Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Trump’s Justice Department is quietly finding legal backdoors to funnel taxpayer money to January 6th rioters even after the so-called “anti-weaponization fund” collapsed. New details are emerging about the MAGA loyalist with zero intelligence experience being handed control of America’s entire spy apparatus. Trump is furious at Republicans just broke with him to rein in his ability to wage war in Iran. And a man caught on video attacking the Capitol on January 6th was just given a high-level counterterrorism job at the Pentagon.
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DOJ Finds Loophole to Pay January 6th Rioters
The Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” may be dead, but the effort to pay Trump’s allies with taxpayer dollars is very much alive.
After Republican lawmakers threatened to sink an ICE funding bill if the slush fund moved forward, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress the Justice Department wouldn’t proceed with it. Trump, however, refused to admit the fund was finished, and said he still loved the idea. So they found a loophole.
DOJ officials are now making clear they have both the authority and the resources to settle lawsuits against the federal government however they see fit. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward posted on social media, “We’re on it,” in response to a suggestion from Senator Lindsey Graham that the government should use existing law to compensate people who claim they were politically targeted. Woodward later deleted the post.
The legal mechanism they’re eyeing is the Federal Tort Claims Act, an 80-year-old law that allows people to sue the federal government for wrongful actions or negligence. Last Friday, nine pardoned January 6th defendants filed a lawsuit under that law, arguing their prosecutions amounted to selective enforcement driven by their support for Trump and orchestrated by senior officials at the DOJ and FBI.
The Trump regime has already gone down this road. In March, the DOJ paid Michael Flynn $1.25 million to settle claims he was the victim of a politicized prosecution. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador, later sought to withdraw the plea, and was pardoned by Trump. A similar settlement was reached with Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser who was placed under court-ordered surveillance.
One January 6th plaintiff, Treniss Evans, said he thinks some defendants might have taken smaller payouts through the scrapped fund. Now he’s expecting something bigger.
And there’s already a backlog building. Lawyer Mark McCloskey says he delivered boxes containing administrative claims for nearly 400 January 6th defendants to the Justice Department in December. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, those claims can move to federal court if the government doesn’t act within six months. That deadline is approaching.
Legal experts are alarmed. Anthony Sebok, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law, put it plainly: the Justice Department, like any competent defense firm, should be making plaintiffs fight for every inch. Instead, he says, the plaintiffs’ lawyers are pushing on an open door.
Keep in mind, this is taxpayer money flowing to people who stormed the Capitol, through a legal loophole. While the administration calls it justice.
The founders wrote the power of the purse into Article One for one reason, to keep any president from reaching into the public treasury to reward the people loyal to him, and Madison called that power the most complete and effectual weapon the people’s representatives could ever hold. Watching it get picked apart by a loophole that pays the very people who stormed the Capitol is exactly the corruption the framers built that wall to stop.
Trump’s Allies Celebrate New Spy Chief as Devout MAGA Soldier
Bill Pulte is about to become the most powerful intelligence official in the United States government. He has no background in intelligence, no military experience, and no national security credentials of any kind. What he does have is Donald Trump’s ear.
Pulte, who currently runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is set to take over as acting director of national intelligence by the end of the month. He’ll oversee a network of 18 agencies, including the CIA and the NSA.
Three people with knowledge of Trump’s decision told NBC News that Pulte earned his place in Trump’s inner circle by taking aggressive action against prominent Democratic critics. At the housing agency, he levied mortgage fraud allegations against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, former Congressman Eric Swalwell, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Trump is apparently always with Pulte, one source said, and always talking about running out of time to get things done.
That urgency is exactly what’s got former intelligence officers worried sick.
Steve Bannon, who helped shape Trump’s 2016 campaign, told NBC News that Pulte’s mandate is to pick up where Tulsi Gabbard left off. That means focusing on so-called foreign threats to U.S. elections, investigating the deep state, and offering up alternative assessments to what comes out of the CIA. Former CIA officer John Sipher said Pulte’s track record suggests he’s meant to run a detective agency for the president.
And here’s the thing about intelligence work that makes this so dangerous: it’s classified. Someone with a political agenda can choose to selectively declassify documents to push a particular narrative, while keeping classified everything that might complicate or contradict that narrative. There’s no way for the public to push back, because they can’t see what’s being withheld.
Former intelligence officials who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents are warning that Pulte could use his access to target political opponents or manufacture justifications for federal oversight of elections, which Trump has already called for, despite his own Cabinet members confirming there was no widespread fraud in 2020.
Some Republicans aren’t buying the sales pitch either. Senator John Cornyn of Texas said he sees no evidence of any qualifications for the job. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana told NBC News the same thing. Senator Thom Tillis said the timing couldn’t have been worse, given that Congress is preparing to vote on renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows spy agencies to collect overseas electronic communications.
Pulte hasn’t been nominated permanently and would need Senate confirmation for the full-time role. That confirmation fight, if it comes, is going to be ugly.
We’ve watched this movie before. Back in the seventies the Church Committee pulled back the curtain and found the nation’s intelligence agencies had been turned inward, spying on Americans and hunting a president’s political enemies, and every reform that came after was built to make sure it never happened again. Handing the keys to eighteen spy agencies to a loyalist whose only qualification is going after the president’s critics isn’t a personnel decision, it’s the exact abuse those reforms were written to prevent.
Trump Erupts at Republicans Who Defied Him on Iran
Four Republican members of Congress joined House Democrats to pass a war powers resolution rebuking Trump’s military campaign against Iran. The vote was 215 to 208.
Trump went straight to his Nazi-infested social media site to call the vote “meaningless” and “unpatriotic.” He accused Democrats of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The four Republicans who crossed him? He called “grandstanders” who should be ashamed of themselves.
The Republicans who voted with Democrats were Thomas Massie, Warren Davidson, Bryan Fitzpatrick, and Tom Barrett.
Davidson defended his vote, saying the War Powers Act does not give a president a blank check to wage war for 90 days. What the administration still doesn’t have, he said, is congressional authorization. His obligation, he said, is to the Constitution and to the men and women who actually fight the wars.
Trump’s claim that he’s in the middle of active, productive negotiations isn’t holding up to scrutiny. The Iranian government has publicly stated there’s been no tangible progress in the talks.
The resolution itself is mostly symbolic. It’s not going to stop the military campaign. That would require Trump’s signature, and Trump isn’t going to sign something that limits his own power. But what the vote does reflect is something the administration can’t dismiss: growing unease, even within the Republican Party, about an undeclared war being prosecuted without congressional authorization.
Madison wrote that the Constitution vests the question of war in the legislature because history shows the executive is the branch most prone to it, and the framers split that power on purpose so no single man could march the country into a fight on his own say so. Those four Republicans who crossed Trump weren’t grandstanding, they were doing the one thing their oath actually demands, holding the line that Congress, not the president, decides when America goes to war.
Pentagon Caught Hiring January 6th Rioter for Top Counterterrorism Post
The Washington Post reported this week that Elias Irizarry, who was filmed for more than five minutes during the January 6th attack moving through restricted Capitol grounds and climbing through a broken window while carrying a metal pole, was hired into a sensitive counterterrorism role at the Pentagon.
Irizarry was 19 years old on the day of the attack. He drove up from South Carolina with two companions to attend the Stop the Steal rally. He and his group left before Trump’s speech even ended and headed straight to the Capitol.
Video shows him in a red bandanna and a MAGA hat. It shows him directing rioters toward a staircase. A voice that prosecutors say was likely his can be heard on video shouting at rioters to go up the side. He crawled through a broken Senate-side window at around 2:26 in the afternoon, still holding the pole. He spent more than 20 minutes inside the Capitol, at one point climbing onto a Ronald Reagan statue and posing for a photo.
His travel companion, Grayson Sherrill, was caught on video swinging a metal pole at a D.C. police officer and later pleaded guilty to assaulting federal officers.
Irizarry himself pleaded guilty to misdemeanor trespass in 2022. At his sentencing in 2023, he said he was ashamed and that January 6th represented the largest attack on American democracy since the Civil War. Trump later pardoned him.
Now, he’s a political appointee in the Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office. That team handles embassy security, personnel recovery, and hostage rescue.
The acting Pentagon press secretary called Irizarry a qualified, patriotic young professional. It’s unclear who in the administration made the hire.
The same people who attacked the People’s House for the first time since the War of 1812 are now being given high-level positions in a convicted felon’s administration. That’s the state of America under Donald Trump.
After the Civil War the country wrote Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment for this exact situation, barring anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then joined an insurrection from ever holding federal office again. The generation that survived a war for the Union understood what we’re being forced to relearn, that the people who attack the seat of government don’t get handed the keys to it.
Raw America is continuing to grow, and we’re committing to having more eyes and ears inside the halls of power, breaking stories that the billionaire-owned outlets won’t cover. We’re also doubling down on our mission to bring you more live interviews with leaders and experts who are sharing inside knowledge with you that the Trump regime wants to keep buried. Today at 1 PM Eastern Time, we’ll be broadcasting a live interview with former TV news executive and reporter Jennifer Schulze, who has a lot to say about what the Ellisons are doing to CBS and 60 Minutes. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
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NFL Commissioner Refuses to Testify Before Congress About Streaming Deals. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell recently declined an invitation to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about the National Football League’s broadcasting deals. The league has been criticized for increasingly forcing viewers to use paywalled streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime to watch regular-season games. Earlier this year, the DOJ announced it was investigating the NFL for potential anticompetitive practices in relation to its broadcasting agreements.
