Sean Flaherty

Main interests are election integrity, civil liberties, national security, tech and culture.

[Sean Flaherty @SeanFlahertyIA]

"Elections are highly complex operations, and errors inevitably occur. The most accurate results come not from relying on either machine tabulation or hand counts alone, but from pairing the two together." - The Bipartisan Policy Center https://t.co/CSU3nSlyhB

[Dave Troy @davetroy]

Hint: she's a 'Dialog Fellow.' And she negotiated Epstein's non-prosecution agreement in 2008 with Alex Acosta. Might want to have a look at this one. 👀
https://t.co/08BuO8capT

[Sean Flaherty @SeanFlahertyIA]

https://t.co/OsdpnPyj3R

[Sean Flaherty @SeanFlahertyIA]

Trump's Greenland ambitions go back to his first term, with deep roots and serious strategizing. This year's stories seemed a distracting farce. They were not. This piece is well worth your time indeed.

[Amy Mackinnon @ak_mack]

This fabulous deep-dive by Ben Taub on Trump's Greenland ambitions is well worth your time https://t.co/ZJLmUjh2OT

[Dan Shapiro @DanielBShapiro]

Until the text of the US-Iran deal is signed and released, there is going to be a lot of spin on both sides. But here is my initial take.

This war was a mistake, and it needs to end. The President thought that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly, but it did not. In fact, it has been strengthened strategically by its survival against a heavy US-Israeli assault and carrying out some effective counterstrikes. Many countries in the region are now courting Iran and looking to deescalate and rebuild ties. A sign of which way the wind is blowing.

Getting the Strait of Hormuz open is the most important outcome of this MOU. Of course, the Strait was open before the war. Now we are paying to reopen it with sanctions relief. Iran has taken a theoretical point of leverage and turned it into a very real and powerful one, imposing costs across the global economy and rattling President Trump.

As for the nuclear issues, there really is no agreement, other than to negotiate over the HEU stockpile and an enrichment moratorium. Iran knows how to drag out those negotiations, and try to pocket concessions along the way. It is possible that no deal will every be reached, and very likely that if one is reached, it will be worse than what we could have achieved through diplomacy before the war.

Iran is not likely to take seriously that the US would return to war, certainly before the US midterms. So that means we will be conducting diplomacy without a credible threat of force.

If any agreement ultimately reached actually safely puts Iran's nuclear ambitions out of reach, I'll acknowledge it. It's just too early to make that judgment.

Trump is mainly focused on comparing his deal favorably to the JCPOA. But we are a long way from being able to make that comparison, and it may end up no better, or weaker than that deal.

But in some ways, Trump's deal and the JCPOA are already similar. Nothing on ballistic missiles, nothing on proxies, nothing on weakening the regime or helping the Iranian people. And plenty of sanctions relief that will strengthen the regime, and be poured into the missile program and proxy network. Honest critics of the JCPOA will not twist themselves into pretzels to defend Trump's approach.

Israelis are deeply disappointed in this outcome, but they should not be surprised. After some initial overlap of Trump's and Netanyahu's interests, there was a strong divergence. The United States needed this war to end. Netanyahu wanted to continue.

Trump's claim to include Lebanon in the ceasefire and his harsh shutting down Israeli attacks on Hezbollah is also a win for Iran. After the JCPOA was signed, Obama and Netanyahu worked together to strengthen Israel's campaign of strikes in Syria to intercept Iranian weapons shipments to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So let's hope we see the removal of Iran's enriched uranium and a long-term suspension of enrichment, with full verification. But to achieve those goals, Trump's team is going to need to engage in far more sophisticated diplomacy, backed by qualified experts, than they have to date. If it is a phase one splash with no follow-up on implementation of later phases, like in Gaza, we will be much worse off after, and because of, this war.

[Sean Flaherty @SeanFlahertyIA]

@ForecasterEnten I don't think he's worried about mass opinion; I worry the blood spectacle on the White House lawn is in part about cultivation of a civilly dominant warrior class and adherents. 1200 of 4000 seats reserved for junior officers and enlisteds who meet physical fitness standards.

[Sean Flaherty @SeanFlahertyIA]

There may more to the UFC madness than Trump's vanity. It could in significant part be about cultivating support among young military officers and enlisteds. 1200 of the 4000 seats are reserved for junior officers and enlisteds who meet physical fitness standards. This event could be about advancing the militarization of American politics.

https://t.co/GSryvOfnLv

[Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien]

Trump is so angry that Iran will not give him a deal that he is telling the US military to commit war crimes. Destroying a drinking water facility is not an attack on a target of war, but a mafia-style operation designed to harm the Iranian people.
https://t.co/RikqZSOaSY

[Sean Flaherty @SeanFlahertyIA]

This proposed amendment is a new low.

[Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi @CongressmanRaja]

My parents brought me to this country as an infant in search of a better life. That’s what America is all about.
Rep. Nancy Mace’s proposed constitutional amendment to bar naturalized citizens from serving in Congress, on the federal bench, and in Senate-confirmed positions is morally wrong. We must stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the bigotry and hate behind it.

[Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi @CongressmanRaja]

Three people are dead after a horrific act of hate at a mosque in San Diego.
No one should fear violence because of how they worship. Anti-Muslim hate has no place in America, and we must confront it wherever it exists.
https://t.co/a6Uv0e6zs4

[Michael Bennet @SenatorBennet]

No, Tina Peters should not have had her sentence commuted. She broke Colorado laws and was convicted by a jury of her peers.

Here’s my statement:

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks.
The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people.

ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher.

My Take
The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing.

I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all.

Hedgie🤗
https://t.co/8Kg8FOrgHW

[Joaquin Castro @JoaquinCastrotx]

Last year, Dr. Ezequiel Véliz was named 2025 Resident of the Year at UT Health, Rio Grande Valley.

Last week, ICE detained him in McAllen, Texas—ripping him away from his family, his life, and his patients.

The Trump Administration’s mass deportation campaign is destroying lives. ICE is not going after the worst of the worst, they are targeting people like Dr. Véliz, who has been living in the U.S. for nine years, married to a U.S. citizen, and meeting the healthcare needs of a severely underserved population. Dr. Véliz should be released immediately.

[Ben Rhodes @brhodes]

In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with the IRGC demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents - including hundreds of children - dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.

[Sean Flaherty @SeanFlahertyIA]

@IngrahamAngle Where do you get the idea that the left doesn't care about the successfull recovery of a US pilot?

[Catherine Belton @CatherineBelton]

A spokesperson for Buskirk, who also is a co-founder of 1789 Capital, the investment firm where Donald Trump Jr. serves as a partner, said he had “no affiliation with MCC, never has, and did not attend these conferences. Any statement suggesting otherwise is false.”

[Protect Kamala Harris ✊ @DisavowTrump20]

Retired 4-Star Navy Admiral and former Navy SEAL William McRaven on Donald Trump: "Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation."

RETWEET if you stand with Admiral McRaven!

[Sean Flaherty @SeanFlahertyIA]

@GOP Bogus. Senate Ds offered a bill that would have funded everything but immigration enforcement, while much-needed reforms to ICE, CBP are negotiated.

https://t.co/zkoLT4kQN5

[António Guterres @antonioguterres]

Muslims worldwide often face institutional discrimination, socio-economic exclusion, biased immigration policies & unwarranted surveillance & profiling.

This International Day to Combat Islamophobia, let’s re-commit to the equality, human rights & dignity of every person, no matter their faith.

[Sean Flaherty @SeanFlahertyIA]

"President Carter himself publicly endorsed mail-in voting and absentee ballots in 2020, a view that continued until his death in 2024.

“I urge political leaders across the country to take immediate steps to expand vote-by-mail and other measures to help protect the core of American democracy — the right of our citizens the vote,” he said in May 2020 amid concerns about elections during the COVID-19 pandemic."

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

There is a strong negative proof for Russian intelligence involvement as well, since as far as can be seen, there are no Russian targets mentioned in the files despite extensive Russian involvement and discussion. They were the hunters, not the hunted.