Yesterday was a lot. British spies caught the Kremlin on tape laughing at Trump. A QAnon ally circulated a 17-page draft order to seize control of American elections using emergency powers. And the Secretary of Defense threatened to invoke a Korean War law to strip the last AI guardrails protecting you from government surveillance. Here’s what you missed.
The Kremlin’s Favorite Punchline
British intelligence intercepted actual communications from Putin’s inner circle – not the diplomatic kind, the “oh my god can you believe this guy” kind. UK officials brought these intercepts to their American counterparts. Multiple times. Trump went to Alaska for a ceasefire summit, left empty-handed, and called it a ten. Then he repeated Kremlin talking points at American press conferences, announced a week-long pause on bombing that turned out to be two days, and blamed Ukraine when Russia resumed strikes.
British intelligence kept bringing the receipts. Someone on the American side apparently kept losing them.
Trump’s Election Emergency Playbook: QAnon Allies Draft the Order
Five years after January 6th, the same crowd that called 2020 stolen is circulating a 17-page executive order. The premise: China interfered in the election. The prize: emergency presidential powers to ban mail-in ballots, ban voting machines, and get the military involved in elections. The people writing this are a Florida attorney once suspended for professional misconduct and a Harvard PhD who helped popularize QAnon. They say the White House is listening.
Courts already blocked an earlier version. So the play is to go bigger – emergency powers live on different legal terrain. The midterms are nine months away. That part’s not a coincidence.
Hegseth Wants to Use a Korean War Law to Make AI Less Safe
Anthropic makes Claude, the only AI model running inside the Pentagon’s classified systems. They have two rules they won’t bend on: no fully autonomous kill decisions, no mass surveillance of American civilians. Pete Hegseth looked at those two guardrails and threatened the Defense Production Act – a 1950 law Harry Truman used to manufacture aluminum for fighter jets during Korea – to strip them out. The other three major AI companies already folded. Anthropic is the last one standing.
A Pentagon official told Axios: “We need them and we need them now.” Defense contractors are being warned about their “Anthropic exposure” – threat language normally reserved for Huawei and ZTE. The two rules at stake: don’t let AI autonomously decide who to kill, and don’t let AI run mass surveillance on American citizens. The Pentagon considers both unreasonable.
Wanna go deeper? The Intelligence Operations section over on rachelandthecity is where the Kremlin intercepts and the Hegseth AI standoff both live – because they are really the same story. Who controls the information, who is watching you, and who is trying to make sure nobody is watching them.
// Go Deeper on rachelandthecity
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