☕️ DOGE THIS ☙ Tuesday, June 16, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

As promised, Part II of the Great Tsunami Story that we started on Saturday. This time, it's the Intelligence Community's turn. Just wait till you see this one. It is SO much better than we thought.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! As advertised, today we conclude describing the tsunami of change that is washing over the deep state’s final redoubt: the funhouse-mirrored corridors of power within the U.S. intelligence agencies. Part two of two.

⛑️ C&C ARMY POST—MAILBAG ⛑️

But first, two themes ran like vines through yesterday’s comments. First, some readers, apparently unaware where my “lucky presidents” reference came from, pushed back (gently). Less gently, other readers said they already feel gypped by the “bad” Iran deal— even before the terms are public. Let’s tackle both, especially the second one, because gypped is exactly how corporate media wants you to feel. I tried to squash that narrative yesterday, but it’s taken root like mutant crabgrass. Let’s pluck it out.

⛑️ If you ever manage to get a liberal to debate you about Trump without them resorting to name-calling, storming off, or spontaneously combusting, you will eventually reach a point where they are confronted with undeniable evidence that Trump did something right. Usually, they have a pre-packaged answer, fresh from the New York Times’ talking-points lab. Sure, the stock market is up a little, but it only helps rich people. What about gas prices? K-shaped recovery!

Occasionally, though, you might point out something for which they don’t have a handy, pre-packaged media dismissal. When that happens, they fall back to their default setting, which is something along the lines of, “Well, even a blind squirrel can occasionally find an acorn.” (They really shouldn’t be bringing up Peanut the squirrel, but whatever. We’ll roll with it.) In other words, if they can’t minimize an accomplishment or claim that Joe Biden actually did it while sleepwalking, they’ll just call Trump the unwitting beneficiary of good fortune. He just got lucky.

My response to that is simple: even if that were true —even if Trump’s successes are purely the result of him stumbling backward into a pot of gold— I will take a lucky president any day of the week. “Lucky” is infinitely better than “smart.” Smart presidents can have bad luck, and where does that leave us? Usually, it leaves us broke, entangled in a foreign war, and paying fourteen dollars for a dozen eggs. Checkmate.

In other words, I’ve co-opted the progressives’ silly argument, and the weekend’s fortuitous meteorological events (after the Democrats celebrated the bad weather way too early) gave me the perfect opportunity to rub it in a little harder. To be clear, I don’t actually believe in luck. I’m with Einstein on this one: God does not play lotto with the universe. (Or words to that effect. Einstein was probably too busy inventing gravity to buy scratch-offs.)

⛑️ More significantly, a not inconsiderable number of folks shared feelings verging on downright pessimistic about the Iran War. It was too expensive, took too long, killed too many soldiers, raised gas prices, and now look: it didn’t even destroy the IRGC and all we’re getting is a crappy tourist t-shirt with the word “Strait” misspelled in “I 💗 the Straight of Hormuz!”

Let me tell you what’s going to happen. The minute corporate media gets its sweaty, panic-mongering hands on the details of this deal, all we are going to hear is how horrible and gyppy it is. That’s the narrative they’ve already written. And that’s exactly why I am pre-debunking it right now. I am boldly taking the position that I do not care what the terms of the deal are. As I said yesterday, the terms don’t even matter, because when you compare it to literally every other Middle East conflict we’ve ever stumbled into, the Iran operation was shorter by an order of magnitude and billions of times better for America.

Just count up the benefits we already know about. The Iran operation ended OPEC— within two months! It got all the fractious countries over there on the same page, made a joke out of the Useless Nations, starved China of oil, put America on top of global energy for the first time in history, pressured the Europeans, et cetera. None of our previous Middle Eastern adventures did anything helpful at all; they just made everything worse.

So, here is my warning. If anyone dares me to defend the terms of some Trump-Iran deal that corporate media and Team Candace call horrible, here is what I will do. Remember, I warned them. I will say that’s fine, please compare it to all the other Middle East peace deals that other presidents have negotiated.

After all, if we want to be intellectually honest —a concept the media abandoned sometime around 1994— we can’t just criticize the Iran deal in a vacuum. We need benchmarks. We need context. How can we possibly tell how truly stinky the Iran deal is without recalling all the super-terrific, totally-not-disastrous deals that past Middle Eastern wars have produced?

So let’s go ahead and pull the records on Bush’s Iraq, Obama’s JCPOA, and 20 years of Afghanistan. Let’s compare those deals to the Iran deal, and see which one ended best. Let’s contrast what we got from each previous war-slash-deal to what we get from Iran. Let’s compare the total cost of the 20-year Afghanistan war and the 8-year Iraq war with the cost of Trump’s three-month Iran war.

I bet we will discover some nifty statistics.

And to be perfectly fair, I will let the critics who are unhappy with the deal (which, again, they haven’t seen yet) do all those calculations for themselves and then report back. There really isn’t anything to talk about until those comparisons have been made.

Or, better yet, we could just refuse to step into the media’s narrative trap of criticizing the Iran deal without historical context.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

On Saturday, we saw Tulsi Gabbard dish out deep state pain over Ukraine biolabs, and the Pentagon cut NATO to the quick by declaring real drawdowns of our force deployment in Europe. To those two encouraging reckoning stories from Saturday, let’s add two more, both related to intelligence agencies. On Saturday, the Hill ran a totally not-hysterical story about how a long-detested spying law finally collapsed in Congressional flame: “FISA 702 lapse plunges US into unknown territory.”

On Thursday, both the House and Senate voted down bills extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) “amid outrage from Democrats about Bill Pulte being tapped to lead the intelligence community.” Opponents ironically included nineteen Trump-aligned Republicans who swung the vote. Seven Democrats voted for FISA’s renewal. (Portlanders: FISA is the law that lets the feds electronically spy on foreigners and any Americans corresponding with them— without pesky warrants.)

As you see, the Hill’s headline dramatically declared that America has been plunged into unknown territory! This kind of headline is how you know for sure the corporate media is the deep state’s willing slave. Literally nobody outside Washington likes FISA. Republicans hate it. Democrats and libertarians hate it. It’s not even an 80/20 issue; it’s more like 90/10. One March poll concluded that barely 12% of surveyed registered voters thought Congress should reauthorize warrantless surveillance without major reforms.

So … which audience was the Hill aiming at with its article whining about FISA lapsing? It’s not the only one. Corporate media headlines are almost universally supportive of FISA and critical of its lapse. Look how the New York Times framed it:

Not “excitement grows.” Hopes dim.

FISA’s support has only ever come from politicians, who, like clockwork, emerge from their SCIFs, blinking like groundhogs in the harsh, unfamiliar sunlight, and solemnly declare, “the world’s dangerous, so we need three more years of warrantless spy powers.”

And then we all say “fine” and, dang it, the world never seems to get any safer. No matter how much spying power we give them. Weird! In fact, it seems to work the opposite way. The more liberty we trade for security, and the more spy powers we give the government, the more dangerous the world becomes. The Hill, two days ago:

Every time we go along with them, it only provokes the next round of powers and compromises they demand, and the spooks on the wheel keep spinning, around and around and around, never stopping, never resting, never taking a break.

Well, it just stopped for once.

🔥 The roster of alarmed folks the Hill quoted about the lapse consisted mainly of former spooks and members of Congressional intelligence committees. The Hill didn’t quote any member of the public. (Who cares what we think? Members of the public are only needed for anti-trans bills.) The Hill ignored civil libertarian groups. And it somehow forgot all about the many rank‑and‑file Senators and Representatives like Rand Paul, or the other Republicans who voted against FISA, who’ve collectively spent decades calling Section 702 an unconstitutional backdoor for domestic surveillance.

Over the years, starting in Trump 1.0, the President himself repeatedly encouraged Congress to “KILL FISA!” His righteous anger was unsurprising, since FISA was how the Russiagate actors “legally” spied on Trump-world. They surrounded the Trump team members with helpful foreign cutouts, informants, and honeytraps, then treated any contact with those same over-friendly assets as the predicate for first surveilling Carter Page— and kept widening that crack to haul in others in Trump’s orbit.

🔥 FISA’s lapse might seem technical and wonky, but really, it was Another conservative dream come true. Spy powers are easy to give, but notoriously hard to take back. Its lapse is a black swan event that conservatives and libertarians have been assured for 20 years was impossible. Bung it onto the growing list of political miracles.

Best of all, Trump wrangled the Democrats into doing it, which prevented any deadly false flagging by the deep state (say, some ‘preventable’ tragedy that punishes wayward politicians and proves how badly FISA is needed after all). Like what? Oh, I don’t know, maybe something like:

Here’s the thing, though— the deep state won’t embarrass its preferred party. Since Democrats killed the bill, the deep state can’t strike back. It won’t.

We needn’t believe in false flags. It’s enough to observe incentives.

Intelligence officials and their media allies are already working overtime to frame the lapse as an unfortunate and totally understandable byproduct of partisan protest over Bill Pulte, rather than as any fundamental repudiation of 702 itself. They hope to revive it. The intelligence community is not, as Senator Schumer’s wife’s boyfriend once told him, “finding six ways from Sunday at getting back” at anyone.

In other words, the deep staters need Democrats to return to the table once the Pulte personnel fight is resolved, and they know a spectacular, conveniently timed “lesson” in what happens without warrantless powers would be read by half the country as an own‑goal against the very party that just burned political capital to protest Trump’s interim DNI choice.

In technical terms, political science types would call that a “no-no.”

So Trump’s 4-D chess move didn’t just knock out 702’s statutory legs for the moment; it simultaneously made it impossible for the deep state to teach the public a bloody civics lesson about why those legs were supposedly irreplaceable.

🔥 The second, seemingly unrelated story that unfolded right as FISA expired, was barely reported anywhere. On Friday, without any fanfare, the White House issued a dense, technical directive —it’s like an Executive Order– that was blandly titled, “National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-12.”

NPSM-12, known only by its acronym, could potentially be one of the most significant intelligence reorganizations in modern history. We don’t know much, since there was no press conference or signing ceremony for this one. They just slipped it in. The corporate media looked the other way. Trade media was less sanguine:

Remember how DOGE worked on a technical level? DOGE agents invaded every major federal agency and office. They linked all the important databases. They synchronized all the critical records. They mapped the payments, contracts, recipients, approvers, and contractors. They forced the big agencies to standardize on a single email platform. Throughout 2025, they fought and won lawsuits to link Social Security, Treasury, Medicaid, and ICE, so checks won’t go out to dead people, and illegals can’t get welfare or tax refunds.

In other words, DOGE tied federal agency databases together, providing the White House with a level of real-time visibility that had never existed before. In particular, DOGE made it possible to follow the money. Over about twelve months, years of deeply buried activity became a searchable evidence trail. Now, DOGE systems empower Trump’s Fraud Task Force. That’s why Democrats fought DOGE so hard.

🔥 NSPM-12 just launched the same transparency process, but this time for the intelligence agencies. The memo “is different than what we usually see,” NextGov advised. Instead of “wiggle room, vague timelines, and the ‘consistent with applicable law’ language that gives everyone room to slow walk implementation, there are named officials. Hard deadlines. A governance body with actual authority to issue binding directives.”

In other words, a control architecture.

Writ large, NPSM-12 places all national security systems under the authority of a single agency, the NSA, for cybersecurity purposes. This makes superficial sense in an age when AI chatbots are racing toward a quantum singularity that could crack any existing encryption.

But some of the NSPM’s related powers could also challenge the standard operating procedures of all clandestine work. One wonky analysis of the order said, “Agencies will be required to maintain annual inventories of all National Security Systems under their control.” And, the NSA “will be able to issue emergency directives requiring agencies to take immediate action, to protect sensitive networks.”

The first example that sprang to mind was the FBI’s alleged “Prohibited Access” files— the Bureau’s second set of books-off-the-books that Kash Patel’s team uncovered. NSPM-12 would have disclosed its existence. The parts of that dark-file system that were electronically stored, searched, transmitted, encrypted, cross-loaded, or hidden within FBI infrastructure— they now fall under the NSA’s brand-new role as National Manager.

That means the FBI’s so-secret-the-secret-is-secret prohibited access system must be inventoried, logged, audited, secured, and surfaced. Assuming the other agencies are pursuing the same “prohibited access” angle (why wouldn’t they?), it will be devastating for generations of deep state skunkworks.

Here’s how NextGov explained it to the agencies:

Needless to say, for any off-books file system, visibility —a “clean picture of a full agency footprint”— is apocalyptic. And if Trump 2.0 has taught career bureaucrats anything, it is that resisters get pink slips.

And now we circle back to Bill Pulte, the dreaded man who just terrified Democrats into protesting so hard that they lapsed their favorite spy program, “plunging” the nation into “unknown territory.” Not coincidentally, Pulte is closely tied to DOGE. His critics constantly complain about how, under Pulte’s leadership, the DOGE model was extended into housing finance and related domains.

Add to that Bill’s pre‑government “Twitter philanthropy” branding, where he explicitly discussed using technology and social media to expose corruption in welfare infrastructures, and later, in mortgage fraud, and you see a consistent character: Bill Pulte leans into a public identity as a tech‑driven, anti‑corruption crusader.

Now, suddenly, Bill Pulte is the acting Director of National Intelligence. And within days of getting that job, without announcement or fanfare, he was handed NSPM-12. Consider that a coincidence if you like. But Bill now sits at the political apex of the IC while a strictly worded memo forces agencies to hand over detailed maps of their most sensitive systems.

Just like that, Bill became entitled to receive a list of everything the agencies are quietly squirreling away in “prohibited access” type programs. Not an inventory down to the file level, but a broad list of all programs housing intelligence files, along with information about where and how the data is stored. In other words, it is an AI-powered roadmap for what to ask for next.

All this falls under the indisputable logic of cybersecurity in an age of artificial-intelligence singularities. It is an irresistible demolition crane. And DOGE-superstar Bill Pulte just got the keys.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Tomorrow we’ll dig into the most tantalizing story of the week— drama queen and oleaginous governor Gavin Newsom just confessed to being under federal investigation in a melodramatic “I’m the real victim” selfie video. That, and much more, in the Wednesday roundup.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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