The News You Need, Thursday, August 6th, 2026
Details of new Iran peace deal emerge, David Ellison's empty promises The Times on Trump's Washington redo, the end of regularity at Justice.
The Terms of Trump’s Capitulation to Iran Emerge
Financial Times
AL-Monitor
US President Donald Trump boards Marine One last week. Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Scott: Scott Bessent says that Trump’s new deal with Iran will emerge within hours. Indeed, he has had the Iran Sanctions page at the Treasury Department’s website taken down for revisions. Usually reliable sources within the Gulf area confirm the timing and suggest a number of details that the deal will contain:
Iran will control in-bound Hormuz traffic, while Oman will control out-bound traffic.
Management fees (that is, tolls) will be assessed. At present the Iranian ask is 5–7%, whereas Oman’s ask is 3%
US forces will be drawn down from the region. Indeed, the withdrawal of US forces in Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq has been underway for several days now—unreported in US media, but reported in local media.
It does not appear that the deal will include any headway whatsoever on the matter that provoked the war, namely Iran’s nuclear projects.
It is difficult to understate the extent to which this deal would be a unilateral win of epic proportions for the Iranians. One needs merely to compare it with the world that existed before Feb 28, 2026, when Trump unleashed the war. Iran would have control over Hormuz and would realize an immense revenue stream from shipping through the strait.
Fifty years from now, historians will conclude that Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran was driven, in true kleptocratic style, by a desire for personal self-enrichment. The Trump and Kushner families likely executed billions in oil futures contracts and enhanced their wealth by untold sums by manipulating the war in cycles tied to their trades. Trump never had objectives beyond this, which is why he consistently refused to articulate them. This war will go down in the history books as America’s most humiliating defeat in the period after World War II… and also as the source of the Trump and Kushner families’ massive wealth.
Donald Trump and his aides have said more than a dozen times over the past five months that the US is “close” to a deal with Iran. But if one materialises from talks between Iran and Oman, it will fall well short of the objectives that the American president laid out when he launched the war.
Since attacking Iran in February, Trump’s immediate demands have shrunk from a sprawling list of concessions involving Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, ballistic missile production and support for proxy militias to just one: that Iran allow the Strait of Hormuz to return to its prewar state.
“The denuclearisation of Iran is the ultimate deal,” US secretary of state Marco Rubio told reporters on Tuesday. “The immediate deal, and the one that you’ve seen a lot of focus on, is the strait.”
In itself, that would mark something akin to strategic humiliation, say critics. Iran exploited its strategic leverage over the strait only after Trump launched the war.
Now any settlement could give Tehran control over some of the waterway and without denying it the power to eventually charge fees from vessels using it — conditions that would have seemed unthinkable to US geostrategists just a year ago.
“What was once free and unfettered is no longer,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator for both Republican and Democratic administrations. “And there is almost nothing that Trump can extract from an agreement that the Iranians are willing to accept that changes that reality.”
As for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Washington will be left to negotiate that issue with an increasingly defiant regime now convinced it has the upper hand and the ability to shut the strait at will — hardly the “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” Trump had demanded of Tehran.
“I do not see right now a way to create a balance of interests where the Trump administration walks away with something that normal humans would regard as a win,” Miller said.
After Bari Weiss Trashes 60 Minutes, David Ellison Promises to Protect It
New York Times
Charles: Reacting to new lawsuits filed by twelve state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America to block the Paramount-Warner merger, Paramount chief executive David Ellison penned a laughable guest essay for The Times, promising “independence” for CBS News (which he already controls) and CNN (which he’s gunning for) as well as journalists who “will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve — not to any party or cause.”
David Ellisony
Ellison writes “The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN.” Considering his mutilation of 60 Minutes, everybody knows the answer to that question is no. After Ellison installed right-wing pundit Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, Scott Pelley said she was “murdering “ to 60 Minutes. He and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired. Cecilia Vega left, the executive producer and executive editor were also fired, as well as another half a dozen senior editorial people.
The Wall Street Journal has reported twice that Ellison’s father Larry has promised Donald Trump he will make “sweeping changes” at CNN to get rid of the people Trump loathes. Paramount spokespeople have denied that.
The Journal reported earlier this summer that David’s father Larry had given “roughly $45 million to a political nonprofit group supporting Trump’s election efforts in 2024.
Journal reporters Emily Glazer Annie Linskey and Jessica Toonkel continued:
More recently, Ellison has given millions of dollars more to groups that support Trump since the election, the people said, with some of the funds going to Trump’s legacy initiatives in Washington, D.C. Oracle is among the corporate sponsors listed by Freedom 250, a Trump-aligned group hosting celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday.
The Ellisons have cultivated a symbiotic friendship with Trump. Larry Ellison and the president share ideological beliefs in support of Israel and critical of some mainstream media
The Ellisons have parlayed this proximity into a dominant position in the American tech and media landscape. The day after Trump’s second inauguration, Larry Ellison was in the West Wing when Oracle was selected as the architectural backbone for the administration’s $500 billion plan to build artificial-intelligence data centers in the U.S. Later in 2025, Oracle was part of an investor group that gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations in a deal brokered by the U.S. government.
So if the Paramount-Warner merger does go through, the chances that the Ellisons will respect the editorial integrity of CNN and 60 Minutes are zero.
Washington, Remade in the Image of Trump
The Times
Scott: Albert Speer would be proud. Under his strong influence, Trump is reshaping the city built by Pierre L’Enfant and shaped according to norms of the Enlightenment. In its place comes a new city driven by the monumental architectural norms of Berlin in the 1930s. The Times offers a drive through.
The End of Regularity at the Justice Department
Propublica
Charles: Propublica’s J. David McSwane, Pratheek Rebala and Carla Astudillo reviewed hundreds of Federal cases in which the presiding judges accused the Justice Department of unlawful, unethical and unseemly conduct.
Former Federal Judge John E; Jones III
“The presumption of regularity” used to mean that judges had to presume that government officials were doing their jobs “according to the rules and in good faith.” Since Trump returned to the White House that has no longer been possible.
“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.
“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”
In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.
“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”
