News Brief: US Media, Top Dems Assist Trump and Israel’s Unprovoked Attack on Iran

Citations Needed | June 13, 2025 | Transcript

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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.

Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations Needed.

And today, Adam, we are going to be discussing Israel’s attack on Iran, which occurred in the early morning hours of Friday, June 13, Tehran time, Iran time, that would be Thursday evening, June 12, on the East Coast of the United States. And we have already seen coverage that kind of frames the story the way Western media wants to frame the story, of course, with parameters set by Israeli officials and US officials. All through the night, Thursday night into Friday morning, we saw major news outlets call this a preemptive strike, sometimes with quotes, sometimes not. ‘Preemptive’ means to stop an imminent attack. Iran was not about to attack Israel. Iran has zero nuclear weapons. Israel has an arsenal of nuclear weapons that is totally unsafeguarded, unmonitored, undeclared. Iran has none of that. It is also a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has agreements with the IAEA, which monitors nuclear materials and assesses their use for civilian or military purpose. At no point has the IAEA said that Iran has any nuclear material enriched to weapons-grade. It does not have any nuclear weapons. It is not manufacturing nuclear weapons.

Israel is not a signatory to the NPT. It has none of those safeguards. It has nuclear weapons. It is currently carrying on a genocide in Gaza, and now it has attacked Iran with the full knowledge and support of the United States, despite what Secretary of State Marco Rubio is trying to claim, that the United States had no role in this. Obviously, when you arm Israel for decades, when you send them billions of dollars in military support and aid and diplomatic cover for years and years and years and years, allowing them to carry on not only an apartheid and occupying state in Palestine, but also to carry on a genocide in Gaza, and now to be able to attack Iran, it’s hard to say that the United States has no role.

So we are following media closely, how they are reporting on this story about Israel attacking Iran. Apparently, over 100 attacks carried out with about 200 Israeli air force planes. They have attacked nuclear facilities. They have bombed residential buildings in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, and so we’re just, yeah, kind of doing a media roundup here, seeing how this story is being framed.

Adam: Yeah. First off, the whole propaganda effort here hinges on a very common misunderstanding, and the media, our media, makes zero effort to clarify it, which is, when they say ‘nuclear sites,’ they are, you know, ‘to stop the nuclear program,’ the assumption is that that’s a nuclear weapon. Obviously, that’s how most people kind of fill in that blank. Now, of course, 31 countries have nuclear programs for civilian use. Iran, just like any other country, is allowed to do that.

Nima: In fact, guaranteed to be able to do that through the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Adam: Right? And they are signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty in the International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring system, and they are always about weeks away from, supposedly, weeks or months away from, whatever kind of sexy, 24, militarized term that Israeli US officials like to use, they’re always about to build some bomb. Now, building a bomb is very hard. It’s very difficult.

Nima: And this has been going on for 40 years, I should mention. 40-plus years.

Adam: Yeah, 40 years. And Nima, you’ve documented this for years, this idea, this sort of imminent breakout, is about to happen. And now what happened was that the IAEA, they condemned Tehran as sort of not aligning with the safeguards, again, safeguards that they ascribe to, that Israel doesn’t subscribe to, because Israel has nuclear weapons, and has hundreds of them, by all accounts. And this was reported on, and this was kept in the very front page, this was a second or third story all day yesterday on New York Times, ostensibly to lend some kind of urgency to the attack and to give Israel a kind of implicit casus belli, right, the idea that they’re sort of enforcing the IAEA or the UN’s guidelines.

Now, in the several articles about this that I read, AP, BBC, New York Times, none of them mentioned the fact, they all mentioned that Israel was threatening to bomb. This was before they actually did it, threatening to bomb, to sort of pseudo-enforce this UN condemnation, which was, the vote was 19 to 35 and was almost exclusively along the lines of what sphere of influence one supports, Russia/China or the US and Israel. And none mentioned that Israel itself didn’t sign the NPT treaty and has no IAEA inspectors, and is, of course, in direct violation. That would seem sort of relevant context, right? They’re kind of above all these rules. They don’t sign any international agreements, whether it’s cluster munitions, whether it’s chemical weapons, no matter what it is, Israel just doesn’t sign it. And they’re not therefore subject to the supposed liberal rules-based international order, despite the fact that they are held up as one of its primary enforcers or beacons.

And so this kind of lays the groundwork where most people are confused, because it kind of looks like Iran is about to build a nuclear weapon, and presumably going to use it, because they’re evile terrorists. Meanwhile, Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and having them permits them to kind of do whatever they want to do. Because the goal of having nukes is not so much to use them. It’s to give you carte blanche to do conventional war, to kind of bomb whoever you want, whenever you want to. And so when this, when the news first broke, people on Twitter were saying, Oh, there’s going to be a nuclear war. No, there’s not, because only one party has nukes. That’s not what, you know, that they sort of implied assumptions that Iran has them, and they don’t. They very much don’t.

Nima: Right, that would be a nuclear genocide by the one country of the two countries that has nukes, the one country that has attacked the other country that does not have any nuclear weapons.

Adam: And so, per usual, this kind of pseudo-targeted military framing was was used by Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, BBC, AP. They all led with this idea of, well, I’ll read you the the Washington Post’s front-page headline this morning, to give you a sense of this kind of faux-precision element, the main headline read, “Israel strikes Iran nuclear, military sites” with a picture of a residential building that’s been demolished. So I guess because military personnel live in residential buildings, again, as they do in literally every country on Earth, that residential building, by virtue of them living there, becomes a, quote, “military site.”

Nima: And it wasn’t just the Washington Post. This is all over our media. For instance, the Associated Press ran the headline, quote, “Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear sites and its top military leaders. Iran retaliates with drones” above a picture, again, of a bombed-out residential building in Tehran. Adam, you read the Washington Post headline, quote, “Israel strikes Iran nuclear, military sites,” end quote, another picture of a bombed-out and destroyed residential building in the middle of Tehran, a city of 10 million people, the capital city of Iran. The New York Times ran the headline, “Israel Targets Iran’s Nuclear Program in Major Attack,” above a picture of a residential building that has been attacked. And NPR ran the headline, quote, “Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear and missile sites, prompting retaliation from Tehran,” end quote. That is from the morning of Friday, June 13, also above a picture of a residential building in Tehran having been attacked.

Adam: Well, don’t you know that he whole country is a military site? And so this was coupled by the New York Times doing what the New York Times has done historically, which is laundering anonymous intelligence, supposedly, quote-unquote, “intelligence” from Israeli officials without an ounce of skepticism. So this is from June 12. The New York Times ran an article sort of explaining why Israel did what it did. Quote, “What to Know About Israel’s Strikes and Iran’s Retaliation,” unquote. Featured in the article was this paragraph, quote,

An Israeli military official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity to comply with protocol…

That’s not really a reason. That’s just nonsense.

…said the strikes had targeted elements of Iran’s nuclear program and the regime’s long-range missile abilities.

He said that Iran had been advancing a secret program to assemble a nuclear weapon, according to Israeli intelligence, and that it had enough material to assemble 15 nuclear bombs within days. The official did not provide details to support the assessment.

Unquote. Now, when they mean they did not provide details. This is, again, a very slippery, grimy way of doing this. What they mean is they didn’t provide evidence, because that’s just something they pulled out of their ass and they have no evidence for. And they’ve since posted stuff on social media that is literally just more blender mock-ups. Again, this is the Hamas command and control center under the hospital bullshit. Israel knows they can pretty much lie and just say whatever outlandish thing they want, and the media will say, Well, Israeli officials say. Print that. Frame the denials as purely a kind of sectarian defense. You know, Hamas denies, Iran denies this. Well, other people are denying it, because no one else supports this, including, by the way, US intelligence, which reaffirmed a few weeks ago that Iran was nowhere near building a nuclear weapon and that its assessment was that it was nowhere close to doing that.

Nima: And had not even made the decision to do so, which I have to stress. So again, Adam, as you said, dozens of countries have civilian nuclear-energy programs. Fewer than that have the domestic capability to enrich uranium to be able to fuel their own programs domestically, meaning they don’t have to rely on a nuclear apartheid system, where certain rich countries have control over who gets enriched uranium for energy programs. Iran’s point for decades now has been that, because they were denied, as far back as 1983, any kind of international support for a domestic civilian nuclear-energy program, they were requesting signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as they are guaranteed the right to do so, the inalienable right, per the treaty, to have a energy program, a nuclear-energy program, and that they should be able to get international support. In fact, it is incumbent on nuclear energy states, including nuclear-weapons states, to provide civilian energy support to NPT signatories.

Iran asked for that support as far back as 1983 and were literally denied by the United States. Were turned down, and since then, Iran realized it could count on no one else but itself for its own needs, and refused to be at the mercy of nations like the United States, which it knows it cannot rely on for its energy needs, and so it decided to embark on a domestic enrichment program, which has been monitored and safeguarded the whole time. Nothing that Iran has done has been done in secret. And when we hear about, for instance, the Natanz facility, a uranium-enrichment facility in Iran that was attacked by Israel and that is mentioned in a lot of these news reports, it says this is an enrichment site, part of the nuclear program of Iran. Again, the fill-in-the-blank here that readers are supposed to do after decades of being propagandized about Iran’s nuclear program, with tons of American and European and Israeli disinformation, the idea here, Adam, is that these sites are secret, right? That it was doing something clandestine.

Adam: Well, yeah, it’s always shifty, yeah. After they threatened to kill all their scientists and blow up their sites, they’re like, Oh, look at they’re hiding something. And it’s like, well–

Nima: And not only threatened, but actually have been doing it.

Adam: And so it’s like, Well, now they’re hiding it. It’s like, well, yeah, they’re hiding it because you’re killing them.

Nima: Well, first off, nothing is actually hidden because they are all under safeguards.

Adam: Well, right.

Nima: And there are monitors and inspectors that go in routinely. Also, the idea that nuclear-energy sites would be protected by Iran itself makes a lot of sense. There’s this common gotcha thing that happens in the media, of commentators saying, Well, if Iran’s energy program was so peaceful, why would they have to surround their facilities with missile systems, and why would they build them underground? Well, for decades, these facilities have been threatened by Israel explicitly.

Adam: Well, another gotcha is, If Iran is the ninth-largest producer of oil, why do they need nuclear energy? And it’s like, buddy, have you looked at the number 1, 3, 5, 7, 6, it’s Russia, the United States, Brazil, China, all of whom–guess what? — have civilian nuclear energy programs. So it’s supposed to be this, gotcha, and it’s just so braindead. Maybe Iran has some secret plans to get a nuclear weapon. You know, who knows? I don’t know, but that’s why you have international agencies in place to monitor these things.

Nima: Yeah, the idea that they could make 15 nukes in a matter of days is not only ludicrous, but also completely misunderstands, purposefully, what quote-unquote “breakout time” means, right? The idea that Iran could break out, that “breakout,” quote-unquote, would also rely on Iran kicking out all IAEA inspectors. It would be so obvious what Iran is doing that it would make that quote-unquote “breakout” totally meaningless. Also, when you make one nuke, you need to test that nuke, which means you then have zero nukes. So the idea is completely absurd.

Also, the notion that these, like I said, Adam, were ever secret, these facilities were ever secret, is totally untrue. Let’s recall, back in September of 2004, that is over 20 years ago, there was an interview in the Financial Times conducted with Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s then-representative to the IAEA. He later served as foreign minister and was head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. And he, in this interview, again, over 20 years ago, laughed at the notion that a facility the size of Natanz, a sprawling installation with inspections and monitoring, that a facility like that could ever operate secretly. And he said this quote,

How can it be secret if it has a few hundred acres, and a sign saying ‘Atomic Energy Organization’ and the buses that go from Tehran to Natanz stop at a station called ‘Atomic station’?

End quote. So the fill-in-the-blank work that’s been done by the media is also part of this propaganda effort.

Adam: Everything is based on this assumption of, because Israel is fighting what they view as being Iran-funded proxies in Palestine and Lebanon. They want to attack Iran because they believe they’re in a proxy war with Iran, but they can’t say that, so they have to build this kind of urgent, ticking-time-bomb 24 plot to justify it, even though, again, no one believes it’s credible. And the reason why the US forced that vote in the UN, again, which was along party lines, was because they needed a thin pretense that, Oh, look, Israel is just a small victim who’s enforcing the UN mandate that the UN won’t do. And so, and now we’re getting another version of helpless Biden, bumbling Biden, regretful Biden, remorseful Biden, with respect to Trump, now acting like he sort of had no idea what was going on. He’s sort of, you know, playing Marco Rubio, you know, What’s what? What’s going on? I just woke up. Sorry, I overslept. Who did what with who? You know, we’re getting this routine like the US is not involved.

Nima: Meanwhile, it had pulled out American officials from the region in advance of this.

Adam: Yeah, the reason why they’re acting like Israel is some rogue nation outside of their control is the same reason Biden did, which is that this shit is incredibly unpopular. It’s unpopular on the so-called global stage. It’s unpopular with their Arab client states in the region. It’s unpopular with American voters. American voters generally don’t like it. The sort of Tucker Carlson crowd obviously doesn’t like it that Trump and Vance sort of vaguely have to, you know, appeal to. So we’re going back to bumbling Biden, stumbling Biden, angry Biden, upset Biden, frustrated Biden, but with Trump. And it’s, of course, obviously not even remotely plausible with Trump, because we know he’s a psycho, you know, bloodthirsty, that’s the sort of whole brand. And now he’s acting like, Oh, well, you know, Israel acted without us, and then we’re playing, catch-up and, and it’s all very sort of dubious. Israel can’t take a piss without asking permission from the United States. Everybody knows this, again, that’s why Mike Huckabee scooped the bombing by, like, sending out one of those ‘Pray for Israel’ tweets like 45 minutes before they bombed them. Good job, Mike Huckabee.

Nima: Meanwhile, the 24-hour cable-news networks are doing their damnedest to hear as much Israeli propaganda and launder it through their programming as much as they can. Last night, as news broke of the Israeli attack, CNN had on Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the US, multiple times throughout the evening. It brought on former IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus to talk, to kind of laud this Israeli operation. It brought on former head of Israeli military intelligence Amos Yadlin to talk about it. It had the CNN Jerusalem correspondent. It had numerous CNN correspondents that have close ties with the Israeli military talking about why Israel felt it needed to do this, the success of the operation, as the New York Times said in its own reporting, quote-unquote, “stunning” and, quote-unquote “remarkable” strikes that Israel was carrying out. We keep hearing the term, quote-unquote, “decapitation” efforts about what Israel has done to the military leadership of Iran. It murdered the lead nuclear negotiator from Iran that was supposed to, in advance of this attack, meet with American officials in Oman this coming Sunday. Obviously, that is not going to happen. So basically, the cable news and the legacy media in the United States at least, has been really cheerleading this effort, and, Adam, you know, you’d think there would be maybe an opposition political party to this that may push back on some of this propaganda, and yet we have the Democrats.

Adam: So yeah, let’s check on the nominal opposition party. We know that the nominal adversarial media is mostly just repeating the Israeli line without skepticism and laundering their so-called intelligence, but now we have Democrats. And so the two most powerful Democrats, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer has not released a statement, and in fact, he just last week, was goading Trump into helping bomb Iran by doing this kind of TACO bullshit. So let’s listen to that clip right now. This is Chuck Schumer on June 2, 2025, mocking Trump for being weak on Iran.

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Chuck Schumer: When it comes to negotiating with the terrorist government of Iran, Trump’s all over the lot. One day he sounds tough. The next day he’s backing off. And now, all of a sudden, we find out that Witkoff and Rubio are negotiating a secret side deal with Iran. What kind of bull is this? They’re going to sound tough in public and then have a side deal that lets Iran get away with everything? That’s outrageous. We need to make that side deal public. Any side deal should be before Congress and most importantly, the American people. So if TACO Trump is already folding, the American public should know about it. No side deals.

[End clip]

Adam: Now, when he says “side deal,” what he means, of course, is a deal that does not involve Israel, which apparently the US is supposed to run everything by as a sort of sovereign country. We’re supposed to, we’re not allowed to have deals outside of that which has been approved by Benjamin Netanyahu. This is ostensibly a US senator arguing that the President of the United States has to get approval from a third country, a third-party country, to deal with another country. And if he doesn’t do it, he’s weak and fickle and gay and stupid and let’s, TACO Trump. Let’s mock him for being weak, right? They’re sort of trying to macho-bait him, right?

This is the opposition party. This is not the far-right of the Republican Party attacking Trump. This is the supposed liberal Democratic Party mocking Trump for being insufficiently violent towards Iran, a notion I assume we’ve now put to bed since he approves these very violent, very escalatory strikes. And since it happened as of the morning of Friday, June 13, Chuck Schumer has not released a statement. Neither, incidentally, has Hakeem Jeffries. He was asked about it on Lawrence O’Donnell, and gave an evasive answer about hoping for de-escalation, but reinforced all the premises for the bombing. Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. They’re terrorists. Blah, blah, blah. So the Democratic response from the leadership has been mostly support or to avoid the issue altogether, because they support it but can’t say that.

Nima: Well, because, as you said, Adam, the entire premise is being supported across the, quote-unquote, “political spectrum,” it’s not that wide, in mainstream American political discourse, right? The idea, you know, you just heard it from Schumer, that Iran is a terrorist nation, right? That it is getting away with things. And so what this does is tee up the justification for Netanyahu and the Israeli military, and the justification for Netanyahu and the Israeli intelligence and military apparatus to commit these international crimes, right? To bomb a country it is not at war with, to do this, quote-unquote, “preemptive strike,” but it’s not preempting anything that’s actually imminent or actually happening. Incidentally, per the UN Charter, a state has a right, a guaranteed right, that cannot be infringed upon, to act in its own self-defense once it has been attacked, which means that the right of self-defense here is being granted to Iran, not Israel. And so again, all of this work being done on the Democratic side, the, quote-unquote, “Trump opposition” side is just confirming the ludicrous premises, the propaganda efforts from Israel and elsewhere about Iran even presenting a, you know, quote-unquote “existential threat” with the nuclear weapons that it does not have.

Adam: And what the 2024 nominee, Kamala Harris, who, you know, the presumptive or leading nominee for 2028, she’s she signaled she’s going to run again. One would be curious what she would say about this. She has not commented. She lost the election about seven months ago. Has not commented at all on Gaza, except twice to hand-wring about Israeli hostages. She’s not opposed anything Trump has done with respect to the genocide in Gaza, not publicly at least. She hasn’t publicly condemned anything that Trump has done with respect to Iran. And the bombing happened last night. Since then, she hasn’t issued a statement. She hasn’t condemned it. She hasn’t opposed it. Now, a lot of people say, Oh, well, Harris would have been better than Trump. Again, very possible, but the one person in the world who could solve this mystery, which is Kamala Harris herself, has yet to criticize Trump on the subject of Israel at all.

And so let’s check in with what her advisors said. The far-left flank of her foreign policy advisor, Phil Gordon, avoided it all together. He responded by saying, quote,

Trump now portraying Iran strikes as him not “chickening out” but opposite seems to be the case. He desperately wanted a deal with Iran and publicly and privately told Israel not to strike. A confident Netanyahu called his bluff, told him Israel needed to act, and Trump felt no choice but to go along. He now has to act as if this was his call but in so doing finds himself having to defend Israel in a war he did not want but could not prevent.

Unquote. So they’re going with Trump is weak because they can’t address the underlying substance. Notice in Gordon’s statement, he doesn’t actually criticize Israel bombing Iran, because he agrees with it, probably, or at very least, he’s a chickenshit who knows his candidate, or future candidate, Harris, will be hoovering up AIPAC dollars, and doesn’t want to run afoul of the orthodoxies. Chris Murphy made a similar argument. This is what Democrats have settled on, which is this, like, Trump is weak. He’s being forced into this. Which is weirdly very much pro-Trump propaganda.

Nima: Right. Bumbling, stumbling. Israel did this without US support.

Adam: Yeah, smol beans Americans who sort of didn’t know any better. And then we have the other end of the spectrum, which is Kamala Harris’s other senior foreign policy advisor.

Nima: Yeah, so here we have Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, former national security advisor for Kamala Harris, writing this at just about 10pm Thursday evening, June 12, quote,

This statement from @SecRubio…

That’s the Secretary of State statement claiming that Israel acted alone, the US had no direct awareness or involvement in Israel’s attacks on Iran. So that’s what she says. Quote,

…conveys that Israel struck Iran without the umbrella of American support.

While Biden twice deployed US troops and resources to defend Israel against direct Iranian strikes last year, Trump isn’t promising Israel defense against an Iranian counter strike, though it’s clearly planning for one.

Grateful that successive Democratic administrations have provided Israel with the means to defend itself.

End quote.

Adam: Right. So we know that’s not true. We know that Trump’s denials are bullshit. We know that they supported it and back it and will defend it to the end of the earth. But again, it’s important you outflank Trump from the right. This is how you suck up the military-industrial complex and AIPAC money.

Nima: And claim that Iran has attacked Israel unprovoked, right? On numerous occasions, that actually Iran is the aggressor, rather than retaliating to Israeli strikes, Israeli assassinations of its officials, things like that, right? Everything always starts with an Iranian action, just like it always starts with a Palestinian action. There is no history before anything that those countries do. Obviously, Israel is not implicated in anything that it does. History only begins when Israel is claimed to be the victim.

Adam: So, yeah, so this is the Democratic response. You know, you have your Rashida Tlaibs saying this is an act of aggression. You have your, you know, Ocasio-Cortez giving this sort of more, Israel is fucking batshit, out of control, someone should do something about it. But mostly Democratic leadership, Democratic elites, Democratic Party presumptive nominees in 2028 and their advisors are either, the spectrum is complete silence. Again, the two Democratic leaders have not, as of this morning, issued any statements at all. My guess is when they invariably do, it’ll be a version of the classic attack Trump from the right line, which is, The food here is terrible and in such small portions. Trump is a reckless warmonger, and he’s also weak and fickle and doesn’t sufficiently bomb other countries. This has been the line.

Nima: It needs to war more. Exactly.

Adam: Yeah, he needs to war more, or more better, or the John Kerry circa-2003 criticism of Bush, that the Iraq war is good and noble and just, but he’s doing it badly. This is the spectrum of debate we have in this country. We have a, How do we best bomb, humiliate and degrade a foreign country that we’ve deemed as existentially evil, because we throw out the word ‘terrorist’ and existentially going to somehow bomb, I don’t know, strip malls in middle America? It’s unclear what the sort of imminent threat is. And how do we do that? And then the debate is how best to do that. That’s the scope of the debate. All the premises are not contested. All the sort of ridiculous propaganda about breakout times in the next 25 minutes, and there’s going to be a, you know, a mushroom cloud over Davenport, Iowa, if we don’t act now. No one really criticizes that. No one really dissects that. No one ever questions the premises. You just kind of run with it. They’re existentially evil. The issue is, How do you best contain them? Do you contain them via sanctions and cutting off, you know, medical supplies and food and oil, or do you just bomb them? And those are your two options. And if you don’t accept those two options, you’re pro-terrorist or pro-Iran or whatever dumb-shit demagoguery they wish to level against those skeptical of this narrative.

Nima: Exactly. Meanwhile, claiming that bombing residential neighborhoods in the middle of a highly-populated city is somehow striking military sites.

Adam: Yeah, the whole country is just a military site.

Nima: Yeah, exactly, exactly, including the Tehran Arak facility, which, incidentally, made nuclear isotopes for cancer treatment, but that’s now been bombed, too. So, cool stuff. We’re obviously going to be following this closely as coverage unfolds. Of course, we can kind of anticipate how the legacy and corporate mainstream media is going to be covering this, so we will, I’m sure, be back soon to share more of our thoughts on this as we continue to pay attention.

But thanks, everyone, for listening and for supporting Citations Needed. We cannot do this show without you. So much gratitude for your ongoing support. Please do follow us on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and, even more importantly, become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. Your support is so incredibly appreciated because we are 100% listener-funded. That will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.

Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.

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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Friday, June 13, 2025.