A stalemate with China. Not a stalemate with North Korea, who were pushed all the way back to the Chinese border, until the Chinese army joined the fight.
Even then, it only became a stalemate because US politicians were unwilling to risk further escalation (as in Vietnam).
To be fair, he probably never once in his wildest dreams ever thought he would be head of the FBI. So he probably didn't think he needed the extra security, because what idiot would put him in charge of the world's largest spy network.
The same idiot who pushed him into SecDef’s office and DNI in 2020.
He shouldn’t be FBI Director and he shouldn’t have been in the DNI or Secretary of Staff for SecDef either. All of those are high positions of responsibility and require tremendous OpsSec. This guy’s first act as FBI Director was to waive most of the investigations into his staff to bypass security clearance checks.
Sorry if I’m not disagreeing with you. Sarcasm is a bit hard to identify these days.
I have 2 family members who are/were special agents for the FBI. Much of their job is harvesting evidence to build cases by spying, which frequently comes more in the form of “spying” in the way we saw in The Sopranos.
The FBI is also the premier counter-espionage organization within the US, so it is tasked with spying on suspected foreign / turned spies.
It is much more than a spy network, but it is exactly that as well.
All cleared citizens are subject to warrantless search at any time by the FBI, some for the remainder of their life. You don't have to be a suspect to fall within their panopticon.
That’s at least partly because upping application for a security clearance, they are signing a contract to do that.
We don’t know how much the Trump political officials managed to avoid those onboarding requirements. It has been widely reported that at least some of them bypassed eligibility requirements and polygraph. It’s probably not a huge leap to assume these same people were not required to consent to these forever-after-searches.
While I understand why you would say that, I think the way "spy network" was meant, was in the way that their job is to spy within the US. And given the resources at their disposition, and the size of the US, "worlds biggest spy network" is not wrong.
Also, they do head up the main counterintelligence effort of the US.
I'd rather he worry about securing government secrets, not spend one second worrying about "personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum".
Obviously government secrets need to be properly secured, but the personal info/photos of a top official can often be used for blackmail or for determining close friends that could be used to compromise Patel.
“The enemy broke into our nuke silo, killed our Air Force manned crew, stole the nuke codes, launched the missile. Not a big deal because we shot it down before it hit its target.”
Most of the time, actual harm is the most important issue. In this case because that office holds so much centralized power and authority over many aspects of American life (domestic law enforcement, some foreign law enforcement, domestic counterterrorism / counterintelligence / counterespionage, and security clearance background checks for all VIPs), the means are equally as important as the ends.
And I would throw in a wrinkle: what evidence is there that the dumps were not stripped of the most useful blackmail material? If I were in charge of a hack operation, I would dump the low impact stuff to show the world how much of a joke this guy’s security is, but only after I already used the best stuff to blackmail him months ago.
The reality is that officials are targetted by various states looking to get some leverage, so not properly securing an email account is a serious failing unless it's part of a wider honeypot scheme. Personally, I'm not convinced that the current U.S. administration is competent enough to plan ahead and implement honeypots.
No point in going round and round with personal opinions and general speculation. The debate is easily settled: just point to some actual harm done by this hack.
I don't think you really understand how blackmail works. If the information is public, then that's a failed blackmail attempt. Also, the U.S. administration is unlikely to provide public information on how top officials have been compromised.
It's not really much of a debate as it's widely acknowledged that letting enemy states get access to the email accounts of officials is a really bad idea.
Patel specifically bypassed security clearance protocols for Bongino and other staff he hired. His top priority isn’t protecting government secrets — it’s to take down what he thinks is the part of the US government that resists bending to Trump’s will.
And you are wrong that the FBI shouldn’t care about securing the Director’s private life information. Anything and everything can and will be used to blackmail him by foreign governments, criminals, political actors.
I highly doubt the first public dump of messages would include the most compromising content — that’s like handing away a maximum severity zero day for the most common OS in the federal government. There’s no logical reason to do that for free, so I suspect the really incriminating/ salacious stuff was withheld for private use.
And if the FBI didn’t enable the high security setting on the FBI Director’s private email account, they might not have known what, if any, compromising materials were in there.
My take isn’t that “nobody cares”. It’s that we realized we are helpless against a President who violates the rules. Until he is impeached, he is for most purposes a king.
> If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets
A reasonable belief, because Iran in fact responded to the US+Israeli strikes by attacking US allies and even neutral nations like Qatar.
And why should we doubt that Iran would have closed the Strait of Hormuz even if the US had not attacked, leaving Israel to attack alone? The strategic calculation (threaten the world economy so other nations oppose the war) would have been the same.
But had the US not been part of the first strike, they could have applied much more diplomatic pressure to open the strait. As an active aggressor, they have no wiggle room. It might seem like semantics to you, but there's a huge difference diplomatically.
Pressure from most of the world isn't enough, why would additional pressure from the US (who Iran already regarded as an enemy) have made the difference?
Iran didn't really do anything last year after supposedly having their facilities "totally annihilated". But it used to be that the US was respected enough that public saber rattling and behind the scenes diplomatic efforts would avoid conflict. Sadly, we've done our damnedest to turn that respect into a joke. We used to make deals with people, but the greatest deal maker ripped up all of them and replaced them with nothing on the word better deals were for the taking.
> But it used to be that the US was respected enough that public saber rattling and behind the scenes diplomatic efforts would avoid conflict.
This is isn't true in practice, even if you want to argue it's technically true. Iran has been participating in conflict through proxies continually for decades. US sabre rattling has done nothing to quell that violence.
Houthis open adversaries, Saudi, are aware that they are not really Iranian proxies [0]. Sunnis in Lebanon are Persian Shi'a 'proxy' only since their leadership was assassinated during negotiations in 2024 (also by this very liberal definition of 'proxy', eastern Iranian clans are US/Israel proxies, and killed more Iranians than Hamas killed Israelis, so I'm not sure we really want to get into it). The only proxy Iran had were Iraki Shi'a paramilitary forces, who agreed for a ceasefire to let US troops and diplomats get out of Iraq, and once the evacuation was done, got their leaders bombed. Never trust the US.
Iran gives missiles to the houtis, houtis then use those to fire at American ships. Its the same kind of proxy war as Ukrain, and people call that a proxy.
Thank you, that's my point. If you think Houtis are a proxy, then you think Ukraine is a proxy for the US, as Houtis have to promise concessions to Iran in exchange for armaments. Better yet, they choose their target without iranian input, so they are even less of a proxy than Ukraine who has been forbidden by the US to use the weapons they were given outside of their borders.
If you think Hezbollah are an Iranian proxy, then Israel is an US proxy, and Hamas is a Qatar/Likud proxy (won't be the first time the far right pay agitators to kill their own citizen to stay/be in power, just look at Italy).
It's also been an ally of Iran. Qatar is not neutral in that it stays distant from both sides, it is neutral in that it attempts to maintain good relations with both sides.
Iran has attacked the US base in Qatar before. When they did so in 2025, Iran's Supreme National Security Council issued a statement: "this action does not pose any threat to the friendly and brotherly country, Qatar, and its noble people, and the Islamic Republic of Iran remains committed to maintaining and continuing warm and historic relations with Qatar".
This time Iran attacked Qatar itself, including the Ras Laffan gas facility and Hamad International Airport.
Qatar has never been allied with Iran. It has had economic partnerships, especially around the oil fields that Israel blew up, but that is not an alliance. Iran does not have military bases in Qatar.
Why would Iran need a base in Qatar? It's right next door.
Iran and Qatar do (did?) have military cooperation agreements, not only economic. [1] That's not a NATO style treaty but Qatar doesn't have a NATO style treaty with the US either.
Is there a meaningful discussion of working conditions here? The article doesn’t have a lot of other context. If this is all that the employee in question said, I would not call it discussion of working conditions.
Yes, the "joke" only works because the implication is that the CEO is out of touch with the lives and working conditions of the average employee. It's pretty overt in meaning.
Should employees be required to discuss things explicitly? Without the natural way people talk? Especially the natural way Americans talk? Seems pretty rigid if you ask me
Mueller's report said: "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."
Perhaps you're talking about obstruction of justice. Yes, Mueller refused to state a conclusion about that, but Trump could have been charged with that by the Biden administration after he was out of office. Yet, despite widespread "lawfare", Democrats never tried to bring that charge. Why not?
Because there we slam dunk cases against him for Jan 6 and the classified documents. Neither of which was lawfare. Neither of which would imperil any intelligence techniques or assets by being brought up during a trial.
The way this war is shown to us (West) is very loopsided - Iran was never going to be able to stop the bombing and they knew it. But they still retain most of their ability to blow up anything they want around their country, which is most of oil and gas fields in the Middle East, and this time they actually proved it.
We like to think we're winning, but are we ? Iran leadership is supposedly decimated, missile capabilities destroyed etc. And yet, when Israel attacked their gas field, they immediately wiped out 17% of Qatari gas productions capacities which will take 5 years to rebuild and they could have wiped out everything. Seems their leadership structure is doing just fine.
As for all the killed - what did we actually achieve ? Replace Khamenei with his son - a guy who had all of his family blown up to pieces by US / Israeli ? That should do wonders to Iran's future relationship with those countries.
Listing a kill count doesn't amount to evidence that the war has been well thought out, it only tells us the US and Israel are good at assassinations.
It is clear the initial aim was to decapitate the leadership and expect capitulation of some form or another to follow. This obviously hasn't happened, and so the fallout grows by the day.
> The Iranian government is bad, and yes, it should be toppled, eventually, by its own people.
You would prefer to tell people in Iran who oppose the regime to take up arms (which they don't have) and fight IRGC soldiers with better training and more resources?
Best case, if they did, Iran would end up in a situation like Syria. Would that be an improvement?
What I can tell you is that no matter how much I hate the government of my country, I would hate a lot more the foreign country that is destroying civilian infrastructure and murdering my people.
Let's not pretend that the US and Israel regimes have the best interest of the Iranian people in mind. They want murder.
I really can't say how this is being received in or out of Iran, but I remember after the initial strikes there was widespread footage of Iranian exiles celebrating, even on anti-Trump media.
Edit: and even people celebrating in Iran itself, which seems incredibly brave.
"videos posted on social media showed joy and defiance elsewhere, with people cheering as a statue was toppled in the city of Dehloran in Ilam province, dancing in the streets of Karaj city, near Tehran in Alborz province, and celebrating in the streets of Izeh in Khuzestan province.
In the town of Galleh Dar in southern Iran, people knocked down a monument commemorating Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic in 1979, a video on social media showed."
Even The Guardian, as anti-Trump as a source can be, reported that "videos shared widely on social media also showed people celebrating, dancing, honking car horns and setting off fireworks as news of the leader’s death broke."
Even then, it only became a stalemate because US politicians were unwilling to risk further escalation (as in Vietnam).
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