Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
The first applicants are already lining up with their hands out to get a piece of Trump’s proposed $1.776 billion slush fund. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is arguing with a straight face that Americans actually want their tax dollars going into January 6 rioters’ pockets. A damning congressional report reveals the true cost of Trump’s war in Iran. And a sitting Republican congressman from New Jersey has been missing from Washington for more than 75 days, his house is dark, his neighbors haven’t seen him and nobody in House Republican leadership seems to know where he is.
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First Applicants for Trump’s January 6 Reparations Fund Revealed
After the Trump Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded pot of money to compensate people who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, people trying to get a piece of it are already coming out of the woodwork.
Within two days of the announcement, a right-wing lawyer named Mike Howell sent a gushing letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declaring himself a candidate for one of the five board seats that will decide who gets paid from the fund. Howell runs something called the Oversight Project, he’s a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, and he’s a close ally of U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, who was himself stripped of his role leading the Justice Department’s “weaponization” working group back in February.
Howell’s letter declared the January 6th prosecutions were a campaign of “vengeance” by the “Radical Left” and described rioters as victims whose civil rights were trampled. He referred to people who ransacked the Capitol losing their careers as an “evil effect” that lingers to this day.
Folks, think about what’s actually happening here. The Framers wrote the Treasury Clause of Article I specifically so that no king and no faction could raid the public purse to reward their friends. Madison warned in Federalist 10 that the greatest threat to a republic was a faction capturing government to redistribute wealth to itself. That’s precisely what we’re watching unfold, with Heritage Foundation operatives already drafting themselves onto the board that decides who gets the money.
People actually asking to be compensated with our tax money have also been revealed. Michael Caputo, a former Trump adviser and administration official, is asking for $2.7 million. Brandon Fellows, a convicted Capitol rioter who was pardoned by Trump, wants $30 million. A pardoned rioter named Rachel Powell, who was caught on video repeatedly ramming a Capitol window with a cylindrical object and described by the DOJ as one of the first rioters to breach Capitol grounds, says she doesn’t know what price tag you can put on what she went through.
Todd Blanche told CNN he believes the behavior of applicants will be factored into any compensation. He said the commissioners will have to consider “what the claimant did.” But those commissioners haven’t been appointed yet. Trump can fire any of them at any time. And the fund runs through the end of 2028.
This is the textbook definition of a bill of attainder turned inside out. Instead of Congress punishing individuals without trial, which the Constitution explicitly forbids in Article I Section 9, the executive is now rewarding individuals without trial, paying them for crimes they committed against the seat of government itself. There’s no precedent for this in American history, and that’s not hyperbole. That’s just the record.
This is what corruption looks like in broad daylight.
Todd Blanche Insists Americans Want to Pay for Trump’s Slush Fund
If the existence of the fund isn’t enough, Todd Blanche showed a new level of hubris during a recent interview about the ploy to divert our tax dollars to insurrectionists.
CNN’s Paula Reid pressed Blanche on the obvious question: why should the average American taxpayer foot the bill for people who were prosecuted for attacking the people’s house? Blanche’s answer was that if Americans were told their government had committed a “horrible wrong” and that victims could get their legal fees back, no reasonable American would object to that.
He then went further, saying, “I do not think the American people have issues with that. To the contrary, I think they do want their tax dollars spent on things like that.”
This is the oldest authoritarian move in the book. You don’t ask the people what they want. You tell them what they already want, and you do it with a straight face, and you count on enough of them being too exhausted to push back. Hannah Arendt wrote about this in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” The point isn’t to persuade. The point is to make you doubt your own eyes.
You heard that right. The acting attorney general wants average Americans to believe that we all want to give nearly $2 billion to MAGA criminals. It’s a breathtaking claim on its own. But pair it with who’s running the fund, who’s already applied for money, and the fact that there’s no independent oversight and the president can remove commissioners whenever he wants, and it starts to look less like legal restitution and more like a political reward system funded by you and me.
When asked if Democrats would even be considered for the commissioner positions, Blanche said he’d be “open, to a point.” He said appointees would need to be “people that understand the political sensitivities.” That tells you everything about what this board is actually for.
“People who understand the political sensitivities” is just bureaucratic code for loyalty test. And once you’ve built a body inside the Justice Department that runs on loyalty rather than law, you haven’t reformed government. You’ve replaced it with something the Founders specifically left England to escape.
Hegseth’s Pentagon Lost Dozens of Expensive Aircraft in Iran War
While the administration has been busy setting up slush funds, a congressional report has quietly revealed just how costly the war with Iran has become.
Operation Epic Fury, launched after Trump ordered strikes on Iran on February 28th, has now resulted in the loss or damage of more than 40 U.S. military aircraft. The report, dated May 13th, lists the full breakdown: four F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets, one F-35A Lightning II stealth fighter, one A-10 Thunderbolt II, seven KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft, one E-3 Sentry surveillance plane, two MC-130J aircraft, one HH-60W rescue helicopter, 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones, and one MQ-4C Triton drone.
The F-35A alone is valued at around $110 million. Three of the F-15s were shot down by friendly fire over Kuwait on March 2nd. A fourth was downed during combat operations inside Iran on April 5th. Seven KC-135 tankers crashed over friendly airspace, with one going down in Iraq and killing all six crew members aboard. The cost just to replace those tankers could run close to $1.8 billion, based on Air Force budget estimates.
Six American servicemembers are dead. Six families got a knock on the door. And we’re learning about it from a congressional report dated more than a week ago, not from the commander in chief who sent them. The Founders gave Congress and only Congress the power to declare war in Article I Section 8 precisely so that one man’s ego couldn’t write checks that other people’s children pay with their lives. We’ve drifted so far from that constitutional design that a sitting president can launch a shooting war and the country finds out the body count from a footnote.
The Pentagon has now revised its total repair and replacement estimate upward from $25 billion to $29 billion.
Trump has continued to frame the conflict as a success. But the congressional report tells a more complicated story, warning that aircraft losses could “generate unplanned costs for their replacement, repair, or sustainment,” and suggesting Congress may need to reassess procurement and readiness budgets going forward.
It also notes something that should raise flags. Iran’s military industrial base is reconstituting faster than American intelligence projected. Tehran has already restarted drone production, is rebuilding missile sites, and is restoring production capacity that was destroyed earlier in the conflict. A U.S. official told CNN that Iran has “exceeded all timelines.”
This is exactly what Eisenhower warned us about in his 1961 farewell address when he coined the phrase military industrial complex. He said the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. When defense contractors stand to make $29 billion replacing what we just lost, and the same political coalition pushing the war is bankrolled by those same contractors, the war doesn’t have to make strategic sense. It just has to keep going.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi didn’t miss the opportunity to gloat, saying publicly that Congress had confirmed the loss of “dozens of aircraft worth billions” and calling it a validation of Iran’s military capability.
The public was told this operation was going well. This congressional report says something very different.
Missing House Republican’s Neighbors Haven’t Seen Him Either
It’s been more than 75 days since Republican Congressman Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey has been seen in Washington.
Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters this week that he spoke to Kean “a few weeks ago now” and that Kean told him he’d be back “soon.” Johnson said he doesn’t even know the details of Kean’s condition and that he has to respect the member’s personal privacy. That’s a generous framing for a situation where one of the 435 voting members of the U.S. House of Representatives has missed 88 roll call votes since March 5th.
A statement from Kean’s office on April 27th cited “a personal medical issue” and said his doctors expected a “complete” recovery. But events scheduled for late May were quietly canceled, and his chief of staff made the notable comment to the New York Times that “there’s no cameras where Tom is.” Wherever that is.
Here’s what nobody’s saying out loud. Article I of the Constitution gives every American the right to representation in the people’s house. The roughly 760,000 residents of New Jersey’s 7th District have effectively had no vote in Congress for going on three months, and the Speaker of the House thinks that’s a privacy matter. It isn’t. It’s a constitutional question about whether seats in Congress belong to the members or to the people who elected them.
Reporters from NOTUS went to his Tudor-style house in Westfield, New Jersey, and found it dark and quiet while the rest of the neighborhood bustled with activity. His wife’s car hadn’t been spotted in the driveway for weeks. The family dog hadn’t been walked. A single gardening glove sat abandoned on the front lawn. The Ford F-150 parked outside was coated in pollen from sitting still so long. The front door’s handle was partially detached. Nobody answered the doorbell.
His neighbors, speaking anonymously, said the disappearance had become the dominant subject of neighborhood gossip. When a reporter finally encountered Kean’s wife, Rhonda, returning home Tuesday morning, she said two words: “No comment.”
Meanwhile, the congressional office has been running a kind of ghost-ship social media operation, posting at least 115 times on X since Kean’s last vote. Staff have attended ribbon cuttings and celebrated high school students enlisting in the military. Posts are being written in the first person. The appearance of an active congressman is being maintained while the actual congressman is nowhere to be found.
There’s also the matter of the stock trades. NOTUS discovered that Kean was still filing financial transaction reports to Congress during his absence, having digitally signed reports on April 13th showing he bought and sold shares in eight stocks with a combined value between $50,000 and $190,000 in mid-to-late March.
Think about that. He’s too sick to show up and cast a vote on behalf of his constituents, but he’s well enough to be trading stocks worth up to $190,000. The STOCK Act of 2012 was supposed to put a stop to this kind of thing, but enforcement has always been a joke, and this is what happens when Congress writes ethics rules with no teeth. Either he’s signing those filings himself, in which case he can show up and vote, or somebody else is signing them for him, in which case we’ve got a much bigger problem.
Speaker Johnson can afford to lose only two Republican votes this week when he pushes through the partisan budget bill. Kean is a missing piece, and no one in leadership is willing to say plainly what’s going on or when, or if, he’s coming back.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump’s Slush Fund Lawsuit Assigned to Judge Who Has Ruled Against Him. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, will be presiding over the new lawsuit aiming to stop President Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund meant to compensate January 6 rioters and MAGA loyalists. Leon is the same judge who ruled against construction moving forward for Trump’s proposed White House ballroom.
Democrats Finally Release 2024 Election Autopsy. Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Ken Martin has finally relented to pressure from Democratic activists to release its assessment of why it lost the 2024 election to Donald Trump. The report was authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, who wrote a disclaimer that the report reflects his own views rather than those of the DNC. Martin said the report — which is incomplete and riddled with errors — didn’t meet his standards for publication, hence why he didn’t release it until now. Rivera wrote that after Joe Biden withdrew from the race, his campaign failed to set up Vice President Kamala Harris for success, and missed the opportunity to correct the narrative that Harris was Biden’s “border czar” when she was instead assigned the responsibility of determining the root causes of immigration from Central American countries.
Colorado Democrats Censure Gov. Jared Polis for Commuting Tina Peters’ Sentence. After Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) — who is term-limited — commuted the sentence of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters this week, more than 200 members of the Centennial State’s Democratic-controlled legislature passed a resolution censuring the governor. Peters, who is a 2020 election denier, was serving a nine-year prison sentence for allowing a far-right activist affiliated with conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell to access the county’s election systems to search for evidence of election fraud.
Trump’s Revenge Campaigns Against Republicans Could Hurt GOP in Midterms. According to Reuters, President Trump’s recent Republican primary victories in which he ousted rebellious members of his own party from office — like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and several Republican state senators from Indiana — is having the effect of forcing Republicans to tie themselves closely to the president. However, because the president is historically unpopular with the nationwide electorate, this could lead to Republicans suffering particularly staggering losses in the November midterm elections.
January 6 Cop Says Trump’s Slush Fund Is a ‘Retainer on a Mob.’ Former U.S. Capitol Police Department officer Harry Dunn, who was injured battling rioters on January 6, 2021, recently tore into the Trump Department of Justice’s proposed taxpayer-funded $1.776 billion compensation initiative for MAGA loyalists. Dunn told CNN that Trump is “putting a retainer on a mob, on a militia that’s already showed the violence that they’re willing to enact on his behalf.” Dunn and other former U.S. Capitol Police Department officers are suing to block the Trump administration from making any payouts.
