Quincy Institute's co-founder and executive vice president of programs Trita Parsi debated Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies today on CSPAN's Washington Journal program.
The two sparred a bit over today's presidential elections in Iran, the nuclear deal and U.S. sanctions on Tehran. They also took call-in questions. Watch below:
When it was reported this week that former President Joe Biden’s FBI may have targeted the cellphones of eight Republican senators in the "Arctic Frost” investigation related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot, the Republicans that were supposedly surveilled were not happy about it.
One was Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who posted on X Wednesday, “We need to know why (ATT) and (Verizon) did not challenge the subpoena for the phone records of eight United States senators when the Biden FBI spied on us during an anti-Trump probe.”
“There needs to be a reckoning for this,” she declared.
On Thursday, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) explained to Blackburn why this might have happened, “It’s called the Patriot Act, FISA, and CISA.”
“Please vote no next time,” he insisted.
During her tenure in the House, Blackburn voted for the Patriot Act each time it came up for renewal since it was passed in 2001 and numerous other federal surveillance measures since that time too.
The Patriot Act was first hastily signed into law in the politically charged days and weeks after 9/11, significantly expanding the federal government’s spying and law enforcement powers. Section 215 allows the F.B.I. to obtain secret court orders and to collect any business records the agency deems vital to national security.
This Act supposedly designed to target potential terrorists has since been used to go after drug dealers, track website users, parents at school board meetings, and more.
Perhaps even spying on Republican senators.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has long been a vocal champion of the Patriot Act. He was also one of the Republicans reportedly surveilled — and he’s very mad about it.
In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Graham roared to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “Can you tell me why my phone records were sought by the Jack Smith agents?” — Smith being the J6 investigation special counsel.
“Why did they ask to know who I called and what I was doing from January 4th to the 7th?” Graham wondered loudly and aggressively.
In May 2015, after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) attempted to block an extension of the Patriot Act with a ten-plus hour filibuster, Sen. Graham famously rolled his eyes over Paul’s efforts.
Paul warned that the Patriot Act undermined civil liberties. Then and now, Graham has always appeared to have full faith in the government handling power responsibly.
Now Sen. Graham seems shocked — shocked — that the FBI might have intruded so easily into his own privacy.
There is little doubt that Sens. Blackburn or Graham are genuinely outraged that they may have been spied on, and it probably feels personal.
But there is something to be said about these Republicans’ privacy possibly being breached through government tools they championed.
Because they can’t say they weren’t told.
Sen. Paul, like Rep. Massie, and Congressman Ron Paul before them, and a handful of other libertarian-leaning Washington lawmakers have long warned that giving intelligence officials unconstitutional or at least extra-constitutional powers was a threat to Americans’ basic privacy.
A handful of progressives, like Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Democratic members of Congress like Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney in the past have consistently opposed the Patriot Act on similar grounds.
In fact, the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act at its inception in October 2001 was Democrat Russ Feingold.
When Republican Ron Johnson ran against Feingold in 2010 and defeated him to win that Wisconsin senate seat, Feingold touted his lone opposition to the Patriot Act in ads throughout his campaign, while Johnson dismissed his opponent on that front.
Sen. Johnson has been a supporter of the Patriot Act. He was also one of the GOP senators allegedly spied on.
Johnson posted on X on Tuesday, “By now, it should be obvious that partisan leftists are the danger to our democracy. The latest example: Biden’s FBI went on a fishing expedition and subpoenaed the phone records of 9 members of Congress.”
“This should shock and outrage every American,” he contended. It should. For some, it long has. For at least these three Republican senators, this never shocked them until this week.
When a then-still unknown Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that the NSA had been collecting the phone data of millions of Americans, Sen. Graham said he was “glad.” “I’m glad the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country,” Graham responded.
Perhaps the Biden administration was glad to see what Lindsey Graham and his Republican friends might have been up to too.
It appears that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is emerging victorious in the internal Trump administration battle over the direction of U.S. policy toward Venezuela.
The New York Times reported on Oct. 6 that White House special envoy Richard Grenell — who, after meeting President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas this January inked deportation agreements, won the release of American prisoners, and secured energy licenses for U.S. and European oil majors — was told by President Donald Trump to stop all diplomatic outreach toward the resource-rich South American nation.
The news comes as some Trump officials, particularly Rubio, have pushed the president to escalate tensions, which he has done by dispatching a major naval deployment to the Southern Caribbean in an alleged counternarcotics operation, killing over 20 alleged drug traffickers in at least four strikes against go-fast boats since early September.
Rubio, a Cuban-American former senator from Florida, has long been a leading voice in Washington for a combination of “maximum pressure” sanctions and related regime change efforts against Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
In January 2019, Rubio asked Trump to recognize little-known National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó as interim president, which he did the next day, prompting Maduro to break off diplomatic ties with Washington. Amid a series of failed military uprisings spurred on by Guaidó that year, Rubio tweeted the Miami jail photo of deposed Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and images of a bloody Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan ruler, minutes before his death, in an apparent threat to Maduro. Before that, under President Barack Obama, Rubio spearheaded some of the first calls to sanction top Venezuelan officials over alleged rights abuses.
Despite catching then-candidate Trump’s ire on the 2016 campaign trail, Rubio, who also serves as the president’s national security adviser, has since become Trump’s most trusted voice on foreign policy, “amassing the kind of foreign policy power last seen by Henry Kissinger,” according to a recent Miami Herald profile.
His ideological flexibility on issues such as negotiations with Russia and cuts to democracy programs abroad has seemingly not extended to his almost obsessive agenda to oust the Maduro government. Yet while Rubio once invoked democracy and the rule of law to push for Maduro’s removal, he and leading figures in Venezuela’s opposition have since weaponized the 2020 indictment against Maduro in a New York federal court to convert Venezuela — which Trump administration officials allege is flooding the U.S. with drugs and criminals — into a purely law enforcement matter.
Rubio has found willing allies on both sides of the aisle in his maximum pressure approach. On Capitol Hill, GOP Florida lawmakers Sen. Rick Scott, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, Rep. María Elvira Salazar and Rep. Carlos Giménez, along with Democratic Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Jared Moskowitz, have all backed Rubio’s hardline policy. Many of these legislators maintain close ties to prominent Venezuelan-American anti-Maduro donors and activists like Ernesto Ackerman, who has called Rubio “our general,” and Kennedy Bolívar, who regularly shares content with him alongside Rubio and Scott.
During Trump’s first administration, when Rubio served as “shadow secretary of state for Latin America,” then-national security adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin also lined up behind regime change in the country. Trump’s special representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams and his deputy, Carrie Filipetti — now chairman and executive director, respectively, of the neoconservative Vandenberg Coalition — with whom Rubio would regularly consult, played important operational roles in those efforts.
At the White House, longtime Rubio ally and former pro-Cuba embargo lobbyist Mauricio Claver-Carone, who also served initially as the State Department’s Special Envoy for Latin America in Trump’s current term, was an architect of sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil industry, which economists say fueled an unprecedented exodus of Venezuelans from the country. “Once Mauricio came in, the policy went on overdrive,” Rubio told the New York Times in 2019.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whose disqualification from running in the July 2024 presidential elections resulted in the candidacy of diplomat Edmundo González, has arguably been the leading proponent of Rubio’s approach. Despite vote tallies from 83% of the country’s electoral precincts showing Gonzalez with an insurmountable lead of 67% of the ballots cast, the National Electoral Council declared that Maduro had won with 51% of the vote, a result denounced by international observer missions as lacking in transparency.
Amid a crackdown against the opposition, Gonzalez fled to Spain soon after the election, while Machado went into hiding. But she has been participating virtually in efforts by her supporters in exile to lobby for regime change, including in conferences with executives and financiers in New York and Houston at which she has depicted Venezuela as a trillion-dollar investment opportunity.
For over two decades, U.S. officials have lined up behind opposition figures working to install a government in Caracas friendlier to U.S. corporate interests. When the Chavez administration nationalized all privately owned oil fields in 2007, U.S. and European firms Chevron and Repsol played by the new rules of engagement, reconfiguring their joint ventures with state-run PDVSA. But ExxonMobil — whose CEO at the time, Rex Tillerson, would become Trump’s first secretary of state — rejected them, leading to years of litigation against Venezuela’s government.
Former Exxon counsel involved in the litigation, Carlos Vecchio, would in 2019 become interim president Guaido’s ambassador in Washington, working closely with fellow Popular Will party co-founder Leopoldo Lopez, special envoy on migration David Smolansky, OAS ambassador Gustavo Tarre, Lima Group ambassador Julio Borges and opposition negotiator Freddy Guevara, among others, to hasten Maduro’s departure.
These voices have featured prominently in the media and at U.S. think tanks like CSIS, AS/COA and the Manhattan Institute, while lobbyists at the Cormac Group and Continental Strategy have represented the anti-Maduro opposition and the neighboring government of Guyana — where Exxon discovered massive offshore deposits in territorially disputed waters after departing Venezuela — in their efforts to isolate Maduro regionally and levy harsher sanctions against the country’s economy.
U.S. government funding through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy and the seizure of Venezuelan assets abroad have also underwritten some of these efforts. Much of the assistance earmarked toward Venezuela has gone toward aid relief and civil society groups, but some has been used to influence the policy debate in Washington and bankroll opposition parties while yet another portion was allegedly siphoned off by Guaidó and his inner circle.
When other approaches appear to have failed, military adventurism has been pursued. In 2020, former Green Beret Jordan Boudreau, after claiming to sign a contract with Guaidó and his Miami-based associates JJ Rendon and Sergio Vergara, led a failed invasion intended to oust Maduro. The Trump administration and Guaidó denied any involvement. More recently Blackwater founder Erik Prince has claimed to have raised over $1 million for an operation designed to achieve Maduro’s downfall.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department recently raised the bounty for the arrest and/or conviction of Maduro to $50 million and designated the “Cartel de los Soles,” which he allegedly heads, as a foreign terrorist organization.
U.S. intelligence agencies have denied claims, including by Rubio himself, that another Venezuelan transnational criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, is led by Maduro.
Yet this hasn’t stopped the administration from using the allegation — which analysts say is being used to justify the military buildup near Venezuela — as a pretext to also strip Temporary Protected Status for 600,000 Venezuelans, many living in the South Florida congressional districts which overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
Many of the overwhelmingly anti-Maduro voters in these districts, a majority of whom also reject U.S. military action to depose him, are now rethinking their decision, mostly over his deportations and termination of protected status for migrants, according to reports this spring.
For now, Rubio seems to be firmly in the driver’s seat of the administration’s muscular approach to Venezuela — even if his traditional base of supporters, and most Americans for that matter, aren’t going along for the ride.
Since early September, members of the Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) terrorist organization have been attacking and kidnapping truck drivers transporting fuel to the Malian capital of Bamako. The effects of this blockade appear to be reaching a high point, with images this week showing residents jammed into long lines in the city’s supply-squeezed gas stations.
This comes after several days during which the blockade’s cuts to fuel forced many gas stations across the city to close. Some of the stations that have since reopened are only able to sell diesel to the city’s residents.
JNIM’s recent offensive has included a wider onslaught on surrounding businesses, attacking many local and foreign firms operating in the periphery of Bamako and in surrounding cities. Among the businesses that have endured attacks include those operating cement and sugar factories as well as mines — each of which is a critical sector to the country’s struggling economy.
According to Beverly Ochieng, a Sahel regional expert and senior analyst at the security consulting firm Control Risks, JNIM’s tactics to disrupt life in the Sahel include violent attacks against the region’s residents and militaries.
Ochieng told the BBC that JNIM plants “IEDs [improvised explosive devices] on key roads, and have long-range capabilities. They [also] target security forces in military bases, so a lot of their weapons come from that. They have also attacked civilians — in instances where communities are perceived to be cooperating with the government."
JNIM’s remarkable ability to bring the transport of fuel to the country’s capital to a near halt is the clearest sign yet of the organization’s extraordinary growth from a collection of disparate armed groups to a powerful player whose actions implicate the physical and economic security of Malians.
Formed in Mali in 2017 from the coalescence of five preexisting armed groups, JNIM is an al-Qaeda-affiliated organization seeking to overtake the governments of Sahelian countries and implement its strict form of Sharia law.
In recent years, the armed group has dramatically increased the territory under its control. According to Dr. Daniel Ezienga, a research fellow at the Pentagon-affiliated Africa Center for Strategic Studies, “The JNIM coalition now exerts much more influence and control over territory in Mali than at any other previous time during the 13-year insurgency.”
Along with the group’s geographic expansion have come a rise in attacks. According to the BBC, in the first half of 2025 JNIM was responsible for carrying out 280 attacks — double the amount of attacks for which the organization was responsible over the same six-month period last year.
Beyond a rise in the number of attacks overall, JNIM’s geographic expansion has increased the breadth of attacks across parts of the country that had previously experienced only limited JNIM activity.
Whereas last year the vast majority of JNIM’s offensive was concentrated in the country’s north — with only 8 percent of JNIM-induced violence occurring in the country’s southwest — this year, close to 20 percent of JNIM’s violent activity has taken place in southwest Mali. Bamako, which houses the seat of the country’s junta government, is located in the far southwest and is increasingly surrounded by JNIM activity and violence.
Among the major cities JNIM has aggressively bombarded in recent months is Kayes, located about 380 miles northwest of Bamako in the heart of the country’s southwest region. Kayes is the country’s second-largest contributor to national GDP, after Bamako, and a major transport route. Straddling the Senegal River, many of the goods transported from neighboring Senegal travel through Kayes on their way to the rest of the country. Both the cities of Kayes and Nioro du Sahel, located to Bamako’s north, have been primary locations of JNIM’s blockade. JNIM has banned all fuel imports from Senegal, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mauritania, and has placed fighters on strategic locations along the country’s roads and riverways to ensure the blockade holds.
JNIM hopes the rippling effects of the blockade will upend the social contract between a population unable to obtain fuel and other basic necessities and a junta government that JNIM views as governing in violation of Islamic principles.
According to Ochieng, “JNIM [has] an ability to embed in local communities or to be able to use local grievances as a means of recruiting or winning sympathy towards their cause.” The economic strife created by the successful blockade, therefore, serves as a way to recruit disaffected Malians.
This fuel blockade and its effects have potential geopolitical consequences. The Malian junta had been receiving extensive support from the Russian Wagner mercenary group until recently, when the Kremlin decided that they would replace Wagner fighters with those from Africa Corps. In exchange, Russia receives payment and access to Mali’s resources. The Russian government has more control over Africa Corps, and uses this group less offensively than
Wagner, which suffered a major loss on the battlefield in 2024 when 84 Wagner fighters were reportedly killed in an ambush in Mali’s northern border city of Tinzaouaten. Whereas Wagner traditionally conducts more direct counterterrorism operations — such as ground-to-ground combat — Africa Corps is focused more on training and logistical support for national militaries with whom it partners.
Russia’s influence in the region grew after the United States and France left. The United States and France — the two traditional counterterrorism partners for Sahelian countries — have completely pulled their troops out of Mali and the neighboring junta states of Niger and Burkina Faso following failed counterinsurgency efforts there, and the rise of coup governments that oppose Western influence. The junta governments then turned to Russian mercenaries for counterterrorism support, believing that Russian aid would come with fewer stipulations.
This recent fuel blockade and its widespread effects on the residents of Bamako is an indication that Russia’s influence in the region is limited, and has thus far failed to defeat the armed groups against which Russian mercenaries have been fighting.
With JNIM threatening the stability of the Malian government and beating down on Bamako’s economic health, Russia’s Africa Corps has a difficult task ahead. If the war’s current trajectory continues, Africa Corps, too, could soon be on its way out of Mali, having failed to deliver peace for a junta government that might not survive the pressures caused by the country’s collapsing economic and security situation.
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