Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
The full text of the Iran nuclear deal has leaked, and the Trump regime is already scrambling to downplay and spin what looks like total surrender. Bari Weiss is already meeting with CNN executives ahead of her takeover of its newsroom. January 6 rioters who attacked cops are now trying to millions in taxpayer money through a gaping loophole Trump’s DOJ won’t close. And Trump’s political brand took another hit in Georgia, where a billionaire used his own money to knock out the president’s hand-picked candidate for governor.
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Iran Deal Leaked — and Iran Is the Clear Winner
CNN has obtained a draft copy of the 14-point memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran, and it shows significant concessions from the Trump administration.
The agreement lays out the terms of a ceasefire between the two countries, which includes the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, billions for Iran, and a formal reiteration from Tehran that it will never produce a nuclear weapon.
CNN obtained the draft agreement from an unnamed U.S. official. A diplomat who saw the document at the G7 summit in France this week confirmed its authenticity, along with two other diplomatic sources with knowledge of the negotiations.
The White House is pushing back, saying the leaked text doesn’t reflect the actual agreement. Iranian state media is also calling it inaccurate. So there’s still a chance the final signed document will differ from what CNN obtained.
But the core terms are eye-opening.
Under this draft agreement, the U.S. agrees to let Iran sell its oil and petrochemical products on the international market. Iran could also tap into a $300 billion development fund, if it meets nuclear commitments in follow-up negotiations.
The U.S. will be lifting all sanctions on Iran, including UN Security Council resolutions, IAEA board actions, and every unilateral American sanction on the books, both primary and secondary. It also commits to ending its naval blockade and withdrawing U.S. forces from surrounding areas within 30 days of the final agreement being signed.
Iran, in the meantime, will commit to reopening shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman within 30 days, and to maintaining the current status quo on its nuclear program in the interim. And the fate of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile is still being left up to final negotiations.
The whole thing is supposed to be formally signed Friday in Switzerland, triggering a 60-day window to hammer out the final deal. U.S. officials are saying the document itself is a “political document” that doesn’t include other commitments Iran has made on its nuclear program.
This is a far more sweeping agreement than anything Trump publicly signaled. Three hundred billion dollars in potential relief. Full sanctions removal. A naval withdrawal. And the nuclear details still unresolved. Keep a close eye on this one.
When the framers handed the Senate its advice and consent role over treaties in Article II, they did it precisely so no single president could bind the country in secret, and a two-page memo nobody in Congress has so much as seen, let alone voted on, is exactly the kind of one-man bargain they were trying to make impossible.
Bari Weiss Meets with CNN Executives Ahead of Her Takeover of Their Newsroom
The merger of Paramount-Skydance with CNN’s parent company is accelerating toward completion. Now, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is already introducing herself to CNN’s leadership.
According to the media newsletter Status, Weiss met recently with several CNN executives, including CNN CEO Mark Thompson, COO Alex MacCallum, and executive editor Virginia Moseley. CBS president Tom Cibrowski was also in the room. The meeting was framed as an introductory session ahead of Paramount Skydance’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
This meeting happened in response to last Friday, when the Justice Department quietly cleared the way for billionaire nepo baby and Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery, shutting down an antitrust investigation into the merger. The Wall Street Journal reported that lawyers inside the DOJ’s antitrust division had actually been inclined to recommend suing to block the deal on anticompetitive grounds before Todd Blanche’s team rammed through approval.
So the deal is moving forward. And Bari Weiss is already getting her bearings inside the newsroom she’ll likely soon oversee.
The context is important: David Ellison is the son of billionaire Trump mega-donor Larry Ellison, who acquired Paramount in June of last year. He brought in Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief in October, after buying her right-wing news outlet The Free Press. And her tenure has been, to put it generously, turbulent.
The most high-profile casualty so far is Scott Pelley, who spent 37 years at CBS before getting pushed out after criticizing Weiss and her handpicked executive editor for 60 Minutes at a staff meeting. Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” the show. After his departure, he accused CBS leadership of instructing him to lie in news stories and of imposing a pro-Trump slant.
Weiss’s response to the uproar? According to Status, she hid in her sixth-floor office, which is now locked and requires a special keycard to access, and isolated herself from everyone except her closest allies.
The level of open corruption is breathtaking. This Justice Department answers to a president who received a $1 billion commitment from CBS’s owner before his second term, and just greenlit a deal that puts one of the country’s most-watched news networks under the control of a right-wing lackey who fired a legendary reporter who pushed back after being told to lie on the air all to cover for that same president.
Thomas Jefferson told Edward Carrington in 1787 that if he had to choose between government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he’d take the newspapers every time, because a free press was the one thing that kept the powerful honest, and what we’re watching now is the powerful simply buying the press so nobody’s left to keep them honest at all.
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January 6 Rioters Exploiting Loophole to Get Taxpayer Money
January 6 defendants, including people who attacked police officers, are now making moves to get millions of dollars in taxpayer money through an obscure loophole known as the Federal Tort Claims Act, or FTCA. And the Trump regime has almost unlimited discretion over whether to pay out those claims.
The FTCA allows individuals who say they were wronged by the government to file claims for monetary damages. The DOJ can settle those claims on its own, with no oversight from Congress or the courts.
This is noteworthy, as we all watched bipartisan outrage erupt last month when Trump announced a $1.8 billion so-called “anti-weaponization” slush fund to pay MAGA loyalists as part of his settlement with the IRS. Even MAGA Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri pushed back, saying people who attacked cops on January 6 shouldn’t get a dime of our tax money.
While the administration retreated on the fund itself, the FTCA gives them a quieter way to accomplish the same thing.
One former top DOJ official who worked on FTCA was blunt about the arrangement, saying it risks “turning the judgment fund into exactly the sort of slush fund that the ‘anti-weaponization’ fund was going to be.” She also warned there’s “no limit on what you can use that judgment fund money for, so long as someone files a bogus claim.”
And a lot of people are now filing claims. One Florida attorney who’s a longtime personal friend of Trump says he’s filed roughly 400 FTCA claims on behalf of January 6 defendants and converting some of them into lawsuits.
Applicants include Ohio man Kenneth Joseph Thomas, who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison after video showed him shoving police officers and throwing himself into a line of officers while shouting at other rioters to hold the line. John George Todd III, sentenced to five years after being found guilty of injuring a Capitol police officer, is also filing a claim. Andrew Taake of Houston, who pleaded guilty to using bear spray on police officers and attacking them with a whip-like weapon, got a six-year prison sentence before he was pardoned. Now he’s seeking $2.5 million.
Senator Adam Schiff of California has introduced a bill that would bar January 6 defendants from collecting FTCA payouts, but with the current Senate, it’s a long shot.
These are the people who attacked the Capitol, attacked law enforcement officers, and are now asking American taxpayers to cut them a check. And the president who pardoned them is the same one deciding whether he’ll write it.
Madison called the power of the purse the most complete and effectual weapon the people’s representatives could ever hold, and he meant it as a check on a grasping executive, so there’s a bitter irony in an executive reaching into that same Treasury to reward the very people who stormed the building where that power lives.
Trump’s Candidate Loses in Georgia
Donald Trump’s endorsement record took another dent Tuesday night, though the winner had to spend $100 million of his own money to do it.
Rick Jackson, a billionaire and onetime Trump skeptic, beat Trump’s hand-picked candidate for Georgia governor, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, in the Republican primary. Jackson spent a record-shattering sum flooding the airwaves. In the end, it worked.
This is the second high-profile Trump endorsement loss in two weeks. Just before that, Iowa Congressman Randy Feenstra lost his gubernatorial primary despite having Trump’s backing.
Trump had a mixed night overall Tuesday. His pick in the Alabama Senate runoff won. Two Oklahoma candidates who got Trump’s blessing are headed to runoffs. Congressman Mike Collins won Georgia’s Senate runoff. But the Georgia gubernatorial primary loss still stings.
Trump backed Burt Jones early, appeared at a White House event with him, and did a couple of tele-rallies. What he didn’t do was go after Rick Jackson, even as Jackson chipped away at Jones’ lead. Jackson also tried to align himself with Trump, sending mailers describing both himself and the president as “Businessmen. Outsiders. Men of action.” And he donated a million dollars to Trump’s political operation.
Trump woke up Wednesday morning and posted in all caps about his big wins from the night before. A few minutes later, he claimed credit for Jackson’s victory too, writing that Jackson “very successfully campaigned on being ‘TRUMP,’ and won.” That’s one way to spin it.
A billionaire with no political experience just outmaneuvered a Trump-endorsed candidate in a major swing state using his immense wealth. But upcoming contests in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Oklahoma where Trump’s picks are in competitive runoffs, the limits of the Trump endorsement are becoming increasingly visible.
Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo back in 1976 that a wealthy candidate can spend as much of his own fortune as he likes, we’ve been sliding toward a politics where the price of admission is a hundred million dollars, and a nomination that ought to belong to the voters of Georgia just got settled by one man’s checkbook.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump Threatens New Attack on Iran if He Doesn’t Like Final Deal. President Donald Trump said Wednesday during the G7 summit in France that the U.S. would resume its bombing campaign of Iran if he didn’t approve of the final agreement negotiated between the two countries. The president stressed the current framework on the table is “not final,” and that “if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their heads.” The current agreement extends the current ceasefire by another 60 days and tables discussions about Iran’s nuclear program, while reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump Lashes Out at Obama in Profane Rant After Iran Deal Leaks. In comments to the press during the G7 summit, President Trump used profanity to discuss former President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), his 2015 agreement with Iran. Trump accused Obama of trying to “bribe his way out” with Iran, and that the Iranian government thought he was a “stupid son of a b—.” The JCPOA included freeing up hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets, along with $1.7 billion in interest. Trump’s leaked agreement with Iran includes a $300 billion fund for rebuilding the country in the wake of the war.
Middle East Expert Calls Iran Agreement ‘Bigger Defeat Than Vietnam.’ In a new article for Foreign Policy magazine, Paul Musgrave — an associate professor of government at Georgetown University in Doha, Qatar — compared President Trump’s framework of a deal to end the Iran War to the United States’ defeat at the hands of Vietnam in the 1970s. Musgrave argued that, like Vietnam, the United States expended significant resources in an overseas conflict with little to show for it, and in a significantly weaker geopolitical position compared to before the war. Musgrave also observed that the Iran war has now created a more “hard-line” regime in Tehran, while its nuclear program remains relatively unchanged.
Senate Republicans Souring on Todd Blanche’s Confirmation as Attorney General. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche may have a tough road to full confirmation in the Senate, due to his perceived lack of independence from President Trump. The Hill reported that Blanche angered a roomful of Republicans questioning his $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded payout plan for pardoned January 6 defendants and other MAGA loyalists, along with the IRS’ agreement with Trump that it won’t audit him, his family or his businesses. Sen. Thom Tillis' (R-N.C.), who is not running for reelection, has opposed all efforts to reward January 6 rioters, sits on the Judiciary Committee, which will decide whether to give Blanche a vote by the full Senate or kill his appointment.
Luigi Mangione’s Attorneys Plan to Say Client Was ‘Emotionally Disturbed.’ Attorneys representing Luigi Mangione — who was charged with the 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — plan to pursue a mental health-related defense ahead of Mangione’s trial in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Mangione, who is 28, has pleaded not guilty to the charges. In the wake of Thompson’s murder and Mangione’s arrest, the latter became the subject of memes characterizing him as a folk hero after evidence recovered from the scene suggested the shooting was motivated by UnitedHealthcare’s well-documented pattern of denying life-saving care in exchange for higher shareholder returns.
