The stories you won’t hear from the corporate press. And the reason we need your help to keep telling them.
This afternoon’s roundup covers a lot of ground. Trump’s public nodding-off incidents have become so frequent that his own Secretary of State got fact-checked in real time. The Newark immigration crisis revealed that the administration’s first instinct made a bad situation dramatically worse. A prison guard who was on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein died testified before Congress this week, and the mysterious orange shape on the surveillance footage still has no explanation. And in our exclusive sit-down with Senator Ron Wyden, he raised alarms about a nominee to lead all of American intelligence who he says has zero relevant experience — and whose main qualification appears to be loyalty to Trump’s political retribution machine.
Raw America is one of the fastest-growing independent news outlets in the country. And we’ve built it without a single billionaire backer or corporate sponsor. No hedge fund owns our editorial decisions. No MAGA-aligned conglomerate tells us what to cover. That independence is getting rarer by the day as legacy outlets are absorbed one by one by right-wing money. We’re currently behind on our fundraising goals, and if just 1 in 20 people reading today’s email became a paid subscriber, we could fully fund our expansion through the midterms. Will you be one of them? Become a paid subscriber today.
“Dozy Don”: Trump’s Nodding-Off Problem Has Become a White House Crisis
At a roundtable in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin on Friday — focused on the crushing fertilizer and energy costs facing American farmers in the shadow of the Iran war — President Trump appeared to close his eyes and tilt his head downward as attendees took turns praising him. The footage went viral within hours.
It was the latest in what has become a genuinely remarkable pattern. Since April 2025, Trump has been accused of dozing off at Pope Francis’s funeral, during a major agreement announcement in Saudi Arabia, at an energy summit in Pennsylvania, during an anti-Antifa roundtable, at a weight-loss drug pricing event, while Marco Rubio praised his Ukraine leadership, at a peace agreement press conference, during a marijuana policy announcement, at a Venezuelan leader briefing, at a school lunch event with RFK Jr., during climate rollback proceedings, at the inaugural meeting of his own Board of Peace, at crime roundtables in Tennessee, healthcare events, a Presidential Fitness Test, and a maternal health announcement. That’s not a rough stretch. That’s a pattern spanning more than a year of public appearances.
The White House has responded with escalating fury. After a clip circulated this week from an Oval Office coal briefing, the administration’s Rapid Response account called critics “dumba-- mouth-breathers.” On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back during Congressional testimony, insisting Trump “doesn’t sleep” and actually calls him at 2 and 5 in the morning. Rubio then watched as senators played him footage of the president apparently nodding off. His defense fell apart in real time.
The White House can attack reporters. They cannot attack physics.
Newark on the Brink: How Markwayne Mullin Made a Crisis Worse, and Why They Called In the Fixer
What started as protests outside Newark’s Delaney Hall detention facility — a 1,000-bed, privately run ICE facility — deteriorated into violent clashes between demonstrators and federal agents. Detainees were on hunger strike. Democratic lawmakers showed up to condemn conditions. And the Trump administration’s response was to send in newly minted DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who promptly threatened to pull customs staffing from Newark Liberty International Airport.
That threat rattled airline industry executives and shocked people inside the administration itself.
The White House then did what it apparently does when things get bad enough: it called Tom Homan. The border czar spent five days on the ground in Newark, eating spaghetti with detainees in a bid to counter sanitation allegations, meeting with the mayor, the governor, state troopers, and police leadership. He declared victory, claiming officials agreed to designated protest zones. Democratic officials said DHS simply agreed to restore basic family visitation — something the community had been demanding for weeks.
Whatever the spin, the story here is clear: the administration’s confirmed first-line response to a crisis made it worse, and they had to deploy their most trusted enforcer to clean it up. Mullin’s tenure as DHS secretary is less than two weeks old.
The Epstein Guard Speaks: An Orange Shape on the Stairs, and Questions That Won’t Go Away
Six years after Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, a corrections officer on duty that night finally testified before Congress — and the most disturbing detail from that night still has no explanation.
Tova Noel, a National Guard veteran who served in Kuwait during Operation Enduring Freedom, appeared before the House Oversight Committee this week. She had been accused of falsifying logs the night Epstein died, with prosecutors alleging she and a fellow guard spent most of their shifts browsing the internet at their desks rather than conducting rounds — leaving Epstein and other inmates in the Special Housing Unit unchecked for eight hours. Both officers eventually reached deals with prosecutors, and their cases were dropped in December 2021.
But what Noel could not explain — and what investigators have not explained to this day — is an orange-colored shape captured on surveillance footage moving up a staircase toward the locked, isolated tier where Epstein was housed at approximately 10:39 p.m. on August 9, 2019. Department of Justice documents confirm investigators flagged the footage. Noel told lawmakers she had no idea what it was. “To be very honest, I don’t know what it is, who it is,” she testified. “I was never carrying anything orange at all, and I never issued anything orange to anyone in the SHU.” She also disputed that the timing of the orange shape matched when she conducted her count that night.
Beyond the mystery footage, Noel pointed to systemic failures: chronic understaffing, inadequate training, and her own acknowledgment that she was never properly trained to work in the unit where Epstein was held. She asked lawmakers for the chance to move on from her association with the case. Congress, and the public, are still waiting for the full picture.
Exclusive: Senator Ron Wyden Sounds the Alarm on Surveillance, Corruption, and the Man Trump Just Picked to Run American Intelligence
Raw America sat down with Oregon Senator Ron Wyden for an exclusive interview. What he told us should concern every American who values their privacy, their wallet, and their country’s national security. You can watch the video above.
Your phone knows where you are right now. Wyden’s warning about FISA Section 702, the law designed to monitor foreign threats, is that it has become a backdoor into the lives of ordinary Americans. The surveillance apparatus built to catch foreign spies is being used to sweep up data on law-abiding citizens. Wyden’s legislation would require a warrant before the government can access that data and would close the loophole that allows location data to be sold and peddled to foreign actors.
But here’s what makes this more than a civil liberties issue. Wyden raised the alarm about what happens when the people controlling that surveillance apparatus are Donald Trump, Kash Patel, and JD Vance. He didn’t mince words. These are not people, he argued, who can be trusted with unfettered access to Americans’ private data. And with AI now capable of combining small, seemingly harmless pieces of data to build a comprehensive picture of any individual, the stakes have never been higher.
On Trump’s crypto dealings, Wyden was pointed: foreign contributions and favors are flowing in without transparency, without audits, and without accountability. A slush fund with no oversight, run by an administration that has, in his framing, set aside the rule of law.
Then there’s Bill Pulte, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the position that sits atop the entire American intelligence community.
Wyden’s assessment was blunt. Pulte has no intelligence experience. None. And in Wyden’s telling, his primary qualification appears to be loyalty to Trump’s political retribution campaign, what the senator called a “revenge tour against political enemies.” Handing the keys to American intelligence to someone whose main credential is being useful to Trump’s vendettas is not a personnel decision. It’s a national security threat.
Meanwhile, at Wyden’s four recent town halls across Oregon, constituents weren’t asking about any of this. They were asking about medical costs. Housing costs. Gas prices. The economic promises that haven’t materialized. And while those questions go unanswered, the administration is spending taxpayer money — after initially claiming private interests would foot the bill — on UFC stages on the White House lawn.
As Wyden put it, the gap between what the public was promised and what they are actually receiving is vast. On immigration, on the economy, on basic costs of living, the promises and the reality are not in the same ZIP code.
A Note From Raw America
Raw America is one of the fastest-growing independent news outlets in the country — and we built that without a billionaire backer or a corporate sponsor. No hedge fund owns our editorial decisions. No MAGA-aligned media conglomerate controls what we cover. In an era where legacy outlet after legacy outlet is being absorbed by right-wing ideologues, we remain accountable to exactly one group: our readers.
But we’re behind on our fundraising goals, and the midterms are coming. Expanding our reporting, securing more exclusive interviews like the one with Senator Wyden, and building the infrastructure to cover what others won’t — all of that costs money we don’t currently have.
Here’s what we know: if just 5% of the people reading today’s email became paid subscribers, we could fully fund our expansion plans through the midterms.
One in twenty. That’s all it takes.
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— John, Justin and the Raw America Team
5 Stories You May Have Missed
A convicted January 6 rioter is now working in a classified Pentagon counterterrorism office. Elias Irizarry, 24, was hired to work in the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office, which manages highly classified military operations — despite having no background in counterterrorism and having pleaded guilty to participating in the Capitol attack. Follow-up reporting revealed he was filmed for more than five minutes during the riot moving through restricted grounds and climbing through a broken window while holding a metal pole. Internal Pentagon staff raised alarms, and the department made no effort to deny the reporting.
The House actually voted to end the war with Iran — and it passed. The House passed a war powers resolution 215-208 on Wednesday to block Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran, marking the first time such a measure has cleared either chamber since the conflict began more than three months ago. Four Republicans broke with their party to support the largely Democrat-backed measure — a genuine crack in GOP unity that leadership tried and failed to prevent by sending members home early for recess. The resolution still faces an uphill battle in the Senate and a likely veto, but the political momentum is notable.
The Senate rammed through $70 billion more for ICE and Border Patrol — with almost no Republican opposition. Senate Republicans passed a $70 billion budget reconciliation package to fund Trump’s immigration crackdown through 2029, on top of the $170 billion already approved last year under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only Republican to vote against it. The legislation does not include language that would permanently bar the Trump administration from creating a $1.8 billion slush fund for MAGA allies — a provision that even some Republicans said they wanted. It now heads to the House.
The Supreme Court just cleared Alabama to use a voting map that lower courts found to be intentionally racially discriminatory. In an unsigned order, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional map in the 2026 elections that lower courts had found to be racially discriminatory, citing its own April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which made it significantly harder for plaintiffs to win Voting Rights Act challenges. The lower court had ruled the map intentionally discriminated against Black voters in violation of the equal protection principle. The decision is part of a broader pattern of Supreme Court rulings that legal observers say are reshaping the electoral landscape heading into the midterms.
The Strait of Hormuz closure is now pushing millions into acute hunger worldwide. The World Food Program warned that soaring costs and fuel and fertilizer shortages caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have pushed an additional 2.5 million people in Somalia, 1.3 million in Sri Lanka, and 2.3 million in Afghanistan into acute food insecurity. U.S. forces this week intercepted Iranian missiles and drones launched toward the Strait of Hormuz, and struck Iranian coastal surveillance radar sites in retaliation — with no resolution to the underlying crisis in sight and Iran signaling it has not deployed its full military capabilities.
