CovertAction Bulletin

The United States and Iran have signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding after over 100 days of bombing and war by the U.S. and Israel since February. The United States, the most powerful military on the planet, has been forced to make significant concessions to Iran, including releasing Iranian funds that Trump vowed would never be available to Iran again. Further negotiations will determine...

Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX’s public offering last week, the largest in history. As of recording, he’s worth $1.4 trillion - an unimaginably large amount of money and more than a trillion dollars over the net worth of the next wealthiest person on the planet, Google co-founder Larry Page. Page is worth just over $300 billion. In fact, combining the wealth of th...

The World Cup is starting on June 11th with matches across the United States, Mexico and Canada. 104 matches will be played, with the majority in the 11 venues across the US. But as this week’s openers get closer, chaos is spreading around visas, travel and the question of whether fans are even going to bother coming to the United States. Host cities like Kansas City, MO are relying on revenue fro...

The Trump administration is planning a series of grand patriotic events for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. From a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship match on the South Lawn of the White House on June 14th - which is both Flag Day and Trump’s 80th birthday - to a ball drop in Times Square, a Grand Prix on the streets of DC in August and the Great American State Fair s...

From the Governor of California to the Mayor of Pensacola and Senate seats in Massachusetts, Ohio and beyond, socialist candidates and ideas are gaining momentum across the country. They’re talking about common-sense ideas that resonate with everyday people - things like public seizure of the 100 biggest corporations, abolishing the Supreme court, reparations for Black Americans, slashing the Pent...

The Pentagon has released hundreds of declassified files, pictures and videos relating to UAPs - Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena - more popularly known as UFOs. The materials date back to the late 1940s and include firsthand but generally uncorroborated narratives from military officers and civilians as well as grainy photos and videos that could really be anything. Various government and private...

In over 3,500 cities and towns across the United States, workers took to the streets on May 1st for a day of no work, no school, and no shopping on the fourth day this year of mass organized action. Following the January 23rd and 30th shutdowns that started in Minneapolis and spread coast to coast and the No Kings Day in March, May Day was the latest in what’s becoming a building process of collec...

Imagine being forced to prove how old you are - and having it verified by a third party -  before unlocking your phone or signing up for a social media site. That’s the goal of legislation introduced or passed in some U.S. states, the UK and Australia. Age verification requirements for social media and “adult content” are being proposed across the US, Europe and beyond with the justification of pr...

Congress is set to vote soon on reauthorization of the Section 702 warrantless surveillance program, part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. 702’s authorization expires on April 20th. On its surface, the program allows intelligence agencies to spy on non-citizens outside the United States - without their knowledge, or the consent of their governments. But people inside the US c...

NOTE : This episode was recorded hours before the announcement of the 2-week ceasefire on April 7th. Just a day after Donald Trump made a national prime-time address on April 1st claiming the US is “winning and winning big” in the war on Iran, an American F-15E Strike Eagle fighter plane was shot down over a mountainous region of eastern Iran, kicking off a frantic search-and-rescue and a covert m...

Cuba is set to receive oil for the first time in 2026, following the March 31st arrival at Matanzas Bay of the Russian tanker Anatoly Kolodkin with over 730,000 barrels, or 100,000 tons, of crude oil. The tanker and its owner, the state-owned company Sovcomflot, have had sanctions on it since 2024. Late last year, the Trump administration announced severe tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba...

Former FBI Director Robert Muller died on March 20th. He entered into that position on September 4th, 2001. Within eight weeks of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had arrested over 1,200 people - mostly Muslim men in the United States. None of them were shown to have any connection to Al Qaeda, but that didn’t deter the FBI and its partners in local law enforcement agencies like the NYPD from heightening...

Swarm Forge. Ender’s Foundry. Project Grant. Open Arsenal. These are the names of just some of the “Pace-Setting Projects” that Pete Hegseth identified in a January memorandum on the “ Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the Department of War. ” Their names are as hard to take seriously as “Operation Epic Fury,” but like the war, the Pentagon’s AI initiatives are already having a significant impa...

The 82nd Airborne Division has canceled a training exercise to keep the Division ready to deploy with just 18 hours of notification for what it calls “forcible entry parachute assaults.” Parts of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, are being moved from South Korea to the Middle East. As we are recording on Tuesday, March 10th, Pete Hegseth said it would be “yet again, our mos...

The US/Israeli war on Iran could easily spark a greater regional conflict if it continues. Donald Trump at first said Tehran would be taken in 3-4 days, then a day later claimed the war would last no more than 4-5 weeks and threatened that the US has enough weapons to fight “forever.” Already, the bombing has killed 787 people, including 180 at a girls’ school in Minab on Saturday as Operation Epi...

Is the U.S. government preparing to go to war with Iran? Leading up to talks set to happen towards the end of the week in Geneva, the Trump administration has also threatened Iran with war, saying the country has “10 to 15 days” as of February 20th to agree to a deal - putting Trump’s one-sided deadline somewhere in the first week of March. In apparent preparation for military strikes, massive amo...

While border czar Tom Homan announced last week that the surge of federal agents in Minnesota could be winding down, he signaled that other cities could be next. “I’m hoping other sanctuary cities look at what happened,” he said, threatening cities that have various levels of protection for undocumented residents. It’s unclear where ICE’s next moves might be, but they have also been ramping up the...

The situation in Cuba is dire as the Trump administration ramps up its campaign to destabilize the country and destroy its revolution. The island has not been able to import a single drop of oil all year, according to President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Tanker ships headed to Cuba from Venezuela were intercepted and seized by the U.S. military, which has been significantly building up its naval presence...

As we reported last week, well over 100,000 people shut down Minneapolis on January 23rd in response to the terror of ICE and CBP agents. The next Friday, in response to a call that originated with the Somali Student Association at the University of Minnesota, businesses across the country shut down and people went to the streets in hundreds of cities, continuing the protest movement nationwide. E...

Rachel was in Minneapolis last week where over 100,000 people took to the streets and reports on the mass action that happened Friday, shutting down businesses, schools and the city in response to the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE to Minneapolis and the brutal killing of Renee Nicole Good earlier this month. The next day, CBP agents killed Alex Pretti, a VA nurse, while he was pinned to...

Mass protests have taken place across the country after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis, executing her in her car as she tried to drive away. The shooting has ignited an extraordinary wave of resistance. In the Twin Cities and beyond, students walked out of school on Monday in protest, refusing to sit in silence while federal immigration officers operate with imp...

At his first court appearance in New York along with his wife Cilia Flores, Nicolás Maduro told the judge, “I am innocent. I am not guilty. I am a decent man, the constitutional president of my country.” He declared himself a prisoner of war and a political prisoner, and along with Flores pleaded not guilty to all of the ridiculous counts of narcoterrorism and gun charges against him. Outside the...

As 2025 comes to an end and we enter a new year, we’re looking back on the past 12 months that sometimes feel like a never-ending cycle of bad news. The year began with Trump’s inauguration,kicking off massive protests in cities and towns across the country that have continued throughout the year, spawning the No Kings movement as well as other national and local resistance. Instead of quietly let...

To protect the huge profits of unregulated AI companies, the Trump administration is trying to bring back a punishment that was stripped from this year’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill. In a December 11th Executive Order titled “ Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence ,” individual states will lose access to the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program if they establi...

A recent op-ed by the New York Times Editorial Board calls for the U.S. military to reinvent itself and rearm itself in new ways in the face of the Western capitalist order losing its hegemony to rising powers across the world. The very idea of returning to a multipolar arrangement without the United States at the forefront terrifies the ruling class - including those elements who are at odds with...