THE WAR ROOM: While Iran continues striking in retaliation and President Trump claims the extremist regime wants “to make a deal,” the word out of Iran is that they aren’t even talking to the US.

  Nonetheless, Trump said Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are directly involved in negotiations. Trump says Iran is so militarily weakened that they have to reach an agreement to end the war. “They’re talking to us and they’re making sense,” Trump told a reporter.

 But Iran in the past day has hit back in Israel, Iraq, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. Israel today launched a wave of attacks on Tehran.

  Trump claimed that Iran has already knuckled to his biggest demand. “They’ve agreed,” he said. “They will never have a nuclear weapon. They’ve agreed to that.”

  Then he said something strange … even for him. He claimed that Iran had given the US a present, ” a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money.” Could it have been a giant wooden horse?

  The President is talking peace but also sending more troops. About 1,000 members of the 82^ndAirborne are being sent to the region as well as roughly 5,000 Marines.

  Trump dodged a question about a story in The New York Times that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is encouraging him to pursue the war and eliminate Iran’s hardline government. “He’s a warrior,” Trump only said. “He’s fighting with us.”

JUST WAIT: The wait to go through security at some airports has grown to four to six hours as the partial federal funding shutdown drags on. As many as 450 employees of the Transportation Security Administration have quit for lack of a paycheck.

  Senate Democrats are considering a Republican offer that would re-open and re-fund the Department of Homeland Security, except for ICE’s deportation division. A deal would get airport Transportation Security employees back on the payroll and presumably would get security lines back to normal.

  President Trump said, “I guess they’re getting fairly close but I think any deal they make I’m pretty much not happy with it.”

  Remember what this is about. The Democrats are fighting for the imposition of professional policing standards on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including the banning of masks and the requirement that they have a judicial warrant to enter a home. 

MISSING: “Today Show” anchor Savannah Guthrie sat for her first formal interview since the kidnapping of her mother in Arizona nearly two months ago. Nancy Guthrie, 84, has not been found.

  Speaking with Hoda Kotb, “Someone needs to do the right thing. We are in agony. It is unbearable,” Guthrie said through tears. “And to think of what she went through.
I wake up every night in the middle of the night, every night. And in the darkness,
I imagine her terror.”

  The interview airs on NBC tomorrow and Friday.

SCREEN TIME: A New Mexico jury found that Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, allowed its platforms to become venues for child predators to solicit young users. They ordered the company to pay $375 million in damages for violations of the state’s consumer protection laws, far less than the billions originally sought in the lawsuit.

  State investigators had gone undercover on Facebook, finding that algorithms exposed children to sexual material. The state attorney general said in a statement,  “Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew.”

  Meta denies it and says the company will appeal.  

THE REGIME: 

— Prosecutors in Minnesota are suing the federal government for evidence related to the three shootings carried out by immigration agents, two of them fatal. The feds have refused to share evidence with the locals although in one case in which a man was wounded, the officer who fired his gun is under federal investigation.

— A group of eight architecture and cultural organizations is suing President Trump and the board of the Kennedy Center over the planned renovations of the arts complex, which are set to begin in just over three months. The lawsuit seeks to have the White House and the Kennedy Center board comply with existing historic preservation laws and secure Congress’ approval before moving ahead with the renovations.

  President Trump has said the building will be stripped down to its framing.

— A top deputy to US Attorney Jeanine Pirro in Washington admitted during a closed-door court hearing this month that the Justice Department did not have evidence of wrongdoing in its criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve over cost overruns in its building renovations. President Trump has 

claimed “there is criminality” in the $2.5 billion overhaul of the Fed’s headquarters. 

THE SPIN RACK: Democrats won a symbolic victory yesterday, flipping the Florida statehouse seat that represents President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. —Police arrested two men, ages 45 and 47, in the burning of three ambulances operated by a Jewish ambulance service. They are accused of arson with intent to endanger life, which carries a life sentence. — At least 66 people died in the crash of a Colombian military aircraft with 128 people on board. Four people were missing and no cause has yet been given. — Residents of one Los Angeles area neighborhood, some of whose homes burned in last year’s fires and now own only a vacant lot, received a bill of $23,614 for fire repairs from their homeowners association. The HOA threatened interest and even foreclosure if the bill was not paid within a month. 

BELOW THE FOLD: President Trump, who claims voting by mail is cheating, voted by mail yesterday in a special election in Palm Beach, Florida. It was because he’s elderly and couldn’t get to the polling station.