Mike Johnson Accidentally Wrecks Trump’s Claim About Strait of Hormuz
Mike Johnson Accidentally Wrecks Trump’s Claim About Strait of Hormuz
Johnson’s comments came almost simultaneously with Donald Trump claiming again that the strait is fully open.
House Speaker Mike Johnson just shattered President Donald Trump’s lies about reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
At a rally in North Carolina Wednesday night, Trump insisted—as his administration has claimed for weeks—that the Strait of Hormuz was open. But hundreds of miles away on Capitol Hill, Johnson revealed that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Now that ongoing conflict obviously has had an effect on gas prices, for example, because the Strait of Hormuz is not completely open safely for commerce yet, and the Red Sea is affected as well,” Johnson said at a press conference.
“Of course gas prices are too high,” he continued. “When we get that thing resolved in the Strait of Hormuz, that will have a direct effect on that, and it will help to bring down grocery costs.”
The speaker claimed that Republican lawmakers were “working around the clock” to resolve the situation by speaking to people in their districts “with authenticity and frankness.” In reality, House Republicans took a five-week vacation and then returned to work for just seven days before adjourning Wednesday until after the midterms.
The Trump administration has spent weeks claiming that the flow of ships and gasoline through the Strait of Hormuz has resumed—but it’s still far less than the prewar average. Even more concerningly, a consistent gap has emerged between the government’s claims about the flow of energy and the quantities tracked by industry firms.
Meanwhile, crude oil prices pushed above $100 per barrel Wednesday, causing diesel prices to surge to more than $6 per gallon at stations around the country. Trump has continued to claim that prices won’t fall until “right after” the midterm elections—when the White House is reportedly plotting to escalate military action against Iran.
U.N. Finds Trump Likely Committed War Crimes in Iran War
The United Nations’ human rights watchdog has found that two U.S. strikes likely constitute war crimes.
An independent group tapped by the United Nations’ top human rights body reported Thursday that it found “reasonable grounds” to believe that the U.S. committed war crimes in Iran.
The cited atrocity was a pair of Tomahawk missile strikes on the “clearly identifiable” Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab—a city in the southern Iranian province of Hormozgan—and a sports complex in Lamerd that occurred in February. The two attacks killed 178 civilians, most of them children.
The findings were documented in a report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran and submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
At the time of the strikes, U.S. military officials denied that they were behind the attack.........
