Good evening, and welcome to Raw America. I’m British Chris.
A federal judge has ordered Trump’s name stripped from the Kennedy Center. The president bought stock in the UFC’s parent company right before hosting a UFC fight at the White House. Kash Patel’s FBI showed up at the private homes of election workers in a key swing state. And an ICE agent who shot a man in Minneapolis has finally been arrested in Texas, eleven days after charges were filed.
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Judge Orders Trump’s Name Removed from Kennedy Center
Congress named the Kennedy Center after President John F. Kennedy. And according to a federal judge, only Congress can change that.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, ruled Friday that the Trump administration had to remove all physical signage bearing Trump’s name from the iconic Washington venue. That means taking down the signs and scrubbing any references to a “Trump Kennedy Center” from official materials. The administration has 14 days to comply.
Judge Cooper wasn’t subtle about it. He wrote that the Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes it “crystal clear” that the center is named for President Kennedy, and that it cannot bear any other formal name based on the board’s unilateral decision.
The lawsuit was brought by Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty. And the ruling is a straightforward one. The administration simply didn’t have the authority to do what it did.
This is a pattern, of course. The Trump White House has consistently tried to act as if congressional statutes are optional, as if the executive branch can just rewrite the rules when it feels like it. Thankfully, the courts are pushing back.
Trump Caught Buying UFC Stock Before White House Cage Fight
President Trump bought between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock in UFC’s parent company, according to his latest financial disclosures. That’s the same company that’s about to get an enormous amount of free publicity from a fight scheduled to take place on the White House lawn on June 14, which happens to be Trump’s birthday.
The event is called “Freedom 250,” and it’s being framed as part of the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations. But the financial arrangements around it aren’t exactly patriotic.
Sponsorship packages for the fights are selling for as much as $1.5 million. Neither the White House nor the UFC has said where that money is going. The president and TKO are controlling who gets access to the event, and the process is opaque by design. Construction of the octagon on the White House lawn has already begun.
Every bit of that attention benefits TKO’s stock. And Trump owns TKO stock.
This isn’t the first time the president has been accused of trading on market-moving information he controls. From tariff announcements to Iran war speculation, there’s a documented pattern of the president and those around him appearing to profit from information the public doesn’t have in advance.
Kash Patel Sends FBI Agents to Election Officials’ Doors
Federal agents in Kash Patel’s FBI have shown up at the private homes of current and former Wisconsin election officials, according to reporting from The Washington Post. They’re conducting interviews as part of an investigation into widely and repeatedly debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories.
This isn’t the first state the FBI has targeted. Agents have seized ballot images in Arizona, raided an election hub in Georgia, and demanded ballot access in Michigan. Now the probe has expanded to the Milwaukee area.
What are agents asking about? One involves a flash drive with absentee ballot results. In 2020, Milwaukee’s election director at the time gathered flash drives from ballot tabulators and brought them, under police escort, to a county office. She realized she’d forgotten one, and another election worker handed it to a police officer. That’s it. Election observers from both parties watched it happen.
The other theory involves a supposed secret backroom where an unnamed man from Illinois supposedly printed ballots for Biden. That claim originated with a public records lawsuit filed by a convicted felon. A judge threw it out.
None of this has stopped the FBI from showing up unannounced at people’s homes rather than contacting their offices through official channels. Critics, including local officials, are calling it blatant intimidation.
Officials in Wisconsin are also worried the FBI will try to seize absentee ballots that, because of a quirk in state voting rules, can be traced back to individual voters. Federal agents could potentially match voters to their choices, eliminating ballot secrecy entirely.
Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes nationally, winning 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. And using the FBI to relitigate it is a direct threat to the integrity of American elections.
ICE Officer Wanted for Minneapolis Shooting Arrested in Texas
Christian Castro, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, was arrested Friday in Texas, eleven days after prosecutors in Minnesota charged him with assault and falsely reporting a crime.
The charges stem from January 14th, when Castro fired through the front door of a Minneapolis duplex and shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan man, in the thigh. Sosa-Celis was legally in the United States. So was the other man present, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna.
Federal authorities initially accused both men of attacking officers with a broom handle and a snow shovel. A federal judge later dismissed those charges. ICE and the Justice Department opened an investigation into whether officers lied.
ICE Director Todd Lyons acknowledged that Castro was one of two agents who lied about what happened. ICE still called the state prosecution “unlawful” and “a political stunt.”
Castro is the second federal agent charged over conduct during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s Minnesota immigration crackdown. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty called Friday’s arrest “a critical step forward.” The county is still investigating Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s killings and has sued the Trump administration to gain access to evidence in those cases.
Federal agents should never be able to shoot legally present residents, lie about it, and expect the government to protect them from prosecution. Friday’s arrest is a reminder that accountability isn’t always fast, but it will always inevitably come.
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Thanks for watching. I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Have a great weekend.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump Administration Begs Troops to Hang Out with Him on His Birthday. New details are emerging about the UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House on June 14, which is President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. According to reporting from the Washington Post, the Pentagon is currently seeking out low-level military personnel to be seat-fillers at the cage match, and that they must meet certain height and weight requirements. Troops selected to attend will have to pay their own way.
Pam Bondi Throws Todd Blanche Under the Bus in House Hearing. During a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee on Friday, former Attorney General Pam Bondi made it clear that matters pertaining to the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files are now the responsibility of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Ranking Democrat Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) said if Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) doesn’t bring Blanche before the committee, he has the votes to subpoena Blanche to compel him to appear, with FBI Director Kash Patel “number two on the list.”
Wisconsin Warns U.S. Postal Service of ‘Unusually Long’ Mail Voting Delays. Election officials in Wisconsin — which has long been one of the most pivotal swing states in presidential elections — are now warning in a letter to the U.S. Postal Service that it’s taking an “unusually long” time for people who requested absentee ballots to actually receive them. One county clerk wrote in a memo attached to the letter that they had to mark 40 ballots as returned after deadline in the April primary election, noting that they had never seen that many before in their career.
Official White House Website Brags About ICE Arresting Over 700 U.S. Citizens. The White House’s new aliens.gov website mocking undocumented immigrants as extraterrestrials includes data showing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested hundreds of native-born U.S. citizens. The site boasts of more than 500,000 arrests in roughly 12,000 cities and towns across the United States. WIRED found that in 715 of those locations, the White House’s website identifies at least one of the arrestees as having been born in the U.S. And in 83 of the locations listed, every single arrestee is an American citizen.
Pope Leo XIV Asked Chicago Mayor About Trump’s ICE Crackdown During Meeting. While meeting in Rome with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Pope Leo XIV — who was born as Robert Prevost in Chicago — reportedly had questions about how the Windy City is dealing with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Johnson told reporters the pope “wanted to know the conditions on the ground in Chicago” and “how we were responding.” The mayor added that Pope Leo XIV was acutely aware of “the mass effort to deport immigrants from the city of Chicago and really around the country.”
