NEW: Trump Steals Classified Docs as Bari Weiss Tanks

ICE agent admits he doesn't know why they're at airports, Trump cuts blue states out of funding deal

Good morning.

ICE agents deployed to airports are wandering around, grabbing Starbucks, and chatting in groups while four-hour security lines stretch out of terminal doors and TSA workers prepare to miss a second paycheck. CBS News is on track for its worst-rated first quarter this century after David Ellison handed editorial control to an anti-woke opinion journalist with no broadcast experience. A senior Democratic congressman says a DOJ memo accidentally revealed that Trump may have stolen classified documents tied to his own business interests and showed a classified map to passengers on his private plane. And leaked ICE documents show the administration is paying local police bounty-style incentive payments for immigration arrests, with funding allocated only to pro-Trump states.

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ICE Agents at Airports Are Mostly Just Standing Around. That May Be the Point.

Trump compared his plan to deploy ICE agents to overwhelmed airports to the invention of the paperclip. What has actually unfolded at 14 airports looks considerably less ingenious.

Agents have been spotted leaning against walls, grabbing coffee, handing out water bottles, and chatting in groups for hours. A reporter who asked a group of agents at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson what their mission entailed was told it was to “support TSA officers.” When she asked what that meant, they did not clarify. A DHS official summed up the situation in five words: “I have no idea what we’re doing.”

The results match the preparation. A four-hour wait at Bush Intercontinental in Houston stretched lines back to the airport subway. Atlanta was still advising passengers to arrive four hours early. Over 30 percent of TSA workers called out sick at JFK and Baltimore-Washington airports on Monday. The NTSB chair said her air traffic control specialist was stuck in a Houston security line for three hours while trying to investigate the LaGuardia crash. A TSA officer in Phoenix put it plainly: “I don’t think we need them here. We need to be paid.”

ICE agents cannot reduce wait times. They are not trained for airport screening. Everyone involved knows it. What they can do is conduct immigration enforcement and make millions of Americans nervous every time they try to catch a flight. Steve Bannon called the deployment a “test run” for ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections. Whatever else it is, it is an intimidation operation wrapped in the language of public service.

CBS Is Imploding Under Bari Weiss. This Is What Billionaire Media Capture Looks Like.

CBS Evening News is on track for its lowest-rated first quarter this century, averaging 4.3 million viewers with the key 25-54 demographic down 18 percent. CBS Mornings is having its lowest-rated quarter on record, down 13 percent from the same period last year.

David Ellison installed Bari Weiss, an anti-woke opinion journalist with no broadcast experience, as editor-in-chief after acquiring CBS parent company Paramount Skydance. Under her leadership, Anderson Cooper left. Historic layoffs gutted the newsroom. Departing employees publicly torched the network on their way out. Weiss attempted to pull a completed 60 Minutes segment that had cleared CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices five times. The correspondent told colleagues: “In my view, pulling it now is not an editorial decision; it is a political one.”

One CBS insider said: “If they can’t retain an audience in the middle of a war, God help you when the war ends.” A veteran television news executive was blunter: “Bari believed it couldn’t get any worse at CBS News. Guess what? Wrong again.”

Ellison is now closing in on CNN. If that deal closes, one man will control two of the most influential broadcast news operations in the country, both rebuilt around an administration that has declared critical journalism a potential criminal matter. This is exactly why Raw America was built. The journalism you are reading exists because of reader support and nothing else. Please become a paid subscriber today.

DOJ Accidentally Revealed Trump May Have Stolen Classified Docs Tied to His Own Business Deals

Representative Jamie Raskin sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi Tuesday citing a January 2023 DOJ memo in which prosecutors wrote that classified documents Trump retained from the White House were commingled with post-presidency documents, and that certain materials “would be pertinent to certain business interests.” Prosecutors assessed these documents established “a motive for retaining them.”

The memo also describes a 2022 flight to Trump’s New Jersey golf club during which Trump may have shown a classified map to passengers on board, including Susie Wiles, now his chief of staff. Raskin noted Trump was at that time negotiating business deals with Saudi interests over the LIV golf tournament. “If this map is related to our military posture in the Middle East, and was shown to any foreign official, Saudi or otherwise,” Raskin wrote, “that would amount to an unforgiveable betrayal of our men and women in uniform currently fighting in President Trump’s disastrous war against Iran.”

One document described as “particularly sensitive” was accessible by only six people in the entire U.S. government. Raskin called the DOJ’s disclosure of this material accidental, writing that Bondi had “quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct.” The White House called the letter “pathetic” and said Trump “did nothing wrong.” It did not address the specific contents of the memo.

Trump Is Paying Local Police Bounties to Make Immigration Arrests. Blue States Need Not Apply.

Leaked internal ICE documents reveal the Trump administration has set aside tens of millions of dollars in incentive payments for local police departments that participate in its deportation program, including per-arrest-style payments for processing unaccompanied migrant children.

The Florida Highway Patrol alone received $89 million and already has more than 1,800 officers credentialed under the program. The funding is explicitly partisan. California, New Mexico, Illinois, Vermont, Massachusetts, and other Democratic-led states are absent from the payment list entirely. As the journalist who obtained the documents wrote: “The money is being doled out to cooperative pro-Trump states and departments, affirming that these are political payoffs and hardly a pure national program.”

The federal government is paying local police bounties for immigration arrests and allocating that money based on political loyalty. That is not immigration enforcement. That is the construction of a politically deputized enforcement army, funded by federal taxpayers and deployed selectively based on how states voted.

A Note From Raw America

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Connect the dots on what you read this morning. ICE running arrest operations at airports. Bounty payments to police allocated by political loyalty. A president who may have stolen classified documents tied to his own business deals. The FBI purchasing your location data without a warrant. Palantir securing a $10 billion military contract to build the AI infrastructure that processes it. The FCC threatening broadcast licenses. Ellison acquiring CNN. The Pentagon handing press passes to Laura Loomer while pushing out independent journalists in defiance of a court order.

This is the merger of surveillance technology and authoritarian media control happening in real time. Raw America is one of the few places connecting these threads without a corporate owner deciding what gets cut. That independence is funded entirely by paid subscribers. CNN is running cover. CBS is imploding under a billionaire’s loyalist. The surveillance state is expanding. Please become a paid subscriber today. We work for you, not for them.

We will see you tomorrow.

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STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Democrat Wins Election in Trump’s Backyard. Democrat Emily Gregory won a special election Tuesday night in Florida’s House District 87 in Palm Beach County, which includes Mar-a-Lago. Gregory defeated Republican Jon Maples, who President Donald Trump endorsed and promoted prior to the election. Gregory’s victory comes despite the district having just voted for a Republican legislator by 19 points in 2024.

• Top House Democrat Warns Republicans Redistricting Working Against Them. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Emily Gregory’s victory in Palm Beach should give Republicans pause about redrawing congressional districts ahead of this fall’s midterms. Jeffries called Gregory a “strong Democratic voice” and pledged that Democrats “will crush House Republicans in November if Ron DeSantis tries to gerrymander the Florida congressional map.”

• White House Struggles to Explain Suspicious Trades Prior to Major Announcements. Just moments before Trump called off planned strikes by announcing talks with Iranian leaders, unknown traders made millions of dollars through suspiciously timed bets on prediction markets. Traders made roughly $580 million following the announcement, which led to oil prices dropping and an increase in stock futures. White House spokesperson Kush Desai insisted that claims people inside the administration were profiting from insider trading “baseless and irresponsible.”

• Jesse Ventura Challenges Barron Trump to Enlist in the Military. During an appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, former independent Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura — a decorated Navy SEAL — recently called on Trump’s 20 year-old son Barron to join the U.S. military, saying it was “something your father didn’t have the courage to do.” Ventura’s challenge comes as Trump’s war in Iran has led to the deaths of 13 American servicemen and women, and the injuries of hundreds of others. Ventura said: “A war is justified if you’re willing to send your kids.”

• Man Tortured in CECOT Prison Sues Trump Administration. 28 year-old Venezuelan man Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel recently filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over his imprisonment in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison, alleging he was subjected to “government-sanctioned torture.” Rengel was part of the initial wave of Venezuelan immigrants who were flown to El Salvador in early 2025, and accused of being a member of the Tren de Aragua gang. Rengel said he was falsely labeled as a gang member due to his tattoos, which include the names of his mother and daughter, and that he was subjected to beatings, denied medical care, and denied contact with family members and attorneys.