emails they say had been done in violation of the Federal Records Act.

America First Legal, the right-leaning, Washington, D.C. based public interest organization founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, sought records concerning the CDC’s endorsement of the controversial gender ideology within public schools in February 2023. In response, the CDC told AFL that it systematically deletes the emails of most employees 30 days after they depart from the agency.

As of Friday, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is now required under a preliminary injunction granted to AFL to enlist the help of Attorney General Merrick Garland and inform Congress to recover the deleted emails and halt the destruction of records. 

‘Notably, while the Biden-Harris administration has been slapped down for illegally violating the law, CDC employees’ homes were not searched and raided without notice or consent, nor have their families had to endure the trauma and onslaught of legal fees or indictments,’ AFL said in a news release. 

‘Yet, the Biden-Harris Administration did exactly that to President Trump. We cannot have a country where government bureaucrats are allowed to circumvent the law without repercussion, and innocent civilians are subjected to invasive and unlawful political persecution for saying the ‘wrong’ thing. The two-tiered justice system in the United States has never been more prevalent,’ the group said. 

In April, AFL filed the initial lawsuit against the Biden-Harris Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and NARA.

‘The Biden-Harris Administration was actively destroying the records of federal employees at the CDC in blatant violation of the law–and we are pleased that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered a stop to their illegal conduct,’ AFL executive director Gene Hamilton said in a statement. 

AFL subsequently reached out to NARA urging an investigation into the CDC’s policy of deleting employee emails. 

‘NARA investigated the allegations but determined that because the ‘CDC instructs individual email account holders to apply retention based on the email’s content value and its applicability to a NARA-approved records schedule,’ NARA considered the matter closed. In short, NARA entrusted individual CDC employees to decide which emails can be automatically deleted,’ AFL said in a news release.x

This isn’t the first time the CDC has been in hot water over its influence in the public. Last year, the CDC reportedly had ‘significant input on pandemic-era social media policies’ at Facebook and Instagram and worked to ‘silence dissent’ related to the COVID vaccine. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denied attempting to suppress the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic began as a result of a lab leak in Wuhan, China, during the heated House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing this summer.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the CDC, HHS and NARA for comment. 

Fox News Digital’s Brian Flood and Danielle Wallace contributed to this report. 

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Iran beware: US moves these 6 top of the line strike options into position in the Middle East

Hurry up. America’s top shooters are moving into position to target Iran.  With Sunday night’s announcement hastening the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and moving the submarine USS Georgia under U.S. Central Command’s control, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is making sure U.S. Central Command is prepared to attack Iran, and/or its proxies, if Tehran strikes Israel in the next few days.

Air Force F-22 fighter jet pilots have already unpacked their bags at a Middle East base where they arrived Aug 8.  Here are more top shooters under Central Command’s operational control – that we know of. 

The guided missile submarine USS Georgia

It’s very unusual for the Pentagon to make announcements about secretive submarines. But then, theUSS Georgia is a very special vessel.  Powered by a nuclear reactor, the USS Georgia began life as an Ohio-class ‘boomer’ designed to carry nuclear weapons, then underwent a high-tech conversion into a conventional guided-missile attack submarine.  Now she can carry an astounding 154 precision Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missiles.  And SEAL teams with mini-submarines.  Add in a highly advanced communication suite, and USS Georgia can stare down Iran all by herself. 

The USS Georgia was already on exercises in Europe and is positioning in the Eastern Mediterranean. Her Tomahawk missiles have roughly a 1,000-mile range, which equates to good coverage well into Iran.  The most modern Tomahawks also accept targeting updates while in flight, giving commanders maximum flexibility to act on fresh intelligence. 

Eight U.S. Navy destroyers

That’s six in the Persian Gulf, and two more in the Red Sea, per a count from the Washington Post on Aug. 2.  Crews from ships like USS Laboon have been whacking Houthi drones, missiles and unmanned boats for months.  The DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers can fire Tomahawks, too, as but the destroyers will have some of their vertical launch tubes loaded with Standard Missiles for air defense across the region, as seen when Iran attacked Israel back in April. 

Two aircraft carriers

Austin ordered the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to speed up its transit from the Pacific to the Middle East, where the USS Theodore Roosevelt is already running sustained flight operations.  Nuclear-powered carriers can charge ahead at 35 knots per hour without slacking off, since they don’t refuel.  The Middle East crisis has compelled Central Command to keep a carrier in the Red Sea area almost non-stop for 10 months and it has required four carriers – Ford, Eisenhower, Roosevelt and Lincoln – to meet the tasking. Moving the Lincoln actually leaves the Navy one carrier short in the Pacific. 

A squadron of F-35C carrier jets flown by Marines

Austin touted the F-35Cs on the Lincoln by name on Sunday, because these stealthy, carrier-based jets have tremendous radar and other sensor capabilities known to intimidate Iran.  In an unusual twist, it’s a U.S. Marine Corps squadron flying the F-35Cs.  Other Marines fly the F-35B vertical take-off and landing variant with amphibious ships.  But this squadron, the ‘Black Knights’ of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron VMFA 314, trains and flies as part of Carrier Air Wing 9.  (Don’t look so shocked.  Marines flew from carriers in World War II and Korea.)

F/A-18EF Superhornets

Yes, the very jet flown by Tom Cruise in ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’  Carrier Air Wing 11 on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt has three F/A-18E squadrons.  They have been busy day and night with air patrols against Houthi aggression in the Red Sea and doing their part in knocking out Houthi drones, missiles and unmanned boats. 

Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles

This ground-attack variant of the F-15 air superiority fighter is affectionately known as the ‘Mud Eagle’ and has been operating quietly in theater for ages. The F-15Es are true fighter-bombers, and their most experienced pilots have thousands of combat hours from the anti-ISIS war.  The two-seat F-15Es carry air-to-air missiles, a gun and ‘any nuclear or conventional weapon in the USAF inventory.’ Just so you know, Iran.

Austin’s choice to deploy America’s top of the line strike options serves two purposes. The first, obviously, is to deter Iran and constrain Iran’s tactical options as the mullahs mull their retaliation plans.  But the specific choice of these forces is to provide Central Command with capability for sustained, precision strikes against military targets in Iran or among Iran’s militia groups.

Don’t forget that U.S. B-2 bombers can reach any spot on the globe.  Also, B-1 bombers were used by Central Command in attacks on Syrian targets. I would not be surprised to see the B-1s in action again with their joint stand-off missiles.

Beyond this, expect Britain, France, regional allies like Jordan, and others to have forces in play.

Of course, China is taking note of this firepower display. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi issued a statement on Saturday supporting Iran’s ‘dignity’ and right to self-defense, whatever that means.  Iran is the center of Mideast terror and China is Iran’s top ally. 

Gen. Erik Kurilla at U.S. Central Command will soon have all he needs to defend, deter or strike back. 

As they strive to keep a lid on this crisis, we owe a big debt of gratitude to the American men and women making these crisis deployments in the Middle East. 

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Israel accuses Iran of smuggling weapons into Jordan as region braces for possible retaliatory strike

Israel on Monday accused Tehran and its Palestinian terrorist proxy Hamas of smuggling weapons into Jordan and the West Bank to destabilize those areas as the world braces for a possible retaliatory strike from Iran. 

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said Monday that a ‘serious and dangerous situation is unfolding in Iran.’ 

Katz alleged that Iranian Revolutionary Guard Units are collaborating with Hamas operatives in Lebanon to smuggle weapons and funds into Jordan ‘with the aim of destabilizing the regime.’ 

From there, Katz said, the weapons are smuggled into the West Bank, flooding areas like Judea and Samaria where there are refugee camps, ‘with dangerous weapons and large sums of money – aiming to create a pro-Iranian Islamic terror front.’ 

Katz said Iran’s effective control of these refugee camps in the West Bank leaves the Palestinian Authority ‘powerless to act.’ 

‘We must take terror hubs like the Jenin refugee camp and carry out a thorough operational campaign to dismantle the terror infrastructure in the camp,’ Katz said, calling such a plan ‘a shared interest of Israel, many regional states, and the entire free world – to halt the spread of Iran’s axis of evil.’ 

Katz’s statement comes as Israel is bracing for a possible retaliatory strike from Iran in response to the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran late last month. 

Israel was immediately blamed for the assassination after pledging to kill Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state, which killed 1,200 people and saw hundreds more taken hostage. 

Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon also late last month confirmed the death of Faud Shukr, its ‘No. 2’ commander who was involved in the 1983 Beirut bombings of a Marine barracks bombing that killed 241 U.S. military personnel. 

This comes as mediators United States, Qatar, and Egypt have been pushing for ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas to end the 10-month war. 

Mediators have spent months trying to get the sides to agree to a three-phase plan in which Hamas would release the remaining hostages captured in its Oct. 7 attack in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel and Israel would withdraw from Gaza. Talks have been expected to resume Thursday.

On Monday, France, Germany and Britain issued a joint statement endorsing the plan, while calling for the return of scores of hostages held by Hamas and the ‘unfettered’ delivery of humanitarian aid.

The statement was signed by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. It also called on Iran and its allies to refrain from any retaliatory attacks that would further escalate regional tensions.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Kamala Harris’ campaign criticizes Trump for serving ‘self-obsessed rich guys’ after interview with Elon Musk

Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is blasting former President Trump’s interview with billionaire Elon Musk, saying Trump’s campaign is in service of ‘self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class.’

Trump joined Musk on X Spaces, a live audio chat feature on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, for an interview Monday night, although it had a shaky start due to technical difficulties. Millions of people ultimately listened to the interview, according to the live tracker throughout the discussion.

Musk said in a post after the interview that he would also be happy to host Harris on X Spaces.

During Monday’s interview, Musk gave Trump ample time to explain his stance on various issues such as immigration, the assassination attempt he survived at a campaign rally last month, inflation and the idea of eliminating the Department of Education to allow states authority over school systems.

‘I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the states … Of the 50 [states], I would bet that 35 would do great. And 15 of them, or, you know, 20 of them, will be as good as Norway. You know, Norway is considered great,’ Trump said, adding that deep blue states like California may struggle if the department is eliminated.

The Harris campaign hit Trump following the interview for the policy proposals the former president touched on and took a jab over the technical difficulties the X Space endured.

‘Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com,’ Harris campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello said in a statement. ‘Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.’

Project 2025 is a controversial initiative organized by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation that was authored by a number of conservatives, including some former Trump administration officials.

The initiative offers right-wing policy recommendations for Trump should he win the presidency, including replacing civil service employees with Trump loyalists, abolishing the Department of Education, criminalizing pornography, eliminating DEI programs, cutting funding for Medicaid and Medicare, rejecting abortion as health care and infusing the government with Christian values.

Trump has sought to distance himself from the initiative, which has been criticized as being an authoritarian and Christian nationalist plan that would undermine civil liberties, saying he knows nothing about it, that parts of it are ‘absolutely ridiculous and abysmal’ and that its backers are on the ‘radical right.’

Monday marked Trump’s return to X after nearly a year of not posting on the social media platform, posting a series of campaign ads prior to the interview with Musk.

Before Musk purchased X in 2022, Trump was suspended from the platform following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, when the platform was still known as Twitter. But even after Musk reinstated his account, Trump’s only post was sharing his mugshot in August of last year.

‘This country is going down, and these people are bad people that we’re running against. And they’re liars. They make statements. They do things that are so bad. They say they’re going to make a strong border. They say they’ve been great on the border, and they’ve been the worst in history. They say they’ll stop crime,’ Trump said towards the end of the interview.

Trump also addressed President Biden’s decision last month to suspend his re-election campaign, saying it was a Democratic ‘coup’ that pressured the president to step aside. Biden’s decision came amid pressure from Democrats to drop out of the race over concerns about his mental acuity.

‘This was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way, or we can do it the hard way,” Trump said.

‘They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him,’ Musk responded before Trump criticized Biden as ‘the worst president in history.’

Fox News’ Emma Colton contributed to this report.

This post appeared first on FOX NEWS

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Politics

FBI investigating Iran’s hack of Trump campaign documents

The FBI says it is investigating Iranian cyber hacking attempts against the 2024 presidential campaign of former U.S. President Trump. 

‘FBI is investigating the recent cyber intrusion into the Trump campaign,’ the FBI told Fox News in a statement. ‘We can now confirm that the FBI is investigating.’  

The 2024 presidential campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris told Fox News it ‘vigilantly monitors and protects against cyber threats, and we are not aware of any security breaches of our systems.’ 

The claim of Iranian involvement came shortly after Microsoft issued a report detailing foreign agents’ attempts to interfere in the U.S. campaign in 2024. 

That report cited an instance of an Iranian military intelligence unit in June sending ‘a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor.’

Politico reported Saturday that it began receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as ‘Robert.’

‘These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process’ Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations, when asked about the claim of the Trump campaign, denied being involved.

However, Iran has long been suspected of running hacking campaigns targeting its enemies in the Middle East and beyond. Tehran also long has threatened to retaliate against Trump over the 2020 drone strike he ordered that killed prominent Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

In its report, Microsoft stated that ‘foreign malign influence concerning the 2024 US election started off slowly but has steadily picked up pace over the last six months due initially to Russian operations, but more recently from Iranian activity.’

The analysis continued: ‘Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations have been a consistent feature of at least the last three U.S. election cycles. Iran’s operations have been notable and distinguishable from Russian campaigns for appearing later in the election season and employing cyberattacks more geared toward election conduct than swaying voters.’

‘Recent activity suggests the Iranian regime — along with the Kremlin — may be equally engaged in election 2024,’ Microsoft concluded.

Fox News’ Jake Gibson and The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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Business

JPMorgan Chase is giving its employees an AI assistant powered by ChatGPT maker OpenAI

JPMorgan Chase has rolled out a generative artificial intelligence assistant to tens of thousands of its employees in recent weeks, the initial phase of a broader plan to inject the technology throughout the sprawling financial giant.

The program, called LLM Suite, is already available to more than 60,000 employees, helping them with tasks like writing emails and reports. The software is expected to eventually be as ubiquitous within the bank as the videoconferencing program Zoom, people with knowledge of the plans told CNBC.

Rather than developing its own AI models, JPMorgan designed LLM Suite to be a portal that allows users to tap external large language models — the complex programs underpinning generative AI tools — and launched it with ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s LLM, said the people.

“Ultimately, we’d like to be able to move pretty fluidly across models depending on the use cases,” Teresa Heitsenrether, JPMorgan’s chief data and analytics officer, said in an interview. “The plan is not to be beholden to any one model provider.”

The move by JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, shows how quickly generative AI has swept through American corporations since the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022. Rival bank Morgan Stanley has already released a pair of OpenAI-powered tools for its financial advisors. And consumer tech giant Apple said in June that it was integrating OpenAI models into the operating system of hundreds of millions of its consumer devices, vastly expanding its reach.

The technology — hailed by some as the “Cognitive Revolution” in which tasks formerly done by knowledge workers will be automated — could be as important as the advent of electricity, the printing press and the internet, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in April.

It will likely “augment virtually every job” at the bank, Dimon said. JPMorgan had about 313,000 employees as of June.

The bank is giving employees what is essentially OpenAI’s ChatGPT in a JPMorgan-approved wrapper more than a year after it restricted employees from using ChatGPT. That’s because JPMorgan didn’t want to expose its data to external providers, Heitsenrether said.

“Since our data is a key differentiator, we don’t want it being used to train the model,” she said. “We’ve implemented it in a way that we can leverage the model while still keeping our data protected.”

The bank has introduced LLM Suite broadly across the company, with groups using it in JPMorgan’s consumer division, investment bank, and asset and wealth management business, the people said. It can help employees with writing, summarizing lengthy documents, problem solving using Excel, and generating ideas.

But getting it on employees’ desktops is just the first step, according to Heitsenrether, who was promoted in 2023 to lead the bank’s adoption of the red-hot technology.

“You have to teach people how to do prompt engineering that is relevant for their domain to show them what it can actually do,” Heitsenrether said. “The more people get deep into it and unlock what it’s good at and what it’s not, the more we’re starting to see the ideas really flourishing.”

The bank’s engineers can also use LLM Suite to incorporate functions from external AI models directly into their programs, she said.

JPMorgan has been working on traditional AI and machine learning for more than a decade, but the arrival of ChatGPT forced it to pivot.

Traditional, or narrow, AI performs specific tasks involving pattern recognition, like making predictions based on historical data. Generative AI is more advanced, however, and trains models on vast data sets with the goal of pattern creation, which is how human-sounding text or realistic images are formed.

The number of uses for generative AI are “exponentially bigger” than previous technology because of how flexible LLMs are, Heitsenrether said.

The bank is testing many cases for both forms of AI and has already put a few into production.

JPMorgan is using generative AI to create marketing content for social media channels, map out itineraries for clients of the travel agency it acquired in 2022 and summarize meetings for financial advisors, she said.

The consumer bank uses AI to determine where to place new branches and ATMs by ingesting satellite images and in call centers to help service personnel quickly find answers, Heitsenrether said.

In the firm’s global-payments business, which moves more than $8 trillion around the world daily, AI helps prevent hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, she said.

But the bank is being more cautious with generative AI that directly touches upon the individual customer because of the risk that a chatbot gives bad information, Heitsenrether said.

Ultimately, the generative AI field may develop into “five or six big foundational models” that dominate the market, she said.

The bank is testing LLMs from U.S. tech giants as well as open source models to onboard to its portal next, said the people, who declined to be identified speaking about the bank’s AI strategy.

Heitsenrether charted out three stages for the evolution of generative AI at JPMorgan.

The first is simply making the models available to workers; the second involves adding proprietary JPMorgan data to help boost employee productivity, which is the stage that has just begun at the company.

The third is a larger leap that would unlock far greater productivity gains, which is when generative AI is powerful enough to operate as autonomous agents that perform complex multistep tasks. That would make rank-and-file employees more like managers with AI assistants at their command.

The technology will likely empower some workers while displacing others, changing the composition of the industry in ways that are hard to predict.

Banking jobs are the most prone to automation of all industries, including technology, health care and retail, according to consulting firm Accenture. AI could boost the sector’s profits by $170 billion in just four years, Citigroup analysts said. 

People should consider generative AI “like an assistant that takes away the more mundane things that we would all like to not do, where it can just give you the answer without grinding through the spreadsheets,” Heitsenrether said.

“You can focus on the higher-value work,” she said.

— CNBC’s Leslie Picker contributed to this report.

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