UpFront – August 14, 2026

Good morning. It's Friday, August 14th, 2026. You're listening to Up Front. I'm Teresa Wers Bianca in for Brian Edwards Teakert, who is on vacation this week. On the show today, we'll speak with Global Investigative Reporter from the Associated Press, Garance Burke, about new information coming out surrounding the treatment of migrant families who have been separated by the Trump administration. We'll also speak with Common Dreams reporter Stephen Prager about new intelligence information implicating Israeli involvement in that supposed Iranian threat on Air Force One earlier this week. And lastly, Tim Redmond veteran, 48 Hills journalist, joins us to talk about independent expenditures and campaign corruption in the San Francisco congressional race. All that coming up after these news headlines. I'm Max Pringle with these headlines. Reports of mental health and supply issues aboard the long-deployed USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier are emerging. The ship has been supporting the U.S. war against Iran, and its deployment has included a record-setting uninterrupted time at sea of almost nine months. James Goodeson reports. Indeed, one senator wants to lead an oversight visit to the Lincoln with both parties involved. Ruben Gallego Gallagher, a Democrat and indeed an Iraq war veterans, said on social media that the sailors are owed a sense of when they will go home. And it's not as simple, of course, as turning the aircraft carrier around and sailing all the way back to the United States. There's a huge amount of maintenance that needs to be done. And crew also need a break as well as we've seen with other aircrafts. They often dock in... European countries for that to happen. That's James Goodison. Shoppers eased up on their spending in July as a boost from government tax refunds faded. Retail sales slipped 0.6% last month. That's the biggest drop since May 2025 from a revised gain of 0.2%. That's according to Commerce Department data released today. There was a notable bump in spending in both April and May as Americans dipped into their tax refunds. Firefighters across Europe are battling multiple wildfires as another record-breaking heat wave grips the continent. Charles Deladesma has more. Firefighters in central England, France, Italy, Spain and further east are struggling against multiple fires as a new wave of record-breaking heat bakes areas over Europe, a task further complicated by exceptionally parched landscapes. All 1,800 residents of the village of Geir in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia State have been evacuated after a while far in a nearby forest threatened to reach their homes. And in Croatia, 14 people have been hospitalized, of whom seven remain in life. threatening condition early Friday from a fire that raged overnight by the coastal town of Omis, forcing more than 1,000 people to evacuate their homes. And in Spain, historical artifacts have been swiftly removed from the monastery of San Juan de la Pena and taken for safekeeping as a wafer advances on the site. I'm Charles Telethasma.

the united arab emirates is blaming iran for firing drones at two tankers operated by a state-owned oil company as they sailed through the strait of hormuz no one was injured but the attacks underlined the dangers of navigating the critical waterway now under threat by iran the british military's united kingdom maritime trade operations center said two vessels were reported to have suffered minor damage when attacked by drones while transiting the strait of hormuz it did not identify them as the emirati ships but it appeared to be the same incident the u ae's foreign ministry blamed the attacks on iran and said they were a quote flagrant violation of the United Nations principles of freedom of navigation. President Trump's son-in-law and negotiator Jared Kushner will travel to the Middle East next week to try to advance plans for an end to the conflict in Gaza, after a deal recently announced by the Trump administration ran into some Israeli opposition. An official with the Board of Peace, that's the body, Trump established to oversee the fragile ceasefire in the Israel-Humaz war, said Jared Kushner, Board High Representative Nikolay Mladenov, an executive board member and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, would arrive in Israel on Sunday for talks. The group will then travel to Cairo, where meetings of a Palestinian contingent set to assume control of Gaza under a U.S. brokered ceasefire deal, have been taking place for the past several months. That's according to the official who spoke on condition of anonymity. because planning for details of the trip have not yet been finalized. Far-right candidate Nigel Farage has regained his seat in the British Parliament, beating a field of fringe candidates, led by a trash-can-wearing comic Count Binface, and a special election boycotted by the mainstream parties. They called it a farce. Nigel Farage is the leader of the anti-immigrant Reform UK Party. and some see him as a possible next prime minister. He abruptly quit his seat in July amid an investigation into whether he failed to report a $6.7 million gift from an overseas crypto billionaire. He denied wrongdoing and ran again for the seat to prove he had the voter support. According to results, announced today, he regained the seat with 63% of the vote in the unusual election. Luigi Mangione is expected to plead guilty as early as today in the federal case accusing him of stalking and killing United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson. It's a major development in a case that rattled business leaders while galvanizing their critics. That's according to a person familiar with the matter. The person was not authorized to talk publicly about the case.

The person cautioned that Mangione could change his mind. Mangione is accused of stalking Thompson, then shooting him outside a New York City hotel in December 2024 as the executive walked to United Health Group's annual investor conference. Luigi Mangione is due in court today for a hastily scheduled hearing in the federal case. His lawyers declined to comment. A new poll from UC Berkeley shows California Democrats are in favor of a proposed one-time tax on billionaires, but are mainly opposed to a measure that would require voters to present ID at the ballot box. Republicans strongly opposed the billionaire tax. Among the overall likely November electorate, the Prop 40 tax proposal holds a narrow lead, 48% to 41% with all voters. The Institute of Government Studies conducted the survey. Opinions about the proposed 5% tax on billionaire's overall wealth, which would be used to make up for federal funding cuts, were highly partisan. 70% of Democrats say they back it, with 80% of Republicans opposed. Mostly sunny today in the San Francisco Bay Area, highs in the 60s and 70s, lows in the 50s, and the Central Valley. Sunny today, highs in the upper 80s, lows in the 60s. Those are the headlines. I'm Max Pringle on KPFA. It's just about 708 in the morning. You're listening to Up Front. I'm Teresa Rezboeanska filling in for Brian Edwards, Tickert, who is on vacation this week. A new Associated Press investigation is raising fresh questions about the Trump administration's treatment of migrant families and the fate of children who were separated from their parents during President Trump's first term. The AP has found that dozens of children who were separated from their parents under the First Trump administration have faced separation from their families a second time, despite a federal court order designed to prevent that from happening. The investigation found cases in which parents were detained or deported while their children remained in the United States. The findings are particularly significant because a 2023 legal settlement prohibits the government from separating families at the border for immigration enforcement purposes as a way of deterring migration. That settlement grew out of the Trump administration's 2018 family separation policy, which separated thousands of children from their parents. The AP reports that some of the families affected by the new enforcement actions had legal protections that were supposed to shield them from deportation. In one case, a mother and her three children, including a U.S. citizen child, were deported to Honduras after repeated ICE check-ins. A federal judge later ordered the government to bring them back, finding that their removal was unlawful.

The investigation was reported by Associated Press journalists Garance Burke and Sonia Perez-D., who have been examining the Trump administration's immigration policies and their impact on families. Garance Burke joins us now to talk about what the AP found, how these families ended up separated again and what the legal settlement means for the administration's immigration crackdown. All right. Well, thank you for joining up front. Thank you for having me. So your investigation found that dozens of children who were separated from their parents during the first Trump administration have now experienced separation again. Can you tell us the story of what is happening? Yes. So we have found that some parents who had previously been separated from their children back in the first Trump administration have been locked in immigration detention facilities for months. Others have been deported back to their home countries after being taken from their families a second time. And in some cases, we found immigration officials who've been conducting interior arrests in the last couple of years. deported some of these separated families despite discovering that they were legally off limits for removal. Can you walk us through some of these stories that you've uncovered? Absolutely. So if people remember back in 2018 during the height of family separation under the First Trump administration, the ACLU filed a lawsuit, which became a class action suit to stop the first Trump administration from separating parents and kids at the U.S. Mexico border. And a federal judge approved the ACLU's request saying that that policy caused, quote, lasting, excruciating harm. And then the Biden administration later approved a settlement for families involved in that class action suit, which gave the families some legal protections as well as services and pathways to residency and asylum for roughly 12,000 families. But what we found is that actually the government now has been re-separating dozens of children from their families. despite that legal landmark settlement that was in place and meant to reunify these families. Yeah, and these families became extremely destabilized, if we remember. And your profile shows families who believed they had finally achieved some stability. What impact did these renewed separations have on the children that you interviewed or that you profiled, particularly those who had already experienced what you go through and explain?

the kind of trauma that they went through years earlier and are now re-experiencing. I think it's just been wrenching. I mean, for some of these families, it has been incredibly destabilizing and, you know, really to be pulled apart once again has meant that children are forced back into their original trauma of the first separation when they were, you know, little kids eight years ago. or sometimes, you know, really force them back into reliving some of these experiences and fears that they would be torn apart from their families once again have become reality. My colleague Sonia Perez and I spoke with the family of an 11-year-old boy. Ederson Garcia Alva, who had been taken from his mother when he was just three years old in 2018. He was taken from his mom at the U.S.-Mexico border under the first Trump administration's family separation policy and kept apart from her in a government facility for months. And they were only reunited after lawyers intervened. And then... Tragically, in June of last year, he and his mother were separated a second time despite those legal protections that were meant to keep them in families like theirs together. And a lot of people who think back on that time associate family separation with the zero tolerance policy that was promoted at that time. How are the separations that you're documenting now similar to? and different from what happened during the first Trump administration. So these separations look different than under the first Trump term. Then, as you say, children were often being forcibly taken from their parents at the border. And now, if parents are arrested or deported within the United States, they're often being made to choose whether or not to leave their children behind. So we spoke to the mother of... Ederson, Miercy, who told us about what happened to her this time around. In June of last year, just after her son had finished some therapy sessions to get over his first trauma, she was stopped by federal agents as she and colleagues were on their way to have a landscaping job. Then she was transferred to two Florida jails, then to ICE custody in Louisiana, and then quickly to a plane full of deportees heading back to Guatemala City. And then the family ultimately decided that... the kids should join her in Guatemala because it was just too hard for Ederson and his sister to be on their own without her in the United States. So ultimately, he and his sister were back in Guatemala with their mom, Mirzi, for nearly a year.

And this was, you know, a really difficult period for them. Edison and his sister didn't speak as good of Spanish as they had when they were little kids because, of course, they'd been living in Miami and going to school in English. The family went through, you know, real stretches of poverty. Sometimes there wasn't enough food in Guatemala. And they... were basically without some of the services and supports that that class action lawsuit had been meant to provide them, to help them heal from the difficulties they had already undergone in the first separation. And you mentioned lack of food and resources in Guatemala. Do you know anything more about the conditions they were trying to leave before setting up residency in the United States? So they come from a town called San Martin Kuchumatan, which is in the indigenous highlands, where the children were born. It's a region that has been grappling with poverty that has spanned across generations. There's been violence in the region, and Mirzi had sought to... make a better life for her children in the United States. She had been working with legal permission to do so and hoping to, you know, just allow her children the opportunity to study and to get ahead while living in South Florida, actually near Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach. What role did you notice that the courts played and then also the settlement agreements from the original family separation? How did that play out for these families? Well, under this 2023 settlement agreement that was signed by the Biden administration, these families who had been separated in the first Trump term were supposed to have legal protections, pathways towards asylum, access to attorneys, work permits, etc. But all of that began to change when Trump began his second term. So some of those supports were never encoded by an act of Congress, and they started shrinking. First, we saw funding for legal services temporarily end. Then the Trump administration said they would charge families $1,000 each to enter, stay in the country. then more parents were told to appear for more frequent ice check-ins, order to wear ankle monitors. And then... attorneys began to see that the government was deporting some of these protected family members and went to court and ultimately a judge ordered the government to immediately tell the ACLU when protected class members were detained and to return some of these reseparated families who had been deported.

Yeah, and many of these families, they were covered by court settlements or the reunification agreements following the 2018 family separation policy. But based on what you learned, are there now legal protections that should have prevented these subsequent separations again? Or do those agreements have, like, limitations that prevent protecting these families? Well, this is still all really playing out in court. You know, just last month, the judge in this case ordered again for the government to provide the ACLU within seven days any reasoning for why they're detaining. class members who are protected as a result of having been separated in the first Trump administration so that the ACLU can decide, you know, whether to go to court again. But what we've seen is that this is a situation in which these families are, you know, uniquely vulnerable. They don't necessarily have humanitarian parole or legal protections. And under this administration, that can be the basis for initiating detention or removal. And you talked about the ACLU. So that organization is central to challenging, well, the original family separation policy in court and now these subsequent separation policies. How has the ACLU responded to these new cases? From what you learned, do you believe, what have you learned that that organization believes about the administration violating the spirit or the letter of those earlier court rulings? Well, I think the ACLU and its partners have been, you know, continuing to fight some of these erosions of the protections. In court, League Alert, the lead attorney for the ACLU has... you know, been very strident in saying that not only is the government refused to acknowledge the horror of the initial separations during the first Trump administration, but it's now detaining and deporting some of these very same families. The ACLU works with other legal services providers who have specialized in, you know, surrounding these families with support, and they have been able to bring back some of the families. who were re-separated. And that includes the family of Mirzi and her son, Ederson, and her daughter, Briselli, who in late May, after months and months of hoping and waiting, were finally allowed to return as a result of a judge's order back to South Florida. And so, of course, the Trump administration has defended these kinds of immigration enforcement policies as...

like really necessary to uphold the law. Did you speak to any officials and how did they, if you did, how did they respond and what kind of explanation did they give you about these repeated family separations? So government attorneys have argued in recent court filings that there's simply no legal restrictions on the government's authority to remove people. We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and acting assistant secretary Lauren Biss told us. that DHS complies with all court orders, even as, quote, radical NGOs shop for the most favorable forum, and activist judges seek to thwart our operations. Biss also said that enforcing immigration law was not optional, and that, quote, every removal of an illegal alien helps restore order and reinforce the rule of law. After speaking with some of these families who've experienced repeated separation, what are some of the long-term consequences of family separation for children? After reading your article, it really highlights the real trauma that affects kids. I think we can probably imagine what we would have all thought as children if we had experienced months-long separations from our parents. What are some of these long-term consequences that they have told you about? Well, we focused again on the case of Etherson, who at age three was taken from his mom and confined to a government shelter in Arizona when he was just a toddler for four and a half months. And when he was, you know, that little and finally brought back together with his mother, he barely recognized her. He continued to have nightmares throughout his time in elementary school. And he... ultimately, through going to therapy for quite a while, was able to address his ongoing fear that his mother would never return, only for him to be taken from her, or separated from her once again. So I think that, you know, from talking with mental health professionals. These kinds of experiences, these traumas early in childhood just leave such a lasting impact on children, and particularly for children who are being re-traumatized. This has just been, you know, a really devastating journey.

What kind of questions do we need to keep asking? There's aspects of these repeated separations that really need to be investigated more, and especially by Congress and by the courts and independent watchdogs. What do we need to keep watching out for? You know, I think that... This court case is going to continue to evolve. And in fact, there have been additional family members who were separated under the first Trump term who have been detained once again just in recent months. And so I think, you know, the general public may have forgotten about some of the, you know, the lasting issues from that family separation. eight years ago, but they're still very much present. And so I think, you know, for folks who are wanting to keep pace with the impacts of immigration enforcement, you know, there are many, many different attorneys and legal services groups who are trying to assist these families. And I think, you know, the public... has every right to ask questions about what is happening, particularly with families who've already undergone so much trauma. And one of the things that... I'm really seeking to understand as well is how is the government using different kinds of surveillance technology this time around to monitor and track families where that data is going? And, you know, what are the risks for families going forward? Yeah, and you mentioned immigration lawyers who are trying to address this. Do you think that some of these cases could now establish new legal precedent about what the government can do or what immigration advocates can do to keep families together? Well, I mean, one of the challenges here is that last week, the administration actually led a key contract with a network of legal groups that work with immigrant children around the country expire. And just recently, my colleagues at AP reported that the Trump administration awarded a new $150 million contract to represent migrant children to a small Texas law firm with ties to the administration, but not very much experience in immigration law. So I think that this is really an area to keep watch on, you know, the administration's policies towards.

migrant children really have departed from some of the bipartisan standards that had been in place providing migrant kids with special legal protections, giving their vulnerability. And so I think that we'll just have to see what happens with legal representation for these kids and their families. And some of that is actually playing out currently in the courts even today. And what else are you currently following and writing about? So one thing I'm looking at is as deportations have risen in the last year and a half, attorneys are saying that separated families have become much more fearful about filling out government paperwork, and many don't actually know that they can apply for asylum, which is a key benefit of this settlement that actually expires in December. And another deadline is looming, too, which is that thousands of separated families need to request. for any pending removal orders, they may have to be canceled by December as well, or else they'll lose their ability to stay in the U.S. legally. So I think a certain amount of this has yet to play out in the courts, but of course for separated families who are just waiting for, you know, their parents to be released from detention or for that paperwork to return. to the U.S., you know, every day feels like, you know, it's moving at a glacial pace. I know that for Edison and his family, it was just such an agonizing weight to finally be able to come back to the United States under a judge's order. And it still doesn't mean that everything is perfect. You know, the kids are... getting used to being back in the United States once again. They've had a lot of dislocation in their short lives. And it remains to be seen how things will go for them as well. Well, thanks so much for speaking with us on Upfront. Thank you so much for having me. We've been speaking with Garantz Burke, a global investigative journalist with the Associated Press. When we come back, President Trump was secretly moved from Air Force One to another military jet during his departure from a NATO summit in Turkey after U.S. officials received an alleged Iranian missile threat. But some new reporting suggests U.S. and Turkish officials questioned the intelligence behind that threat. and that it may have originated with Israel. We'll speak with Stephen Prager, the journalist who reported on that story for common dreams, about what we know about the alleged plot, why the intelligence is now being questioned, and what the situation reveals about the increasingly complicated U.S. Israel relationship. That's coming up after the news.

I'm Max Pringle with these headlines. Reports of mental health and supply issues aboard the long-deployed USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier are emerging. The ship has been supporting the U.S. war against Iran, and its deployment has included a record-setting uninterrupted time at sea of almost nine months. James Goodeson reports. Indeed, one senator wants to lead an oversight visit to the Lincoln with both parties involved. Ruben Gallego Gallagher, a Democrat, and indeed an Iraq war veterans, said on social media that the sailors are owed a sense of when they will go home. And it's not as simple, of course, as turning the aircraft carrier around and sailing all the way back to the United States. There's a huge amount of maintenance that needs to be done, and crew also need a break as well as we've seen with other aircrafts. They often dock in... European countries for that to happen. That's James Goodison. Shoppers eased up on their spending in July as a boost from government tax refunds faded. Retail sales slipped 0.6% last month. That's the biggest drop since May 2025 from a revised gain of 0.2%. Firefighters across Europe are battling multiple wildfires as another record-breaking heat wave. GRIPS the Continent. Charles Della Desma has more. Firefighters in central England, France, Italy, Spain and further east are struggling against multiple fires as a new wave of record-breaking heat bakes areas over Europe, a task further complicated by exceptionally parched landscapes. All 1,800 residents of the village of Geir in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia State have been evacuated after a while far in a nearby forest threatened to reach their homes. And in Croatia, 14 people have been hospitalized, of whom seven remain in life threats. in condition early Friday from a fire that raged overnight by the coastal town of Omis, forcing more than 1,000 people to evacuate their homes, and in Spain, historical artifacts have been swiftly removed from the monastery of San Juan de la Pena and taken for safekeeping as a wafer advances on the site. I'm Charles Telethasma. The federal investigation accuses California's prison system of failing to protect incarcerated women from sexual abuse by prison guards. The Justice Department released its findings on Thursday, focusing on two state prisons. Investigators found that guards regularly abused women and that women were told to report misconduct using a non-confidential online system that was accessible to accused officers. The department found that staff tasked with investigating misconduct were often themselves accused of sexual abuse or harassment. Mostly sunny today in the San Francisco Bay Area, highs in the 60s and 70s, lows in the 50s, and the Central Valley. Sunny today, highs in the upper 80s, lows in the 60s. Those are the headlines. I'm Max Pringle on KPFA.

It's 7.33 in the morning. You're listening to Up Front. I'm Teresa Wears Bianska, filling in for Brian Edwards-Tekert, who is on vacation this week. We now move to that story about President Trump learning about an alleged Iranian threat to Air Force One. He moved from the flight, hiding himself in a catering truck, and then boarded a different military jet. Leaving reporters and White House staff to travel on the original targeted plane and leaving them vulnerable to attack. Trump has gotten some backlash and criticism over his handling of this threat. New reporting is coming out now that suggests the intelligence behind the supposed plot originated out of Israel, possibly, which leaves us with questions. So Stephen Prager, journalist at Common Dreams, has been following this story and joins us now to walk us through some of this incoming information. Hi, Stephen, how are you? Hi, Teresa. Great to be here. Thanks for joining the show. All right. Can you help us out? Can you run listeners through what happened? What intelligence did the president receive that made his team decide to remove him from flying on Air Force One? Just get us started. Yeah, so I mean, a lot of people are probably aware of the basic, you know, outline of the story. Trump was at a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, in early July, and ended up not flying home on Air Force One as everybody expected him to. And the reason for that was that the U.S. had received intelligence, which we now know, as you said, came from Israel, indicating that Iran might fire a missile at the plane as it was supposed to take off. Now, the Washington Post reported earlier this week that... that after learning about this threat, Trump's security team created basically this like elaborate ruse to get him out of Ankara on a different plane and they ended up using a catering truck that they pulled up to the side of the aircraft to sneak Trump out and got him on a different military jet. Like you brought up, you know, a particularly crazy aspect of this is that you know even though they got trump off of air force one a bunch of other people in the administration were so on board you brought up you know white white house staff members of the press um but also Marco Rubio uh the secretary of state and uh the treasury secretary Scott Bessent were also on the decoy flight uh that ended up you know flying out that iran was theoretically supposed to attack Apparently, you know, Pete Hegseth went with Trump on the catering truck. That's sort of in dispute right now. I've seen different reports from different outlets about, you know, whether he was there or not. But basically, so the idea was that...

According to the Wall Street Journal, the day before Trump was supposed to leave, Israel passed along information saying that there were Iranian proxies who were planning to kill Trump while he was in Turkey. And what they said was that Iran had planned to use a shoulder-launched missile and fire it at Air Force One as Trump took off. It's not entirely clear who exactly was supposed to be launching this missile. There wasn't really any actual information about a specific individual, any identity. It was just that there was, you know, reportedly an Iranian terror cell that had entered Turkey and was planning the attack. This ends up getting relayed to Turkish intelligence by the US. They looked into it and they weren't able to corroborate any of this information. And then, you know, as we learned from the Washington Post a day or two ago, U.S. intelligence officials also were looking at it and they didn't find it credible either. According to the post report, which I cited, there were CIA analysts who said that they had very low confidence in the report, and that they told that to members of the administration before Trump left Turkey. But at the same time, it's a bit difficult to follow who exactly believed what, because, you know, as with any story involving, like, high-level intelligence, there's, you know... Everything is sort of couched in this, you know, a senior official said that, you know, and people familiar with the situation said this. So you're getting some people saying, oh, we believe there was a threat. And we're getting other people saying, yeah, no, this was very clearly not credible. This is, you know, very, you know, they're just very thin. So, yeah, I mean, it turns out that the Secret Service ended up acting on it just out of an abundance of caution, which that's... you know, their job is to, you know, protect the president at all costs. But it seems that the people who are actually scrutinizing the intelligence didn't really have a strong belief that it was real. Yeah. And so like if Israel provided intelligence warning that Iran planned to target Air Force One, I'm wondering what evidence is there that Israeli intelligence was a source of information and what did U.S. officials make of its credibility? I know you said that they were questionable about it, but how do we know? Well, so, I mean, I'm mainly going off of the Washington Post reporting that was out yesterday where there were a number of officials who, I mean, they said that they received it from Israel. That was also reported in the Wall Street Journal a day or two ago.

And this is something that has been discussed for a while. You know, it was reported back in July that, you know, Israel had informed Trump that there were, you know, plans by Iran to, to attack him in some capacity. So this has been something that's kind of been percolating for a while. As far as... Sorry, can you repeat the question? Oh, no, we can move on. No, no, no. Yeah, I can continue, though. I was just asking you about how we know. Like there's so much hearsay rumors, viral charges on X, all kinds of things going on. How do we, what evidence shows us that this is an Israeli source? I mean, basically just what intelligence officials have been saying in their reports. I mean, they were the ones who passed this along. And I think the interpretation that American intelligence had was that they were sort of more trying to influence Trump's perception of the situation more so than, you know, necessarily trying to protect him. Because you have to remember around this time, there are these, you know, highly sensitive negotiations happening related to whether or not to continue the war with Iran. And at the time you have the memorandum of understanding that had been signed a few weeks ago, you know, basically on the verge of collapse. And Israel really opposed that deal and wanted to... there's strong evidence that they had wanted to drive a wedge further between Trump and the Iranians and really portray Iran as an existential threat. And what better way to do that than to convince Trump that, you know, Iran is going to try to kill him. Right. And you also cited a post by Joe Brian Kemp, who is a former senior intelligence official who publicly questioned the credibility of the threat in a post on. X what who was Joe Brian Kemp and what did he say in that post and how significant is it that someone with his intelligence background is publicly casting doubt on the assessment that prompted the president's secret plane switch. So, yeah, Joe Kent is his name. He was former, yeah, yeah, no problem. But yeah, he was the former, he was a former senior intelligence official, and he was in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center.

which is responsible for coordinating intelligence about terrorism threats. So this is a guy who had the highest level of knowledge about what the intelligence community was learning. Now, he was not currently serving in that role at the time of the Israeli attack, or the reported Iranian attack. So he resigned from his position in March. People will probably remember this. basically broke with the administration's line about the evidence that the government had, that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. He said, you know, I've seen the intelligence and, you know, what they're saying to justify this war, that Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon, that Iran is capable of, you know, hitting the U.S. with... with long-range missiles this is this is not true um and his His ongoing argument has been that basically the U.S. is being sort of pushed into this war by Israel. And that, you know, a few weeks before the war started, Trump had this meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, where he presented this very, you know, urgent case for why the U.S. needed to attack now. And even Trump's own advisors, you know, Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe, the CIA, the CIA director, he, they both said, you know, this is. really hyperbolic. This is, you know, Marco Rubio used a term that I don't think I can use on the radio. He called it BS, basically. And Kent is saying that basically the, this is another example of that where, you know, Israel is presenting this, you know, sort of hyperbolic intelligence. to push the U.S. towards a more hostile position with Iran. Because if you remember in the weeks leading up to the supposed attack on Trump, you know, there was a discrepancy between the U.S. and Israel, probably some of the strongest criticism Trump has ever made towards Israel that basically, you know, he believed that they were trying to sabotage the deal between the U.S. and Iran. You know, they had really ratcheted up their attacks against Lebanon. at this time you know they launched these huge strikes against Beirut and Trump came out and said you know this is way too much you need to you know fool it guys basically in this in this very public forum and yeah it was uh In the memorandum of understanding, one of the key provisions was that it's not just a piece between the U.S. and Iran, it's a piece on all fronts, including Israel's occupation of Lebanon, where they've been systematically demolishing village after village and created, you know, this, you know, emptied out occupation zone over the last several months.

And, you know, Israel wants to continue doing that. And the idea is, you know, sort of that... They have been trying to push the envelope and, you know, keep, you know, sabotage the deal in that way and also push Trump to, you know, continue pursuing this very hard line against Iran. And that is sort of, you know, Joe Kent is, he doesn't have any specific knowledge probably of the specifics of the plane incident because he's not working in intelligence anymore. You know, he quit. You know, he followed his conscience. You know, he's. He's a very, you know, he's a strong like MAGA Republican, but, you know, he is also, he describes his ideology as being basically America first, and he believes that our interests are not served by, you know, getting into this war. He believes it's more serving Israel's interests. But he is in a position to understand. Yeah, I quoted him in this article. saying that you know whenever you get intelligence from a foreign power whether it's israel or anybody else you have to think about well what do they stand to gain from passing this along you know no intelligence agency is doing things like that out of the kindness of their heart and i mean i think we've seen specifically with israel they've you know passed along intelligence to the united states you know specifically about iran that has a very clear agenda and a very clear effort to uh you know, persuade Trump to take the most maximalist action that he can. And I think the Kent's argument is that this is another example of that. Well, Stephen, that is our time. Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about your reporting with us. Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me. All right. We've been speaking with Stephen Prager, reporter at Common Dreams. Coming up next, San Francisco's congressional race is drawing scrutiny over the growing role of... independent expenditure groups and big money donors. In a new piece for 48 Hills, veteran political and investigative reporter Tim Redmond says that the alleged coordination between an independent expenditure committee supporting Scott Weiner and the Weiner campaign could undermine campaign finance rules designed to limit the influence of wealthy donors. Welcome to the show Tim.

Very happy to be on the show, as always. Great. So you argue that the rules separating independent expenditure groups from candidate campaigns are maybe being disregarded right now in the San Francisco congressional race. What has led you to believe this and what suggests the Weiner campaign and its independent expenditure committee are coordinating? Okay, first of all, let me just say full disclosure. My daughter works on the Connie Chan for Congress campaign, and I am disclosing that every time I talk about this. Okay. All right. That out of the way. So starting back in the early 1970s after the Watergate crisis. Congress and states and local governments passed laws limiting the amount of money that any one individual can give to a political candidate. In San Francisco, for example, no individual can contribute more than $500 to a candidate for supervisor. The limits are higher for the state legislature and higher for Congress, but they still exist. And the idea is you don't want one person. Going back to the days of Richard Nixon, this was Howard Hughes, sending what would today be almost a million dollars in cash through an intermediary in Las Vegas to Richard Nixon, you don't want that kind of thing going on because it's bribery, right? It essentially says, I'm rich enough that I can say, I'm going to give you enough money to get elected, and then you're going to do what I want. So these rules are in place for a reason. They have been undermined to a great extent by Supreme Court decisions that say that independent expenditure groups can spend whatever they want. In other words, if I want to support a kid, if I were. a wealthy person which i am not but if i were a billionaire and wanted to support a candidate for congress or for a local legislative seat or president or whatever else i could set up an independent committee that has nothing to do with the candidate it's just me and i can fund it to any extent that i want and the rule though is you can't coordinate it has to be completely independent so that it's not a case where one billionaire can essentially fund an actual campaign So they say these rules exist for a reason. When the independent expenditure committee is no longer independent, it kind of undermines the whole idea of campaign contribution limits. And that is what we are seeing with the group called Neighbors for an Affordable San Francisco, which is an I.E that's received a lot of money, for example, from AI execs. It's supposed to be independent. But the employees who are working for the Scott Weiner campaign. are also working for neighbors for an affordable San Francisco. They're getting paychecks from each one, which seems like an awful lot of coordination. That seems like it's almost impossible not to be coordinating with that campaign. When we reach that level, and this is happening around the country, we're seeing more and more of this. When we reach that level, what's the point of campaign contribution limits? It's as if we're just ignoring that entire concept and that entire rule of law that's been in place since the 1970s.

Yeah, so can you draw a line from the Watergate era campaign finance reforms to what's happening right now in San Francisco today. Can you explain a little bit more about how the scandals from the 70s shape these contribution limits that we have now and like why they're at risk? Sure. I mean, again, going back to Richard Nixon and his suitcase full of... what was then a hundred thousand dollars cash from howard hughes who of course as we know was a billionaire um in the uh airline industry that's pretty close to bribery right that says that one very wealthy guy could essentially be tell who had interests in watching he needed um presidential approval for airline routes airline regulations all this kind of stuff is essentially um bribing a candidate for president of the united states This was not the only example. There were lots of cash contributions, sketchy contributions, money coming into the Nixon campaign, which paid, among other things for Watergate burglary. Right. So Congress, starting in 1974, changed the rules and said, number one, you can't give cash, right? Everything has to be traceable. It has to be a check or now you can do it through Act Blue or various different online things. It has to be traceable. Let's be a paper trail, right? Number two, no one individual can donate more than a certain limited amount of money to a... political campaign for Congress, for president, for U.S. Senate, the state of California adopted the political reform act at the same time, city and county of San Francisco, almost every city in the country now has local campaign contribution limits, and they're intended to prevent. the sort of undue influence that we're now seeing, of course, with Trump, for example, Elon Musk giving $300 million to supposedly independent campaign to support Donald Trump for office. And then look what ends up happening. Elon Musk ends up in the Oval Office, wrecking the country through his Department of Government Efficiency. getting whatever other handouts need. This is how this has been working with Trump. And it really undermines the entire idea of limiting the influence of one or a small number of individual wealthy actors. Again, we can't stop. independent expenditure committees from existing because the Supreme Court and Buckley v. Vallejo and later Citizens United authorized that to happen and said that that money is speech and that individual actors can support candidates. But you can't be doing, you can't be running the campaign together.

You can't be actively involved in working together with a, with unlimited money, unlimited independent expenditure money and the official campaign. As, as we see that become more and more common in this country, it's as if it's as if the Watergate reforms never happened. It's as if why do we even bother? If, you know, somebody from an AI company can give half a million dollars to an independent expenditure committee on behalf of a candidate. And then that many ends up paying the candidate staff and paying the office rent. And it's as if you just throw up your hands and say, why did we even bother? And nobody's enforcing this. The federal elections commission isn't enforcing it. Every once in a while, the San Francisco Ethics Commission found that Mark Farrell, a candidate for mayor. was illegally coordinating with an independent expenditure committee. And they find him a little bit. He settled for an amount of money that he could well afford to pay. So it's kind of like, oh, well, if we get caught, we'll pay a minor fine, slap on the wrist, keep going forward. It doesn't matter as long as our candidate gets elected. And, you know, they say it's really, it's gotten out of control. Yeah, and so if independent expenditure groups can just effectively coordinate with campaigns, what does that mean for the average San Francisco voter? And what do you think we need to do to restore meaningful limits on how big money and big tech enact political influence in these campaigns? Well, I mean, in an ideal world, we'd overturn Buckley v. Valo and we would have strict spending limits. on how much you can spend on a campaign, as many, many other countries do. But since that's not going to happen anytime soon, what we need to do is enforce the existing laws. We need to, the Samuester's Ethics Commission, the Fair Political Practices Commission, and the Federal Elections Commission are all complaint driven. Nothing happens unless you file a complaint. And you file a complaint, by the time the complaint is adjudicated, the election is over. The damage is done. right and if the candidate wins oh well the fine is just the the price to pay for playing this game the the the the city the state and the federal government need to have fully funded aggressive um agencies that go out and look for that investigate this the same way that police investigate crimes the the the san francisco ethics commission should not wait for a complaint They should have investigators who go out and look for this. When they see it's happening, they go after it. The same with the FPPC and the Federal Elections Commission. You know, otherwise, it's everybody's just turning them blind eye to this. And then of course, you know, does the other campaign want to file a complaint, which makes it look like sour grapes or bad faith or whatever? A lot of times they don't. And then nothing happens. And we have like 60 seconds, but you make a comparison between Scott Weiner as being like the candidate of tech and real estate and Latifah Simon as candidate of labor. How much do these campaign finance patterns actually tell us about policy interests and constituencies behind these candidates? Well, it's Connie Chan. Latifah's in the East Bay. Oh, I'm sorry, Connie Chan. But what they tell you is who does the AI industry want?

in Washington. Who does the labor movement want in Washington? And you can tell a lot by who is funding campaigns. It is right now, it appears that from what my research shows, that Scott Wiener is the candidate who is supported by big tech and real estate and Connie Chan is supported largely by labor. And that tells you something about the constituencies that these folks will have if they end up getting elected. Well, thank you for coming on the show and talking to us about these issues. Of course, always happy to be on the show. All right. We've been speaking with Tim Redmond, veteran journalist from 48 Hills. And that does it for today's show. Up front airs weekday mornings at 7 a.m. We post information about our topics and our guests online at kpFA.org where you can also dig through our archives, subscribe to the show as a podcast, and connect to us on social media. If you'd like to give us feedback on something you heard or suggest something for us to cover, send us an email. Upfront at KPFA.org. Big thanks to everyone who makes the show happen, producer Kimia Akbar, engineer, Kirsten Thomas. I'm your guest host today, Teresa Wers Bianca, filling in for Brian Edwards Teakert, who will return. If you're incarcerated and mails easier, write to Upfront, KPFA, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Berkeley, California, 947. Oh, four. Stay up, stay tuned, law and disorder. No, I'm sorry, it's not law and disorder. But stay up and stay tuned and have a great morning.

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