🧵 THREAD: What is the International Rescue Committee?
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the accused, worked for the International Rescue Committee.
He is also being reported as working for the CIA.
Given this, is the International Rescue Committee a CIA front? I'm going to do a deep dive here.
As always, patience as I pull together the thread:
The first thing that jumps out when analyzing the IRC is its government grants. Out of its nearly 1.5 billion dollars, it has nearly a billion in grants. Their USAID grant in Afghanistan went towards "Accessible and Quality Basic Education (AQBE) Activity."
Yeah, sounds like intelligence work.
If I'm reading this right -- I am not sure I am reading this -- it seems like almost all of their government grants are from the USA. This is fairly unusual for a charity NGO of this size; often humanitarian NGOs will be co-financed by foreign governments.
One of the receipients of the IRC Freedom Award is ... George Soros, in 1993. Because of course.
This was at the peak of Soros' influence with the State Department - when he was advising NED on Eastern Europe strategy.
Wait, Soros got the award twice! Again in 2013. Then Samantha Power in 2020. You can't make this up.
The timing of Samantha Power is interesting -- if I am inferring timelines correctly, then the awards are given *within* the year, not after... in November of that year, specifically. So Samantha Power would have been given this around November 2020, before she entered the Biden administration and having left Obama's office for 4 years. Her resume does not give a clear rationale why.
On the private donation front, IRC gets major funding from Catholic Charities.
IRC has had to pay penalties for their misconduct in other countries.
IRC's head, David Milibrand, was Foreign Secretary for Tony Blair. MI6 (the British version of CIA) reports to the Foreign Secretary. This is getting more and more interesting.
Their COO advised UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which used to house MI6 according to Gemini. Can't make this stuff up.
Here's a letter from IRC to Allen Dulles -- the infamous CIA director. It references working with the Ford Foundation and thanks Dulles for intervening in their funding.
I am seeing awards for International Rescue Committee that do not appear to have been cancelled. @DOGE_GSA
National Endowment for Democracy (our CIA quango) presented a 2005 award to IRC's then-President, John Richardson. He served as CEO of Radio Free Europe, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational & Cultural Affairs, and was a founding staff member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, as well as a founding board member and chairman of NED.
I've seen enough. IRC is a CIA front.
@DOGE_GSA I've seen enough. IRC has got to be a CIA front. Just too many intelligence presidents.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
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. @PunchbowlNews would you like to comment on this business model I've reversed engineered of how you keep @LeaderJohnThune in line?
@PunchbowlNews @LeaderJohnThune Punchbowl, would you also like to comment on how virtually every major sponsor of yours has donated to John Thune for a total of 1.2 million?
@AndrewDesiderio , any comments?
@PunchbowlNews @LeaderJohnThune @AndrewDesiderio By the way ... the only people who are sponsoring me on this are my $3/month subscribers. I don't know any heavy hitter here who's been approached to go against SAVE America Act.
I'd been looking at PAC contributions when I should have been looking at the people who actually have daily access to the Capitol - the media. The true lobbyists.
Punchbowl News represents a whole lot of powerful industries and they are unflinching admirers of Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
John Thune is the "paid influencer ecosystem." 𝕏 merely exposed how that machinery works in the Senate.
Just look at the posts of @AndrewDesiderio , their senior Senate "correspondent." Almost every single one is about defeating the SAVE America Act and praising Thune.
Punchbowl isn't shy about where their money comes from. Founder Jack Sherman himself admitted that 90% of Punchbowl's revenue is from "corporate sponsorships." They made 10 million dollars in revenue their first year... what kind of "journalist" company pulls that off?
The podcast featuring them outright describes their business model as getting their money from "sponsorships bought by trade groups and companies looking to get their public affairs messaging in front of those making and influencing policy."
Punchbowl got in ethical hot water when they treated a whole bunch of lobbyists to luxury box seats at a NFL game.
If you want to know why SAVE America Act is being slow-walked...
Start with @PunchbowlNews .
. @AndrewDesiderio do you want to share which of your employer's clients are against the SAVE America Act, or should I figure it out myself?
Thune access timeline documented: Five distinct confirmed Punchbowl-Thune interactions between Sept. 2025 and March 2026, including two Fly Out Day appearances. Punchbowl's Feb. 26, 2026 piece declaring the "talking filibuster dead" was the key conventional wisdom-setting event, published before Trump's March 9 ultimatum, using Thune's framing and characterizing SAVE Act supporters as a caucus "tearing itself apart."
🛰️ New Article: Building an OSINT Pipeline to Cut Through the Iranian Conflict Noise.
SPOILER ALERT: We're winning.
I just published a long-form analysis on the Iran conflict and the strategic dynamics around it. Sorry for the Substack-only publication; the article itself was far too long and complex in formatting to publish with 𝕏 tooling. (Feedback to the 𝕏 team - if you can just make full Markdown capability, I would be thrilled.)
Before anything else: I'm only a civilian data analyst, not a military officer or intelligence professional. This piece is the result of two weeks of intensive work where I did something unusual.... I built and experimented with an AI-assisted OSINT synthesis pipeline using military doctrine, think tank research, and public reporting.
Part of the goal was to produce something useful for readers.
But honestly, the bigger goal was education for myself, forcing a structured process to sort signal from noise in an information environment that's chaotic right now.
The pipeline pulls from sources like CSIS, ISW, CEPA, ISIS nuclear reporting, CENTCOM and IDF briefings, plus open-source economic and energy data. Where I step beyond what those sources explicitly state, I mark it clearly as [ASSESSED] and try to show the reasoning.
This article is the first full output of that process.
If you have expertise in:
🔹 air campaign planning
🔹 nuclear nonproliferation
🔹 Middle East security policy
🔹 energy markets
🔹 OSINT methodology
I would genuinely welcome corrections, critiques, or improvements. The entire point is to make the analytical process more rigorous over time.
The pipeline itself will keep evolving. Bring on the rotten tomatoes.
🧵WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING: Meet David Pascoe, candidate for SC Attorney General. He's running as a Republican. But is he actually a Democrat?
Joe Biden is in South Carolina today.
Which makes this the perfect moment to introduce you to David Pascoe, candidate for SC Attorney General, running as a Republican, and what he said about Joe Biden in January 2020:
"He is the most decent man I have ever met in American politics. Joe has been a role model of mine for many years. He is someone my sons look up to. Joe is the first and only candidate I have ever endorsed for public office."
That's not only a Democrat who voted for Biden. That's a Democrat who hosted Biden's campaign fundraiser at his own annual oyster roast, endorsed him for president, and was Biden's frontrunner to become US Attorney for South Carolina.
David Pascoe spent 20+ years as an elected Democrat, 6 consecutive terms as SC First Circuit Solicitor. He pushed DEI-style racial quota systems for SC judges as recently as December 2023. Six months before his "conversion," he endorsed a Democratic state rep who voted against banning gender procedures on minors.
And here are the receipts. 👇
As always, patience as I pull together this thread.
David Pascoe spent 20+ years as an elected Democrat, 6 consecutive terms as SC First Circuit Solicitor. On April 10, 2025, he switched to the GOP. SC Dem Chair Christale Spain says he "has been trying to find a lane to run for higher office."
Pascoe switched parties in April 2025.
Pascoe launched his AG campaign in August 2025.
That's 4 months, in a state where no Democrat has won a statewide race since 2006.
You do the math.
If you're a subscriber, enter your oppo research request below! I haven't scaled it out yet, so can only do about 3 a day. It also helps if you pair a name with a focus (e.g., investigate connections to so-and-so entity)