This is C.I.'s "The Snapshot" for today:
A newly released video adds to the evidence that an American missile likely hit an Iranian elementary school where 175 people, many of them children, were reported killed.
The video, uploaded on Sunday by Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency and verified by The New York Times, shows a Tomahawk cruise missile striking a naval base beside the school in the town of Minab on Feb. 28. The U.S. military is the only force involved in the conflict that uses Tomahawk missiles.
A body of evidence assembled by The Times — including satellite imagery, social media posts and other verified videos — indicates that the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on the naval base. The base is operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was standing beside Mr. Trump, said the Pentagon was investigating, “but the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
The video of the strike, which was first reported by the research collective Bellingcat, was independently verified by The Times. We compared features visible in the footage to new satellite imagery captured days after the strikes in Minab.
The video was filmed from a construction site opposite the base and shows a worn, dirt path across a grassy area and piles of debris also evident in recent satellite imagery, bolstering its credibility. The video also comports with other verified videos taken in the immediate aftermath of the strikes.
Iran projected defiance in the face of expanding U.S.-Israeli attacks on Monday by naming a son of its slain supreme leader as his successor, disregarding warnings from the Trump administration, while a surge in oil prices signaled growing alarm over the war’s effect on the global economy.
The new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was appointed by a committee of senior clerics days after President Trump declared that he was an “unacceptable choice” and amid Israeli threats to kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s successor.
There have been only two supreme leaders since the job was created after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Now Iran has a third.
Mojtaba Khamenei, a 56-year-old politician, cleric and son of the previous supreme leader, was appointed to the role by a council of 88 clerics, known as the Assembly of Experts, according to a statement released early Monday morning local time.
As supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei becomes the head of state of the Islamic Republic of Iran, both a spiritual leader and the highest authority in the land. Under Iran’s Constitution, that gives him overarching control of Iran’s politics and its armed forces, as well as leadership in religious affairs.
The moment that split Steve Nikoui’s life into a before and after was when three Marines walked up his driveway to notify him that his 20-year-old son had been killed in Afghanistan.
Mr. Nikoui, who lives in Southern California, was recently pulled back into that painful memory, as he watched a mother on TV describing the same knock on the door after her own child was killed, this time during the conflict in Iran.
“My heart really went out to her and the families,” said Mr. Nikoui, whose son Kareem was killed during the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. “That is the beginning of your new life, a life that you never asked for, never dreamed about. Now it’s here.”
“Every day I just think about Kareem, the life he would’ve led, the things he would’ve done,” Mr. Nikoui added.
Since the United States and Israel launched coordinated attacks on Iran last month, at least seven American service members have been killed. Before Iran, the last reported deaths of U.S. service members occurred in December, when an attack in central Syria killed two Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter.
The WSJ ahead of the weekend published a story called, "Lindsey Graham's Quest to Sell Trump on Striking Iran." In that piece, there is a nugget about the senator engaging in a campaign to help Netanyahu to persuade Trump to launch an Iran war.
"To help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country's intelligence agency," the Journal reported Friday.
Graham is quoted in the article as saying, "They'll tell me things our own government won't tell me."
The report further states, "He spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead, Graham said."
Appearing on MS NOW over the weekend, Gillespie highlighted the hypocrisy of Trump's position on Iran, noting that he initially claimed military strikes would empower Iranians to choose their own leader—only to reverse course days later by declaring his intention to heavily influence Iran's next leader.
"A leader without followers is just a guy out taking a walk," Gillespie said, invoking a famous John Boehner quote. She warned that Trump is rapidly losing support among his core base.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So, do you have an estimate on the number of Americans still stranded in the Middle East?
SENATOR TIM KAINE: It's thousands and thousands.
MARGARET BRENNAN: It is?
SENATOR TIM KAINE: Now, not every American chooses to come home.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Right.
SENATOR TIM KAINE: So, there's hundreds of thousands if you just add them all up who is coming home. I am working with the Virginians who are reaching out to my office. We were able to facilitate one Richmond area resident getting home from Dubai on a flight a couple of days back. And so it's sort of dealing with that. But what worries me a little bit more is that some of the professionals at embassies and consuls are not being told to come home and they're sort of there and often their security presence is not what we wish it would be. So, we have to pay close attention to them.
Chump put no time into planning this war, he just rushed to join Netanyahu.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You're on Armed Services as well.
SENATOR TIM KAINE: Yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The Pentagon may be looking at a supplemental budget request to fund this new war in the Middle East. CSIS estimates the first 100 hours of the war cost nearly $4 billion.
SENATOR TIM KAINE: Yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Have you heard an estimate on cost? Where are we on this supplemental? Will it get any Democratic support?
SENATOR TIM KAINE: We don't know that the White House is sending a supplemental. So, we had a classified briefing the other day and the topic came up. What I can say, and it's not classified, is the administration said they haven't made a decision. My goals right now are two-fold. Stop this war, which I view as both illegal and profoundly unwise, and protect our troops. If a supplemental comes over, I'm going to be looking to see, OK, how does it square with those goals? Protecting the troops is key. That's one of the reasons I want to stop the war. I think they're just exposed to a completely unnecessary risk by what President Trump has done. So, we'll look at a supplemental, if they send one –
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yes.
SENATOR TIM KAINE: To see, OK, how does it accomplish those goals.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Did they tell you what that's dependent on? Why don't they know if they need more money? Is it the duration of the time of the conflict or –
SENATOR TIM KAINE: I think that's the issue. You traditionally don't ask for a supplemental halfway through because you might ask for an inadequate amount. You might not – I think they may not want to ask for a supplemental because they're trying to avoid debates and votes in Congress on the Iran war right now.
I put up a war powers vote that I was –
MARGARET BRENNAN: Right.
SENATOR TIM KAINE: That I lost earlier this week. But I can assure you, I'm not going away. We have other means to have a debate and discussion about whether this war is in the U.S.' interest after 25 years of war in the Middle East.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yes.
SENATOR TIM KAINE: They may want to avoid a vote on that and are trying to delay it for that reason.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yes.
SENATOR TIM KAINE: They'll make that call and we have to look at the content.
American employees of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Saudi Arabia have been told to leave the country under mandatory departure orders issued by the State Department, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The move by the State Department means American officials are aware of growing risks in the region. It is the first time the agency has approved or issued what it calls an ordered departure in Saudi Arabia since the U.S.-Israel war on Iran began on Feb. 28.
The Justice Department released F.B.I. documents on Thursday describing several interviews with a woman who made an accusation against President Trump. The pages had been previously withheld from the vast trove of documents related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein because of what officials called a mistaken determination that they were duplicates.
The typewritten notes recounted multiple interviews the F.B.I. conducted in 2019 with the woman, who said she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump. She came forward shortly after Mr. Epstein was arrested that summer on charges of federal sex trafficking.
Her accusations against Mr. Trump date back to the 1980s, when she was a teenager. Her description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the president, contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.
The department had already released documents describing the existence of the memos released Thursday, indicating that the F.B.I. had conducted four interviews related to her claims and had written summaries of each conversation. But only one of those interviews, in which she described being assaulted by Mr. Epstein, appeared to be included in the initial release, raising questions about why the remaining three were missing.
The documents detail an FBI interview in 2019 with a woman who alleged that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was between the ages of 13 and 15 years old.
The allegations within the documents have not been corroborated by any additional evidence. However, the decision to exclude them from the Epstein files database has led to widespread suspicion that the DOJ was concealing them on Trump’s behalf, in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which prohibits files from being restricted for the purpose of protecting someone’s reputation.
The woman first came forward to the FBI following the 2019 arrest of Jeffrey Epstein, and was interviewed by the agency four separate times. A Justice Department source told the Miami Herald that the woman was found credible by the agency, the outlet reported.
In her interviews with the FBI, the woman accused Epstein and at least two other associates, including Trump, of sexual assault when she was 13. She accused Trump of sexually assaulting her, pulling her hair and punching her in the head sometime in the mid-1980s.
While details of her specific allegations against Trump were not further verified by The Post and Courier, other details she provided the FBI were, giving further credence to her account.
For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that “whether the women liked it or not,” he would “protect” them from migrants, whom he slandered as “monsters” who “kidnap and kill our children.”
But when given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability. During her hearing Bondi tried desperately to deflect attention, claiming that the stock market was more deserving of public attention than Epstein’s victims.
Even the Republican rank-and-file is now mysteriously detached from the Epstein files.
Dr. Bernard Kruger, a doctor in Manhattan, has stepped away from roles at two concierge medicine practices after the public disclosure of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy sex offender who died in a jail cell in 2019.
The head of one practice, the Atria Health and Research Institute, sent an email to employees on Monday saying that Dr. Kruger had “recently retired and is no longer involved with Atria.” He had been a part-time, nonpracticing physician there, the email said.
A spokeswoman for the other practice, Sollis Health, a private emergency room, said on Friday that Dr. Kruger was on leave from the company’s board of directors “pending a review launched by management in consultation with external legal counsel when it became aware of Dr. Kruger’s past interactions with Jeffrey Epstein.”
The doctor had been part of a small circle of specialists catering to Mr. Epstein in the last decade of his life, The New York Times reported last week.
[. . .]
Dr. Kruger was a longtime physician to Mr. Epstein. In 2016, a private emergency room in Manhattan that he co-founded charged Mr. Epstein $15,000 for an annual membership that covered him and five “girls,” emails show. An accountant told Mr. Epstein that the practice — called Priority Private Care at the time, but now Sollis Health — did not require naming the patients, which would give him “more flexibility.” (A spokeswoman for Sollis said names were added later, and also said Dr. Kruger had never been a practicing physician there.)
Dr. Kruger’s medical office in Manhattan also appears to have allowed Mr. Epstein to book appointments without using names. In one case in 2018, the office sought to reschedule an appointment for “Jeffrey’s assistant” but didn’t know which assistant. (It turned out to be a lawyer close with Mr. Epstein, and Dr. Kruger’s spokesman said the doctor never saw patients without knowing their identities.)
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., today demanded that big businesses and corporations use any tariff refunds they receive to compensate small businesses and U.S. consumers for any costs they incurred from Donald Trump’s reckless tariffs.
Trump’s trade war and reckless tariffs have resulted in higher prices, lost jobs, and chaos for businesses up and down the supply chain. Estimates show the average U.S. family paid nearly $2,000 because of the tariffs. If large corporations that passed along tariff costs are receiving refunds, it is imperative that consumers and small businesses who bore some of those costs are made whole.
“American consumers and small businesses did not choose to pay these tariffs, and the Supreme Court has confirmed that the tariffs were unlawful,” Wyden and Schumer wrote to Suzanne Clark, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Simple fairness demands that the financial burden imposed on small businesses and working families not become a windfall for the largest corporate balance sheets. Companies that passed along tariff costs should pass along savings from tariff refunds.”
This letter comes following an order from the Court of International Trade directing the Trump administration to cease delays and begin issuing refunds of the tariffs recently struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The order follows nearly two weeks of stalling by the Trump administration, which has tried to withhold refunds of tariffs they illegally collected from U.S. businesses.
The text of the letter is here.
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