☕️ CUSTODY AND CONTROL ☙ Monday, April 20, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The Navy confiscates Iran’s favorite sanctions-busting freighter, Tulsi hands DOJ the impeachment receipts, Erica Schwartz tests MAHA’s blood pressure, more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Your roundup includes: the U.S. Navy’s cinematic seizure of Iran’s sanctions-busting cargo ship Touska after six hours of warnings and a few well-placed rounds into the engine room; Tulsi Gabbard’s astonishing declassification of the impeachment files, complete with criminal referrals for the “whistleblower” machinery that helped launch Trump’s first impeachment; and a reality check for jumpy MAHA world after Trump nominated a new CDC director whose résumé looks a lot scarier at first glance than it does after you actually read it.

🚀⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE ⛑️ 🚀

Over the weekend, an Iranian cargo ship tried to run the U.S. blockade at the Strait of Hormuz and found out. BBC reported, “US attacks and seizes Iranian cargo ship, as Iran says ‘no decision’ yet on joining peace talks.” In dramatic audio released by the US military, a radio operator warned the ship’s crew to “vacate the engine room, we are preparing to subject you to disabling fire.”

CLIP: U.S. Central Command stops the Touska (0:35).

“Guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance intercepted M/V Touska as it transited the north Arabian Sea at 17 knots enroute to Bandar Abbas, Iran,“ CentCom clinically reported. “American forces issued multiple warnings and informed the Iranian-flagged vessel it was in violation of the U.S. blockade.”

The Touska —a container ship 965 feet long and heavy as an aircraft carrier— ignored the warnings and steamed ahead, radio silent. You have to hand it to the captain; that guy has some stones. With a massive destroyer tracking him for six long hours, he thought, nah. I bet they won’t do it. They’ll TACO. The Spruance then “disabled the Touska’s propulsion by firing several rounds from the destroyer’s 5-inch MK 45 Gun into Touska’s engine room.” Oh. I guess they WILL do it.

Ropelined Marines then boarded the drifting vessel and “took the Touska into custody,” using a maritime term that sounds like they shoved it into the back of a police car or something. Either way, it has been seized. All your cargoes now belong to us. President Trump tweeted, “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!” The manifest and other paperwork might be particularly interesting.

IRGC officials blasted the United States, accusing us of “black-hearted piracy on the high seas,” or words to that effect. And then they warned darkly that we’d be sorry. And then they closed the Strait. Again. Somebody should probably spray WD-40 on the Strait’s hinges since it’s opening and shutting every ten minutes. (Coming from a regime that has seized 18+ foreign tankers in the Gulf since 2019, calling us pirates was pretty rich.)

It wasn’t piracy. We’re sailing in safe legal seas. The Touska is what you might call a “repeat offender.” The ship has a record and priors thicker than the barnacles on Iran’s sunken fleet. According to Financial Express, the Touska has already been sanctioned by multiple countries and is currently blacklisted from international finance and global ports. (It’s the diplomatic equivalent of being banned from every Starbucks on planet Earth.)

There are good reasons. Firstly, Touska is operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, which is not a recreational cruise provider. It’s a fake IRGC cut-out disguised as a company, considered by Western agencies to be the primary transport arm for the IRGC’s ballistic missile and nuclear proliferation programs. And Touska is believed to have previously sneaked in dangerous explosive materials like sodium perchlorate (a key precursor for solid rocket fuel) from ports in China.

It’s always gotten away with it before, neatly navigating around financial sanctions and blacklists. Nobody’s ever been willing to kinetically stop the Touska, presumably over fears of causing so-called “diplomatic incidents.” Those lax days are over.

Following through on its dramatic threats, the IRGC bragged to its state media that it had launched “several drones” at unnamed U.S. military vessels in the Gulf of Oman, which is east of the Strait of Hormuz near Somalia, where Iran’s Houthi allies are based. Un-dramatically, no damage was reported, not even in IRGC-controlled media. (An interesting side note: the Spruance is a veteran of last year’s Houthi conflict and has tangled with those rabid rebels before. Which reminds me: What else do you have when you have a room full of Somali pirates? A full set of teeth.)

So now we clearly see the matchup. Iran’s ‘Navy,’ such as it is, can deploy ineffective Somali “drones” —presumably, tiny, remote-controlled ACME motorboats laden with three dynamite sticks, or possibly small model planes with grenades in the nose— which accomplish nothing against defended targets unless the Iranians get extremely lucky.

Meanwhile, the US Navy can shoot with pinpoint accuracy into Iran’s massive military cargo ships and then confiscate them whenever it wants, completely unopposed. But sure, Iran is winning. Okay.

On the economic front, oil prices ticked up slightly this morning, recovering some of their losses from Friday’s historic close, but remained well below the $100/barrel rate. Brent crude futures rose by +4.74% to $94.66 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) was +5.6% higher at $88.55. The oil markets appear to be doing what Iran cannot: calming down.

The current cease-fire expires on Wednesday. Today, American negotiators plan to attend peace talks in Islamabad, Pakistan. But they might be lonely; the Iranian side cannot confirm its own attendance. The Iranians are drowning in internal struggles between the secular, elected government and the murky, militarized IRGC corporation. Nobody knows whether Iran’s team will show up or, if they do, who’ll wear the captain’s hat.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

This was potentially huge news, the first rumblings of a massive political earthquake. Late last week, Fox News reported, “ODNI sends criminal referrals to DOJ for ex-IG, whistleblower tied to Trump impeachment.” In a rare example of a “somebody said something” story that was actually newsworthy, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a remarkable —if not historic— official DNI press release that declassified more new documents related to Impeachment I. Here’s the staggering title, right from the website:

She didn’t just declassify some documents. Tulsi simultaneously made criminal referrals to the DOJ against several key actors involved in the 2020 Impeachment. It was a poisoned dagger shivved into the heart of the conspiracy to defeat President Trump using politicized lawfare: “they manufactured and manipulated the whistleblower process to create the pretext for an impeachment of the sitting President.”

It’s dense— replete with murky names, a calendar’s worth of dates, and documents bearing bureaucratic titles as long as small novels. Let’s walk through it without getting in the weeds.

This round’s starring character was former Intelligence Community Inspector General (IC/IG) Michael Atkinson, who served during the middle years of Trump 1.0 until the President fired him. The IC/IG is supposed to be a neutral, internal watchdog for the entire intelligence community, and definitely not a policy or political actor. One of those “nonpartisan” career professionals we keep hearing about but never seem to find.

Atkinson is the key federal official who formally launched the RussiaGate impeachment hoax. Under the banner of his “nonpartisan” office, he made a “referral of urgent concern” to Congress in 2019, alleging there was “credible evidence” that President Trump blackmailed Kiev’s clownlike president Zelensky. Atkinson claimed that Trump intimidated Zelensky to investigate the Biden Crime Family’s nefarious activities in Ukraine, which Atkinson claimed was intended to influence the upcoming election, presumably by exposing Biden’s illegal hijinks to the public.

In other words, Atkinson’s narrative was that Trump leveraged his office and the tools of U.S. foreign policy, including by pausing aid (the stick) and dangling a White House visit (the carrot), to induce Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. The dual charge: abuse of power combined with election interference. The worst.

That is old, well-worn news. Now’s where it gets really interesting based on the new document disclosures— which itself was a historic declassification unlike anything that has ever before emerged from the DNI’s secretive offices. For the very first time in ODNI’s 21-year history, a sitting DNI has made criminal referrals against her own office’s former leadership.

🔥 Tulsi declassified Atkinson’s investigative file. What she found —and what the file shows— is that the “nonpartisan” inspector general was anything but nonpartisan. He twisted the rules into a mall pretzel shape to fit the “crimes.” He ignored the actual transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky, and instead relied on four unnamed “whistleblowers”— none of whom heard the call and all of whom were easily impeachable for obvious political bias.

The whistleblowers were all partisan Democrats with a history of Trump opposition, none of whom were on the call. Atkinson knitted that into a “referral of urgent concern” that spurred the President’s impeachment and sidelined his agenda.

And he bent the rules like Uri Geller bending a drawer full of spoons. First, and maybe most egregiously, the IG’s office had a long-standing rule for whistleblowers: no hearsay. That means whistleblowers could only report things they actually knew about— and nothing that they “heard” from someone else. That rule was actually printed right on the form.

But none of his whistleblowers had personal knowledge of the call. One whistleblower actually wrote, “I do not have direct knowledge of private comments or communications by the President.” The second whistleblower claimed to have read the transcript, and wrote they “would not have been able to get from ‘point A to Z’ the way the (first) Whistleblower did.” A third whistleblower —also going from the transcript— wrote that they had to “read between the lines,” and that his/her perception of a quid pro quo only “became clear in hindsight.” Just guessing.

This kind of second-hand testimony was prohibited right on the face of the form. So Atkinson just … changed the form. He simply deleted the prohibition against hearsay. Kind of like changing the definition of “vaccine” on the CDC website.

And, even though all the ‘witnesses’ all based their conclusions on readings of the call transcript— Atkinson never read the transcript himself. He hid behind the sofa. He avoided the transcript like it was a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses ringing his front doorbell.

Despite all that, Atkinson quickly made a criminal referral to the DOJ. DOJ looked at it and found “no urgent concern,” and kicked it back. Atkinson shrugged, re-packaged it for Congress —no actual investigation needed— and the impeachment game was afoot.

🚀 Now let’s look at Atkinson’s “whistleblowers”— who were just people who’d read the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky call. The “call” included a crowd of officials and employees approximately the size of a high-school football team. On the Ukrainian side, Zelensky had an unspecified number of aides and advisors. The US side included Trump, White House notetakers, NSC staff, and other senior aides. Trump later declassified and released the transcript.

Nobody who was actually on the call ever objected, became a whistleblower, or testified against Trump. None of them were even interviewed by Atkinson before he made his impeachment referral. House and Senate Democrats took the deeply flawed report and ran with it.

Instead, the first and main witness told Atkinson: (1) he was a registered Democrat. (2) He “worked closely with Vice President Biden” and was involved in Biden’s Ukraine businesses. (3) He said he was “the target of right-wing bloggers … and conspiracy theorists.” (4) He coordinated with Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee staff before filing the complaint.

Despite all those clues, Atkinson later testified that “I never considered the whistleblower to be politically biased.” During the 2020 impeachment trial, Democrats refused to let Trump’s lawyers ask about the Whistleblower’s bias and motives.

The second ‘whistleblower’ was just as flawed. (1) They admitted in a witness interview to being a “co-author of the 2017 ICA”— the discredited source of the RussiaGate allegations. (2) They admitted to working ‘alongside’ now-disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok (of the “insurance policy” fame). (3) They advised interviewers of being “disappointed everyday by policy decisions”— meaning the President’s policy decisions.

Basically, Atkinson rounded up some of the most virulently partisan Democrats in the deep state —who weren’t on the call— and used them to manufacture out of thin air a criminal allegation against the sitting President of the United States. That’s apparently all it took to launch the coup.

🔥 In the long, secretive, buttoned‑down history of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy, Tulsi Gabbard’s press release landed like a meteor crashing into a mobile home. This isn’t just another dry “we take these concerns seriously” memo. It’s the sitting DNI accusing her own predecessors and official watchdogs of running a years‑long coup and then stapling criminal referrals to the front for good measure.

It’s a big deal. I’m not sure there’s anything remotely historically comparable. On behalf of the entire ODNI, Tulsi is not just admitting past wrongdoing. The Office is explicitly alleging that senior IC players and an Inspector General deliberately “manufactured and manipulated” intelligence and whistleblower processes to overturn the democratic result of a national election, and did it in an official press release labeled as advancing “transparency and accountability.”

In a single stroke, the ODNI dragged the secret world’s dirty laundry into the DMV’s fluorescent lights, naming names, declassifying transcripts that Congressional Democrats literally kept in a safe, and inviting Todd Blanche’s DOJ to go hunting for crimes in the same skunkworks that helped impeach the President.

For an institution that normally communicates in passive voice and footnotes, this is the bureaucratic equivalent of flipping the lights on at 3 a.m. in the deep state’s nightclub and handing the bouncers over to the cops. Future historians will circle April 13, 2026, in red ink— as the day the intelligence community publicly turned its detective flashlight back on itself.

If the Atkinson file confirms what conservative reporters have been saying for six years —that Schiff’s staff was coordinating with the Whistleblower (Eric Ciaramella, pictured above) before the referral was filed— then Schiff’s 2028 hopes will die, too.

One cannot help but notice the timing. Seven months remain before the midterms. The Florida grand jury is continuing its work. Historically, the DOJ has avoided bringing politically-sensitive indictments within two months of an election. But Biden’s DOJ trashed that ‘unwritten rule’ in the Trump cases.

When South Florida Judge Cannon pressed Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s team on the 60‑day rule, his lead prosecutor flatly said putting Trump on trial in the run‑up to the election was consistent with the Justice Manual and that the “60‑day rule” doesn’t appear anywhere in the DOJ’s formal rules. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

💉💉💉

Some MAHA folks were up in arms this weekend after Trump nominated a new CDC director who was involved in enforcing military mandates for the covid jabs. CNN reported, “‘We just need someone who’s not crazy’: Inside the White House decision to nominate Erica Schwartz as CDC director.”

Erica Schwartz, MD, JD, MPH, is smart, attractive, highly credentialed, well-spoken, and experienced in all the areas that MAHA people are concerned about. It’s just the wrong side of the experience lane.

This weekend, anti-vaccine superlawyer Aaron Siri called Dr. Schwartz “the Queen of Mandating Vaccines,” and called her nomination “incredibly ironic.” Indeed, she authorized the Coast Guard’s first policies on Anthrax, Smallpox, and Influenza vaccination. Earlier in her career, she served as Chief of the Immunization and Preventive Medicine Department, which oversaw the Guard’s 42 clinics and sickbays, where vaccines were given to servicemembers.

Later, as Deputy Surgeon General (2019-2021), Dr. Schwartz was involved in the pandemic-era response, including through the initial vaccine deployments, but not including the federal mandates period. Specifically, she left the office in April 2021— months before the first federal mandates began in September, and right after the vaccines were initially deployed (she tendered her resignation in January, 2021).

The CDC has seen a revolving door of anti-vaxx and anti-establishment characters. They oversaw massive staff layoffs and a ban on the CDC’s public communications. You might consider them to be change agents. Critically, one pro-vaccine candidate —Susan Monarez— was fired after refusing to take orders from Secretary Kennedy. (She famously dragged few other top hardliners into rage-quitting with her, including the kinky, leather-loving, pentagram-tattooed ‘monkeypox czar.’)

One alert reader challenged me on ‘X’ this weekend over Schwartz’s nomination:

You would think that Trump nominated that human cockroach, Fauci, or something.

To be clear: even if Erica were awful, nominating an enthusiastically pro-vaccine CDC head would be frustrating but not even close to making me consider ditching Trump and embracing Democrats. Just put that silly notion right out of your head. We’ve made more progress against Big Pharma and vaccines in the last 14 months than in the 25 years before that. I’m rational, not suicidal.

Notwithstanding that, it is far too soon to panic. (Wait until I give the signal.) There is no evidence that Dr. Schwartz is a pharma sellout. She enforced long-standing military policy, which only means she follows orders. She was incompatible with the Biden Administration, which is yet another good sign. She was not involved in the civilian covid mandates.

Why don’t we wait and see what she does? Maybe Erica’s the stable force intended to follow all the chaos and change that was necessary to reset a CDC that had become distorted and distracted? I’d be just as happy as the next sane person for the CDC to be permanently closed. Frankly, I prefer our chances without one. But short of that, the proof will be in the pudding.

Personally, I’m never going to hysterically issue threats or rage-quit over what some nominee might do. You’ve got the wrong coffee blogger if that is what you’re looking for. I will call out bad policies if and when I see them. I might even file lawsuits; who knows. In the meantime, I’ll assume the President knows what he is doing and I’ll let the man work.

So, yes. President Trump is still “my man.” Keep on working.

Have a marvelous Monday! Race back here tomorrow morning for another educational and informative roundup of essential news and commentary.

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