Witkoff, Steven

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    Trump Gives Conflicting Signals and Mixed Messages on Iran Nuclear Talks

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    Just a few weeks ago, President Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, a longtime hawk on Iran, cast the administration’s goal in negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program in crystal clear terms.“Full dismantlement,” he said. He went on to list what that meant: Iran had to give up facilities for enriching nuclear fuel, for “weaponization” and even its long-range missiles.But what sounded like a simple, tough-sounding goal on a Sunday talk show has started to unravel. In the past 24 hours, officials have left a contradictory and confusing set of messages, suggesting the administration might settle for caps on Iran’s activities — much as President Barack Obama did a decade ago — before backtracking on Tuesday.Some of this may simply reflect inexperience in dealing with nuclear weapons programs. Mr. Trump’s chief negotiator is Steve Witkoff, a friend of the president’s who, as a New York developer like him, has spent a lifetime dealing with skyscrapers but only began delving into Iran’s underground nuclear centrifuges and suspected weapons labs a few weeks ago.But the inconsistency also appears rooted in the splits inside Mr. Trump’s national security team as it grapples anew with one of the longest-lasting and most vexing problems in American foreign policy: How to stop Iran’s nuclear program without going to war over it. So far, the result is a blitz of mixed messages, conflicting signals and blustering threats, not unlike the way Mr. Trump and his aides talk about their ever-evolving tariff strategy.The issue came to the fore on Monday night when Mr. Witkoff began talking about his first encounter with Iran’s foreign minister last Saturday in Oman. The meeting went well, he said, plunging into the complex world of Iran’s nuclear program, which has taken it to the very threshold of building a weapon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Administration Deflects Blame for Leak at Every Turn

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      It was a hoax. The information wasn’t classified. Somehow the journalist got “sucked into” the Signal chat, either deliberately or through some kind of technical glitch.In the days since the editor in chief of The Atlantic revealed he had been inadvertently included in a group chat of top U.S. officials planning a military strike on Houthi militants in Yemen, senior members of the Trump administration have offered a series of shifting, sometimes contradictory and often implausible explanations for how the episode occurred — and why, they say, it just wasn’t that big a deal.Taken together, the statements for the most part sidestep or seek to divert attention from the fundamental fact of what happened: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used Signal, an unclassified commercial app, to share sensitive details about an imminent attack in an extraordinary breach of national security.Here’s a look at the main players and what they’ve said about what happened, and how much their reasoning matches up with what transpired.President Trump said the Atlantic’s article was a “witch hunt” and called the journalist a “total sleazebag.”President Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the fervor over the Atlantic’s article was “all a witch hunt,” suggesting that perhaps Signal was faulty, and blaming former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for not having carried out the strike on Yemen during his administration.“I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you,” he said, after complaining that “Joe Biden should have done this attack on Yemen.” The fact that he didn’t, Mr. Trump added, had “caused this world a lot of damage and a lot of problems.” While the Trump administration has criticized Mr. Biden for not being aggressive enough against the Houthis, his administration led allied nations in several attacks on Houthi sites in Yemen in 2024.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Crypto Venture Introduces a Stablecoin

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      World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company started by Donald J. Trump and his sons, announced on Tuesday that it was planning to sell a digital currency called a stablecoin, deepening the president’s financial ties to crypto as his administration relaxes enforcement of the industry.The stablecoin would be known as USD1, the company wrote in a social media post, without revealing when it would go on sale. Stablecoins, a popular form of cryptocurrency, are designed to maintain a constant value of $1, making them useful for many types of crypto transactions.“No games. No gimmicks. Just real stability,” World Liberty Financial posted on its X account.The stablecoin is the fourth digital currency that Mr. Trump and his business partners have marketed to the public over the last year. World Liberty already offers a cryptocurrency called WLFI. This month, World Liberty announced it had sold $550 million of those digital coins. A business entity linked to Mr. Trump receives a 75 percent cut of the sales.Days before his inauguration, Mr. Trump also started selling a so-called memecoin — a type of digital currency based on an online joke or a celebrity mascot. Melania Trump put her own memecoin on the market that same weekend.Mr. Trump has made aggressive forays into the crypto market as his administration eases enforcement of crypto firms and rolls back regulations. His efforts to profit from an industry he oversees amount to an enormous conflict of interest, with virtually no precedent in American history, government ethics experts have said.World Liberty’s stablecoin adds to that messy knot of business conflicts. Congress is considering legislation to regulate stablecoins that could reach Mr. Trump’s desk before the end of the year. In a speech at a crypto conference this month, Mr. Trump called for “simple, common sense rules” for stablecoins, saying they would “expand the dominance of the U.S. dollar.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is Russia an Adversary or a Future Partner? Trump’s Aides May Have to Decide.

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      On Tuesday, America’s top intelligence officials will release their current assessment of Russia. They are caught between what their analysts say and what President Trump wants to hear.When the nation’s intelligence chiefs go before Congress on Tuesday to provide their first public “Worldwide Threat Assessment” of President Trump’s second term, they’ll face an extraordinary choice.Do they stick with their long-running conclusion about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that his goal is to crush the Ukrainian government and “undermine the United States and the West?”Or do they cast Mr. Putin in the terms Mr. Trump and his top negotiator with Russia are describing him with these days: as a trustworthy future business partner who simply wants to end a nasty war, get control of parts of Ukraine that are rightly his and resume a regular relationship with the United States?The vexing choice has become all the more stark in recent days since Steve Witkoff, one of Mr. Trump’s oldest friends from the real estate world and his chosen envoy to the Mideast and Russia, has begun picking up many of Mr. Putin’s favorite talking points.Mr. Witkoff wrote off European fears that Russia could violate whatever cease-fire is agreed upon and a peacekeeping force must be assembled to deter Moscow. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, the pro-MAGA podcaster, Mr. Witkoff said the peacekeeping idea was “a combination of a posture and a pose” by America’s closest NATO allies.It is a view, he said, that was born of a “sort of notion of we’ve all got to be like Winston Churchill, the Russians are going to march across Europe.” He continued: “I think that’s preposterous.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More