Morning Wire - Iran’s Options Narrow & Biden DOJ’s Pro-Abortion Collusion? | 4.15.26

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

Tensions build across multiple fronts in the Middle East, inflation data reveals the widespread effects of rising gas prices, and an explosive report released Tuesday suggests the Biden DOJ coordinated with abortion-rights activists to target pro-life advocates. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.- - -Ep. 2734- - -Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3- - -Today's Sponsors:Hello Fresh - Go to https://HelloFresh.com/morningwire10fm now to Get 10 Free meals + Free Nutribullet® Ultra Plus+ 2-in-1 Compact Kitchen System ($189.99 value) on your 3rd box.Vanta - Get started at https://Vanta.com/MORNINGWIRE - - -Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacymorning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with WestJet, from rolling countryside to cobblestone streets. Begin your next chapter. Book your seat at westjet.com or call your travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off. As the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports holds, the White House says Iran will come back to the table after Trump called their bluff. Everybody in the region has taken note and seen who is strong and who is weak,

and they want to be with the strong. I'm DailyWire, executive editor John Bickley, with Georgia Howl. It's Wednesday, April 15th, Tax Day. This is Morning Wire. New inflation numbers are less dire than expert forecasts, but economists point to warning signs as the Iran conflict wears on. It was, I think, overall, better than market expectations, but market expectations were horrible.

And a new Justice Department report reveals how the Biden-D-OJ partnered with abortion groups to surveil and prosecute pro-lifers. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. It's the middle of the week. You're tired and dinner feels like a chore. You can make your usual go-to meal, but you've been craving something new.

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naval posture in the Strait of Hormuz to renewed diplomatic signals. Joining us now to discuss all the latest developments is Victoria Coates, foreign policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. Victoria, great to have you back on the show. Thanks for having me. So first, we're into week six of this conflict. There's a lot of doom and gloom from the media, a lot of second-guessing of the Trump administration. Do you see progress in terms of the U.S. goals with Iran at this point? Oh, absolutely. And, you know, everyone from the economist to the New York Times is trumpeting how the Iranians have all the leverage.

They are essentially winning. And the Iranians are apparently reading this propaganda because they have an unrealistic view of where they are right now. But at the same time, by any objective metric, the United States is won. The president's bottom lines that they will not get a nuclear weapon. He's destroyed their facilities, that they will not, and that's what we're negotiating now to get to the final stages of that, that they won't have this missile system. Those have been largely destroyed, along with the industrial base to reconstitute them. And their terrorist proxies are essentially powerless at this point to come to their assistance. So all those things are to the good. And then on top of that, you know, the economic meltdown, everybody predicted has not yet come to pass. The mass. massive energy spikes have not come to pass, particularly here in the United States. Yes, gas is higher than we would like to see it. But at the same time, we also have 121 mega tankers steaming towards the United States for nice clean United States oil and natural gas. That is a massive boon to our energy sector. We're going to be seeing positive things out of this as well. And then

finally, the other piece that's amazing is the integration of Israel into this joint exercise. Israel's done an incredible job working hand and glove with the United States military, and I think we're going to see a lot of acceleration to the process of normalizing Israel with other regional partners. Right, and as you know, we'll be talking with your colleague, E.J. and Tony, next about the latest economic numbers. I know he sees some warning signs there, too. Now, the Trump administration said yesterday that about a half a dozen ships were turned back to Iranian ports. How many ships are getting flagged at this point? Pretty much all of them.

So anybody who tries to come out is getting flagged by the United States from Iranian ports. And so I think that is happening largely, to my observation, John, through the threat of force, not through the actual use of force. So I don't think we're seeing American servicemen and women being put in dangerous way here. I think the Iranians just realize there's not much they can do. And I think that's a really important lesson for them and for the rest of the world, that a lot of their threats are empty. Now, we used to see, I think the number was something like 140 ships a day go through the Strait of Hormuz. That was way down, something like 12 or fewer in the last few weeks.

Are we seeing the pace pick up at all yet on the Strait of Hormuz? I think the traffic's still pretty tight. We're seeing a little bit, but what we're looking for is an admission from the Iranians that they are not going to do this anymore, that they promised in return for the ceasefire, that they would free up navigation. We need them to take that step. And I think the fact that they've come back to the administration after the failure of Islamabad and said they want to try again, that's going to happen as early as tomorrow. My understanding is it'll be thirsty that they will be able to get into negotiations to really open up the straight. And then we can talk about next steps.

Right. So you're hearing the same thing we are, which is that talks could resume as early as tomorrow. Yes. And bear in mind that the talks that took place in Islamabad, were historic for one reason. Those were the first high-level direct talks between Americans and Iranians in over a decade and the highest level on the American side since 1979. The Biden administration begged for that meeting. They started begging in February of 2021 for direct negotiations with the Iranians. It was enormously important to them. And knowing that, the Iranians

just said no for four years. Now the Americans aren't taking that anymore. And from what I've heard, was a fascinating discussion, very unclear where their decision-making is, whether they even know who is making decisions for the Iranian government, and maybe a little delusional about how much leverage they actually have. Right. Our White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olahan said exactly that as well. Victoria, thank you so much for talking with us. Absolutely a pleasure.

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effects of our war with Iran. We've seen inflation, but the Trump administration is actually touting the new numbers as something close to welcome news, at least. What are the top lines here? Well, look, I think it's a little premature to be taking it. a victory lap on inflation, even if you strip out the volatile categories of food and energy, energy obviously was where a lot of the increase came from month over month. But even still, even if you're just looking at that so-called core component, it remains way above the Fed's 2.0% target. And then again, once you add back in those energy components, the picture is not good. A lot of fuels are up double digits. Diesel was up 42% month over month. I mean, that's a significant cost for

business. Is there any good news from this report? You know, you can find a few individual categories, especially in food, where you did see prices come down. So that's a good thing. It means that businesses are charging customers less, essentially, for a few of those products. So good news there. But that's about it, honestly. And if we look at not just what's called final demand, but intermediate, in other words, not just what the final business is selling a product to a consumer at, but what the wholesaler, you can say, is selling it at. A lot of those prices were actually increasing faster than the retail price. And what that points to, unfortunately, is more pain down the road. In other words, more price increases just at the consumer level, not at the business

level. Right. So that's your argument that this is premature to be saying this is positive news on any level. Do you expect inflation to climb more? You mentioned the cost of fuel, still been very high. It's kind of up and down. Doesn't look like it's coming down any time real soon. What do you expect? Yeah, I think, unfortunately, we're going to continue to get very hot inflation prints, largely driven by that energy component, as you mentioned. And what that is going to do is start trickling down into everything else. Higher energy prices will push up prices everywhere. The other big thing that we have to remember is that we have multiple supply chain crises going on right now. It's not just oil. That is the one that's most apparent because it's already pushed up

prices at the pump. But we also have a global fertilizer crisis right now that a lot of people are not talking about. The thing is that that won't cause consumer prices to go up, though, until the autumn. Then it will be apparent that we had a crisis. It was just several months ago. We have seen the president say that some of the oil tankers are coming to the U.S. now. Some more countries are starting to look to the U.S. for their oil. Do you see that being maybe a long-term win for the administration, or again, is this premature? The issue here is just a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand. I think it's great that we're exporting more. The problem is that after four years of Biden, we just don't have any real excess capacity because he declared a war on American energy. Let's just call it what it is. And well count was steadily declining, even though production levels stayed high per well output just increased to compensate. So if you look at how much we produce here at home, it's not even half of what used to go through the Strait of Hormuz. What I'm getting at, is that even if we were to export literally everything and keep none for ourselves, which is obviously impossible, but even under that ridiculous scenario, it still is not to fully replace all of the lost supply. So again, we're still dealing with that fundamental supply demand mismatch.

And how much does Venezuela being more amenable to our trade relationship helping alleviate any of this? Is that helping? It helps a little bit. The problem with Venezuela is that their production is way down from where it used to be because of the communist mismanagement of that industry. But again, at the end of the day, it's not just a matter of Venezuelan oil coming here to the U.S. or going to Europe or going to Asia. This is a global problem, right? Right. It all comes down to that. E.J. Antony, thank you so much for lending us your expertise. Oh, thank you for having me. An explosive report released Tuesday finds the Biden Justice Department went much further than previously thought to target religious Americans who oppose abortion. It suggests federal authorities may have coordinated with abortion rights activists. Here with more is Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham. So, Megan, this is a massive report.

It includes some 700,000 records. What exactly is being claimed that happened behind closed doors with the Biden Justice Department? Yeah, Georgia, this report comes from the Trump administration's weaponization working group, and what it has found is that the Biden administration misapplied the Face Act to target pro-life groups, and that's something that we knew that they were targeting peaceful pro-life protesters, but it finds that at that same time, they were also offering support to abortion clinics and minimizing attacks on pro-life groups and religious institutions. It also alleges serious prosecutorial misconduct, including withholding evidence, misleading the court, and failing to screen out jurors who had a bias against religious and conservative views.

So in one case, prosecutors reportedly referred to Christian pro-life beliefs as quote-unquote culty, and they openly criticized those beliefs in the courtroom. And then to make this story even more newsworthy, the Biden administration relied on information that was gathered from radicals. pro-abortion groups to track, prosecute, and even spy on peaceful pro-life protesters. So we caught up with Daily Wire White House correspondent Mary Margaret O'Lehand right after her story on this report dropped. Now, she's busy traveling with the vice president right now, but this was her analysis on what this report contains. One of the major things that we learned is that these pro-abortion activists with the National Abortion Federation were spoon-feeding information.

to the DOJ to help them to target American citizens. And we know this because the emails show that National Abortion Federation employees were literally emailing Sanjay Patel, a DOJ official who is asking them for pictures, information on the families, on their kids, and sending all this information along and using it to put some of these people in jail. Now, long-time listeners will know. This is a story we've been tracking for years. But this report has some very concerning details, things that we had not seen in the past. Tell us about some of the new things that Mary Margaret found. Yeah, Georgia. And some of those details are, as John somewhat alluded to in his intro, pretty explosive.

So this wasn't simply outside abortion rights activists sending general tips to the Biden DOJ. In some cases, Mary Margaret found in this report emails showing those abortion rights activists sending dossiers. personal information about pro-life activists who had not even been accused of crimes to the Biden DOJ. And she says that the surveillance that she saw described in these emails is something akin to what you would expect from a national security investigation. Chip Roy, a congressman from Texas, during a hearing, he had sat down one of the top officials at the National Abortion Federation and grilled her about whether they were helping the DOJ to target pro-life Americans. She was very careful with her wording, but she tried to make it seem like it wasn't true that they were

assisting with that. That is actually false. They were very, very involved in assisting with tracking down these pro-life activists, portraying them as terrorists. If you look at these emails, you would think that some of these individuals were Islamic terrorists the way they tracked them across state lines and followed their Facebook activity. It's very unnerving to look at. So this report says that these dossiers led to the arrest and prosecution of dozens of pro-life activists, many of whom were participating in the kind of peaceful protests that included things like praying, singing, or sitting in front of clinic doors. Now, several of these protesters were sentenced to years in prison before President Trump took office for the second time and pardoned them in his first week. And given that this report is 800 pages long, it's very possible that we will get yet more reporting on what the Biden administration was pursuing in terms of these pro-life protesters. Well, disturbing stuff and good work from Mary Margaret.

Megan, thanks for reporting. Yep, my pleasure. And before we go, today is Tax Day. Daily Wire reporter Lyndon Blake is here with what you need to know as the deadline arrives. Today is very important because the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, reports taxpayers this year will spend nearly 7 billion hours and more than $477 billion to do their taxes. It's a lot of time and money, so it's important to make sure you're filing correctly. There are several changes this year. First, the standard deduction is higher, and tipped workers

can deduct up to $25,000 per year in qualified tax tips. Thanks for waking up with us and for those listening to the show. You can now watch the show free on Daily Wire Plus. We'll be back this evening with more news you know. Thanks.