Good evening. I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America.
A journalist just revealed three critical omissions from the toxicology report on Trump’s would-be assassin in Pennsylvania. Bari Weiss is positioned to run CNN if Paramount is allowed to buy its parent company. A MAGA election official in Arizona’s most populous county seized ballots and voting equipment. And a Texas Republican congresswoman was just caught in leaked audio panicking over her own internal polling showing her in a dead heat with her Democratic opponent.
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Trump Shooter’s Toxicology Report Missing Three Major Details
There are new questions swirling around the attempted 2024 assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania after several major details were omitted.
Investigative journalist Ken Silva told Tucker Carlson he obtained Thomas Crooks’ toxicology report through a months-long legal battle. At first, nothing jumped out at him.
But everything changed when a tipster asked Silva whether he’d taken a closer look at the report. He eventually found three specimens that the medical examiner collected but either didn’t test or didn’t include in the findings — a sample of bile, a tube of blood, and a hair sample.
Silva says those particular specimens could have shown whether Crooks had any psychotropic substances in his system before he opened fire. He’s careful not to make any conclusions, and stressed he doesn’t know what to make of the omissions.
But those omissions are glaring when considering that the person in question tried to assassinate the then-presumptive Republican nominee in broad daylight. This news also comes just after new FBI records revealed Crooks had multiple email exchanges with a Butler County Sheriff’s deputy before the attack. Because of that, every gap in the official record looks that much more suspicious.
Nobody’s saying yet what happened to those three samples or why they were left out of the report. But the speculation is about to hit a fever pitch until we get definitive answers.
Bari Weiss May Be About to Do to CNN What She’s Doing to CBS
The chaos that has engulfed CBS News under Bari Weiss may be a prelude to what’s about to happen at another major TV news network.
If and when Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery clears its final hurdle, Weiss is likely to take editorial control of CNN as well. That’s a massive expansion of influence and power for someone who’s been in the CBS News chair for less than a year, and who had zero TV news experience before that.
Paramount Skydance CEO and billionaire Trump donor David Ellison reportedly couldn’t be happier with Weiss’ performance so far. Sources described her as having the company’s full confidence.
Her tenure at CBS News has been rife with controversy. She fired 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. Scott Pelley was fired after he accused Weiss of “murdering” the show. She then installed tech journalist Nick Bilton as the show’s new executive producer.
The show’s three remaining correspondents, Lesley Stahl, Jon Wertheim, and Bill Whitaker, have said they’re staying but have been sharply critical of Weiss’ management.
The Warner Bros. Discovery deal is a roughly $110 billion transaction that still needs to clear federal approval, and potentially a lawsuit from California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders have already signed off. The companies expect the deal to close between July and September.
This is exactly what happens when right-wing billionaires use their immense wealth to buy up news outlets. Actual journalism gets snuffed out, and anyone who speaks out gets fired. This is exactly why we created Raw America. If you value truly independent journalism that doesn’t take billionaire money and answers only to readers, we need you to step up and help keep Raw America operational. We can’t do any of this without you.
Swing State Election Official Seizes Ballots and Equipment
Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, a MAGA Republican and known election denier, had his staff remove a ballot scanner from a secure election site in March without authorization. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors says security cameras captured the whole thing.
His employees loaded the scanner and a stack of provisional ballot envelopes, some of which may have contained live ballots from Tempe municipal elections, into a personal vehicle and kept them for roughly 50 minutes. The scanner was returned after the county’s elections director called Heap’s office about it.
Because the scanner was out of authorized custody long enough to potentially be compromised, the board said it had no choice but to buy a replacement, costing taxpayers around $70,000.
Heap claims the equipment was purchased by his office in 2023 and was never properly transferred to the elections department, so he says his office still controlled it. But most notably, he did not explain why his staff also took the ballot envelopes.
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate whether Heap’s employees broke state law.
Heap is now represented by America First Legal, which was founded by Trump advisor Stephen Miller. AFL attorneys have threatened county officials and poll workers with criminal prosecution over routine election practices like ballot drop boxes.
The county’s Republican-controlled board has accused AFL of using Heap’s case as a “launching pad for an unprecedented power grab.”
To be clear, this is the largest election jurisdiction in a critical swing state. The uncertainty Heap’s conduct has created is casting a dark cloud over the midterms. County board vice chair Debbie Lesko, who is also a Republican, plainly called Heap’s actions “chaos.”
MAGA Congresswoman Heard Panicking About Midterms in Leaked Audio
Punchbowl News obtained a recording from May in which Rep. Monica De La Cruz of Texas tells her own supporters she’s scared. Her internal polling shows her leading Democratic challenger Bobby Pulido by just one point in Texas’ 15th Congressional District. De La Cruz could be heard saying, “Oh, sweet Lord Jesus. That’s not good.”
Pulido is a Latin Grammy Award winner, whose father is also a Latin Grammy Award winner. His uncle was a county judge. His cousin is a former district attorney. There’s a high school gym in South Texas named after him and his father. He has deep roots in Hidalgo County, where roughly 75 percent of the district’s population is Latino.
De La Cruz won her seat twice, but Texas’ new maps have caused headaches even for incumbent Republicans. Texas lawmakers redrew the map so aggressively that De La Cruz’s current constituents make up only two-fifths of her new district. She’s heard in the recording admitting fundraising is “so critical” to her political survival.
She’s not alone. Republicans across the country are facing increasingly difficult terrain thanks to backlash over Trump. Democrats are widely expected to take back the House, and the Senate is also within reach.
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Thanks for watching. I’m British Chris. We’ll see you tomorrow.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
ICE Has Detained Over 500 Babies and Toddlers During Trump’s Second Term. New reporting from MS NOW and the Marshall Project shows that at any given time, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has approximately 25 babies and toddlers aged three and under in federal detention centers. And since President Donald Trump took office in 2025, federal officials have detained at least 500 children who are three years old or younger. That figure is ten times higher than in the previous 12 months under former President Joe Biden’s administration.
ICE Guard Lost Loaded Firearm Inside Largest Detention Center. A federal government watchdog is alleging in a new report that an ICE detention center guard lost a loaded gun inside Camp East Montana near Fort Bliss in Texas in January. The Government Accountability Office wrote in its report released Tuesday that both detainees and the general public were put at “significant risk” due to the guard’s failure to secure his firearm. The facility holds roughly 3,000 detainees across six tent encampments on any given day.
Jon Stewart Says Trump’s Outburst at NBC’s Kristen Welker Was His ‘Worst Nightmare.’ During Monday’s episode of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, host Jon Stewart argued that Trump was subjected to his “worst nightmare” by being “trapped in a barn” with “a woman who won’t stop asking pertinent questions.” Trump angrily ended the interview after Welker kept pressing him on the Iran war and reminding him that he ran on ending all foreign wars.
MAGA Group Runs Ad Featuring AI-Generated Version of James Talarico. A dark money group named Citizens for Sanity recently released a new ad for Texas’ U.S. Senate race with a six-figure budget to run statewide. The ad shows an AI-generated version of Democratic candidate James Talarico wearing a dress and singing “My Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music,” though the lyrics have been rewritten to attack transgender people. According to the New Republic, Citizens for Sanity is closely linked to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and has previously released racist ads attacking both Latino immigrants and Black Americans.
New Mockup of Penn Station Remodel Bears Trump’s Name. New mockups of the planned $8 billion remodel of New York’s Penn Station have been released by Amtrak, which owns the station, and development firm Penn Transformation Partners. The mockups show both the Roman-style columns the station was known for before it was bulldozed to make way for Madison Square Garden, and President Trump’s name and official seal on the inner wall of one of the entryways. The project is slated to begin in 2027 and take six years to complete.
