As Seen in the Des Moines Register: Trump Administration Failure at the DEA / Two Water Plants, Two Fire Departments, Two Schools / A Pause and an Apology

RIVA Over RINO: The Real Betrayal of Republican Values
PAID FOR BY HONESTY REPORTING LLC WWW. HONEST-POLITICS.COM
Dear Fellow Former Republican Voters,
There was a time when being a Republican meant something. It meant balanced budgets, not bloated
deficits masked by bluster. It meant limited government, not an executive branch that bulldozes
every institution standing in its way. It meant respecting the rule of law, not treating court orders like
suggestions and Supreme Court justices like subordinates on a payroll.
Donald Trump didn’t save the Republican Party. He hijacked it.
And his favorite weapon? The word “RINO,” short for Republican In Name Only, hurled like a
grenade at anyone who dares remember what the party once stood for. The irony is breathtaking. The
man who donated to Democrats for decades, who praised Hillary Clinton, who holds no fixed
ideology beyond self-promotion, has crowned himself the arbiter of Republican authenticity. He
doesn’t get to hand out membership cards to a party whose principles he’s never bothered to read.
I don’t believe in RINO. I believe in RIVA: Republican In Values Always.
RIVA means you honor those who served. John McCain spent five and a half years as a
prisoner of war in Vietnam, refusing early release because he wouldn’t leave his fellow
soldiers behind. Trump’s response? “I like people who weren’t captured.” Let that sink
in. That was a man with five deferments mocking a man who was tortured for his
country. McCain, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, and the late
George H.W. Bush, decorated veterans and public servants among them, were dismissed,
degraded, and cast out because they refused to bend the knee. Gold Star families
attacked. Generals ridiculed. The party of national defense now wages war on its own
heroes.
RIVA means you remember when Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and demanded that
walls come down, not go up. Reagan championed free trade, warning that tariffs are taxes on your
own citizens disguised as toughness. Today’s Republican Party slaps tariffs on allies and calls it
patriotism. Reagan would call it what it is: economic illiteracy wrapped in a flag.
RIVA means you remember when political opponents were adversaries, not enemies. Reagan and
Tip O’Neill fought like hell over policy, then shared a drink. They disagreed on principles, not
personal vendettas. Today, dissent within the party is met not with debate but with intimidation:
primary threats, social media mobs, and the RINO label branded on anyone who votes their
conscience.
RIVA means you understand that NATO wasn’t a protection racket; it was the greatest security
alliance in human history, built on American leadership. Our allies in Europe once looked to us as
partners and protectors. Now they draft contingency plans in case we become the threat.
RIVA means you understand that the Supreme Court is part of a co-equal branch of government, not
a rubber stamp or a team of employees who owe their boss loyalty. The judiciary exists to check
power, not serve it.
And let us address the elephant in the room that the party refuses to acknowledge: never in the
history of the Republican Party, or in the history of the American presidency, has a candidate carried
34 felony convictions into the Oval Office. Not one. Not ever. We would never allow a convicted
felon to run a prison. We wouldn’t trust one to manage a school district or oversee a police
department. But we’ll hand him the nuclear codes and the fate of 330 million Americans? What
precedent does this set? What message does it send to every child taught that character matters, that
actions have consequences, that the law applies equally to all?
The real RINOs aren’t John McCain, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, or Adam Kinzinger. The real
Republican In Name Only is the man who uses the party as a vehicle for personal power while
abandoning every value it once held sacred.
Intimidation is not leadership. Loyalty tests are not principles. And a party built on one man’s ego is
not a party at all; it’s a cult.
It’s time to stop asking who’s a “real” Republican and start asking: what do we actually stand for?
RIVA. Republican In Values Always. That’s worth fighting for.
Sincerely,
Brent Lambi

THE RED SCARE RERUN
They Cry
“Communist.”
Look Who Rolled Out the Red Carpet.
A party with no plan for your grocery bill has found
one word for November. In my opinion, it is
pointing at the wrong address.
THE WEDDING GIFT. Now follow the money. ProPublica reports that Umar
Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, paid hundreds of thousands
of dollars toward Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding celebrations: a
private island, the fireworks, the works. The family calls it a gift from a friend.
Ukraine calls him sanctioned.
“They warn you about the red menace.
Then they roll out the red carpet.”
THE RED CARPET. Who laid an actual red carpet in Anchorage for Vladimir
Putin, a former KGB officer wanted by the International Criminal Court for the
deportation of Ukrainian children? Donald Trump.
Who keeps pressing Ukraine, the country that was invaded, to take a deal with
the country that invaded it? Donald Trump.
Who now blames your diesel prices on Ukraine for hitting Russian refineries
rather than on Moscow for starting the war? Donald Trump.
This is a man who said he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love.” Senators who once
built careers standing up to Moscow now stand behind him and point at a thirtyfour-
year-old city councilman.
THE HONEST PART. Democratic socialists did win primaries this year, and
some planks of their platform deserve hard debate. Democrats are not communists.
Neither, strictly, is Putin: his Russia is an authoritarian oil kleptocracy, not
a Marxist state. No one has shown that the wedding money bought a policy, and
the President says his pressure on Kyiv is about ending a war. Readers should
weigh all of it. But a party that shouts “communist” while its leader hosts Moscow’s
strongman has forfeited the right to be taken seriously on the subject.
THE BALLOT QUESTION. Every Republican on your November ballot should
answer one question on the record: Will you condemn a Putin-connected oligarch
paying for the President’s son’s wedding, yes or no? If they cannot say it,
they have told you who they answer to.
Sources: ProPublica; Axios; NBC News; The New York Times; NPR; The Hill; MS NOW.
THE CARPET Anchorage, Aug. 15, 2025: red carpet for Putin
THE WEDDING Putin-tied oligarch paid for an island and fireworks
THE WAR Kyiv pressed to take a deal with its invader
THE DIESEL Prices blamed on Ukraine’s refinery strikes
PYONGYANG On Kim: “We fell in love”
THE STOCKS ~30 federal equity stakes, incl. ~10% of Intel
WHO IS CLOSER TO MOSCOW?

TEN YEARS, ONE DIRECTION
The Real Communist, or Socialist,
Is a Republican in the White House
A Hundred Thousand Dollars a Night: Paid by a Friend of Vladimir Putin.
A Putin-linked oligarch bankrolled the President’s son’s wedding celebration. The administration
is carrying Moscow’s map to Kyiv. And now the fuel line at home is Ukraine’s fault.
THE GIFT
ProPublica reported Monday that Umar
Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir
Putin, covered hundreds of thousands of dollars
of Donald Trump Jr.’s three-day Bahamas
wedding celebration, based on records and
three people familiar with the event.
The island where guests slept rents for roughly
$100,000 a night. The fireworks ran about
$70,000. The money moved through a Dubai
entity tied to Kremlev’s boxing federation, a
federation financed by Gazprom, the Russian
state’s energy company. The groom is worth
an estimated $300 million. He did not need
the help. He took it anyway.
WE HAVE BEEN HERE
BEFORE WITH THE SAME SON
This is not the first time this particular Trump
has taken a meeting with Moscow.
In June 2016, offered dirt on Hillary Clinton
described in writing as coming from the Russian
government, Donald Trump Jr. answered
“I love it” and booked the room at Trump
Tower. A two-year investigation followed.
Robert Mueller found that Russia interfered
in the election in a sweeping and systematic
fashion; his investigation did not establish
a criminal conspiracy with the campaign.
Print both halves. Then print the bipartisan
one: the Republican-led Senate Intelligence
Committee concluded in 2020 that campaign
chairman Paul Manafort’s sharing of internal
polling data with a man the committee assessed
to be a Russian intelligence officer was
a grave counterintelligence threat. Ten years
later, the same family is still taking the Russian
offer, only now it comes with fireworks.
A gift is not a crime. But a country
is entitled to ask what it bought.
THE GUEST LIST NOBODY WILL PRINT
Was Volodymyr Zelensky invited? Put it plainly:
nobody rented Ukraine an island.
The guest list is not public. Rep. Robert Garcia
A SATIRE: THE HOAX LEDGER
The Hoax Within the Hoax
The World Is Flat, Per Donald Trump
He has now given himself a title: Hoax Buster. But the fraud in this story is the word itself,
deployed nearly 800 times against nearly everything, except the things that actually were.
When I filed this case, I expected a straightforward
process involving discovery and documents.
If the record supported it, I also expected
the true wrongdoer to be named as a third
party defendant.
That is not what has happened. It is my
opinion that discovery in this matter is being
shaped by people whose names do not appear
in the case caption. I cannot prove that
today, and I will not tell readers otherwise. I
can only tell you what I believe and why I am
acting on it.
I am therefore pausing my lawsuit.
I want to be plain about Berkshire Hathaway.
My view is that the company and its agents
may themselves have been used by someone
else who gave them a version of events and left
them to act on it.
If I am right, Berkshire is not the author of
this defamation but a vehicle for it. To the extent
that my filings suggested otherwise, my
apology is sincere.
My hope is that Berkshire Hathaway or its
agents will come forward or tell others what I
suspect they may already know: the origin of
this matter is federal.
I remain of the view that my dispute with
the federal government is ongoing and that the
government’s objective is to silence and discredit
me.
Free speech has cost me a great deal. In this
political climate, it is plainly not free.
Brent Lambi: The opinions expressed above
are solely those of the author.
A Pause and an Apology
An update on the Berkshire Hathaway defamation matter
and why I am putting my own case on hold for now.
“Berkshire is not the author of this defamation but a vehicle for it.”
THEY DID NOT TORTURE HIM OVER A
FLAT EARTH. NOBODY EVER DID. The
flat earth is a fable, not something medieval
Europe believed, but a story invented about
it centuries later. The Greeks had the globe
measured by 240 B.C. What Galileo Galilei
proved was that the Earth moves, and in 1633
Rome tried him for it, not for lying, but for being
right in public. He was threatened with
the instruments of torture, made to recant on
his knees, and confined to his house for life.
Rome conceded the point in 1992, three hundred
and fifty-nine years later. And a professor
invited to look through the telescope refused,
not because he had weighed the evidence, but
because looking was the risk.
THE CREDENTIAL. On Monday the President
announced that the only guardrail artificial
intelligence requires is “a STRONG AND
SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” He then declared,
“I am the Hoax Buster.” Six posts, one
afternoon, no hearing and no vote. American
safety policy for the most powerful technology
ever built now consists of one man’s opinion
of his own intelligence.
THE INTELLECT IN QUESTION. If the credential
is the argument, examine it. This is
the man who told the nation that windmill
noise causes cancer. Who asked on live television
whether disinfectant might be injected
“inside, almost a cleaning” and then called it
sarcasm. Who took a Sharpie to a federal hurricane
map rather than concede a forecast.
Who toured the CDC mid-pandemic and concluded,
“Maybe I have a natural ability.” Who
challenged his own Secretary of State to an IQ
test and named the winner in advance. That is
the lens now pointed at superintelligence.
THE LEDGER. The case file to date:
has had to ask for it, along with records of every
purchase made for the wedding by foreign
nationals, because a minority member can
only request what a majority could compel.
Garcia told Trump Jr. this may be the most serious
allegation against him to date.
THE CARPET CAME FIRST
In August 2025 this administration gave Vladimir
Putin a red carpet on American soil at
Anchorage, a bomber escort overhead, and a
ride in the presidential limousine.
Six months earlier the President of Ukraine,
the man whose country was invaded, was
dressed down in front of the cameras in the
Oval Office. One of those two men started a
war. Only one of them got the carpet.
THE MAP THEY KEEP
CARRYING TO MOSCOW
The President’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and his
son-in-law Jared Kushner, have now made
the Kremlin run repeatedly.
The original 28-point framework was described
by European governments as tilted
toward Moscow and had to be whittled down.
On Sept. 6 the two men spent hours with Putin,
then flew to Kyiv. On Sept. 12, at a forum
in Kyiv, Kushner said the rest of the deal is already
built; the only thing missing is Ukraine
agreeing to pull back to the line Putin has
drawn. That line includes the whole of Donbas,
including ground Russia has not been
able to take by force, plus a permanent bar on
NATO. Moscow’s negotiators also raised joint
economic ventures with the United States.
That is not mediation. That is delivering the
invader’s terms and calling it peace.
AND NOW YOUR DIESEL IS KYIV’S FAULT
Ukraine has found the one weapon that reach-
Sources: ProPublica and Axios (Sept. 14–15, 2026); letters of Rep. Robert Garcia, Sept. 14, 2026; Associated Press, Bloomberg
and Reuters on the Sept. 13 Doonbeg remarks and U.S. diesel prices; NPR, Axios and Ukrainska Pravda on the Sept. 6–12
Witkoff–Kushner talks; Report of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III (2019); Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
Russian Active Measures, Vol. 5 (2020).
es Russia’s war economy: cheap drones against
refineries, more than 190 strikes this year.
Diesel is what moves tanks, and it is what buys
them. On Sept. 11 American diesel passed $6
a gallon for the first time. Two days later, from
his golf course in Ireland, the President said
Zelensky “has to stop knocking out diesel fuel
in Russia.” Plenty of other targets, he said. Not
that one. Now weigh his premise. The Strait of
Hormuz has been strangled since his own war
with Iran; the Houthis took Mokha and Perim
Island on Sept. 10 and 11; a Saudi pipeline
built to bypass Hormuz was knocked offline
by drones the same week. Analysts put the
larger share of the squeeze in the Middle East,
not in Ukraine. The President is asking the
invaded country to stop hitting the invader’s
fuel supply, and asking you to believe your
pump price is the victim’s fault.
WHAT REAGAN DID
Reagan did not fly to meet the Soviets to soften
the terms, and he never asked a captive
nation to stand down for the sake of a commodity
price.
He told them to tear the wall down, and he
outspent and outlasted an empire built on
oil and fear. Reagan’s party did not take the
check, did not carry the other side’s map, and
did not guard the other side’s refineries.
THE HONEST PART
No one has proven a quid pro quo here, and
this editorial does not claim one.
Mueller did not establish a conspiracy in 2016,
and that belongs in print as much as the rest.
Trump Jr.’s spokesman calls Kremlev a personal
friend with no business relationship; his
wife says friendship requires no political motive;
the President says he never heard of the
man and was not present. Diesel really is short,
and some of that shortage really does trace to
Ukrainian drones. Take every one of those
concessions. The pattern still runs one way,
in every single instance, for ten years: toward
Moscow. In my opinion, a party that calls that
coincidence is not conservative. It is captured.
THE FUEL THAT FUNDS THE KILLING IS A MILITARY
TARGET, NOT A CAMPAIGN PROBLEM.
STAND WITH REAGAN, NOT WITH THE MEN
WHO ROLLED OUT THE CARPET.
1. Global warming: an “expensive hoax,” once
a Chinese invention. He said he was joking.
2. The Russia investigation: thirty-four indictments
and eight convictions, all hallucinated
by a grand jury.
3. The Steele dossier: a hoax. He got this one
right; more below.
4. Impeachment: both of them. A hoax the
House took a roll call vote on. Twice.
5. Ukraine: still a hoax as of Monday, a million
casualties in.
6. Criticism of the COVID response: “their
new hoax,” February 2020. The 1.2 million
American dead have filed no correction.
7. “Suckers and losers”: a hoax his own chief
of staff confirmed on the record.
8. The Jeffrey Epstein files: a fabrication so
total that Congress voted 427–1 to release it,
and his Justice Department still sits on three
million pages of it.
9. Affordability: “the greatest con job,” disproven
by a Walmart turkey bundle. Your receipt
is in on it.
10. Artificial intelligence: the people who
built it are warning about it, which he offers as
proof they are lying.
The Washington Post counted the word nearly
800 times through 2021 alone.
THE PATTERN IS NOT SUBTLE. A hoax is
never something that flatters him. It is always
something that costs him: a subpoena, a verdict,
a regulation, a grocery bill he would
have to explain. The standard is not evidentiary;
it is an invoice. Note Monday’s tell: he
did not argue that AI is safe. He argued that
the industry’s founders are conspiring to
bankrupt themselves.
A hoax, in this administration, is any
fact that arrives with an invoice.
WHAT A HOAX ACTUALLY IS. A hoax is a
deliberate deception. It requires a hoaxer, so
we are owed names. Who paid the ice to melt?
Which operative persuaded the chief executives
of Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX to
campaign against their own valuations? He
never says. That is the hoax within the hoax:
the word itself, sold as an investigation when it
has only ever been a verdict issued in advance.
THE HONEST PART. He has not been wrong
every time, and an honest paper says so. The
Steele dossier was substantially discredited.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop
was Russian disinformation was false, and
fifty-one former intelligence officials signed
it anyway. Yet a man who calls everything a
hoax will one day stand in front of a real one,
and nobody will be able to tell.
THE TELESCOPE IS STILL SITTING
THERE. The men who built the machine are
asking him to look through it. He has ruled the
instrument a hoax, the builders a conspiracy,
and his own IQ the lens. Four hundred years,
and we are back to a man who will not put his
eye to the glass, except that Galileo’s accusers
had to hold a trial. This one posts.
THE BIGGEST HOAX OF ALL. Set the ledger
aside, because the largest fraud on it is the
credential itself. He has spent fifty years advertising
an intellect he has never once documented.
No IQ score has ever been produced.
His own former attorney testified under oath
that he was sent to threaten Trump’s schools
with legal action if they released his grades
or his test scores. He has claimed he finished
first in his class at Wharton; the published
honors lists do not carry his name. He sold a
university that was not a university and paid
$25 million to end the fraud suit. The man offering
his brain as the sole safeguard against
superintelligence will not release a transcript.
Every hoax on this page was named by someone
with something to hide. This is the one he
will never investigate.
THE WORLD IS NOT FLAT. IT NEVER WAS.
THE HIGHEST IQ IN PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY:
THAT IS THE BIGGEST HOAX OF ALL TIME.