Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Kentucky’s Democratic governor is revealing he received calls from officials suggesting Republican Senator Mitch McConnell had died weeks before the senator’s own health update was released. A former Trump White House is warning the president is preparing to declare a national emergency ahead of the midterms. The Trump administration is quietly lawyering up for a Democratic-controlled House next year, and two Republican FCC commissioners who approved a huge media merger took thousands of dollars in gifts from the very same company they were supposed to be regulating.
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Governor Andy Beshear Says He Was Told Mitch McConnell May Already Be Dead
Two-term Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear just revealed something pretty stunning in a new interview with Katie Couric. Beshear says he got calls from multiple agencies suggesting that 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell had died. Beshear received those calls before McConnell’s own team put out its statement about his month-long hospitalization.
Beshear had been publicly pushing for more transparency from McConnell since July 8, four days before McConnell himself broke his silence. And what McConnell’s team did share on July 12th was still light on details. According to the senator’s statement, he was briefly rendered unconscious after a fall and developed pneumonia. The statement said there was no stroke, heart attack or tumor, but that’s still a lot for an 84-year-old to be dealing with quietly, out of public view, for more than a month.
Beshear told Couric that his office hasn’t had any direct contact with McConnell’s staff since he was hospitalized on June 14th. He called the July 12th update a step in the right direction, but insists Kentuckians deserve more information from their senator.
If McConnell’s seat opens up before his term ends in January of 2027, the path forward is anything but simple. Kentucky Republicans rewrote the state’s succession law in 2024, stripping the governor of the power to appoint a temporary senator and requiring a special election instead. If the seat comes open after August 3rd, there’s no time under the law for that election, and the seat would simply sit empty until January. Legal experts say the law has never been tested and could face a constitutional challenge, which means Kentucky could go months with only one senator while the lawyers fight it out.
Whatever is actually going on with McConnell, the secrecy surrounding him has become its own story. When a sitting U.S. senator disappears from public view for more than a month and government officials start suggesting he may be dead, voters should have real answers.
There’s a reason this feels so familiar. When Woodrow Wilson’s inner circle hid his massive stroke from the country in 1919, the nation eventually answered with the Twenty Fifth Amendment, and while no such safeguard exists for a senator, the principle is exactly the same, that in a self-governing republic the health of the people we elect can never be treated as a state secret.
Former Trump White House Lawyer Says Trump Preparing to Declare Emergency Ahead of Midterms
Ty Cobb, who served as a White House attorney during Trump’s first term, is now warning Americans to be ready for the president to do anything he can to disrupt the midterms, including a national emergency declaration giving himself new powers.
Cobb told PBS that Trump’s obsession with voting machines, his efforts to restrict mail-in voting and imposing new voter registration hurdles, and his firings of members of the Election Assistance Commission are all part of a pattern. He added that Trump appears to be seeking a justification to declare a national emergency right around the time voters head to the polls.
He noted it’s almost guaranteed that ICE agents will show up at polling places this fall, and possibly the National Guard. Cobb argued the goal is intimidation of immigrant and minority voters, and potentially even seizing voting machines, as Trump wanted to do back in 2020 before his attorney general told him there was no legal basis for it.
Cobb cautioned that Trump doesn’t have people like General John Kelly, General James Mattis, and Nikki Haley in his second-term administration willing to push back on his most reckless proposals, and that any internal checks are now gone. What’s left, in his words, are yes-men eager to carry out Trump’s orders.
The former White House counsel said the last real guardrail remaining is ordinary Americans showing up to vote. In his words, that’s the only guardrail left in our democracy, because the internal resistance of the first term is gone. And he’s urging Americans to treat any new claims about compromised voting machines or foreign interference with deep skepticism, saying those claims are inflated and won’t be backed by credible sources.
Abraham Lincoln held the election of 1864 in the middle of an actual shooting civil war, and afterward he reminded the country that if a rebellion could force Americans to forgo a national election, it could fairly claim to have already conquered us. If Lincoln refused to let a real war interfere with the vote, no president gets to invent an emergency to do it now.
Trump White House Quietly Prepping for Democratic House in 2027
While Donald Trump’s White House is publicly dismissing the idea that Democrats could win in November, they’re privately preparing for a wave of accountability measures from a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives next January.
According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration is quietly lawyering up in preparation for a wave of legal challenges that would come with a Democratic-run House. Michael Williams, who worked in the first Trump White House, said staff are expecting another impeachment push, even while the administration publicly refuses to admit the possibility.
Emma Doyle, a former chief of staff at the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump administration, confirmed the White House is bringing on experienced lawyers to help officials prepare for impeachment proceedings. Advisors Jason Miller and Johnny DeStefano have both rejoined the administration in the past month specifically to prep for the worst possible outcome after the midterms.
Doyle admitted recruiting in this environment is tough, saying nobody wants to sign up for a job where the boss is telling them they’re probably going to get impeached.
Trump himself seems to see the writing on the wall. He’s been saying since January that Republicans need to win the midterms, because if they don’t, Democrats will impeach him for a third time.
Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu of California, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, laid out exactly what Democrats want to investigate. This includes Trump’s ICE crackdown, stock trades by members of his family, his federal prosecutions against his political opponents and others. Lieu separated impeachment from oversight, saying Democrats plan to dig into what he called massive corruption regardless of whether they choose to go down the impeachment path.
Republicans maintain they’ll stay in control of the House despite dismal polling and a razor-thin majority. A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee accused Democrats of counting their chickens before they hatch. But a president lawyering up for impeachment hearings isn’t something you do if you’re expecting victory.
And congressional oversight of a corrupt executive branch isn’t some partisan invention. In 1927, in McGrain v. Daugherty, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld Congress’s power to compel testimony and investigate the executive, in the same wave of Teapot Dome investigations that sent a Harding cabinet secretary to prison. Digging into corruption isn’t a stunt, it’s a constitutional duty.
Republican FCC Commissioners Took Lavish Gifts from Paramount Ahead of Merger
ProPublica is now reporting that two Republican FCC commissioners, Olivia Trusty and Chair Brendan Carr, took expensive gifts from Paramount while the company had massive deals requiring FCC approval. Trusty and a guest received tickets to the Kennedy Center Honors gala worth more than $12,000 courtesy of Paramount, just five months after she cast a deciding vote approving Paramount’s $8 billion dollar merger with Skydance.
Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison — the son of billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison — and other executives. Those seats reportedly sell for $125,000 apiece. It’s not clear whether Paramount actually paid for Carr’s seats, because the FCC still has yet to release his 2025 financial disclosure form.
This isn’t a one-time thing either. Records show Carr accepted Kennedy Center tickets from CBS or its parent company at least seven times since 2017, adding up to roughly $63,000 in value. And across the last ten years, seven of the ten commissioners who’ve served on the FCC accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets worth more than $260,000. Federal ethics rules explicitly prohibit officials from accepting gifts from companies that are regulated by, or seeking action from, their own agency, for obvious reasons.
Ethics experts told ProPublica this is about as clear cut a conflict of interest as it gets. Walter Shaub, who used to run the federal Office of Government Ethics, said there is no scenario where a top federal regulator should ever accept a gift from a company whose business will be directly affected by their decisions.
Keep in mind that December gala took place while Paramount was actively launching its hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery — the parent company of CNN — which now needs approval from the very same FCC. That deal would put Paramount Plus, HBO Max, CBS and CNN, and dozens of other networks and platforms under the thumb of one billionaire and his son.
More than 5,000 actors and entertainment industry workers, including Robert De Niro, Javier Bardem, and Glenn Close, have signed a letter opposing the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. And a dozen Democratic attorneys general have already filed a lawsuit trying to block it.
Ethics experts say Carr and Trusty should recuse themselves from any further votes on the Paramount deal in light of the gifts. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could trust a decision they make to be free of Paramount’s influence.
When Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934, it wrote a promise into law, that the airwaves belong to the American people and broadcasters only borrow them in exchange for serving the public interest. When the regulators guarding that bargain are sitting in a 125,000 dollar skybox with the executives they oversee, it’s not just an ethics violation, it’s a betrayal of a deal Congress made with every American nearly a century ago.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
Here are a few stories you may have missed:
Trump’s Election Denial Speech Sparks Calls for 25th Amendment. Following President Donald Trump’s nationally televised address in which he doubled down on his debunked claims of election fraud in 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked to remove Trump from office. Trump claimed documents showed that China allegedly interfered on behalf of Joe Biden in 2020, though the documents posted to the White House confirm Russia worked to undermine Biden’s campaign and help Trump’s reelection effort.
Trump Demands FCC Yank ABC and NBC Broadcast Licenses for Refusing to Air His Speech. President Trump erupted at ABC and NBC after the networks announced they wouldn’t be airing the president’s national address live, and called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke their broadcast licenses. The president went on to accuse the networks of being “part of a plot” to aid the “radical left” and to perpetuate election fraud. In addition to ABC and NBC, CNN also declined to air the live broadcast of Trump’s speech, while CBS preempted their own programming with a “special report” in which the network aired part of the president’s address while anchor Tony Dokoupil reported on Trump’s history of election fraud claims.
2020 Conspiracy Theorists Hope Trump Will Invoke Insurrection Act Ahead of Midterms. Far-right conspiracy theorists are now pointing to Trump’s election speech as evidence that the president may invoke the Insurrection Act in order to have the U.S. military be deployed on American streets and sent to polling places in November. Former CBS reporter-turned-election denier Lara Logan called Trump’s address “the opening salvo in a much bigger plan.”
DOGE Fired Nearly Every Employee in CDC’s Cyclospora Lab. As the parasite cyclospora continues to cause explosive diarrhea for thousands of Americans in multiple states, new reporting from WIRED found that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative last year fired eight of 11 staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s cyclospora lab. Former lab director Joel Barratt told the outlet that the lab’s capacity to quickly respond to outbreaks of dangerous pathogens like cyclospora have been “greatly diminished” due to the hollowing out of the CDC.
Zohran Mamdani Rejects 18 Percent Pay Increase Approved by City Council. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) announced this week he wouldn’t be accepting a pay increase approved by the City Council that would boost his annual salary from $258,750 to $305,800. The pay raise, which applies to council members, the mayor, the public advocate, borough presidents, district attorneys and the city comptroller, is the first such salary increase since 2016. City Council Speaker Julie Menin also refused to accept her own pay raise.
