We get it. Nobody has time to read every Substack post there is. There are so many good writers and publishers here now that getting to all of them is its own part-time job.
So on weekends we are going to hand you Narativ’s cheat-list — the week in one sitting. We publish close to 50 shows and articles a week, 10 a day. The weather is turning and you have more time on your hands, so pull up the comfy chair, put your feet up, and take a walk through the week that was.
Paolo Zampolli spent thirty years known as the man who introduced Melania to Donald Trump. Then we read his emails. Zampolli traded passports, U.N. votes and Trump condos from a desk inside the American mission to the United Nations, where Trump had made him Special Envoy for Global Partnerships. You give a small country $400,000, you get its passport, and the money goes in dressed as an investment in a hotel you will never visit. The countries selling those passports also vote at the U.N. Zampolli sat exactly where those two things meet. Intelligence services have always worked through the syndicates that move money and people, and this week we got to watch one do it from inside a building the whole world is supposed to trust.
Sean Wiswesser spent a career at the CIA. He sat down with Zev and Olga Lautman on Narativ Live this week and said Russia helped Iran kill American servicemen in Saudi Arabia. Fourteen Russian satellites crossed Prince Sultan Air Base in the two days before the missiles hit it. Trump was warned on March 6 that Russia was aiming those missiles at American troops, and he phoned Putin, thanked him, and let Russian oil sail six days later. By Friday the Pentagon’s own inspector general was saying the Iran war left America short of the munitions it would need to answer. Trump knew in March. He thanked Putin anyway.
Thomas Massie filed eight articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, thirty-four pages, and read every one aloud on the House floor. Mike Johnson sent the House home a day early the next morning and the vote went with it; he says he will table the articles in November, after the midterms. While the Speaker was emptying the building, serving soldiers were sending photographs to CBS anonymously — an E-3 Sentry at Prince Sultan with its tail severed, a burned-out vehicle at Camp Buehring. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face,” one of them said. “These are not ‘squirters’ getting through.” He picked that word because Hegseth used it in March, after a strike at Port Shuaiba killed six Army Reserve soldiers. Military Times counts 18 Americans dead and 774 wounded. Trump told NewsNation there was “no damage.”
Umar Kremlev runs boxing for Vladimir Putin, and ProPublica reported on Monday that he secretly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars toward Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas — the island, the fireworks, the planning — through a company in Dubai. Then he stood on the beach and watched. The Trumps posted scores of photographs from that weekend and the Russians are in almost none of them; the top of Kremlev’s head shows in the back of one group shot. Ukraine sanctioned Kremlev. Washington never did. Then Olga Lautman named the man the Night Wolves biker gang had introduced him to: Alexei Rubezhnoi, who runs the service that guards Putin’s body. That is a second Russian operative standing close to a Trump family member, and this time the chain of introductions ends at Putin’s own security detail.
Houthi missiles burned out the pumping station on the Saudi pipeline, and the satellite pictures show it. American diesel hit $6.23. Driving fuel prices up seven weeks before a midterm is the least clever thing a president can do, and Trump is doing it without a flicker of worry. Either he has reason to think the election is already settled, or somebody is making enough money to make it worth the loss.
Anthropic published a report saying a Houthi cell wrote its rocket guidance with Claude and test-fired it. The company’s own chief executive told CBS the industry “lied” about the risks, and Trump spent the same week calling the warnings a hoax. So we put Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini on one panel and asked them directly.
That’s The Weekly. Many more stories are waiting for you, so enjoy looking around the site.
PS — our AI council returns Monday with a special.
