FBI Working With DHS, ODNI On Election Integrity: FBI Director

 by Frank Fang and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

The FBI worked with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on the recent disclosure by President Donald Trump on foreign influence on U.S. elections, agency director Kash Patel said.

FBI Director Kash Patel speaks during an interview at the FBI headquarters in Washington on Aug. 4, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

During an interview with EpochTV's "American Thought Leaders," aired on Aug. 8, Patel said the three agencies worked as partners, but the FBI played a smaller role, while DHS and ODNI had the technical capabilities and a remit focused more on overseas incidents involving U.S. election infrastructure.

"We shared our information. We made a lot of our information public through President Trump's speech the other week," Patel said.

Patel said the three agencies acted at Trump's direction.

"I think the president was right to go to the nation and the world and put forth this information, but it was only possible because the president directed us to declassify and divulge this information to the American public and the world," Patel said.

In a primetime address on July 16, Trump announced the declassification of documents that showed China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and other information.

"This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare," Trump said during the address.

Trump did not explicitly claim that China altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

China began targeting him in an operation in 2018, Trump said, citing a CIA report that described an effort to "reduce [his] votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection."

The CIA report found "China was working to influence the results of the U.S. midterm elections, and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself," according to Trump.

In 2019, China had a strategy focusing on "undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president," Trump added.

"They wanted to just make [it] sound like your president wasn't so hot when actually your president has done a great job," he said.

That strategy included influencing U.S. business leaders to turn against him, Trump said.

"The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could," he said.

The declassified documents included a CIA wire memo from July 2000, which included information from the FBI, showing that the Chinese Communist Party was targeting "personal e-mail accounts of senior US leadership, including officials in the Executive Office of the President and high-ranking officials in multiple Executive Branch organizations, Congress, and the federal judiciary."

Separately, a National Intelligence Council report found that "Beijing has expanded its cyber collection of data related to the 2020 US elections by carrying out opportunistic intrusions against US private-sector entities in efforts to collect information on US political candidates, campaigns, donors, and voter data."

Trump's claim on China's election interference by targeting American voter registration data was backed by the heads of the ODNI, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a White House fact sheet released on July 30.

In September 2025, Patel discussed China's threats extensively during a hearing before the House Committee on the Judiciary.

China "presents the greatest and most sophisticated cyber threat to U.S. public safety and national security," Patel said, according to written testimony.

He singled out one particular Chinese threat group, "Salt Typhoon," which had breached the networks of multiple telecommunications companies in the United States and elsewhere.

Patel also noted in his written testimony that all 55 of his agency's field offices had active Chinese counterintelligence investigations.

"This calendar year alone, as I was mentioning, our counterintelligence operations and cases brought against the Chinese are up by something like 40 percent," Patel told House lawmakers at the hearing.

"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has deliberately created an environment that abuses global interconnectedness and encourages intellectual property theft, using human intelligence officers, corrupt corporate insiders, and reckless and indiscriminate cyber intrusions," Patel stated in his written testimony.

Watch the full 'American Thought Leaders' interview below, covering a great deal more than election integrity:

00:00 Intro 
1:31 World Cup Security 
4:17 Scam Centers & Operation Blackout 
6:55 Pig Butchering Scams 
11:25 Slaves in Scam Compounds 
13:19 Why's the FBI Working with China's MPS? 
19:00 How Does the FBI Get the Money Back?
23:41 Advice to Viewers on Scams 
26:00 Chinese Interference in 2020 Election
28:26 Removal of Spies 
31:42 CCP Targeting Americans with Security Clearances 
35:26 Tackling Transnational Repression
38:40 Terrorist Attacks Thwarted
41:26 What is the Director's Strategic Information Center (DSIC)?
44:33 Major Reforms at the FBI 

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-working-dhs-odni-election-integrity-fbi-director

Iran protest crackdown veteran Taeb returns to lead Basij, expand intel network

 Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei appointed veteran intelligence official Hossein Taeb to lead the Basij, giving the former protest crackdown figure a mandate to expand the paramilitary force’s grassroots intelligence network and use of new technologies.

In his decree, Khamenei instructed Taeb to “strengthen the popular intelligence network,” improve training and skills and make greater use of new technologies for what he described as a “people-based” response to enemy threats.

The directive places intelligence gathering prominently among Taeb’s responsibilities at the Basij, whose branches extend through neighborhoods, universities, workplaces and other parts of Iranian society.

With Taeb’s appointment, Khamenei is returning a figure closely associated with the suppression of dissent and protests to a leading role in one of the Islamic Republic’s main domestic security and mobilization organizations.

Taeb previously commanded the Basij during the unrest surrounding the disputed 2009 presidential election, when the force played a major role in suppressing demonstrations.

Taeb’s career has been centered on Iran’s security and intelligence establishment for more than four decades.

Born in Tehran in 1963, the cleric joined the Revolutionary Guards in 1982 and served in IRGC units in Tehran, Qom and Khorasan before moving into the Intelligence Ministry, where he rose to a senior management position.

He also served in counterintelligence at the ministry and later headed the IRGC’s own intelligence protection apparatus.

Return to Basij

His Monday appointment brings him back to an organization he previously led.

Taeb, a longtime ally of Mojtaba Khamenei, was appointed commander of the Basij Resistance Force in 2008, before becoming head of the newly established IRGC Intelligence Organization in October 2009, shortly after the mass protests that followed that year’s presidential election.

He went on to lead IRGC Intelligence for more than a decade, making him one of the most influential figures in the Islamic Republic’s internal security apparatus. The organization grew during his tenure into a powerful intelligence body operating alongside the Intelligence Ministry and became heavily involved in cases concerning political activists, journalists, dual nationals and alleged espionage.

Khamenei’s decree also ordered Taeb to broaden the Basij’s reach under the slogan “Every Iranian, a Basiji,” expand neighborhood and sector-based units, deepen cooperation with state institutions and develop social-service networks centered on mosques. He was also tasked with promoting the Basij model of “popular resistance” abroad.

Taeb replaces Gholamreza Soleimani, who was killed in the US-Israeli war earlier this year.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202608090309

'Sweaty Mamdani plan: ‘harness’ hot air from NYC subway platforms, warm city buildings'

 It’s just what the city needs — more hot air in government buildings.

Excess heat from infamously sweltering Lower Manhattan subway platforms soon could be pumped out to both cool the platform for straphangers and warm nearby city buildings, officials revealed Monday.

A joint study by the city and the MTA will explore installing a thermal energy network — or, TEN — at the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and Chambers Street subway stations, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and transit honcho Janno Lieber jointly announced.

TENs are geothermal networks that capture, store and redirect heat, thereby cooling broiling-hot spaces such as the Chambers Street J/Z stop — Mamdani said as he visibly sweat during a news conference in the decrepit station.

“Anyone who has stood on a subway platform in August knows that our stations do not just get hot — they turn into underground saunas,” the perpetually besuited mayor said.

“If you, like me, do not know what a summer suit is and choose instead to commute in a wool one, let me tell you, it is far from a therapeutic experience,” he quipped.

The “thermal energy network feasibility study” will explore harnessing the heat that builds up at the subway station over the summer to heat government buildings — including City Hall, the David Dinkins municipal building, Tweed Courthouse and Surrogate’s Court — come the winter, Mamdani said.

A contract to conduct a feasibility study first needs to be awarded by the fall, with an eye toward design work in early 2027, according to officials.

The project would be the first TEN in a US transit system, officials said.

4

The city’s subways can turn into “underground saunas” during the summer, Mamdani said.REUTERS

The Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and Chambers Street stations are the among the “sweatiest” in the subway system, Lieber said.

“The average temperatures last summer peaked at 96 degrees, and every year it’s actually getting hotter because of climate change,” the MTA honcho said.

“This technology has never been tested before in a transit system here in this country, but it is being used elsewhere in the city, like in St. Patrick’s (Cathedral), because it could be a real win-win.”

4

The temperature in the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall station averaged about 96 degrees last summer, officials said.Paul Martinka

The project would include radiant cooling technology to absorb heat from the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall platforms — and potentially those on Chambers Street as well — and transfer it through pipes to geothermal boreholes, officials said.

Those boreholes will be drilled beneath an abandoned Chambers Street platform, an ideal location for testing the technology because it would disrupt passengers, the officials said.

“We would capture heat in boreholes that will run 500 to 600 feet underground, and install a system of circulating pumps and pipes that will use the heat from below our city surface to warm the offices where our municipal workers are hard at work powering this incredible city,” Mamdani said.

4

The project would dovetail with an effort to rehab the infamously dilapidated Chambers Street subway station.Gregory P. Mango / pool

The work at Chambers Street would dovetail with a project announced last week by Gov. Kathy Hochul to modernize the dilapidated, 113-year-old subway station.

The restoration project — which will be funded by congestion pricing tolls — will replace damaged ceramic tiles and mosaics, replace or modify stairs and doors, plug leaks, install new lighting and give the station a fresh coat of paint, among other fixes, officials said.

Hochul’s office put out a release touting the geothermal project.

But neither the governor, nor anyone from her office, sweated it out with Mamdani and Lieber for their underground news conference.

https://nypost.com/2026/08/10/us-news/sweltering-nyc-subways-heat-could-be-pumped-into-nearby-buildings-in-bid-to-lower-platform-temperatures/

Mamdani’s taking over NY institutions to push his agenda —testing the law’s limits

 Mayor Zohran Mamdani may be an ideologue, but he’s also what Niccolò Machiavelli deemed “a sensible man”: One who will “will base his power on what he controls.”

And he’s using his time in office to exert greater control over city institutions — sometimes even testing the bounds of the law — to build a political machine that can persist beyond his tenure.

As the recent congressional primaries revealed, the mayor’s grip on the city chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America gives him the power to unseat entrenched incumbents.

Though fractured among a red-tinted mosaic of internal caucuses — including avowed Marxist revolutionaries — the DSA closes ranks behind him, marshaling tens of thousands of volunteers for his candidates and causes.

Now, he’s brought the door-knockers inside government through the Office of Mass Engagement.

Its commissioner, Tascha Van Auken, and Mamdani’s housing czar, Cea Weaver — both DSA leaders — are actually entering buildings to organize tenants into “unions.”

And the office is using taxpayer funds to film documentaries about tenant organizing.

It’s far from apparent that tenant organizing passes muster under the Conflicts of Interest Board rules, which prohibit public servants from using city “letterhead, title, personnel, equipment, resources, supplies, or technology assets” for any “non-City purpose.”

If withholding rent becomes a common tenant-union tactic, that will only accelerate building disinvestment and deterioration.

For the mayor and the DSA, however, forcing rent-stabilized property owners into foreclosure or bankruptcy is the point.

His housing plan calls for seizing buildings from “bad actors’ hands” and transferring them to “responsible stewards” like nonprofits.

Never mind that there’s no reason to think housing controlled by nonprofits or government would produce better conditions. NYCHA’s chronic corruption and mismanagement provide ample evidence to the contrary.

For DSA lefties, the important thing is that tenant unions and the nonprofit sector can muster reliable votes.

The mayor’s appointments to various governmental bodies likewise represent power plays to exert greater direct control — even at the expense of good government.

Most glaringly, Mamdani’s appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board voted for the rent freeze he campaigned on, despite the board’s own research showing landlord costs spiked 5.3% between April 2025 and March 2026.

The city’s administrative code requires members to consider these costs and other factors in determining a rent increase that balances multiple interests; instead, Mamdani appointed his board to deliver his signature campaign promise.

A vigorous lawsuit by former Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro is challenging the RGB’s decision as arbitrary, capricious and unlawfully predetermined.

If the mayor isn’t stopped in the courts, he will obtain the de facto power to set stabilized rent increases, rendering the statutory text toothless.

Unlike with his RGB picks, Mamdani didn’t immediately bother to appoint members to the Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, the body responsible for recommending qualified picks for criminal and family court judgeships.

On his second day in office, however, he appointed his election lawyer, Ali Najmi, as head of the memberless body.

Then in April, Mamdani and Najmi rejected the nomination of Appellate Division Justice John Leventhal to the committee, raising questions about whether his Jewish identity played a role in their decision. Mamdani has denied these claims.

But Leventhal’s unprecedented rejection was even more striking because his nomination came from the state’s highest judge, Rowan Wilson, a staunch progressive but not a DSA member.

Najmi and his firm, by the way, actively practice law before the city’s various criminal courts, even though simultaneously chairing the body that screens judges creates a conflict of interest and the appearance of impropriety.

Najmi is representing the family of the victim killed in June’s Central Park horse-carriage tragedy in a suit against the city.

His influence with the mayor again creates the appearance, if not the reality, that city officials will feel pressure to offer a generous settlement. If they do, Najmi and his firm will pocket a handsome contingency fee.

More still: Last week, Mamdani abruptly disbanded the advisory board of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, the nonprofit that raises private donations to further the mayor’s top causes.

To be sure, the fund has atrophied since Mayor Michael Bloomberg left office, likely driven by a lack of faith in the city government’s ability to execute programs effectively.

But Mamdani’s axing the advisory body was needlessly antagonistic toward the city’s business leaders.

The move fits with his broader scheme: Reshaping who has power in the city means controlling who sits on such boards.

Mamdani has heeded Machiavelli’s advice well: The prince who controls everything answers to no one.

John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at Manhattan Institute.

https://nypost.com/2026/08/10/opinion/mamdanis-taking-over-ny-institutions-to-push-his-agenda-testing-the-laws-limits/

Trump signs childhood immunization exec order to limit shots, claims MMR vaccine can be ‘quite lethal’

 President Trump said Monday that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine could be “quite lethal” as he urged the three inoculations to be administered separately to reduce what he said could be an elevated risk of autism.

Trump made the recommendation while signing an executive order in the Oval Office alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to affirm the court-paused CDC recommendation of 11 childhood vaccines, down from 17.

“Effective immediately, my administration is recognizing gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only 11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases, along with the MMR, which hopefully will be split up,” Trump said.

“The MMR we wanted in three separate vaccinations, given at separate times. Together there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal, and separately, it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective. So the MMR we want to have separate visits, separate times.”

Trump described the vaccination as “the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body, and bad things happen in many too many cases.”

“Parents can still choose to give their children all of the vaccinations if they wish,” the president said. “There are some groups that have virtually no problem with autism, and they, you know, I have to say this: they’re groups that aren’t big into the world of vaccines.”

Trump softened his tone on the MMR vaccination when a reporter asked if he was aware of evidence that it could harm children — a claim health regulators have long denied.

“No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way, and I say, ‘Well, let’s say there’s a 5% chance of it. Let’s split it up,’” Trump replied.

“But I’ve heard when you put them together, they can’t be explosive.”

Trump told a different reporter that he split up vaccinations for his own children, who were born between 1977 and 2006.

“I did. I took my children to five different vaccinations. In other words, I broke it up,” Trump said. “It’s inconvenient. It’s five stops, but it’s something that I think will have a huge impact on autism.”

Kennedy, a longtime vaccine safety skeptic, did not offer a specific assessment of whether childhood shots cause autism when he spoke at the event.

“We’re only noticing it in kids who were born around 1989 or after. The older generations are not seeing those increases. So something happened in the mid ‘90s that changed our children, and it has to be an environmental exposure,” Kennedy said. “You need an environmental toxin.”

https://nypost.com/2026/08/10/us-news/trump-signs-executive-order-to-limit-childhood-vaccines-claims-mmr-shots-can-be-quite-lethal/

Fresh proof that ‘democratic socialists’ will act like communists once elected

 It is not difficult, these days, to see the neo-communist flipside of “democratic socialists” — once they find power.

Indeed, the more the ossified Democratic Party claims that its growing cadre of socialist renegades are not really socialists, the more they act like — and even appear comfortable being called — communists.

With every new policy they propose, the socialists have been dropping the pretense that they are not Marxists.

Declaring capitalism a failure? All the socialists now do that.

Confiscating private property? New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani claims he will do just that if New York’s landlords, in his opinion, are poor custodians of their own property.

Dismantling the Constitution? Almost all Democrats have long called for destroying the 238-year-old Electoral College.

And now the socialists openly brag that, when they take over the Democratic Party and then the nation, they will, as good Bolsheviks, go much further: destroying the Senate, destroying the Pentagon, prisons, the police and our borders.

And they want to take over utilities, break up or absorb corporate agriculture and own major industries.

Apparently, socialists believe that with a snap of their fingers they can destroy key elements of the US constitutional order.

They also seem to have taken their cue for such radical change from “mainstream” Democrats — for example, Kamala Harris.

Now in her third vain bid for the presidency, she has adopted the doctrine of “if you can’t beat them, join them.”

The NYC Democratic Socialists of America hold a rally, marking the start of their campaign to tax the rich, in New York City on Sunday, November 16, 2025.Michael Nagle

So Harris now promises that if she is elected, she will pack the court, admit two new blue states (to snag four liberal senators), end the filibuster and junk the Electoral College.

How she plans to amend the Constitution to that effect she never tells us.

Like all good Marxists, these “ends-justify-the-means” leftists show an utter lack of principle: If two new red states wished to join the United States, they would lecture us on the sanctity of a 50-state union.

If they were a permanent Senate minority, they would, as in the past, honor the filibuster.

How about making “enemies of the people” lists and forcing sales of private property?

Mamdani just sent out a public list of nearly 1 million New York homeowners.

He sent official warnings to 17,000 of these property owners that, if they cannot prove they have lived full-time in their own properties, the city will levy a huge surtax on them to drive home the point that no one should own a second high-value home.

Are show trials next for those who decline to reply?

Mamdani has flipped the American tradition of “innocent until proven guilty.”

Almost 20,000 New Yorkers are now automatically presumed guilty of being house-hoarding, capitalist leeches who owe the exploited classes tens of thousands of dollars a year in reparations, unless they can prove themselves innocent.

Welcome to Mamdani’s revolutionary court.

Recently, on cable news, the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Megan Romer, was asked about her group’s agenda.

Far from denying its communist radicalism, she gleefully confirmed it all — from destroying the border to ending prisons, the military and the police.

But it is in Spain, and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s corrupt and unpopular regime, where we see what one-eyed-jack socialists can do when they are finally in power, especially when they are hated and on their way out.

Sanchez has given amnesty to 600,000 illegal aliens. One result was that 60,000 Muslim men from North Africa in a single day recently swarmed Spain’s colonial outpost at Ceuta, demanding amnesties — while looting and vandalizing businesses and attacking Spaniards.

Why do European socialists and American leftists, once elected, destroy borders, create conditions of mass chaos and welcome in millions of illegal aliens — poor, often angry and unassimilated — from the Third World?

Aside from their belief that the capitalists and their bourgeois hirelings deserve violence and upheaval, they hate the fact that capitalism is too class-fluid to furnish a permanent exploited proletarian underclass.

And so they import a huge victim class, and virtue signal their purported moral superiority.

Then they spend lavish social largesse upon the influx, and, in quid pro quo fashion, thus bind their imported underclass with their welfare-state assurances.

Socialist candidates (as opposed to registered socialist activists) hide their communist-adjacent agendas during elections.

But once in office and drunk with power, they find socialism too wishy-washy and go full communist.

They destroy borders, institutions, names, dates, statues, norms, customs and traditions to replicate the illiberalism and concomitant failures of a new Haiti, West Bank or Morocco in the West.

In sum, to make a new socialist America, you must first destroy everything that made Americans — and all that they hold dear.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.

https://nypost.com/2026/08/10/opinion/fresh-proof-that-democratic-socialists-will-act-like-communists-once-elected/