Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
A federal judge just ordered the Justice Department to stop hiding files on the woman who accused Donald Trump of assaulting her when she was 13 years old. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick blocked the opening of a brand-new bridge between the U.S. and Canada so he could squeeze more toll money out of the deal. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s luxury resort development has triggered a mass uprising in Albania that could bring down the country’s government. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is delivering on one of his biggest campaign promises, winning a historic rent freeze on a million apartments.
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Judge Forces Trump DOJ to Release Full Trump Allegation in Epstein Files
A federal judge just gave the Justice Department an ultimatum to release documents tied to a woman who says Donald Trump assaulted her when she was 13.
Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee, sided with journalist Katie Phang this week, ordering acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to either hand over unredacted FBI files related to Trump and Jeffrey Epstein or explain in court why they can’t. The DOJ has until next Thursday to comply.
The files in question are FBI interview summaries from a South Carolina woman who told agents that Epstein introduced her to Trump in 1984, when she was 13 years old. She alleged that Trump ordered everyone else out of the room and forced her to perform a sex act on him. The White House has denied the allegations.
This woman was interviewed by the FBI four times in 2019, shortly after Epstein was arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges. Those interviews were eventually included in the DOJ’s Epstein files dump, but dozens of pages tied to those interviews still haven’t been released.
So far, the Trump DOJ has only released about half of the roughly 6 million pages of documents it has on Epstein. And a lot of what has been released is so heavily redacted it’s barely readable.
Phang sued Blanche directly, arguing he violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act by failing to release documents the law requires to be made public and by improperly redacting documents that have been released. Blanche countered that Phang couldn’t sue him directly and would have to file a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA request instead.
Judge Sullivan didn’t buy it. In his 48-page opinion, he ruled that Phang absolutely has the right to sue, and that FOIA doesn’t provide an adequate remedy in this case. Sullivan also told the DOJ to publish a full log of every redaction to the Epstein files, as required under the Transparency Act.
The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has previously argued that the Biden DOJ’s decision not to pursue the allegations proves Trump did nothing wrong. But Judge Sullivan just made clear that stonewalling isn’t a defense. The government now has to either open the files or explain under oath why it can’t. Keep a close eye on this one.
And here’s why this matters more than a stack of redacted pages. Back in 1971, when the Nixon administration ran to the Supreme Court to stop newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the Court said no, because the public’s right to know what its own government has done outweighs that government’s wish to keep it hidden. Judge Sullivan just applied that same principle to a law Congress passed almost unanimously. When officials get to decide on their own which files the rest of us are allowed to see, they stop being accountable to anyone, and a country where the powerful audit themselves in secret isn’t really governing itself at all.
Lutnick Blocked New Bridge from Opening to Squeeze Canada
The Gordie Howe International Bridge is a $6.4 billion crossing over the Detroit River connecting Michigan and Canada. It’s been years in the making. Canada paid for the whole thing. And earlier this month, Michigan and Canadian officials were ready to open it. But then Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stepped in and killed the ribbon-cutting.
Bloomberg is reporting that Lutnick intervened at the last minute to block the opening ceremony and is now pushing to renegotiate the deal so Canada gives up even more toll revenue.
Canada financed the bridge specifically because the Moroun family, who own the nearby Ambassador Bridge, spent years blocking any competing crossing. The current chairman, Matthew Moroun, is a billionaire Trump donor who gave a million dollars to a pro-Trump group and reportedly met with Lutnick before the opening got killed. The original deal gave Canada the right to collect tolls until it recoups the full cost of construction, after which revenues would be split. Michigan and Canada are set to share ownership of the bridge.
Lutnick apparently thinks that’s not enough. His spokesperson put out a statement saying the secretary is “committed to securing the best possible deal,” but didn’t offer any specifics.
This bridge is significant for a lot more than just toll revenue. The Detroit-Windsor corridor is one of the most critical trade routes in North America. Ford, for example, makes engines in Windsor that supply its factories in the Midwest. The U.S. and Canada did more than $875 billion in trade last year. Excluding oil, the U.S. actually runs a trade surplus with Canada.
Trump laid the groundwork for this squeeze play earlier this year, when he said the U.S. should own half the project and predicted revenue from the bridge would be “astronomical.” It’s not clear how closely he’s tracked the situation since then.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer reportedly discussed the bridge with Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles at some point, but Wiles didn’t directly give a green light. Michigan moved to schedule the opening anyway, suggesting Whitmer read that as a tacit blessing.
The bridge is ready to open. Both American and Canadian companies are ready to use it. But instead of being open for business, it’s sitting idle while Trump’s commerce secretary haggles over toll splits.
Think about what’s really going on here. One wealthy family has spent years using its money and its access to keep a public bridge from opening, because an open bridge would cut into the tolls on the private one they own. We’ve seen this movie before. It was the Gilded Age, when a handful of robber barons got to decide which railroads got built and which towns got skipped, until the country got fed up and passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 and Teddy Roosevelt set about breaking the trusts apart. The whole point of that fight was that no private fortune should get to stand between the public and the roads and rails and bridges the public paid for. When a commerce secretary holds up a finished bridge to protect a donor’s toll booth, we’re sliding right back toward the world those laws were written to end.
Ivanka and Jared’s Luxury Resort Development Could Bring Down Albania’s Government
This spring, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner announced a $1.4 billion resort development on the Albanian coast, which would be built on protected land. Since then, tens of thousands of Albanians have flooded the streets of the capital city demanding the resignation of their prime minister who green-lit the development.
The project tied to Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners involves two sites: one on Sazan Island, and another in the Zvërnec area, a protected coastal ecosystem that’s home to flamingos, dune systems that took centuries to form, and one of the last wild coastlines left in Europe. When word got out about Zvërnec, locals were outraged.
Residents and environmental activists discovered a fence had gone up around the development site. They tried to tear it down. Private security guards confronted them. The whole thing was filmed and went viral. That was the spark.
Protests spread quickly from the nearby city of Vlorë to the capital, Tirana. Albanian communities in Germany, the U.K., Switzerland, and Greece organized solidarity protests. The movement has no central leadership and calls itself the Flamingo Revolution, after the birds that live in the Narta Lagoon near the Zvërnec site.
Protesters are now calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama, along with the repeal of legislation they say enables unchecked foreign investment in protected areas. They also want a government led by scientists and experts rather than career politicians, along with early elections.
The lack of transparency has poured gas on the flame. Key documents, including the full investment agreement and the environmental impact assessment have yet to be published. Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors have opened new investigations into several coastal investments. And at least five Albanian shareholders in the ownership structure of the development company remain undisclosed, reportedly set up in a way that circumvents public disclosure laws.
Rama’s response to the protests has not helped him. He initially offered dialogue, then abandoned that and started attacking the movement itself, calling protesters “flamingos” who refuse to listen to facts. He also accused them of being pawns of foreign governments and social media algorithms. The protesters naturally seized on those comments to grow their movement even larger.
Protesters are planning a nationwide mobilization tomorrow. The chant going around is: “Albania is not a Gucci bag on sale.”
The Trump family’s international business dealings have now led to the potential overthrow of a European country’s government. Americans could learn a thing or two from the Albanians.
And there’s a reason the founders worried about exactly this. When they wrote the Constitution, they added a clause forbidding anyone who holds federal office from taking gifts or payments from a foreign government without the consent of Congress. They had a specific fear in mind. Benjamin Franklin had come home from France carrying a diamond-studded snuffbox the French king had given him, and the framers saw how easily a foreign power could buy influence by enriching the people closest to American power. Now a foreign government has handed the president’s daughter and son-in-law a sweetheart deal on protected land, hoping to win favor with the White House, and it’s the people of Albania who are out in the streets defending a principle that’s written right into our own Constitution.
Mamdani Delivers on One of His Biggest Campaign Promises
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has had a very good week, to say the least.
On Tuesday, every single candidate he endorsed won in the city’s primary elections, including three congressional races and several state legislative races. That cemented his standing as a genuine political kingmaker pushing the Democratic Party to the left.
Then on Thursday night, the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to freeze rents on all of New York City’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments. The freeze covers both one-year and two-year leases and will protect roughly two million tenants when it takes effect for leases signed starting in October of this year.
The two-year lease freeze is a first in the city’s history. The board has frozen one-year rents before, three times under Mayor Bill de Blasio, but those years still came with increases on the two-year leases. This is the first time the board has frozen both.
Mamdani ran on lowering the cost of living for working-class New Yorkers, and the rent freeze was the backbone of that agenda. He’s been careful since taking office not to explicitly call for a freeze, aware that landlord groups were planning a legal challenge. But he’s appointed six of the board’s nine members, which made the math pretty clear.
Tenant activists packed the hearing in Manhattan chanting “No increases on our leases!” The vibes were jubilant.
Representatives for landlords were less enthusiastic. One of them, Christina Smyth, resigned from the board in protest earlier that same day, alleging in her resignation letter that the outcome was predetermined and that the board had become a body that “starts with an answer and vibe codes its way backward to justify it.” A lawsuit may be coming in the near future.
The data the board released gives both sides fuel for their arguments. Landlord costs rose 5.3 percent over the last year. But on the other hand, landlord incomes were up 6.2 percent. The board sided with the tenants.
For a city where rent has been crushing working people for years, this is a major win delivered by a mayor who said he’d do it and then did it just six months into his term.
And here’s the deeper meaning of that vote. In January of 1944, in the middle of a world war, Franklin Roosevelt stood before the country and laid out what he called a Second Bill of Rights, and among the rights he said every American was owed was the right to a decent home. More than eighty years later we still treat that as a radical idea, even though more than half the renters in our biggest city hand over a third or more of everything they earn just to keep a roof over their heads. What happened in that auditorium wasn’t charity and it wasn’t a gift. It was a city deciding that housing is a right people are owed, not just a commodity to be squeezed for whatever the market will bear. A mayor made a promise to working people and then he kept it, and that by itself tells you how rare that’s become.
Support the Journalism That Tells You What the Billionaires Don’t Want You to Know
In this newsletter you read about how a judge isn’t letting Trump’s DOJ get away with hiding the most damning contents of the Epstein files. You learned about how a sweetheart deal for the president’s family is toppling a corrupt government overseas. And we shed light on how the mayor of America’s largest city is using government to actually make people’s lives better. Raw America is able to give you these stories because we don’t have a billionaire or a corporate advertiser breathing down our necks. But that also means support from readers like you is essential to keeping this kind of journalism going. If you’re reading this on the free list, make today the day you join the Raw America community as a paying subscriber. You aren’t just contributing to independent media. You’re directly countering the billionaire takeover of the Fourth Estate. Subscribe today.
I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
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