Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Donald Trump Jr. secretly met with an Indian billionaire before his federal fraud charges against him were dropped, raising fresh questions about what led to the DOJ’s decision to drop the case. Trump is now threatening to sue ABC News over its reporting on his botched Reflecting Pool renovation. A federal judge just delivered another blow to the White House’s ICE crackdown. And a new breakdown of Trump’s public statements shows he’s been talking about his vanity projects 70 percent more than the Iran war, even gas prices stay high and his poll numbers keep sinking.
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Trump Jr. Had Secret Meeting with Indian Billionaire Before His Fraud Charges Were Dropped
While federal fraud charges were still hanging over one of the world’s wealthiest men, Donald Trump Jr. quietly flew to India to meet with him.
Bloomberg is reporting that the president’s eldest son met with Indian billionaire Gautam Adani in Ahmedabad. The meeting was previously undisclosed. Nobody knows exactly what was discussed. What we do know is what happened afterward.
The Justice Department dropped its federal bribery and fraud case against Adani last month. The charges were originally brought under the Biden administration’s DOJ. They alleged that Adani and his associates bribed Indian government officials to win lucrative solar energy contracts.
A spokesperson for Trump Jr. told Bloomberg the meeting had “zero to do” with the DOJ’s decision. But here’s what the timeline actually looks like.
Adani’s younger son, Jeet, also met with Trump Jr. at Mar-a-Lago last year, according to an unnamed source close to the president’s son. Jeet pushed hard to end the federal case against his father. Adani also hired Boris Epshteyn, one of Trump’s closest personal lawyers and advisers, to help with his defense, according to the Wall Street Journal. And reports emerged that Adani’s lawyers offered to invest $10 billion in the United States as part of the effort to make the charges go away.
Then the charges went away.
Adani publicly praised Trump after his re-election, calling him the “embodiment of unbreakable tenacity, unshakeable grit, relentless determination.” And since the charges were dropped, Adani’s net worth has climbed by nearly $8 billion to an estimated $88.6 billion, making him the second-richest person in Asia.
Nobody’s calling this a quid pro quo on the record. But it’s worth asking what exactly the Justice Department thinks its job is right now?
Back in 1977, after Watergate exposed a whole culture of corporate payoffs, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act precisely so that bribery wouldn’t become just another cost of doing business with the American government. When a ten billion dollar pledge can make a foreign bribery case quietly disappear, we’ve effectively repealed that law without a single vote being cast in Congress.
Trump Threatens to Sue ABC for Reporting on Reflecting Pool Disaster
Donald Trump is so infuriated by coverage of his failed renovation of the Reflecting Pool that he’s now threatening to sue media outlets reporting on it.
ABC News reported last week that the cost to repaint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool shot up to more than $14.65 million, which was over $4 million above the original estimated cost of a no-bid contract. The network also flagged a $1.74 million contract awarded to an Ohio company to install a “nano bubble” system to kill algae, also through a no-bid process, to one of Trump’s friends. All in, the project is running north of $16 million.
Trump’s response was to threaten a lawsuit, writing on his Nazi-infested social media site that he planned to take ABC to court for “false reporting.” He even added, “I like their money.”
He also baselessly claimed that the Obama administration spent over $100 million on the Reflecting Pool, though he of course provided no evidence. In reality, Obama spent $35 million on the monument to repair structural leaks, install concrete pilings and improve the filtration system.
Trump blamed the Reflecting Pool’s problems on “vandals,” claiming once again without evidence that someone sliced a “350-foot slit” down the center of the pool floor with a “box cutter or a knife of some kind.” At least five people have been arrested. But the White House still hasn’t produced any evidence that the pool’s persistent algae blooms and structural cracks are the result of intentional damage.
Trump’s pish to renovate Washington also includes his proposed $400 million White House ballroom, a 250-foot arch by the Arlington National Cemetery and an overhaul of the Kennedy Center. Lawsuits have paused the ballroom and the Kennedy Center projects, while a judge forced Trump to remove his name from the Kennedy Center. A tarp is currently covering the building facade, almost certainly because Trump doesn’t want all of us to see that his name got ripped off.
In addition to Trump’s lawsuit threat, ABC is also dealing with two separate FCC investigations under Trump’s appointed chairman, Brendan Carr. The FCC demanded that ABC submit early renewal applications for eight local broadcasting licenses, even though those stations weren’t up for renewal until 2028 at the earliest. That pressure came shortly after comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about Melania Trump and the president demanded Kimmel be fired.
ABC is now launching an on-air campaign asking viewers to back the network against Trump’s FCC.
This is what you’d normally see under an authoritarian regime. The leader uses his regulators, an army of lawyers and the full weight of the government to make a news outlet think twice before reporting on a failed vanity project. It’s working exactly as intended.
In 1735, a New York printer named John Peter Zenger sat in a jail cell because a royal governor couldn’t stand seeing himself criticized in print, and the jury that walked him free planted the idea that a free press answers to the public and never to power. When a president reaches for his lawyers and his regulators to punish a newsroom over a story about a leaky pool, he’s trying to drag us straight back to the world Zenger’s jurors rejected almost three hundred years ago.
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Trump Spent 70 Percent More Time Talking About His Vanity Projects Than Iran War
Between May 1 and June 10, the Telegraph found that Donald Trump talked about his Washington renovation projects 70 percent more than he talked about the Iran war. And on his social media, he mentioned the renovations 35 percent more than the war.
Matthew Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University, said Trump is a “master of distraction” who is “pin-balling from one topic to the next” because “no president likes to own failure.” And Iran has been a massive failure, by almost every metric
Trump’s approval ratings have continued to drop since the U.S. and Israel launched the war in February. The war has also notably contradicted three of Trump’s core campaign promises: lowering costs, staying out of foreign wars and making deals benefiting the U.S. on the world stage.
Trump’s war shut down global oil traffic and drove up gas prices to well over $4 a gallon, and stretched on for months without a clean resolution. Weekend talks in Switzerland produced some progress, with officials saying they’ve worked out “mechanisms” to protect the Strait of Hormuz and wind down related fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The U.S. also claims Iran agreed to allow UN nuclear inspectors back into its sites. Iran’s foreign ministry said the country made “no new commitments.”
Critics have noted that what the administration appears to have negotiated, at enormous cost, is something close to a restoration of the Obama-era nuclear deal that Trump blew up in 2018. Most Americans say in recent polling that the war wasn’t worth it.
After Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 because the country had learned the hard way that a president who can drag us into a war owes the people an honest reckoning with it. A leader who’d rather show off paint swatches than answer for the war he started isn’t just dodging reporters, he’s dodging the basic bargain a republic makes with the citizens it sends toward danger.
So yes, it’s politically useful for the president to talk about paint and reflecting pools and victory arches instead.
But those projects are also going sideways. The ballroom is tied up in court. The Kennedy Center reversal was a humiliation. The Reflecting Pool is leaking and growing algae. The no-bid contracts keep producing headlines about ballooning costs.
What you’re left with is a president who can’t talk about the war because it’s failing, can’t talk about the economy because prices are still high, and whose signature domestic legacy project is a $16 million pool that can’t hold water.
Judge Strikes Down Trump’s Attempt to Strip Los Angeles of Sanctuary City Status
The Trump administration’s effort to strip Los Angeles of its sanctuary city protections just hit a wall in federal court.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin, an Obama appointee, granted Los Angeles’s motion to dismiss the DOJ’s lawsuit challenging the city’s sanctuary ordinance. The ordinance, which Mayor Karen Bass signed shortly after Trump won the 2024 election, bars city personnel and resources from being used to assist with federal immigration enforcement. It also prohibits city workers from sharing data that could be used to track someone’s immigration status.
The DOJ sued LA last June, claiming the ordinance violated the “intergovernmental immunity doctrine” and that it led to, in the White House’s words, “lawlessness, rioting, looting, and vandalism.” Judge Olguin disagreed.
He wrote in his ruling that the ordinance doesn’t regulate the federal government, but what Los Angeles’s own employees and agencies can do, which is within the city’s right. He also ruled the DOJ failed to “plausibly allege” that the ordinance discriminated against the federal government.
City attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto celebrated the ruling, saying Judge Olguin’s ruling “reinforces the well-established principle that local governments have the authority to decide how to use their personnel and resources.”
The DOJ has until July 3 to amend its complaint. But this ruling is a significant defeat for an administration that’s been trying to force cities to help ICE.
This ruling also underpins the argument that cities have the right to set their own priorities. Local officials are accountable to their residents, not to federal agencies trying to force them into becoming their foot soldiers. Other cities are likely watching this case closely.
Back in 1997, in Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Washington can’t simply commandeer state and local officials to carry out federal policy, and that anti-commandeering principle is exactly what shielded Los Angeles here. The whole design of our system rests on the idea that a city’s police officers and clerks work for the people who actually live there, not as conscripts for whoever happens to be running the federal government this year.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump’s Acting Intelligence Chief Carrying Out Mass Firings. Bill Pulte — who recently took over as acting director of national intelligence (DNI) following the resignation of former DNI Tulsi Gabbard — is now conducting mass firings within his office, which oversees 18 different intelligence agencies. Pulte, who is the former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is a staunch MAGA loyalist who has no prior intelligence experience. President Donald Trump has named U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, of the Southern District of New York, to be full-time DNI, despite Clayton also having no prior experience in national intelligence.
New York Times Journalists Reveal Inner Circle That Runs Trump’s White House. New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who are co-authors of the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, say the president is just one of a small cabal of people who are running the White House during Trump’s second term. Haberman and Swan say in addition to Trump, Vice President JD Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, White House counsel David Warrington, White House communications director Steven Cheung, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine make up the president’s inner circle. Notably absent from that group are Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Florida Officially Shuts Down ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Camp. After more than a year of lawsuits, Florida has officially closed its immigrant detention camp in the Everglades, which it dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” The facility was known for brutal conditions that included overflowing toilets leaking into sleeping areas, constant 24-hour lighting, insect infestations, unsanitary food and water, prolonged solitary confinement and even detainees being forced to scoop out feces from toilets with their bare hands because there wasn’t enough water pressure to flush toilets. Florida stated the facility was being shut down due to safety concerns from the hurricane season, though the camp was opened last year during hurricane season with officials boasting the facility could withstand Category 2-force winds.
United Nations Investigation Claims Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry recently concluded that Israel is committing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza by deliberately targeting Palestinian children. The UN investigation alleges Israeli forces “deliberately carried out acts inflicting death and severe bodily and mental harm on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children,” including after the ceasefire agreement Israel struck with Hamas last fall. The investigation also accused Israel of committing war crimes in the occupied West Bank.
Americans Fired Over Charlie Kirk Posts Compensated for First Amendment Violations. Multiple Americans who lost their jobs after criticizing slain far-right activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his murder last year have since received major payouts in First Amendment lawsuits. Maria Ruhtenberg — a public defender working for the state of Iowa — was fired several days after posts to her personal Facebook page, though she was awarded $125,000 in damages in May. Ball State University health instructor Suzanne Swierc was paid $225,000 as a result of her lawsuit she filed after her firing. Former Florida Fish and Wildlife biologist Brittney Brown was also fired, though she settled her lawsuit against the state for $485,000.
