15 SEP 26 SITREP

• Anthony D'Esposito, Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Labor, confirmed the department has issued dozens of subpoenas and executed search warrants across the country targeting fraudulent foreign labor visa schemes, with those same warrants turning up guns and narcotics along the way.
• Investigators went on the ground in Texas and walked into a three-story office building with 30 to 36 units where every single office had the lights off, mail piled up at the doors, and not a soul present, yet that one building alone had nearly 500 approved H-1B visa applications tied to it from companies falsely claiming to operate out of that address.
• H-1B visa holders were found working as waiters, waitresses, and hostesses at Texas restaurants, jobs that have nothing to do with H-1B authorization, and transnational criminal organizations were identified as the driving force behind visa mill operations, holding workers' documents hostage, taking cuts of their wages, and threatening expired-visa holders into continuing to work for as little as $5 an hour, a racket D'Esposito compared directly to the cartel and coyote operations that funneled millions of people across the southern border under the Biden-Harris administration.
• The Department of Labor coordinated with Acting Secretary Keith Sonderling to suspend H-1B applications for Cognizant and Cloudera, two of the most frequently named violators, and D'Esposito disclosed that major U.S. universities are under investigation for exploiting the J-1 visa program, with evidence linking J-1 holders at those institutions to money flowing back to China and directly funding the CCP, with more company and university actions described as coming soon.

• A large trove of new documents dropped last night related to the July 2024 assassination attempt against President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, revealing that an anonymous donor paid for the cremation of shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, and newly surfaced footage from the day of the shooting showed Crooks looking physically different from his high school photo, with more muscle, longer hair, and a visibly menacing expression on his face.
• The footage from Butler showed the Turning Point Action logo visible directly behind Crooks in the background, and field representatives who had been manning a Turning Point Action table at that location confirmed when contacted that they remembered a man matching Crooks's description coming by their table, describing him as almost completely emotionless with a noticeable air of condescension about him.
• Crooks's father disclosed that his son had been emotionless from birth, rarely crying and never laughing, and had been known for harming pets as a child, and President Trump stated publicly that by the time he took office in 2025 most information related to the Butler shooting had been missing, altered, corrupted, or gone, and accused former FBI Director Christopher Ray of lying before Congress by claiming Trump had not been shot but had instead been grazed by broken glass from a teleprompter, with the teleprompters visibly intact on video.
• Crooks was identified as having used the name Bob Dole as a pseudonym in connection with gun parts purchases, and the Butler attack was placed within a broader sequence that included a subsequent assassination attempt at Trump International, an assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, whose one-year mark had just passed at the time of this broadcast on September 15, 2026.

• The Houthis, a client force of Iran receiving material and financial support from Tehran, activated military pressure at the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the southern mouth of the Red Sea also known as the Gate of Grief, pushing to close that chokepoint while simultaneously conducting strikes at the Suez Canal at the northern mouth of the Red Sea, putting Iranian-aligned forces in position to squeeze both ends of the Red Sea at the same time.
• Iranian-aligned militia forces including the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, a militia self-reporting over 100,000 fighters inside Iraq, conducted pipeline strikes in the region, with the Iraqi government initially denying the strikes came from Iraqi territory before partially walking that back, and those pipeline strikes directly undermined proposals to use overland routes to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and other maritime chokepoints that the business and Iran-hawk communities had been pushing as an alternative.
• The dual maritime pressure campaign drove a 25 percent spike in both Brent and WTI crude oil prices over the preceding week, and Curt Mills, Executive Director of The American Conservative magazine, founded in 2002 by Pat Buchanan in opposition to the Iraq War, assessed that Saudi Arabia is caught in an impossible bind, forced to choose between suing for peace with the Houthis, which would humiliate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or accepting a military bailout from Israel that would require Riyadh to formally recognize Israel's right to exist, a concession MBS cannot make given that his father King Salman remains alive and his succession claim is already described as tenuous.
• Curt Mills assessed that Iran and its allies are deliberately timing their escalation to the U.S. midterm election cycle, calculating that grinding pressure on President Trump before the midterms is their best window, and that China is running the same playbook with Xi Jinping traveling to Washington within days, both authoritarian governments viewing open democratic elections as a structural vulnerability they can exploit in a way their own systems never face.