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Welcome to this weekend’s Trump Tyranny Tracker…

ICE will hide body camera footage, the Senate confirmed Trump’s lawyer as attorney general, and U.S. intelligence linked Russia to an explosive drone at a German airport.

This Weekend at a Glance

• Trump revives his attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook

• Greenland warns Trump-linked oil company after it brings drilling equipment ashore without approval

• U.S. economy loses 23,000 jobs in July as hiring weakens

What We Need to Pay Attention To

ICE will release body camera video only when seen in the agency’s ‘best interests,’ policy says

What Happened: ICE said that all field officers will have body cameras by the end of August, but the agency can withhold footage of shootings and other serious incidents unless releasing it is in ICE’s “best interests.” The ICE director can block or indefinitely delay footage, and released videos will conceal officers’ faces, names, and badge numbers.

Why It Matters: ICE has repeatedly acted as if the rules don’t apply to it, and this policy makes accountability even harder. The agency can now decide whether the public gets to see evidence of its own officers’ misconduct based on whether releasing it is in ICE’s “best interests.”

Source: Associated Press

Corruption

Major Republican fundraiser winning contracts from Trump administration, emails reveal

What Happened: Republican megadonor Palmer Luckey, co-founder of defense contractor Anduril, has donated $5.9 million to the party while his company receives billions in federal contracts. In March, the Army awarded Anduril a $20 billion sole-source drone contract, and the company could also compete for Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense project.

Why It Matters: Luckey is raising millions for Republicans while his company is getting billions from the government. It is classic pay-to-play cronyism where major political donors gain access and influence while taxpayer money flows to their businesses.

Source: The Guardian

Small law firm with ties to Trump gets massive no-bid contract to aid immigrant kids

What Happened: Trump officials awarded a $150 million no-bid contract to the 24-attorney Burke Law Group to represent unaccompanied immigrant children after ending contracts with dozens of organizations that previously provided those services. Only two of the firm’s attorneys specialize in immigration and asylum law, while two of its leaders have served in Trump’s government.

Why It Matters: Trump officials took legal services for vulnerable immigrant children away from experienced organizations and handed $150 million, without competitive bidding, to a politically connected firm with little immigration expertise. Trump allies get a massive government contract while children facing deportation pay the price.

Source: MS NOW

SEC drops insider trading suit against ex-healthcare executive pardoned by Trump

What Happened: The SEC moved to dismiss its insider trading lawsuit against former healthcare executive Terren Peizer, who was convicted of insider trading and securities fraud and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. Trump pardoned Peizer in January.

Why It Matters: Trump’s pardon already erased Peizer’s criminal punishment, and now the government is dropping the civil case against him too, removing another consequence for crimes a federal jury found he committed.

Source: Reuters

Power Consolidation

In Confirming Blanche, Senators Endorse a Justice Dept. Under Trump’s Sway

What Happened: The Senate narrowly confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general after he repeatedly argued that Trump has broad constitutional authority to direct the Justice Department, including ordering investigations. When asked about DOJ independence during his confirmation hearing, Blanche pointed to Article II and said executive power belongs to Trump.

Why It Matters: Trump has put his former personal lawyer in charge of a Justice Department he has already used to target his enemies and protect his allies. Blanche believes Trump can direct investigations and prosecutions. DOJ independence is effectively gone, leaving federal law enforcement in the hands of a Trump loyalist.

Source: New York Times

Trump Revives Attempt to Fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook

What Happened: Trump revived his effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over “mortgage fraud” allegations she denies, two months after the Supreme Court blocked his previous attempt because she had not been given enough opportunity to respond. The White House has now given Cook 21 days to answer the allegations before Trump decides whether to remove her.

Why It Matters: Trump wants the Fed to lower interest rates and is again trying to remove a governor who stands in his way. Replacing Cook would give him another chance to install a loyalist and bring an institution that is supposed to operate independently of the president further under his control.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Weaponization of Institutions

Hegseth Strips Security Clearance From Biden’s Air Force Secretary

What Happened: The Pentagon revoked former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s eligibility to access classified information, accusing him of revealing sensitive information about Trump’s Qatari Air Force One. Kendall denies disclosing classified information and says he has not been told what he allegedly revealed.

Why It Matters: Kendall publicly raised security concerns about Trump’s Qatari plane, and now the Pentagon is stripping his security clearance over information it has not even identified. The government is once again using its power to punish someone who criticized Trump.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Trump calls on Jeanine Pirro to ‘re-visit’ Reflecting Pool case

What Happened: Trump publicly called on U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to revive charges against a former Olympian accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool. Prosecutors dropped the case after finding evidence that faulty installation, not vandalism, may have caused the damage, but Trump insists a crime occurred and has criticized Pirro for dropping it.

Why It Matters: Trump is publicly ordering a federal prosecutor to reconsider a criminal case after her office found the evidence did not support it. Criminal prosecutions are supposed to follow the evidence, not the president’s personal demands.

Source: Politico

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Media Suppression & Authoritarian Tactics

US to vet social media of foreign journalists applying for visas, report says

What Happened: The State Department is reportedly expanding social media screening to foreign journalists applying for U.S. visas and requiring them to make their accounts public for government review. The move follows new limits on how long foreign journalists can remain in the country.

Why It Matters: Foreign journalists now have to consider whether their reporting on Trump or his government could jeopardize their ability to enter and work in the U.S. That gives the government enormous power to punish or deter journalists whose coverage it doesn’t like.

Source: Reuters

Human & Civil Rights Abuses

Women’s Share of Top Military Promotions Falls as Hegseth Blocks Nominees

What Happened: Pete Hegseth has blocked at least 40 high-ranking military promotions from reaching the Senate, roughly half involving women and people of color. Women now account for just 4% of nominations for general and admiral positions this year, the lowest share in at least 25 years.

Why It Matters: Hegseth is personally intervening in promotions while openly attacking diversity in the military. Women are reaching lower officer ranks in record numbers, but their path to the military’s highest ranks is being narrowed.

Source: New York Times

The Deaths ICE Doesn’t Count

What Happened: ICE ended a policy requiring it to report and investigate deaths that occur within 30 days of release from detention. Prisciliano Trejo Ricano, 29, became critically ill in ICE custody and died from acute leukemia eight days after his release, but his death does not appear in ICE’s official count.

Why It Matters: ICE can now release gravely ill detainees and leave them out of its death count if they die days later. The government has created a way to hide deaths connected to its brutal detention system.

Source: Mother Jones

Fled to America at 11. Stole at 18. Deported to Vietnam at 44.

What Happened: Trump has deported more than 1,200 people to Vietnam and 400 to Laos, more than during the previous three presidential terms combined. Many came to the U.S. legally as children after the Vietnam War and are now being deported decades later over old criminal convictions after Trump pressured both countries to accept them.

Source: New York Times

New Jersey opens civil rights probe of privately run ICE detention center in Newark

What Happened: New Jersey opened a civil rights investigation into GEO Group’s treatment of detainees at Delaney Hall, days after Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died following a medical emergency. His family says he was not receiving necessary medication. The privately run ICE facility has faced other allegations of inadequate medical care, spoiled food, and unsanitary conditions.

Source: Reuters

Government Disruption

A top US general in Europe abruptly removed from command

What Happened: Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, commander of the Army’s V Corps overseeing U.S. forces and operations across Europe, was abruptly removed nearly two months before his scheduled departure. The Army has not explained why, and Costanza joins more than two dozen senior military officers removed or sidelined under Pete Hegseth.

Why It Matters: V Corps helps coordinate U.S. forces along NATO’s eastern flank and provide support for Ukraine as Russia escalates its attacks across Europe. Removing its commander without explanation adds another senior officer to Hegseth’s growing purge of military leadership at a very dangerous moment.

Source: ABC News

Trump administration considers order on autism and vaccines, source says

What Happened: Trump is considering an executive order on vaccines and autism as his regime continues investigating a connection despite decades of research involving millions of people finding no credible link. Trump has reportedly pressed RFK Jr. privately about whether he believes he can prove such a conspiracy.

Source: Reuters

Imperial & Geopolitical Watch

Oil prices tick higher as Iran issues demands to reopen Strait of Hormuz

What Happened: Oil prices rose Sunday after Iran issued sweeping demands for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, including an end to U.S. attacks, withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region, sanctions relief, and compensation for war damages. Tankers have been unable to use the strait, which normally carries about 20% of global oil supplies, since fighting resumed in July.

Source: CNN

Greenland issues ‘strong warning’ as Trump-linked oil firm prepares to drill

What Happened: Greenland issued a “strong warning” after Greenland Energy, a Texas oil company linked to Trump, brought drilling equipment ashore without government approval. The company claims the area could hold $1 trillion in oil and is preparing to drill as Trump renews threats to seize control of Greenland.

Why It Matters: Trump is threatening to invade Greenland while a company tied to his circle is preparing to exploit its oil without permission. His threats against Greenland are unfolding alongside private efforts to profit from its natural resources.

Source: The Guardian

U.S. Squeezes Cuba Even as It Searches for a New Regime Leader

What Happened: Trump officials have directed U.S. intelligence agencies to identify a current or former Cuban official who could take power in Havana and cooperate with the U.S. At the same time, Trump is pressuring Cuba to open its economy to U.S. businesses, buy American oil, and expel Russian and Chinese intelligence operatives.

Source: New York Times

Far-Right & Russian Influence Watch

U.S. Intel Links Russia to Explosive Drone at German Airport

What Happened: U.S. intelligence assesses that an explosive-laden drone found near a Ukrainian cargo plane at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle Airport likely belonged to the Russian government. The discovery forced the airport to shut down, and German reports say the drone failed to detonate.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Economic News

July jobs report reveals unexpected loss of 23,000 jobs, missing economists’ forecasts

What Happened: The U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, far below economists’ forecast of 95,000 new jobs, while May and June were revised down by another 103,000. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1%, largely because people left the workforce.

Source: CBS News

Resistance

Check out 50501 for local and nationwide events…

Source: 50501

Voter turnout surges in Tennessee after Black-majority district is erased

What Happened: Democratic turnout for House primaries in Shelby County, which includes Memphis, more than doubled from 2024 and reached its highest level in a decade. The surge followed Tennessee Republicans’ decision to dismantle the state’s only majority Black congressional district and divide its voters among three districts after the Supreme Court eroded Voting Rights Act protections.

Source: The Washington Post

By the Numbers

• $20 billion — Sole-source Army drone contract awarded to Anduril, whose co-founder Palmer Luckey has donated $5.9 million to Republicans since 2017.

• $150 million — No-bid contract awarded to a small Trump-connected law firm to represent immigrant children

• 4% — Share of general and admiral nominations going to women this year, the lowest in at least 25 years

• 1,600+ — People deported to Vietnam and Laos under Trump

• 23,000 — Jobs the U.S. economy lost in July

What to Watch Next

ICE controls the cameras meant to hold its officers accountable — Will Congress step in and force ICE to change a policy that allows it to hide evidence of misconduct?

Trump has an attorney general who says he can direct DOJ investigations — How much further will Trump be allowed to go in using federal prosecutors against his political enemies?

Trump is trying again to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve — Will he succeed in replacing her with a loyalist and gaining more control over the Fed?

Trump-linked business interests are colliding with his threats to invade Greenland — What happens as Greenland pushes back against unauthorized drilling?

Key Takeaways

Rising Costs — Higher oil prices, new tariff threats, and growing trade tensions are pushing up the cost of groceries, school supplies, and other everyday essentials.

Control Over Justice — Todd Blanche says Trump can direct DOJ investigations, while Trump is already publicly pressuring federal prosecutors over individual criminal cases.

Hiding the Evidence— ICE can decide when to release body camera footage and has stopped counting some deaths that occur shortly after people leave its custody.

Cronyism Pays — Republican donors and Trump-connected firms continue benefiting from enormous federal contracts, including deals awarded without competitive bidding.

Consolidating Control — Trump is again trying to remove a Federal Reserve governor while Hegseth continues to remove or sideline senior military leaders.

Call to Action

Document Everything: Document purges, corruption, and power grabs. Share credible information with journalists, watchdogs, and legal experts. Silence enables authoritarianism—see something, say something.

Defend Press Freedom: Support independent journalism by subscribing to and sharing reporting that challenges Trump’s power grab.

Contact Lawmakers: Demand accountability for Trump’s unchecked power and war on oversight.

Mobilize for Action: Organize or join legal efforts and resistance movements to protect democracy and human and civil rights.

Thanks for reading the Trump Tyranny Tracker. Stay tuned for more updates.

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When it comes to the bullshit, batshit-crazy anti-vaxxer movement that currently has the United States in its un-scientific grip, I’ve focused most of my attention on RFK Jr. And, frankly, for good reason. For arguably decades, but definitely for the last five to ten years, RFK Jr. was the most infamous anti-vaxxer in the world. Kennedy would deny this, of course. In fact, it is old habit for him to talk out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to vaccines, but his anti-vaxxer side speaks much more loudly. And, because of course, one of his chief claims has been that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism.

When Donald Trump tasked Kennedy with finding the “cause” of autism, it came off looking like Trump fulfilling his promise to let Kennedy promote his pet conspiracy theories in exchange for gobbling up the MAHA vote when he ran for president. Then Trump himself started parroting some of the same claims you would normally hear from Kennedy. Still, it all looked like performative promise-keeping.

All of that has changed. Donald Trump just made himself the most famous anti-vaxxer on the planet. On Monday, Trump signed an Executive Order making enormous changes to vaccine schedule recommendations for children, both limiting the number of vaccines recommended and advising that vaccines be split up and not offered in combo-shots.

The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings. Rather, they are based on false anti-vaccine fearmongering about harms, including the debunked claim that they cause autism, and misinformation that multiple vaccinations can “overwhelm” children’s immune systems. This false claim has also been repeatedly debunked and explained.

During a signing event at the White House on Monday afternoon, Trump falsely claimed that pediatricians “have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda,” that is “poured into a little child’s body, and bad things happen in too many cases. This is an explosion; this is an epidemic,” Trump said.

He also tied the new vaccine recommendations to his goal of finding out “what’s going on with autism.” Dozens of high-quality studies encompassing data on millions of children have found no evidence linking the neurodevelopmental condition to immunizations. Nevertheless, Trump suggested that the changes outlined in the order would reduce autism rates in the US.

This is madness. Trump has no understanding of the science or medicine behind vaccines. The fact that he’s layering lies into his signing ceremony for this unscientific proclamation should tell you everything you need to know. It was not that long ago that my own children received their childhood vaccines. I can promise you that no doctor approached them with a syringe the size of a soda can to pour into them. These are lies. Bald-faced lies.

And, while this has been pitched as putting America in line with the vaccine schedules of other developed nations, that is also a lie.

Under the new recommendations, Trump said children should get fewer vaccines, suggesting that the US recommends an excessive number of vaccines compared with other high-income countries. In reality, by dropping down to only 11 recommended vaccinations, the US becomes an outlier in recommending so few, according to fact-checking by Stat News in January. The only other country that recommends so few vaccines is Denmark, a small, relatively homogenous country with universal healthcare.

As for breaking up the MMR vaccine into individual shots, that specific part of the EO also came with lies from Trump. In the signing ceremony, he claimed that the combo MMR shot was “quite lethal.” There is has never been a death linked between the MMR shot and a person with a normally functioning immune systems. Those who are immuno-compromised are already warned against getting the combo shot. In fact, that warning and inability to get what are otherwise normal vaccinations is why it’s so damned important that everyone else immunize based on the previous recommendations, which were made under good science. It’s herd immunity that protects the immuno-compromised. This EO, to whatever extent it is implemented, will be “quite lethal” or otherwise produce negative health outcomes for a non-zero number of people, mostly young children.

This EO will almost certainly result in the deaths of at least some children.

And why? Ego, it appears.

The order is in line with reports that Trump personally promotes the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism and that he wants part of his legacy tied to curing autism. Trump had reportedly put pressure on anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to do more to link vaccines and autism. In the signing event, Trump praised Kennedy, saying, “He’s doing a fantastic job,” and telling the anti-vaccine advocate “I’m proud of you.”

That Trump would prioritize his own legacy over the health of American children is about as surprising dilated pupils at a Grateful Dead concert. But Trump now directly owns the consequences of promoting anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories to his dedicated flock, as well as the health outcomes for their children. I expect lawsuits to come fast and furious from medical associations and institutions. And I hope they work, but they won’t be enough.

Some percentage of the country will listen to Dear Leader, because that is how cults work. And their innocent children, vulnerable to the misinformed demands of their parents, will be hurt. Perhaps time, money, and effort will be wasted doing trials on individual vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. What comes next is not certain.

But what is certain is that this EO is crafted from a place of selfish ignorance. It does no good and can only cause harm. And our own president is the one harming us.

During the signing of an executive order on vaccines, President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a deluge of false and misleading claims about the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule.

The executive order establishes “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations” and directs federal agencies and states to advance them. The new recommendations attempt to repeat prior administration changes to the routine vaccine schedule through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reducing it from targeting 17 to 11 diseases. At the time, we explained that HHS had justified this decision with a variety of incorrect or misleading assertions. A judge subsequently blocked these changes after the American Academy of Pediatrics sued HHS.

During the Aug. 10 signing, Trump repeated claims about the childhood vaccine schedule and autism that he has made in the past, often bolstered by comments from Kennedy.

• Trump misleadingly claimed that the changes to the vaccine schedule align the U.S. with peer nations. When counting diseases the schedule protects against, the changes would put the U.S. at the low end of peer nations in the size of its vaccine schedule, exceeding only Denmark.
• The president falsely claimed that the U.S. requires “72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children.” States require certain vaccinations to attend school, but none come close to mandating 72 doses. And there are no federal vaccine mandates.
• Trump said children don’t need to be vaccinated against hepatitis B until adolescence. That ignores what medical experts say are good reasons to vaccinate every newborn at birth.
• He falsely claimed that children and infants are being injected with massive volumes of fluid during routine immunizations, referring at one point to “vats of vaccine.” Doses of childhood vaccines are generally about a tenth of a teaspoon, and there’s no evidence that the size or number of doses under the current vaccination schedule is harmful.
• Trump baselessly suggested rising rates of autism are connected to the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule over time. A number of studies have found no connection between vaccines and autism, and the contention that there has been a massive rise in autism is also faulty.

It’s unclear what the practical results of the executive order will be. “It should not be valid legally, and CDC should not be changing its immunization schedule table,” Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at University of California Law San Francisco, wrote in a Substack post.

The new order additionally recommends splitting up combination vaccines into separate doses given on separate medical visits. In another article, we wrote about Trump’s false claims about the combination measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine.

Misleading Country Comparisons

Trump justified his Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations by misleadingly claiming that the U.S. has been out of step with peer nations in the number of vaccines it recommends.

“For long — and far too long — a long period of time, America has recommended more childhood vaccines than any peer nation and even twice as many doses as some European countries, and even more than that,” he said during the Aug. 10 signing. He later claimed that “this updated recommendation finally aligns the United States with other advanced and developed nations around the world.

The U.S. childhood vaccine schedule historically has recommended a relatively high number of vaccines, routinely protecting against a few more diseases than the median among other high-income nations, according to our previous analysis. Reducing the number of routinely recommended vaccines to 11, as the executive order suggests, would put the U.S. schedule at the low end compared with peer nations’ recommendations.

HHS previously attempted to limit universal recommendations to these same 11 childhood vaccines in January, although this change was subsequently blocked in court. HHS backed the decision to pare down the schedule with a 33-page assessment comparing the U.S. schedule with recommendations in 20 peer nations. Among these countries, only Denmark has a smaller number of universally recommended vaccines than put forward in the proposed 11-vaccine schedule.

HHS at the time justified these changes with a variety of incorrect or misleading claims about the vaccines and the diseases they target. For example, in no longer recommending universal vaccination against rotavirus — diverging from recommendations in 17 of the 20 peer nations — the assessment minimized the significant impact of hospitalizations and the risk of death from this gastrointestinal illness. The assessment also made misleading assertions about the safety of the hepatitis A vaccine and the effectiveness of pediatric flu vaccination, while claiming that the low incidence of meningococcal disease in the U.S. was reason not to vaccinate.

“[L]ow incidence in the context of a vaccination program is what we want,” Dr. David S. Stephens, an expert on bacterial meningitis at Emory University, told us in an email at the time. “Even though polio is very low in the US we still recommend routine vaccination.” 

No Requirement for 72 ‘Jabs’

Trump erroneously claimed that the U.S. is “requiring 72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children.” States mandate that children get certain vaccines to attend school, but the number of shots needed to meet these requirements is nowhere near 72.

The CDC’s vaccine schedule recommends a broader set of vaccines than the states require for school. The CDC vaccine schedule does not constitute any sort of vaccine requirement, as we’ve written before.

There are various ways one could count the number of recommended injections or oral doses in the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule. It is only possible to reach the 70s if counting annual flu and COVID-19 vaccines through age 18, while also opting to get some available combination vaccines as separate shots. The current schedule, however, does not recommend COVID-19 shots for all children.

No states require flu vaccines for school-age children, nor do any states require COVID-19 vaccination for school.

Kennedy claimed an even higher number of recommended shots, stating that there were “72 jabs before 18, but it actually could be up to 94 jabs.”

But getting above 90 injections and oral doses would require counting each component of each combination vaccine separately. This includes separating out vaccines, such as the MMR vaccine, that are currently only available in combination. Kennedy’s inflated shot number would therefore only be near possible if Trump prevails in getting vaccine companies to break up combination vaccines, as he advocated in the executive order, while continuing to count annual flu and COVID-19 doses.

Dr. Paul Offit, a physician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, pointed out the contradiction in criticizing large numbers of injections for children while simultaneously advocating that combination vaccines be separated.

“Here you have this administration constantly talking about how children get too many shots and then they say they want more shots,” he told us.

Infant Hepatitis B Vaccines

Trump also criticized the longstanding practice of vaccinating infants against hepatitis B at birth, saying that vaccination isn’t necessary until adolescence. But that ignores the reasons medical experts have cited for why every newborn should be vaccinated.

Health care providers, Trump said, are “giving the hepatitis B shot to infants and newborns on top of many other vaccinations. The hepatitis B shouldn’t be given until they’re 14 or 15 years old. They were given early.”

Hepatitis B is a viral liver infection that can cause serious long-term complications, including death from cirrhosis and liver cancer. Infants and children face much higher risks than adults of developing a chronic hepatitis B infection if exposed to the virus, making it especially important to prevent infections in kids. Most childhood infections result from mothers passing the virus to newborns during pregnancy or birth, though caregivers and other close contacts can also transmit the virus. 

As we’ve written before, hepatitis B can also spread in adults via sex or injection drug use, and some activists have invoked the disease’s association with those risk factors to question the need for universal vaccination at birth.

The CDC first recommended a universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine in 1991. As explained in a 2025 review by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, the agency did so after narrower approaches — which focused on screening pregnant women and vaccinating the newborns of those who tested positive — proved ineffective at reducing childhood hepatitis B infections. 

Since that time, according to the review, hepatitis B infections in infants and children have fallen by about 99% — from around 16,000 cases a year to fewer than 20.

The CIDRAP review notes several reasons why the previous frameworks based on maternal screening proved insufficient, including gaps in prenatal care and false negatives. Vaccinations at birth can also protect children from catching the virus if someone else in their household is infected. 

Late last year, the CDC dropped its longstanding recommendation that all newborns receive a hepatitis B vaccine, saying only those born to mothers who had tested positive for the virus, or had an unknown infection status, needed a vaccine at birth, and other parents could decide “when or if” to vaccinate — which is among the changes blocked in court. As we’ve written previously, that decision came after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed the members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and appointed new ones.

Leading medical groups continue to recommend hepatitis B vaccination for all newborns. 

‘Vats of Vaccine’

Trump also claimed, falsely, that children are being injected with massive volumes of fluid when they get their shots, comparing it to “a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body” or “a large glass of something.”

“Vats of vaccine are currently pumped into your child’s body,” Trump said, echoing language he’s used before. He added that appointments should be further apart “so the body can handle this massive amount of fluid being pumped in.”

This is false. The volume of vaccines given to children is nowhere near what Trump is describing. Moreover, as we’ve written before, there’s no evidence that the number or size of doses that kids receive under the current vaccination schedule is harmful, or that the shots need to be further spaced out. 

Offit told us that doses of MMR and other vaccines given to young children are typically around 0.5 milliliters, or a tenth of a teaspoon. So even if a kid gets several vaccines at one appointment, the volume probably wouldn’t exceed one teaspoon. 

Multiple studies have looked at the effects of giving different combinations of vaccines at once and found it to be safe, according to a CDC page dated December 2024. As the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explains, kids’ immune systems are responding to thousands of bacteria from the moment of their birth, and the vaccines they receive before age 2 “are just a drop in the ocean when compared with the tens of thousands of challenges their immune systems successfully manage every day.”

Delaying routine vaccinations, meanwhile, can leave children vulnerable to preventable diseases, according to the CDC.

Offit also noted that even though children today receive more vaccines than previous generations, those vaccines actually contain a smaller total quantity of immunologic components — components such as proteins that stimulate an immune response — thanks to advances in vaccine science.

“I had a greater challenge to my immune system with the vaccines — two vaccines — I got as a child than my four grandchildren are getting today,” he said.

Baseless Connection of Vaccines and Autism

Trump repeated the baseless suggestion that the increasing number of recommended vaccinations is linked to a rise in autism.

“Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today,” he said. “In those times, people were much healthier. And, of course, the high rates of autism now observed did not exist. So there’s a reason for such epidemic rates of autism. And we’re going to bring it back to much closer to where it was.”

Autism is “many, many times what it used to be years ago,” he later said. “And it gets progressively worse. And we add progressively more and more vaccines.”

As we’ve written many times before, scientists have researched the question of whether vaccines cause autism in multiple ways, looking at the MMR vaccine, vaccine ingredients shared across multiple vaccines and the vaccine schedule as a whole. None of these efforts has uncovered a link between vaccines and autism.

Trump’s underlying assumption that there has been a massive rise in autism is also highly flawed.

Experts have previously explained to us that while there may have been some true increase in autism, evidence indicates a large portion of the rise in cases comes from increased recognition of the condition. Factors driving this include broadening definitions of autism, as well as increased screening and awareness of the condition. Researchers have also suggested that the growing availability of services for children with autism contributed to a rise in diagnoses.

Rather than recognizing these factors, Kennedy and Trump made a misleading comparison between an estimate from a 56-year-old study and today’s autism prevalence figures.

“In 1970, the biggest epidemiological study at that time in history was performed,” Kennedy said. “And the university scientists from across this country looked at all the 8-year-olds in Wisconsin, about 900,000 children, and they were looking for autism, and they knew what autism looked like. And they came back with an incident rate of 0.8 per 10,000, so less than 1 in 10,000. The rate according to CDC today in this country is 1 in every 31 children.”

Trump repeated a version of these statistics. “When you hear that number, where it was 1 in 10,000 20 years ago and now it’s 1 in 30 … it’s something — something happened in the meantime. Something happened environmentally or otherwise,” he said.

Dr. Eric Fombonne, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University, previously told us that it was “completely absurd” to compare the autism prevalence estimate from the 1970 Wisconsin study to estimates today. At the time of the Wisconsin study, few people were aware of autism, and the researchers looked at children using different diagnostic criteria than are used today. Fombonne added that even at the time, other studies estimated a higher autism prevalence, and that people claiming a large rise in autism cite the Wisconsin study “because it gives them a very low starting point and accentuates the trend.”

Also, the researchers did not do autism evaluations on all the 8-year-olds in the state. They looked at records of children in certain medical settings, such as health clinics and hospitals.

Kennedy then repeated an incorrect claim that autism must be increasing because it’s not being seen in older adults. “If we were just noticing it more, we would notice it in older groups, but we’re not,” he said. “We’re only noticing it in kids who were born around 1989 or after.”

As we explained in 2023 in response to Kennedy’s claims, there are in fact autistic people across all generations, although the CDC doesn’t systematically monitor autism prevalence in adults. There are various factors that may lead autism in older generations to go unrecognized.

Jessica McDonald contributed reporting.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Trump and RFK Jr. Repeat False and Misleading Vaccine Claims appeared first on FactCheck.org.

In signing an executive order about childhood vaccines, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine was unsafe and that splitting up the combination shot would reduce the number of children with autism. There’s no evidence for those claims, and the vaccine has been well-studied for several decades.

Together with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he also repeated many other falsehoods we’ve fact-checked before about vaccines. We wrote about those in another article.

On Aug. 10, Trump signed the executive order aiming to overhaul childhood vaccination in the U.S. Couched in the language of “gold standard” science, but bypassing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s typical process for recommending vaccines, the order attempts to reinstate earlier efforts by the administration to cut the number of universally recommended vaccines. The earlier changes to the vaccine schedule were blocked in court.

In addition to lowering the number of recommended vaccines and asking states to revise their immunization requirements for schools, the order also called for administering the MMR vaccine in separate shots, preferably giving all vaccines “at separate medical visits.”

“We want it in three separate vaccinations given at separate times,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine in remarks made when signing the order. “Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal. And separately, it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective.”

“It’s inconvenient, it’s five stops,” he said later, referring to multiple trips to the pediatrician. “But it’s something that I think will have a huge impact on autism.”

“The worst thing that would happen would be nothing happens. We’re not going to lose anything,” Trump said of splitting up the MMR vaccine. “At the same time, we could gain tremendously. We could save hundreds of thousands of lives, millions of lives.”

There is no evidence that splitting up the MMR vaccine, which has been in use for more than 40 years, would be safer, save lives or prevent cases of autism. Since a fraudulent scientific paper first proposed a connection between the vaccine and autism nearly 30 years ago, the MMR has been rigorously investigated for any link to the condition. No credible link has been found.

More broadly, the MMR is among the most well-studied vaccines on the planet, with far more data on its safety and effectiveness than any of the standalone vaccines. More than 800 million doses of the Merck MMR vaccine have been given in more than 75 countries as of 2021, with decades of post-marketing safety surveillance and clinical and population studies.

“To date, there has been no published scientific evidence that shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots,” a Merck spokesperson told us in a statement. “Use of the individual components of combination vaccines increases the number of injections for the individual and may result in delayed or missed immunizations.”

Merck’s combined MMR vaccine was first approved in the U.S. in 1971, not long after the individual vaccines were introduced in the 1960s. In 1978, the vaccine was updated to include a superior rubella component. The Food and Drug Administration approved a similar MMR vaccine made by GSK in 2022. That vaccine has been licensed in more than 100 countries, including all of Europe, and more than 800 million doses have been distributed, according to a company press release in 2022. GSK did not reply to our request for comment.

While health officials in the administration have frequently pointed to European countries as a model for U.S. vaccination policy, all exclusively use the combined MMR shot. No country in the world gives each of the three components separately as part of the childhood immunization schedule. 

Some countries, mostly lower- and middle-income countries, use a measles and rubella combined shot rather than the MMR largely because it is cheaper, and not due to any safety concerns. Japan is one of the few, if not only, high-income countries to separate out the mumps vaccine. This policy stems from a safety concern with the mumps component that used a mumps strain that was never used in the U.S. (Autism rates did not decline when Japan stopped using the combined MMR vaccine.)

Moreover, as the executive order acknowledges, no U.S. vaccine manufacturer still makes the individual shots. Merck stopped in 2008 due to manufacturing constraints, and declined the following year to resume production.

“Today’s executive order is not based on ‘gold-standard science.’ There is no new evidence to justify significant changes to childhood immunization guidance. Dozens of studies involving millions of people show there is no link between vaccines and autism, and yet federal leaders continue to promote this outdated, disproven idea to scare families,” Dr. Andrew D. Racine, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics , said in a statement. “The only purpose of this announcement is to sow confusion so that more people doubt the importance of vaccines. Delaying or skipping shots is risky, especially as measles continues to spread and children go back to school.”

“This executive order is part of a troubling pattern by the administration to attempt to unilaterally change vaccine guidance, particularly for children, rather than relying on the transparent, scientific review that has guided the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule for decades,” Dr. Jan K. Carney, the president of the American College of Physicians, said in a statement. “If implemented, the changes could increase costs to patients and families, including additional copays while also placing a greater burden on families needing to schedule multiple appointments for a multiple-dose MMR vaccine.”

The executive order does not give a scientific rationale for recommending that the MMR vaccine be broken up. Rather, it simply states that its recommendations “recognize” that the MMR vaccine “should be administered in three separate single-disease shots once such products are domestically available.” It directs Kennedy, through a task force, to “present plans” to Trump within 90 days to offer the single vaccines as options.

“President Trump is one of countless parents who have voiced questions and concerns about the combined MMR vaccine,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told us in an email when asked to explain the reasoning for splitting up the MMR and for evidence that the combination shot is a problem. “The Administration’s push to develop separate vaccinations for all three diseases will give parents more options on timing and frequency for their children, which ultimately will increase vaccination rates for all three diseases.”

Experts, however, fear that adding the option of separate MMR vaccinations will lower vaccination rates.

It remains to be seen how Trump’s executive order will play out.

“There’s not the force of law behind this,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us. “He’s asking states to consider implementing this. I think that it will be ignored because it should be ignored. It’s not a science-based recommendation.”

Autism Claims Come from Fraudulent 1998 Paper

As we’ve explained before, the notion that the MMR vaccine might be safer separated out goes back to a fraudulent research paper by the British physician Dr. Andrew Wakefield. In 1998, Wakefield published a case series of 12 children in the Lancet that proposed the MMR vaccine might cause autism. 

The British journalist Brian Deer reported that in a press conference announcing the results, Wakefield recommended that the government stop using the combination MMR vaccine and switch to individual shots, given a year apart.

“I can’t support the continued use of these three vaccines given in combination until this issue has been resolved,” Wakefield said.

But the underlying data had been faked or misrepresented. Five of the 12 children had developmental problems prior to vaccination, and many did not even have an autism diagnosis. Prior to the study, Wakefield had been hired as a consultant by a lawyer who wanted to sue MMR manufacturers, and many of the kids in the study had been recruited by law firms or groups opposed to vaccination. The publication was later retracted. Wakefield, who has since lost his medical license, also did not disclose at the time that he had previously filed a patent on his own measles-only vaccine, which he alleged was “most probably safer.”

Fraud aside, the hypothesis that the MMR vaccine causes autism has now been formally tested repeatedly. In 2012, the Institute of Medicine, now the National Academy of Medicine, concluded that the evidence “favors rejection of a causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism,” finding a “high degree of confidence in the epidemiologic evidence” of no connection and a lack of evidence of any mechanistic link.

Since then, even more studies have continued to support this conclusion. In 2019, a Danish study used population registry data to probe the link again, also looking to see whether there might be a link for higher-risk children. “The study strongly supports that MMR vaccination does not increase the risk for autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases after vaccination,” the study concluded.

Last month, a study looking at the electronic health records of 2.5 million American children also found no association between the MMR vaccine and autism when giving the first dose before the age of 2, as is recommended. The first dose is typically given between 12 and 15 months of age, with a second dose at 4 to 6 years of age.

“This is Groundhog Day 25 years later,” Offit said, of the idea that the MMR vaccine should be broken up.

False Allegation of Lethality

During the Q&A portion of the signing, a reporter asked Trump if there was any evidence for his comment that the MMR combination vaccine is “quite lethal.”

“What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way,” Trump said. “And I say, well, let’s say there’s a 5% chance of it.”

“Let’s split it up,” he continued, adding that when the MMR is given separately, “they” say “there is no impact. In fact, they’ve said how safe it seems to be. But I’ve heard when you put them together, they can be explosive.”

Regardless of what Trump might have heard, this is false. While serious side effects can occur, they are rare. And death from MMR vaccination is exceedingly rare.

“There have been no deaths shown to be related to the MMR vaccine in healthy people,” the Infectious Diseases Society of America website says. “There have been rare cases of deaths from vaccine side effects among children who are immune compromised, which is why it is recommended that they don’t get the vaccine.”

The concern for immunocompromised children is the measles component of the vaccine, which is a weakened but live virus. For almost everyone, this weakened virus poses no risk of death, in contrast to the virus that can circulate in an outbreak and sicken people. But on very rare occasions, if a child is severely immunocompromised, and doctors don’t realize it — or mistakenly still vaccinate against recommendations — it can prove fatal. A 2015 article by the CDC noted that there have been “at least six case reports of death among severely immunocompromised persons that have been linked to vaccine strain measles virus infection.” This exceptionally rare outcome, however, would still occur if children got a separate measles shot rather than the combination vaccine.

Anaphylaxis, a serious allergic reaction that can be life-threatening, can also occur with any vaccine, but these are extremely rare, and in many cases can be treated.

To be clear, a 5% chance of death would be astronomically high and easily detectable in both studies and surveillance. Trump’s claim that the combination MMR vaccine is “quite lethal” is false.

Negative Impacts from Splitting the Vaccine

Many experts disagree with Trump that the worst outcome of splitting up the MMR vaccine would be “nothing.” On the contrary, the main concern, assuming the shots were available, is that fewer people would get vaccinated, putting more people at risk for disease and leading to more outbreaks.

“We’re in the midst of a big measles epidemic. There are more cases of measles than we’ve seen in more than 30 years,” Offit said. Moving to a six-dose regimen, he said, would introduce chaos and confusion, and children would be less likely to get all their necessary vaccines. He called it “an incredibly irresponsible thing to do.”

University of Utah pharmacotherapy professor Joey Mattingly wrote in a Health Affairs perspective last month about using single-disease shots: “The available evidence on vaccination behavior and coverage favors retaining the combined formulation, and the same evidence suggests that moving to separate vaccines, whatever flexibility it might offer families, could make it harder to recover the coverage levels that population immunity requires,” referring to the decline in measles vaccination rates.

Offit said that first, the FDA would need to license the standalone vaccines. It remains to be seen whether any manufacturers would want to go through the process.

The Health Affairs article noted that doing so would require significant investment and clinical trials. “There is little commercial incentive to build a less convenient product to compete with a vaccine that already works,” Mattingly wrote. Clinics and pharmacies would then need to stock them, when it might not make financial sense to do so.

Moreover, just the suggestion that the MMR should be split — as Trump and other officials have now done — could discourage vaccination with the only available vaccine.

As Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, wrote in STAT, “the government is directing the health system toward an alternative that is not licensed here — and asking parents to reconsider a familiar, highly effective combination vaccine in the process.”

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The post Trump’s False MMR Vaccine Claims appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Journalists and others were allowed to fly on presidential jet despite security threat while Trump was spirited away

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Democrats called on Tuesday for a congressional briefing over a stunning charade in which Donald Trump was secretly spirited to a different plane than the one the public and press believed he was travelling on. Critics now question why reporters and the public had been deliberately misled.

When US intelligence allegedly found a credible threat that Iran plotted to kill him last month, Trump left Air Force One in a catering truck, an episode first reported by the Washington Post and also by the New York Times. While the president was reportedly snuck out the side door of the plane, more than a hundred aides, officials and reporters were kept onboard to fly towards Britain, without being told there was a threat to their lives.

Ruling expands on earlier order that prevented implementation in 23 mostly Democratic-led states

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A federal judge on Tuesday blocked ⁠the US Postal ⁠Service ​(USPS) from implementing part of Donald Trump’s executive order that aims ⁠to tighten rules for mail-in voting ahead of November midterm elections that ⁠will decide control of Congress.

The ruling by ​US district ‌judge Indira ‌Talwani in Boston in effect expanded on an ‌earlier order she had issued in June that had prevented Trump’s administration from implementing it in 23 mostly Democratic-led states.

Group says new executive order is attempt to evade supreme court’s earlier ruling against the president

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other advocacy groups have asked a federal judge to block Donald Trump from enforcing new executive ⁠orders he signed last week in his latest attempt to restrict eligibility ​for birthright citizenship in the US.

In a Tuesday court filing, the groups called the US president’s new orders an improper attempt to evade the US supreme court’s 30 June rejection of his first, more sweeping bid to deny automatic citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents.

Cronyism, politicization and outright weaponization of the Justice Department have become so routine in Trump’s second term that the scale is hard to comprehend. New abuses, attacks and crimes by the White House and its enablers land in rapid succession, and they usually register individually rather than as parts of a pattern.

That pattern is why Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general carries such grave weight. Critics and former officials warn that Blanche now effectively has free rein at the Justice Department, now that he is no longer angling for the job and forced to appease critics and skeptics in the Senate. He is fully empowered to pursue Trump’s agenda, and there is little to hold him back.

We already know where his priorities and loyalties lie. Asked at an April press conference whether he wanted the attorney general job permanently, Blanche said, “I did not ask for this job. I love working for President Trump.” Pressed on what would happen if Trump chose someone else, Blanche said he would respond, “Thank you very much. I love you, sir.”

Cultish devotion of that sort—from the man who spent 16 months as Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney before joining the department—is an organizing principle. It will underlie all of the DOJ’s decisions in the coming years about prosecutions, self-dealing, transparency and even our elections.

Rather than throw up our hands and surrender to the storm, we can chart a path above its dark clouds. From there, we can make some predictions about what’s coming straight for us and our democracy now that Blanche is helming the DOJ. We can in fact sort his likely behavior into four large buckets.

But first, in order to get our bearings, it’s helpful to remember what the DOJ is supposed to be. We begin some 50 years ago, in the wake of the previous worst scandal of the modern U.S. presidency.

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The reforms Blanche is dismantling

Historically, the Justice Department has not had a clean track record. Even before Nixon, the DOJ was implicated in abuses and scandals. As Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer noted, Woodrow Wilson’s AG targeted socialists and communists, imprisoning thousands without due process. Harding’s AG was forced out amid allegations that he failed to investigate a corruption scandal linked to the interior secretary accepting bribes from oil interests. Bobby Kennedy, serving under JFK, authorized the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr.

Under Richard Nixon, however, the DOJ truly became an instrument of the president’s personal grievances. Attorney General John Mitchell, who had also run Nixon’s re-election campaign, oversaw illegal wiretaps of anti-war activists, leaked damaging information about Nixon’s political opponents and worked to block publication of the Pentagon Papers before resigning to lead the Nixon re-election committee later implicated in the Watergate break-in.

Nixon’s resignation in 1974 left the department’s credibility in ruins. Gerald Ford’s response was to install Edward H. Levi, a University of Chicago law scholar with no political ambitions of his own, specifically to rebuild the DOJ as a nonpartisan institution the public could trust. At his 1975 swearing-in, Levi told the department that “our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” and warned that nothing could more endanger the country than failing to make that true by word and deed.

Levi spent the next two years building the guardrails that defined DOJ independence for the next half-century. He established early limits on White House contacts with a policy limiting communication between the department and the president on pending matters. He created the Office of Professional Responsibility to police the DOJ’s own attorneys. And he initiated the work that led to the Principles of Federal Prosecution, implemented later by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, which hold that charging decisions should follow the evidence rather than the target’s politics.

Every administration since Ford maintained some version of these guardrails for the next 50 years. Until Trump came along.

Weaponized prosecutions and the Principles of Federal Prosecution

The first Blanche bucket carries the slop of Trump’s personal grievances against his political enemies. Here, the Principles of Federal Prosecution bear directly on the pattern we are seeing from this DOJ. And those principles will likely continue to expose Blanche’s politicized prosecution decisions for what they are.

Under those principles, a charging decision is supposed to arise from the evidence, not the defendant’s politics. But Pam Bondi, and now Todd Blanche, moved in precisely the opposite direction. Since Blanche took the deputy attorney general post in 2025 and the acting AG role in April, the department has pursued criminal investigations or prosecutions against a lengthening list of Trump’s perceived critics: former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, former FBI Director James Comey, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI).

Bondi’s failure to get any charges to stick against the people on this list contributed to her being pushed out of the job. Blanche no doubt understands that he has to deliver more than Bondi did in order to keep his boss happy.

That may not be so simple. The problem both Bondi and Blanche face is institutional. Politicized prosecutions don’t go very well when career prosecutors won’t cooperate. The case against New York Attorney General Letitia James is a good example. After the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia resigned rather than press charges on a politicized case against James that lacked sufficient evidence, Trump installed his former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan. But she had no prior prosecutorial experience and little support from the office. She personally presented mortgage fraud charges against James to a grand jury and secured an indictment—though it was rife with issues. Not long after, however, a federal judge threw it out on the grounds that Halligan’s appointment itself was invalid. The department returned to a grand jury in Norfolk to refile the charges, but jurors there refused to indict—a rare rejection. Prosecutors tried a second time in Alexandria, before a different grand jury. Jurors refused again.

Career prosecutors in New York also invoked the Principles of Federal Prosecution in the corruption case against then-Mayor Eric Adams. They were fired or resigned rather than carry out the DOJ’s order to drop corruption charges against Adams as part of what was reported as an arrangement trading dismissal for Adams’s cooperation with the White House on immigration enforcement.

The DOJ also struck out in its attempt to prosecute sitting lawmakers who challenged Trump’s unlawful military orders. Prosecutors asked a federal grand jury in Washington D.C. to indict Sens. Kelly and Slotkin, along with four House members, over a video in which the lawmakers, all military or intelligence veterans, reminded service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders. The grand jury refused, demonstrating that regular citizens can also smell a political witch hunt and abridgement of speech when presented with one.

This year, while serving as acting attorney general, Blanche extended the White House’s target list beyond individual political enemies of Trump to include groups working to oppose his agenda. The DOJ brought charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization whose prosecution the ACLU describes as touching on nothing more than SPLC’s long-standing work tracking extremist groups. Disturbingly, a federal judge in Alabama, appointed by Trump, refused to dismiss the case, allowing the targeting and weaponization to continue while raising the stakes for organizations everywhere that stand against white supremacy, Christian nationalism and the abridgement of civil liberties.

Self-dealing and institutional capture

In the 1970s, Attorney General Levi also established early limits on White House contacts, his most direct answer to the danger of self-dealing. The policy that developed from those limits restricts communication between the White House and the DOJ specifically to prevent a president from directing federal law enforcement toward his own political or financial benefit.

Blanche’s DOJ has tested that policy directly, and a federal judge has already found that it failed. In January, Trump sued the IRS and Treasury (both of which he also controls) for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns by a contractor who had already been prosecuted and imprisoned. But government lawyers, who were in on the con, never meaningfully contested the case. In May, the two sides announced a “settlement” creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who claimed they had been unfairly targeted by the government.

The fund illustrates the danger of unchecked close contact between the White House and the DOJ. Payouts would go to anyone claiming to have been wronged by federal law enforcement, with eligibility and amounts decided by a five-person committee appointed by the attorney general, giving Blanche control over who would make those decisions. Nothing in that structure requires a court finding of wrongdoing, an independent review or any process a claimant couldn’t simply lose by falling out of favor with the president. Public money raised through a lawsuit against the government would flow back out at the discretion of the president’s own former defense lawyer to a pool of claimants that critics say was always understood to include Trump allies and January 6 defendants.

Separately, Blanche signed a memo permanently barring the government from investigating or acting on Trump’s past tax returns, with that protection extended to his businesses and family members.

The fate of that fund, and possibly others like it, remains unclear. Last month, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams issued a scathing 56-page order finding that Trump’s lawsuit was never adversarial to begin with, writing that the parties “worked in tandem and were never actually adverse” and that the case was brought “for an improper purpose — to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.” She barred the government from citing or using the settlement as evidence of a valid judicial agreement in any future proceeding, sanctioned Trump’s attorneys and referred one of them to the Florida Bar for potential discipline.

Judge Williams was especially pointed about the audit-immunity memo Blanche had signed, calling it a “blanket grant of immunity” that was “wholly incompatible with the duties of DOJ attorneys ... to enforce the law and protect the public interest.”

Trump, his two sons Don Jr. and Eric, the Trump Organization and their attorneys have appealed her ruling to the 11th Circuit.

Rep. John Larson, a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee overseeing the IRS, put the stakes of such a fund in blunt terms: “Your tax dollars are not Donald Trump’s personal ATM. The attorneys who signed off on this settlement should face accountability — including Todd Blanche.” Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden pressed the Treasury Department and the IRS directly after Williams’s ruling, writing that “the IRS should not and cannot implement illegal orders” and demanding answers on whether the agencies were still complying with the voided settlement.

Facing political headwinds, Blanche purportedly rescinded the $1.776 billion fund the Sunday before his confirmation vote, telling senators it was “not moving forward.” Sen. John Cornyn, whose support Blanche needed to be confirmed, said publicly that he wasn’t convinced the administration had made a binding commitment before voting to advance Blanche anyway.

Despite the alleged rescission of the fund, Blanche did not abandon the audit-immunity provisions, agreeing only to narrow their scope, which drew far less scrutiny from Senate Republicans. Sen. Jim Justice told HuffPost the issue was too “complex” to assess on short notice, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville said simply, “I hadn’t kept up with all that.” Asked by senators whether the remaining tax-audit immunity provisions were still in effect regardless of the ruling, Blanche confirmed they were: In his telling, the ruling was still under “review.”

Given Blanche’s intransigence and evasion over the fund and audit-immunity provisions, we should expect an expansion of this kind of self-dealing between the White House and the Justice Department, with the latter putting its imprimatur on bogus settlements, payouts and further immunities for Blanche’s boss. None of it is normal, and none of it is permitted under the existing White House contacts policy, but that has not stopped Blanche from plowing ahead. That will be especially true now that he faces zero political obstacles.

Erosion of transparency and trust

Levi created the Office of Professional Responsibility during his tenure in the 1970s. Separately, the “presumption of regularity” is an established legal doctrine courts employ to extend baseline trust to what the government represents as fact in court.

That presumption has been breaking down in real time and is likely to erode further under Blanche. As NPR reported, federal judges have repeatedly raised concerns about the regime’s failure to comply with court orders or its representations that weren’t backed by facts. Several high-profile cases have unraveled recently, including the dismissal of vandalism charges against a former Olympic canoeist and others tied to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Blanche’s own rhetoric toward the judges enforcing these orders adds urgency to the problem. As deputy attorney general, Blanche urged Justice Department lawyers to join what he called a war against federal judges whom he accused of “micromanaging” the executive branch. He falsely described district courts as “more political ... than the most liberal governor or DA,” for merely following the law.

Blanche’s treatment of adverse rulings as illegitimate, rather than binding, is a clear break from the practices that Levi’s reforms were designed to protect and echoes Trump’s own disregard for the rule of law. The Office of Professional Responsibility is meant to police misconduct within the department, while the presumption of regularity allows courts to assume that DOJ officials have properly discharged their duties absent evidence to the contrary. Both depend on the department accepting judicial oversight as legitimate rather than treating it as an obstacle to circumvent.

The Epstein files, over which Blanche has played a principal role in obstruction and cover-up, are the clearest test of the erosion of both DOJ professionalism and regularity, while offering some paths to fight back successfully. Journalist and attorney Katie Phang sued the DOJ in April, arguing that the department was slow-walking document releases required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Judge Emmet Sullivan found in June that Blanche had effectively conceded his own noncompliance, ordering him to either produce more unredacted files or show cause for withholding them. Blanche ultimately complied only minutes ahead of a court deadline in late July, and even then, redaction logs categorized withheld material only as generic “personally identifiable information” rather than specifying whether it involved victims or law enforcement.

Judge Sullivan wasn’t having it. In an order issued Aug. 6, he found the DOJ still had not complied with his prior rulings: It had failed to justify its redactions of names it claimed, without evidence, belonged to victims rather than associates of Epstein, and had withheld handwritten FBI interview notes without credible explanation. He scheduled a status hearing for Aug. 13 to force the department to explain itself in open court.

Blue state officials are also stepping up to battle the DOJ’s lack of transparency. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued the department in August after it refused to share Epstein-related investigative material with his office. Torrez said the material had been shared routinely with state law enforcement in the past, and he didn’t mince words: “Instead they have decided to stonewall, to obstruct and to frankly conceal for whatever reason.”

Democratic lawmakers, who will likely regain the House committee gavels next year, are also gearing up to take on Blanche. Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, raised concerns about the DOJ’s lack of transparency in January after the department released only half of the roughly 6 million pages of Epstein files it had collected. Garcia argued that it was evidence the department intended “to withhold roughly 50% of the Epstein files, while claiming to have fully complied with the law.”

The greatest risk of all

After losing the 2020 election, Trump and his allies pushed a series of escalating claims that the national vote had been stolen through systemic fraud. Attorney Sidney Powell alleged that voting machines had been programmed to flip votes from Trump to Biden as part of a coordinated international conspiracy. Trump pressed the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security to investigate, and at one point a group discussed federalizing the effort outright. Advisers even went so far as drafting an executive order that would have appointed Powell as a special counsel with authority to seize state voting machines, while Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, publicly suggested the military could be used to “rerun” the election.

Then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s response was a rare example of the department’s principles actually holding. The DOJ investigated the voting machine-tampering claim specifically and found nothing to support it. Barr told the AP in December 2020 there was no evidence machines had been programmed to skew the results, and separately said he saw “no basis right now for seizing machines by the federal government” when pressed on whether the DOJ would act on the executive order under discussion.

Barr testified to the Jan. 6th Committee that he told Trump directly the fraud claims were “crazy stuff” that were “doing a grave disservice to the country.” Trump’s own White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, independently rejected the machine-seizure executive order as a “terrible idea,” telling colleagues in a late-night West Wing meeting, “That’s not how we do things in the United States.”

In short, at least with respect to Trump’s bogus claims of a stolen election, Barr continued to recognize the Principles of Federal Prosecution and required that evidence rather than politics guide his decision. That baseline produced an attorney general willing to tell the president no, even under direct pressure, because the department’s institutional integrity mattered more than the president’s preference. It held in 2020, albeit imperfectly and briefly, under a president who would go on to try to overturn the outcome anyway.

Ty Cobb, who served as special counsel to the president during Trump’s first term, argues the guardrail will not hold this time. Referencing Barr’s refusal directly, Cobb told Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo’s “Mehdi Unfiltered” that there is “no circumstance under which we shouldn’t expect Blanche to seize ballots and seize voting machines and try to interfere in the process of the upcoming election.”

That warning must be our guiding assumption, and the documented record already points in that direction. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County’s election hub in Union City, Georgia, seizing between 656 and 700 boxes of materials from the 2020 election, including original ballots, tabulator tapes and ballot images. In April, a federal grand jury convened by the DOJ subpoenaed the Fulton County elections board for the personal information of election staff and volunteers.

Notably, the DOJ has now lost 20 consecutive lawsuits seeking unredacted voter rolls from states, including a Colorado case dismissed with prejudice this month, out of lawsuits filed against more than 30 states and D.C. in total. Twelve of those 20 losses came from judges appointed by Republican presidents, and eight of those 12 came from judges Trump himself appointed.

Unable to force compliance through the courts, Trump has turned repeatedly to the SAVE America Act to try to reshape voter eligibility rules ahead of the midterms. That effort has hit resistance in the Senate, where it has twice failed even to reach a simple majority: The vote was 48–50 in April and again in June, with the same four Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) — joining every Democrat in voting no, well short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Beyond the courtroom record, the DOJ continues to defend Trump’s anti-mail-voting executive order. Bondi and Blanche have both sent letters pressuring state officials over voter roll compliance, including one to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tying compliance to concerns about unrest in his state.

Blanche has also declined multiple opportunities to specifically rule out Justice Department intervention in the midterms. Marc Elias, the election lawyer who founded Democracy Docket, has been warning about this for months, including in April when Blanche told reporters that it was the president’s “duty” to weaponize the DOJ if he chose to. Elias called Blanche “an unusually good liar” and “incredibly dangerous” in response.

Blanche’s other comments on the subject have done little to reassure critics. At a Conservative Political Action Conference appearance in March, before he became acting attorney general, Blanche waved off concerns about deploying immigration agents to voting sites. “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” he asked. “Illegals can’t vote. It doesn’t make any sense.”

At his July confirmation hearing, pressed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on whether he would commit to keeping armed federal agents away from polling places, Blanche said only that he would “follow the law … no matter what it includes” — stopping short of a direct commitment.

Levi’s 101s

Levi’s reforms, put in place after Watergate, are still holding more often than not. Grand juries in Norfolk and Alexandria refused to indict James. A grand jury in Washington, D.C. refused to indict Kelly and Slotkin. Career prosecutors walked rather than drop the Adams case as commanded. Even U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro dropped the absurd criminal charges tied to the Reflecting Pool for lack of evidence.

Judges, including those appointed by Trump himself, have drawn a line. They have consistently ruled against his Justice Department’s requests for voter roll data from states that challenged Trump’s executive order on voting. At least one federal judge has stopped taking the department’s word on the Epstein files and is demanding it show its work.

None of this happened because Blanche relented. It happened because key people inside and around the institution he leads have, so far, declined to go along. But that resistance is not a guarantee. It is based on a principle that must be renewed case by case, court by court, and ultimately by the voters in a midterm election that Blanche himself has refused to promise to stay out of.

And when this regime ends — and it will end — two big projects will remain. The first is accountability for Blanche and everyone else in the DOJ who treated an oath and a license to practice as inconveniences rather than obligations. Here, Blanche ought to take note of history: Nixon’s AG John Mitchell was convicted for his role in that scandal and served 19 months in prison.

The other is restoration of the guardrails Levi and others built after the last time an attorney general mistook the president for his client. These guardrails have held before and can hold again, but only if the people who intend to repair them understand exactly how close they are right now to coming apart.

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Justice department is asked to weigh new charges against David Hearn after US attorney dropped vandalism charges

The White House has asked the Department of Justice to weigh new charges against a former Olympian accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, according to a person familiar with the matter, pushing to revive a case Donald Trump has fumed about ever since an ally dropped the case citing insufficient evidence.

Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, dropped the charges against the man, David Hearn, on 31 July, blaming a contractor for a flawed installation. In a 20-page filing dismissing the charges, Pirro’s office said it had received evidence that damage to the pool occurred before Hearn visited it, and that “it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.” Hearn has maintained that he reached in the water to touch a piece of already detached lining while he was on a bike ride in June.

In July, Donald Trump hid in a catering truck and reportedly secretly switched planes in a security ruse prompted by a credible Iranian assassination threat.

The Guardian breaks down the footage from that day, showing how the president reportedly boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras, and then was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight. Trump’s actual location was concealed from journalists and some White House staff, who thought they were traveling with Trump on the older plane

• Trump reportedly hid in catering container to board secret flight in Turkey amid Iran threat

Greg Sargent did a story yesterday promising the dismissal of Davey Hearn’s charges last Friday, “is not the final chapter in this story—not by a long shot” and laying out how whether we can get accountability for those malicious charges, “will help settle whether we are capable of dispensing real justice to all those Trump accomplices who are helping make our slide into authoritarianism possible.” (As I have been working on this post, WSJ reports that Trump is pressuring DOJ to find a new way to charge Hearn.)

Sargent is an engaging writer who lays out the stakes, and the story was well-received. But while I agree with his frame — Hearn’s case is that important — in my opinion Sargent lays out an entirely inadequate map to accountability. I responded badly to that, and for that I apologize.

In hopes of being more constructive I want to lay out where I believe Sargent was wrong and what he’s missing about the task ahead. But I also point to other things we can do, we need to do, now, and if we don’t, this inquiry will suffer the same fate as the Russian investigation, impeachment 1, impeachment 2, and January 6 generally. We cannot sit around and wait for six months in hopes that Raskin gets subpoena power while Trump stokes personalized opposition to Hearn, because that is not the only or even the best route to accountability.

The House Judiciary Committee will not avenge Davey Hearn

Start with his notion that justice for Hearn is most likely to come from Jamie Raskin’s promised investigation (update, here’s Raskin’s letter, which makes current demands). The focus on what Jamie Raskin plans to do six months from now if Democrats win the House takes up 295 words, 23% of Sargent’s story, and holds place of privilege at the start and end of the story.

The focus on Davey’s remaining legal fight (just in his criminal case), which is sandwiched between coverage of Raskin, took up 236 words, 18% of the total article. Over half of that focuses on quotes from an expert who offers no specific comment about the posture of this case or the reputation of this judge or the prosecutors. That’s a journalistic convention, even among journalists who cover the law full time. But the space could have better been used describing more about what’s in the public court docket or even providing further description from Norm Eisen about the proof they have that Jeanine Pirro knew Davey Hearn didn’t do the damage she accused him of. As I’ll show, Sargent seems unaware of stuff that’s in the docket, of some questions that have been answered and other questions that are posed there, of what transparency may be possible from it. Similarly, he seems unaware of the different strengths and weaknesses of the tools of accountably.

As for Congress, for example, Sargent promises that “Subpoena power would help fumigate all this” and envisions “put[ting] Pirro and Burgum under oath and tak[ing] them apart.” It’s as if Sargent doesn’t remember how little Dems could do with subpoena power back in 2019, even under an impeachment inquiry, to say nothing of the stone-walling the January 6 Committee faced in 2021 and 2022. Since that time, Trump has added to his bag of tricks, invoking Trump v. US in a bid to cover up Aakash Singh’s role in a similarly fraudulent prosecution last week, and having OLC expand executive power to cover Boris Epshteyn this week — an expansion that would have protect Steve Bannon from his 2021 J6C subpoena.

Similarly, Sargent tells Congressional Dems to assure potential whistleblowers that “Democrats will have their back.” How’d that work out for the main Ukraine impeachment whistleblower? For the Vindmans? For Cassidy Hutchinson? Democrats have been able to use whistleblower information to good effect already this Trump term. But journalists have had a better record of protecting whistleblowers than Congress, and Democrats need to learn how better to protect these people.

Congress has certain tools, including appropriations and impeachment, and some of their tools, including subpoenas, will work better with other targets (like the law firms Trump has politicized or the media companies he bribed). There are even questions specific to this case, such as how Pirro is staffing her office (which is split between Superior and District Court) and how she’s paying lawyers that Raskin could pursue right now. But dumping your hopes on Congress — six months in the future, and only if Dems with the House!!! — ignores the lessons of 2019 and 2020 and 2021 and 2022, to say nothing of the tools Trump has rolled out since (or been gifted by a far right SCOTUS) to defy or at least delay Congress.

It is far more important for Raskin to game out how he’ll thwart this obstruction than it is to map out an investigation into the Hearn case.

I’m not saying that Raskin’s letter — or Sargent’s coverage of it — harms the case. At the very least, when Pirro refuses his request, it’s a good way to generate scandal.

I am saying that we need to have a realistic discussion about what tools are best suited to this task.

What we’ve gotten and what we may get

Meanwhile, Sargent does the same thing that happened with the Jack Smith case, where some of the most prominent commentators (including HJC member Dan Goldman) proved to be unaware of what was made public by the prosecution; Sargent is promising future disclosures but showing little curiosity about what’s already public, much less playing a role in doing anything to magnify that information.

To Sargent’s credit, he treats Pirro’s scapegoating of Interior in her Motion to Dismiss with the skepticism that most outlets have not. He links a news report about the first, but not the second, disclosure about the grand jury proceedings. But that’s about it. There’s a good deal more about the investigation in the filings that are far more pressing to expose than Raskin’s plans six months down the line (if Democrats win).

They include:

• There are two main witnesses who implicated Davey Hearn: a female Parks Service employee who claims he told her she was “awfully sensitive about the pool,” and Emily Miller, the right wing propagandist who captured his arrest and claimed to talk to Pirro’s people about the case; Miller may be a witness mentioned in the arrest affidavit (she blocked me when I asked if she was on Xitter).
• That woman from the Parks Service did not testify to the grand jury and the investigative witness who did (MF) emphasized that her testimony “was not a sworn statement.” She’s the source of the claim that Hearn “violently” ripped at the pool liner.
• There are two photographs, one posted publicly by Hearn before he was charged, and another taken by a government employee, both of which show the damage was already done before Hearn reached his hand into the water.
• With regards to Hearn’s photo: the government did not present it to the grand jury (which is not a clearcut abuse) but also did not mention it in an affidavit to seize his phone (which is).
• With regards to the other photo, the government seems to have claimed that the female Parks Service employee took it and obscured when it was taken; Pirro’s MTD corrects the timing and attributes the photo to another government employee. The government refused to provide Hearn with metadata to prove this before they dismissed the case.
• There is CCTV footage that should have been turned over to Hearn that was not — footage that was shared with Jesse Watters so he could do propaganda to support Trump’s claims of sabotage. It almost certainly would debunk the entirety the Parks Service employee testimony.
• Even if we buy Pirro’s suspect claims about what Interior turned over when or her claimed ignorance about the problems with the pool before that, we know she had notice of the problems with the pool well before July 16 or 17, when she claims DOJ discovered the problems for the first time. DOJ knew of a damage assessment Interior did — which included a map of many different sites of damage — no later than July 10 (when she turned over the report to Hearn). And investigative agents were at the pool on July 13, three or four days earlier than Pirro let on in her report.
• The harms witness (MR) testified to the grand jury twice. The first time he described tons of pre-existing damage and said it would not be possible to isolate the damage attributed to Hearn. The second time (21 minutes later), he claimed he could attribute $1,000 of damage to Hearn. The prosecutor who sent MR back into the grand jury to give conflicting testimony — he said “Hopefully that kind of nailed down that specific question” to the grand jury after MR changed his story —  is probably the prosecutor most responsible for the abuses in the prosecution.

In other words, we have a pretty good sense of how Hearn was indicted, one of the questions Sargent hopes Raskin will answer: An unreliable Parks Service employee made suspect claims about Hearn, which were presented via an investigative witness, not under oath. DOJ covered up the photographic evidence they had (or Hearn had taken) that the pool was damaged before he got there. And their harms witness was sent back to the grand jury to give testimony that arguably conflicted with what he had given 21 minutes earlier so they could meet a crucial element of the felony offense.

That’s what we already know. As Sargent noted, Hearn is still demanding grand jury testimony. For the reasons I laid out in this post, Judge Todd Edelman seems far more amenable to the request than Sargent’s expert lays out. For example, Sargent notes that Norm Eisen can still pursue this largely because Pirro moved to dismiss the case without prejudice, and that’s true. But Edelman could have just dismissed it with prejudice after Hearn responded to the government MTD. He did not, retaining jurisdiction to grant that grand jury transcripts motion or more. So the judge — not Pirro — is responsible for leaving that option and others on the table. Indeed, Edelman already said he’ll hold a hearing where we should expect DOJ witnesses to go on the record on risk of sanctions about what happened. Some of the questions Raskin wants to ask — in six months time, if Democrats win — are likely to be aired at this hearing, and if the prosecutor abused his ethics to get the indictment, Judge Edelman has more ability to get recourse than Congress does.

Even if Edelman denies that motion, though, if he relies on any of the things Hearn has already submitted as sealed exhibits, we will have reason to demand it under First Amendment precedent. Those exhibits include:

• The affidavit for Hearn’s phone (making a false claim about who took the Park Service’s before picture and making no mention of his picture).
• The initial excerpts of grand jury testimony (reflecting that the pool was already leaking millions of gallons of water and had already been damaged), and also reflecting the testimonial witness’ squeamishness about the Parks Service witnesses claims.
• The follow-up excerpts, in which the prosecutor delivered up altered testimony and closed down discussion.
• The damage report, dated June 30.

Davey Hearn’s case is really a remarkable instance where someone has superb criminal defense attorneys (don’t forget that one of the key January 6 prosecutors, Mary Dohrmann, is representing him), but also someone like Eisen, who not only knows how to work the press, but who has been instrumental in suing Trump for accountability.

Barring discovery violations, criminal defendants have the ability to get information that Congress will have to fight to get, which is likely why this case was dropped. But Eisen’s involvement ensures that there will be follow-up lawsuits where Hearn will also be differently postured than Congress.

Stop the bleeding

The reason why it’s utterly crucial that people like Sargent learn these details and use them now is because the first thing we need to do to get accountability is to undercut Trump’s propaganda designed not only to prevent that, but to extract revenge for even asking for it.

Consider this very sophisticated piece of propaganda Trump posted on Sunday.

Not included in this post, but another tack he’s already using, is to attack the judge, Todd Edelman.

Hopefully my annotations make it clear how Trump’s post works — most notably, how Trump is trying to change the meaning of the linked document (Pirro’s MTD) and resuscitate the credibility of the Parks Service accuser.

Trump’s trolls responded. Just as one example, Libs of TikTok did what she does; triggering grievance with her attentional device — “HOLY CRAP” — (over 300K views when I screen capped it, which is monetized), expanding the ActBlue conspiracy beyond what Trump claimed, then dehumanizing her targets, techniques which have long shown to lead to stochastic terrorism.

I was actually mildly surprised at how much pushback Libs got after posting this, with people pointing out she was dumb as shit for repeating Trump’s lies. She moved onto stoking other conspiracies.

I can’t solve far right stochastic terrorism in this post. But in pushing back against it, it’s important to understand and hook on Trump’s new lies here, because it’s the only way to short circuit the propaganda campaigns of the like that Trump has always used to defy oversight. Trump’s post attempts to reframe Pirro’s motion to dismiss by highlighting the part he likes — the testimony of the female Parks Services employee who accused Hearn. As laid out above, we already have reason to suspect she falsely accused Hearn.

Participatory messaging

The most important thing lefty pundits need to understand is how that media economy from Trump to Libs to death threats against Hearn and the judge works and find a way to undercut it. This page has a good description of how that works. But the dynamic is that, while Trump is a key source of disinformation, there are people like Libs making shit tons of money to do things like make unsubstantiated claims about Hearn’s ties to ActBlue and dehumanize him, with predictable effects.

I’m not asking the left to lie or get on Xitter to monetize incitement or anything like that.

I am asking the left to understand that this is the engine via which Trump survives every single attempt at accountability, and even if Raskin had more tools awaiting him, until we address this media economy, Trump will continue to escape accountability. Every single time we make comments about what Trump is doing, we have a choice: Do we act like we have the ability to do what the far right is doing? Or do we outsource the work to people like Jamie Raskin?

Map the structure and find surface area

I also urge people (as people like Norm Eisen already have) about various directions to go at this problem, because some of them will show more immediate payoff than waiting 6 months for Raskin to get subpoena power, maybe.

Some of the other ways people are contesting the reflecting pool are:

WaPo’s very good and persistent coverage of this issue

Leaks from whistleblowers about Doug Burgum’s corruption

Scott MacFarlane’s report on the diversion of National Park dollars to Trump’s vanity projects

A shadow hearing by Robert Garcia and Richard Blumenthal on Trump’s “vanity” projects, generally (I was not aware of this in real time, though Meidas Touch did post it

Jared Huffman’s oversight (the ranking member on the Natural Resources Committee, who would have jurisdiction), including his opposition to a 2025 flunky being installed as Inspector General

But there are other points of leverage, any one of which might pull loose new threads:

• Emily Miller’s role in this
• Pirro’s choice to use DC Superior Courts, her $25,000 retention payments to AUSAs, and the use of JAG and ICE lawyers as prosecutors in DC Superior (though not in this case)
• Will Sharf — whom Trump just named to succeed David Warrngton as White House Counsel —  and his role on the National Capital Planning Commission

We are in a fight for our lives. And the last thing we should do is sit back and assume Jamie Raskin will fix things … if we’re lucky enough to have a fair election and manage to win one or both houses of Congress. Especially when there are far more effective means of accountability we can pursue right now.

The post How to Drain Trump’s Corruption Pool appeared first on emptywheel.

Is there any science behind the recommendations? Will they result in lower vaccination rates? And will they cause a resurgence of preventable diseases?

A new executive order from the US president, Donald Trump, calls for sweeping changes to childhood vaccine recommendations.

His plans would result in fewer vaccines being recommended overall; the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine being replaced with three separate shots, and all childhood immunisations being administered during separate medical visits “to the maximum extent feasible”.

Our children should be able to visit our nation’s capital without having to think about Donald Trump and about how much he did to deface it

History has shown us how much dictators and aspiring dictators love building monuments to themselves. They enjoy reminding the world that they can do anything, no matter who is responsible for the physical labor or who will be paying the financial and human cost.

They prefer outsized structures, heroic arches, towers and columns designed to prove that their signature and their esthetic will be with us forever, even after they’re dead, though dictators often seem to believe they are too powerful to die.

Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

For a post, I wrote up a list of everything we know about how Jeanine Pirro succeeded in getting a felony indictment against Davey Hearn. I’ve summarized this here.

• There are two main witnesses who implicated Davey Hearn: a female Parks Service employee who claims he told her she was “awfully sensitive about the pool,” and Emily Miller, the right wing propagandist who captured his arrest and claimed to talk to Pirro’s people about the case; Miller may be a witness mentioned in the arrest affidavit (she blocked me when I asked if she was on Xitter).
• That woman from the Parks Service did not testify to the grand jury and the investigative witness who did (MF) emphasized that her testimony “was not a sworn statement.” She’s the source of the claim that Hearn “violently” ripped at the pool liner.
• There are two photographs, one posted publicly by Hearn before he was charged, and another taken by a government employee, both of which show the damage was already done before Hearn reached his hand into the water.
• With regards to Hearn’s photo: the government did not present it to the grand jury (which is not a clearcut abuse) but also did not mention it in an affidavit to seize his phone (which is).
• With regards to the other photo, the government seems to have claimed that the female Parks Service employee took it and obscured when it was taken; Pirro’s MTD corrects the timing and attributes the photo to another government employee. The government refused to provide Hearn with metadata to prove this before they dismissed the case.
• There is CCTV footage that should have been turned over to Hearn that was not — footage that was shared with Jesse Watters so he could do propaganda to support Trump’s claims of sabotage. It almost certainly would debunk the entirety the Parks Service employee testimony.
• Even if we buy Pirro’s suspect claims about what Interior turned over when or her claimed ignorance about the problems with the pool before that, we know she had notice of the problems with the pool well before July 16 or 17, when she claims DOJ discovered the problems for the first time. DOJ knew of a damage assessment Interior did — which included a map of many different sites of damage — no later than July 10 (when she turned over the report to Hearn). And investigative agents were at the pool on July 13, three or four days earlier than Pirro let on in her report.
• The harms witness (MR) testified to the grand jury twice. The first time he described tons of pre-existing damage and said it would not be possible to isolate the damage attributed to Hearn. The second time (21 minutes later), he claimed he could attribute $1,000 of damage to Hearn. The prosecutor who sent MR back into the grand jury to give conflicting testimony — he said “Hopefully that kind of nailed down that specific question” to the grand jury after MR changed his story —  is probably the prosecutor most responsible for the abuses in the prosecution.

In other words, we have a pretty good sense of how Hearn was indicted: An unreliable Parks Service employee made suspect claims about him, which were presented via an investigative witness, not under oath. DOJ covered up the photographic evidence they had (or Hearn had taken) that the pool was damaged before he got there. And their harms witness was sent back to the grand jury to give testimony that arguably conflicted with what he had given 21 minutes earlier so they could meet a crucial element of the felony offense.

The post How Jeanine Pirro Framed Davey Hearn appeared first on emptywheel.

WaPo has an absolutely stupendous story about how Trump took a third plane — not the Flying Bribery Palace, not even the Old Air Force One we “saw” him use in real time, but a nondescript military jet — from the NATO summit in Turkey last month to the UK.

The story is stupendous for the sheer magnitude of the scoop and the import of exposing how Trump used the traveling press corps as bait for any Iranian attack; for the many different kinds of sources it relied on to tell the story; for the visual journalism that showed, step-by-step, how Trump pulled off the subterfuge of transferring from Old Air Force One to the military jet…

… and for the way it recontextualized Trump’s public statements in real time.

Asked why reporters had been instructed to lower the window shades on the plane in Turkey, Trump said that it was “because you’re probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleaze bags that we have to deal with.” Trump said that he has a “threat all the time” against his life, and that he is “number one” on Iran’s “list.”

“But if I go, you go. Right?” Trump suggested to reporters. “Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”

One of my favorite things about the story is that, among the various flight tracking accounts WaPo used to reconstruct the flights of all three jets, one was called The New Area 51, invoking the way conspiracies are born from US military secrecy, but also hinting that random others had a far better idea of where Trump was than the press corps did.

The aviation account “Thenewarea51″ noted the C-32A’s arrival in Britain and its call sign, reporting that night that systems allowing for the aircraft to be easily tracked while in the air had been switched off. “Reach” call signs are often used for personnel transport flights and those that haul military equipment, according those familiar with the mission.

My other favorite thing — and no doubt many people share that opinions — is the description of how the man whose vanity led him to accept a bribe in the form of an insecure plane took to sneaking onto a third plane via a food truck.

To exit that plane without being seen by those uninvolved in the operation, Trump and several aides stepped aboard an airport catering truck, which was elevated plane-side using hydraulics and positioned at a door on the opposite side of Air Force One’s entrance, according to the U.S. official and other corroborating material.

As Bill Grueskin tracked in real time, for a brief moment NYT even made that their headline, before they once again pulled their punches from Trump.

The story may — should — destroy whatever trust remains between the press corps and Trump.

It also does so on a story where Trump has already gone nuclear to prevent its exposure (as NYT notes at the tail of its story, on which just Eric Schmitt was among those targeted) and WaPo describes mid-story.

After the Times reported about the security concerns in Turkey, and the fact that the Qatari jet lacked the same defensive capabilities as the older presidential aircraft, Mr. Trump was enraged by the leaks. The Justice Department issued subpoenas for grand jury testimony to the reporters who had been on the bylines of the stories, as well as some of their family members. Those subpoenas were withdrawn after a federal judge admonished federal prosecutors for the process involved.

Mr. Trump has continued to rage about information coming from his government that contradicts what he is telling the public, particularly about the war in Iran that he began on Feb. 28, according to multiple officials.

This changes the import of the leak investigation into NYT, which may, in turn, relate to the delightful viciousness of this attack.

Chris Geidner had a related thought, focusing on how Trump’s handlers had the press pull their window shades, which helped Trump sneak between planes, and noting that Jay Clayton immediately started investigating NYT’s journalists and then was installed as Director of National Intelligence before this story broke.

But it also makes the question I raised here newly important. Did DOJ subpoena NYT for what they published … Or what they didn’t?

As the NYT has reported consistently, even before NYT published the two targeted stories  (hot link one, docket link one; hot link two, docket link two), a senior FBI person was threatening journalists and demanding sources.

Before the Wednesday article was published, a senior official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted a reporter and a senior editor at The Times to ask that the article be held, calling it an issue of national security, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The F.B.I. official declined to explain the security issue. The official also asked The Times to disclose its sources for the article; the newspaper refused to do so. (A spokesman for The Times, Charlie Stadtlander, confirmed the account.)

I suggested in that story, there were several other journalists — some of the WaPo’s journalists might be included, as well as CBS’ Jim LaPorta — were chasing this same story. I described that those earlier calls suggest several other possible goals for the subpoenas:

• DOJ reacted the way it did because it learned the NYT had sources for the real threat, the specific threat from Iran.
• DOJ reacted the way it did because NYT had sources for the threat Israel raised, which Trump mistook to relate to the real threat, but as a result alerted NYT there was more there.
• DOJ’s overreaction led NYT to hunt down the real threat.

I’d add, DOJ may have reacted the way it did:

• To prevent NYT from pursuing the ruse story.
• As part of the subterfuge, to reinforce the idea that the switch was about counter missile defenses rather than something else.

Whatever else it does, it also means the first story DOJ targeted, which started by describing that Trump flew Old Air Force One, was entirely incorrect.

President Trump flew out of Turkey on Wednesday night on the old Air Force One instead of his new Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 as a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran, according to people briefed on the plans, who said the change came at the urging of the Secret Service.

Given WaPo’s uncertainty how Trump got back onto Old Air Force One so he could be seen exiting that to transfer to the Flying Bribery Palace,

Videos show the legacy Air Force One, after landing, coming to a stop in a place where the C-32A had briefly been parked. The hobbyist videos on YouTube do not show Trump exiting the C-32A or entering the legacy Air Force One, as the stairway entries faced away from the plane spotters’ cameras.

It’s not clear how Trump moved from the C-32A to the legacy Air Force One after landing, but he appeared before television cameras and descended external stairs from the legacy Air Force One about 10:56 p.m., according to a media pool report.

And NYT’s vagueness on that point,

Before that, unbeknown to reporters, Mr. Trump was brought by vehicle from the third plane that he had arrived on to the older Air Force One, boarded it through a different entrance and strode down the step from the upper left-side door as he would typically do, according to the U.S. official.

It might suggest other reporting NYT was doing was of equal sensitivity. In the magnus opus on the Flying Bribery Palace that NYT published after DOJ had to drop the subpoenas, they listed a bunch of things — beyond just the counter missile defenses — that Old Air Force One has that the Flying Bribery Palace does not. At least one of those may have been used for Trump’s escape and reentry: a bunch more doors, built for quick entry and exit.

The plane has had a lower side door with self-contained stairs, which is easier to protect. Mr. Trump used that entrance while boarding the old Air Force One last October after the Secret Service discovered what it suspected was a hunter’s stand hidden at the edge of the Palm Beach, Fla., airport.

Mr. Bush also used the lower stairs on Sept. 11, 2001, when he landed unexpectedly at an Air Force base in Louisiana, with military personnel armed with machine guns helping guard him.

But the retrofitted Qatari jet has no such entrance or a similar rear door with self-contained stairs, according to experts who examined photographs of the plane for The Times.

Administration officials did not dispute that. There was a “reduction of the number of airstairs” for autonomous entry and exit, a Pentagon official told The Times.

Trump would have a much harder time sneaking on and off the Flying Bribery Palace because it doesn’t have the escape doors in place for just that purpose.

WaPo’s huge scoop came at a remarkable time. It comes after DOD stripped Joe Biden’s Air Force Secretary, Frank Kendall, of his security clearance, scapegoating him for the NYT story, in which he was a named source.

The Trump administration has revoked the security clearance of Frank Kendall, who served as Air Force secretary under President Joe Biden, accusing him of disclosing classified information about Air Force One to the media.

Kendall has recently been quoted in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, in stories scrutinizing the security features of the Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar, the plane President Donald Trump is using as his official presidential aircraft.

Kendall told the Times that he was “surprised to see this plane used outside the U.S.,” given how speedily it was modified after the Qatari royal family gave it to the United States. To the Journal, Kendall expressed skepticism that the plane had been “maxed out” with security features, as Trump has said it would be.

In an X post Friday night, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Kendall was being stripped of access to classified information and his ability to hold any sensitive position following “unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding Air Force One’s capabilities.”

“Safeguarding classified information is a non-negotiable duty. Those who violate that trust forfeit the privilege of access and any role requiring it,” Parnell wrote.

Such vindictiveness is the kind of thing that makes sources chatty. Plus, this story proves that Trump hasn’t found the sources he is looking for.

And it comes days after DOJ was due to provide Judge Arun Subramanian details (under seal) on whether it attempted to obtain information from the subpoenaed journalists via other means.

With respect to the July 14, 2026 application for a non-disclosure order, the Government should, on or before Monday, July 27, 2026, furnish to the Court on an ex parte basis any internal communications on or before July 16, 2026, concerning (1) the decision to seek the non-disclosure order, (2) whether the application should or should not reference that the owners of the records were reporters, and (3) whether and when notification of the third-party subpoenas should be given to the reporters.

Upon DOJ request, Subramanian extended this deadline to last Friday, long enough to get both Clayton and Todd Blanche confirmed before any fallout.

As he considers Friday’s materials (if, indeed, DOJ met his extended deadline), Judge Subramanian will have this story to contemplate as well: the evidence that the story Trump was chasing was not in fact what he claimed, the evidence that the story for which DOJ starting obtaining subpoenas was not just not classified, but was not true at all.

The post From Flying Bribery Palace to Failed Leak Investigation to Catering Truck appeared first on emptywheel.

Two advisers have links to a venture fund co-investing in US defense companies that benefit from federal spending

Pete Hegseth’s appointments to a key Pentagon advisory body include two men with ties to the venture capital fund where Donald Trump Jr is a partner, which has lucrative investments in military and space technology.

Defense Policy Board appointee Marc Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms and known by the name “a16z”, co-invests alongside the Trump partnership 1789 Capital in three defense contractors. Fellow DPB appointee Blake Masters also sits on the boards of three ventures tied to 1789 Capital.

Federal staff will have to stay 100ft outside polling sites in Hennepin and Ramsey counties after county officials refuse access

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Pete Hegseth’s appointments to a key Pentagon advisory body include two men with ties to the venture capital fund where Donald Trump Jr is a partner, which has lucrative investments in military and space technology.

Defense Policy Board appointee Marc Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms and known by the name “a16z”, co-invests alongside the Trump partnership 1789 Capital in three defense contractors. Fellow DPB appointee Blake Masters also sits on the boards of three ventures tied to 1789 Capital.

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There’s no evidence that vaccines cause autism, or that we should separate MMR shots. This order is dangerous

“This is based on what I feel.” That was the president last September, explaining why he wanted the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine broken into three separate shots. On Monday, he signed an executive order instructing exactly that.

Four decades in intensive care have taught me what a feeling costs once it becomes national policy. Children will be hospitalized who did not need to be. Some of them will die. No one can name those the vaccine has saved, because prevented harm is invisible by definition, and that invisibility is what makes preventive medicine easy to dismantle and hard to defend.

Today’s Report

1. Overview

2. White House News

3. Truth Social Posts

4. Government Department News

5. 2028 Democratic Presidential Candidates

6. AI & Tech Company News

7. Congressional Watch

8. Policy Impact Analysis & Heatmap

1. Overview

President Trump commemorated National Shooting Sports Month by pledging to defend Second Amendment rights and minimize regulations on gun owners. The administration also released a report claiming that its intervention in D.C., led by the National Guard, successfully reduced violent crime to historic lows. Additionally, the President signed an Executive Order establishing “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations,” which aims to promote informed consent and support parental choice regarding immunizations.

On Truth Social, President Trump demanded that Iran provide reparations for victims of past conflicts and roadside bombs, instructing his representatives to prioritize these demands in future negotiations. He expressed strong support for FIFA President Gianni Infantino and issued a wave of endorsements for various congressional and gubernatorial candidates in the upcoming August 11 elections. Trump also attacked a report by the Center for American Progress that questioned the efficacy of the National Guard’s role in D.C., labeling the organization a “Radical Left SCAM” and indicating that a lawsuit is forthcoming.

The State Department marked the one-year anniversary of the White House peace summit with Armenia and Azerbaijan, noting continued progress in regional stability and infrastructure development. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security secured a guilty plea from a Florida man who threatened Secretary of State Marco Rubio, while the Department simultaneously announced the revocation of over 175,000 visas for national security and criminal concerns. At a renaming ceremony for a base honoring Senator Lindsey Graham, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent praised the Senator’s legacy and urged Congress to support increased military funding. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced new FDA food safety reforms, including a formal definition for “ultra-processed foods,” to further the administration’s MAHA agenda.

Governor Gavin Newsom announced a new AI Cyber Defense Program to secure California’s infrastructure, criticizing the Trump administration for “scaling back” federal support for state-level cybersecurity. He also condemned a proposed federal firearm regulation change, accusing the administration of being “in the pocket of criminals” by potentially easing online gun purchase rules. Meanwhile, Governor Wes Moore announced $80 million in grants to expand rural healthcare access through the Rural Health Transformation Program, a move supported by federal HHS investments. Governor Tim Walz highlighted Minnesota’s natural resources during a trip to the state’s northern region and ordered flags to be flown at half-staff to honor the late Justice Esther M. Tomljanovich.

OpenAI announced the expansion of its Daybreak program, introducing two new access tiers for its AI models to assist cybersecurity professionals in defending against automated threats. The “Daybreak Red” tier provides access to the GPT-5.6-Cyber model, which is specialized for vulnerability research and exploit validation. Additionally, OpenAI sent a formal letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, expressing the company’s commitment to developing “responsible AI infrastructure” in collaboration with local stakeholders and utility providers.

The administration’s executive order prioritizing “personal autonomy” in vaccine scheduling introduces significant revenue uncertainty for high-volume vaccine developers by threatening the standardization that underpins their business models. Conversely, the defense sector remains supported by consistent procurement contracts for essential aerospace sustainment, signaling a commitment to strategic military readiness despite broader shifts in political rhetoric. Meanwhile, the implementation of “confrontational diplomacy” regarding historical financial restitution creates elevated volatility in energy markets, as the demand for retroactive compensation from geopolitical adversaries complicates regional stability and increases long-term risk premia.

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2. White House News

Presidential Message on National Shooting Sports Month

President Trump commemorates National Shooting Sports Month by celebrating the “glorious exercise of our Second Amendment rights” and the nation’s hunting traditions. The administration is prioritizing access to public lands for shooting and hunting through the Make America Beautiful Again Commission and updated regulations intended to reduce “unnecessary burdens on law-abiding gun owners.” President Trump emphasizes the connection between sporting traditions, conservation efforts, and personal responsibility, stating that he will “continue to defend our Second Amendment rights” and preserve America’s “frontier heritage” for future generations.

Reference: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2026/08/presidential-message-on-national-shooting-sports-month-4561/

Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Delivers Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans

President Trump signed an Executive Order to recognize “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations” intended to “maximize parental choices” regarding immunizations. The policy aligns childhood vaccine categories with scientific evidence and practices from peer developed countries. The initiative follows a January 2026 HHS scientific assessment that compared U.S. vaccine recommendations with international peers, evaluating vaccine uptake, public trust, and mandates. Ultimately, the administration states that “President Trump is committed to building a healthier future for America, starting with our youngest generation” through these updated medical standards.

Reference: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/08/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-delivers-gold-standard-childhood-vaccine-recommendations-for-americans/

Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans

President Trump issued an executive order to align U.S. childhood vaccine recommendations with international best practices, citing the need to support “maximal parental choice” and “personal autonomy and informed consent.” The order establishes “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations,” categorizing immunizations and advocating for single-dose administration over combination products. Furthermore, it directs HHS to research vaccine safety and instructs the Attorney General to challenge state laws that conflict with “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law” regarding immunization mandates and exemptions.

Reference: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/delivering-gold-standard-childhood-vaccine-recommendations-for-americans/

One Year Later, President Trump Has Delivered on Making D.C. Safe Again

One year after President Trump declared a crime emergency in the District of Columbia and established the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, the administration reports that “violent crime has been smashed to levels not seen in decades.” Through an partnership of federal and local agencies, including the National Guard, the administration claims it successfully removed “violent predators” and cleared homeless encampments. The report asserts that under President Trump’s leadership, the city is no longer a “Democrat-run nightmare” and is becoming the “safest and most beautiful capital.”

Reference: https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/08/one-year-later-president-trump-has-delivered-on-making-d-c-safe-again/

3. Truth Social Posts

Trump addressed international affairs by demanding that Iran provide compensation for victims of their conflicts, including those killed by roadside bombs and the families of victims from the USS Cole, as well as the families of protestors killed over the last 50 years. He instructed his representatives to include these demands in all future negotiations, further stating that Iran should be held responsible for damages and deaths in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza. Additionally, Trump defended FIFA President Gianni Infantino, calling him “fantastic” and warning that replacing him would be a “terrible mistake.”

Domestically, Trump issued a broad wave of endorsements for the August 11, 2026, elections, including Senator Darline Graham Nordone for the South Carolina U.S. Senate seat, Barry Moore for U.S. Senate in Alabama, and Tommy Tuberville for Governor of Alabama. He also endorsed Jerry Carl, Rhett Marques, Gary Palmer, Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tony Wied, Michael Alfonso, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Derrick Van Orden, and Bryan Steil for their respective congressional seats, while backing Tom Tiffany for Governor of Wisconsin. Separately, he celebrated the announcement that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito will remain on the bench for another term, and he shared a photo with golfer Gary Player (no link).

Trump also attacked a report from the Center for American Progress that claimed the deployment of the National Guard had no impact on crime, labeling the organization a “Radical Left SCAM.” He criticized the group’s diverse list of funders, ranging from technology companies to foreign embassies, and characterized the findings as a personal effort to “hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’” He announced that a lawsuit is being prepared and that he is considering targeting the organization’s individual contributors, asserting that under his administration, “Crime is way down.”

Reference: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump

4. Government Department News

State Department (state.gov)

Joint Statement of the United States, Armenia, and Azerbaijan on the Peace Summit Anniversary

The U.S., Armenia, and Azerbaijan marked the one-year anniversary of the White House peace summit. Leaders noted progress in normalizing relations and stability in the South Caucasus. Projects like the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) are advancing, supported by U.S. investment and infrastructure development. Both nations have signed strategic partnership charters with the U.S. and implemented trade agreements. Following the summit, Azerbaijan lifted transit restrictions with Armenia, and both countries pledged to support the sovereignty and territorial integrity of one another.

Diplomatic Security Leads Investigation Resulting in Guilty Plea for Threats Against Secretary of State Marco Rubio

A Miami man, Jon Christopher Enriquez, pleaded guilty to transmitting threats through interstate communications after posting threats on X against Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The investigation, led by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security with support from several law enforcement agencies, identified posts threatening the Secretary with execution. Protecting Department leadership from violence remains a top priority for the Bureau, which maintains continuous monitoring to detect and respond to such threats against officials.

State Department Revokes More Than 175,000 Visas

The State Department has revoked over 175,000 visas from foreign nationals for reasons including criminal activity, immigration system abuse, and endangering national security. Common grounds for revocation include assault, theft, drug crimes, reckless driving, and fraud. The Department cited continuous vetting operations as the method for identifying these individuals. Under President Trump and Secretary Rubio, the Department emphasized that holding a U.S. visa is a privilege rather than a right and stated it would continue to revoke visas of those who threaten American safety.

Ecuador National Day

Secretary of State Marco Rubio extended congratulations to Ecuador on the 217th anniversary of its independence. He highlighted the “robust and historic bond” between the two nations, noting that under the Trump Administration, cooperation has intensified in areas of transnational crime, narcoterrorism, trade, civil nuclear energy, and critical minerals. Rubio commended Ecuador’s participation in the Shield of the Americas and the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, affirming a shared commitment to a “free and prosperous Western Hemisphere.”

Department of War (war.gov)

Contracts for Aug. 10, 2026

The Department of War announced multiple defense contracts, including a $109 million award to Boeing for 76 F/A-18 outer wing panels. Supply Chain Management Inc. received a $20.7 million contract for technical and logistical services for Navy surface combat weapons, and Systems Application & Technologies Inc. was awarded $20.7 million for support services for the Aircraft Instrumentation Division. Additionally, Childs Engineering Corp. and Appledore Marine Engineering were each awarded indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts worth up to $15 million for routine inspection of waterfront facilities.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Remarks at Joint Base Lindsey Graham Naming Ceremony

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth honored Senator Lindsey Graham at a renaming ceremony for the South Carolina joint base. Hegseth praised Graham as a patriot who fought against “radical leftist ideology” that he claimed “killed our military recruiting.” He stated that President Trump has successfully worked to “run those radicals out of the Pentagon.” Hegseth urged Congress to approve a $1.5 trillion investment for the military, citing it as the best way to honor Graham’s legacy and ensure national strength.

Remarks by Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby in Manila, Philippines

Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby emphasized a shift toward “hard-nosed, clear-eyed republican realism” in U.S. foreign policy. He described President Trump’s strategy as a move away from post-Cold War “comfortable illusions” toward a focus on concrete national interests. Colby characterized this approach as “NATO 3.0” in Europe and a “Trump Corollary” in the Western Hemisphere, emphasizing practical partnerships and shared responsibility. He affirmed that the Indo-Pacific remains a paramount priority for the U.S. in ensuring regional deterrence and defense.

Department of Health and Human Services (hhs.gov)

Secretary Kennedy Announces Landmark Food Policy Reforms to Advance President Trump’s MAHA Agenda

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced two major initiatives to support President Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda. The FDA proposed a rule requiring mandatory notifications for food substances deemed “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS), closing existing transparency gaps. Additionally, HHS and the USDA submitted the federal government’s first formal definition of “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs). These actions aim to modernize food safety oversight, improve scientific consistency in nutrition research, and address chronic disease by increasing transparency regarding ingredients entering the U.S. food supply.

Treasury Department (home.treasury.gov)

Remarks from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at Joint Base Lindsey Graham Renaming Ceremony

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered remarks at the renaming ceremony for the base now known as Joint Base Graham. Highlighting Senator Lindsey Graham’s decades of service in the Air Force and the Senate, Bessent described him as a patriot who prioritized national safety and possessed a “generosity of spirit.” Bessent praised Graham’s career as a testament to the American dream and noted that the base, home to the C-17 fleet, serves as a fitting legacy for a man he called “America’s workhorse.”

5. 2028 Democratic Presidential Candidates

Gavin Newsom (gov.ca.gov)

First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Senate President pro Tem Monique Limón celebrate women founders leading innovation in California

First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom and Senate President pro Tem Monique Limón honored 11 California women founders on the Senate floor. The event celebrated their leadership across sectors like STEM, agriculture, and finance. The initiative, supported by the F5 Collective and the California Women’s Wealth Advisory Council, aims to close the women’s wealth gap and encourage investment in women-led businesses. Honorees received Senate resolutions for their economic contributions and innovation, which officials say are essential to strengthening the state’s economy and inspiring future entrepreneurs.

Governor Newsom condemns Trump administration proposal to weaken federal gun safety

Governor Newsom criticized the Trump administration for proposing federal firearm regulation changes that would ease online gun purchases and permit the destruction of records used for crime tracing. Newsom stated that the administration is “in the pocket of criminals” and “putting our communities in danger.” Multiple state agencies, including the Department of Public Health and CalVet, filed formal comments opposing the proposal, citing risks to public safety, veteran suicide prevention efforts, and the ability of crime victims to seek justice and restitution.

Golden State in the spotlight: Governor Newsom announces nine new TV projects – including iconic reboots, sequels, and star-studded dramas – to launch second year of California’s expanded tax credit program

Governor Newsom announced that nine television projects, including reboots of *The Rockford Files* and *Clueless*, have been awarded tax credits under California’s expanded program. These productions are expected to generate $608 million in economic activity and create over 1,000 filming days in the state. Officials highlighted the program’s success in driving industry growth, with application volume increasing 82% in the last year. The program aims to maintain California’s competitive edge in entertainment by providing incentives for high-quality, local productions featuring A-list talent.

Governor Newsom announces new AI cyber defense program to protect California’s critical infrastructure

Governor Newsom launched a new AI Cyber Defense Program to defend state assets and critical infrastructure against artificial intelligence-enabled cyber threats. The initiative directs state agencies to improve cybersecurity coordination and expand AI-driven defenses. Newsom stated that the state must build robust defenses, noting that cyberattacks are becoming faster and more sophisticated. The program aims to address emerging risks while the Trump administration scales back federal support for local and state cybersecurity, ensuring that essential services like water, power, and transportation remain secure.

Wes Moore (governor.maryland.gov)

Maryland Department of Health Announces $80 Million in First Round of Rural Health Transformation Program Awards

Governor Moore announced $80 million in grant funding awarded to 41 recipients under Maryland’s Rural Health Transformation Program. These funds aim to expand primary, behavioral, and dental care in rural communities through initiatives like telehealth, mobile pediatric services, and innovative technology. Supported by a $168 million federal investment from the HHS Secretary, the program reflects the administration’s goal that “Marylanders’ ability to access affordable and quality health care should not depend on their zip code.” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz lauded the program’s locally driven approach.

JB Pritzker (gov.illinois.gov)

Daily Public Schedule: Monday, August 10, 2026

Governor Pritzker has no public events scheduled for Monday, August 10, 2026.

Tim Walz (mn.gov)

Governor Walz Visits Minnesota’s Northernmost Point

Governor Walz traveled to the Northwest Angle and Warroad to highlight Minnesota’s outdoor destinations and support local economies. Accompanied by DNR Commissioner Sarah Strommen, the Governor toured a forestry office, bridge construction, and Zippel Bay State Park. He encouraged citizens to explore the state’s natural resources, noting that such visits provide essential economic support to communities recovering from recent wildfires. The administration emphasized that state parks have seen a 20% increase in visitors, along with significant expansions in trail mileage and reforestation efforts.

Governor Walz Orders Flags at Half-Staff to Honor Former Justice Esther M. Tomljanovich

Governor Walz has ordered all United States and Minnesota flags at state buildings to fly at half-staff on August 11, 2026, to honor the late former Justice Esther M. Tomljanovich. Describing her as a “trailblazer for women,” the Governor recognized her service on the Minnesota Supreme Court and her advocacy for gender equality, including her work to establish equal pay protections. Justice Tomljanovich, a pioneer in the state’s legal system, served as one of the first female judges and justices in Minnesota history.

6. AI & Tech Company News

OpenAI (openai.com)

OpenAI’s letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas

OpenAI sent a letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott regarding the development of responsible AI infrastructure within the state. The company expressed its commitment to collaborating with state and local leaders, community stakeholders, and utility providers to ensure that the deployment of AI infrastructure provides significant benefits to the people of Texas.

Expanding Daybreak as the Cyber Defense Window Narrows

OpenAI is expanding the Daybreak program with two access tiers to provide defenders with advanced tools against AI-driven cyberattacks. “Daybreak Blue” offers frontier models like GPT-5.6 Sol for general defensive tasks, while “Daybreak Red” provides access to the new GPT-5.6-Cyber model, purpose-trained for vulnerability research and exploit validation. GPT-5.6-Cyber is designed to reduce refusal rates on complex cybersecurity requests, achieving a 95% completion rate on advanced scenarios compared to 1.5% for the standard model, helping security professionals stay ahead of automated threats.

Putting frontier cyber models in more trusted hands

OpenAI is expanding its Daybreak Cyber Partner Program to integrate frontier AI models into existing security products and services. By partnering with cybersecurity firms, the company aims to help organizations identify and remediate vulnerabilities more efficiently. Approved partners use Daybreak Blue or Red access within governed environments featuring identity verification, logging, and human oversight. This initiative is designed to provide enterprises with advanced defensive capabilities while maintaining strict controls, ensuring that these powerful tools are used responsibly by security practitioners to protect their clients’ infrastructure.

7. Congressional Watch

Covers the 2026-08-09 session — the Congressional Record is published with a one-day delay.

No Congressional Record found for 2026-08-09.

8. Policy Impact Analysis & Heatmap

This analysis is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

Impact on Market

Based on today’s policy developments, our analysis identifies the following market impact themes:

THEME 1. HEALTHCARE REGULATORY DISRUPTION

The administration’s executive order on childhood vaccines aims to shift the landscape toward “personal autonomy” and away from standard mandates. This creates material risks for vaccine developers who operate on high-volume, standardized combination schedules. Critics argue that undermining proven public health practices could lead to a resurgence of preventable diseases, ultimately increasing long-term systemic healthcare costs. Market participants are watching for potential legal challenges to state-level mandates as the Attorney General prepares to intervene in state-level enforcement.

THEME 2. DEFENSE PROCUREMENT CONTINUITY

Despite a shift toward isolationist rhetoric, the administration continues to prioritize critical military sustainment through targeted contract awards. The F/A-18 wing panel order confirms that established aerospace firms retain strong government support for maintaining core national capabilities. This remains a bullish signal for the defense industrial base as officials emphasize the need for readiness in the Indo-Pacific theater. The primary risk remains the reliance on sole-source contracts which may face future scrutiny from budget-conscious congressional factions.

THEME 3. GEOPOLITICAL DIPLOMATIC FRICTION

The administration is increasingly using formal negotiations as a platform for demanding retroactive financial restitution from adversaries. The new demand for compensation from Iran, linked to historical combat losses, adds an unpredictable variable to energy and foreign policy risk premia. This “confrontational diplomacy” threatens to derail stability in energy-producing regions. Investors remain wary that such aggressive posturing will limit the potential for de-escalation, maintaining high volatility in energy-related sectors.

Policy Impact Heatmap with Market Direction

Each cell shows an estimated impact score on a fixed scale of -10 to +10, reflecting how today’s policy developments may affect each market sector. Positive scores (green, ▲) suggest bullish impact; negative scores (red, ▼) suggest bearish pressure. Rows and columns are sorted by impact strength, and sectors and policy events with no meaningful impact are omitted. The heatmap, the analysis below, and the Impact on Market themes above are produced from a single unified analysis: the heatmap visualizes the magnitudes, while the text explains the causal reasoning behind them.

The administration’s directive to prioritize “Gold Standard” vaccine recommendations creates significant regulatory uncertainty for the healthcare sector. By challenging state-level mandates and promoting single-dose administration over established combination products, the policy risks disrupting supply chains for major vaccine manufacturers. Critics view this as an “unnecessary” political interference that may erode public health standards. Simultaneously, the focus on visa revocations adds friction to global mobility, likely impacting service sectors that rely on international labor and cross-border consumer demand. These administrative actions reflect a broader pivot toward decentralization and strict border control measures, raising compliance costs for multinational corporations.

Defense spending remains a bright spot, highlighted by the latest sole-source award to Boeing for F/A-18 sustainment. This underscores the administration’s commitment to “peace through strength” and maintains robust revenue streams for legacy military contractors. Conversely, the aggressive stance on Iranian compensation demands injects a new risk premium into energy markets. This rhetoric threatens to complicate ongoing diplomatic efforts, potentially restricting future supply integration. While the administration frames these moves as “defending sovereignty,” market participants must navigate heightened geopolitical tension that favors traditional industrial and defense incumbents over firms exposed to international integration.

Elaborate ruse was used to transport president to military flight from Air Force One in July

Donald Trump departed on a secret military flight from Turkey to Britain last month when the White House said he was flying aboard ⁠Air Force One, in an extraordinary ruse – prompted by an Iranian assassination threat – that involved hiding the president in an airport catering container, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times.

The operation took place when Trump was in Ankara for a Nato summit with world leaders, according to the Post. The president reportedly boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras, and then was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, a US official told the Post.

• US president backs ‘fantastic’ Infantino in Truth Social post

• Infantino under pressure following doomed World Cup sell-off plan

US president Donald Trump has warned Fifa would be making a “terrible mistake” if they get rid of Gianni Infantino as the head of world football’s governing body.

Infantino has come under pressure following his doomed plan to sell off stakes in the men’s World Cup to private investors.

Company also announced a paid service for early access to president’s posts on policies to the social media site

Donald Trump’s media company – which owns the Truth Social platform favored by the US president – posted a $238m loss in the second quarter.

Trump Media & Technology on Monday reported that losses in the three months through June came as the company branched into new ventures including crypto. The company’s new chief executive, Kevin McGurn, announced at a conference call about the earnings that after a yearlong effort to expand into online betting and crypto, the company would be refocusing on social media.

US president’s statement is latest sign that negotations to end war and reopen strait of Hormuz have stalled

Donald Trump has said he will demand that Iran pay compensation for the deaths of thousands of US soldiers and Iran’s own civilians killed in recent decades in the latest sign his negotiations to end the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz have reached an impasse.

The US president is trying to end conflicts in Iran, Gaza and Lebanon, and his additional demands of Iran are likely to provoke anger in Tehran at the same time as Israel has rejected Trump’s terms for a 15-point roadmap to end the war in Gaza.

We’ll see how long US Attorney (and, of course, former Fox News personality) Jeanine Pirro gets to keep her job. I would guess the exit door is only inches away from hitting her ass since she refused to carry out Donald Trump’s plan to punish Reflecting Pool visitors for highlighting the failures of his no-bid contract buddies.

Former Olympian David Hearn got rung up first on federal vandalism charges. Then he got un-rung, once the DOJ told the court Doug Burgum’s Interior Department had basically lied to it about the most likely causes of the peeling sealant and algae swarms that embarrassed the president into pressing criminal charges and threatening journalists.

The crux of dismissal motion by the DOJ was this:

[I]t was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026. It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI. Indeed, USAO DC could only rely (on the information provided by DOI that the damage was entirely caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn…

Despite the insult of being lied to by a fellow member of the federal government, the DOJ could only bring itself to move for a dismissal without prejudice, which means the administration can always take another swing at Hearn and the other Reflecting Pool defendants.

The good news is that everyone facing criminal charges for supposedly “vandalizing” the botched, hasty pool repair job is now off the hook… at least for now.

Court records now show that prosecutors are dropping the charges against the three other defendants – Justin Carreno, Cameron Thiers and Sophie Dennison-Gibby – who were all accused of destruction of property with a value of less than $1,000.

The bad news is everything else. Ever since the first dismissal, both Donald Trump and DOI Secretary have done little more than bash Pirro for actually doing her damn job and claiming (again, without evidence) that the Reflecting Pool was vandalized, rather than just mishandled by a.) one of Trump’s donors/pool guys and b.) a company that had never been awarded a federal contract before.

For what it’s worth, it seems Pirro did confront Trump and Burgum about their wild antifa-vandalism-whatever-the-fuck assertions. Pirro did the right thing and — according to this report — did it well.

Mr. Trump raged against Ms. Pirro in private on Monday. Then he raged a little to reporters. Rumors she would be fired burbled through West Wing. Then he raged a little bit more before hosting a high-drama, face-to-face meeting with Ms. Pirro at the White House worthy of two decorated veterans of confrontational reality TV.

Mr. Burgum had been invited too, so Ms. Pirro came prepared. She entered the White House from the West Executive driveway in a bright red blazer that matched her fight-back mood, schlepping a white box containing evidence, plus a black box with documents, on wheels.

This confrontation seemed to have gone as well as it possibly could. According to NYT sources, Pirro made a solid case that Burgum had concocted a vandalism cover story to conceal his contribution to the Reflecting Pool embarrassment. This is as good as it gets when it comes to Trump:

Mr. Trump seemed considerably less angry by day’s end, the person said.

It didn’t last long. In addition to the insults he handed out immediately following the Hearn dismissal, Trump had this to say in the days following the White House meeting with Pirro:

“U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro should re-visit her hastily made decision,” ​Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

[…]

Trump, who has ​repeatedly alleged that vandals damaged the pool, has sharply ​criticized Pirro for dropping the case, saying this week that she had “choked” under pressure from a judge and “folded like an ​umbrella.”

And, as is par for the course for Trump, he’s also attacked the judge handling the case (who did nothing more than respect the government’s dismissal motion) and disparage the work done by the pool crews he so recently defended as so far above reproach that any issues with the pool whatsoever could only be due to malicious acts of vandalism.

If this were a normal presidency and a normal timeline, I’d say something pithy like “it’s all over but the desperate flailing.” But it isn’t, so any pithiness is immediately undercut by the realization that “desperate flailing” is MAGA GOP SOP, and with this party in power, it can always be converted into actual punishment of Trump’s perceived enemies.

Trump can never be wrong, so he’s back on his vandalism bullshit.

President Trump on Saturday posted photos of alleged vandalism to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool amid a push for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, to revisit a recent decision to drop charges related to the pool.

Late Saturday, the president posted two photos of what appeared to be graffiti and some peeling of the coating of the pool. Both photos were labeled with the word “Vandalism.”

Just imagine the dumbest, weakest, vaguest, conspiracy theory-ist shit you’ve ever seen. Now, lower your expectations.

These are pictures taken of something somewhere. One is labeled “RIP,” which is hardly instructive since we can’t tell what this is or what relevance this peeling has to do with anything. Even if we are to immediately believe (or even recognize) these to be photos of the Reflecting Pool and its lining, there’s nothing in here that immediately suggests malicious damage, rather than what’s already on the record: a hasty application job done by under-qualified people working under severe time constraints and somehow still managing to go millions of dollars over budget.

These are the sort of things you bring to the attention of the contractor performing the work, not the sort of thing you use to support criminal charges. It’s one thing to see a shattered window and a heavy object nearby. It’s quite another to see some peeling weather stripping around the sill and claiming your house has been vandalized.

This government is nearly as dangerous as it is stupid. But that’s only because its stupidity is unparalleled. The most venal president in history is seeing the end results of his willingness to allow his loyalty to be purchased. It’s the worst form of kleptocracy: one that’s fully bought into the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

MMR vaccine would be broken into separate shots under order, putting a financial and logistical strain on families

Donald Trump has signed an executive order with plans for sweeping changes to the childhood vaccination schedule that would require that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to be broken into three separate shots, once it becomes available in the US.

The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together.

Loyalist sworn in after Senate voted narrowly in favor of his confirmation on Saturday morning

Todd Blanche has been sworn as the US attorney general, cementing Donald Trump’s installation of his former personal attorney as head of the Department of Justice.

Blanche, who has been serving as acting attorney general since April, was confirmed in his new position during a ceremony at the White House on Monday. The 52-year-old is the second Senate-confirmed attorney general of Trump’s second term, after Pam Bondi, who was ousted earlier this year.

In the ten days since Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss the case against Davey Hearn, I’ve been crowing about a prediction I made two days after Hearn’s arrest: It would backfire.

The heavy-handed arrests themselves have gotten a lot of attention. Good luck to Jeanine Pirro attempting to prosecute these cases, not least because doing so would require calculating the value of a painted cover that degraded before the defendants came along. Prosecuting these cases would necessitate addressing whether Trump’s repairs did what they were supposed to, an inquiry Pirro will be loathe to do.

Sure enough, Pirro is clinging to her job after a motion to dismiss — blaming Department of Interior for DOJ’s own failures — also revealed that DOI knew the reflecting pool renovation was falling apart before Davey Hearn showed up.

I made a similar prediction about the SPLC indictment: that they would ask for proof of the way SPLC helped the FBI prevent terrorism, which had a likelihood of backfiring.

I suspect they’ll also do something that had a key role in the collapse of the case against Michael Sussmann: they can request the FBI’s own records of tips SPLC shared with the Bureau. When Sussmann got his own FBI and DOJ records, he was able to show:

• The DNS data that Durham had claimed was invented was, instead, data that the FBI itself relied on.
• Some of the things about which Durham invented conspiratorial explanations were clearly explained by Sussmann’s cooperation on the DNC investigation.
• Sussmann had provided similar tips to DOJ based on DNS traffic that Rodney Joffe had discovered.
• Joffe had a long and useful history of sharing valuable information with the FBI.

SPLC is similarly situated as Sussmann was: a long-term valued partner to the FBI, which had provided important tips that helped FBI prevent crimes, just as ADL’s tip, had it been prioritized, could have prevented the Evergreen shooting.

At the very least, such discovery will show that the FBI used SPLC tips, knowing how they were gathered, and found them important tools to prevent political violence. But given the slovenly nature of this DOJ and the rush with which Kash and Todd Blanche rolled out a gift for Stephen Miller, it is exceedingly likely there will be bigger surprises about how FBI used or misused SPLC tips in such discovery, including failing to use them to prevent serious crime, just like Kash failed to prevent the Holly shooting.

On Friday, Judge Emily Marks denied SPLC’s motion to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution. In spite of some commentary on the opinion, it applies precedent as it has traditionally been applied, before the President turned the entire DOJ into his weaponization machine. As such it reminds me of the opinions by two Trump appointees ruling against Hunter Biden’s twice claims of selective and vindictive prosecution. The politicization was crystal clear. But it was also exercised through prosecutors who could claim they’re not biased against the defendant.

Just a few hours after Marks released her opinion, SPLC filed a motion to compel demanding that DOJ cough up records of FBI’s past reliance on information from the organization.

The SPLC’s repeated efforts to provide federal law enforcement agencies with evidence generated by the informant program and used by those agencies used to investigate, prosecute, and, on repeated occasions, convict individual members of racist groups engaged in criminal activity are fundamentally inconsistent with the government’s core theory: that the SPLC was “engaged in the active promotion of racist groups.” Such evidence is plainly favorable to the defense and must be produced. See, e.g., Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419, 441-43 (1995) (evidence that another individual gave inconsistent accounts of the crime in a possible effort to frame the defendant was favorable to the defense and should have been disclosed); Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 86-87 (1963) (prosecution’s failure to disclose that another individual admitted to killing victim constituted suppression of evidence favorable to the accused); United States v. Severdija, 790 F.2d 1556, 1560 (11th Cir. 1986) (written recording of defendant’s statement at time of event “constitute[d] favorable and material evidence wholly consistent with appellee’s defense” and thus satisfied the Brady standard).

Despite the fact that evidence showing that the SPLC cooperated with law enforcement by providing information about the members of these groups is material and exculpatory, the government has apparently taken no steps over the past three months to search for or obtain this exculpatory information from its files or disclose it to the defense.1

1 Shortly after arraignment on the original indictment on May 7, 2026, the government produced three categories of information it deemed exculpatory: 1) a letter from SPLC donors stating that they believed the use of their funds to support the informant program was proper and consistent with their expectations; 2) a recorded interview of a bank employee which included her statement that she was fully aware that the bank accounts the SPLC opened in the names of “fictitious entities” (ECF 51, Introduction) were in fact utilized by the SPLC to protect the safety of those individuals; and 3) Bank-1’s records and email communications confirming the SPLC’s connection to the alias bank account names that were associated with the SPLC, the bank’s knowledge of that association, and its knowledge of the purpose of having the alias names on the accounts. In total, the government produced just 20 pages of supposed Brady material and none of it is responsive to the three requests at issue here.

As it describes, even before the indictment SPLC reminded DOJ of three instances where DOJ relied on information from SPLC to investigate or disrupt terrorists: An Atomwaffen extremist who was charged in Nevada, a Vanguard America member was prevented from getting security clearance and detained, and the extensive information shared in advance of Unite the Right.

An exhibit to the motion lists 10 more examples — including at least one SPLC informant that the FBI made their own informant — they’ve learned about during the investigation. These are heavily redacted, but (in addition to the three prior examples) the motion describes:

1. A presumed SPLC informant interviewed on February 23 described handing over a “rifle” from someone he was informing on and “immediately turned it over to the feds.”
2. A presumed SPLC informant met with the Feds both before and after attending a Volksfront meeting. This witness met with the Feds on May 5.
3. A presumed SPLC informant “received information from the FBI and worked undercover with Aryan Nations.” This witness met with the Feds on March 23.
4. A presumed SPLC informant tipped an FBI Agent in the Asheville office to someone stockpiling weapons. This witness met with the Feds on December 8.
5. A presumed SPLC informant, who was interviewed by the Feds on December 8 (and so is likely the same informant as appears in item 4), had contact with the Knoxville FBI office.
6. A presumed SPLC informant worked as an informant for the FBI in 2011-2012. An FBI Agent confirmed this in December 2020.
7. A presumed SPLC informant alerted the FBI to a murder-for-hire scenario (this may be the same informant as appears in item 1). This is sourced to a February 23 interview.
8. A presumed SPLC informant (or perhaps employee) engaged with two FBI agents. This person was interviewed by the Feds on March 31.
9. A presumed SPLC informant shared information with a Montana FBI Agent about the Malheur occupation. This person was interviewed by the Feds on March 31 (and so may be the same person as item 8).
10. A presumed SPLC informant served as an FBI informant. This person was interviewed by the Feds on April 17.

Remember: Back in April, SPLC had to ask Judge Marks to get Todd Blanche to stop lying about SPLC’s usefulness to the Feds, when he claimed,

There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement.

Blanche mostly equivocated, but he hasn’t repeated the claim.

The FBI learned most of this information before Blanche’s April 21 comments. In one case, it is information (again, apparently about an SPLC informant the FBI itself recruited) going back to 2020.

And DOJ won’t turn the information over.

Indeed, the prosecutor on this case suggested that if Judge Marks orders DOJ to turn over this information, they’ll just declare at least some of it is classified.

In fact, after the Court issued its pre-trial scheduling Order in this case (ECF 107), Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Davidson emailed defense counsel and advised that, as it concerns any motion to compel, if the prosecution “[is] ordered to turn over FBI documents related to F’s that haven’t already been turned over . . . some documents will almost certainly be classified” “at a certain level.” This is the first time the government has raised the specter of classified documents possibly existing as it relates to law enforcement material involving any F’s, and would be encompassed in and by the SPLC’s document requests described in this motion.

At this point, it’s hard to tell whether DOJ is refusing to share this information because they:

• Fucked up by charging this and they’re trying to preserve the case
• Don’t want to admit to MAGAts that far right extremists are dangerous
• Consider these right wing terrorists — like the adjudicated January 6 terrorists Trump freed on his first day on the job — their allies and so really just want to make SPLC useless

And while Judge Marks’ decision on the selective and vindictive prosecution claim is solidly within precedent if not reality, withholding all the materials that SPLC would need to mount a defense would not be.

The Michael Sussmann case is not the only high profile precedent for that. As SPLC cites by referring to just one of the many Proud Boy informants who were referenced or testified in the Proud Boys’ case, “Aaron,” the Proud Boys got such information, even in a prosecution that they insist was unfair.

And yet Blanche’s DOJ insists on treating the SPLC worse than they treated the now — pardoned or dismissed — far right extremists who led the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

The post Todd Blanche Is Hiding How SPLC Warned FBI about a Murder-for-Hire Scenario appeared first on emptywheel.

Q: Is President Donald Trump really cutting Medicare subsidies?

A: The Trump administration recently announced that it is ending a temporary subsidy that has reduced premiums for Medicare Part D standalone prescription drug plans. The subsidy, originally slated to run through at least 2027, was put into place by the Biden administration to offset expected premium increases after major changes to the Part D benefit. Analysts say some Medicare beneficiaries could see higher Part D premiums as a result. 

FULL ANSWER

We’ve received several questions from readers about whether the Trump administration is cutting or changing the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. The administration is not changing the benefit itself, but recently announced that it will end a temporary subsidy that had helped keep premiums for standalone Part D prescription drug plans down. 

The change could lead to higher prescription-drug premiums for some Medicare recipients, though we won’t know the full impact until we get more detailed information about 2027 premiums this fall. 

To understand what’s going on, it’s helpful to have some background on the different parts of Medicare and how the subsidy came about in the first place. 

Broadly, Medicare coverage has three components: Part A covers inpatient hospital care; Part B covers outpatient medical services, and Part D is prescription drug coverage. Beneficiaries can access that coverage in one of two ways. They can enroll in what’s called traditional or original Medicare, which includes Parts A and B, and add a separate, standalone Part D prescription drug plan. Or they can sign up for what are called Medicare Advantage plans — subsidized plans offered by private insurers that bundle hospital, outpatient and, typically, prescription drug coverage together. 

According to the nonpartisan health policy research organization KFF, more than 56 million people were enrolled in Part D coverage as of February — 44% in standalone prescription drug plans and 56% through Medicare Advantage plans. 

The end of the temporary subsidy should not affect premiums for Medicare Advantage enrollees, as it was targeted specifically to the standalone prescription drug plans available to people with traditional Medicare.

Those standalone drug plans are offered by private insurers that contract with the government. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included a major overhaul of the Part D benefit, with several changes meant to make prescription drugs more affordable for seniors with standalone Part D plans. Among those changes was capping enrollees’ total out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs for the first time, starting in 2025. The cap was $2,000 for that year.

Those changes, however, were expected to lead to higher premiums, as insurers adjusted to higher costs on their end. 

One way policymakers tried to mitigate that was by limiting annual increases in something called the “base beneficiary premium,” which is used in calculating the premiums that people actually pay. The Inflation Reduction Act caps year-to-year base premium increases at 6% per year through 2029; that provision remains unchanged.

Separately, the Biden administration in 2024 created the temporary subsidy program, which was meant to further stabilize standalone drug-plan premiums starting in 2025 (hence its official name, the Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration). The Trump administration renewed the subsidy at a lower level for 2026, then announced last month that it would no longer be in place for 2027.

The subsidy cost $9.8 billion over two years, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Juliette Cubanski, vice president and director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, said the premium demonstration program appears to have worked as intended. In 2026, the subsidy reduced premiums for standalone Part D plans by an estimated $16 per month on average, according to the federal Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

“To put that in context, the average standalone drug plan premium this year is $36 a month,” she said. “So without that additional subsidy, people might have had to pay nearly 50% more for drug coverage this year.”

By extension, some Medicare beneficiaries could see higher increases in their Part D premiums for 2027 now that the subsidy is ending, she said. But we won’t have a clear picture of how costs are changing until September, when the federal government releases information about premiums for specific plans.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency responsible for Medicare, has said most people will not see a large spike in premiums. 

“The Biden admin gave BILLIONS of taxpayer money DIRECTLY to Big Insurance Companies,” Oz wrote in a July 28 post on X, referring to the subsidy. “This is unacceptable. We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed. Premiums will go up by less than $10 [per month] for most Medicare recipients, with many even seeing LOWER premiums.”

We asked CMS what those figures were based on. In response, a spokesperson said bids submitted by insurers for 2027 plans show the subsidy demonstration is no longer needed because the market has adjusted.

“We understand that outside organizations without plan bid information have voiced concerns, however our data shows that plan bids have stabilized,” the spokesperson told us in an email. “[A]mong the roughly quarter of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in plans the previous demo impacted, over 85% of beneficiaries will have access to a Part D plan that is either lower cost or less than a $10 increase next year.”

The spokesperson also said all of those beneficiaries “will have access to at least three prescription drug plan options with total monthly premiums of $50 or less.”

The spokesperson did not respond to our followup question about whether 85% of those beneficiaries could stay in their current plans without premiums rising more than $10, or if some would have to switch plans to keep costs below that level. 

Again, we’ll get clearer data on this in September. 

“It may well be true that plans have gained sufficient experience in managing drug costs under the revamped Part D benefit design,” Cubanski said. “But I think it’s also true that without this enhanced financial support, there are going to be some Medicare beneficiaries who will face deeper premium increases.”

She encouraged people with standalone Part D coverage to look at their plans carefully during this fall’s open enrollment period; in addition to changes in premiums, it’s possible that insurers could pare back which drugs they cover, increase cost-sharing or make other plan changes to keep their costs down.

If premiums do rise significantly, that could also have other effects on the market for standalone prescription drug plans. 

Cubanski said the temporary subsidy was designed to not just stabilize premiums, but also to stabilize enrollment. She noted that standalone Part D plans already face “stronger financial headwinds” compared with Medicare Advantage drug plans, which are more heavily subsidized. If more people switch to Medicare Advantage, that could push up overall Medicare spending over time. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission estimates the federal government is paying 14% more for Medicare Advantage enrollees compared to what they would have cost under traditional Medicare, a difference of $76 billion in 2026.

Standalone Part D plans are also important in many rural areas, where people have fewer Medicare Advantage options, Cubanski said.

“People still have about 10 prescription drug plans on average to choose from in 2026, so it’s not like this market [for standalone prescription drug plans] is on the verge of collapse,” Cubanski said. “But we have seen some, I think, concerning signs about the health of this marketplace relative to drug coverage through Medicare Advantage plans.” 

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The post Explaining the Medicare Drug-Plan Subsidy That Trump Is Ending appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has no interest in agreeing to a deal. For relief to come to Gaza, real US pressure must be exerted

At the end of July, Donald Trump announced that a “monumental” US-backed deal had been struck on Gaza, securing the phased disarmament of Hamas in parallel with Israeli military withdrawal. Three days later it was reported that another 18 people had died in Israeli airstrikes. Not for the first time, it appeared that Mr Trump’s rhetoric had only a distant relationship with the reality it purported to describe.

Such suspicions were duly confirmed yesterday. Under pressure from far-right members of his coalition, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, explicitly rejected the sequencing of a 15-point plan from the increasingly hapless Board of Peace – an international body set up by the US president – and poured scorn on “a wave of rumours of … Israeli withdrawals on all fronts”. In a direct message to the White House, Mr Netanyahu stated that “we know how to stand our ground, even against our best friends when necessary.”

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Israeli prime minister faces incompatible demands from his far-right government ministers and from Donald Trump

Benjamin Netanyahu’s public rejection of a US-backed deal for Gaza drew scepticism in Israel, amid reports he was personally hammering out details of a pilot military withdrawal days earlier.

The Israeli prime minister is struggling to balance incompatible demands on Gaza policy from his key domestic and international allies.

US president on Truth Social concedes contractor had cut some corners to finish $14m renovation project by deadline

Donald Trump has conceded his own administration’s renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool was rushed and shoddy, while insisting that alleged vandals were to blame for damage to the Washington landmark.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, the US president said the pool’s contractor had cut some corners to finish the $14m repainting project in time for a 4 July opening. “As with many jobs, there was also some contractor error done by rushing the job,” he wrote on Sunday, claiming the resulting damage from this was confined to “a very small area” and “relatively inconsequential”.

The Last Week Tonight host discussed how the president has transformed, weakened and weaponised the Department of Justice

John Oliver took aim at Donald Trump’s attempts to corrupt the Departmenr of Justice, calling it a once-respected institution that has now been infected by “utter maniacs”.

The Last Week Tonight host spoke about justice and how it’s “both a snatched blinded lady and a pretty good name for a dog above 40lb” before talking about the “absolute fiasco” that has warped the justice department.

Today’s Report

1. Overview

2. White House News

3. Truth Social Posts

4. Government Department News

5. 2028 Democratic Presidential Candidates

6. AI & Tech Company News

7. Congressional Watch

8. Policy Impact Analysis & Heatmap

1. Overview

President Trump announced that Will Scharf will serve as Assistant to the President and White House Counsel beginning September 1st. Trump praised the outgoing counsel, David Warrington, for his service while describing Scharf as “Tough, Strong, and Smart.” The President further characterized Scharf’s background as essential for continuing his administration’s legal defense against what he labeled the “corrupt and illegal campaign of Weaponization” orchestrated by the previous administration.

Regarding domestic matters, Trump reported on ongoing repairs and security upgrades at the Reflecting Pool following alleged vandalism by David Hearn. He asserted that Black and Brown voters are increasingly “flocking to the Republican Party” because they fundamentally reject “communism and socialism.” Internationally, the President highlighted a report documenting a “worldwide border crackdown” under his tenure and shared an opinion piece by Hillary Clinton suggesting his Gaza policy is currently the most viable option available. Trump also posted updates regarding his personal time spent golfing with Gary Player at his properties in New Jersey and Scotland.

The State Dept is actively engaging Caribbean leaders through the CANTO 2026 conference to advocate for secure digital infrastructure and the exclusion of untrusted vendors from regional ICT ecosystems. In tandem with the Commerce Department, the agency is providing technical assistance to help regional governments draft legislation to improve 5G, satellite connectivity, and AI readiness. Additionally, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau began a regional trip to Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana to discuss energy security, critical minerals, and economic investment with local leadership. Meanwhile, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is visiting Joint Base Charleston alongside several state and federal officials, an event scheduled for broadcast on the DOW’s digital platforms.

Mandates enforcing the use of “trusted vendors” in Caribbean telecommunications impose significant compliance burdens on hardware supply chains, creating headwinds for firms reliant on diverse, cost-efficient international networks. Conversely, federal facilitation of regional energy partnerships in Guyana and Trinidad creates tailwinds for private energy producers by stabilizing supply routes, though critics warn that a lack of local oversight risks environmental and long-term market instability. Finally, the prioritization of domestic defense infrastructure maintenance signals steady support for local base operations, though observers note that this narrow focus may offer only limited improvements to broader defense procurement efficiency.

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2. White House News

No White House news found.

3. Truth Social Posts

Trump announced that Will Scharf will become Assistant to the President and White House Counsel effective September 1st, succeeding David Warrington, whom he praised for doing a “truly outstanding job.” Trump described Scharf as “Tough, Strong, and Smart,” noting his legal background and history of representing the administration against what he termed the “corrupt and illegal campaign of Weaponization” conducted by the previous administration.

Regarding domestic affairs, Trump highlighted witness testimony from a National Park Service employee alleging that David Hearn vandalized the Reflecting Pool, while also noting that security cameras are being installed and the pool will reopen shortly. He also asserted that Black and Brown voters are “flocking to the Republican Party” because they reject communism and socialism and recognize the party’s history. In the international sphere, Trump shared a report crediting his leadership for a “worldwide border crackdown” and circulated an opinion piece by Hillary Clinton suggesting that despite opposition, his Gaza plan is currently the best available option.

During his personal time, Trump posted about spending time with Gary Player at Bedminster and shared an additional image of the golfer at Trump Turnberry. He also featured the 10th hole at his Palm Beach County golf course and commented on “51 years of bad behavior.”

Reference: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump

4. Government Department News

State Department (state.gov)

United States Advances Trusted Digital Infrastructure at CANTO 2026

The U.S. engaged Caribbean leaders at the CANTO Annual General Meeting to promote secure digital infrastructure and exclude untrusted vendors from regional ICT ecosystems. Officials introduced a new initiative to expand undersea cables and improve 5G, satellite connectivity, and AI readiness. The State Department, in collaboration with the Commerce Department, is providing legal and technical assistance to help regional governments draft trusted-vendor legislation, aiming to bolster hemispheric network security and long-term economic growth.

Deputy Secretary Landau’s Travel to Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is traveling to Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana from August 9-12, 2026. In Trinidad and Tobago, he will meet with Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to discuss energy, security, and economic cooperation. In Guyana, Landau will consult with President Irfaan Ali and cabinet members regarding expanded investment opportunities and strategic collaboration in energy and critical minerals. The visit aims to reinforce regional partnerships, energy resilience, and shared economic prosperity.

Department of War (war.gov)

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Travels to Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is scheduled to visit Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina. He will be accompanied by Secretary of the Air Force Dr. Troy E. Meink, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Governor Henry McMaster, and Senator Darline Graham. The event will be broadcast on Pentagon Channel 2 and livestreamed across official Department of War digital platforms.

5. 2028 Democratic Presidential Candidates

JB Pritzker (gov.illinois.gov)

Daily Public Schedule: Sunday, August 9, 2026

Governor JB Pritzker has no public events scheduled for Sunday, August 9, 2026.

6. AI & Tech Company News

No relevant AI & tech company updates found for this date.

7. Congressional Watch

Covers the 2026-08-08 session — the Congressional Record is published with a one-day delay.

No Congressional Record found for 2026-08-08.

8. Policy Impact Analysis & Heatmap

This analysis is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

Impact on Market

Based on today’s policy developments, our analysis identifies the following market impact themes:

THEME 1. SECURE DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE MANDATES

United States efforts to promote trusted vendors in the Caribbean represent a systematic attempt to isolate non-aligned telecommunications providers. This directive imposes significant compliance burdens on firms reliant on multi-national hardware supply chains. Critics argue such mandates disrupt existing cost-efficient networks and may provoke retaliatory regulatory actions from international competitors.

THEME 2. ENERGY SECURITY AND REGIONAL DIPLOMACY

Diplomatic missions to Guyana and Trinidad highlight an intensification of U.S. focus on regional energy partnerships. By facilitating cooperation between private energy producers and regional governments, the administration aims to secure reliable supply routes. Opponents worry that deepening these ties without robust local oversight could lead to environmental vulnerabilities and long-term instability in regional energy markets.

THEME 3. DEFENSE SECTOR READINESS

The Secretary of War’s focus on military installations indicates a continued priority for domestic defense infrastructure maintenance. This visit underscores the importance of operational readiness in key strategic regions like the Carolinas. Critics contend that prioritizing localized base visits over broader strategic reform may yield limited gains for overall defense procurement efficiency.

Policy Impact Heatmap with Market Direction

Each cell shows an estimated impact score on a fixed scale of -10 to +10, reflecting how today’s policy developments may affect each market sector. Positive scores (green, ▲) suggest bullish impact; negative scores (red, ▼) suggest bearish pressure. Rows and columns are sorted by impact strength, and sectors and policy events with no meaningful impact are omitted. The heatmap, the analysis below, and the Impact on Market themes above are produced from a single unified analysis: the heatmap visualizes the magnitudes, while the text explains the causal reasoning behind them.

State Department efforts to secure Caribbean digital infrastructure aim to displace foreign competitors from the regional market. This regulatory alignment forces telecommunications firms to pivot away from specific supply chains, increasing short-term capital expenditures. Energy sector sentiment improves as diplomatic focus on Guyana and Trinidad signals deepened bilateral cooperation regarding regional resource extraction and supply security. These efforts are viewed as strategic measures to consolidate western energy dominance.

Concurrently, the appointment of a new White House Counsel marks a transition in the administration’s legal and regulatory posture. Market participants often interpret such personnel changes as signals for shifts in antitrust enforcement or compliance standards. While the administration maintains a rigorous stance on border and digital security, opposition figures remain concerned that these actions may lead to retaliatory trade barriers or increased geopolitical friction in the Western Hemisphere. The focus remains on strengthening domestic and allied industrial capacity through targeted engagement and infrastructure oversight.