Hello, I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America.
There’s a lot happening you won’t hear about in the billionaire-owned press. The IRS is quietly building out surveillance infrastructure using one of the most controversial tech companies in America. A journalist has published a sweeping theory about the women who may have actually been running Jeffrey Epstein’s network. The White House released a mobile app that’s giving your location info to a third party. And somebody dropped a ten-foot golden toilet next to the Lincoln Memorial.
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MAGA Surveillance Company Helping IRS Conduct Audits
The IRS paid Palantir — which was founded by Trump donor Peter Thiel — $1.8 million last year to build something called the “Selection and Analytic Platform,” or SNAP. It’s essentially an AI-assisted audit targeting tool.
The IRS has apparently been running over a hundred different business systems and more than 700 different methods for deciding who gets audited. Enter Palantir.
What SNAP actually does is dig through “unstructured data” from supporting documents, looking for discrepancies that older systems might’ve missed. Now, Palantir says it’s only working with data the IRS already has. But researchers who’ve studied IRS tech point out the agency has previously contracted with Coinbase to get crypto transaction data, and has experimented with mining social media posts.
And here’s the broader context that makes this worth paying attention to. The IRS’s workforce has been gutted. Back in February of last year, around 103,000 people worked there. By July, more than 25,000 had resigned or taken buyouts. Leadership turnover is chronic. Modernisztion attempts keep failing. One researcher put it plainly: the agency basically hasn’t had a successful tech overhaul since the 1960s.
So the question hanging over all of this is: Who does an AI-powered audit tool serve when the human workforce overseeing it keeps shrinking? And who gets targeted?
Shocking New Theory Shines Light on Epstein’s Accomplices
Journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez published a long, detailed essay this week arguing that Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t actually the top of his own network. Her central claim is that Epstein was a tool, and that the people who actually controlled him were women, three in particular.
The first is Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. Valdes-Rodriguez argues Maxwell was an intelligence operative who deliberately brought Epstein into her orbit, knowing exactly what he was useful for. Maxwell’s father, Robert, has long been alleged to have worked on behalf of the Israeli government and had ties to multiple intelligence agencies.
The second woman is Karyna Shuliak, Epstein’s last known girlfriend and the person he named as primary heir to his estate in a will signed just two days before his death. Valdes-Rodriguez points out that accounts of Shuliak describe her as controlling Epstein’s finances, his staff, and his schedule. Two days before he dies, she inherits everything. The timing is, at minimum, striking.
The third is Catherine Huffines, wife of Texas businessman and MAGA politician Don Huffines. The Huffines family purchased Epstein’s Zorro Ranch property in New Mexico in 2023. Valdes-Rodriguez notes that Mrs. Huffines was independently donating to Rand Paul’s political action committee going back to 1996, a PAC that has, at documented points, intersected with Russian financial and influence operations.
Whether or not the full theory holds up, the underlying critique of how the media framed every woman in this story is hard to dismiss.
The White House App Is Tracking Users’ Every Move
The Trump administration released an official White House mobile app last Friday, available on both iOS and Android. The official White House account on X promoted it as a way to get real-time updates “straight from the source.”
What they didn’t mention is what the app wants from you in return.
To download it, users are asked to grant access to their precise location, their network connections, their fingerprint and biometric data, the ability to prevent their device from sleeping, and permission to modify or delete content in shared storage.
One researcher decompiled the app and found it’s sending users’ exact location data to a third-party server every four and a half minutes. That third party is OneSignal, a push notification company. Location data sent to OneSignal is typically used for location-targeted campaigns.
Here’s why that’s particularly alarming. This same app encourages users to report people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So you’ve got an app that’s collecting granular location data and also functions as a reporting tool for immigration enforcement. That combination should concern anyone, regardless of where they stand politically.
Golden Toilet Sculpture Mocking Trump on Display in DC
And finally, someone put a ten-foot-tall golden toilet next to the Lincoln Memorial.
It’s called “A Throne Fit for a King,” and it’s the work of a group of anonymous artists called the Secret Handshake. These are the same people who previously installed a sculpture of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein titled “Best Friends Forever.”
The toilet is a direct reference to Trump’s decision last year to renovate the bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom during a government shutdown, replacing the original Art Deco green tiles with marble and fitting the trash can, lamps, and faucet handles in gold. Trump said at the time the renovation was “happening faster than anticipated, one of my trademarks.”
The sculpture’s plaque describes the renovation as Trump’s “crowning achievement,” and calls him “an unwavering visionary who looked down, saw a problem, and painted it gold.”
The artists say the toilet can be sat upon. It’s expected to stay on the Mall for several days.
And for what it’s worth, there’s a bit of history here. Back in 2017, the Trump administration asked the Guggenheim to loan them a van Gogh. The museum declined and offered to send their famous solid gold toilet sculpture instead.
Raw America Is Doing What Corporate Media Can’t
Raw America has been bringing you the stories that the mainstream press either won’t cover or doesn’t cover well. In recent weeks, that’s included exclusive interviews with former January 6 Capitol Police officer Michael Fanone and former Trump DHS official Miles Taylor. There are several more major interviews coming in April, and our reporter on the ground in Washington DC is providing live coverage of crucial votes in Congress as they happen.
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In case you missed it, Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson recently sat down with New Republic columnist Virginia Heffernan, who discussed her recent reporting on the new investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, as well as Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon pursuing the Biblical end times in the Middle East. You can watch the full interview below:
Thanks for watching. I’m British Chris. We’ll see you tomorrow.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Alex Pretti’s Death Came After Stephen Miller Demanded ‘Confrontations’ with Protesters. U.S. citizen Alex Pretti — who was fatally shot in Minneapolis while protecting a woman being harassed by ICE — was killed not long after White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller gave agents specific orders. Miller reportedly wanted agents in Minneapolis to force “confrontations” with anti-ICE protesters in order to win a “PR battle,” according to one unnamed official. That official confided to the Daily Mail that Miller told agents that protesters “need to be vanquished by any force necessary.”
Karoline Leavitt — Who is Catholic — Picks Trump Over Pope. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt walked a fine line in her latest press conference in the wake of Pope Leo XIV saying that God doesn’t listen to prayers from those who wage war. Leavitt countered that it was “a very noble thing to do” for a president to pray for troops “serving our country overseas.”
Trump’s Approval Rating Plummets to Just 33% Nationally. A new University of Massachusetts-Amherst poll conducted between March 20 and March 25 found that President Donald Trump has just 33 percent approval from respondents. That’s an 11 percent drop from April of 2025, and a five-point drop from July of 2025. Respondents said skyrocketing gas prices, poor stock market performance, and the increasingly unpopular Iran war were the main drivers of how respondents viewed Trump’s job performance as president.
Airlines Rapidly Running Out of Fuel Supplies Ahead of Summer Travel Season. Top U.S. airlines are warning that the new fuel supply shock caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz (which is a chokepoint for roughly 20 percent of the global oil supply) are straining their fuel supplies, which may result in significant chaos ahead of the summer travel rush. The spot price for jet fuel in the U.S. hit $4.25 a gallon last week, which is up from $2.50 prior to the February 28 attack on Iran.
Trump Apparently Ambivalent About Tulsi Gabbard. While taking questions aboard Air Force One, Trump offered only a tepid endorsement of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The president acknowledged his intelligence chief was “a little bit different in her thought process” than him, and would only say “yeah, sure” when a reporter asked if he still had confidence in her. Gabbard has been conspicuously silent since the attacks on Iran. During her failed 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gabbard sold t-shirts that read “No War with Iran.”
