A former Pentagon official has turned whistleblower, shredding the Trump administration's "shameful" lack of regard for civilian casualties during the ongoing war in Iran, during an interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour.

Wes J. Bryant previously worked with the Department of Defense's office for civilian harm assessment, which was formed to help mitigate non-combatant casualties in military operations. Last year, however, the office was dissolved under the direction of President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As the war in Iran has unfolded, critics have highlighted disturbing rhetoric and conduct indicating the administration's lack of care for civilian lives and the laws of war, including the destruction of a girls' school by a U.S. strike and Hegseth's insistence that enemy combatants will be given "no quarter."

Speaking with Amanpour, Bryant said that his colleagues have tracked over 80 potential instances of strikes against civilian targets by the U.S. and Israel, putting casualty estimates around 1,800.

"I find this shameful, frankly," Bryant said. "Shameful that our administration, our secretary of defense — or 'war,' as he calls himself — and our senior military leadership, can't even to this day acknowledge that they struck the school, let alone provide some kind of half-semblance of an apology and address the situation appropriately. For our own secretary of defense and commanders to not even be able to tell the American people where they've dropped their own bombs and missiles, that's a problem in and of itself."

He continued: "And then we have the problem of just the sheer recklessness and bloodthirst of this campaign, and we're joining with Israel, who has been committing genocide in Gaza.... The horrifying aspect of this is that we're importing to the U.S. military, importing the standards that Israel has created with the war in Gaza, of utter recklessness in targeting, blatant disregard for international law and an incredibly high tolerance for civilian casualties, and brushing them off. Saying things like, 'civilian casualties will happen in war, the enemy embeds in urban areas and no other military takes as much care to prevent civilian casualties.'"

Bryant attested to the fact that the U.S. military had, over the years, taken care with military strikes to prevent civilian casualties, but also stressed that many mistakes had been made. This, he argued, was why his prior office for harm assessment was established under the Biden administration. He explained that the office was ultimately slashed under Hegseth's leadership because it did not fit his vision of military "lethality."

A whistleblower came forward through the proper channels about Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; however, lawmakers will never hear from that whistleblower because Gabbard has blocked it.

The Wall Street Journal said in a bombshell report that an email sent to Democratic congressional staffers on Feb. 13 said that it would not give the unredacted intelligence sought by lawmakers “due to the assertion of executive privilege to portions” of the intelligence itself.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the top-ranking members on the respective intelligence committees, asked who asserted the privilege in a letter that was sent to Gabbard on Tuesday.

"The intelligence at issue was assembled in a report by the National Security Agency early last year and relates to a conversation two foreign nationals had about Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner," the report said, citing a previous story.

The White House said the claims were false.

“Executive privilege” typically refers to the power of the executive, meaning the president, to have confidential conversations that are private and inaccessible from Congress or the judiciary. Using it to limit intelligence would be unusual, current and former intelligence officials told the Journal.

“Executive privilege is rarely used as a reason to not give information to the Gang of Eight,” former general counsel to the National Security Agency, Glenn Gerstell, said, talking about the top four members of each party chosen for the small group.

He added that he wasn't aware of the issues detailed in the whistleblower report, but that it is hard to justify using executive privilege when the conversations don't involve anyone in the White House.

“The request and provision of intelligence reports have been longstanding practice between the [intelligence community] and its congressional oversight committees,” Warner and Himes said in their letter.

The whistleblower alleged that Gabbard restricted intelligence within the administration for political purposes.

The information also includes intelligence on Iran and is derived from a sensitive surveillance method. Gabbard's office shared the complaint with some lawmakers but redacted a lot of it.

A whistleblower is claiming that FBI Director Kash Patel’s frequent use of one of the agency’s two jets has led to the delay of a high-profile murder probe.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday revealed he had received new whistleblower disclosures related to his investigations into Patel’s use of FBI aircraft for personal travel, and he said they showed Patel’s decisions regarding the use of FBI planes had delayed investigations not only into the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk but also the November 2025 mass shooting at Brown University.

In the case of Kirk, Durbin said that the FBI shooting reconstruction team’s deployment to Utah “was delayed by at least a day because of a bureau plane and pilot shortage caused by the director’s personal flights.”

Durbin said that he also received information showing how Patel bungled the aftermath of the Brown shooting by putting the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) on standby to respond to the incident.

“The director’s decision caused immediate confusion,” Durbin said, “because that order was not communicated to HRT; it upended the responsibility typically assigned to the local field office closest to the incident in question—in this case Boston or New York City—to provide immediate support; and it froze the aircraft’s usage by any other FBI team until the director removed the hold.”

Durbin then said that the whistleblower described how his team “had to drive from Quantico, Virginia to Providence, Rhode Island overnight during a winter storm to reach the scene by 9:00 am the following morning to immediately process evidence.”

Durbin noted he received this information shortly after Patel was seen chugging down a beer in the locker room of the gold medal-winning US men’s Olympic hockey team on Sunday, after the director once again used an FBI plane to fly to Milan, Italy.

The Democratic senator said that Patel’s trip to Italy could have seriously hampered the FBI’s ability to investigate what may have been an assassination attempt on President Donald Trump.

“It also cannot be ignored that the director’s latest personal jaunt occurred on the same weekend an armed intruder attempted to breach President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence,” Durbin explained. “The man was allegedly carrying a gas can and a shotgun, and he was killed on the scene by law enforcement.”

Durbin concluded by saying that “the FBI cannot afford to have its resources further stretched by a director who views its staff and aircraft as a means to support his jet-setting lifestyle.”

MS NOW reported that an FBI spokesperson has “disputed” the whistleblower’s claims that Patel’s decisions had caused delays to investigations, but added that they need to “check into the matter more deeply to gather information.”

A whistleblower is dead, and it is making heads turn to look at top tech bros.

Sam Altman, the new pal of President Donald Trump, is facing a campaign from the mother of former employee Suchir Balaji, who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment after his New York Times interview on OpenAI using copyrighted data.

RadarOnline.com reported an exclusive piece, Balaji's mother, Poornima Ramararo, suggested the evidence they have shows a different story.

She characterized her son as a "happy-go-lucky engineer."

Renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Ronald Graeser saw two major indicators that flagged the likelihood of foul play. First, there were massive levels of GHB in his system. GHB is known as the date-rape drug because it significantly incapacitates the individual. Incapacitated people don't generally shoot themselves. They're incapacitated. Still, the medical examiner brushed it off as "self-induced."

There's one main forensic inconsistency: the blood-splatter pattern is an angle consistent with a shooter standing over the victim. The family also pointed out other concerns about minor injuries that weren't included in the medical examiner's conclusions.

"I don't think it's a suicide – and that leaves deliberate homicide or murder," Graeser said.

Then there's the scene itself. The wires to his security camera were cut. There was blood in two rooms, a random wig left in the room, and Balaji ordered DoorDash before allegedly committing suicide, which seems inconsistent with those who are distraught.

Meanwhile, Altman told Tucker Carlson, "It looks like a suicide to me."

Carlson disagreed, "No, he was definitely murdered."

Altman foe Elon Musk told Joe Rogan, "All signs point to it being a murder."

According to Musk, Altman stole trade secrets from his own AI company xAI and he thinks Altman was involved in Malaji's death, the report said.

Malaji's mother agrees, saying her son was marked for death by a "team of assassins" after he blew the whistle on Altman's business.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is facing a highly classified whistleblower report, and there is concern about how to safely share it with lawmakers.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday morning that the sensitive report is "said to be locked in a safe." President Donald Trump's administration has avoided telling lawmakers about it, claiming that it involves such secret information.

The information could cause “grave damage to national security" if it becomes public, an official claimed. The information reportedly includes "claims of executive privilege that may involve the White House."

This is an administration, however, that has claimed "national security" liberally, such as the rationale for taking over Greenland and the immigration crackdown.

“If everything can be a national emergency or a threat to national security or a matter of foreign policy, then essentially all constitutional powers are ceded to the president,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford Law School in an Aug. 2025 report by Paul Blumenthal. “And that can’t be intended by the constitutional design.”

Gabbard's office claims the allegations are “baseless and politically motivated.”

However, the whistleblower's lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, said he was never aware that the inspector general's office had made any determination about the complaint's credibility. However, the inspector general's office decided that some of the allegations weren't credible while others might be.

Bakaj sent a letter to Gabbard that was also sent to the House and Senate in November, which the Journal has viewed.

"Months later, lawmakers still haven’t received the complaint itself. Some Democratic staffers on the intelligence committees have tried to learn more about the complaint in recent weeks, with little success," congressional aides told the reporters.

The month before the complaint, Republicans approved a new inspector general for the intelligence community on a 51 to 47 vote.

The new IG is Christopher Fox, who worked for Gabbard before the new job overseeing her work.

Read the full report here.

According to a whistleblower, a former DOGE employee with access to highly sensitive Social Security databases planned on sharing data with his private employer. As a result, reports the Washington Post, the Social Security Administration (SSA) is investigating what would be among the biggest security breaches in the agency’s 80-year history.

In letters from the agency’s acting inspector general, Congress and the Government Accountability Office were notified of the disclosure and investigation, and the latter has launched its own audit of DOGE’s data access. Per the whistleblower, an ex-DOGE software engineer bragged to coworkers that he not only possessed two highly restricted databases containing information for some 500 million Americans both dead and alive, but that he had one database on a thumb drive that he planned on using to provide data to a private company. Whether or not he was successful was not included in the complaint and has not been reported.

In the past, tighter restrictions around data access were maintained to prevent such leaks, but in summer of 2025, the Supreme Court gave DOGE employees “unfettered” access to Social Security data. As a result, the ex-DOGE member in question claimed to have been given “God-level” security access. After leaving the agency, he allegedly kept not only the thumb drive, but his agency computer and credentials.

Before the investigation was even launched, SSA spokesman Barton Mackey claimed that the whistleblower’s allegations were “found to be false based on evidence and investigations by all involved.” But in August 2025, former SSA chief data officer Charles Borges claimed that such data mishandling was common, and then in January of this year, the Department of Justice admitted that other DOGE employees had shared sensitive data, with the Trump Administration revealing that at least one planned on providing Social Security data to a political advocacy group that intended to use the information to overturn election results in key states.

The latest incident is one of many that have prompted criticisms of the Administration’s lax approach to data security.

“Not only has an ex-DOGE bro been accused of running around with the Social Security information of every American on a flash drive, he also may have the ability to edit and manipulate data at the Social Security Administration at will,” declared Congressman Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “This is dangerous and outrageous, and Oversight Committee Democrats will fight for transparency and accountability.”

While Republicans have largely sought to downplay the situation, as Leland Dudek, former acting commissioner of the SSA under Trump, admitted, if information was leaked, it “violates the law.”

Former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales penned a guest post for the Substack "Checks and Balances," lamenting the destruction of the Justice Department under President Donald Trump's administration.

The Republican from President George W. Bush's administration wrote that he'd always upheld the DOJ and those who worked there as a kind of "cathedral of justice." No longer, however, as it "is being dismantled stone by stone."

Many of the career lawyers at the Justice Department have either been fired, shoved out or quit very publicly under the leadership of former Trump lawyers Todd Blanche, Emil Bove and Pam Bondi.

"Prosecutors appear to no longer enjoy prosecutorial independence," he said as an example. "Prosecutions at the federal district level against perceived political or personal enemies of the administration’s leadership are, in many cases, now directed by senior leaders at the Department or by subordinates at the White House."

This only adds to Trump's assault on law firms. He issued an executive order last year, giving him the legal authority to personally target the firms he didn't like. While many ran scared, there are still several fighting back.

Then there is the "politically motivated criticism of our judges, as well as threats to their families," which he wrote "threaten to undermine the independence of the courts. Recently, it was reported that leaders in the various 93 US offices were told to provide DOJ headquarters with examples of perceived judicial activism that would serve as the basis for referral to the House of Representatives for possible impeachment proceedings. There are growing complaints about executive branch defiance of court orders."

It's proof that prosecutions are coming not from a striving for justice but from politics, he said. However, most of them "have all failed to an embarrassing level."

Like many, he wants to see norms reestablished and a return to the rule of law. But he remains fearful about the "pace at which norms and traditions are being abandoned." He called it outright "dangerous." He lamented that it will likely take "time and hard work" to rebuild the DOJ once Trump is finished with it.

One of the many controversies the second Trump Administration is facing involves Emil Bove, a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) appointee who — former DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni alleges — encouraged colleagues to defy federal court rulings on President Donald Trump's immigration policies. Bove has flatly denied Reuveni's allegations, but on Thursday morning, July 10, Politico journalists Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney reported that Reuveni "has provided Congress with a trove of e-mails and text messages to corroborate his claims" that Bove "crudely discussed defying court orders."

"The newly-released messages reinforce claims by whistleblower Erez Reuveni that Bove played a key role in a decision by Trump Administration immigration officials to turn scores of Venezuelan immigrants over to El Salvador's government despite a U.S. judge's order not to do so," Gerstein and Cheney report. "The messages show increasing alarm among Justice Department lawyers that the (Trump) Administration had in fact defied court orders and that some officials — including a prominent DOJ lawyer brought on by the Trump Administration — could face sanctions for misleading the courts."

According to Gerstein and Cheney, "The disclosures to the Senate Judiciary Committee, requested by the panel's Democrats and shared with Politico, come as the committee prepares to vote on and likely advance Bove's nomination to a seat on the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Bove's brief but rocky tenure at the Justice Department appears unlikely to derail his nomination, particularly after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a key vote on the panel, suggested Wednesday, (July 9) he was likely to back Trump's pick."

READ MORE: 'Completely reckless' Trump judicial pick may still be confirmed despite scandal: expert

Many Democrats, in light of Reuveni's allegations, are encouraging a "no" vote on Bove.

Politico's new reporting on Bove is receiving a lot of discussion on X, formerly Twitter.

Senate Judiciary Democrats tweeted, "More whistleblower evidence corroborates allegations that Emil Bove, a Trump judicial pick, said the Justice Department would need to say 'f--- you' to federal courts. Disqualifying."

College professor J. Thibodeaux said of GOP Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, "Collins and Murkowski will still vote to confirm. Watch."

READ MORE: Trump admin's new 'lie detector' campaign against leakers is unlikely to succeed: expert

CBS News' Scott MacFarlane posted, "ALERT: Whistleblower's texts suggest Trump judicial nominee Emil Bove urged lawyer to defy court order."

X user The Porcelain Dalmation tweeted, "So not only did Bove advocate disobeying court orders, he committed perjury when he lied about it in front of the committee …. Internal DOJ messages bolster claim that Trump judicial nominee spoke of defying court orders…. @politico."

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council posted, "When questioned under oath at his confirmation hearing, Emil Bove refused to outright deny that he'd said the DOJ should tell federal judges 'f--- you,' instead avoiding any straight answer. Now newly-released text messages lend further support to the whistleblower's account."

READ MORE: That $20 dress you love now costs $30 — thanks to Donald Trump

Read Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney's full Politico article at this link.