Sara Hakel

[CBS News @CBSNews]

Former special counsel Jack Smith was pressed by Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) on Tuesday during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about whether he attended a NBA game between the Atlanta Hawks and Golden State Warriors in Atlanta in early February 2024.

Smith said he “definitely did not go" to an Atlanta Hawks game. "I think you've already perjured yourself," Schitt said during the exchange, calling Smith a "total dirtbag."

Smith said he instead attended a Maryland-Iowa women’s basketball game to see Iowa star Caitlin Clark play. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) suggested Schmitt had confused the Iowa Hawkeyes with the Atlanta Hawks and said Smith deserved an apology.

[Sara Hakel @hakelpics]

Watching online cooking on FB and the “chefs” using a table spoon as their main utensil gives me anxiety. Is that how you really cook? Asking for a friend

[MAGA Cult Slayer @MAGACult2]

When the Titanic went down, Donald Trump was right there. Jiffy on the spot to help. Yes, we are going to mock him relentlessly.

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

On camera, Don Jr. pulls out a little baggie with white powder at his father's birthday party.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨SHOCKING: Pete Hegseth and his staff came to the Senate to ask for a half TRILLION dollar increase for the Pentagon, but when asked about Iran war spending, they're like deer in headlights.

Billions of taxpayer dollars are vanishing into a war with zero exit strategy, and those in charge have no idea where the money goes.

INCOMPETENCE is an understatement.

[Sara Hakel @hakelpics]

@SidneyPowellQ A

[Mykhailo Rohoza @MykhailoRohoza]

Donald Trump attacks Giorgia Meloni — and she delivers a fiery speech he’ll never forget.
Donald Trump thought he could easily score political points by calling Giorgia Meloni “an insult to Jesus,” accusing her of “not being woke,” and claiming that God does not discriminate. Unfortunately for “Don Dementia,” this time he picked the wrong target.
Standing at a historic location, Giorgia Meloni didn’t just respond — she delivered a full moral reckoning.
“The President of the United States just said that I insult Jesus,” Giorgia Meloni declared. “Do you want to know what really insults Jesus? Taking healthcare away from the sick while cutting taxes for billionaires.”
And that was only the beginning.
“Do you want to know what else insults Jesus?” she continued. “Deporting foreigners and separating children from their mothers.”
Then she went even further, touching on war, corruption, and hypocrisy.
“Do you want to know what insults Jesus? Bombing innocent schools in Iran and sending our brave men and women to die in yet another endless war… hiding the Epstein files and then refusing to prosecute anyone involved.”
This wasn’t politics as usual. It was a full moral indictment.
Giorgia Meloni, targeted by Trump for supporting transgender people and for saying that “trans children are children of God,” completely turned the tables. Instead of backing down, she grounded her message in the very teachings Trump tried to weaponize.
“I am not a perfect Christian,” she said. “There was only one perfect man, and two thousand years ago he was crucified.”
Then came the line that hit the hardest:
“Jesus told us to love our neighbor as ourselves… Can we imagine war in heaven? Can we imagine hatred in heaven? Can we imagine poverty in heaven? Then why do we tolerate these things on Earth?”
This is how you respond. Not with insults. Not with fear. But with clarity and conviction.
Trump tried to discredit her. Instead, Giorgia Meloni delivered a sermon that now echoes far beyond that hall.
Please share Giorgia Meloni’s inspiring words.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Kaivan Shroff @KaivanShroff]

9 years ago.

@HillaryClinton warned us:

“This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes – because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.”

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Actual quotes from President Trump:

Trump’s “victory timeline” claims.

Mar 3: "We won the war."
Mar 7: "We defeated Iran."
Mar 9: "We must attack Iran."
Mar 9: "The war is ending almost completely, and very beautifully.
March 10: practically nothing left to target
Mar 11: “You never like to say too ⁠early you won. We won. In ​the first hour it was over.” Mar 12: "We did win, but we haven't won completely yet."
Mar 13: "We won the war."
Mar 14: "Please help us."
Mar 15: "If you don't help us, I will certainly remember it."
Mar 16: "Actually, we don't need any help at all."
Mar 16: "I was just testing to see who's listening to me."
Mar 16: "If NATO doesn't help, they will suffer something very bad."
Mar 17: "We neither need nor want NATO's help."
Mar 17: "I don't need Congressional approval to withdraw from NATO."
Mar 18: "Our allies must cooperate in reopening the Strait of Hormuz."
Mar 19: "US allies need to get a grip - step up and help open the Strait of Hormuz."
Mar 20: "NATO are cowards."
Mar 21: "The Strait of Hormuz must be protected by the countries that use it. We don't use it, we don't need to open it."
Mar 22: "This is the last time. I will give Iran 48 hours. Open the strait"
Mar 22: "Iran is Dead"

Mar 23: "We had very good and productive talks with Iran."
Mar 24: "We’re making progress."
Mar 25: “They gave us a present and the present arrived today. And it was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. I’m not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a very significant prize.” Mar 26: "Make a deal, or we’ll just keep blowing them away."
Mar 27: "We don’t have to be there for NATO."
Mar 28: No major quote
Mar 29: Claimed talks were progressing
Mar 30: "Open the Strait of Hormuz immediately, or face devastating consequences."
Mar 31: Claimed a deal was "very close" and that Iran would "do the right thing"
Apr 1: "We’ll see what happens very soon."
Apr 2: Repeated that a deal was likely, while warning of continued strikes if not
Apr 3: "Something big is going to happen."
Apr 4: Said Iran must comply "immediately" or face further consequences.

Apr 5: "Open the fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah."
April 6 :a whole civilization will die
April 7: total and complete victory
April8: objectives were met

A true disaster

[Abier @abierkhatib]

‘The golfer from Mara lago’
🫢

[Mark Slapinski @mark_slapinski]

This is HILARIOUS.

Canada is just ROASTING Karoline Leavitt.

[Sara Hakel @hakelpics]

@Nas_tech_AI 2

[BMcArthur @bmcarthur20]

Living in this crazy world can mean sometimes we forget what love looks like. Here's a reminder.

WATCH:

#DemsUnited

[Sara Hakel @hakelpics]

@onlyyou_5510 127

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

Keep Retweeting please 🙏

[Sara Hakel @hakelpics]

@sophia_artx Sky

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

Immigrants ‘plucked out of line’ at citizenship oath ceremony at Faneuil Hall “the cradle of liberty”.

If you ever claimed you want immigrants to do it the right way, you should be outraged by this. On the other hand, If you think this was okay, you need to come to terms with your white nationalist views.

[Meidas_Charise Lee @charise_lee]

It’s RACISM‼️ They are NOT white‼️