Welcome to the W³P Daily News Open Thread.
Post whatever you got in the comments section below.
This feature will post every day at 6:30am Mountain time.
Thursday, November 27, 2025
Unknown Intel Intercepts Phone Call Between Emissary Witkoff and Russian Policy Advisor Yuri Ushakov – Then Leaks to Bloomberg
The global intelligence motive (5 Eyes) would be laughable if it were not so transparent. In an effort to create problems for President Trump and the Ukraine-Russia peace negotiations, an unknown intelligence agency intercepted the call then provided a recording to Bloomberg News.
The intercept was not likely U.S-based, or the leak would be to a different media outlet (WaPo, NYT or Politico). The Bloomberg angle indicates a likely EU intelligence source, with one of the “coalition of the willing” (U.K, France, Germany, or Brussels) the most likely suspect. Given the nature of the intercept, and the intent behind the leak, the British seem the most likely of sources.
The phone call itself is generally a non-issue. Essentially President Trump emissary Steve Witkoff and Russian Foreign Policy Advisor Yuri Ushakov were discussing the best way for their two principals (Trump and Putin) to connect and discuss the potential for a peace plan on October 14, 2025.
Between the margins there’s something we have discussed at length on these pages, a coordinated messaging campaign between the Trump administration and the Putin administration with both private objectives and public statements aligned in common purpose. The call itself is solid affirmation of our prior analysis of the relationship.
As we have long discussed, both President Trump and President Putin want to end the conflict. However, the EU, NATO, British, French, German govts, as well as the U.S. congress and Ukraine want to keep the war continuing.
President Trump and President Putin both understand the nature of each other’s political position. Thus, their communication is coordinated in public with back-channel messaging organized by their emissaries.
The October 14th call between the emissaries was intercepted, and with the Trump administration having brought Ukraine into the proximity of agreement, the call is leaked in an effort to weaken the plan sponsored by President Trump, Secretary Rubio and Emissary Witkoff. Some unknown intelligence agency doesn’t want the peace deal to be finalized.
The transcript was prepared after Bloomberg reviewed a recording of the call.
[phone rings]
Steve Witkoff: Hi Yuri.
Yuri Ushakov: Yeah Steve hi, how are you?
SW: Good Yuri. How you doing?
YU: I am ok. Congratulations my friend.
SW: Thank you.
YU: You made a great job. Just a great job. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.
SW: Thank you Yuri and thanks for your support. I know your country supported it and I thank you.
YU: Yes, yes, yes. Yes. You know that’s why we suspend the organization of first Russian-Arabic summit.
SW: Yes.
YU: Yeah, because we think that you are making the real job there in the region.
SW: Well listen. I am going to tell you something. I think, I think if we can get the Russia-Ukraine thing solved, everybody’ll be jumping for joy.
YU: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you need to solve only one problem. [laughs]
SW: What?
YU: Russian-Ukrainian war.
SW: I know! How do we get that solved?
YU: My friend, I just want your advice. Do you think that it will be useful if our bosses will talk on the phone?
SW: Yes, I do.
YU: You do. And when you think it could be possible?
SW: I think as soon as you suggest, my guy is ready to do it.
YU: Ok, ok.
SW: Yuri, Yuri, here’s what I would do. My recommendation.
YU: Yes, please.
SW: I would make the call and just reiterate that you congratulate the president on this achievement, that you supported it, you supported it, that you respect that he is a man of peace and you’re just, you’re really glad to have seen it happen. So I would say that. I think from that it’s going to be a really good call.
Because — let me tell you what I told the President. I told the president that you – that the Russian Federation has always wanted a peace deal. That’s my belief. I told the president I believe that. And I believe the question is — the issue is is that we have two nations that are having a hard time coming to a compromise and when we do, we’re going to have a peace deal. I’m even thinking that maybe we set out like a 20-point peace proposal, just like we did in Gaza. We put a 20-point Trump plan together that was 20 points for peace and I’m thinking maybe we do the same thing with you. My point is this…
YU: Ok, ok my friend. I think that very point our leaders could discuss. Hey Steve, I agree with you that he will congratulate, he will say that Mr. Trump is a real peace man and so and so. That he will say.
SW: But here’s what I think would be amazing.
YU: Ok, ok.
SW: What if, what if… hear me out…
YU: I will discuss that with my boss and then I come back to you. Ok?
SW: Yeah because listen to what I’m saying. I just want you to say, maybe just to say this to President Putin, because you know I have the deepest respect for President Putin.
YU: Yes, Yes.
SW: Maybe he says to President Trump: you know, Steve and Yuri discussed a very similar 20-point plan to peace and that could be something that we think might move the needle a little bit, we’re open to those sorts of things — to explore what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done. Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere. But I’m saying instead of talking like that, let’s talk more hopefully because I think we’re going to get to a deal here. And I think Yuri, the president will give me a lot of space and discretion to get to the deal.
YU: I see…
SW: …so if we can create that opportunity that after this I talked to Yuri and we had a conversation I think that could lead to big stuff.
YU: Ok, that sounds good. Sounds good.
SW: And here’s one more thing: Zelenskiy is coming to the White House on Friday.
YU: I know that. [chuckles]
SW: I will go to that meeting because they want me there, but I think if possible we have the call with your boss before that Friday meeting.
YU: Before, before — yeah?
SW: Correct.
YU: Ok, ok. I got your advice. So I discuss that with my boss and then I come back to you, ok?
SW: Ok Yuri, I’ll speak to you soon.
YU: Great, great. Thank you so much. Thanks you.
SW: Bye, bye.
YU: Bye.
[Call Ends]
As you can see the content is a ridiculous nothingburger. The two guys who are supposed to be talking together are talking together; about the stuff they are supposed to be organizing on behalf of their bosses. {{Insert Eyeroll Here}}
It’s a “nothingburger” unless you are a stakeholder who wants to block the intentions of the phone coordination, which is a peace agreement. In that framing, the phone call provides the opportunity to shout, “Ah Ha! They’re in cahoots against Ukraine,” or something.
(Via Bloomberg) – Asked about Witkoff’s approach, Trump said he hadn’t reviewed the call but that he heard it was a “standard negotiation.”
“He’s got to sell this to Ukraine. He’s going to sell Ukraine to Russia. That’s what a dealmaker does,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “You got to say, look, they want this, you got to convince them of this. I would imagine he’s saying the same thing to Ukraine, because each party has to give and take.”
[…] Trump said Tuesday he was directing Witkoff to meet with Putin, in the hopes of finalizing a peace plan.
“The original 28-Point Peace Plan, which was drafted by the United States, has been fine-tuned, with additional input from both sides, and there are only a few remaining points of disagreement,” the president said in a post on Truth Social. (more)
President Trump Delivers National Address Following Afghan Terrorist Attack in DC
The shooter has been identified as 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who entered the U.S. in 2021 under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome. Law enforcement said he is believed to have acted alone. Witnesses say Lakanwal shouted, “Allahu Akbar” as he carried out his premeditated attack.
Fox’s Bill Melugin revealed that his permission the be in the US expired in September 2025, and he has been living in the United States illegally ever since. According to follow-up reports, an American couple named Stanley & Valerie Creighton took in Rahmanullah Lakanwal & his family. They all lived in their Bellingham Washington home.
Lakanwal ambushed two National Guard members outside a metro station in downtown Washington, D.C. He was shot by a third Guard member. The first victim — a female Guard member — was struck immediately and collapsed where she stood. Lakanwal then took her firearm and shot her in the head before continuing to fire. According to CBS, the suspect was wielding a handgun, had four rounds in his firearm initially. After he fired them at two national guards, he then took the fallen Guardswoman’s weapon and used it to continue shooting, striking the second Guard member.
President Trump announced a surge of another 500 National Guard troops into Washington DC, and said, “we must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden.” All Afghan immigration has been halted. All current Afghan immigrants are being investigated. WATCH:
VIA CBS – The Trump administration has paused the processing of all immigration applications for Afghan nationals following Wednesday’s shooting of two National Guard members, officials said, after the suspect detained in the shooting was identified as an Afghan national.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Wednesday night that it’s enacting an indefinite pause on the processing of all immigration applications filed by Afghan nationals.
“Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols,” the USCIS statement obtained by CBS News reads. “The protections and safety of our homeland and of the American people remains our singular focus and mission.”
The Department of Homeland Security has identified the shooting suspect as Rahmanullah Lakamal, who DHS says was admitted to the United States in September 2021, a month after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“We must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden,” President Trump said in an address Wednesday night. (source)
Conrad Black - A Strong Economy Would Strengthen Trump’s Hand in the ‘Culture Wars’
What is generally referred to as the “culture wars” in the United States is in historical and practical terms a misnomer. It comes from the Kulturkampf conducted by the great German statesman and unifier of Germany, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, against the large Roman Catholic minority in the newly united Germany, and to a lesser extent, against the other Episcopal Church in Germany, the Lutherans. This was one of the very few serious errors that Bismarck committed in his 28 years as prime minister of Prussia (1862–1890), including 19 years as the founding chancellor of the German Empire. As a dogmatic, though not overly pious, low church Protestant, Bismarck completely misread the proclamation of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870. All that was proclaimed was that the pope was correct in asserting what had always been asserted on major points of principle and doctrine in the Roman church. It was a symbolic consolation prize arranged for Pope Pius IX (pope from 1846–1878), as a consolation for the Pope’s loss of secular control of the papal states in the reunification of Italy, which was concluded concurrently with Bismarck’s unification of Germany. Bismarck mistakenly saw that as a challenge to secular authority. Subsequently, he assaulted religious freedom in Germany, sharply diminished the Catholic and Episcopal Churches’ influence in schools, and harassed those churches with a lot of petty officious irritation and censorship. He offended not only the 40 percent or so of Germans in those denominations, but also many others.
Bismarck should have ignored sectarian matters entirely and prepared to take over the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, though it was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, could have been better governed by the Germans than by the failing hands of the Habsburgs in the extreme twilight of their 700-year government in Vienna. It was 40 years since the great Austrian chancellor Clemens von Metternich, a mentor of Bismarck’s, had referred to the Austro-Hungarian Empire as “a costume party in a dilapidated country house.” With a little patience, Bismarck could have absorbed all the non-Slavic parts of that empire into a greater Germany peacefully, while making some concessions to Russia’s masquerade as the protector of the Slavic world. The phrase “culture wars” has been taken up, in the United States especially, to describe sharp political and social differences between large blocks of the American public. The so-called “progressives” are contesting the moderate status quo. “Progressive” is another massive misnomer, as no sane person could describe the orchestrated societal self-hate of wokeism—with all the accompanying claptrap about critical race theory, white privilege, systemic racism, colonization, and the ardent campaign for the self-abasement of all of Western civilization to the apostles of fraudulent or wildly exaggerated victimhood of vaguely defined minorities claiming centuries of oppression at the hands of so-called white exploiters and despots—as “progress.” |
Historians will examine in detail how it happened that the two major American political parties bifurcated so sharply in the aftermath of the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the world, to which the bipartisan government in the United States led the West in the Cold War. The containment strategy that ultimately caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of international communism without a shot being fired between the United States and the USSR was devised by the strategic team assembled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and maintained by his successors, including Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan. Bipartisan agreement was reached to depart from the American tradition of isolationism and lead a defensive alliance accompanied by an unprecedentedly bountiful American-backed program of postwar reconstruction to douse the fires of political discontent in places that might have been vulnerable to communist exploitation.
After the end of the Cold War, the Bush and Clinton families dominated respectively the Republican and Democratic parties and had similar domestic and foreign policy agendas. Donald Trump, one of the most famous people in the United States, used his celebrity and his advocacy on behalf of the very large number of Americans whom he detected were dissatisfied with the distribution of benefits of U.S. economic growth and resented the flow of manufacturing jobs overseas and what they saw as the preferments of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and professional sport elites. He gained control of the Republican Party and became the only person in the history of the United States to be elected president without ever having sought or held public office—elected or unelected—or high military command.
The intervening years before Trump’s second term saw the quintupling of the inflation rate, the sharp rise of taxation levels, and the frequent embarrassing of America in the world, especially in Afghanistan. Approximately 12 million mainly destitute and unskilled people, including at least half a million convicted violent criminals, were permitted to enter the country illegally. The artificially bloated electorate grew 22 million votes from 2016 to 2020, yet when COVID subsided and many states restored proper vote-counting safeguards, that total sank by 5 million in 2024, and despite an unprecedented campaign of spurious criminal indictments of Trump, he was re-elected with a clear mandate to dismantle the previous program. The president and his entourage believe that the nearly $20 trillion that has been arranged to be invested in the United States, as well as the effects of his tax cuts, will cause the voters to ratify his program next year. Trump has ended illegal immigration, rolled back the anti-capitalist green pursuit of unsubstantiated alarm about climate change, shaped up the NATO alliance so that the allies pay their way, and has negotiated a ceasefire in the Middle East that promises the removal of the terrorist government in Gaza. These so-called culture wars will be decided in favor of moderate conservatives, as long as the Trump economic program is reasonably successful in the balance of his second term.
|
National Guard Shooting Suspect Came From Afghanistan Through Biden Program
Two National Guardsmen were shot and critically injured in Washington, D.C., when a suspect, identified as an Afghan national let in through a Biden-era program allegedly ambushed them Wednesday.
Fox News’ Bill Melugin reported the suspect in custody “is an Afghan national who entered the U.S. on 9/8/2021 as part of the Biden admin’s Operation Allies Welcome in the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
Melugin reported that the suspect’s “permission to be in the U.S. expired in September of this year, and he is now in the country illegally.”
The Department of Homeland Security inspector general released a report in 2022 finding the agency did not properly “screen, vet, and inspect all Afghan evacuees arriving as part of Operation Allies Refuge (OAR)/Operation Allies Welcome (OAW).”
After the disastrous and deadly Afghanistan withdrawal, the Biden administration decided to import thousands of incompatible foreigners into the country. As The Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis wrote for The American Mind, “The solution for failing to export American democracy to Afghanistan, you see, is to import Afghanistan into America.”
Davis pointed out the “moral blackmail” taking place at the time: “Are you concerned that people posing as refugees might be terrorists intent on killing Americans on U.S. soil? You’re a racist. Are you worried that the same government and immigration system that allowed the 19 9/11 hijackers entry to the U.S. might not be competent to judge who is and who is not a security threat? You’re a xenophobe.”
And Davis’ concerns were later proved valid, as the DHS inspector general report found that “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees.”
“We determined some information used to vet evacuees through U.S. Government databases, such as name, date of birth, identification number, and travel document data, was inaccurate, incomplete, or missing. We also determined CBP admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States.”
The report concedes the government may have “paroled individuals into the United States who pose a risk to national security and the safety of local communities.”
According to a press release from Sen. Chuck Grassley, more than 97,000 individuals designated as evacuees came into the country following the chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal under Biden, approximately 77,000 of whom were admitted through Operation Allies Welcome, which grants entry to the United States via humanitarian parole, as The Federalist reported.
Notably, then White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in September of 2021: “I can absolutely assure you that no one is coming into the United States of America who has not been through a thorough screening and background check process.”
Meanwhile a 2022 letter from Sens. Josh Hawley and Ron Johnson suggested that “‘324 individuals evacuated from Afghanistan were allowed to enter the United States, despite appearing on the DoD’s Biometrically Enabled Watchlist,’ which identifies people determined to be ‘threats or potential threats to national security, including known suspected terrorists.’” Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray later testified that there were “a number of individuals through our joint terrorism task forces that we are actively trying to investigate.”
Notably, the Department of Defense reported in February of 2022 that “‘50 Afghan personnel in the United States’ had been identified who had ‘information in DoD records that would indicate potentially significant security concerns.’”
America First Legal further revealed last August that newly obtained documents proved the Biden-Harris administration lied when it “claimed that they were importing refugees who helped the U.S. gov[ernmen]t.”
In order to bring in thousands of foreign nationals, the administration abused the “parole” authority by arguing the foreign nationals needed admittance due to an “urgent humanitarian reason” or “significant public benefit,” according to America First Legal.
Notably an Afghan national was arrested last October for allegedly plotting an Election Day massacre. The 27-year-old, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, worked as a security guard for the CIA in Afghanistan. Tawhedi entered the U.S. in September 2021 on “a special immigrant visa,” but NBC News reported that he was brought in via humanitarian parole, a designation that involves less scrutiny.