Trump Ballroom Costs Balloon and Taxpayers Foot Half the Bill
INSIDE: Gavin Newsom ... Boris Epshteyn ... Jeffrey Epstein
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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Really liked your closing words David.
It's not a "Peace Deal". It's a 60 day MOU/Memorandum of Understanding. Iran pretty much gets it all and willy nilly Lindsay Graham is blaming Vance for the deal. I'm ok with that, as Vance is a low life huckster, but Trump wants ALL the credit for losing this
war.
If they can get rid of Newsom, Pritzner will be next.
So the nyt says Esptein committed suicide? Well THAT settles it then...