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Trump Threatens Companies Over Tariff Refunds

So the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs. Companies overpaid. They’re legally entitled to refunds. Pretty straightforward, right?

Not if you’re Donald Trump.

In a Tuesday morning phone interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Trump about large companies (Apple and Amazon were mentioned specifically) that haven’t sought refunds because they don’t want to, quote, “offend” the president.

Trump’s response was something else.

He said he thinks it’s “brilliant” if they don’t ask for their money back. He said he’d be “honored.” And then he said, “I’ll remember them.”

The president of the United States is telling corporations that if they voluntarily give up money they’re legally owed, he’ll reward them. And if they do take the refund? Well, he’ll “remember” that too.

That’s not a wink and a nudge. That’s a threat dressed up in flattery.

This kind of behavior has a name: corruption. It’s the same playbook Trump’s used throughout his political career. Companies that donate to his projects, or whose executives show up at Mar-a-Lago with a check and a smile, get favorable treatment. Companies that exercise their legal rights, or push back, get attacked.

From any other president in modern history, this kind of statement would trigger immediate congressional hearings and wall-to-wall media coverage.

But Trump’s normalized this. Corruption becomes the background noise. Nobody’s even surprised anymore.

That should terrify us.

Trump’s Fed Nominee Won’t Say Biden Won 2020 Election

Here’s a simple question: Did Joe Biden win the 2020 presidential election?

Biden got 306 electoral votes. Trump got 232. Congress certified it on January 6th, 2021. The courts threw out every single legal challenge Trump and his allies brought.

It’s a matter of historical fact. Not opinion. Fact.

So when Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, asked Kevin Warsh — Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Reserve — whether Biden won in 2020, you’d expect a pretty quick answer.

That’s not what happened.

Warsh tried to dodge by saying the Fed needs to stay out of politics. Warren pushed back: she wasn’t asking about monetary policy, she was asking a factual question about American history.

Warsh’s response? “I believe that this body certified that election many years ago.”

Warren made clear that wasn’t the question. She asked again whether Trump lost in 2020.

Warsh changed the subject to inflation.

This is the person Trump wants running the Federal Reserve. A man who can’t or won’t acknowledge a documented historical fact in a Senate confirmation hearing.

And the Warsh hearing raised other red flags too. His financial disclosure ran 69 pages and reported assets somewhere between $131 million and $209 million. But it didn’t include information on whether he holds stock in banks, which Federal Reserve Act rules say board members can’t do.

Warren also pressed him on a fund in his portfolio worth more than $50 million, asking whether it has any ties to Trump-affiliated companies, Chinese-controlled entities, or financing vehicles connected to Jeffrey Epstein. That last part matters: Warsh’s name appeared on guest lists for a pair of gatherings that Epstein apparently attended, according to Justice Department emails.

Warsh’s answers were evasive throughout. Warren called him “quite adorable” after one non-answer. It was not a compliment.

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GOP Senate Leader Facing Full MAGA Revolt

The MAGA movement is now eating one of its own.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is under fire this week after Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna announced that he’s no longer pushing the SAVE Act — a voter ID bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and impose stricter photo ID requirements for federal elections.

The bill already failed to move forward in March, falling seven votes short of the 60-vote threshold it needed to break a filibuster.

MAGA world did not take the news well.

Right-wing commentator Rogan O’Handley called Thune a “swamp rat” and demanded South Dakota primary him. A Georgia state senator said Thune should be replaced for the “largest blown political trifecta in history.” And a MAGA influencer known as Catturd posted that Thune is “deep state” and should be fired from leadership immediately.

None of this is really about voter ID, though.

The underlying pressure is about the filibuster. Trump’s been demanding Republicans eliminate it so they can pass the SAVE Act and other legislation with a simple majority. Thune’s refused. He’s told reporters that nuking the filibuster is “way more complicated” than it sounds and that he’s not going to do it.

An anonymous Republican senator put it bluntly to Punchbowl News: “John is playing footsie with MAGA on the SAVE Act. Nothing he does will ever satisfy them. Why are we carrying on with this charade?”

That’s a remarkable thing for a sitting senator to say about their own leader. It tells you something about how dysfunctional the Republican caucus is right now, caught between a president who wants to blow everything up and a Senate leader who knows it’d blow back on them.

MAGA Man Who Threatened No Kings Protesters Hit with Child Porn Charge

This one’s deeply disturbing.

Elijah Millar, a 20-year-old from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was arrested last June after he brandished a gun while confronting protesters at a “No Kings” rally in downtown Nashville. He’d previously been diagnosed with a mental illness that legally prohibited him from possessing firearms. He had one anyway.

Now a federal grand jury has returned a superseding indictment against him, adding two more firearms charges and two counts related to child pornography — including receiving child porn and possessing artwork depicting children in sexual situations.

Earlier reporting by NewsChannel 5 Investigates had already revealed that Millar had a documented fascination with Adolf Hitler and mass murderers, and that he’d decorated several of his firearms to mimic the styles of some notorious killers.

He’s been in federal custody since his arrest and remains there.

This isn’t just a crime story. It’s a reminder of who was showing up armed to peaceful protests, and what some of those people were carrying around in their lives beyond the confrontation.

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Thanks for watching. I’m British Chris. We’ll see you tomorrow.

• Making universal healthcare a key campaign issue

• Selling progressive policies to a swing state that voted for Trump twice

• Trump’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, paid for with cuts to social programs

• Israel’s war in Gaza, which El-Sayed describes as a “genocide”

• El-Sayed’s campaign rally with streamer Hasan Piker

• How Democrats can connect with Trump voters without compromising on policy

Raw America is fully independent — we proudly have no billionaires behind the scenes watering down our coverage and telling us what to cover and what to bury. But independent journalism that only answers to our audience requires financial support from readers and viewers in order to survive. Please consider updating your free Raw America subscription to a paying one. None of this would be possible with you.

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El-Sayed’s Top Issue: Universal Healthcare

El-Sayed brings impressive credentials to the healthcare debate. He rebuilt Detroit’s Health Department after it was shuttered, led Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services, and co-authored a book on Medicare for All. As mentioned in the interview, respected medical journal The Lancet found that the Medicare for All legislation sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would not only save 68,000 lives each year, but would save American taxpayers roughly $150 billion annually.

El-Sayed he argues that the biggest obstacle to universal health care isn’t logistical, but rather political cowardice enabled by corporate money.

He pointed to a familiar Washington pattern: consultants armed with polls convince candidates to chase voters where they already are rather than persuade them toward something better. El-Sayed sees that as a fatal mistake, and he invoked an unlikely role model to make the point.

“The best evidence I can point to, as much as I hate to point to him, is Donald Trump,” El-Sayed said. “When he came down that hideous golden escalator, nobody was talking about immigration, but he kept talking about it and talking about it and talking about it to the point where now he’s using immigration to destroy the Constitution itself.”

El-Sayed believes Democrats need to show the same commitment to healthcare that Trump showed to immigration — relentlessly, unapologetically, in every forum. And he says the reason most Democrats don’t is simple: they’re financially compromised.

“Too often, the people who are willing to fight for health care in the first place are taking money from the companies who benefit from the system as it is,” he said. “I don’t take corporate money. I never have, I never will. I’m the only person running for Senate in Michigan who can say that.”

Selling Universal Healthcare in a State That Voted for Trump in 2024

When asked if he could make the case for universal healthcare in a state that twice voted for Donald Trump in the last twelve years, El-Sayed said he’s already doing it. He described a health care town hall held in Houghton, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — hardly a Democratic stronghold — where 100 people showed up, many of them Trump voters.

“It’s only those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about politics who use this really outdated model of left versus right, Democrat versus Republican,” he said. “Most people don’t think about politics that way, because most people don’t think about politics.”

His pitch to those voters is direct and economically grounded: with every paycheck, before they have any say in the matter, their insurance company takes its cut through premiums — and then, when they actually get sick, they’re hit with a deductible on top of that. Medical debt in America has reached $225 billion, more than the GDP of half the states in the U.S.

He recounted a memorable encounter on the campaign trail with a man who told him bluntly: “I never met a Muslim, and I’ll be honest with you — I don’t like you.” But the man said he was going to vote for El-Sayed anyway.

“He said, ‘I thought you were either dumb or honest. I know what a doctor can make, and you’re out here trying to talk to people like me about giving me health care, and I think you really want me to have healthcare,’” El-Sayed recalled. “I said, ‘Sir, I really want you to have healthcare.’”

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Trump Wants $1.5 Trillion from Social Programs to Fund War. El-Sayed Points Out the Hypocrisy

President Trump proposed $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon, and wants to fund it by enacting even steeper budget cuts to programs that provide healthcare, housing, social services, and disaster assistance to Americans.

El-Sayed drew a sharp contrast between how government spending on domestic programs is treated versus military spending and foreign aid.

“Every single time you come up with one of these programs, some smart legislator comes up to you and says, ‘Well, Doctor, how you gonna pay for that?’” he said. “And the crazy thing is, when you’ve got a general who’s drawing up war plans, or you’ve got a treaty that says we’re just gonna write you a check for $3.5 billion — it doesn’t matter if you’re conducting an apartheid or a genocide with it — nobody actually asks, ‘Hey, General, how you gonna pay for that?’”

He said his role as a senator would be to force that question — to be the voice in the chamber demanding accountability for military expenditure with the same rigor applied to spending on schools and healthcare. He also pushed back on the notion that supporting a foreign government is somehow a senator’s job.

“My job is to advocate for Michigan,” he said. “It’s a crazy thing that somehow people think that their job in the U.S. Senate from you-name-the-state is to advocate for a foreign government.”

He added a personal note: his family immigrated from Egypt, one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid. “I love and revere the Egyptian people just like I love and revere the Jewish people, just like I love and revere people from all over the world. I just don’t pay my taxes so that those people get tanks and bombs.”

El-Sayed Calls Gaza War a Genocide. Here’s Why

El-Sayed didn’t hesitate on using the specific word “genocide” to describe what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza — a major issue for Michiganders in the 2024 presidential election.

“I went to good public schools and a good public university where they taught me that words have meanings, and that usually you should use the words that describe the meanings,” he said. “When you articulate that you want to cleanse people of a certain ethnicity from a place, then proceed to bomb all their infrastructure and their homes and their schools and their hospitals in contravention to international law, and then try to ship them off to other places — having articulated a particular animus for those people as a function of their ethnicity — that meets [the definition of] genocide.”

He acknowledged the political cost of that position. The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) called him “the most dangerous candidate for the U.S.-Israel relationship” and is expected to spend $20 million in the Michigan Senate race to defeat him.

“I honestly wish they’d send me a t-shirt. I’d wear it every day,” El-Sayed remarked. “I’m not afraid of AIPAC.”

His broader argument is that foreign policy and domestic policy are inseparable — that money spent on bombs abroad is money not spent on schools and health care at home — and that voters increasingly understand that connection.

“I’m not willing to give up my dignity and my beliefs and my sense of the truth so that I can have an office where they can tell me what I can and can’t do with the office,” he added.

El-Sayed Defends Rally with Hasan Piker — and Says Politics Is About Connecting with Audiences

El-Sayed recently held a packed campaign rally at the University of Michigan with streamer Hasan Piker, who has an audience of millions, primarily among the Gen Z cohort. Piker has made controversial statements in the past — including expressing more sympathy for Hamas than Israel. El-Sayed rejected calls to disavow Piker and questioned the efficacy of political purity tests.

“If we played that game to its logical conclusion, none of us would ever talk to anybody,” he said. “I just thought that we had gotten past the cancel culture ridiculousness of the early 2020s.”

He pointed out that then-Vice President Kamala Harris invited Piker to stream from the Democratic National Convention in 2024. He also noted that on the very same day he rallied with Piker, he appeared on Fox and Friends — a fact that drew none of the same criticism.

“Fox and Friends and I disagree on a lot more than Hasan and I disagree on,” he said. “Should I not go on them?”

El-Sayed said his calculus is simple: go everywhere, talk to everyone, and trust that the message holds up.

“If Fox and Friends give me a platform, Hassan gives me a platform, or you give me a platform, or Rogan gives me a platform, or Bill Maher — who said some absurd things about people who pray like I do — gives me a platform, I’m going to go there. Because my conversation is with the broader public, and I’m going to go anywhere and talk to everyone who gives me the opportunity.”

El-Sayed’s Message to Michigan’s Trump Voters

Because El-Sayed is a Democrat running in a state that voted for a Republican in the most recent presidential election, connecting with Donald Trump voters in red counties is a must for any Democrat hoping to win a general election. El-Sayed said he approaches his conversation with Trump voters from a place of genuine respect. He argued that most people who voted for Trump did so because they felt they had no better option.

He described a telling exchange with a Trump voter over the Second Amendment. The man challenged El-Sayed, expecting standard Democratic pablum. Instead, El-Sayed engaged him directly, walking through what the Second Amendment was actually designed to protect against — government tyranny — and asking whether that logic extended to nuclear weapons.

“He was like, ‘Okay, okay, fair point,’” El-Sayed recounted. “And after the discussion, he pulled out a $100 check and said, ‘I’m going to support you.’ I was like, ‘Wait — why? We disagreed.’ He said, ‘We disagree on this point, but we agree on a lot more than we disagree on, and the fact that you were willing to debate me and share your perspective tells me that when you get to the halls of power, you’re going to say the same things.’”

For El-Sayed, that exchange captures what he thinks is fundamentally broken about how Democrats have approached these voters — and how to fix it.

“I don’t run away from my positions. I don’t trim my positions to go and earn a vote because I have some stereotype about what somebody else believes,” he said. “Take me or leave me. I want you to know what I believe.”

Raw America Is Committed to Bringing You Real Unfiltered News

El-Sayed’s interview with Raw America comes on the heels of recent interviews with newsmakers like former CNN anchor and current Substack host Jim Acosta, former Biden DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer, former NATO Ambassador Ivo Daalder and others. We’re committed to bringing you perspectives and viewpoints you won’t find in billionaire-owned media outlets.

This kind of hard-hitting independent news is only made possible through the support of paying subscribers. We don’t answer to the billionaire backers or corporate advertisers who regularly muzzle news networks and tell them what they can and can’t say. We answer to you. If that matters, take a moment and become a paying subscriber to Raw America. We genuinely couldn’t do this without you.

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This morning, Tucker Carlson is publicly apologizing for helping put Donald Trump in the White House. Trump’s own team cannot keep his story straight on Iran negotiations, with White House staff scrambling to correct the president’s public statements in real time. The British ambassador scandal is now touching Epstein, Starmer’s government, and Trump himself. And 34 members of Congress are demanding answers about how Palantir and a network of surveillance companies are being used to build what they are calling a mass surveillance ecosystem targeting American citizens. Corporate media is running cover for the war and the administration running it. The FCC chair has made clear what happens to broadcasters that don’t. And the billionaires are buying up whatever newsrooms remain. This is the news they don’t want you sitting with this morning.

Raw America is Raw Story and Really American’s people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. CBS and CNN are both moving under the control of MAGA-aligned billionaires Larry and David Ellison. The FCC chair has threatened to pull broadcast licenses from outlets that don’t run cover for the Iran war. Independent newsrooms are being bought and folded into billionaire portfolios at every level, not just the Washington Post and the LA Times, but local stations and digital outlets you’ve never heard of going quiet one by one. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today is the day.

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Today at 1:30 PM Eastern Time, Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson will be hosting a live conversation with Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Watch on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

Tucker Carlson Says He’s Sorry for Helping Elect Trump

Tucker Carlson went on his podcast Monday and did something that would have been unimaginable two years ago. He apologized.

“I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people,” Carlson told his brother Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter. “It was not intentional, that’s all I’ll say.”

He went further, accepting personal responsibility for Trump’s return to power. “You and I and everyone else who supported him, you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him. We’re implicated in this for sure.” He acknowledged there had been warning signs about Trump’s character that he and others chose to ignore: “Clearly, there were signs of low character. We knew that.”

His brother raised the 25th Amendment on air, saying it was “not crazy to talk about it in this context.”

Trump has responded to Carlson’s criticism in recent days with a series of Truth Social attacks, calling him a “broken man” and a “low IQ person” and grouping him with “Flailing Fools.” Carlson’s son, also named Buckley, recently resigned from his role as deputy press secretary to Vice President JD Vance amid the escalating feud.

A note of context worth keeping in mind: in 2023, documents released through Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News revealed that Carlson had privately written, just two days before January 6, “I hate him passionately.” He privately called the entire first Trump term “a disaster” and described Trump as a “demonic” force, even while publicly championing him to millions of viewers every night.

There’s a long history in this country of propagandists discovering their conscience only after the damage is done. The question isn’t whether Tucker’s sorry now. It’s what we do as a nation with the documented proof that television personalities will knowingly lie to tens of millions of Americans, night after night, because the paycheck is good and the ratings are better. That’s not a personal failing. That’s a business model, and it’s still running.

The apology tour now underway is either genuine reckoning or performance. The audience will have to decide.

Trump Can’t Keep His Story Straight on Iran and His Own Staff Keeps Cleaning it Up

The Washington Post reported Monday that Trump told journalists on Sunday morning that Vance would not travel to Pakistan for Iran negotiations because of security concerns. This directly contradicted what UN Ambassador Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright had already told reporters publicly. White House staff then scrambled behind the scenes to correct the president, telling reporters privately that Vance would in fact lead the delegation to Islamabad.

The next day, Trump told the New York Post that Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner were already in the air and would arrive in Pakistan that night. About ninety minutes later, Vance’s motorcade pulled up to the White House. Staff again had to walk back what the president had just publicly said.

The contradictions go beyond logistics. Trump initially said Iran had agreed to uranium removal and that most of the 15 negotiating points were already settled. When Vance then proposed a 20-year moratorium on enrichment at the April 11 talks, Trump told the New York Post he didn’t like it. He subsequently claimed Iran had agreed to uranium removal again. On the Strait of Hormuz, Trump claimed Iran agreed never to close it, while Iranian officials announced they would close it due to the continued U.S. naval blockade. Trump then claimed the American blockade had already closed it.

On gas prices, Trump told The Hill that his own Energy Secretary was “totally wrong” predicting prices wouldn’t hit $3 a gallon until 2027. A week before, Trump had told a different outlet prices should be “around the same” in November. The current national average is $4.04 a gallon, up 87 cents from a year ago.

The founders put war powers in Article One for a reason. They didn’t want a single person stumbling this country into armed conflict, especially not a person who can’t remember what he said ninety minutes ago. When the commander in chief can’t keep his own policy straight on a nuclear-armed confrontation, that isn’t a communications problem. That’s a constitutional emergency hiding in plain sight, and Congress is letting it happen.

The White House spokeswoman described negotiations as “very fluid and evolving in real-time.” That much, at least, appears to be accurate.

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The British Ambassador Scandal: Epstein, Mandelson, and a Security Vetting Override

Trump attacked British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Truth Social Monday night over the Peter Mandelson affair, writing that Mandelson was “a really bad pick” as UK ambassador to Washington, and somewhat confusingly adding, “Plenty of time to recover, however!”

Here is what actually happened. Starmer appointed Mandelson, a former EU trade chief, as British ambassador to Washington in late 2024. Mandelson failed the standard security vetting process because of his longstanding friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his business ties with China. Officials at the Foreign Office overrode that vetting failure to allow Starmer to proceed with an appointment he had already announced publicly.

Starmer says he did not know the vetting had initially been denied. He fired Mandelson last September after the U.S. House Oversight Committee released documents showing Mandelson had maintained contact with Epstein well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. A second round of Justice Department files alleged Mandelson had passed sensitive government information to Epstein on multiple occasions. That is now the subject of a police investigation in the UK.

This is what an international elite protection racket actually looks like in daylight. Security vetting exists because governments learned the hard way that people who socialize with predators and foreign adversaries shouldn’t be handling state secrets. When that vetting gets overridden and the friendships with Jeffrey Epstein keep surfacing on both sides of the Atlantic, year after year, you’re not looking at isolated bad judgment. You’re looking at a transatlantic club that protects its own across every border it crosses, and the public is expected to keep pretending that’s normal.

Trump’s willingness to publicly pile on carries some irony. Trump himself had a longstanding relationship with Epstein beginning in the late 1980s, believed to have ended over a real estate dispute around 2005. Allegations about the nature of that relationship have followed his administration throughout his second term. Several of his cabinet members, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have also faced scrutiny for maintaining contact with Epstein after claims against him first became public.

34 Members of Congress Say Palantir Is Being Used to Build a Mass Surveillance Ecosystem

Thirty-four members of Congress sent a letter Thursday to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE director Todd Lyons demanding answers about how the administration is using surveillance technology to power its immigration crackdown, including tools built by Palantir, Clearview AI, PenLink, L3Harris, and Paragon Solutions.

The letter states that this suite of tools could be used to “compile, aggregate, and analyze large volumes of personal data and information” about Americans. It demands a response by April 24.

The lawmakers asked specifically about a Palantir-built app called ELITE, short for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, requesting a full accounting of its purpose, its data categories, and how many DHS officials have access to it. Palantir also built ICE’s core law enforcement case management system and the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, which agents use to select deportation cases and track who has been removed.

Congressman Dan Goldman, a lead author of the letter, said the administration has “weaponized” Palantir technology to power its “inhumane mass deportation agenda” and to “surveil American citizens.” The lawmakers also asked whether DHS collects data on people who are “peacefully observing, documenting or protesting immigration enforcement operations,” citing cases in which facial recognition was used to identify U.S. citizens who encountered ICE agents.

Every generation of Americans has had to decide whether to let the government watch everyone all the time. The Church Committee warned us back in the seventies what happens when surveillance tools built to chase foreign threats get turned on citizens at home. Now Peter Thiel’s company is building that same infrastructure on a scale J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t have dreamed of, and they’re renting it to an administration that has openly threatened its political enemies and declared protesters enemies of the state. The Fourth Amendment wasn’t written for comfortable times. It was written for exactly this moment.

Palantir’s government revenue nearly doubled in fiscal year 2025, hitting approximately $1 billion. Its business has exploded since Trump’s second term began. The company’s founder has been closely allied with the administration. And the congressional letter demanding transparency has, so far, received no substantive public response.

This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You Now

Here is the picture we are looking at this morning.

The government is using Palantir and a network of AI-powered surveillance tools to track, target, and deport people at a scale this country has never seen, including American citizens caught in the dragnet. Those same tools are being used, lawmakers allege, to monitor people who are simply watching or filming immigration enforcement in public. The surveillance infrastructure being built right now is not just for immigrants. It is being built for everyone.

At the same time, the billionaires are buying the press. CBS and CNN are heading under the control of the Ellison family, Trump allies whose Defense Secretary has said publicly the sooner David Ellison takes over CNN the better. The FCC chair has threatened to pull broadcast licenses from any outlet that covers the Iran war in ways the administration doesn’t like. And independent newsrooms are being absorbed into billionaire portfolios one by one, not just the Washington Post and LA Times, but local stations and digital outlets across the country going soft or going dark.

This is not a media story. It is a power story. A government building mass surveillance infrastructure needs a press corps willing to report on it. What it is getting instead is a press corps being bought by the people who built it, intimidated by the regulators who protect it, and told to look away.

Raw America was built to look directly at it.

Because of your support, we have had reporters on the ground at the most important hearings of this political era. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool and going after the interviews that hold power accountable, bringing them directly to you, unfiltered and unbought.

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This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.

STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Trump Demands $1.5 Trillion for Pentagon at Expense of Healthcare and Housing. In a new column, The Guardian’s Steven Greenhouse elaborated on President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion budget request for Pentagon funding, and how he proposes paying for it. Greenhouse noted that the war in Iran has already caused gas prices to skyrocket in excess of $4 a gallon due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and now Trump risks causing even more stress on the finances of working-class Americans by targeting social welfare programs they rely on. According to Greenhouse, Trump’s proposed cuts also hit “medical research, job training, home heating assistance, environmental protection and disaster relief after hurricanes.”

• Ketanji Brown Jackson Tears into Supreme Court Conservatives. The Supreme Court recently ruled 7-2 in favor of the Washington D.C. Metro Police Department in a case over a 2023 stop in which a driver claimed police violated his 4th Amendment rights. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor were the only dissenters. In her dissent, Jackson laid into her conservative colleagues for stepping in to wordsmith the lower court’s analysis of the case, and for the continued erosion of the Fourth Amendment under the Roberts Court.

• Republicans Fight to Kick Each Other Out of Congress. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) recently filed a resolution to expel Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) from the House of Representatives, accusing him of sexual misconduct. Mace explained she was filing the resolution because “the swamp has protected Cory Mills for far too long and we are done letting it slide.” Mace’s resolution comes on the heels of Mills filing his own expulsion resolution against Mace, citing an incident from earlier this year when she launched into a profanity-laced tirade at airport security in Charleston, South Carolina.

• The SAVE Act Dies in the Senate. The SAVE Act — Republicans’ attempt to disenfranchise millions of voters ahead of this fall’s midterm elections — failed to pass the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. The bill would have required voters provide proof of citizenship in order to be added to their state’s voter rolls. The bill may also have caused voter registration problems for married women who changed their last name, as it requires a voter’s eligibility be based on citizenship documents like their birth certificate.

• House Republican Shrugs Off FBI Director’s Alleged Drinking Problem. In the wake of an explosive report in the Atlantic about FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged bouts of excessive drinking, Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) dismissed Americans’ concerns. In an interview with journalist Pablo Manriquez, McCormick said Patel was “executing his job brilliantly” and that “as long as it doesn’t affect his job in a negative way, I’m cool.” Patel has claimed the allegations in the story are false and is suing the Atlantic for $250 million.

Raw America is bringing you on-the-ground coverage of a detention center five miles from the border wall. Meanwhile, dozens of members of Congress have been accused of sexual misconduct, a swing state is battling with Trump over voter data, and one Republican wants to expel another House Republican over a fight with airport security. Let’s get into it.

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28 Members of Congress Have Been Accused of Sexual Misconduct

The House Ethics Committee just released something that should be required reading for every voter in America.

It’s a list. Twenty-eight investigations into members of Congress spanning several decades, all involving allegations of sexual misconduct. The committee released it as two high-profile cases forced the issue back into the spotlight.

The list includes names from both parties. Matt Gaetz is on it. So are Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales, both of whom resigned in recent weeks rather than face expulsion votes. Gonzales admitted to texting sexually explicit messages to a married former aide who later died by suicide.

The committee’s own statement acknowledged there are probably cases that were never reported at all. That’s the part that should haunt people.

It’s a documented record of how long this has been going on and how many times the institution chose to protect itself instead of the people working inside it.

Raw America Reports from an ICE Detention Center

Otay Mesa Detention Center has been at the heart of the controversy at the southern border. Located just five miles from the border wall, the facility has been the site of numerous allegations of human rights abuses: malnutrition, overcrowding, sickness, inconsistent access to legal representation. That’s why we sent Luke De Cresce, our Capitol Hill reporter, to see what the situation looks like on the ground.

In February, Rep. Juan Vargas and Sen. Alex Padilla were both denied entry when they tried to investigate. The denial came from the top brass of the Department of Homeland Security, no less.

Yes. The administration is blocking federal representatives from investigating a prison in their own district.

Every Sunday, advocacy groups from San Diego County hold a vigil on the street outside the facility. The weekly demonstrations raise awareness, funds, and public support for the detainees at Otay Mesa. When Kristi Noem showed up just before she got fired, the protesters were there to disrupt her press conference.

Immigration advocates say Otay Mesa detainees are shipped between similar centers across the country with little notice, keeping their whereabouts hidden from family members. And, if they are ultimately deported, it’s sometimes to a country they have no ties to. Most recently, a group of detained migrants from South America wound up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Sound ludicrous? That’s part of the issue. The system isolates and exiles detainees (many of whom have no prior criminal record) with no oversight, while the administration denies any wrongdoing.

Yet, the protests at Otay Mesa show us there is still something that can be done. The protesters can’t immediately stop the detentions, but they make the problem impossible to ignore, for both the general public and the administration.

Raw America is proud to bring you on-the-ground coverage of news both in the Capitol and across the U.S. But this kind of reporting doesn’t happen without the support of paying subscribers. We don’t have a billionaire backer — we have you. Click the button below to support Raw America’s independent journalism.

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Michigan Stands Up to Trump’s DOJ

The Trump Justice Department sent a letter to Wayne County, Michigan, demanding ballots, ballot receipts, and envelopes from the 2024 election. Wayne County is home to Detroit, which is heavily Democratic. That’s not a coincidence.

Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson didn’t comply. They published the DOJ’s letter and their reply, and they came out swinging, saying the request was “as absurd as it is baseless.” Nessel called the inquiry a “circus,” and said her office is “prepared to protect the people’s right to vote.”

This is part of a broader pattern. The Trump administration is still relitigating 2020 while claiming to investigate 2024. FBI Director Kash Patel went on Fox News and said arrests over alleged 2020 election fraud are “coming soon.” The DOJ has sued 29 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to hand over voter registration data.

The DOJ claims its staffers found 350,000 dead people on the voter rolls after reviewing 60 million records. What they didn’t provide is any evidence that votes were actually cast in those names.

And the courts are pushing back. Judges have ruled against the DOJ’s election records demands in Rhode Island, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Oregon. The administration is losing in court. But losing in court doesn’t mean it stops trying, and other states need to be watching Michigan’s example closely.

House Republicans Devolve Into Circular Firing Squad Right Now

Republican Cory Mills is drafting an expulsion resolution against Republican Nancy Mace. Yes, seriously.

Mills is facing his own Ethics Committee investigation over allegations of stolen valor, federal contract conflicts of interest, and alleged violence against women. Apparently, his strategy is to go on offense.

His draft resolution reportedly focuses on an airport incident where Mace berated TSA officers and security personnel, repeatedly calling employees “f—ing incompetent” according to an officer’s report from last October.

Mace, who’s running for governor of South Carolina and is herself under Ethics investigation, didn’t take it quietly. She went straight to X and listed Mills’ alleged misconduct right back at him: the stolen valor claims, the domestic violence allegations, the restraining order.

What’s happening in the House isn’t just chaotic. The ethics guardrails that were always loosely enforced are disintegrating in real time, and members are using expulsion threats as political weapons as much as accountability tools. The result is an institution that can barely govern itself, let alone the country.

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I’m British Chris, for Raw America. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you tomorrow.

STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Trump Cabinet Secretary Resigns Amid Numerous Scandals. U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned from her role on Monday amid a flurry of allegations involving her and husband. Chavez-DeRemer has been battling accusations of using taxpayer resources to go on personal vacations and allegedly having an affair with a member of her security team. Her husband, Shawn, was accused by two female employees of sexual assault, and has been banned from the Labor Department building. Deputy Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling will serve as acting labor secretary until President Donald Trump officially nominates a replacement.

• The Onion Launches New Effort to Take Over InfoWars. Ben Collins — who is CEO of the satirical website The Onion — announced Monday that his company is planning a new effort to take over far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars website. The new deal would involve The Onion paying $81,000 per month to Gregory Milligan, who is the manager of InfoWars’ bankruptcy. The Onion was prepped to assume control over InfoWars in 2024, though Jones argued that the acquisition had been marred by collusion. A judge ultimately blocked the first attempted takeover.

• Republican Introduces Bill to Strip Citizenship Away from Members of Leftist Groups. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) on Monday introduced the MAMDANI (Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists) Act, which would revoke citizenship for any naturalized U.S. citizen who is a member of groups like Democratic Socialists of America and any of their local affiliates. Roy rolled out his bill with a statement accusing the U.S. government of “mass-importing the third world” and “hostile ideologies fundamentally opposed to American values.”

• Virginia Republicans Mount Last-Ditch Effort to Stop Redistricting Measure. Virginians will head to the polls on Tuesday to vote on whether to allow a temporary new redistricting map that would create as many as four new Democratic-leaning U.S. House seats. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has already filed a lawsuit challenging voter identification in Fairfax County, which is a predominantly Democratic population center with a large immigrant population. The RNC is alleging that the county’s Driver Privilege Cards issued to immigrants are a “loophole” that would “allow unqualified, non-citizen individuals to vote in elections.” However, Fairfax County already requires voters with DPCs to present another form of ID in order to be added to voter rolls.

• Trump Talks About White House Ballroom Just as Much as Affordability. A new report delves into Trump’s obsession with his proposed $400 million White House ballroom. According to the Washington Post, Trump discussed the ballroom roughly one out of every three days in 2026, which is approximately as much as he’s talked about health insurance and affordability. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon — an appointee of George W. Bush — has paused construction on the ballroom for now, saying Congressional approval is required before the building can be constructed.

This morning, Susie Wiles has called an emergency summit of top Republican operatives as Trump’s approval rating hits 37 percent. ICE’s own numbers reveal that 400 people a day are being arrested with no criminal record, more than Trump’s entire first term averaged. Rahm Emanuel just went on Bill Maher and said the U.S. should stop treating Israel as a special case, in what looks a lot like a 2028 trial balloon. And oil prices are back up, markets are falling, and the Iran ceasefire may have just collapsed after the U.S. fired on an Iranian vessel in the Gulf of Oman overnight. Corporate media is softening its coverage of all of it. The FCC chair has made clear what happens to outlets that don’t. And the Ellisons are about to own CBS and CNN. This is what it looks like when independent journalism matters.

Raw America is Raw Story and Really American’s people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. CBS and CNN are both about to land under the control of MAGA-aligned billionaires Larry and David Ellison. The FCC chair has threatened broadcast licenses from any outlet that doesn’t run cover for the Iran war. And independent newsrooms are being bought and folded into billionaire portfolios at every level, not just the Washington Post and the LA Times, but local stations and digital outlets you rely on every day. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today is the day.

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The White House Just Hit the Panic Button on the Midterms

Susie Wiles, Trump’s White House chief of staff and former campaign manager, has summoned dozens of top Republican operatives from across the country to a closed-door summit in Washington this Monday. Sources familiar with the plans described it to reporters as part of a wider push to “intensify preparations” for what insiders are already calling a “challenging midterm cycle.”

The urgency is not hard to explain. Trump’s approval rating now sits at 37 percent. Two-thirds of voters hold a negative view of his second term. The Silver Bulletin forecasting platform has Republicans at nearly a six-point disadvantage heading into November, with Democrats on track to potentially take both the House and the Senate if current patterns hold.

When a sitting White House chief of staff is pulling operatives into a war room eighteen months out from an election, that’s the sound of people who know the floor is tilting underneath them. The Founders built the midterms as the one reliable check the people hold against a runaway executive, and Republican operatives clearly understand that check is still working.

What has driven those numbers down? The Epstein files handling. The immigration crackdown. Tariff-driven economic turbulence. An unpopular war in Iran that has sent gas prices to levels not seen since 1967. And in just the past week, a public meltdown targeting the Pope and a deleted AI image of himself as Jesus Christ that drew denunciations from his own religious base.

This is the second such GOP strategy session since February. The pattern tells you everything about where Republican leadership thinks things stand heading into the fall.

ICE’s Own Numbers Show 400 People a Day Arrested with No Criminal Record

The outgoing head of ICE went before a congressional subcommittee last week and, in the course of asking for $10 billion in additional funding, revealed a number that his own boss probably wishes had stayed out of the record.

Todd Lyons told lawmakers that ICE has arrested nearly 457,000 people since January 20, 2025. He said that more than 281,000 of those had been flagged as having “criminal histories.” That leaves roughly 176,000 people with no criminal record whatsoever, which works out to approximately 405 arrests per day of people who had done nothing wrong under any law.

That 405-per-day figure for people with no record actually exceeds the average daily arrest rate for everyone, criminal history or not, across all four years of Trump’s first term.

The 281,000 “criminal histories” number also deserves scrutiny. ICE includes in that category immigration-only offenses such as unlawful entry, traffic violations, and charges that were filed but never resulted in a conviction. The Daily Beast previously revealed, citing leaked ICE data, that close to three out of every four people held by the agency carried no criminal conviction, and only one in twenty had been convicted of a violent offense.

Every authoritarian turn in American history has started with the same move. Round up people who haven’t broken any law that matters, call them dangerous, and dare the courts to stop you. The Palmer Raids. Japanese internment. McCarthy’s lists. That’s not rhetoric, that’s the record, and we’re watching the next chapter get written in real time with our tax dollars.

Trump has spent two years describing the people in his dragnet as the “worst of the worst.” His own agency’s testimony to Congress tells a very different story.

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Rahm Emanuel Just Said the Things Democrats Aren’t Supposed to Say About Israel

Rahm Emanuel appeared on Bill Maher’s show this weekend and said something that landed like a live grenade in Washington’s most carefully managed policy conversation.

“Israel’s a very wealthy nation,” Emanuel said. “There should be no more taxpayer support for what they want to do, and they get the same deal that any one of our allies does.” He added that “the United States should never spill any blood for Israel’s security.”

To be clear about who is saying this: Emanuel is a former U.S. congressman, Barack Obama’s first White House chief of staff, mayor of Chicago, and former ambassador to Japan. He is also widely understood to be testing the waters for a 2028 presidential run. These are not the words of a backbencher. They are, by any reasonable read, message development.

His framing is not anti-alliance, but anti-special treatment. Israel gets the Britain deal or the Japan deal, not a category of its own. Coming from a Jewish Democrat with deep establishment credentials, that lands differently than the same line coming from the party’s left wing.

George Washington used his farewell address to warn the country against what he called “passionate attachments” to any foreign nation, because attachments like that bend American policy toward another country’s interests over our own. For two generations, saying that plainly about Israel inside Democratic politics has been a career-ending offense. Rahm Emanuel just said it on cable, and he said it because he’s betting the ground has moved under the party’s feet.

He is not alone in moving away from subsidizing Netanyahu. More than three dozen Senate Democrats recently backed Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block arms sales to Israel, a development that would have been nearly unthinkable a few years ago. Axios described Israel’s standing with congressional Democrats as hitting a new low. Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, and Josh Shapiro have each staked out varying positions in this shifting terrain, with Ocasio-Cortez going furthest by opposing all military aid including defensive systems.

Emanuel is trying to occupy a new Democratic lane, tougher-sounding, more transactional, less ideological. Whether that message lands with Democratic voters exhausted by war and chaos is what he seems to be finding out.

The Ceasefire Is Over. Oil Just Surged 7.5 Percent.

The Iran ceasefire may be finished.

Late Sunday, Iran’s military accused the United States of breaking the ceasefire after the destroyer USS Spruance fired on an Iranian-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman that tried to evade the U.S. naval blockade. Iran vowed to respond.

Markets reacted immediately. America’s benchmark oil contract, West Texas Intermediate, surged 7.5 percent to $90.17 a barrel by Sunday evening. International benchmark Brent North Sea crude gained 6.5 percent to $96.27 a barrel. Both moved on the news within hours.

Every American war of the last half century has turned on an incident somebody found politically useful. The Gulf of Tonkin. The incubator babies story. Iraqi yellowcake. Now there’s a shot fired at a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman, oil’s up seven and a half percent overnight, and a war that couldn’t be ended by diplomacy may now get extended by a single engagement. It’s always worth asking who profits when a ceasefire falls apart.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas normally flows, has been virtually closed since the war began eight weeks ago. The ceasefire had offered a brief window of hope that shipping might resume. That window now appears to be closing.

Iran has said it will not participate in the next round of negotiations the U.S. had been pressing to begin before the ceasefire expiration date. The IEA director warned last week that Europe has roughly six weeks of jet fuel remaining if the Strait does not reopen. And there are growing fears about a downstream fertilizer shortage, as one of the vital commodities that normally transits the Strait remains largely blocked, with serious implications for global food security.

This war entered its eighth week this morning. The peace talks meant to end it may have just collapsed over a shot fired at a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman.

This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You

Let’s be direct.

The government is threatening broadcast licenses from outlets that won’t run cover for this war. The Ellisons are buying CBS and CNN. And newsrooms that once asked hard questions are being absorbed, one by one, into portfolios owned by people with direct financial ties to the people they’re supposed to be covering.

Raw America was built to be the thing that doesn’t get bought.

Because of your support, we have had reporters on the ground at the most important hearings of this political moment. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool and going directly after the interviews that matter, bringing them to you unfiltered and unbought.

That coverage, coverage that challenges power, refuses to sell wars, and won’t propagandize for the Ellisons, requires your support. We have no hedge fund, no billionaire backer. We answer to our readers and no one else. If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, today is the day.

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This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.

STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Kash Patel Sues The Atlantic Over Report on Alleged Drinking Habit. FBI Director Kash Patel is now suing The Atlantic magazine. Patel said in his lawsuit that he wanted compensation for “false and obviously fabricated” claims in a recent story in which unnamed sources confided to the outlet that he had frequent bouts of excessive drinking that led to multiple absences, jeopardizing “time-sensitive decisions” that required his input. In one of the 17 allegations, FBI personnel reportedly requested “breaching equipment” as they had been unable to reach a presumably intoxicated Patel behind locked doors.

• Bishop of Palm Beach Issues Direct Rebuke of Trump. On Sunday, the Bishop of Palm Beach — whose diocese is just 13 miles from Mar-a-Lago — projected a statement in front of his congregation that read that the diocese “stands firm with our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, and strongly rejects the disrespectful and violent attacks that Donald J. Trump has directed against the Holy Father.” He went on to call Trump’s attacks “a grave violation of the religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.” His remarks come after Trump has repeatedly assailed Pope Leo XIV, calling him “weak” and “terrible” after the pope criticized his war in Iran.

• BBC Reveals Strong Evidence of Insider Trading at White House. A new investigation by the BBC has honed in on five specific instances of perfectly timed bets on White House policy that resulted in mystery bettors profiting handsomely from Trump’s decisions. In one example, Trump told CBS News the Iran war was “very complete, pretty much,” but 47 minutes before the CBS reporter tweeted about the interview happening, one bettor made a significant bet on falling oil prices. After the interview was published, the bettor made millions of dollars. Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in the prediction market Polymarket and sits on its advisory board. He is also an advisor to prediction market Kalshi.

• Trump DOJ Building New Revenge Prosecution with Trump-Friendly Judge. According to the New York Times, the Department of Justice has now hired former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova, who worked in the Reagan administration, to lead an investigation into alleged violations of Trump’s constitutional rights during former President Joe Biden’s administration. Trump is attempting to connect the dots between the 2016 Russian election interference inquiry and former DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith’s two criminal investigations into both the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago as one grand plot to attack him. The investigation is reportedly relying on information obtained via a grand jury convened in Fort Pierce, Florida, where Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (who threw out the classified documents indictment) is the only federal judge, is overseeing the process.

• Trump’s Energy Secretary Admits Gas Prices Will Stay High for Remainder of 2026. During a recent interview with CNN, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told host Jake Tapper that gas prices may not dip back below $3 a gallon until 2027. The current national average for a gallon of gas in excess of $4, according to AAA. Gas prices were just $3.05 a gallon when Trump took office in January of 2025. Gas prices have been steadily rising since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in March. While Trump officials have been justifying the price spike by pointing to gas prices during the Biden administration, those were a result of demand in the wake of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and dropped back down below $3 a gallon in a matter of months.

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, reflecting on a genuinely remarkable week for independent media.

I scored an exclusive sit-down with Jim Acosta this week: the former CNN chief White House correspondent and Trump antagonist who’s built one of the most successful Substacks in the country. I’ll also upd…

Read more

Good morning.

The director of the FBI just had a meltdown because he thought he was fired — and he wasn’t, but multiple officials wish he were. The administration deported 174 people who were legally protected from deportation under DACA. A court interpreter who has lived in Texas for 35 years is sitting in a detention cell, possibly about to be sent to a country she has never been to. And the largest insider trading scandal in American political history may be unfolding in plain sight — with hundreds of millions of dollars in suspiciously timed bets placed moments before major war announcements — and the agency that is supposed to regulate it has exactly one commissioner, appointed by Trump. Corporate media is not asking hard questions about any of this. The FCC chair has made clear what happens when they do. And the Ellisons just won their bid to own both CBS and CNN. This is what independent journalism looks like today.

Raw America is Raw Story and Really American’s people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. MAGA-aligned billionaires Larry and David Ellison have now won the bidding war for CNN’s parent company, putting them on track to control CBS, CNN, HBO, and dozens of other outlets under one roof. The FCC chair has threatened to pull broadcast licenses from outlets that don’t run cover for the Iran war. This is happening right now. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today is the day.

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THE FBI DIRECTOR THOUGHT HE WAS FIRED. HE WASN’T. EVERYONE WISHES HE HAD BEEN.

On the afternoon of Friday, April 10, FBI Director Kash Patel struggled to log into an internal computer system. He immediately became convinced he had been fired, and spent the next several hours frantically calling aides and allies to announce his termination. Nine people familiar with the outreach described it to reporters. Two of them used the phrase “freak-out.” The White House fielded calls from the FBI and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge. The answer was still Patel. It had been a technical error.

This might be darkly funny if Patel were not in charge of an agency of 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. It would also be less alarming if what follows were not an account of a man that dozens of current and former officials describe as erratic, frequently absent, and — according to multiple accounts — regularly drinking to the point of obvious intoxication in Washington bars and Las Vegas clubs while in the company of administration staff.

Multiple officials told reporters that Patel is known to drink to excess at a private Washington club called Ned’s and at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings had to be rescheduled because of his alcohol-fueled nights. Members of his security detail have had difficulty waking him on multiple occasions. A request was made last year for “breaching equipment” — normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams — because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors. The DOJ’s own ethics handbook prohibits employees from habitually using alcohol to excess and warns that off-duty drinking can make officials vulnerable to exploitation by foreign adversaries.

When Trump launched his war with Iran, Patel fired members of a counterintelligence squad that had focused, in part, on Iran. He said the agents had ethics violations. Multiple officials say the firings were rushed and have left the country shorthanded at a critical moment. “The instinctive level of muscle memory or discernment that is necessary to identify and counter a terror attack is missing,” one former senior intelligence official told reporters.

Patel has reportedly been effective at one thing: purging agents and staff he views as insufficiently loyal to Trump, and using polygraph sessions to identify anyone who has said anything critical of either himself or the president. The White House says he is doing a fine job. One FBI official put it more directly: “We don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”

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174 DREAMERS DEPORTED. DACA PROTECTIONS IGNORED.

The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has confirmed in a letter to Congress that ICE deported 174 people who were in the process of renewing their DACA protections in the first nine months of Trump’s second term. Another 270 DACA recipients were arrested during that same period.

DACA — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — was established in 2012 to protect people brought to the United States as children. There are roughly 533,000 active recipients. ICE’s own letter acknowledges the deportations. DHS says most of those arrested had criminal records. Advocates say that is not consistent with what they are seeing on the ground.

“Daca does not confer any form of legal status in this country,” a DHS spokesperson said. “Any illegal alien who is a Daca recipient may be subject to arrest and deportation.”

These are people who grew up in the United States. Many have never known another country. One hundred and seventy-four of them have now been sent to one.

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THE ONLY PUNJABI COURT INTERPRETER IN TEXAS IS IN AN ICE DETENTION CELL

Meenu Batra has lived in south Texas for 35 years. She fled anti-Sikh pogroms in India in 1991, raised four children here, and became the only licensed Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu court interpreter in the state of Texas. In 2000, an immigration judge granted her legal protection, concluding that she faced likely persecution if returned to India.

Last month, ICE agents stopped her at the airport in Harlingen, put her in handcuffs, and transferred her to a detention facility in Raymondville. She has been held there for a month without explanation. Her lawyer says the government has not told them where they plan to send her, and because the government has not reopened her immigration case, they cannot legally send her back to India — which her attorney says means they may be planning to ship her to a third country she has never set foot in.

“It feels bizarre,” Batra said by phone from detention. “I don’t know how else to put it. Here I am just staring at the wall wondering what exactly I’m doing here.”

She added that she has been helping other detained women understand how to request attorneys and make confidential phone calls, because her fluency in English and knowledge of immigration law make her one of the most informed people in the facility. ICE agents, she said, forced her to pose for photos with her hands behind her back to give the impression she was still handcuffed, and told her the photos were “for social media.”

“This made me feel humiliated and treated like a criminal,” she said.

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HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN SUSPICIOUS BETS PRECEDED MAJOR WAR ANNOUNCEMENTS. ONE REGULATOR IS WATCHING.

The pattern of suspicious trading around Trump’s Iran war announcements is becoming impossible to ignore.

Sixteen betting accounts on the prediction market Polymarket each pocketed more than $100,000 by accurately predicting the precise date of the U.S. strikes on Iran the night before they happened. A single account called “Magamyman” made more than $553,000 by betting that Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei would be “removed” from power — moments before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. On April 7, at least 50 Polymarket accounts bet that the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire hours before Trump announced it on Truth Social — the same day Trump had said “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not open the Strait of Hormuz.

The oil futures market tells the same story. On March 23, traders placed $580 million in oil futures bets just 15 minutes before Trump posted that Iran talks were going “productively,” triggering a price drop. On April 7, traders placed $950 million in oil futures bets hours before the ceasefire announcement. Both times, the bets paid off.

“Not only the timing, but the amount of these bets makes it look very likely that someone had insider knowledge,” said one public interest attorney who has filed a formal complaint with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Here is the problem: the CFTC currently has exactly one commissioner. Trump appointed him at the end of 2025, and he has described himself as friendly toward prediction markets. The agency responsible for investigating these trades has been reduced to a single person installed by the administration that would be implicated in an investigation.

No one has been charged. The administration denies wrongdoing. The trades are still sitting there, time-stamped, on the public ledger.

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THIS IS WHY RAW AMERICA EXISTS — AND WHY WE NEED YOU TODAY

Let’s be straight with you.

We are behind on our fundraising goals. And the moment we are in could not demand more from independent journalism.

The government is threatening broadcast licenses from outlets that won’t cheerfully cover this war. The Ellisons just won their bid to own both CBS News and CNN. Newsrooms from coast to coast are being absorbed into billionaire portfolios — not just the Washington Post and the LA Times, but local stations and digital outlets you’ve never heard of, one by one, going dark or going soft.

Raw America was built for this. Because of your support, we have had reporters on the ground at the most critical hearings of this political era. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool. We are going after the interviews that hold power accountable and bringing them directly to you, unfiltered and unbought.

That coverage — coverage that challenges power, refuses to sell wars, and won’t propagandize for the Ellisons — requires your support. We have no hedge fund. We have no billionaire pulling our strings. We answer to our readers, and only our readers.

If just 5% of the people reading this who are still free subscribers became paid subscribers today, we would completely fund our 2026 expansion plans. That is not a metaphor. That is the math. Being independent means our readers are what makes this possible.

If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, this is the moment. Not later. Today.

Stay vigilant. Stay Strong.

John, Justin and The Really American Team

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STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED

• Democrats just won another special election — and the House majority is now on a knife’s edge. Progressive Democrat Analilia Mejia won New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District Thursday night by roughly 20 points, continuing a pattern in which Democrats have overperformed their 2024 margins by an average of 11 points in every special election so far this year. The win leaves Republicans with a working majority of just 217-214-1 in the House, barely functional, particularly with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie routinely voting against his own party. A war powers resolution vote this week fell one vote short. If Mejia had already been seated, the outcome could have gone the other way.

• Trump’s own voters don’t believe him about the Iran war. A focus group of 13 Georgia voters who all supported Trump in 2024 was conducted this week. Not a single participant said they would describe the military action in Iran as going well, despite Trump’s claims that the war is nearly over. When asked how the conflict made them feel, participants used words like “afraid,” “angry,” “concerned,” “sad,” and “despair.” Twelve of the 13 said they are more anxious about the economy now than before Trump took office, with rising prices as their primary concern.

• Europe may have six weeks of jet fuel left. The head of the International Energy Agency warned this week that Europe has “maybe six weeks” of jet fuel supplies remaining and called it the global economy’s “largest energy crisis.” Jet fuel prices have roughly doubled since the war began, and airlines including KLM, easyJet, and Lufthansa are already cutting flights and raising fees, with more cancellations expected if the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t reopen soon. The peak summer travel season is weeks away.

• Russia hammered Ukraine with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles — while the world was looking elsewhere. Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure this week, killing at least 16 people across Kyiv, Odesa, and Dnipro with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles in a strike that stretched for hours. Ukraine has now lost roughly 20 percent of its territory to Russian occupation, and the war continues with almost no American diplomatic attention while the administration remains focused on Iran.

• A prediction market trader made $300,000 betting on Biden pardons — moments before they happened. The insider trading story goes further than previously reported. In the final hours of Biden’s presidency, an anonymous trader placed lucrative bets on who would be pardoned even as the betting odds were nearly zero — and walked away with more than $300,000. The pattern of suspiciously timed prediction market activity now spans multiple administrations, multiple announcements, and hundreds of millions of dollars — and the regulatory agency meant to investigate it remains a one-person operation.

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You’re here because you keep caring, and I don’t take that for granted. Not for a single day.

This is an exhausting moment to follow the news. The Iran war. The Epstein cover-up. The wholesale destruction of the nation’s leading media outlets by craven billionaires.

Twenty-two years ago, I founded Raw Story. Last year, I took a break. Then something happened that I couldn’t shake.

Renée Nicole Goode and Alex Pretti were executed by ICE.

Alex was trying to help a woman being pepper-sprayed. Trump’s thugs shot him eleven times on American soil. The regime called him a terrorist and corporate media amplified the lie.

I sat with that. The grief of it. The rage of it. The particular sadness of a monstrous act being swept away like just another news story.

If the billionaires with the biggest platforms weren’t going to call a state-sponsored execution what it was, someone who knew how to call a lie a lie had to build a new platform.

That’s why Raw America exists: as a direct response to what happened to Renée and Alex. And every other person executed by ICE whose story got buried by the corporate press.

In January of this year, I launched Raw America believing that if I built something honest, people like you would show up. You did.

In late March, I went live with Miles Taylor, the man who was Anonymous, the senior Trump official who blew the whistle on the first administration. He sat down with us. Not CNN. Not MSNBC. A two-month-old publication that exists entirely because of readers like you.

Already, we have a reporter on Capitol Hill. We’ve talked to generals. We’ve covered the Trump Epstein War, the conflict this administration launched while working overtime to keep Jeffrey Epstein’s files buried.

We’ve reported on the billionaire capture of the American press: Bezos gutting the Post, CNN falling into the arms of David Ellison, whose father Larry is one of Trump’s closest oligarch donors.

We broke news as if we’d been doing this for a decade. Because of you.

None of that is possible without your support. Not the Capitol Hill reporter. Not Miles Taylor. None of it. Raw America answers to no one but readers. That’s not a slogan: it’s the only reason we can do what we do.

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P.S. I think about Renée Goode and Alex Pretti more than I can express. Their stories are part of why this publication exists. The fact that you're still here, still reading, still refusing to look away honors what happened to them. If you can support this work, please do. If you can't right now, just keep reading. We're not going anywhere.

I need to be straight with you today.

CBS News shut down its flagship radio network — once home to legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow — as part of its downsizing operation since the network was taken over by a billionaire ally of President Donald Trump. CBS Radio provided news to about 700 affiliated stations around the country.

Now it’s gone.

Not because the news business is slow. Not because there are fewer stories to tell. Because David Ellison, the billionaire who bought CBS, is remaking it in his own image. Trump lackey Bari Weiss just laid off dozens more journalists. And CNN is likely next, with Ellison closing in on the entire Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio — including TNT, Discovery and HBO.

This is not a media story. This is a democracy story. And it’s happening right now, while a war is killing American service members and nobody at the major networks is asking the questions that need to be asked.

That’s why I’m writing to you. Raw America needs your support. Here’s why I want you to consider supporting out independent media today.

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This is what’s happening to your media.

In mid March, FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from any network that covers this war in ways the administration dislikes. Trump told reporters that honest war coverage is “pretty criminal” and that outlets could be “in serious jeopardy.” The president of the United States floated criminal prosecution as a weapon against the free press.

Meanwhile, a former Newsmax news director was just installed at Voice of America, the day after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop dismantling it. VOA was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda.

Then the FBI admitted under oath in late March that it is purchasing your location data without a warrant, using commercial data brokers to get around the Fourth Amendment entirely.

This is the environment Raw America is operating in every single day.

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Here’s what Raw America is doing about it.

I founded Raw Story in 2004 because I believed someone had to cover the raw truths that the mainstream press was avoiding. I came back to build Raw America because what’s happening now is worse. The billionaires aren’t just ignoring the stories anymore. They’re buying the newsrooms and killing them.

To fight back, in late March Raw America hired a reporter in Washington to cover the hearings that matter, the votes the networks ignore, and the protests the cameras aren’t showing you. We published an exclusive interview with a top general from the Iraq War you can’t find anywhere else. We’ve covered the Epstein story with the tenacity it deserves. We’ve been in the room.

We have bold, ambitious plans for 2026. We plan to add more reporters, video coverage across the country, and columns on topics that matter to you. I’m thrilled and excited, as much as I was when I started Raw Story 22 years ago.

But here’s the honest truth.

We’re behind on our fundraising goals.

Not because the work isn’t resonating. The response from readers tells me it is. We’re behind because we don’t have David Ellison writing us a check. We don’t have a billionaire backer who can cover the gap.

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Why this moment is different.

The Iran war has killed 13 American service members. Oil has surged past $111 a barrel. The administration approved Israeli strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure and then lied about it publicly. Trump’s Director of the National Counter terrorism Center resigned in protest and wrote that the war was built on a lie.

Corporate media barely covered it.

These are the stories that matter. These are the stories that the networks — now owned by people with a stake in this administration’s success — are softening, burying, or ignoring entirely.

Raw America was built for this fight. We answer to our subscribers and nobody else. We don’t sell wars. We don’t run cover for power. We don’t take calls from billionaires telling us which stories to kill.

That’s our biggest strength. But that independence is only real as long as our readers are the ones funding it.

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What I’m asking you to do.

If you’ve been reading Raw America and you haven’t yet become a paid subscriber, today is the day. Not next week. Today.

CBS is cutting journalists right now. The FCC is threatening the outlets that remain right now. Ellison is closing in on CNN right now. American service members are dying in a war built on shifting justifications right now.

And the people who own the cameras have decided not to tell you the full truth about it.

Your paid subscription isn’t a donation. It’s an investment in the only kind of journalism that cannot be bought, threatened, or restructured out of existence by someone with a checkbook and an agenda.

Become a paid subscriber today. We’re not backing down from this fight. We just need you in it with us.

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The Trump administration is about to pay Iran an enormous sum to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. MAGA is increasingly doubtful that the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania was real. A judge Trump appointed is shutting down his administration’s voter data grab. And Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer is betting that Trump will pardon his client. Let’s get into it.

But before we do, please take a moment to update your free subscription to Raw America to a paying one. We all know billionaires are using their bottomless bank accounts to buy up media outlets, gut newsrooms, and suppress accountability reporting. Independent journalism that doesn’t answer to billionaires is only possible because readers like you make it possible. The only way to fight the billionaire conquest of the media is to build something they can’t own.

That’s why we created Raw America. We don’t have nor want billionaire backers. We’re committed to publishing honest journalism supported directly by readers. If that matters to you, please click the button below and become a paying subscriber. It’s the single most important thing you can do to keep independent media alive.

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Trump May Offer $20 Billion to Iran to End War

The Trump administration is working on a deal that would have Iran surrender its stockpile of enriched uranium in exchange for roughly $20 billion in previously frozen assets.

That’s a significant concession from Trump, who has been looking for a way to end his war as gas prices skyrocket and the November midterms draw ever closer.

Here’s what’s actually on the table. Iran is sitting on nearly 2,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, It’s not weapons-grade, but it’s close. The U.S. wants it shipped out of the country entirely. Iran has pushed back, preferring to “down-blend” it under international monitoring. The current compromise would send some of it to a third country and down-blend the rest.

The moratorium on enrichment is another sticking point. The U.S. started by demanding 20 years. Iran countered with five. They haven’t bridged that gap yet.

After the story broke, Trump posted on Truth Social that “no money will change hands,” though he didn’t specifically address the idea of unfreezing Iranian assets. That’s a pretty notable omission.

There are hawks on both sides who want this to fail. And some in Washington are already comparing any deal to Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement that only gave Iran $1.7 billion, which Trump spent years attacking.

MAGA Increasingly Believes Trump’s Assassination Attempt Was Staged

Something unusual is happening inside Trump’s base. A growing number of MAGA figures, including some who were once among Trump’s most loyal supporters, are starting to publicly entertain the idea that the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, was staged.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. It started after Trump’s former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, who resigned over the Iran war, went on Tucker Carlson’s show and suggested that investigations into the shooting had been shut down prematurely.

A Texas delegate from the 2024 Republican National Convention posted on X that Trump “has shown no interest in investigating what really happened.” She noted that Trump rarely mentions it anymore.

Comedian Tim Dillon, who had JD Vance on his podcast, said he thinks “maybe it was staged.” Candace Owens, who has completely broken with Trump, claimed billionaire Republican donor Miriam Adelson was behind the attempt because Trump hadn’t followed through on promises related to Israel. And Ali Alexander, the Stop the Steal architect, wrote on Telegram that the attempt was a sign Trump is the Antichrist, citing the Book of Revelation.

This is what a coalition looks like when it starts to fall apart.

Trump’s decision to enter the Iran war, his attacks on the Catholic Church, and recent remarks that seemed to compare himself to Jesus Christ have all created real cracks. These aren’t just fringe voices anymore. They’re Republican convention delegates and former administration officials.

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Ghislaine Maxwell’s Lawyer Expects Trump Pardon

Even though Ghislaine Maxwell is a convicted child sex trafficker serving a 20 year prison sentence, her attorney, David Oscar Markus, is confident that Trump will eventually pardon her.

Markus is playing a central role in Maxwell’s communication with senior Justice Department officials, including acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is also Trump’s former personal criminal defense lawyer.

Last July, Blanche personally traveled to Tallahassee to meet with Maxwell for two days. She was granted limited immunity for the meeting. Afterward, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security facility in Texas, where Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is also housed. Democratic lawmakers questioned whether that transfer was a reward.

Maxwell has not yet been granted clemency, and Markus says now isn’t the right time to push hard for it given the political firestorm over the Epstein files. Congress is still investigating. Former AG Pam Bondi was pushed out in part because of how badly the administration handled the release of those files.

But Markus doesn’t hide his optimism. Asked about the chances of a pardon, he said: “There’s a good chance and for good reason that she would get a pardon.”

That’s a remarkable statement about someone convicted of sex trafficking a minor.

Trump-Appointed Judge Shuts Down His Attempt to Seize Voter Data

A federal judge appointed by Trump during his first term has ruled against the Trump administration’s effort to obtain detailed voter registration data from Rhode Island.

U.S. District Court Judge Mary McElroy, who Trump appointed to the bench in 2019, sided with state election officials and civil rights groups, writing that the Justice Department was attempting a “fishing expedition” that federal election law simply doesn’t permit.

The administration had been seeking unredacted voter data, including birth dates, home addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers. DOJ lawyers acknowledged in court filings that the data would be shared with the Department of Homeland Security to check voters’ citizenship status.

Judge McElroy found that the federal government hadn’t even alleged that Rhode Island was failing to comply with voter list maintenance requirements.

This isn’t an isolated ruling. Courts in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Oregon have all rejected similar lawsuits. A judge in Georgia dismissed a related case on procedural grounds.

The administration says it needs the data to ensure election integrity. State officials from both parties, along with privacy advocates, say the real goal is to build a federal surveillance database of American voters. That’s worth watching closely.

Help Raw America Compete with the Billionaires

Raw America recently brought you exclusive conversations with former CNN journalist and current Substack host Jim Acosta, former Biden DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer, and former Obama administration official Christopher Hale. We have more exclusive conversations lined up later this month. Those interviews don’t happen without the support of paying subscribers.

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for watching. See you next week.

STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Senate Republicans Beg Trump to End Iran War as Oil Prices Skyrocket. Republicans in the U.S. Senate are fearing backlash in the November midterm elections unless President Donald Trump finds a way to quickly end his war with Iran. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she’s working on legislation to authorize a use of military force as a means of having Congress dictate how and when Trump could deploy troops in Iran. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he’s eagerly awaiting an “exit strategy” from the White House, adding that “the clock is ticking” to lower gas prices before voters decide which party controls Congress this fall.

• Caitlyn Jenner Complains About Trump Administration Forcing Passport Change. Conservative commentator Caitlyn Jenner — who is a transgender woman — recently lamented about the Trump’s administration forcing a change on the gender marker on her passport. Jenner, who has identified as a woman since 2015, was a stalwart supporter of Trump’s 2024 campaign in which he promised to crack down on transgender rights, called the change a “safety factor” and complained that she could no longer travel internationally.

• Restaurants Push for Immigration Reform After Mass Deportation of Workers. A coalition of restaurant owners in Texas are now advocating for Congress to take up comprehensive immigration reform. The push comes amid thousands of Texas restaurant workers being deported by the Trump administration. Kelsey Erickson Streufert, who is the chief public affairs officer at the Texas Restaurant Association, told the New York Times that “the vast majority of Americans recognize that there is a large group of undocumented immigrants who have been literally keeping food on our tables.”

• Trump Snubbing Former Official’s Birthday Party at Mar-a-Lago. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) — who was White House physician during Trump’s first term — is holding his upcoming birthday party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. However, despite him going through the trouble of booking the venue, Trump won’t be there. The president announced he would be missing his former doctor’s party to speak at a Turning Point USA event in Arizona. Jackson’s tenure as White House physician was marred by a scandal in which he provided easy access to prescription pills to White House staff, which ultimately cost him both his job and an appointment to lead the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

• Satire TurboTax Site Tells You How Your Tax Dollars Fuel Big Oil Subsidies. A new satirical website dubbed “TrumpoTax” is educating Americans on how their tax dollars are being funneled to Big Oil. The group United to End Polluter Handouts (UTEPH) is behind the effort, which includes sample questions like: “How many new oil wells did you drill this year?” And “do you operate your pipelines through a master limited partnership?” The site reminds users that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” created $40 billion in new subsidies for the oil and gas industries.

The Post and Courier is reporting that FBI handwritten notes from a 2019 interview with an Epstein trafficking survivor contain details that were left out of the official summaries released by the Justice Department in March — and those missing details matter.

The woman, from South Carolina, told FBI agents she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein as a teenager and brought to New York or New Jersey, where she was introduced to Donald Trump in 1984. She was approximately 13 years old.

The official summaries, known as 302s, described some uncertainty about how she traveled with Epstein. The handwritten notes are more direct: Epstein both drove and flew her to meet Trump. She described being taken to a very tall building with large rooms. She said Trump ordered everyone else out, then…

Read more

As Trump’s original image got reposted (along with a cleaned up version where the demon at the top no longer has horns) and spread across social media — followed by his trash-talking the Pope — the comments lit up with a steady stream of people offering their “proofs” that Trump was, in fact, the Evil One come to ravage the Earth. That he’s a literal and iniquitous thaumaturge. The proverbial Real McCoy devil.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted the image with the horns, saying: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

Mandy Arthur, a Christian influencer with a huge online following, similarly tweeted: “God, we might have made a mistake and [accidentally] elected the Antichrist. Send help.”

But is it even possible? It’s a fascinating question, whether put literally or metaphorically.

Asking the question literally requires a belief in the actual reality of a Son-of-God Christ figure and of an Antichrist opponent of nearly equal but opposite power. This sort of thing fills the Bible, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first consider the question from the secular perspective, which argues these two terms represent, at their core, metaphors for the embodiment of good and evil.

In this context, then, a more accurate question is: “Is Donald Trump evil, and thus an antichrist?”

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A Daily Newsletter of Renaissance Thinking about Progressive Politics, Economics, Science, and the Political News Issues of Our Day

By Thom Hartmann

In The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke in the plural when he predicted “false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” After warning that grifters and con artists (in secular terms) would try to exploit His followers, He said, “by their fruits ye shall know them.”

Trump’s “fruits” are pretty obvious:

• More than twenty women have accused him of rape and sexual assault, including some who were 13 and 14 at the time of the attack. Two separate juries both ruled that he raped E. Jean Carroll.

• Hundreds of contractors, customers, and employees have accused him of stealing from them or refusing to pay them (or both), as have members of his own family.

• Throughout his first term, he lied over 30,000 times and continues to lie daily.

• He pits Americans against each other by race, religion, and region in an effort to tear our country apart and thus weaken opposition to his authoritarian rule.

• He openly encouraged violence against unarmed people at multiple rallies and encouraged state violence at a speech to chiefs of police; he encouraged an assault on members of the press and routinely denigrates female reporters.

• He tried to overthrow and end our democracy, which some believe was divinely inspired (Jefferson referred to “Nature’s God” in the Declaration).

• He embraces depraved, ungodly murderers, kleptocrats, and “strongman” rulers while ridiculing western democracies and their elected leaders.

• He tried to damage or dismantle political and military systems designed to keep peace in the world, including the UN, NATO, and the Iran JCPOA.

• He reaches out to Jesus’s followers and then directs them toward bigotry, violence, and hatred.

• As an object of admiration and a role model, he’s replaced Jesus in many white evangelical congregations.

• He delights in the killing of anti-ICE protestors like Renee Good and Alex Pretti and tearing children from their parents and putting them in cages.

• He tried to end Americans’ access to lifesaving medical care by killing Obamacare subsidies, privatizing Medicare, and gutting Medicaid.

• He watched on TV, like a delighted child, as his followers killed four police officers, sent 140 others to the hospital, and tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House.

• He lied about Covid (after disclosing the truth to Bob Woodward), causing more disease and deaths in America than any other nation in the world except Peru.

• There is literally not a single one of the Ten Commandments that he hasn’t broken (love God, don’t make graven images, honor God’s name, keep the Sabbath, don’t kill people, honor marriage, don’t covet or steal other’s property, and tell the truth; he even failed to “honor your parents” when he allegedly ripped off his father’s estate).

• He threatened to commit genocide on a scale never seen in human history.

• He and “Whiskey Pete” have celebrated the murder of over 100 people in small boats in the Caribbean without any due process or legal basis.

• He has his entire administration work to cover up crimes committed by multiple wealthy and powerful men against underage girls.

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The main reason many Christians freak out about an antichrist is that following him will get you banned from heaven or even cast into hell. But what did Jesus — the guy Trump’s white evangelical followers claim as their savior — say was necessary to get into heaven?

Back in 1998 I had a private audience with Pope John Paul II at his invitation; one of his personal secretaries had read one of my books. He gave Louise and me a private tour of many non-public parts of the Vatican and, the next day, we sat through an open-air concert with Pope John Paul II and about 30 VIPs, including the leader of Germany’s Bundestag, for more than an hour, surrounded by the splendor of Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer palace on the rim of an extinct volcano overlooking lake Albano.

When we spoke privately after the concert, His Holiness’s forceful comments about the work we all must do invoked Jesus’ words in Matthew 25. It’s an amazing 2,000 year-old story that tells us everything we need to know about today’s “Christian” politics:

Jesus’ disciples had gathered around him in a private and intimate setting.

Finally, they thought, they could ask him, straight up, the question that had been haunting them, particularly now that the Roman authorities were starting to talk about punishing or even executing them: How they could be sure to hang out with Him in the afterlife?

Jesus told them that on judgment day He’d be sitting on His throne separating the sheep from the goats “as a shepherd divideth.”

The nations of “sheep” would go with Him to heaven, the “goats” to hell.

“For I was an hungred, and ye gave me food,” he told his disciples he would say to the sheep. “I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”

At this point, His disciples — who had never, ever seen Jesus hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick, or naked — freaked out. Whoa! they shouted. We’re screwed!

“When saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee?” they asked, panicked. “Or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? Or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?”

“Verily I say unto you,” Jesus replied, reassuring them, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

This is the only place in the Bible where Jesus explicitly tells His disciples what acts they must perform, in their entirety, to get into heaven.

Feed the hungry, care for refugees, house and clothe the homeless, heal the sick, have compassion on those in prison.

That’s it.

And it’s a list that is quite literally the opposite of everything that Donald Trump advocates, stands for, and has done in his careers, both business and political.

While biblical scholars are split about who the actual “Beast” was that John referenced in his Revelation, many consider it to have been a then-politically-necessary cloaking of the identity of Roman Emperor Nero, who was actively murdering Christians.

It was clearly a political figure, who represented the antithesis of the values and works Jesus laid out in the Sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 25, a leader whose actions unleashed:

“…a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”

After Trump put up the picture of himself as Jesus, people from dozens of nations offered their own proofs of Trump being the Beast or the Antichrist, posting across multiple social media platforms:

• “MAGA” means “magic” or “sorcerer” in Latin and multiple other languages

• His grandfather’s name when he emigrated to America to start a whorehouse in the Pacific Northwest was “Drumpf,” which he changed to Trump. John in German is “Johann.” Therefore, his “actual” name is Donald Johann Drumpf — each name having six letters (666). (Weirdly, the same is true of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the guy who laid the foundation for MAGA.)

• He illegally armed the Saudis for their merciless bombing war against Yemen which had five million people facing famine as the Saudi military blocked food arrivals.

• His family owned 666 Fifth Avenue.

• He fooled millions of evangelical followers of Jesus into following him instead, just as the Beast is supposed to do.

• He put his own red-hat MAGA mark on their foreheads.

• He consorts with “whores” and “criminals.”

• Isaac Newton calculated that Jesus was crucified on a blood moon, and some argue he predicted the antichrist would be born on one; Trump was born on a blood moon.

It was a fascinating moment picked up by media across the world, and I was surprised by how many people — like Marjorie Taylor Greene — were actually religiously freaked out about Trump.

But for me, all the proof I need that Trump, if not the biblical Antichrist, is at least a political one, is what he says and does. In my humble opinion, he’s already revealed himself as an Antichrist, both as a disciple of the “Father of Lies,” and through his anti-Christ-type policies.

As Pope Leo XIV today tells us, a man’s “fruits” show us all we need to know about who he really is.

The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support Thom’s work, click here to become a free or paid subscriber.

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This morning we have a story about the president’s son-in-law’s family quietly walking away with a $20 billion Pentagon contract while Jared Kushner plays diplomat in the same war that contract services. We have a president attacking Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones by name in a morning Truth Social rant. We have 20 Republican House members breaking with Trump on surveillance powers. And we have the man Kristi Noem fired for opposing her — being brought back to run FEMA permanently. It is a busy Friday. Corporate media is covering some of it. The FCC chair is making sure they know what happens when they cover too much. And the billionaires keep buying. Let’s get into it.

Raw America is Raw Story and Really American’s people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. We exist because of you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today is the day.

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The Kushner Family Just Landed a $20 Billion Pentagon Contract

Let’s start with the one that should be front page everywhere but isn’t getting the attention it deserves.

The Pentagon has awarded a $20 billion, sole-source contract to Anduril Industries, a defense tech company backed by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Jared Kushner, who is simultaneously serving as Trump’s informal mediator in the very wars this contract helps prosecute.

The 10-year deal consolidates what had been more than 120 separate procurement actions for Anduril’s commercial solutions into a single enterprise contract covering hardware, software, infrastructure, and services. At its core is Anduril’s Lattice platform, an AI-driven command system capable of detecting and responding to threats without human input. The company also makes surveillance drones, sentry towers, and loitering munitions that can hunt and eliminate targets autonomously across hundreds of miles.

The contract was awarded under a “sole source” framework, meaning the Pentagon bypassed the normal competitive bidding process, claiming no other company could match Anduril’s capabilities. The public notice inviting vendors to respond was posted over the holiday period in December and gave companies just three weeks to reply. One company confirmed it couldn’t compete. Three others either didn’t respond or turned out not to be defense contractors at all. The Pentagon took that as confirmation that only Anduril could do the job.

Joshua Kushner holds his Anduril stake through his venture capital firm, Thrive Capital. Sources say Thrive co-led a $4 billion funding round for Anduril just days before the Pentagon announced the contract.

Meanwhile, Jared Kushner, who holds no official government title but has been repeatedly deployed by Trump to lead negotiations in Ukraine, the Middle East, Iran, and Venezuela, is currently facing a congressional inquiry after Democrats accused him of soliciting billions from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and Gulf monarchies while conducting those diplomatic missions. Qatar, sources say, ultimately poured around $200 million into Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, after initially declining and reconsidering ahead of Trump’s reelection.

This is the same Jared Kushner who sat at the table in Islamabad for ceasefire talks with Iran last weekend. His brother’s company just received a $20 billion Pentagon contract to service those wars.

The White House declined to comment. The Pentagon said contracts are awarded based on merit.

Dwight Eisenhower warned us back in 1961 about the military industrial complex gaining what he called unwarranted influence in our government, but even Ike couldn’t have imagined a version where the president’s in-laws own pieces of that complex while one of them is walking into ceasefire rooms with a direct financial stake in how long the shooting lasts. This is exactly the kind of self-dealing the founders wrote an emoluments clause into the Constitution to prevent, and it’s happening in broad daylight while most of corporate media looks the other way.

There is more. Defense Secretary Hegseth faced allegations last month that his financial broker inquired about defense sector investments in the weeks before Trump launched his Iran attacks. Senator Markwayne Mullin, now DHS secretary, purchased stocks in defense contractors and oil companies five days before the Venezuela invasion, while sitting on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sources say $580 million in oil futures flooded the market roughly 16 minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants. The administration has denied any wrongdoing on all counts.

The picture these stories collectively paint is one that demands sustained, independent scrutiny. That is not what is happening in corporate media right now.

Trump Attacks His Own Base: Tucker Is ‘Low IQ,’ Candace Is ‘Mentally Ill’

President Trump spent Friday morning on Truth Social going after prominent figures from his own political orbit.

“Tucker is a Low IQ person — always easy to beat, and highly overrated!” he wrote. “So are Megyn Kelly, ‘Candace’ — Really Dumb and mentally ill — and Bankrupt Alex Jones, who is completely ‘fried.’” He added, “There are others, also!” and floated the idea of publishing a ranked list of who he considers good, bad, and somewhere in the middle.

The post came in response to a segment on conservative media comparing his approval ratings against other prominent right-wing commentators. Trump is known for late nights and early morning posting. His vice president once described it to Fox News this way, sometimes the president will call you at 12:30 or 2:00 in the morning, and then he’ll call you at 6:00 in the morning about a totally different topic.

Tucker Carlson, it should be noted, was one of the figures raising questions before this post about whether Netanyahu may be using leverage against Trump to keep the United States in the Iran war.

Every authoritarian movement in history eventually reaches the point where it starts devouring its own, from Stalin’s purges to Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the loyalty oaths of McCarthy’s America, and when the leader starts ranking his followers by devotion instead of ideas, you’re watching a cult rather than a political party. The people getting labeled low IQ and mentally ill this morning are the same voices who were told they were patriots yesterday, and that’s how it always goes with strongmen who can’t tolerate anyone asking the wrong question.

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20 Republicans Broke with Trump on FISA — and Forced a Punt

Late Thursday night and into early Friday morning, 20 House Republicans joined most Democrats to block Trump’s push for a five-year extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the surveillance law that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor overseas communications without a warrant, including communications involving American citizens.

Trump had publicly called on Republicans to “stick together” and pass a “clean” extension. Speaker Mike Johnson backed the plan. It failed anyway.

Leadership then tried a shorter 18-month renewal. That failed too. The final result was a short-term extension pushing FISA’s expiration back only to April 30, a few days, not years.

“Are you kidding me? Who the hell is running this place?” said Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern on the House floor, as the chaos unfolded.

Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, who championed the bipartisan coalition that blocked Trump, framed it as a transparency fight. “Now, they will have to fight in daylight,” he said.

The Republican rebels did not all oppose surveillance itself. Many wanted reforms and limits. That 20 of them were willing to defy the president publicly, on a national security vote he had personally lobbied, is worth watching.

The Fourth Amendment exists because the colonists remembered exactly what it felt like to have British soldiers rifle through their homes on general warrants, and they built this new country specifically so that would never happen again on American soil. Two hundred and fifty years later, we’ve constructed a surveillance apparatus those colonists couldn’t have imagined in their worst nightmares, and the fact that 20 House Republicans refused to hand a five-year blank check to a president with open authoritarian instincts is one of the few genuinely hopeful things that happened in Washington this week.

Trump Is Bringing Back the Man Noem Fired for Opposing Noem

In a move that manages to be both vindication and embarrassment simultaneously, Trump is nominating Cameron Hamilton to permanently lead FEMA, the same man Kristi Noem fired last May for publicly refusing to support her plans to dismantle it.

Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL, was serving as acting FEMA administrator when he told a congressional hearing, “I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” He was escorted out of FEMA headquarters the following day. Noem also reportedly made him take a lie detector test to find out if he had leaked details of a private meeting about FEMA’s future.

Now Trump is nominating him for the job on a permanent basis.

This is the latest in a series of reversals at DHS and FEMA since Trump fired Noem in March following a tenure that included a $220 million self-promotional ad campaign, a policy requiring her personal sign-off on any DHS contract over $100,000, and a management style described by more than 80 current and former employees as chaotic and allegedly unlawful. Her successor has already eliminated the contract approval bottleneck that caused delays in disaster relief, and brought back several officials Noem had pushed out.

Hamilton still needs Senate confirmation. His path may be complicated by his lack of state emergency management experience. But the story of his return is also a straightforward accounting of what happens when someone tells a hard truth in Washington and eventually gets proved right.

There’s an old truth about Washington that the real measure of any administration isn’t how it treats the powerful, it’s how it treats the people who stand up and tell inconvenient truths. Cameron Hamilton told the truth about why FEMA exists and paid for it with his job, and now he’s being asked to come run the thing he was fired for defending, which tells you everything about how the ideological dismantling of American government goes when it finally collides with an actual hurricane or flood or wildfire that doesn’t care about anyone’s Heritage Foundation policy paper.

This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You

The Kushner-Anduril story. The Mullin stock trades. The FISA revolt. These are the stories that take resources, time, and independence to tell correctly. Corporate media is running cover for a war and the financial interests behind it. The FCC chair has made clear what happens to broadcasters who don’t. And the billionaires are buying up whatever newsrooms remain, from the Washington Post and the LA Times down to local outlets most people have never heard of.

Raw America was built for exactly this. Because of your support, we have had reporters in the room at the most critical hearings of this era. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool and going directly after the interviews that hold power accountable, bringing them to you unfiltered and unbought.

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This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.

STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• ICE Agents’ Shady Backgrounds Revealed. The Associated Press (AP) recently uncovered the backgrounds of dozens of ICE agents added to the payroll during President Donald Trump’s hiring spree. While the AP had to limit their findings to ICE agents who publicized their hiring on LinkedIn due to ICE’s efforts to keep agents anonymous, reporters discovered that many had legal and competency issues that would typically result in them being passed over by other law enforcement agencies. One agent lied in a police report to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman, leading to a $75,000 settlement. Another failed to graduate from police academy and only lasted three weeks as a police officer.

• Republican Says Trump ‘Almost the Second Coming’ of Jesus. Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) defended Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV by saying the president was “better than sliced bread” and “almost the second coming [of Jesus Christ].” Nehls’ comment came just days after Trump posted (and eventually deleted) an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ. Nehls also said after Trump’s reelection that if Trump ordered Republicans to “jump three feet high and scratch your head,” they should all do it.

• Billionaire Trump Belittles Americans for Paying Their Taxes. During a recent roundtable discussion in Las Vegas, Nevada to promote his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump — whose net worth is in excess of $6 billion — criticized Americans for paying their full amount of taxes. Trump told the crowd that while poorer taxpayers “don’t think in terms of deductions,” rich people are always looking for tax deductions. The standard deduction for a single taxpayer is $15,750, which is typically well above any itemized deduction amount for working-class taxpayers.

• Trump’s Acting ICE Director Quits. Todd Lyons — who is the acting director of ICE — recently announced he would be leaving his role at the end of May. Lyons’ tenure has been marked by high-profile incidents like the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, and widespread domestic protests against his agency’s actions. Lyons was reportedly hospitalized at least twice for stress-related events. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called Lyons “a phenomenal patriot,” and border czar Tom Homan said he “served selflessly.”

• California Democrat Running for Governor Wants ICE Agents Jailed. Tom Steyer, who is a progressive billionaire running for the Democratic nomination in California’s 2026 gubernatorial election, is now proposing that both ICE agents and ICE leadership be subject to criminal prosecution. Steyer referred to ICE as a “violent extremist group” and also proposed a special task force to investigate crimes at ICE detention centers, and a widespread “know your rights” campaign to educate Californians should they have an encounter with ICE.

Tonight, new details are emerging about Trump’s DOJ launching a criminal investigation into one of his longtime political enemies. The nation’s top health official was brutally grilled by Congress and confronted over a report that he cut off a dead raccoon’s penis while his family was steps away. Trump’s inner circle is worried that they could still go to prison despite any preemptive pardons from the commander in chief. And an ICE agent now has a warrant out for his arrest. Let’s dive in.

But before we do, please consider updating your free Raw America subscription to a paying one. Independent outlets like this one are the last line of defense against the wholesale gutting of American journalism. Right-wing billionaires are determined to dictate what stories get told and which ones get buried. The only way to fight back is to fund news outlets that refuse to be bought. If you believe the work we’re doing here matters, please click the button below and become a paying subscriber today. Every subscription is an act of resistance against the right-wing billionaires seeking to control what you read and watch.

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Trump’s DOJ Now Going After Obama’s CIA Director

Reuters is reporting that the FBI is preparing to question roughly half a dozen witnesses in a criminal inquiry targeting former CIA Director John Brennan. And what’s this about, exactly? The 2017 intelligence assessment, the one that concluded Russia interfered in the 2016 election specifically to help Donald Trump win.

The probe has been quietly underway for months. The focus appears to be on congressional testimony Brennan gave in 2023 about how that assessment was put together. The core conclusions of that 2017 assessment weren’t just Brennan’s opinion. They were later affirmed by the Justice Department itself, by a bipartisan Senate committee, and by a CIA review. And yet here we are, with Trump’s DOJ treating the people who produced that intelligence as criminals.

Brennan has called the whole thing politically biased and a flat-out misuse of the legal system. His lawyer says there’s no legally justifiable basis for it.

Legal experts are pointing out that prosecuting Brennan in Florida, when his testimony took place before a House committee in Washington, is going to face serious legal hurdles. Courts in Washington have already pushed back hard on previous efforts to go after Trump’s perceived enemies.

But the point, of course, may not be to actually convict anyone. The point is the investigation itself.

RFK Jr. Confronted Over Mutilating Dead Raccoon in Front of His Family

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat before Congress Thursday for a pair of hearings, and it didn’t go well for him. Democrats came loaded for bear, and they didn’t miss.

Representative Linda Sánchez of California hit Kennedy hard on vaccines, pointing out that the CDC removed its universal childhood vaccine recommendations for seven immunizations under his watch, including coverage for flu, hepatitis, and rotavirus. That policy change came, she noted, right as measles was spiking in the United States. When pressed about whether the measles vaccine could have saved a child’s life in Texas, Kennedy conceded it was “possible.”

Then there was Representative Terri Sewell of Alabama, who pressed Kennedy on remarks he made in 2024 suggesting that Black children diagnosed with ADHD should be, quote, “re-parented” and sent somewhere without screens. Kennedy said he didn’t know what that phrase meant and denied saying it, despite the fact that the recording exists.

And then, because this is RFK Jr., TMZ DC caught him outside the hearing and asked him the question everyone else was apparently too polished to ask: what happened to the roadkill raccoon penis he reportedly cut off while his family waited in his car? Kennedy’s response was complete silence, followed by a laugh that seemed to be carrying a lot of additional information. His new biography confirms the roadkill story. The laugh is doing the rest of the work.

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Trump Officials Worry His Preemptive Pardons Won’t Save Them

There’s a fascinating piece out from Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng, and the upshot is this: a significant number of senior Trump administration officials are genuinely worried they’re going to end up in prison.

Stephen Miller. Pete Hegseth. Officials spread across multiple departments. According to administration insiders, they’re watching the polling data, they know Democrats are likely to retake the House in 2026, and they’re under no illusions about what that could mean.

They’ve already noticed Democratic politicians making increasingly public calls for aggressive prosecutions of Trump officials. One Trump aide described the trend as, quote, “kind of worrisome.” Many of these officials don’t believe that even presidential pardons will be enough to protect them once the political winds shift.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump has promised to sign mass pardons for administration officials before leaving office. But apparently that promise isn’t as reassuring as it sounds. Last year, multiple Trump officials quietly purchased new legal insurance and professional liability coverage in anticipation of future investigations and subpoenas.

The reality is setting in. These people know what they’ve done. And they’re starting to realize that history has a long memory.

Minnesota Authorities Issue Nationwide Arrest Warrant for ICE Agent

State prosecutors in Minnesota have charged an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent with two counts of second-degree assault after a road rage incident in February. Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. is accused of pointing his weapon at the heads of two people in another vehicle on a Minneapolis highway after he illegally drove his unmarked SUV on the shoulder to try to pass them.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced the charges Thursday and made clear this is the first federal agent charged in connection with Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s controversial immigration enforcement push in the Twin Cities. She believes it may be the first case of its kind anywhere in the country.

The context here matters. Operation Metro Surge has already been linked to the January killings of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents. Those deaths are still under investigation.

There’s now a nationwide warrant for Morgan’s arrest. Moriarty said ICE should make arrangements for him to turn himself in. That warrant, she said, will remain in effect until they have him in custody.

Raw America Is Growing — Help Us Keep it Up

This is exactly the kind of reporting Raw America exists to do. And we couldn’t do any of it without you.

Today, we brought you an exclusive interview with former CNN anchor and current Substack host Jim Acosta. This week, we also interviewed former Biden DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer, former Obama administration official Christopher Hale and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on his 100th day in office. None of these conversations happen without paying subscribers making them possible. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do it now by clicking the button below. Raw America doesn’t have a billionaire backer, we have you.

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you tomorrow.

STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Trump Explodes at Judge Who Cancelled Construction of His Ballroom. In a lengthy post to his Truth Social platform, President Donald Trump erupted at U.S. District Judge Richard Leon (an appointee of President George W. Bush) for blocking above-ground construction of his $400 million ballroom. Leon wrote that construction couldn’t continue without Congressional approval. Trump maintained that the below-ground portion of the structure would be “useless” without the rest of the building, and said that construction of the ballroom was necessary for “national security.”

• Retiring House Democrat Is Deciding Vote to Sink House War Powers Vote. A Thursday vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to assert Congress’ Article I powers over the ability to declare war failed by 213-214 margin. Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who is not running for reelection, voted with Republicans to kill the legislation. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) voted for the measure along with 212 Democrats, while Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) voted “present.” Golden cited the temporary ceasefire due to expire next week as the reason for his vote.

• Mamdani Warns Iran War Making Americans Poorer. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani accused Trump’s war in Iran of worsening the affordability crisis facing working-class Americans. The 34 year-old mayor said the war should “not just be opposed on political grounds, on moral grounds, but even just on economic grounds,” arguing that the billions of dollars being spent in the Middle East could instead help Americans meet basic needs like food and shelter. Mamdani — who was a rapper before entering politics — cited a lyric from 2Pac’s “Keep Ya Head Up” in which the California rapper said: “They got money for war, but can’t feed the poor.”

• Trump Manufactures Quote from Pope Leo XIV Amid Ongoing Feud. While addressing reporters outside the White House on Thursday, Trump baselessly argued that Pope Leo XIV advocated for Iran to have nuclear weapons (which the pontiff has never done) and insisted he was correct to attack the pope due to the potential danger of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. When a reporter pointed out to the president that the pope never expressed support for a nuclear Iran, he ignored her.

• Kentucky Governor Accuses JD Vance of Violating Ten Commandments. Two-term Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear (D) — who is rumored to be considering a run for president in 2028 — recently took a jab at Vice President JD Vance (who is also thought to be a Republican presidential candidate), suggesting that he’s disregarding one of the Ten Commandments. Beshear said Vance was ignoring the commandments to not worship false idols and to not tell lies, accusing him of “apologizing for a guy who is picturing himself as Jesus and then claiming, ‘No, I thought it was a doctor,’ therefore violating ‘thou shalt not lie.’”

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This morning, Pete Hegseth led a prayer at the Pentagon using a monologue a screenwriter invented for a hitman in Pulp Fiction. The Supreme Court’s most powerful conservative justice went on television to blame “intellectuals” for the decline of America. An 86-year-old French widow of a U.S. Army veteran is sitting in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana because she overstayed a tourist visa. And a political analyst is raising serious questions about whether the administration is quietly preparing for conflicts well beyond Iran. Corporate media is not asking these questions. The FCC chair has made clear what happens to broadcasters who do. And the billionaires are lining up to buy every outlet that’s left. This is what independent journalism looks like right now.

Raw America founder John Byrne will be bringing you an exclusive interview with former CNN anchor and current Substack host Jim Acosta today at 1 PM ET. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com. Interviews like these with newsmakers offering perspectives you won’t get in billionaire-owned media outlets are only possible with the support of paying subscribers. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. We exist because of you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today is the day.

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Hegseth Prayed a Pulp Fiction Monologue at the Pentagon

Pete Hegseth held a religious worship service at the Pentagon this week and opened it with what he described as a prayer written by the lead mission planner for a recent Air Force rescue operation in Iran.

The prayer, Hegseth said, was entitled “CSAR 2517” — Combat Search and Rescue 2517 — meant to reference the Bible verse Ezekiel 25:17.

There is just one problem. Most of what Hegseth recited is not from Ezekiel 25:17. It is from Pulp Fiction. Specifically, it is the monologue delivered by Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman character Jules Winnfield immediately before he shoots someone dead — a passage that screenwriter Quentin Tarantino largely invented and put in the mouth of a killer.

Hegseth’s version: “The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

The actual Ezekiel 25:17 ends with “I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” Everything before that in Hegseth’s prayer is a lightly modified version of the fictional Tarantino monologue.

This is not the first time Hegseth has used a Pentagon worship service to call for violence. Last month, at a similar event, he recited what he said was a prayer from troops following the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, including the line: “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

When a nation’s military leaders start framing warfare as a holy crusade, borrowing the language of Hollywood hitmen and wrapping it in scripture, that’s not just embarrassing — it’s a warning about how they see the people on the other end of those weapons. Every democracy that has slid into authoritarianism has done it with a flag in one hand and a Bible in the other.

The man running the United States military is reciting Pulp Fiction at Pentagon prayer services and framing warfare as a religious crusade. The press corps covering this war is doing so under explicit threat of having their broadcast licenses pulled if they report things the administration does not like. Trump has endorsed the FCC chair’s threat to revoke broadcast licenses, calling critical news organizations “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic.” Media advocacy groups say the pressure is designed to push broadcasters toward self-censorship without the government having to take explicit action. That is the environment in which this story is being covered. Or not covered.

Clarence Thomas Went on Television to Blame Intellectuals for America’s Decline

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a lengthy televised address at the University of Texas Law School this week in which he argued that “progressivism” is an existential threat to the founding principles of the United States, and that the nation’s colleges and universities have allowed those values to “fall out of favor.”

“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” Thomas said. “It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”

Thomas, 77 and the Court’s longest-serving conservative member, also took aim at Washington officials he said lack commitment to “righteous cause, to traditional morality, to national defense, to free enterprise, to religious piety or to the original meaning of the Constitution.” He said such figures “recast themselves as Institutionalists, pragmatists or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences, and their country.”

What Thomas is really doing here is laying the intellectual groundwork for the Court’s continued rightward march, dressing up raw judicial power in the language of divine authority so it can’t be questioned by mere mortals. When a sitting Supreme Court justice starts telling the country that his opponents are enemies of God and the founding, he’s not interpreting the Constitution anymore — he’s running a campaign.

The speech came as Trump himself has publicly floated the idea that Thomas and fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, 76, may be too old for the bench — comments that landed in Washington like a quiet grenade. Trump praised Alito as one of the “greatest justices of all time” but suggested there is “a theory that if you reach a certain age,” justices should step aside to make room for younger appointees of similar persuasion.

Thomas closed his remarks with a call to action echoing the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He did not reference Trump or any contemporary political figure by name.

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Are They Preparing for a Bigger War?

A political analyst writing on Substack this week raised an alarm that deserves wider attention.

Political writer Heather Delaney Reese reports that the Pentagon was privately briefed last month on plans to dramatically boost weapons production — not just within the defense industry, but beyond it. Sources say the administration approached U.S. car manufacturers about converting factory capacity to produce munitions.

The Wall Street Journal confirmed the outlines of the story: “The Pentagon is interested in enlisting the companies to use their personnel and factory capacity to increase production of munitions and other equipment as the wars in Ukraine and Iran deplete stocks.”

Reese reports that by late March, the Pentagon had signed framework agreements with defense contractors to put the military on what it called a “wartime footing.” She also notes the administration is deploying more than 10,000 additional troops to the Middle East before the end of April — roughly 6,000 aboard one carrier group and another 4,200 from a Marine expeditionary unit — bringing total U.S. personnel in the region to approximately 60,000, with three aircraft carriers in theater.

Her conclusion is direct: “That is not what a country does when a war is almost over. That is what a country does when it is preparing for something much bigger.”

Congress hasn’t declared a war, the American people haven’t been asked, and yet the machinery of a major military escalation is already turning — quietly, without debate, without a vote. That’s how republics get pulled into catastrophic conflicts they never chose, and it’s how the defense industry gets exactly what it always wants.

Whether that preparation reflects deliberate planning, the logic of defense contractor interests, or something else entirely, the question deserves to be asked loudly: Where is this going? And who is being told?

An 86 Year-Old Widow of a U.S. Soldier Is Sitting in an Immigration Jail

Marie-Therese Ross is 86 years old. She is a French citizen. Her husband, William Ross, was a former captain in the U.S. Army. He died in January. They had married just months before.

On April 1, ICE agents detained her in Alabama for overstaying her 90-day tourist visa. She is now being held at a federal immigration detention facility in Louisiana.

The French government has “fully mobilized” to press for her release. The French Consul General in New Orleans has visited her in detention twice and told reporters, “Given her age, we really want her to get out of this situation as soon as possible. We want to get her out of jail.”

France’s diplomatic offices in Washington, Atlanta, and Paris are all engaged. They have contacted DHS directly. DHS has said she overstayed her visa, which is true, and that agents followed standard protocol.

This is what happens when enforcement replaces judgment and when a system stops asking who someone is and only asks whether they have the right paperwork. An 86-year-old widow of an American soldier in a Louisiana detention facility isn’t a border security success story — it’s what a government looks like when cruelty has become the point.

Marie-Therese Ross is an octogenarian widow of an American soldier, detained in a Louisiana jail, while the French government makes diplomatic calls on her behalf. This is the immigration enforcement regime this administration has built. It does not ask who you are. It asks for papers.

This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You

Let’s be honest about the landscape.

The government is threatening broadcast licenses for war coverage it doesn’t like. The billionaires are buying the newsrooms that remain. And the reporters still doing the work — in the hearing rooms, at the briefings, asking the questions no one else will — are running out of places to stand.

Raw America exists to be one of those places. Because of your support, we have had reporters on the ground at the most critical hearings of this political moment. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool. We are going directly after the interviews that matter and bringing them to you unfiltered, unbought, and unafraid.

That coverage — coverage that challenges power, refuses to sell wars, and won’t propagandize for the Ellisons — requires your support. We are not backed by a hedge fund. We have no billionaire pulling our strings. We answer to you, full stop.

If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, this is the moment. Not later. Today. The stories we are chasing won’t wait.

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This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.

STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• U.S. to Launch Tariff Refund Website Next Week. American businesses who imported goods subjected to President Donald Trump’s now-invalidated tariffs will be able to apply for refunds beginning on April 20. U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently announced the launch of the CAPE system, which will facilitate approximately $166 billion in refunds to importers following the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the bulk of Trump’s tariffs imposed via an emergency declaration. Court filings show roughly 330,000 importers paid the now illegal tariffs on 53 million shipments of goods since they were first announced in April of 2025.

• Trump Flips on Key Policy to Help His Businesses. According to new reporting from the Wall Street Journal, Trump wound up reversing his position on H-2B visas for foreign guest workers in order to staff Mar-a-Lago. The Journal reported that Mar-a-Lago staffers Bernd Lembcke and Peter Petrina convinced Trump that the hospitality industry needed more H-2B visas in order to hire more workers like hotel maids, landscapers, cooks and farm workers. Two weeks after that meeting — and much to the chagrin of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — Trump released the full maximum allowable amount of H-2B visas. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) also personally lobbied Trump hard for the release.

• RFK Jr. Mutilated a Dead Raccoon in Front of His Family. In one excerpt of a forthcoming biography of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author Isabel Vincent recounted an instance where Kennedy admitted to cutting the penis off of a dead raccoon while his then-wife and children waited for him in their car. Vincent also mentioned that the HHS secretary keeps “a freezer full of roadkill” at his home.

• Republicans Break with Trump on Protecting Immigrants. Six House Republicans recently sided with Democrats on a vote to extend Temporary Protected Status to roughly 350,000 Haitian immigrants slated for deportation. The bill by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) extended protections to eligible Haitian immigrants for three years, with the Massachusetts Democrat arguing that violence and instability in Haiti necessitated the protection of Haitians seeking refuge in the United States. The support of Reps. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) and Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) helped ensure the bill’s passage.

• Trump Lawyer Behind January 6 Plot Disbarred. Far-right attorney John Eastman will no longer be able to practice law in California after the California Supreme Court on Wednesday denied his appeal to keep his law license. Eastman was the author of the notorious “Eastman Memo,” which outlined the plot to have then-Vice President Mike Pence deny the certification of then-President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College votes in Congress in order to keep Donald Trump in office. Eastman’s law license in Washington D.C. — which is currently suspended — could also be permanently revoked following Wednesday’s ruling.

President Donald Trump is melting down over his favorite news channel platforming a Democrat. The Pentagon is quietly drawing up invasion plans for Cuba. New York just found a smart way to tax the rich. And Saudi Arabia is now pressuring Trump to end his war in Iran.

Raw America is Raw Story and Really American’s people-powered response to MAGA billionaires buying news outlets and gutting newsrooms. Oligarchs aren’t doing this because they love journalism. They’re doing it to silence the reporters who hold them accountable. Independent media isn’t a luxury right now. It’s a lifeline. Subscribing to Raw America is the most direct way to punch back against the billionaires in their war on the news. Become a paying subscriber today. The link is right below.

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Trump Rages at Fox News

So apparently, even Fox News can end up in the doghouse.

President Trump went after his favorite network for doing a segment on Tom Steyer, a Democrat running for governor in California. Trump called Steyer a “sleazebag” and demanded to know why Fox was giving him any airtime at all.

He went on to accuse the network of basically handing Steyer a winning campaign, saying Fox was making it possible for someone like that to win, and urging people to vote for Republican Steve Hilton instead.

Here’s the thing, though. Fox spent a chunk of the segment pointing out that Steyer’s old hedge fund had ties to private prisons now being used to detain immigrants. That’s not friendly coverage. That’s a hit.

And Fox did interview Hilton, Trump’s preferred candidate, in a longer segment that ran right after. Trump had apparently already changed the channel by then.

McCallum even speculated that Steyer might be a second-string choice for Democrats, brought in after Eric Swalwell was pushed out. This wasn’t the coronation Trump seemed to think it was.

What this really shows is Trump’s relationship with Fox News has never been as solid as it looks. The moment the network does something he doesn’t like, even briefly, even critically, he goes nuclear. Trump clearly needs constant validation and panics when he doesn’t get it.

Pentagon Planning to Invade Cuba

USA TODAY is reporting that military planning for a possible Pentagon-led operation in Cuba is quietly ramping up, with two anonymous sources confirming the directives are in motion. The Pentagon says it plans for a range of contingencies, which is about as non-denial of a denial as it gets.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. Back in January, the Trump administration started cutting off oil shipments to Cuba as part of a pressure campaign to force political change on the island. Trump himself has said publicly that he expects to have the “honor” of invading Cuba. Just this past Sunday, he said as much to reporters at the White House, casually floating military conquest of a neighboring country as if he’s talking about a road trip.

Analysts are divided on whether this is real strategic planning or mostly signaling. Brian Fonseca, a Cuba military expert at Florida International University, says there’s no “imminent threat” argument being built the way there was before operations in Venezuela and Iran.

He does note, though, that Cuba’s military equipment has deteriorated, and it’s not clear the officers would fight hard for an unpopular regime. What comes after is where it gets ugly fast. As Fonseca put it, “This will be a very easy military victory, but a far more difficult political victory.”

Sound familiar? It should.

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New York Wants to Tax Empty Mansions

Here’s a policy idea that’s both simple and long overdue.

Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a proposed pied-à-terre tax this week, which would hit secondary residences worth $5 million or more that aren’t being used as anyone’s primary home.

The idea is straightforward. If you’re a billionaire or foreign investor who owns a luxury apartment in Manhattan but lives somewhere else, you should be paying into the city’s tax base just like everyone else does.

The tax is projected to raise at least $500 million a year in recurring revenue. It’d affect roughly 13,000 properties, with higher rates kicking in for homes valued above $15 million and again above $25 million.

New York City is staring down a budget gap of around $6 billion heading into fiscal year 2027. That gap has already narrowed from $12 billion earlier this year, but it’s still enormous. And this isn’t a radical idea. It’s a targeted tax on people who own luxury property in one of the most expensive cities on earth and then don’t even live there. The fact that it’s taken this long is the more interesting story.

Saudi Arabia Wants Trump to Stop the War They Helped Start

The war in the Middle East that the Gulf states quietly helped encourage? Saudi Arabia is now trying to pump the brakes.

According to reporting in the Telegraph, confirmed by two Gulf officials, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is now pressing Trump to scale back the military campaign against Iran and return to negotiations. The concern is specific: if the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports continues, Iran could respond by instructing its Houthi allies in Yemen to blockade a critical Red Sea chokepoint that Saudi oil exports now flow through.

That would be catastrophic for Riyadh. Saudi Arabia managed to survive the closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier in the conflict by rerouting oil exports through its Red Sea port of Yanbu. But if the Houthis seal the Red Sea too, there’s no third route.

For a while, the crown prince was one of the more hawkish voices in the region, reportedly concluding alongside Netanyahu that this was a rare chance to permanently weaken Iran. Other Gulf states didn’t share that appetite for risk. Saudi Arabia did, and it placed a big bet on Trump. That bet is looking shakier by the week.

The Gulf states welcomed Trump’s return, ramped up oil output, pledged trillions in U.S. investment, and one of them even gave him a luxury Boeing 747. They thought that would buy stability.

Instead, as one unnamed official put it, “Trump has set the Middle East on fire.”

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Today, Raw America’s Carl Gibson sat down with former Obama administration official Christopher Hale — who writes the Letters from Leo Substack — to discuss Trump’s feud with the pope. And tomorrow at 1 PM Eastern, Raw America founder John Byrne will host an exclusive conversation with former CNN anchor and current Substack host Jim Acosta. Visit our homepage at RawAmerica.com to watch live.

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Thanks for watching. I’m British Chris, with Raw America. We’ll see you tomorrow.

STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Pentagon Deploys Thousands More Troops to Middle East. The Department of Defense is planning to send approximately 10,000 more troops to the Middle East in an attempt to pressure the Iranian government to agree to U.S. terms for a ceasefire. 6,000 personnel will be aboard the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier (which was most recently near the Horn of Africa) and several warships escorting it, while another 4,200 are from the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group and the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. The deployment coincides with the end of the two-week ceasefire Trump announced in April.

• Trump’s Acting AG Backpedals Over Epstein Files. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who inherited the position after former Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired — is now publicly backtracking his previous position on the Department of Justice’s release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Blanche said earlier this month that the Epstein files “should not be a part of anything going forward,” though he told Semafor on Wednesday that he supported Epstein survivors coming forward to testify, as First Lady Melania Trump suggested during last week’s press conference. Many prominent Epstein survivors said the first lady was improperly putting the onus on victims, pointing out that many have already offered many hours of testimony to the DOJ.

• Trump Sued Over Firing Most Black Officials in Federal Government. A Black former federal appointee is now suing the Trump administration, alleging that the White House is intentionally targeting Black workers at independent agencies for firings. Alvin Brown — who President Biden appointed to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) — alleged that 75 percent of all Black officials at independent federal agencies have been fired by the Trump administration. Brown’s lawsuit listed several examples of Black appointees being fired at the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, the Library of Congress and the Federal Reserve.

• Virginia Takes Major Step Toward Eliminating Electoral College. Virginia on Wednesday signed onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), in which states agree to award their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote once the number of states amounts to 270 electoral votes (the number needed to officially elect a president). With Virginia adding their 13 electoral votes, the total count of NPVIC states is at 222. There are now 18 states and one territory (Washington D.C.) that have signed onto the NPVIC.

• Jury Rules Ticketmaster Is an Illegal Monopoly. A Manhattan jury ruled Wednesday that entertainment giant Ticketmaster was liable for illegally monopolizing the market for live event ticketing, and tying its concert promotions business to the use of its venues. According to Bloomberg, the verdict could eventually lead to a judgment that may lead to Ticketmaster being broken up. The lawsuit was first launched by then-President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, which was joined by 40 state attorneys general. 34 of those 40 decided to continue to trial after the DOJ settled its claims with Ticketmaster.

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In partnership with Really American, we met up with Mamdani as he delivered his first 100 days address. While corporate media attack Mamdani for taxes on billionaires, Raw America steps in to get you the truth fro…

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Today is Tax Day. And this morning we can tell you exactly where your money went. We can also tell you about a president who spent his overnight hours ranting at the Pope, attacking NATO, and sharing AI images of himself as Jesus Christ. About a billionaire media mogul who is hosting a dinner party for Donald Trump days before the White House Correspondents’ dinner — at a venue being renamed in Trump’s honor. About Democrats filing impeachment articles against Pete Hegseth for alleged war crimes. And about a press corps being bought and threatened into silence while all of this unfolds. Corporate media is running cover. The FCC chair is reminding everyone what happens if they don’t. And the billionaires are doing the buying. This is what they don’t want you reading this morning.

Raw America is Raw Story and Really American’s people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. We exist because of you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today is the day to change that.

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Trump’s 3 A.M. Meltdown: The Pope, NATO, and a Deleted Image of Himself as Jesus

The president of the United States was up past midnight Tuesday, firing off Truth Social posts in what has become a recognizable pattern: grievances about the Iran war, attacks on anyone who questions it, and increasingly erratic behavior that even his own allies are struggling to explain.

The first post, sent just before midnight, targeted Pope Leo XIV, who has repeatedly called for peace in the Middle East. Trump claimed Iran had killed 42,000 protesters in recent months — a figure that does not match any verified reporting — and demanded that Leo stop speaking out. This follows a Sunday meltdown in which Trump branded the Chicago-born pontiff “weak on crime, and terrible for foreign policy” and falsely accused him of supporting Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Five minutes after the first post, Trump turned to NATO. “NATO wasn’t there for us, and they won’t be there for us in the future!” he wrote, continuing a pattern of threatening allies who have declined to join his war in Iran. He has threatened to cut off all trade with Spain after its prime minister refused to cooperate. He has floated punishing NATO members who won’t support the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Then came the Jesus post.

Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself depicted as Jesus Christ — healing a man in a hospital bed, surrounded by American flags and bald eagles — less than an hour after attacking the Pope. The backlash from his own base was swift. Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called it “more than blasphemy” and said it carried “an Antichrist spirit.” A 19-year-old MAGA influencer wrote, “Faith is not a prop.” MAGA podcasters and commentators across the right called on him to delete it and ask for forgiveness. Trump eventually did delete the image, and later claimed he thought it was supposed to show him as a doctor, not Christ.

JD Vance once described Trump’s overnight posting habits to Fox News this way: “Sometimes the president will call you at 12:30 or 2:00 in the morning, and then he’ll call you at 6:00 in the morning about a totally different topic. It’s like, ‘Mr. President, did you go to sleep last night?’”

What we’re watching isn’t just erratic behavior from one man — it’s the deliberate dismantling of every institution, alliance, and moral authority that’s stood between American democracy and authoritarianism for eighty years. When a president attacks the Pope, threatens NATO partners, and wraps himself in the imagery of Christ, he’s not having a bad night. He’s telling you exactly who he thinks he is.

Democrats File Impeachment Articles Against Hegseth for Alleged War Crimes

House Democrats are introducing five articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today, accusing him of abuse of power, war crimes, and conduct damaging to the U.S. military. The measure, led by Arizona Democrat Yassamin Ansari and eight co-sponsors, has no realistic path to passage in the Republican-controlled Congress, but it puts on the record what Democrats believe the evidence shows.

The first article accuses Hegseth of ordering unauthorized strikes against Iran without congressional approval and signing off on plans involving extreme and unnecessary risk to U.S. personnel, including consideration of ground operations. The second alleges violations of the Law of Armed Conflict and the targeting of civilians, specifically citing the bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, and reports of double-tap strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats. Democrats contend that Hegseth’s public statements about showing “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” raise serious questions about violations of the Geneva Conventions.

The third article addresses Signalgate. The fourth accuses Hegseth of obstructing congressional oversight by withholding information about military operations and civilian casualties. The fifth charges him with conduct damaging to the military’s reputation.

The Pentagon’s response was to dismiss it as Democrats trying to make headlines. Hegseth, sources say, will keep doing what he’s doing.

The Geneva Conventions weren’t written by idealists — they were written by people who had just lived through the worst wars in human history and understood that without rules, wars become bottomless. When a Defense Secretary brags about showing “no mercy” and Congress does nothing, we’re not just losing a debate about tactics. We’re losing the principle that America is bound by the same laws it helped write.

David Ellison Is Throwing a Dinner Party for Trump. At a Venue Being Renamed After Trump.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison — son of top Trump donor Larry Ellison, and the man who installed MAGA-aligned commentator Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News — is hosting an intimate event honoring Donald Trump and his White House correspondents just two days before the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The venue: the United States Institute of Peace, which the State Department announced would be rebranded to include Trump’s name.

Ellison previously spent $150 million acquiring The Free Press and installing Weiss at CBS News, despite her having no television industry experience. Since then, sources say CBS News has grown notably warmer toward the Trump administration while shedding audiences and laying off journalists. CBS News has also reportedly invited both Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller to the Correspondents’ dinner, a move that prompted internal concern among CBS staff. One network employee called it an “access play.”

Ellison is also pursuing a $110 billion deal for Paramount to purchase Warner Bros., the parent company of what remains of CNN. That deal is awaiting regulatory approval. Trump’s Defense Secretary has already said publicly that the sooner Ellison takes over CNN, the better — because, the implication is clear, the coverage will change.

This is the state of American media. The man who controls CBS News is throwing a dinner party for the president, at a building named after the president, two days before the press corps annual dinner. And he is trying to buy CNN.

Independent outlets are being swallowed by billionaire investors — not just the Washington Post and the LA Times. It is happening at every level, in every market, one newsroom at a time. The ones that aren’t being bought are being threatened. FCC Chair Brendan Carr has made clear that broadcasters who don’t run cover for the Iran war risk losing their licenses. Trump has called critical outlets “corrupt and highly unpatriotic.” The chilling effect is working. That is the point.

Every democracy that’s ever collapsed has had this moment — the moment when the press stopped being the watchdog and started being the lap dog. When the people who own the microphones decide it’s more profitable to flatter power than to challenge it, citizens don’t just lose news. They lose the ability to make informed decisions about their own lives and their own country.

Independent media has never been more important. And it has never been under more pressure.

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Your Tax Dollars at War

Today is Tax Day. So here is what your money paid for.

According to a new analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies, the average American taxpaying household sent about $4,049 to military-related spending in 2025 — up from $3,707 the year before. That breaks down to roughly $1,870 going to Pentagon contractors, $770 to military personnel, and $130 for nuclear weapons. That number does not yet account for the Iran war, which sources say cost over $11.3 billion in its first six days alone. Trump has since proposed increasing defense spending by roughly 40 percent while cutting other programs by 10 percent.

For comparison, the average household paid about $2,492 toward Medicaid, $2,207 toward Medicare, $396 toward food stamps, and $607 toward education. The war came after those figures were calculated.

A Fox News poll from March found 70 percent of registered voters believe their taxes are too high, up 11 points from last year. Gallup found 60 percent say their taxes are too high — near the most negative levels recorded in two decades. And oil prices driven up by the Iran war pushed inflation to its highest single-month spike since 1967 this past March. Consumer confidence has dropped to its lowest level on record.

You are paying for this war. You are paying more for gas because of this war. And the media that is supposed to hold the people who launched it accountable is being bought, threatened, and brought to heel.

There’s a word for a government that takes your money to fight a war you didn’t vote for, cuts the programs your family depends on to pay for it, and then buys up the press so nobody covers what happened. We don’t have to use that word today, but we should all be honest about what we’re looking at.

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Raw America was founded for exactly this moment.

Because of your support, we have had reporters on the ground at the most important hearings of this political era. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool and going directly after the interviews that matter, bringing them to you unfiltered and unbought.

That kind of coverage — coverage that challenges power, refuses to sell wars, and won’t propagandize for the Ellisons — requires one thing: your support. We have no billionaire benefactor. We answer to you and no one else.

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This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.

STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Protesters Disrupt Russ Vought’s Congressional Testimony. Russ Vought — who is the White House’s Office of Management and Budget director — is currently testifying before the House Budget Committee. Protesters in support of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) interrupted the hearing to chant “PEPFAR saves lives, spend the money.” Trump’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget proposal would eliminate PEPFAR.

• Democrats Announce Task Force to Address Trump Family Corruption. Democrats in Congress are now launching an effort to investigate President Donald Trump’s corruption and his use of the federal government to enrich his family. Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) is leading the effort, and is calling for a ban on stock trading for all members of the executive branch, Congress and the judiciary. He also suggested term limits and a binding code of ethics for Supreme Court justices.

• Europe Makes Plans to Continue NATO Alliance Without U.S. America’s closest allies overseas are now drawing up a contingency plan to keep the NATO alliance going if Trump pulls the U.S. out. According to the Wall Street Journal, Europe is now creating the framework for a “European NATO,” and Germany has reportedly signed on. This is despite Germany previously pushing back on France’s past efforts to create a European-led NATO, marking a stunning shift in policy from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

• JD Vance Heckled at Right-Wing Event Over Middle Eastern Policy. Vice President JD Vance was confronted by a heckler during a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia. The unknown heckler shouted over Vance that “Jesus Christ does not support genocide,” with Vance agreeing. The heckler then asked why the Trump administration was supporting genocide in Gaza, and said Vance was responsible for “killing children.”

• Connecticut State Senate Passes Bill to Rein in ICE. The Democratic-controlled Connecticut legislature is poised to pass a landmark bill that would place significant guardrails on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations inside state lines. The Connecticut Senate on Tuesday night passed Senate Bill 397 on party lines, which would require ICE agents obtain a judicial warrant signed by a judge to conduct raids at hospitals, schools, churches and homeless shelters, prohibit them from wearing masks, require them to wear a badge with their name and gives the Connecticut attorney general the power to sue ICE agents who violate constitutional rights.