Trump’s Secret Talks With the Men Who Control Iran & Ukraine Strikes Russia’s Starlink

**Megyn Kelly** (0:00)
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**Mike Baker** (0:50)
It's Monday, the 17th of August. Welcome to The President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. First up, the Trump administration reportedly bypassed Iran's official negotiators and opened a secret line directly to the Revolutionary Guard. We'll explain who carried the messages and what the talks revealed about who really controls the regime. Later in the show, Ukraine targets Russia's answer to Starlink before it can become fully operational, striking a rocket center hundreds of miles inside Russian territory. Plus, China launches a new Arctic shipping route to Europe, using melting ice and Russia's northern coastline to bypass the world's increasingly dangerous maritime choke points. And in today's Back of the Brief, Iran says three pilots missing since a failed bombing run early in the war are being held prisoner in Qatar. But first, today's PDB spotlight.
For months now, we've been documenting the chaos inside Iran's ruling establishment, the assassinations or decapitation strikes, the leadership vacuum and the growing power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Not to mention the popular game show Dude Where's My Ayatollah. The new supreme leader has not been seen or heard from in public since taking over the top spot. Now, new reporting reveals just how serious that confusion has become. While attempting to negotiate an end to the war, the Trump administration reportedly encountered a fundamental problem. Washington had no idea whether the Iranian officials sitting across the table had the authority to actually make a deal. Iran's senior leadership had been decimated. The old supreme leader was dead, other powerful figures had been eliminated, and the new supreme leader as mentioned, Mostafa Khamenei had disappeared from public view amid questions about his existence. That left American officials confronting a question with enormous consequences. Who was actually running Iran?
Was it the new supreme leader, the civilian officials negotiating with Washington, or the generals commanding the IRGC? Well, according to Axios, the White House became so uncertain that it ultimately went around Iran's official representatives and established a secret back channel directly to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The confusion became a major problem in May when American negotiators, always oddly optimistic in their messaging, believed that they were getting close to an agreement that could end the war. Hmm, how'd that work out? The US and Iran had entered talks following an April ceasefire and a summit in Islamabad. By early May, White House officials reportedly believed, for whatever reason, that they were approaching a potential deal. And then Iran just stopped responding. More than 10 days passed without a clear answer from Tehran, leading US officials to question whether the Iranian representatives sitting across the negotiating table had the power to approve anything. At the time, those negotiators included Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammed Bakr Ghalibov and Foreign Minister Abbas Arajchi, two of the most prominent political officials remaining inside the regime. But Washington began to suspect that neither man could commit Iran to an agreement without approval from the Revolutionary Guard. And that brings us back to the power struggle that we've been tracking. This is just the latest evidence that the war dramatically strengthened the IRGC's grip over Iran. Now, the Revolutionary Guard Corps was already the regime's most powerful military and political institution. But with much of Iran's traditional leadership dead, wounded, or missing from public view, IRGC commanders reportedly gained even greater control over national security and foreign policy. So, the Trump administration decided to do something highly unusual. It went around Iran's official negotiators and tried to contact the IRGC directly.
To establish that secret channel, the White House turned to Netjivan Barzani, the president of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region. You may ask, why Barzani? Well, it's a fair question. He lived in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, studied at the University of Tehran, and speaks fluent Farsi. More importantly, he has personal relationships with senior Iranian officials, including members of the IRGC, while also maintaining strong ties in Washington. In other words, he was one of the few people supposedly trusted on both sides, trust being a relative term here. Around the 10th of May, then Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, remember her, reportedly called Barzani. According to Axios, Gabbard made clear that she was reaching out with the approval of President Trump and Vice President JD. Vance. The mission was straightforward. The White House wanted Barzani to contact General Ahmad Wahidi, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, and determine whether the IRGC supported the Iran diplomats that had been negotiating.