What I Got Wrong

Writing about politics every day inevitably leads to an internal mental landscape full of regrets, self-recrimination, and second-guessing about how you covered the news, what you skipped that you shouldn’t have, and what you plain got wrong.

I had anticipated only last month that Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general would “cue up the mother of all confirmation battles” and “sets up a potentially epic confirmation battle.” So far, that really has not come to fruition, even though this is most important nomination the Senate has ever considered

As the confirmation hearing began this morning, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed poised to confirm Blanche, with ostensible holdouts Thom Tillis (NC) and John Cornyn (TX) creating a bare modicum of drama but giving themselves plenty of room to jump on board the Blanche bandwagon when the time comes to vote.

The nomination is most hung up on the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund, with Tillis insisting on a vote on standalone legislation to ban it before he’ll vote for Blanche. Note that he’s only demanding a vote, not passage.

This is one of those patented Capital Hill smokescreens, where a senator reduces a complicated, wide-ranging, multi-dimensional issue to a single high-profile element of that issue — then offers an easy way to talk him off the ledge on it. These kinds of maneuvers are so transparently about not taking a stand that I can’t believe they still work to fool anyone, reporter or voter. But clearly they still do, because they remain an invidious part of congressional politics.

But Tillis and Cornyn — whose political careers Trump ended — deserve no more scorn that the rest of Senate Republicans, who know exactly what Blanche has done and have a chance to put a stop to him doing any more of it. As my colleague John Light puts it, Republican senators are voting on the future prospects of Trump’s ongoing retribution campaign.

For a year and half at DOJ — including as acting attorney general for the last few months — Blanche has unmistakably shown who he is and what he will do if confirmed. He has been nothing less than a travesty: destroying the independence and professionalism of the Justice Department; capitulating to the president and letting the White House run DOJ; abusing the powers of his office for the president’s personal benefit; and hijacking the criminal justice system to use it as a tool of political retribution.

But sure, tell us more about how the slush fund is a bridge too far for you.

My error in anticipating the mother of all confirmation battles wasn’t so much misplaced confidence in GOP senators doing the right thing. It was in under-crediting the fact that Blanche, having already been confirmed by the Senate as deputy attorney general, can stay on as acting attorney general for the rest of Trump’s term of office, even if the Senate rejects his nomination. That creates a perverse dynamic where GOP senators would have to assume all of the risk of rising up against Trump but have very little to show for their efforts in the end.

And so GOP senators sit back once again — abdicating their constitutional roles and prioritizing their own self-preservation — while watching democracy slip away at an ever quickening pace.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Grand Juries: “Federal judges are increasingly peering under the hood at the Trump-led Justice Department’s use of grand juries aimed at well-known adversaries of President Donald Trump,” Politico reports. “And they don’t like what they’re seeing.”

• DOJ Case Quotas: In a blunt, statistics-driven, quantity-over-quality move, Aakash Singh, the associate deputy attorney general overseeing US attorneys’ offices, has announced the imposition of case quotas on line prosecutors, Bloomberg reports.

• Law Firm Subpoenas: In a convoluted and head-scratching move, the Trump DOJ is subpoenaing the nine law firms that struck deals with the White House plus four other firms that fought that Trump executive order, the NYT reports. The latest development comes after the American Bar Association, in its lawsuit against the administration for attacking law firms, sought to force the White House to turn over internal documents and communications among it, Trump personal lawyer Boris Epshteyn, and Stephen K. Bannon. The most charitable explanation for the DOJ move is that this falls under the rubric of “the best defense is a good offense,” but it still doesn’t really make any sense.

Is ICE Really Halting Traffic Stops?

Reports yesterday — confirmed by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) — that ICE was halting traffic stops nationwide in the wake of two fatal shootings by federal agents in Houston and Maine were quickly contradicted this morning by President Trump in a social media post:

… we CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.

The initial decision immediately seemed like a sop to Collins, who is in a tough re-election campaign. But only momentarily.

“It’s not a policy change. It’s a temporary pause,” Trump administration border czar Tom Homan told Fox News.

Even that was too much of a concession for Trump.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Florida: A Mexican national running from an “encounter” with ICE at a gas station was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer on a nearby roadway.

• Mexico: President Claudia Sheinbaum is demanding U.S. criminal investigations into the deaths 14 Mexican nationals who have died in detention centers and three who have been killed in ICE operations since President Donald Trump took office, the WaPo reports.

• Targeting ICE protesters: A new report documents 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of “less-lethal weapons” against ICE protesters from June 2025 through May 2026 that led to 203 injuries, including blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions, according to the Guardian.

The Corruption: ‘Development Fee’ Edition

A $2 million “nonrefundable development fee” made last year to President Trump’s holding company by a South Korean company “illustrate[s] the minefield Mr. Trump has created by maintaining personal financial ties with nearly 30 different business ventures with foreign counterparts worldwide — unlike any other president in modern American history,” the NYT reports.

In Hegseth’s Navy, Women Need Not Apply

NYT:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of seven senior Navy officers, five of whom are women or people of color, to two-star admiral rank, current and former defense officials said.

The highly unusual move means that for the first time in more than a decade, no female active-duty naval officers are likely to be promoted to admiral this year, officials said.

Musk’s $1 Million Checks Broke Election Law

The Wisconsin Elections Commission found last week that Elon Musk likely broke state law when he handed out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election and referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office for possible prosecution, the AP reports.

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‘Now We Have All the Evidence’

The first hints that the Trump administration might be softening its position of refusing to cooperate with Minnesota’s investigations into the three shootings by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge emerged on June 22.

In its unusual lawsuit against DOJ and DHS in federal court in D.C. seeking to obtain evidence that the feds refused to share, the state of Minnesota asked for filing deadlines in the case to be pushed back 11 days until July 6 because state and federal law enforcement agencies had “recently reengaged in discussions about the prospect of mutual information sharing.”

Then on June 30, both sides jointly asked for another much larger extension of 45 days, until Aug. 20, “in light of ongoing discussions … about the prospect of mutual information sharing” between state and federal law enforcement.

We now know that sometime in the past two weeks the Trump administration finally relented and coughed up what state prosecutors are suggesting was the whole enchilada of evidence gathered by the feds in the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.

The evidence includes the car Good was driving when she was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. It also includes body cam footage and statements by federal agents across all three cases.

“The wonderful thing is now we have all the evidence,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a press conference in Minneapolis yesterday announcing the breakthrough:

As part of the information sharing, Minnesota law enforcement reciprocated by sharing with federal law enforcement the evidence it had independently gathered in the three cases.

The Trump administration has not publicly acknowledged that it has come down from its maximalist position of withholding evidence from state investigators. Even after Moriarty’s press conference, Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen “refused to confirm any cooperation agreement between state and federal agencies,” according to Steve Schleicher, an attorney representing the Pretti family who met for an hour with Rosen yesterday afternoon.

It took a virtually unprecedented lawsuit by a state against the federal government to puncture what had effectively been a cover-up of the shootings — which given everything we know about the Trump administration would have been directed from and by the White House. What we don’t know is why the White House relented, if, in fact, it did.

The Associated Press suggests the breakthrough came after, ironically, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office sought evidence from the Minnesota
Bureau of Criminal Apprehension about its investigation into the shooting of Sosa-Celis, which led to the state indictment of ICE agent Christian Castro. In a June 3 letter filed in the D.C. case, BCA superintendent Drew Evans told federal prosecutors that the state would share its evidence if the feds would share theirs.

While this breakthrough is huge and gives state prosecutors a fighting chance to complete full investigations and make sound charging decisions, a lot has already been lost that could come back to bite any attempted prosecutions of federal agents.

There’s little indication that federal law enforcement fully investigated the three shootings so while the evidence the feds do have is critical it may be incomplete. In addition, time was wasted. Leads that might have been followed if the evidence was available may be harder to follow now.

If any federal agents are eventually charged, they may use the fact of the contested investigation in their defense, raising questions about the delays, the chain of custody of the evidence, and other anomalies that wouldn’t have occurred if the feds hadn’t circled the wagons and refused to cooperate.

It’s also difficult to draw any broad lessons from this episode that might apply in future cases, especially after fatal ICE shootings over the past week in Texas and Maine — other than the obvious: Minnesota’s elected Democratic officials presented a united front and took aggressive action to assert their rights to investigate state crimes and protect their prerogatives in our federal system.

For Your Radar …

In a notable departure from recent ICE shootings, DHS said the agent in the fatal shooting of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, in Maine yesterday fired after “fearing for public safety” — rather than fearing for his own life.

I’m not sure what to make of this exactly, especially given that DHS provided a separate explanation to Congress saying the driver had “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement.”

Stay tuned …

Quote of the Day

“I heard agony. I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”—Mary Hayes, a witness to the fatal ICE shooting in Maine, who described seeing a screaming woman on her knees, next to a young girl.

ICYMI …

This story last week from Bolt is newly relevant: “Maine Lawsuit is Testing the Boundaries of Suing Federal Immigration Agents”

Judge Blasts Trump’s IRS ‘Settlement’

You’ve seen by now that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams eviscerated President Trump, his lawyers, and top Justice Department officials for Trump’s collusive lawsuit against the IRS and the purported “settlement” of the case which produced the since-abandoned $1.776 slush fund and the still-live federal tax immunity for Trump.

I don’t have much to add except to note that Williams went as far as she could given the limits of the law — sanctioning Trump’s lawyers and sending her order to bar authorities in two states that have open complaints against two of the three top DOJ officials, Todd Blanche and Stan Woodward — but that is still not enough and won’t be enough until Republicans in Congress begin to put country above party and prevent the wholesale looting of the Treasury.

There is every reason to think Trump and Blanche will find some other way to compensate Jan. 6ers other than the aborted slush fund.

Good Read

Via NOTUS, Rapper Boosie Badazz is in arbitration with TPM faves Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman after he paid them $600,000 to work on obtaining him a pardon from President Trump. They allegedly told him they had secured him a pardon, but it never materialized. Now they say they’re effectively bankrupt.

Quick Reminder

I’ve heard from some of you who have already contributed to the TPM Journalism Fund during our annual fund drive, and some who have given and plan to give more. Thank you! Really!

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Don’t You Dare Say the New Air Force One Has No Clothes

Just 18 months into Trump II, the president feels the confidence and swagger to demand that grand jury subpoenas be served immediately upon the nation’s leading newspaper for reporting that his beloved new Qatari-gifted Air Force One doesn’t haven the same defensive capabilities as the older models.

In a striking move to intimidate and coerce a free press, FBI agents were at the homes of New York Times reporters with the grand jury subpoenas Friday night, only a day after newspaper’s second big scoop of the week on the airplane’s deficiencies. But as stark as it was an overreach of government power, it was also a fit of personal pique from a thin-skinned president who pushed hard to rush the aircraft into service even if meant reduced capabilities.

One of the ironies of the story is that initial reports were that FBI Director Kash Patel was summoned to the White House Friday because of irritation that he was planning to use a government plane that day yet again to fly to go see his country music singer girlfriend perform, this time in Chicago. Subsequent reporting from the NYT itself revealed that the White House put the screws to Patel in that meeting to investigate the leaks that produced the NYT’s scoops (emphasis mine):

Mr. Patel scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than F.B.I. headquarters — a major departure from historical practice. Mr. Patel also briefed senior administration officials on the investigation, two people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions.

Of course, both versions of why Patel was summoned to the White House can be true — and given Trump’s way of doing business they plausibly are both true. The eager-to-please Patel — under the gun for his travels to the point that Republican senators are becoming irritated — was an easy mark for Trump to strong-arm into launching a leak investigation and targeting his nemesis, the NYT.

The speed of the subpoenas to the NYT was breathtaking and undermined DOJ claims that the leakers were the target, not the NYT. The earliest the investigation could have started was Wednesday, after the first NYT story on Trump taking the old Air Force One back from the NATO summit in Turkey, before transferring to the new one in the U.K. (pictured above) for the transatlantic flight home. The subpoenas call for the reporters — Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt — to appear before a grand jury in Manhattan this Wednesday.

To ramp up an investigation up that quickly and begin serving subpoenas stretches the bounds of the space-time continuum under which the Justice Department has historically operated in almost any circumstance. It was especially striking given long-standing DOJ policies, since dispensed with under Trump II, that made seeking evidence from journalists an investigative avenue of last resort.

While there are no substantial legal impediments to the feds subpoenaing journalists, coercing testimony from reporters was typically treated gingerly, researched thoroughly, came after other investigative techniques proved fruitless, and was made at the highest levels of the DOJ, not the White House. The abbreviated time frame between the first NYT story and Friday’s subpoenas suggests the Trump DOJ is starting the investigation by coercing reporters to testify.

The contrast isn’t just a stark sign of how much has changed or pearl-clutching over norms. The facts give away the game: The NYT is a Trump target here. It is not merely incidental to the leak investigation.

At a minimum, targeting the NYT gives him a chance to take some of the political heat off by flexing his executive powers and avoiding the appearance of being on the defensive over having undermined national security and the continuity of government by using an inferior aircraft. But much more is at stake than that.

I don’t know how to say it any more clearly: The president of the United States is ordering investigations, being run from the White House, of the nation’s leading newspaper in order to intimidate it into ceasing to publish stories that are personally and politically embarrassing to him.

This is all of the worst fears of a Trump II presidency coming home to roost.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Politico: U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly of D.C., a Trump appointee, reluctantly granted the Trump DOJ request to drop the seditious conspiracy convictions of high-ranking members of the far-right Proud Boys, but not before taking one last shot at conveying to posterity the seriousness of the Jan. 6 attack.

• Bloomberg: Top Trump DOJ officials plan to drop charges against alleged $722 million crypto fraudster Matthew Goettsche, who was indicted in Trump I and was scheduled to go to trial in October. Even then-acting New Jersey U.S. Attorney Alina Habba resisted pressure to drop the case:

But after further advocacy from Goettsche’s team earlier this year, senior DOJ official Aakash Singh convened a meeting in Washington last month between the defense and prosecutors to discuss a resolution. … The mediation culminated in the deputy attorney general’s office decision that New Jersey’s new US attorney, Robert Frazer, would back away from criminal charges while still seeking to recoup a portion of investors’ losses, the people added.

Scenes From a Gerontocracy

The sudden and unexpected death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), 71, from an aortic dissection was followed this weekend by the barely convincing written statement from hospitalized and soon-to-retire Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), 84, that he is still alive and functioning.

Lindsey Graham’s Real Legacy

President Trump gives the late Sen. Lindsey Graham a lifetime score of 99 out of 100:

The Corruption: Gov’t Contracts Edition

• DHS: Inspector General Joseph Cuffari has found evidence that Corey Lewandowski may have been involved in improperly awarding government contracts while he served as a unpaid senior aide to then-Secretary Kristi Noem, the WSJ reports:

The investigators are examining many of the contracts the department signed in Noem’s tenure, and department officials had been surprised at how involved Lewandowski was in the process, some of the people said. He personally signed specific contracts, according to people who reviewed those documents or had knowledge of the approvals, despite not technically serving as a full-time U.S. government official.

Lewandowski denies issuing contracts while at DHS and says he hadn’t been contacted about the ongoing investigation.

• Kennedy Center: Former project managers claiming whistleblower status have sent Congress internal documents that they say show how the performing arts venue bypassed government contracting norms in work carried out under President Trump, the NYT reports.

Must Listen

The New Yorker’s David Remnick interviews Atul Gawande, the author and Biden-era USAID official, on the astounding death toll since the Trump administration’s obliteration of the foreign aid agency and the difficulty of tracking mortality rates: “The U.S. was the provider of some of the best, highest-quality data in the world—out of U.S.A.I.D., which was dismantled.”

Marco Rubio: Viceroy of Venezuela

An essential read from the NYT on on how Marco Rubio effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources, and its government in a quasi-colonial arrangement since the U.S. capture of President Nicolás Maduro.

Breaking: Possible ICE Shooting in Maine

Authorities haven’t released any information yet on an incident this morning in Biddeford, Maine, but state Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau (D) said in a Facebook post that it was a fatal shooting and ICE was involved.

Piecing Together the Houston ICE Shooting

The NYT visual investigations team does its best with the limited footage available of the pursuit that ended in the ICE shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston last week.

Sign of the Times

Dave Matthews: “This father and grandfather who was murdered by ICE in Houston, Texas. Then they say he’s not even the guy they were looking for. Well then don’t pull the trigger you assholes. It just makes me mad. I want to send this to the memory of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo”
by u/CantStopPoppin in EyesOnIce

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A Case of Mistaken Identity

The ICE shooting of an unarmed immigrant in Houston — who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years, raised a family, and had no known prior run-ins with the law — has turned from deeply troubling to acutely tragic as new details of the Tuesday incident have emerged.

The most dismaying new news is that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not the target of the traffic stop that ended in his shooting death. There was another man in the white work van that Salgado Araujo was driving whom ICE agents thought was one of the two men they were looking for — but that turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

The other news that has come out over the past 24 hours paints a picture of ICE continuing to act with the flagrant disregard for good policing practices and without fear of real accountability:

• Despite a huge infusion of new federal funding and promises to issue body cameras, the agents involved in the incident were not wearing body cams at the time.

• In what is hard not to see as a convenient way of covering up the details of the shooting, ICE has detained the three other men who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s brother, and is pressuring them to self deport, a representative of the men’s families told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent.

• The three other men in the van told a lawyer that Salgado Araujo never veered toward federal agents and that a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle, the Washington Post reports. Attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra said he met with the three men individually while they were in detention and they separately gave similar accounts. “All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra told the Post. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”

While video of some portions of the incident has emerged, none of it captures the shooting itself.

The Houston district attorney, which is investigating the incident, is consulting with local prosecutors in Minneapolis about the challenges of investigating an ICE shooting without cooperation from the federal government, the AP reports.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Chicago: A federal judge in Chicago who hauled a chastened U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutrous into court yesterday concluded that he had violated her order sealing a criminal case when he spoke publicly about it at a Main Justice press conference last week, but she concluded that he did not do so for “any nefarious purpose” and declined to impose sanctions against him.

• D.C.: Even Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who has been unfailingly solicitous of FBI Director Kash Patel until this point, has concerns about Patel’s use of an FBI plane for personal travel and the FBI’s purchase of BMW vehicles. Grassley quietly sent Patel a letter in May inquiring about these issues, MS Now reports — though Grassley was quick to grouch about the reports of his minimal efforts at oversight.

Trump Fires EAC Commissioners

Just Security’s Aaron Blacksberg on the practical impact of President Trump’s unprecedented firing of all the remaining commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission, leaving it commissioner-less.

Tidbit of the Day

President Trump’s recent stock-trading frenzy was triggered by an appeal court’s August reversal of New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $500 million judgment against him. Off the hook for that penalty, Trump quickly began investing the $175 million he had sitting in a Schwab account as collateral for the appeal bond, the WSJ reports: “Within days, the Schwab account was snapping up and selling dozens of stocks as an automated trading strategy put the cash to work.”

The Emperor’s New Airplane

President Trump is essentially flying naked when he boards his cherished new Qatari-gifted Air Force One because it “lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities,” the NYT reports.

The White House and Air Force are dodging questions about Trump’s push to rush the airplane into service before it was thoroughly retrofitted for the job of protecting the nation’s head of state while he travels.

UPDATE: TPM Journalism Fund Drive

Folks, we’ve gotten off to a rip-roaring start in our annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. It launched Tuesday with a goal of $500,000, and we’ve already crested $200,000 in the first three days and change. Still a ways to go, but a fantastic way to start. Thank you!

The early success was helped by our single biggest contribution ever to the TPM Journalism Fund: $20,000. But the first three days still looked like what we have seen in past drives: broad-based support from readers giving what they can, which ranges from single-digit contributions to the occasional five-digit boost.

The sooner we can hit our mark, the quicker I can stop pitching you. So as the week ends, please consider taking just a moment to pitch in now and support our work. I and the rest of the team could not be more appreciative for your support.

Good Weekend Reads

• TPM’s Josh Marshall: Why the Democratic Party Has No ‘Base’ and Why That Matters

• Off Message’s Brian Beutler: How Democratic voters began to question, and ultimately lost faith in, their party’s establishment: a comprehensive history.

See Ya Monday

Time to Pay Up, Bub

President Trump’s last-ditch bid to avoid having to cough up $5 million to pay the judgement that E. Jean Carroll won against him for sexual abuse and defamation was rejected by an appeals court.

The late-evening denial by the Second Circuit came after the trial judge earlier in the day ordered the court clerk to disburse to Carroll the money Trump had deposited with the court, plus some $800,000 in accrued interest.

In an accompanying opinion, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Manhattan accused Trump of “stalling” the case for years before declaring it was time for Trump to pay up:

Carroll has waited a long time, not so much for the money, but for the comeuppance Trump so richly deserves and has spent most of his life avoiding with the help of a family fortune, a endless string of enablers, and hardball litigation tactics.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Houston: The family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the immigrant killed by ICE this week in Houston, is demanding an independent investigation at the same time the Houston district attorney is saying the feds have sidelined local officials from participating in any investigation.

• Eswatini: Eleven more migrants have been deported to the African country where they were immediately detained in its notorious Matsapha correctional facility, a U.S. lawyers told Reuters. “The arrivals ​bring to 29 the number sent to ​the southern African country under a $5.1 million ⁠agreement that has been challenged by lawyers ​who say deportees are being detained despite having ​already served sentences for crimes committed in the United States,” Reuters reports.

Judge Dugan Avoids Jail Time

Former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine but avoided any jail time for her conviction on a felony obstruction charge for shielding an immigrant from ICE agents in her courthouse last year.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Chicago: After a last-minute bid to avoid having to appear in federal court this morning was rejected by the judge, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutrous is set to have to explain why his public comments about a criminal case against reputed members of the Tren de Aragua gang didn’t violate the judge’s order sealing the case.

• Houston: Federal judges in the Southern District of Texas have appointed the virulently Islamophobic Aaron Reitz as interim U.S. attorney. “Islam is not compatible with Western Civilization,” Reitz declared this year, during his unsuccessful GOP primary campaign run for state attorney general, in an X post that remains live.

• Main Justice: The Trump DOJ has eschewed challenging mergers on antitrust grounds because of reticence from Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the department’s No. 3 official, Bloomberg reports:

He has taken an unusually active role in the work of the antitrust division compared to previous administrations, stifling merger litigation, according to people familiar with the matter. …

In meetings about antitrust issues, Woodward has questioned why the DOJ can’t simply stop reviewing deals and suggested that blocking a merger could violate a company’s constitutionally protected due process rights, according to some of the people, who are familiar with his remarks.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

TPM’s Khaya Himmelman surveys the states where election deniers are on the ballot this year to serve as top election officials: Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Vermont. They are all, of course, Republican candidates.

Platner Out

Graham Platner’s inevitable withdrawal came in a video posted last evening. Now Maine Democrats now have 18 days to try to salvage come kind of challenge to Sen. Susan Collins (R).

Hostilities With Iran Continue Into Day 2

With the ceasefire in in tatters, the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire overnight in the biggest escalation of hostilities since President Trump declared the Islamic republic’s “unconditional surrender” last month.

Criminalizing Dissent: International Edition

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invited senior ministers from more than 60 countries to a meeting in D.C. next week about the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism,” the WaPo reports, based on documents it reviewed.

The Trump administration has at various levels labeled left-wing opposition to the president as “domestic terrorism,” and has successfully brought criminal charges in at least one case.

White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka has been pushing the myth of a broader international union of left-wing terrorists, and the State Department meeting seems to fall in line with that push. A linkage to foreign terrorist groups “can unlock certain investigative tools,” such as surveillance, one U.S. counterterrorism official told the WaPo.

How Much Risk Does New AF1 Present?

At the Secret Service’s insistence, President Trump returned from the NATO summit in Turkey aboard the old Air Force One, not the fancy newly refurbished Qatari-donated one, seeming to confirm suspicions — despite White House denials — that the gifted plane was rushed into service without all of the necessary security features, the NYT reports:

But people briefed on the new plane’s capabilities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues, said the new plane does not have all the features of the older plane. The switch in the president’s aircraft when he departed Turkey was a precautionary measure made at the advice of the Secret Service and not because of a specific threat, they said.

RIP Bonnie Tyler

I don’t usually share purely pop music here, but the voice of Bonnie Tyler, who has died at 75 after an extended illness, still immediately transports me back to the first couple of years of high school, when her music was ubiquitous:

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Do Trump’s Bidding on Elections or Else …

In a pre-election blitz, the Trump administration has issued sweeping new threats to red and blue states alike if they don’t fall in line with the president on how to run their own elections:

• Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon sent similar letters to all 50 states and D.C. threatening election officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t take certain steps to crack down on the myth of noncitizen voting. Dhillon gave states five days to respond with details on how they intend to comply.

• FEMA has told states that they will lose 20% of their antiterrorism grants unless they transition to paper ballots, verify citizenship of voters and make other changes to election procedures, the NYT reports. The forced changes are part of the laundry list of dubious election rules that President Trump has pushed through executive order, proposed legislation, and endless misleading rhetoric.

The one-two punch of threatening criminal prosecution and making unrelated federal funding contingent unless states comply with Trump’s wishes represent a new level of coercion just four months before Election Day.

Trump’s previous efforts along these lines have been thoroughly rejected by federal courts on the obvious grounds that the Constitution leaves the running of federal election in the hands of the states and gives the president no authority in the election realm.

Some of the demanded changes at this late date, like switching to paper ballots, are absurdly impractical. Nearly all of the demands emerge from Trump’s relentless efforts to discredit free and fair elections, which has given rise to extensive conspiracizing on the right.

The latest moves are yet another way that Trump has harnessed the powers of the federal government to buttress his political position and seek retribution for his 2020 defeat.

In related news: Detroit election officials are pushing back against the DOJ’s plan to send voting monitors to the city for Michigan’s Aug. 4 primary.

Quote of the Day

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”—Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson (R), Utah’s top election official, on Harmeet Dhillon’s letter

Judge Quashes 2020 GA Election Subpoena

U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II, notably a Trump appointee, quashed a wide-ranging federal grand jury subpoena into the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, Georgia as too much, too late.

The subpoena for personal information on every county employee who worked on the 2020 election was “staggering” in its breadth, Ray ruled.

It was part of President Trump’s never-ending quest for retribution for his loss, a point that Ray made explicitly: “Thus, perhaps it makes sense that the DOJ, now unquestionably under the current President’s control, is seeking to identify individuals who might possess information or opinions in support of his claim that the 2020 Election was not legitimate.”

In a spicy footnote, Ray directed his scorn toward the DOJ’s tactic of using out-of-state prosecutors in the case, rather than the local U.S. Attorney’s Office: “To be clear, no evidence has been presented to the Court that the actual Grand Jury in the Northern District of Georgia seeks this information, as opposed to the out-of-district prosecutors who the DOJ has appointed to lead this inquiry who have served this Subpoena in the name of the Grand Jury.”

In the end, Ray based his decision to quash the subpoena on the rather narrow but sturdy contention that “the statute of limitations for any possible crime arising from the 2020 Election has long expired” and therefore the subpoena “would not lead to information that could be used to charge anyone with anything, at least not any viable charge.”

Inside the Fight Over MN Subpoenas

Documents from the intense fight over federal grand jury subpoenas of Democratic elected officials in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge are slowly being unsealed after U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz of Minneapolis quashed the subpoenas last month, Minnesota Public Radio reports.

The Trump DOJ engineered and defended the retaliatory subpoenas on the grounds that state elected officials were illegally interfering in ICE enforcement operations, an argument Judge Schiltz rejected: “The fact that connections between the information sought in the subpoenas and any possible criminal violation range from extremely weak to nonexistent only adds to the overwhelming evidence that these subpoenas were not issued to investigate, but to harass, coerce, and retaliate.”

ICE Shoots and Kills Houston Immigrant

An ICE agent shot and killed an undocumented Mexican national who had reportedly been in the United States for nearly 35 years during an attempted traffic stop arrest in Houston on Tuesday morning.

ICE, which has been notoriously unreliable in providing accurate details of shooting incidents, issued a statement from its acting director with an interesting caveat that seems like a nod to its troubling track record (emphasis mine): “From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”

The shooting is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office.

In an unrelated case in Nebraska last week, a Venezulean man pleaded guilty to one count of forcibly resisting arrest causing bodily injury as part of a plea agreement after the case against him for attempted murder of a federal officer fell apart. While DHS and federal prosecutors originally claimed that he had “violently attacked an ICE agent,” including choking her and slamming her head into the ground, video evidence of his arrest later contradicted those claims, Nebraska Public Radio reported.

The allegations made in the initial complaint were “at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete negligence,” U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter said during sentencing, adding that he found the law enforcement reports “embellished” and “troubling.”

The Latest on Iran …

• NYT: U.S. Strikes Iran and Reimposes Sanctions in Retaliation for Tanker Attack

• WSJ: Trump Says Ceasefire With Iran Is Over After Latest Attacks

• NPR: New lawsuit alleges U.S. shared asylum application details with Iran

Trump Shakes NATO With New Threats

President Trump arrived at the NATO summit in Turkey and immediately resumed the bombast and threatening behavior that has weakened NATO to Vladimir Putin’s advantage:

• Trump reasserted his spurious claims to Greenland, saying “Greenland is very important for the U.S. but it’s not important for Denmark.” That prompted a strong reaction from Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen: “We are ready to defend every inch of NATO, including our own territory.”

• Trump improbably purported to halt U.S. trade with Spain.

What’s at Stake in Europe

One of the things I came away with from my trip last week to Denmark, where I got a good refresher on 20th century European history, was a new appreciation for how misguided America’s conceit about NATO is. The idea that Trump embodies isn’t new, but rather is the same self-serving notion that if we just leave NATO to its own devices we’ll get all of the benefits of the alliance without all of the cost.

That conceit is premised on the deeply flawed notion that NATO is a default arrangement, rather than the historical anomaly it is. Denmark, for instance, had a long history of maintaining neutrality, including during the First World War, until the cataclysm of the Second World War prompted it to become a founding member of NATO. For it’s part, Finland didn’t join NATO until 2023. There are innumerable other examples of how NATO represents a dramatic break from past statecraft on the continent.

The U.S. abandoning NATO now doesn’t mean Europe will revert to a 1914 mindset; too many economic, cultural, and political threads have been sewn together in the post-WWII period for it to revert to that arrangement. But it is a distinctly American myopia to think Europe will stand pat, won’t evolve on its own as it manages all of its own competing interests, makes it own internal compromises, and responds to the domestic political realities of each country.

The U.S. isn’t just abandoning NATO; it’s abandoning having a hand in managing those dynamics and minimizing their impacts on its own national interest — which is another, albeit more nuanced, way of saying Trump is putting his own interest above the nation’s.

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‘Warning Notice’

This story has been percolating in local media since last month — credit to Syracuse.com, which appears to be the lead dog on this story — but the totality of it just hit the national radar over the last 24 hours or so.

In two instances in western New York, ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility — which has apparently switched from serving as an internal watchdog to targeting online critics — has tried to force people who posted criticisms of ICE to sign a “Warning Notice” admitting that their criticisms were unlawful.

David Streever of Rochester, New York, sued ICE on Monday in federal court in D.C., alleging that ICE’s OPR violated his First Amendment rights when it went to his home last month and then tracked him down while he was traveling to issue him a “Warning Notice” about a critical email he sent to then-acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons. He refused to sign it.

“Like many Americans, I was deeply upset after the shootings in Minnesota and I felt compelled to do something,” Streever said in a press release about his lawsuit. “Writing an email to the head of ICE seemed like the least I could do to express my sense of outrage. I never dreamed it would lead to a knock on my door by federal officers or descending on my hotel in the dark of night.”

The visit to Streever’s home came the same day that ICE OPR approached Paigelynne Gonyea while she was serving as a poll worker at a polling place in Syracuse, New York, about an Instagram post from January about the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good. Gonyea also refused to sign the “Warning Notice.”

In Gonyea’s case, there’s some dispute over which Instagram post prompted ICE to investigate. She says it was this post that urged the indictment of the ICE agent by name:

ICE claims it was a separate post that provided the agent’s home address, a claim Gonyea denies.

The fact that both cases are out of western New York could mean a particularly aggressive ICE OPR effort in that area, rather than a nationwide push. The “Warning Notice” in the Rochester case looks looks nearly identical to an image of the one in the Syracuse case.

The story has now been picked up by Wired, the WaPo, and the New York Times.

Streever is being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which said in a statement: “Simply put, the only threat here is the one DHS and ICE officials pose to Streever’s First Amendment freedoms — and those of his fellow Americans.”

National Guard Shoots Black Man

National Guard troops deployed to combat street crime shot and killed an allegedly armed Black man in Memphis early Sunday.

The incident began when Memphis police responded to reports of shots having been fired. With assistance from the National Guard, they began pursuing “an armed male carrying a handgun,” according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which has taken over investigation of the shooting and issued a statement on the incident:

During the pursuit, the male turned toward NG members with his weapon. Tennessee National Guard soldiers discharged their weapons, striking the male. The male was pronounced deceased at the scene.

Tyrin Johnson, 20, was pronounced dead at the scene.

National Guard troops are not typically trained in policing or in the use of force in the civilian context.

Trump DOJ Watch

Bloomberg: “Justice Department leaders’ shutdown of a long-running criminal case against Abbott Laboratories over contaminated baby formula has fueled a broader pullback on corporate prosecutions protecting consumer health, said people familiar with the situation.”

The Roberts Court’s Corrupting Power

Drawing on the work of Mark Warren, Henry Farrell has an important new piece that argues for a more expansive understanding of corruption in a democracy …

To understand corruption properly, we shouldn’t think of it as an individual level phenomenon. Classical thinkers, like Machiavelli, understood corruption as a condition that could afflict governments and indeed societies. But if we value democracy as the best way to order our affairs, we should understand corruption as not a moral phenomenon but a political one, which involves the corruption of democratic processes.

… and applies it to the Roberts Court:

Across an apparently unrelated range of issues – campaign finance, executive immunity, political corruption and gerrymandering – the Roberts Court’s decisions have persistently corrupted the workings of democracy, so as to undermine equality in decision making and voice in favor of processes that are both duplicitous and exclusive.

The point is that individual level quid pro quo corruption is too narrow and cramped a way of thinking about the corruption of democracies — and the corruption of the Roberts Court, which has been a driving force in the deeper, systemic American corruption that has become so insidious over the past two decades.

Platner Meltdown Is All But Complete

A woman who dated Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner off and on a few years ago came forward a second time with new allegations that he sexually assaulted her. Jenny Racicot was first interviewed by the NYT for last month’s bombshell report in which she was one of several women who described unsettling behavior by Platner:

Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior “reckless” and “unsettling.”

Racicot was far more forthcoming about the incident in a Politico story published yesterday and in a later story by the WaPo. She also sat for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper:

Democrats quickly began abandoning Platner’s candidacy en masse. If he withdraws, as seems likely, state Dems have until July 27 to name a replacement candidate

Trump’s Attack on Higher Ed: Ph.D Edition

NYT: “The number of students admitted to Ph.D. programs this fall dropped 15 percent from the previous year, according to data from over 50 top research universities, raising fears that the nation’s capacity to produce new science could be diminished.”

TPM Journalism Fund Drive

Today we’re launching our annual drive to support the TPM Journalism Fund. The pitch is as simple as it is essential: Many of our most committed members want to contribute more than their annual membership fee, and we’ve created a mechanism for doing so. It’s a critical part of our annual budget. We’re aiming to raise $500,000 this year. The size of the not-tax-deductible contributions we get for the fund has ranged in past years from single digits to five figures. If you’re in a position to pitch in, I’d really appreciate you contributing what you can. Just click here.

If that’s not the right value proposition for you, the best way to support TPM remains becoming a member, and we have a special discount on memberships right now. Just $25 for one year, if that better fits your pocketbook.

As always, you have our deepest appreciation for valuing our work, especially in a world that wildly undervalues independent journalism.

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Greetings!

Many thanks to the eminently capable Sarah Posner for standing in for me here the past two weeks while I was on vacation in Copenhagen.

Thanks for the Tips!

You outdid yourselves with recommendations, tips, and dos/donts for Copenhagen and the surrounding area.

Copenhagen’s food scene remains vibrant, and we ate extremely well, but thanks to you, we landed in some gems we otherwise would not have encountered.

Your tips on what to avoid were handy, too, and let us double down on some points of interest we happened upon along the way, rather than wasting time on more conventional attractions.

Again, thank you. Your emails were thoughtful, clever, insightful, and proved you to be the well-traveled lot that I imagined you to be.

I Need to Get Out More

This was my first trip abroad since the onset of the Trump II presidency, and it was an invigorating antidote to my own provincialism. As much as I deplore American self-centeredness, I am guilty of it, too.

Just as it’s important to contextualize America’s rightward lurch with Europe’s, it’s critical to look abroad for other examples of durable democracies, cultural strengths, policy solutions, and ways of doing things.

By American standards, Denmark is tiny. Its combination of population (6 million), land area (16,000 mi² for Denmark proper), nominal GDP ($501 billion), and per capita nominal GDP ($81,000) makes it roughly comparable to Maryland.

I’m actually partial to Maryland and it’s geographic, demographic, and cultural diversity — from the Chesapeake Bay region to the urban density of Baltimore to the suburban sprawl around D.C. to its thoroughly Appalachian panhandle — but I spent a lot of time imagining Maryland as a NATO member responsible for its own national defense, with universal health care, a splendid rail and transit system, and free college tuition.

I am more prone than most to romanticizing the places I visit, and this was purely a personal pleasure trip, not a reporting junket. So I want to be careful not to let my enthusiasms get the best of me, or pretend my casual observations as an enchanted tourist are serious analysis. Denmark is not perfect. It has struggled with increased immigration, showing spasms of anti-immigrant assholery like we’ve seen here. An aging population is straining its health care system. Trump’s designs on Greenland and his abandonment of NATO have forced it into historically high levels of defense spending.

And yet … the thing that drew me there — Copenhagen’s reputation as a humane, livable, bicycle-centric city — didn’t prepare me for its bustling, entrepreneurial, vibrant economy. There’s construction everywhere, and not just new construction, but renovations, repairs, and constant upkeep. The Danes seem to have a cultural aversion to the kind of maintenance debt that we’re so familiar with in the United States, especially for public infrastructure.

Things are tidy, well-kept, and invested in — in both public and private spaces. Every public clock I saw was working and told the correct time. I found myself improbably marveling over the quality of windows and doors even in ancient buildings. Things are tight, sealed, and useable. Stuff works.

I’ve never been especially persuaded by the claims that America used to do things but doesn’t anymore. After seeing all the “doing” going on in Denmark, I’m having second thoughts. Most maddening was the extent of the EV infrastructure in urban Copenhagen. While D.C. and other American cities have hemmed and hawed and puzzled and quarreled over how to respond to the EV revolution, Copenhagen just did it. Chargers are everywhere. They’re not obtrusive. They’re not over-engineered. They’re tucked in along sidewalks, emerge from cobblestone streets, and manage to blend in like parking meters. With space constraints and historic streets and architecture to consider, they just got busy and did it.

None of Denmark’s charms by themselves point toward a path forward here, where one of the two major political parties has spent two decades torpedoing good governance, indulging in epic political corruption, and not just eschewing responsibility for the real problems we face but actively making them worse for its own Machiavellian purposes. But Denmark was a needed reminder of what things can look like when stuff is getting done — and that it’s a choice that every society makes not just at each election but every day in every way. It’s more cultural than political, a social movement born of countless individual decisions.

I needed a reminder of what that felt like because it’s easy to lose the memory of that feeling.

Reentry Was Rough

I made it back to D.C. in time for the Fourth — and 100 degree temperatures. The roar of military jets streaking outside my apartment window most of the day Saturday made for an unsettling Trump-infused holiday.

Photo of the Day

Programming Note

Back to the more typical Morning Memo tomorrow, but I’ll mix in some more Denmark reflections this week. Thanks for indulging me.

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

The Reflecting Pool Saga Gets Uglier

Federal prosecutors have obtained a one-count felony destruction of property indictment against David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist who has been swept up in Trump’s very Trumpian pursuit of a scapegoat for his botched Reflecting Pool repairs. During a press conference announcing the charge yesterday, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro treated the case with a zeal that only a prosecutor who confuses their job with that of a Fox News host can muster, boasting that it could carry a ten-year prison term.

Hearn’s attorneys, Norm Eisen and Mary Dohrmann, called the charge “outrageous,” demonstrating “the administration’s effort to shift blame for their own failures. On the eve of our nation’s Independence Day, Americans should be deeply concerned by the misuse of government power against an ordinary citizen.”

Hearn, who was detained for five hours last month over the incident, has said that he touched a flap of the sealant that had peeled away and was floating in the pool. But the Trump administration has refused to admit that the more than $16 million in no-bid contracts it awarded, in one case to a company owned by one of Trump’s friends, produced shoddy work that drew the attention of onlookers at the site as well as national ridicule. At yesterday’s presser, Pirro claimed to have witnesses who saw “a violent effort to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool,” which she believed was with “his bare hands, both hands.” But at the time that Hearn was at the Reflecting Pool, the floating, faulty sealant had already been observed and photographed by others. Pirro appears to have abandoned the claim, pushed by Trump, that a vandal had cut a 350-foot gash in the sealant. She claimed yesterday that Hearn had damaged “two square feet” of the pool’s liner.

Pirro likely did not endear herself to District of Columbia residents and prospective jurors, who have endured all the disruptions caused by Trump’s ambitions to remake the nation’s capital in his own image, subjecting them to the National Guard patrolling the streets while he bulldozes the White House East Wing and hosts absurdist events like his birthday UFC fights and the Great American State Fail — I mean Fair — on the National Mall. She cast Trump’s “beautification” of the city as a defense against “anarchy” and “civil disorder.”

Hegseth Really Working the Room

In that same vein, earlier in the day, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visited a District of Columbia park to commemorate the work of National Guard troops he claimed have produced “the largest, fastest, steepest reduction in violent crime that has been achieved in any city anywhere in this country since the recording of crime data has existed.” (Needless to say, this is not true, despite the troops costing taxpayers approximately $1.5 million a day.) Reacting to protesters opposing the Guard’s presence in their city and the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crackdowns, Hegseth called their chants “the sound of ingrates, of ingratitude, of people who are so blinded by ideology they can’t see law and order and common sense in front of them.”

Did Trump Pay Taxes on His Massive Crypto Haul?

Tax experts tell CBS News that Trump could potentially owe half a billion dollars in income tax from his cryptocurrency investments, but their ability to calculate the profit from his ventures is impossible “because of the lack of transparency around the corporate entities holding the income,” and because Trump doesn’t make his tax returns public. Would the White House provide a reporter the answer to this question? Of course not.

“Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career,” writes Timothy Noah at The New Republic. “Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry.”

Trump’s Sons Are Reaping Huge Profits From the Wars He Promised Not To Start

MSNOW investigates how Eric and Donald Trump Jr.’s investments in defense firms are paying off. Earlier this year, they were the beneficiaries of a “reverse merger” between a golf course company of which they were then part owners and a drone company of which they are now part owners. Now, the Pentagon is placing orders from the drone company. And that’s just one of 10 companies in which the Trump sons have stakes, and which together have received over $3.7 billion in federal contracts since Trump returned to the presidency last year.

Trump Deploys More Federal Resources For Disproved “Rigged Election” Obsessions

The FBI is “surging” agents to Fulton County, Georgia, “an extraordinary effort by the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency to find evidence supporting President Donald Trump’s darkest election fraud conspiracy theories,” MSNOW reports. Also yesterday, House Democrats warned Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, not to declassify intelligence on any election-related matters, after Trump said he told Pulte he could “declassify whatever you want.” Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, notoriously attended the FBI’s January raid on Fulton County’s election offices, and Trump has said he tapped Pulte to investigate “rigged elections.”

Characteristically Weird and Twisted Trumpland Story

Influencer Laura Loomer has held up the appointment of a former DOGE operative, now at the State Department, to the White House National Security Council because the operative, Jeremy Lewin, has what Loomer considers to be an unacceptably liberal past. That seems, at first glance, to be the most important feature of this story, and, truth be told, Loomer’s ability to control administration personnel matters is certainly noteworthy. But what is probably more significant in this Politico report is that while at DOGE, Lewin “oversaw the gutting of USAID,” and in his current post at the State Department, as undersecretary of State for foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs and religious freedom, he is “assisting” with earthquake relief in Venezuela.

The Christian Right Has New Goal: Anti-Trans Laws in Blue States

Kristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which successfully litigated the anti-trans sports ban case the Supreme Court decided this week, warned “blue states with boys on podiums” that “you’re next.”

Well-Oiled Machine

Federal prosecutors in Miami accidentally turned over a volume of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigations of Trump’s criminal activity, which is the subject of a gag order they assiduously sought from Trump’s favorite judge, Aileen Cannon. They inadvertently sent the document to a defendant in a separate criminal case: a former federal prosecutor charged with violating Cannon’s order by emailing herself a copy of the Smith report.

Babies Born in the Second Half of 2026 Will Get a Social Security Card Commemorating Freedom250

The Social Security Administration has announced that babies born between July 2 and December 31 this year, whose parents request a Social Security card for them, will receive a card embossed with the Freedom250 logo. Fox News describes it as a “once-in-a-generation keepsake tied to the nation’s 250th birthday.” It’s great, I suppose, for anyone wanting a memento of Trump’s massive corruption for their child.

Happy Fourth of July

Thanks for reading these past two weeks. Have a wonderful Fourth of July, and, especially if you’re in D.C., stay safe from the hazardous air pollution caused by 850,000 fireworks blasted into a heat dome. David will be back on Monday.

Hijacking the 250th

An explosive interim staff report, released this morning by Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee, charges that Freedom 250, the organization President Trump and his allies created to supplant the nonpartisan, congressionally-created America250 celebration, misled donors who thought they were supporting the nonpartisan celebration. According to the Democrats’ sources, Freedom 250 officials confused corporate executives who had already donated to America250 with its “aggressive outreach,” and even gave the routing and account numbers for Freedom 250 to donors intending to make contributions to America250.

“I’m a lawyer, and I know better than to pronounce that a crime has been committed,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the committee, told the Washington Post, which first reported on the investigation. “But I do know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”

The report, titled “From Vanity to Insanity,” emphasizes that one of the chief goals of Freedom 250, in addition to being a personalist project for Trump, was to infuse the semiquincentennial with Christian nationalism and “enshrine their preferred kind of Christianity as the de facto national religion.” As a result, “a commemoration Congress designed to educate, engage, and unite the country has, under Freedom 250, become a vehicle for a Christian nationalist, partisan, and Trump-centered vision of American identity.”

The drafters write that while “significant questions remain unanswered,” the evidence they do have “supports a conclusion that should alarm the American people. The national celebration that belonged to the entire country was hijacked to serve one man’s vanity, andthe methods they’ve used and perfected—from capturing nonprofits to exploiting interested donors, diverting public funds, and dismantling independent entities—have paved the way for the ultra-wealthy and politically connected to take advantage of the American people.”

As Trump Fumes About His Great State Fair Fail, His Staff Question July 4 Plans

CNN reports that Trump has been “livid” about the sparse turnout at his Great American State Fair, particularly the kick-off speech he decided to give after numerous musical acts backed out. (The musical acts, incidentally, are cited in the Democrats’ report about Freedom 250’s deceptions. The report charges that Freedom 250 used “middlemen—including businessmen in the entertainment industry with past ties to President Trump—to conduct outreach to the artists and obscure Freedom 250’s political nature.”) Given Trump’s obsession with the poor turnout, his own staff is mystified about the planning for the Fourth of July, which seems tailor-made for encouraging people to stay home: a maze of street closures, fencing, a late start, possibly 11:00 p.m., for fireworks, and the heat dome that is enveloping Washington, D.C. with oppressive heat and humidity. Trump’s genius marketing skills were on display yesterday at his speech at the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, during which he pledged that on the Fourth he would give a “really long speech,” even though it’s going to be 107 degrees.

What Is With Trumpers and Pulp Fiction?

Brian Kaylor, who broke the story of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth praying for “great vengeance and furious anger” by using a fictitious version of Ezekiel 25:17 used in the Pulp Fiction by Jules Winnfield, the character played by Samuel L. Jackson, finds that another top Trump official finds religious meaning in Jackson’s portrayal of a gangster. In promoting his new book about his religious journey, Vice President JD Vance referenced the film on a podcast this week, describing how a bloody shoot-out scene in the film, which both the characters portrayed by Jackson and John Travolta miraculously survive, was influential to his own faith journey. Referring to the Winnfield character, Vance said, “he has this religious sort of epiphany. And that’s really the entire movie from his perspective, is this ongoing religious journey.” Vance went on to talk about how he, too, “felt the touch of God.” Vance even once called Jackson’s character “one of my favorite theologians.”

SCOTUS to Hear Challenges to Assault Weapon Bans

I was already deeply concerned that the Supreme Court will be hearing legal challenges to assault weapons bans in Chicago and Connecticut, given its recent track record in Second Amendment cases. But knowing that the Vice President of the United States sees religious meaning in a lethal, bloody (albeit fictional) shoot-out scene makes the Republican obsession with assault weapons even more chilling. Yesterday the Justice Department also filed new lawsuits against California’s ban on Glock-style guns and Virginia’s ban on assault weapons, arguing they are unconstitutional.

ICE Arrested a Nun. Where Are the ‘Religious Freedom’ Police?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested a beloved nun, Sister Leticia Ugboaja, known as Sister Letty, walking to mass in her habit on Sunday in McAllen, Texas. Although she was released the next day after a social media furor and intervention by Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) and Monica de la Cruz (R-TX), her story remains a pressing topic in the Catholic press, including the conservative Eternal Word Television Network and the news service of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. Both news outlets report that Sister Letty’s community in the Rio Grande Valley remains on edge because of ICE. “For now, it is clear that Homeland Security enforcement protocols that make it possible for a religious sister, or anyone, to be detained and handcuffed while peacefully walking to church on a Sunday morning are wildly disturbing and need to be reformed,” said Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville.

Meanwhile, Vance continues to declare the Vatican’s teaching on immigration “troubling.” There is also no word from Trump’s “religious liberty” allies, who have often claimed that under Democratic presidents, Christians are under threat of government “weaponization” of “anti-Christian bias,” and even arrest.

DOJ Withholding Information Ahead of Blanche Confirmation Hearings, Dems Charge

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are demanding Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche turn over information in response to dozens of unanswered oversight requests dating back to January of 2025. The subjects of the requests include pardons, payments to January 6 insurrectionists, DOJ purges of career attorneys, Emil Bove, Jeffrey Epstein, Blanche’s cryptocurrency conflicts, ICE’s murder of Renee Good, Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund, and much more.

Kushner Resort Threatens Albania’s EU Accession

European Union officials are warning Albania’s governmental leaders that the country’s accession to the EU is at risk owing to its support of the Jared Kushner-backed resort that has sparked the Flamingo Revolution and mounting calls to topple the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama. Tineke Strik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament who led a fact-finding mission to Albania, told the Guardian, “If Rama is really serious about his EU ambitions, he should step back from this trajectory and say to the Trump clan: ‘Sorry, the EU is my first priority.’”

What in the World…?

Trump has appointed Avi Loeb, a controversial astronomer known for his claims about alien life, to lead a panel studying the supposed national security risks of supposed UFOs. “His theories have won praise in UFO circles but often put him in conflict with academic peers,” the Associated Press reports. “Other astronomers accuse him of making exotic claims with little evidence. Some chafe at his habit of skipping the peer review process and bringing claims directly to the public.”

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‘A Good First Step’

The Christian right is hailing the pair of anti-trans Supreme Court decisions yesterday, seeing the Court’s permission for states to ban trans girls from participating in school sports as a key victory on their path to further eroding LGBTQ rights. That will culminate, they hope, in overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, the court’s 2015 decision establishing the right to marriage equality.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, made the connection to Obergefell plain in a statement yesterday. “The Supreme Court could not dodge the cultural chaos ball it created with the redefinition of marriage,” he said in a statement on X. “Like the American people, who are connecting the dots and changing their minds on the reordering of society with the redefining of marriage, maybe the Court will eventually find its way back. This is a good first step.”

Using assaults on trans rights as a path to undermine marriage equality has been in the movement’s sights even before the court decided Obergefell. As the political shift towards marriage equality became clear, the movement began to cast Obergefell as its next Roe v. Wade — that is, a landmark decision they would spend decades fighting, notching smaller victories along the way, shaping the Court to favor their position, and ultimately overturning a 50-year precedent. With abortion, they chipped away at abortion access with petty restrictions and invasive protests, trying to craft a public position that they were the ones on the side of saving lives and protecting women from the “harm” of abortion.

With Obergefell, the Christian right set out to replicate their long-haul, intergenerational fight against Roe, specifically by waging a campaign against trans rights in state legislatures. Again, they seized this opportunity to define their position as one of “protecting” kids. They started with bathroom bills and expanded into bans on sports participation and gender-affirming care. They purported to protect girls from predators in bathrooms and locker rooms; from “biological boys” taking away their sports trophies; and from lifesaving health care they falsely denigrated as “child abuse.” All this activity in state legislatures queued up the court fights that would lead to decisions like yesterday’s, and the court’s 2025 decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti, which upheld red state bans on gender-affirming care.

Movement leaders are leaving no doubt that ending marriage equality is their ultimate goal, again by casting themselves as defenders of children. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported earlier this year that Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and other Christian right groups are backing a new campaign, based on long debunked claims, to reverse Obergefell on the grounds that marriage equality has resulted in “child victimization.”

Trump Pocketed $2 Billion from the Presidency Last Year

Is there even a word for this? Unprecedented, unrivaled, stunning, betrayal, are all words I’ve seen describing this, but none of them remotely approach adequately describing it. According to his financial disclosure reports, President Donald Trump cashed in to the tune of more than $2 billion from his presidency in 2025, most of it, $1.4 billion, from his cryptocurrency ventures. Much of this crypto windfall comes from Trump’s brazen exploitation of presidential power to allow the already illicit world of cryptocurrency to run wild, free of government oversight. World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto firm, partners closely with the crypto exchange Binance, which, as Public Citizen’s Zach Everson reported earlier this year, “pleaded guilty to ‘anti-money laundering, unlicensed money transmitting, and sanctions violations’ regarding Iran and other sanctioned countries and entered into a settlement acknowledging that it unlawfully facilitated financial transfers to organizations designated as foreign terrorists by the United States.” Trump pardoned its founder, Changpeng Zhao, in October.

Under Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission stopped regulating memecoins. Trump profited to the tune of $636 million from his $TRUMP memecoin in 2025, more than he made from all his businesses combined in 2024. The presidency has been a massive money-making scheme for him.

Trump also disclosed “over $80 million in income ‌from ⁠settlements with various media companies,” according to Reuters. Filing baseless defamation lawsuits apparently pays off very well, but not as well as your own unregulated memecoin.

Trump Announces Midterm Convention

Trump announced yesterday that the Republican Party would host a midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, in September. Jonathan Bernstein, a political scientist who writes the Good Politics/Bad Politics newsletter, noted this would be the first time a party held a midterm convention since the Democrats did it when Jimmy Carter was president. (In other words, not auspicious.) He predicted this event would be “just a two-day rally, not a convention as such,” but that “it’ll be fun for Dems to attack every candidate who attends and attack Trump for all the no-shows.”

Trump apparently chose Texas to help boost the prospects of his endorsed candidate in the closely-watched Senate race, Ken Paxton. But as new New York Times/Siena polling shows, Democrats now have an “enthusiasm edge” in some states that Trump won in 2024, including in Texas, where the Senate race is tied. “That excitement appears to be helping Democrats blunt natural Republican advantages in states like Iowa, Ohio, Alaska and Texas that have trended Republican in recent years — and which voted for Mr. Trump in 2024 by double-digit percentages,” the Times reports. So the question is whether a Trump rally dressed up as a party convention will be the one neat trick Trump might think it is.

Judge Enjoins Additional Pentagon Press Restraints

A federal judge in Washington yesterday granted a preliminary injunction against a Pentagon policy requiring reporters for the New York Times and other outlets to have a minder inside the Pentagon, a policy enacted after the judge halted previous Pentagon restrictions on press freedom. The judge cited numerous statements by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his deputies denigrating the media, including Hegseth’s attacks on “legacy Trump-hating press” who produce an “endless stream of garbage,” and his comparing reporters to Pharisees.

To the GOP, Empathy for Colleagues Is for Suckers

TMZ caught up with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) yesterday, after fellow Republican Tom Kean (NJ) returned to Congress after a four-month absence owing to depression. In comments emblematic of today’s GOP — callous, mocking, and enjoying it — Boebert called Kean’s absence “embarrassing,” adding that “who gets four months off of work because they’re sad?” She added, without irony as she stood in the District of Columbia, that for his constituents, his absence was “literally taxation without representation.”

Trump Welcomes Convicted Felon Tina Peters to White House

On the other hand, Trump has long expressed great empathy for former Colorado election official, convicted felon, and MAGA hero Tina Peters, who was sentenced in state court to a nine-year prison term in 2024 as a result of her tampering with voting machines in a quest to prove Trump’s false rigged election claims. Under pressure from Trump, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D), commuted Peters’ sentence in May. Yesterday, Trump welcomed Peters to the White House, posting on Truth Social that it was “an Honor” to have lunch with her. “She knows that the Voting Machines are RIGGED, that the Mail In Ballots are a DISASTER, and that our Elections are very Dangerous and Corrupt at a time when, with the Threat of Communism, we must be very wise and careful!” Trump wrote. He was quick to add, of course, that his 2024 victory was “TOO BIG TO RIG, but they tried.”

Republicans Go Off the Deep End After Birthright Decision

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) proposed covering up the Statue of Liberty with a bedsheet.

Top White House advisor and anti-immigrant zealot Stephen Miller suggested on Fox News banning pregnant women traveling to the United States, lest they deliver their child here. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) has introduced legislation to ban U.S. travel by pregnant women. No, you are not hallucinating. This is the Republican Party in 2026.

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MAGA Rages at Barrett

The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday, upholding a Mississippi law permitting state and local election officials to count mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days later, has triggered the president into yet another round of unhinged demands that the Senate pass the SAVE American Act lest the country descend into communism. It also sent some of his supporters into an uncontrolled, disproportionate tailspin of attacking the decision’s author, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and forecasting new attempts to manipulate the midterm elections based on fabricated claims of voter fraud.

Donald Trump is so fixated on forcing Senate Republicans to take up the Save America Act that he called the housing bill he has yet to sign a “big yawn,” just to make sure everyone understands that he believes affordability is boring and voter suppression is a thrill. On X yesterday, MAGA influencers raged at Barrett, who Trump nominated to the court in his first term to much Republican adoration, calling her “a gigantic fucking disaster of a Supreme Court appointment,” among other insults. “WTF,” tweeted former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. On her radio show later, Kelly complained, “It’s very annoying, especially in a case like the Mississippi one where now we’re talking about whether we can ever trust election results because post-COVID, the Democrats are really enamored with this mail-in balloting thing.” Her guest, Mike Davis, a right-wing lawyer and social media troll who reportedly has Trump’s ear on judicial nominees, replied to Kelly, “we’re going to have Third World elections.” He falsely claimed that because of the Mississippi decision, Democrats will use Election Day to “figure out how many votes they’re behind, they’re going to be able to go find those votes, fill out ballots, have the their postal workers postmark those ballots, and then apparently Election Day under Barrett’s rationale is the number of days it takes for Democrats to steal the election.” (Davis has floated the prospect of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon as a possible Supreme Court nomination for Trump.)

Because there is not a sliver of evidence that mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud, or that allowing them to be counted upon delivery after Election Day is suspect, the MAGA obsession with them is escalating into a frenzy of conspiracies that are getting more convoluted and difficult to comprehend, unless, of course, one is fluent in the lingua franca and the cast of characters of the online far right. On his podcast, Steve Bannon mused about grand juries, voter databases, “manipulated” voter rolls, supposed Chinese interference in the 2020 election, and a possible “emergency order” that would somehow lay out a “national security” reason for voting restrictions in the midterms.

Bannon was characteristically cagey and rambling about how all of this would be carried out, and hinted that John Solomon, the conspiratorial journalist who the White House made a “special government employee” last month to run a “task force” on “transparency” would be involved. (Solomon has previously claimed to have inside knowledge of an FBI investigation into supposed voting irregularities in Maricopa County, Arizona, and Trump’s Department of Justice has used articles published on Solomon’s site Just The News in its decisionmaking.) On yesterday’s podcast, Bannon said Solomon is “restricted on saying exactly what they’re doing. But also Pulte, this is why they’re trying to stop him at DNI,” referring to Bill Pulte, Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence, who Trump installed to carry out investigations into “rigged elections.” Last week, Pulte appointed as his chief of staff Christina Norton, a former Republican National Committee official who directed the RNC’s “election integrity” efforts, which involved Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec and other right-wing conspiracy theorists.Top Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees blasted the move.

Another L for Trump on Getting State Voter Rolls

U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante, who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, is the 11th federal judge to dismiss a Trump lawsuit to obtain a state voter registration database, this time in New Hampshire.

Trump Secretly Awarded a $500M No-Bid Contract for His Ballroom

That is, he secretly committed $500 million of taxpayer money for his vanity project, while lying that he was building the ballroom with private donations, according to new reporting in the Washington Post. He had even once claimed that Clark Construction, the company to which he awarded the no-bid contract, had offered to build it for free. “Records also show that President Donald Trump was directly involved in negotiating some costs for the East Wing project,” the Post reports.

Talarico and Paxton Tied, NYT Poll Finds

In one of the most scrutinized Senate races this year, a New York Times/Siena poll finds a tie between Democratic state legislator and seminarian James Talarico and scandal-plagued Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. “A majority of likely Texas voters see Mr. Talarico as having good character and the right moral values, but not Mr. Paxton,” the Times reports, and “Paxton has failed to attract some voters who otherwise said they would like to see a Republican-controlled Senate.”

Hegseth Stacks Defense Policy Board With MAGA Loyalists and Billionaires

After purging the Defense Policy Board last year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth yesterday announced new members, including MAGA theorist Michael Anton; Peter Thiel protege, conspiracy theorist, and failed Senate candidate Blake Masters; and billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose firm has massive investments in companies doing business with the Pentagon, including OpenAI and SpaceX.

Hegseth’s Vaccine Blunders Persist

Because of the delay caused by Hegseth’s two-month-long effort to end flu vaccine mandates for basic training recruits, now the Pentagon has been rushing to provide the vaccines before they expire today. New vaccines will not be available until August.

More History Erasure From Trump’s National Park Service

The Philadelphia Inquirer finds mentions of slavery have been removed from sites in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, in addition to the National Park Service’s removal of a larger exhibit at the President’s House in Philadelphia last year. It is yet another sign that “that the administration is not letting any stone go unturned when it comes to ridding or softening even smaller mentions of slavery at Philadelphia’s most iconic historic sites ahead of the 250th anniversary.”

Trump to Ruin D.C.’s Fourth of July

District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser predicts D.C. families will stay home from the Fourth of July fireworks celebration, given the 40-minute spectacle planned by Freedom 250 to display the 851,000 fireworks is slated to start at 11:00 p.m. Trump is scheduled to speak at 7:00 p.m., and temperatures are forecast to be in the mid-90s to low 100s.

Peak 2026 Headline

MAGA Man Arrested For Masturbating At Trump’s America 250 Spectacle, via HuffPost.

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Religious Liberty for Christian Nationalists

Trump’s White House Religious Liberty Commission released a 224-page draft report on Friday afternoon, delivering a tome that is at once an homage to Christian nationalism and a roadmap for the United States Department of Justice to embrace. At the center of the report is an attack on the wall of separation between church and state, which Christian nationalists falsely contend is a “myth.” Instead, the report argues for a “better analogy” that “religious liberty acts as a bridge between church and state.”

A bridge, that is, between Christian nationalists and an authoritarian state that privileges their rights over everyone else’s.

Trump created the Commission by executive order last year, and stacked it with mostly right-wing evangelicals, a smattering of Catholic leaders, and one Jewish member, all of whom endorse the Christian nationalist claim that America was founded as a Christian or “Judeo-Christian” nation, according to a lawsuit filed against the Commission by The Interfaith Alliance and other faith groups. The draft report embraces an array of Christian nationalist persecution complexes and anti-trans hobbyhorses, such as claims that COVID-19 vaccine requirements violated religious freedom, and that public school officials “have sought to impose a new radical orthodoxy on parents and kids,” which leaves “boys and girls confused about how God made them.”

Micah Schwartzman, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Virginia School of Law, called the report “an embarrassing document,” noting, in just one example, that it blames Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre and other proponents of “a new philosophy” that “emerged in Europe, which laid the intellectual foundations for threats to American religious liberty.”

Beyond European philosophers, there are other culprits cited in the report as enemies of religious liberty — claims just as divorced from reality as the core assertion that the term “wall of separation” has been “reappropriated to signify something that operates more like a ‘Berlin wall’ of separation between church and state than a mutually respectful boundary.” The report contends that “transgender ideology,” which another section of the report describes as a “new radical orthodoxy,” finds its roots in “the third-century Gnostic dualism, which posits that there is a gulf of separation between the spirit and the physical world, which it sees as intrinsically evil.” The report concludes that in the 20th century, “this age-old ideology began to take hold of American institutions and paved the way for the progressive activist movement to accumulate power at the expense of parents, families, churches, and individuals.”

Trump’s executive order dictated that the Commission be housed at the DOJ; now, in its report, the Commission recommends that Trump “instruct” the DOJ “to issue guidance clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.” The report also says Trump should “instruct” the DOJ, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “to create religious liberty violation reporting hotlines/online portals for students, parents, teachers, healthcare workers, and others to obtain support in the face of religious liberty violations and increase public awareness of existing reporting channels.” To ensure such a snitch state function to pursue violations of other Americans’ rights is upheld, the Commission also recommends the nomination and confirmation of federal judges “with a history of showing courage to decide religious liberty cases on the merits where warranted, rather than engage in improper judicial avoidance.”

The report’s authors note that there is a 15-day public comment period, although the document does not say where to submit a comment.

More Founder Fabulists

Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins spotted House Speaker Mike Johnson attributing a quote, often used by Christian nationalists, to John Quincy Adams in his speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington on Saturday. The phrase, “duty is ours, results are God’s,” Jenkins has reported, is “an axiom quoted by Christian nationalist leaders affiliated with groups such as Wallbuilders, the organization run by activist David Barton,” probably the figure most responsible for embedding the “myth of separation” in the Christian nationalist consciousness. According to Jenkins’ reporting last year, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has also used it, attributing it to “the Founders” and Adams. But, “like other dictums embraced by Christian nationalists, the sourcing is dubious,” Jenkins wrote. “Researchers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which holds Adams family papers, told RNS they couldn’t find any instance of Adams using the phrase.”

Off-the-Charts Corruption Continues Apace

Children of Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stand to profit from a $1.6 billion dollar agreement between the Commerce Department and a “little-known American company” to mine in Kazakhstan for tungsten, a metal essential for the manufacturing of weaponry and computer chips. The Kazakhstan deal, the New York Times reports, “is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project.”

Trump’s Great American State Fair Is Terrible

“The U.S. capital has been outfitted of late with visual trappings that many associate with authoritarianism, such as banners depicting Donald Trump’s face and featuring his slogans. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before the president erected his own Potemkin village: the Great American State Fair, where almost nothing is what it pretends to be,” is Kelsey Ables’ lede in a quietly devastating and deliciously detailed review of a marquee event in Trump’s “patriotic” celebration of America’s 250th birthday. About the replica “triumphal” arch erected on the National Mall as a preview of the larger monstrosity Trump wants to build across the Memorial Bridge, Ables writes that it “appears as if it could have been designed in Minecraft and ordered from CVS for same-day pickup.”

JD Vance and Watergate

Historian Rick Perlstein reminds us that, despite the furor Vice President JD Vance caused last week by laughing off Watergate and saying it would be a 12-hour news story today, minimizing Watergate and trying to pass it off as a prank or harmless campaign antic is a long Republican tradition.

Why Todd Blanche Will Have to Talk More About Jeffrey Epstein at His Confirmation Hearings

Marcy Wheeler explains how journalist Katie Phang’s lawsuit to compel the release of documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act raises even more questions that Blanche will have to answer about DOJ’s ongoing withholding of documents at his upcoming confirmation hearings to be attorney general.

How Trump Is Dismantling the Federal Civil Service

This important New York Times story about the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) may on the surface seem to be only of interest to D.C. insiders, but it gets to the heart of Trump’s campaign to politicize the federal civil service for his own ends. Led by a White House staffer, James Sherk, who previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, “churning out policy papers about waste and abuse within the civil service,” the administration pressured the MSPB, in a case involving the firing of immigration judges, to take up “a constitutional argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would invalidate its own existence, siding in favor of presidential power.”

Police State

ICE agents have been criss-crossing New York State, hunting down citizens who had been critical of the agency’s lethal immigration crackdown in Minnesota. They went to the Rochester home of David Streever, who had written a letter to then-ICE director Todd Lyons comparing the agency’s tactics to Nazis. Not finding him there, chillingly, agents then tracked him down at a hotel room in New York City as he was en route home from an overseas trip. In another instance, agents found Paigelynne Gonyea, who had posted about the murder of Renee Good on Instagram, and confronted her where she was serving as a poll worker in Syracuse in New York’s primary two weeks ago. “Another poll worker captured the visit on video. It was so wild, the Republican elections commissioner called a contact at Homeland Security to confirm it wasn’t a hoax,” Syracuse.com reports.

What a Difference a Year and a Historic Election Makes

Budapest held its first Pride march since the anti-LGBTQ authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Trump ally was voted out of office in April. Last year, under Orbán’s leadership, the government passed constitutional amendments attacking LGBTQ rights, including banning pride events, which had the effect of turning the scheduled march into a massive anti-government demonstration, drawing an estimated 200,000 people, and foreshadowing Orban’s ouster.

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

RFK’s Anti-Vaccine Crusade is Worse Than We Knew

New reporting published yesterday adds to the already damning assessment of a story that’s been unfolding for months: Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. brazenly asserted in his confirmation hearings that he would not undermine vaccines, and, once confirmed, promptly proceeded to do just that.

First, The Guardian reports that newly-obtained documents show that, contrary to what Kennedy claimed in his confirmation hearing last year, he did travel to Samoa in 2019, when he was chair of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group, in order to study the health of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Kennedy has denied that the trip was for the purpose of comparing children who had and had not been vaccinated against measles — reportedly a longtime goal of Kennedy’s in order to establish that vaccines were not necessary by using unvaccinated children as guinea pigs.

Kennedy’s trip took place in the aftermath of a decline in vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) in Samoa, following the 2018 deaths of two infants who had received tainted vaccines. The Samoan government then temporarily halted the MMR vaccine. Even though it had resumed the vaccination program by the time Kennedy arrived in 2019, officials said his visit boosted anti-vaccine sentiment there. A measles outbreak followed his visit, resulting in 83 deaths, mostly of children. The new documents The Guardian obtained show that, contrary to Kennedy’s repeated claim to the Senate that his trip “had nothing to do with vaccines,” his colleague, Michael Graven, who died in 2022, told Samoan officials during trip planning that he would “evaluate outcomes associated with the recent discontinuity in vaccinations.” After the trip, Kennedy continued to push for such comparative studies, and, as HHS secretary, has pushed the agency to conduct them. (According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “When a safe, effective vaccine already exists against a disease, giving children in the placebo group no protection against that disease is unethical.”)

The New York Times raises additional red flags about whether Kennedy and his aides deliberately hid his anti-vaccine efforts from senators prior to their vote to confirm him. Democrats on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) this week obtained and released a tranche of internal emails from Dr. Debra Houry, who was at the time the chief medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control. Houry told the Times that early in Trump’s term, numerous HHS websites were taken down following Trump’s directive to purge any information he considered to be “DEI.” But before the Senate had confirmed Kennedy, his hand-picked aides at the agency “feared that removing vaccine-related pages might endanger Mr. Kennedy’s chances of being confirmed,” and ordered most of them restored.

After his confirmation, though, according a memo prepared by HELP Committee Democratic staff, Kennedy tried to end public information campaigns about vaccines, “wasted agency resources to obtain data to demonstrate the long-unproven link between vaccines and autism,” including directing agency employees to improperly obtain data without following privacy and ethics protocols, and explored removing vaccines from the CDC’s Vaccines for Children program. As the memo notes, Kennedy had said under oath at his confirmation hearing, “I will do nothing as HHS Secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking vaccines” — which was, he has clearly demonstrated, not true.

Since Kennedy took over as HHS secretary, the U.S. has seen its biggest measles outbreaks in decades, racking up numbers that imperil our measles elimination status. But some MAGA media figures have other priorities. They are pushing Kennedy to have HHS to declare “Trump Derangement Syndrome” a “diagnosable mental illness.”

Before Flu Outbreak, Military Leaders Pressed Hegseth to Reverse His Anti-Vaccine Order

Even before the flu outbreak at basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio this month, leaders in the Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy pressed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for a reversal of his April decision to end required flu shots for trainees, who “are particularly susceptible to the flu because they sleep in bunk beds in open bays and share meals at large communal tables,” the New York Times reports. After initially only granting exemptions to the non-mandate, the Pentagon confirmed this week that despite Hegseth having described the vaccine mandate as “absurd” and “overreaching,” it was once again requiring the vaccine for all basic training recruits.

After Venezuela’s Devastating Earthquakes, Where Is Trump, Who Claimed To Be Running the Country?

At The Intercept, Nick Turse reports that following the U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, President Donald Trump declared that America would “run” the country, saying that “we’re in charge.” After a pair of devastating earthquakes hit several Venezuelan cities on Wednesday, killing at least 230, injuring thousands, and trapping an unknown number in the rubble of buildings, Trump jauntily announced on Truth Social that “We will be there for our new and great friends.” But a U.S. official tells Turse that since Trump has essentially declared Venezuela a vassal state, he owes the country far more than just friendship. What’s more, according to Turse’s reporting, Trump claimed recently that the U.S. seizure of Venezuela’s oil industry has reaped more than $5 billion in proceeds; advocates are pressing the administration to provide not just humanitarian and search and rescue aid to earthquake victims but to lift sanctions and release oil revenues being held in U.S. accounts to address the massive destruction of the country’s infrastructure.

Russell Vought’s Path to Destruction

Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation about Russell Vought’s new quest, laid out in his proposed rulemaking, to politicize every federal expenditure of money, from food aid to scientific research, wresting control from subject matter experts and placing it in the hands of political cronies. “If you thought Elon Musk and DOGE were bad (and they were and are responsible for the deaths of many just by dismantling USAID alone), Vought is 100 times worse,” Gonsalves writes. “This rule is codifying the work of DOGE and taking it to a whole other level.”

Reagan-Appointed Judge in Texas Rejects State Officials’ Sharia Panic

In a very, very Texas story, the state funeral regulator tried to shut down an Islamic center’s ability to perform funeral rites, based on the state GOP’s outlandish conspiracy theories about a Muslim takeover of America and Texas, in particular. The Islamic center sued, citing a violation of its religious freedom, and this week a Reagan-appointed judge denied the state’s motion to dismiss the case. The ruling, reports Texas Monthly, “is a firm rebuke of the anti-Muslim political hysteria fueled by [Texas Governor Greg] Abbott and his team of advisers.”

Why Did Tiffany Trump’s Husband Join Marco Rubio for a Meeting with the UAE President?

The Secretary of State has struggled to answer the question, beyond saying that he and the U.S. president’s son-in-law, Michael Boulos, are “good friends,” which … doesn’t make it seem any better?

Court Orders Blanche To Produce Documents Under the Epstein Files Transparency Act

The journalist Katie Phang sued Acting Attorney General Blanche, and yesterday U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered him to produce documents that the Department of Justice has withheld, noting that Blanche had “conceded” he was in violation of the law.

What High-Profile GOP Departures Mean

Geoffrey Kabaservice, a historian of the American right, assesses the impact of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene leaving the Republican Party.

Trump To Speak to Christian Right Group Today

Trump will speak to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference in Washington today. Although much attention is paid to how Trump courts and manipulates the support of online influencers, he knows that veteran operative Ralph Reed’s group is where the action is for getting out the evangelical vote for the midterms.

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Republican Senators Try to Patch Things Up With the President

Even by our fully debased standard of grading President Donald Trump on a curve, yesterday was a rolling catastrophe of astonishing political blunders. Not even the kind that seem like gaffes to normies but energize his base with high-fiving celebrations of owning the libs. No, Trump didn’t own the libs yesterday. The only person he owned was himself. And yet, Senate Republicans remain submissive, even after showing small flashes of fight.

Voters of both parties are worried and stressed about housing costs and affordability, so any sane politician would seize the opportunity for a photo op of his support for a bipartisan housing bill. Instead, Trump, who lives in a gilded penthouse and private golf club when he’s not in residence rent-free at the White House, which he is needlessly renovating with taxpayer money, unexpectedly cancelled a scheduled signing ceremony (via Truth Social, of course), saying he would not sign the bill unless Senate Republicans passed the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill. Wow, this guy really knows how to negotiate, doesn’t he? As any viewer of Schoolhouse Rock knows, the housing bill will become law without his signature, and then he will have missed the opportunity to show everyone how much he cares. Instead, he hands Democrats an opportunity to show voters how much he only cares about his delusions and conspiracy theories, and not about addressing their struggles to afford housing.

Headlines about Trump’s lunch with Senate Republicans yesterday were dominated by the shouting matches, especially with Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, triggered by the tensions he has stoked with his own party, stemming from his SAVE America Act demands, his anger over the passage of the Iran war powers resolution, and other matters. While such a confrontation seemed to mark a new era in Trump-GOP relations, definitively declaring a turning point was perhaps premature. Late last night the Senate, with Cassidy switching his position, voted against another war powers resolution in a procedural vote GOP leadership brought to the floor for the sole purpose of assuaging Trump after his blow-up with Cassidy earlier in the day. According to the Washington Post, Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and John Barrasso (R-WY) successfully pressed Cassidy to change his vote.

The Reflecting Pool Debacle Gets More Ridiculous and Embarrassing

Following his Capitol Hill showdown, Trump met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office, where he reprised his conspiracy theories about his botched reflecting pool renovation, insisting there is photographic proof of “thugs” vandalizing it. “They took razor blades and they cut patches like that, 350 feet long. A lot of them are like a foot, a foot, a foot. They cut the lining and there’s pictures of the guy bending over. I don’t know if anybody saw that, but there are pictures of the guy,” he said. Reporters, of course, have asked the White House, the National Parks Service, and the Department of the Interior to see these photos for themselves. This is not just a “Trump claimed, without evidence” moment. Trump is just making stuff up — not unprecedented for him, but notable because the reflecting pool debacle is such a huge, visible, and easily comprehensible tale of corruption and incompetence that it will prove much more difficult for him to bullshit his way out of it.

While Trump fabricated his story about the vandalism of the reflecting pool, which he has portrayed as a great affront to himself and the country’s heritage, he claimed during the same meeting not to have seen actual photographic proof that an American Tomahawk missile struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, at the outset of the war, killing 175 people. Although the proof of the U.S. strike has been reported in major news outlets, Trump nonetheless claimed to have not seen these reports, saying, “I have to wait for it to be complete,” adding later, “I don’t think it was us.”

Trump Is Trying to Blame Global Oil Shocks on “Liberal” U.K.

Responding to questions about the resignation of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and the likely ascension of newly elected Labour MP Andy Burnham to the role, Trump said, “I hear he’s extremely liberal,” which apparently bothers Trump because “that means he probably won’t open up the North Sea.” Trump claimed to have unsuccessfully pressed Starmer to “open up the North Sea,” by which he meant drill for oil there. This only became an issue after Trump’s war in Iran caused oil shocks around the world. So now Trump will judge Burnham on his “liberalism,” which Trump defines as not bailing him out of this historic self-inflicted wound.

Trump Declares “Golden Age” At Great American State Fair Launch

Trump gave a campaign style speech on the National Mall last night to kick off his Great American State Fair, which many states have declined to participate in. He announced several weeks ago that he would be speaking at the launch after numerous musical acts backed out of performing at his overtly partisan event. Last night he repeated some of his usual grievances and lies, and then boasted that the country is in a “golden age,” claiming, “There’s never been an age like this.”

Courts Deal Trump Losses in His Effort to Control Elections

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled against the Trump administration’s attempt to force state election officials in Michigan to turn over its voter rolls to the federal government. The court affirmed a lower court ruling by a Trump-appointed judge, dismissing the Department of Justice’s lawsuit filed to obtain the sensitive voter information. The ruling is binding on all states in the circuit, including Kentucky, where the DOJ has also sued state officials. This is the first appellate court to rule on the administration’s unprecedented power grab, along with nine trial courts who rebuffed Trump. In another case in which states challenged Trump’s 2025 executive order purporting to control elections, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper held Wednesday that significant parts of the order were unconstitutional, including its requirement to provide proof of citizenship when using the federal voter registration form, and its prohibition on counting mail ballots postmarked but not received at election boards by Election Day.

Election Fraud!

Thomas Pischke, a Republican senator in the South Dakota state legislature, is facing two felony counts for falsifying signatures for candidates for state Republican Party positions without their knowledge. “It’s a bad optic for the party,” said Jim Eschenbaum, the state GOP chair.

Judge Blocks Trump DOJ Attempt to Subpoena Trans Patients’ Medical Records

A federal judge in New York has blocked DOJ’s attempts to subpoena New York City hospitals for private medical information of trans youth who obtained gender-affirming care at their facilities. Chris Geidner has all the details at Law Dork.

Harrowing Read

Mother Jones’ Samantha Michaels profiles the Perez family, whose four children, all U.S. citizens, were left to fend for themselves after ICE detained both their parents. The Perezes, who live just seven miles from Mar-a-Lago, are among more than 146,000 U.S. citizen kids whose parents were detained by ICE between January 2025 and April 2026.

A Catholic at Pete Hegseth’s Prayer Meeting

After outcry over apparent snubs of Catholics at the Pentagon and anti-Catholic statements by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s religious mentor, Doug Wilson, Hegseth’s monthly prayer meeting yesterday featured a Catholic speaker. Jonathan Morris, a former priest, is also a Fox News contributor who has appeared on the network with Hegseth. Brian Kaylor watched it so you don’t have to.

Frozen Embryos Are People, Too, Says HHS

Moira Donegan takes a look at a Department of Health and Human Services call for grant applications, part of a revival of a George W. Bush-era program to raise awareness about frozen embryos. She finds that the Trump administration is referring to them as “children who already exist and are in need of a family.” The phrasing, she writes, “lends ammunition to anti-choice groups that have sought recognition of fetal and embryonic personhood in the courts, and who can now claim that embryos are already persons under the law as evidenced by the fact that they are treated as such in federal policy.”

Trump Keeps Trying to Strong-Arm the States

In Washington, D.C. yesterday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan rejected an effort by the Trump administration to use a revised database of Social Security numbers and citizenship status to check the accuracy of state voter rolls.The database was created following a Trump executive order aimed at one of Trump’s phony “election fraud” obsessions: that massive numbers of non-citizens vote in our elections. Sooknanan found that the administration “had haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.” As a result, some states, after accessing the database, used its inaccurate information to remove U.S. citizens from voting rolls. “All in all,” the judge concluded, “the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

In Maryland, Judge Stephanie Gallagher blocked the administration’s attempt to obtain state voter rolls — also for the purported reason of purging non-citizens from voting. The state records include dates of birth, residential addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. While some Republican states turned over their voter rolls to cooperate with Trump, the administration has sued 30 others and Washington, D.C. in an effort to force them to comply. Gallagher, who Trump nominated to the bench in his first term, became the ninth federal judge to reject this strong-arming, dismissing the case as built on “absurd” arguments.

Meanwhile, CNN reported yesterday that the Trump administration is threatening to withhold $1 billion of homeland security funding to states unless they make his demanded voting changes, including phasing out electronic voting systems, reverting to using paper ballots, and, yes, running their voter rolls through the database Sooknanan struck down. Expect court challenges to these demands and threats, if actually carried out, as well.

DC Circuit Steps in on Boasberg’s Contempt Inquiry

As David reported here back in April, two Trump-appointed judges on a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit blocked District Court Judge James Boasberg from pursuing a contempt inquiry over the Trump administration’s violation of his March 2025 order to halt deportations of Venezuelan nationals to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, and return any flights that were en route. The case provided the country some of our earliest visibility into the lawless brutality of Trump’s mass deportation plans, and of the shocking devolution of the Department of Justice and its commitment to the rule of law.

“The sneering tone toward Boasberg from Judge Neomi Rao in the majority opinion reinforced how much cover the Trump appointees have been giving the president as the administration seeks to cover up the details of its complicity in defying Boasberg’s orders,” David wrote about the opinion that aimed to put an end to Boasberg’s efforts to hold administration officials, possibly including DOJ attorneys, in contempt of court for flouting his orders and covering up their wrongdoing.

Yesterday, the D.C. Circuit vacated that April 2026 order and ordered a rehearing of the case en banc — that is, in front of all 11 judges on the court. Arguments are scheduled for September.

Huckabee’s Christian Zionist Pitch to America

Amid the highly unusual tensions between the Trump administration and Israel over his capitulations to end the war he started in Iran, it is important to keep your eye on how his white evangelical base — largely highly committed to its Christian Zionism and very supportive of the Netanyahu government — is reacting. Things have been pretty muted publicly, likely because they are caught now between their dedication to Trump, who they have long hailed as a stalwart supporter of their vision for Israel, and Trump’s apparent heel-turn on Netanyahu, who he’s called “fucking crazy,” among other Trumpian outbursts. Trump’s evangelicals cheerleaded his war in Iran, and now they are forced to think of ways to cut his losses for him, or somehow spin them as not as bad as they seem.

Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, as an evangelical and ardent Christian Zionist, is deeply enmeshed in this world, and no doubt is intimately engaged with the squeeze they are feeling right now. He spoke this weekend to an international policy conference in Jerusalem, where he sought to reassure Israelis that America still had their back, despite Trump’s crash-out and Vance’s not-so-veiled threat that “Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.” Huckabee’s remarks were not only aimed at Israelis; they were particularly targeted to evangelicals at home who entangle their Christian nationalism with their Christian Zionism.

In making his case for America’s “unbreakable bond” with the state of Israel, Huckabee emphasized not so much that Israel should be thankful for American support, but that Americans should feel indebted to Judaism and Israel for our political founding and freedoms — an incredibly odd thing for anyone to say, but especially for an ambassador, who is supposed to be representing America’s interests in Israel, not convincing Americans that they owe a debt of gratitude to Israel based on his revisionist history. “One of the reasons that our nations are tied together is because it is upon the Jewish foundation that Christianity was formed and upon the Jewish and Judeo-Christian foundation, Western civilization was formed. And without that there would not be an America. It is as simple as that,” he said. Americans, he went on, “need to be grateful to God for the Jewish people and the foundation upon which freedom and the sanctity of the individual was founded because that is what separates our values from the values of totalitarianism and dictatorship.”

Trump Is Still Hiding Kennedy Center Signage With His Name Removed

Thanks to intrepid photography by the group Hands Off the Arts, the Washington Post has confirmed that Trump’s name has indeed been removed from the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as required by a court order. The Trump-less signage remains covered by scaffolding and tarp, because Trump can never admit that he has lost, which he has been doing a lot of lately.

Speaking of Losing

In California, U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles, rejecting, like judges in Boston and Chicago before him, Trump’s arguments that ordinances barring use of city resources to aid in federal immigration enforcement are unconstitutional. In Minnesota, Judge Patrick Schiltz threw out grand jury subpoenas issued to Governor Tim Walz and other Democrats, part of Trump’s political revenge campaign against the state.

Trump Is Also Losing Friends

Politico reports on how Trump has become a liability for far-right leaders in Europe, including Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the U.K.’s Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, and National Rally party leader Jordan Bardella in France.

Are Jared and Ivanka Triggering a Revolution in Albania?

Their investment in a planned 10,000-room luxury resort on the beloved, pristine Sazan Island off the coast of the Albanian Pishë Poro-Narta conservation reserve, has triggered an unprecedented uprising against the project — and against the Albanian officials who have supported it. “Not since the collapse of communism, more than three decades ago, has Albania been shaken by such collective fury,” the Guardian reports.

Speaking of Corruption

Casey Michel reports on an ongoing push by Trump allies to make the United States a safe haven for shell companies. “All of this is a staggering gift to cartels, Chinese money-laundering networks, Iranian proxies, and others who have relied on anonymous U.S. shells—all of whom Republicans supposedly stand against,” he writes.

Nepobaby Energy Drinks

What happens when the president’s son and granddaughter develop and market their own branded energy drinks? Nothing good.

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The Reflecting Pool as a Reflection of Trump’s Corruption and Tin-Potism

After President Donald Trump’s boastful, $16 million-plus makeover of the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial was spoiled by rapidly blooming algae and peeling paint, he flew into one of his trademark weekend Truth Social rages against “Radical Left Lunatics.” He baselessly blamed “terrible Vandals,” and called for the arrest and “Years in jail” for people who had, in his words, committed “a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”

The entire debacle has all the hallmarks of a flailing dictator story. First, Trump’s supposed “makeovers” of Washington, D.C. landmarks and monuments are nothing more than vanity projects, as he fancies himself the sole definer of our national history, and importantly, our national aesthetics. Second, his administration doled out no-bid, taxpayer-funded contracts, one to a Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor who was once embroiled in a bribery scandal. (Yes, that scandal involves vintage TPM character Jim Traficant). Now, Trump is apoplectic that his vaunted “American flag blue” paint has peeled away as if it had been installed with a glue stick — a disastrous symbolism even Trump recognizes.

His response is to lash out, and claim, with no evidence, that curious residents and tourists had sabotaged his handiwork and even desecrated the monuments he claims to be restoring to a glory only he can achieve. As icing on the cake, his handpicked prosecutor, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, went on the state news network, aka Fox News, on Sunday to promise “serious charges” against anyone who puts their hand in the pool’s water, or touches a clump of peeling paint floating in it. She did not rule out prosecuting ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, who reported from the site last week.

Trump is baselessly accusing “vandals” of pouring “corrosive” substances into the pool to trigger the algae, and for a nonexistent 250-foot “gash into the beautiful facade.” The administration has already begun charging people, including David Hearn, a former Olympian who stopped to take a look at the reflecting pool while out for a bike ride on Friday, and spent five hours in detention at a Park Police facility before being released.

The entire episode is peak Trumpism: both preposterous and dangerous at the same time. As far as the likelihood that D.C. juries would convict anyone in the Reflecting Pool saga, just remember Sandwich Guy.

Hillbilly Elegy Elegy

“There is something deeply the matter here with JD Vance, and with this book,” is not exactly a sentence a writer wants to see in the second paragraph of a review of their newly published memoir, but that’s how Colin Dickey opens his appraisal of Communion, JD Vance’s 2028 presidential campaign salvo masquerading as a personal account of his faith journey. Dickey, writing in The New Republic, takes aim at Vance’s disingenuous efforts to pretend he’s a different kind of politician — and a different kind of religious thinker — than Trump and his evangelical loyalists. Vance’s tale of rejecting evangelicalism, and then atheism, in favor of Catholicism will baffle evangelicals and Catholics alike. For evangelicals, he left their faith for atheism, but when he returned to religion he chose Catholicism, with some disdain for his childhood religion. Catholics reading this book will be similarly mystified by how he writes about their religion, which he very recently joined but about which he nonetheless feels entitled to lecture the Pope.

“If nothing else, ‘Communion’ confirms what was already obvious: Vance is not the theologian he thinks he is, and indeed, he knows very little about the Catholic faith,” writes religious studies scholar Anthea Butler at MS NOW. Instead, Vance seems to have invented his own version of Catholicism, which he can use both as a political calling card for Republican voters and a bludgeon against the left. Remarkably, though, as Jessica Winter observes at the New Yorker, “the strongest emotion Vance seems able to express in ‘Communion’ is his distaste for the tenets and rituals of the faith he has elected to join.” This book, she writes, far more than Vance’s first, career-catapulting memoir Hillbilly Elegy, “is the work of an inveterate opportunist, one who appears torn between the urge to camouflage his careerism—Vance’s true religion—and an equally strong desire to be admired for how well and how profitably he plays the game.”

DOJ Civil Rights Division Aims to Christianize Major League Baseball

The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether the civil rights of Christian players for the San Francisco Giants were violated by the team’s special caps for Pride Night earlier this month. Four players who objected to the caps — three who had altered the cap with Bible verses, and one who refused to wear one at all — received warnings from Major League Baseball for violating its uniform policy. But in the eyes of Trump’s DOJ, MLB is woke, and, according to Harmeet Dhillon, head of Trump’s DOJ Civil Rights Division, the four players were being discriminated against for expressing “their opposition to MLB’s pro-Pride orthodoxy.” Dhillon griped to the New York Post, “It doesn’t really matter how gay San Francisco is — these workers have rights.” This is just the latest example of how far the Trump DOJ will go to completely remake the Civil Rights Division as a lawless enforcer of Christian nationalist persecution complexes.

Is the Trump Administration Now… Anti-Israel?

The Wall Street Journal editorial board goes there, accusing Trump of making Israel a “scapegoat” in his still-shaky Iran Memorandum of Understanding to end the senseless war he started in Iran. “Mr. Trump now finds himself in the position of attacking the best U.S. ally in the region for defending itself,” the board wrote. “Like Barack Obama, he risks becoming an apologist for Iran. This may win him support among Mr. Vance’s friends in MAGA’s anti-Israel wing. But it risks giving away the gains of his military campaign.” Is there something more enraging the Journal could write about Trump than to liken him to Obama?

No one in the conservative world, though, wants to ask this question: isn’t criticizing Israel, as both Trump and Vance have now done, grounds for being investigated for antisemitism by the Trump administration?

Tulsi Gabbard Was Not Acting Alone

The Washington Post’s Jon Swaine has a shocking, meticulously reported story about former Congresswoman and now former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and her lifelong relationship with the Hare Krishna breakaway group, the Science of Identity Foundation. Swaine’s investigation makes the case that Chris Butler, the group’s guru, directed many of Gabbard’s legislative and media actions throughout her tenure in Congress — if not longer.

Bill Pulte Bulldozes His Way Into Gabbard’s Former Role

After Trump blew up the prospect of quick confirmation hearings for Jay Clayton, his actual nominee to replace Gabbard as DNI in order to install Bill Pulte, his interim pick, Pulte showed up a day early at HQ and proceeded to make noises about firing hundreds of employees and demanding to know whether a private plane was one of the position’s perks. Pulte, as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is best known for ginning up ultimately unsuccessful, evidence-free criminal investigations of Trump nemeses former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud; for encouraging Trump to post the AI-generated photo of himself as Jesus; and for triggering Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to threaten to “punch you in your fucking face.”

RFK, Jr. Holding Up Crucial Social Services Funding

The Department of Health and Human Services, now under a directive that all funding be approved by the White House and Department Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to states and social services organizations that provide suicide prevention, opioid addiction, disease outbreak, and other crucial public health interventions, NOTUS reports. The first step in this new review system requires all funding Congress has already appropriated to “first clear an AI screening which flags certain keywords that the administration finds unacceptable, such as culture, harm reduction, gender and transgender.”

Happy Summer!

National Parks, a summer holiday destination made more attractive this year by rising costs of flying, are plagued by staffing shortages, gridlock, and delays at entry gates, the New York Times reports.

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Still Obsessed

Amid all the justified criticism of his flimsy deal to end his reckless and unlawful war against Iran, nothing seems to get under President Trump’s skin quite like unfavorable comparisons to President Obama’s deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump famously pulled the plug on the JCPOA in one of the worst disasters of his first term, so the comparison is more than apt. It’s an essential point of reference for the capitulation Trump just made to Iran for it to get him out of the war he started against it.

“And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch,’” Trump said in one of his biggest tantrums of the week.

The memorandum of understanding, which Trump unbelievably chose to sign while at dinner at Versailles last night, punts entirely on Iran’s nuclear program. It saves those negotiations for another day, with no real mechanism to force the parties back to the table or to compel Iran to strike a new nukes deal. In that narrow sense, Trump is right when he claims his deal is the “complete opposite” of Obama’s.

“When a reporter asked Trump about that absence, he said that what would guarantee Iran’s compliance is fear of renewed U.S. bombing,” Heather Cox Richardson notes. “But Iran has shown it can withstand such attacks, and in any case, the U.S. has no stomach for them.”

In any event, if it turns out badly, Trump can just blame JD Vance.

Trump coming out on the short end of these Obama comparisons happens to coincide with the opening of Obama’s presidential library in Chicago, which itself has stirred up Trump enough that he has felt compelled to mock it.

Boat Strike Survivors Lost at Sea

The two survivors of a U.S. strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat this week have presumably died at sea, after the U.S. Coast Guard suspended search and rescue operations:

Since a double-tap strike in September that killed the survivors of the first attack in the lawless U.S. campaign, most of the survivors of subsequent strikes have perished at sea.

The ostensible rescue missions, either launched by the U.S. Coast Guard or handed off to the Mexican Navy, have been too little too late and raise serious questions about whether the Trump administration wants to deal with survivors at all.

Senate GOP Shows Sign of Life

The Senate has tucked a provision into the must-pass annual defense bill that would drastically cut Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal travel budget unless the Pentagon coughs up more information on the lawless campaign of high seas boat strikes.

The bill, which passed the GOP-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee last week, is trying to force the disclosure of the unedited footage of every boat strike in the campaign. It also wants more information on the Pentagon’s investigation into the apparent U.S. missile strike on a girls school in the opening days of the Iran war.

If the Pentagon fails to provide the information, Hegseth’s travel budget would be cut by 75%. The Senate tried a similar but less draconian move late last year, which the new provision suggests didn’t succeed in obtaining the requested information.

‘Mistakes Are Made’

Good Read

TPM’s Josh Kovensky: DOJ Invokes McCarthy-Era Law to Strip Somalia-born Minnesotan of Citizenship

Mass Deportation Watch

• Politico: Immigration judges are denying ICE detainees release. Federal judges are stepping in.

• WaPo: ICE removed detainee protections after private outreach from top contractor

• Politico: ICE’s detention policy won at the 5th Circuit. Then judges found another way to reject it.

• NYT: Internal Emails Raise Questions About D.H.S. Ending Haiti Protections

For Your Radar: Bill Pulte Edition

With President Trump having successfully torpedoed yesterday’s Senate intel committee confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton as DNI, Bill Pulte is poised to become acting DNI tomorrow. The amount of mischief, disinformation, and chaos Trump’s favorite gremlin can generate in that position is alarming, even though DNI doesn’t have a direct operational intel function.

For our purposes though, pay particular attention to the upcoming elections. DNI served as a clearinghouse in recent elections for intel on attempts by foreign adversaries to influence the vote. It sets up an opportunity for Pulte to use the position to plant seeds of conspiracy theories, sow doubt about the results, and enable ratfuckery in various forms.

Important

The Trump DOJ moved this week to block an NAACP lawsuit in Mississippi against Elon Musk’s AI company which alleges that its dozens of gas-burning turbines violate the Clean Air Act. In doing so, the DOJ third-ranked official, Stanley Woodward Jr., made the extraordinary claim that the federal government has the authority to stop environmental lawsuits brought by private groups or individuals.

Anti-White Supremacy Lesson Costs Prof Her Job

Indiana University has declined to renew the contract of a non-tenured lecturer who was suspended in October from teaching the graduate-level course “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice.”

The scrutiny of the instructor, who showed a graphic in class that identified “Make America Great Again” as an example of covert white supremacy, came after Indiana passed a law claiming to promote “intellectual diversity” while protecting students from being subjected to political views unrelated to the course, the NYT reports.

Headline of the Day

The New Republic: Tommy Tuberville Hit With Lawsuit Over Secret Life as Florida Man

Travel Alert

I’ll be away until July, doing something I’ve always wanted to do but in my race to see as much of the world as possible have never managed to do: Go abroad to one place for a couple of weeks and just stay there. No city hopping. No multiple border crossings. No sandwiching in a wilderness trek or a mountain climb.

Copenhagen is my one and only destination (although day trips are allowed … hello, Malmö?). I’m a first-time visitor. Recommendations? Tips? Off-the-beaten path gems? I’m keen to simply be a local for a few days.

TPM contributing writer Sarah Posner will be subbing for me here. Please make her feel welcome.

Enjoy Your Long Weekend

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Pick Your Poison: Sanctions or Criminal Contempt

In a flurry of new filings overnight, attorneys for the Broadview Six continued to press their advantage in seeking a full accounting for the Trump DOJ’s misconduct and subsequent alleged cover-up in the now-dismissed case against ICE protesters.

Among the new requests, the Broadview Six are now asking U.S. District Judge April Perry to:

Appoint a Special Counsel: In seeking the appointment of a outside special counsel to investigate and, if warranted, prosecute DOJ officials in Chicago and D.C., including U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, they argue that the Justice Department is scapegoating the line prosecutor who appeared before the grand jury in the case:

Indeed, these steps must be taken in large part because of what appears to be a determined effort to blame a single prosecutor when the misconduct now known – particularly in this case – runs much deeper and indeed to the highest levels of the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office and likely to the Department of Justice in Washington D.C.

If the investigation yields evidence of criminal contempt, they want the court to empower the special counsel to prosecute those officials involved.

Conduct a Hearing on Prosecutorial Misconduct: In conjunction with the request for a special counsel, the Broadview Six also wanted an evidentiary hearing on sanctions for “both the misconduct that is already manifest, and additional misconduct which we anticipate is yet uncovered.” As they continue to pound the lectern that more misconduct is likely to be found upon further investigation, they ask for additional discovery to inform any hearing on sanctions or criminal contempt of court:

We ask that the Court direct the government immediately to conduct a search for any emails, text messages, phone calls, memos, notes, or other records of communications between anyone in the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office and anyone – including [DOJ official Aakash] Singh – from DOJ or DHS related to this case.

Note the particular focus on Main Justice.

Allow Limited Discovery to Recoup Attorneys Fees: In another new filing, the Broadview Six attorneys revealed that the Trump DOJ “will not contest” that the defendants are entitled to recover their attorneys fees and costs. How much they are entitled to recover remains in dispute. In pursuit of recovering attorney fees, the Broadview Six previously asked the court to allow additional limited discovery “to demonstrate the bad faith, vexatious, and/or frivolous nature of this misguided prosecution.”

Trump DOJ Goes After ICE Protesters in Minnesota

A sweeping new indictment of 15 ICE protesters in Minnesota is another test case of the Trump DOJ’s penchant for slapping conspiracy charges on alleged “antifa” dissidents — though the facts of this case are complicated and will take some time to unpack and distill.

It led to this bit of absurdism from Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen during a press conference announcing the charges:

The indictment of protestors comes even as the Trump administration continues to refuse to investigate or prosecute federal agents who killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti — or cooperate in the state investigations in their deaths.

Court Declines to Discipline DOJ Attorney

After appointing a special counsel to look into it, the federal court in Rhode Island has declined to discipline a DOJ attorney who failed to disclose to a judge that an ICE detainee she ordered released had an outstanding international arrest warrant.

The Trump Department of Homeland Security seized on the release of the detainee to attack the judge publicly, and the lawyer apologized for not being more forthcoming with the court, saying ICE has instructed him not to divulge the existence of the warrant.

In a letter to DOJ attorney Kevin Bolan, Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. admonished:

Given your knowledge and the importance of the information you knowingly withheld from the Court, the Special Counsel found sufficient evidence that your conduct violated the duty of candor owed to the Court. And the Court agrees. In particular, your knowing decision not to disclose this critical fact was, under the circumstances, the equivalent of making an affirmative false statement to the Court about Mr. Gómez’s criminal history, in violation of Rule 3.3(a)(1).

Nevertheless, the special counsel and the court found “countervailing factors” that made formal disciplinary proceedings unnecessary:

While your error was serious, countervailing factors are also present. The Special Counsel’s investigation found, and the Court agrees, that there is no reason to conclude that you were part of a scheme to deceive the Court, or that you acted in bad faith or for personal gain. On your own initiative, you publicly accepted responsibility and apologized to Judge DuBose and this Court. Outside of this incident, you have participated responsibly in many cases here. Your lapse of judgment reflected a failure to prioritize your duty to the Court over the instructions of your client, but you did not act for any deceitful or illicit reason.

The April DHS news release — titled “Activist Biden Judge Releases Violent Criminal Illegal Alien Wanted for Murder” — remains online.

Secret Service Big Mad at Kash Patel

FBI Director Kash Patel jumped the gun again in racing to post news of a criminal investigation to social media while arrests were still being made.

It prompted an unusual public backlash from the deputy director of the Secret Service, which led the investigation into an alleged plot to attack the UFC event Sunday at the White House on President Trump’s birthday.

“I’ll tell you a phrase I learned early in my career in the New York field office and that’s `’Don’t choke on your own smoke,’” the Secret Service’s Matthew C. Quinn said at a press conference, without naming Patel. “I’ll tell you the Secret Service led that investigation from the beginning. I’ll tell you that case is ongoing. In order to maintain the integrity of the investigation and the security plan, we chose not to leak it.”

At least five people from four states — California, Missouri, Nebraska and Ohio — have been charged in the alleged plot involving drones and rifles, which was uncovered when a concerned mother called the police, though it remains unclear whether they had the means to carry out the attack.

In related news: The Trump DOJ seized on the alleged plot in its appeal of the court order shutting down construction of Trump’s vanity ballroom, dubiously arguing that it shows the need for a secure location (to hold UFC fights and related circus events?).

Patel Has a Slush Fund for FBI Loyalists?

In a new letter, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) claims FBI Director Kash Patel “may” have unlawfully paid more than $1 million in bonuses to agents on his Director’s Advisory Team and on his security detail.

Trump Holds DNI Nom Hostage to Election Interference Bill

In another sign of the gathering storm of a Big Lie redux for the midterm elections, President Trump this morning scotched a plan to quickly confirm Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence in order to pressure Congress into passing his election interference bill, the SAVE America Act, as part of extending FISA’s Section 702 surveillance authority.

Under Trump’s new plan, his loyalist Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, would step in as acting DNI in the meantime — an ironic move because fast-tracking Clayton was a way of sidelining Pulte, whose selection as acting DNI had derailed the FISA reauthorization in the Senate.

In his social media post announcing the move, Trump said he was cancelling today’s Senate Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Clayton’s nomination, but committee Chair Tom Cotton (R-AR) said the hearing would proceed.

Midterms Results: Georgia Edition

• GA-Sen: Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins won the GOP runoff to challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff (D), giving Democrats the general election opponent they wanted.

• GA-Gov: Trump-endorsed Georgia Lt. Governor Burt Jones lost the GOP runoff to billionaire Rick Jackson, despite having led in the first round of the primary.

U.S. Boat Strike Leaves 2 Survivors

A U.S. attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific on Tuesday killed one man and left two survivors adrift on the high seas, bringing the death toll in the lawless Trump administration campaign to at least 208. In what has become a largely meaningless refrain, the U.S. military said it “immediately notified U.S. Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivors.”

Trump Faked Out Most Media on Iran War Deal Yet Again

It’s now basically confirmed that the U.S. and Iran agreed to disagree and that President Trump turned around and peddled that publicly as an agreement to end the war.

The terms of a draft of the memorandum of understanding between the two countries, which isn’t yet signed, is both generally favorable to Iran and leaves much unresolved for later negotiations (which may or may not happen).

After touting it over the weekend — and being inexplicably taken at face value by most major news outlets — Trump gave the whole thing an absurdist twist this morning in Europe at the G7 summit:

That’s not just Trump free-associating in front of the cameras. That’s the official administration line, per this rich CNN headline: “US officials downplay text of the Iran agreement, saying it doesn’t account for back-channel commitments.”

Meanwhile, each night since the MOU was conceptually agreed to, Iran has launched drones against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. has shot them down, NBC News reports. `

Messi Doing Messi Things … at Nearly 39

Vintage Lionel Messi last night against Algeria, where his three goals for defending champ Argentina tied him for most in a career in World Cup play:

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Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

President Trump’s oft-repeated claims that no public monies will be involved in his vanity ballroom project appear to be untrue, according to a new Washington Post report that also reveals the cost of the project has ballooned.

The newspaper obtained copies of detailed project summaries prepared for the White House by its contractor, Virginia-based Clark Construction. One summary from March estimated the cost of the project at $600 million, 50% more than the $400 million price tag Trump has repeatedly given publicly for the project.

More than half of the $600 million cost for the project would be covered by public funds, according to the March summary:

• $155 million from the Secret Service

• $149 million from the White House Military Office

• $3 million from the Executive Residence

Congress has not authorized the project or allocated monies for it.

The alleged private funding for the project was itself problematic, a prime opportunity for corruption, with little transparency. In the end, it turns out to be problematic in every way.

In response to the WaPo story, the White House was still insisting on the $400 million figure: “President Trump and generous American patriots are funding the ballroom to the tune of approximately $400 million …”

Take It With a Grain of Salt …

Kash Patel, the social media addict who happens to be FBI director, posted this morning on X that the bureau thwarted a planned attack on President Trump’s UFC event at the White House on his birthday. “[M]ultiple individuals are now in custody and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold,” Patel posted.

Patel has a history of jumping the gun with social media posts on law enforcement activity and then having to backtrack, so proceed with caution on this.

The Retribution: Gavin Newsom Edition

The announcement by California Gov. Gavin Newsom — a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 — that the Trump DOJ is investigating his wife prompted an darkly comic response from what appear to be Justice Department sources.

The Wall Street Journal put it like this: “The probes have been going on since at least 2025 and were started by federal law-enforcement officials in California—not political appointees in Washington—after witnesses there came forward with information, the person said.”

The New York Times version was: “A person familiar with the matter … disputed Mr. Newsom’s assertion that the investigations were politically motivated, and said they had been initiated by federal law enforcement officials in California, not launched by officials in Washington.”

The implication: Hey, we know exactly what politically motivated investigations driven by the Trump White House and Main Justice look like and this ain’t it!

Of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Federal prosecutors and FBI agents outside of D.C. can initiate their own politically motivated investigations, too. See, for example, Nevada.

The Corruption: Antitrust Edition

Political appointees at Main Justice short-circuited the antitrust review by career attorneys of the Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the WSJ reports:

A team of career lawyers who had spent months scrutinizing the deal were leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law, the people said.

The staff investigators hadn’t yet made a final recommendation—a typical step in the deal-review process—and were told Friday that the department would close the investigation, effectively clearing the deal at the federal level, some of the people said.

Boris Epshteyn Watch

A somewhat convoluted story in the WSJ — packed full of denials by the key players — reports that Trump personal attorney Boris Epshteyn was involved in Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s successful effort to get the Trump DOJ to drop criminal charges against him.

As of last summer, the [Adani] family was telling people that Epshteyn was helping them, some of the people said.

Epshteyn, who also serves as the president’s adviser and legal coordinator, didn’t attend meetings with prosecutors. Nor did his name appear on legal papers. …

But Epshteyn’s presence was discussed inside the Justice Department and among others familiar with the case, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Epshteyn emphatically denied the claims in the WSJ article. The firm representing Adani in the case, Sullivan & Cromwell, said it “did not work with or retain Mr. Epshteyn.” The Adani Group also issued a denial: “We have no relationship with Boris Epshteyn, have not retained him in any capacity, and have made no payments to him, directly or indirectly.”

On Jeffrey Epstein’s Death

The NYT just published an exhaustive investigation of Jeffrey Epstein’s jailhouse death that concludes:

Some important questions about Epstein’s death remain unanswered and likely unanswerable. Nevertheless, our reporting establishes that Epstein showed a clear pattern of behavior in the weeks before his death suggesting an intent to kill himself. The apparent suicide note memorialized Epstein’s despair and desire to “say goodbye” on his own terms. Other writings from his final days presented a picture of a fraying mental state that sharply contrasted with the upbeat picture he presented to jail psychologists, including another note in which he hinted at ending his life. …

The picture drawn most clearly by this new information is not the elaborate conspiracy that his murder would have required; rather, it is an unfortunate though not improbable convergence of longstanding institutional failures, human errors and chance events, which created an opportunity for Epstein to act on what was by then a well-established desire that he had already tried and failed to realize.

Headline of the Day

I didn’t touch the reported deal with Iran in yesterday’s Morning Memo because so much of the reporting relied on President Trump’s own characterizations of it. I don’t grasp the editorial decision-making that leads major news outlets to take Trump’s statements on the Iran negotiations at face value, given his abysmal track record on exactly this topic.

A day later, the details remain sketchy. It’s not clear, for example, whether the two sides are even working from a common draft document. But what already seems to be unraveling is the initial round of misinformation from Trump that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened with the same free passage that existed before the war.

This NYT headline captures the inanity: Iran Says Strait of Hormuz Won’t Have ‘Tolls’ but It Will Have ‘Fees’

No Means No, Jet Ski!

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