Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
President Donald Trump’s State Department just released a McCarthy-esque report naming dozens of American citizens and organizations it claims are part of a foreign subversion campaign. People inside the Trump White House are privately admitting that the Iran war has become a “quagmire” as it drags on with no end in sight. A top House Democrat is opening a new investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. And yet another judge Trump himself appointed to the bench just ruled against his immigration agenda.
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State Department Publishes Report Accusing Leftist Activists of Being Foreign Agents
The State Department dropped a 100-page report this week with a title straight out of a Cold War pulp novel: “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” But strip away the dramatic packaging and what’s left is something much more disturbing. It’s a list of American names.
Journalist Ken Klippenstein published the report and the list on his Substack. Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s is on it, as well as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Journalist Amy Goodman was also named, along with Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Maxine Waters, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is also on the list, mentioned alongside leftist groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and even the Amazon Labor Union.
The report accuses all of them of being a part of Cuban influence operations. It even praises the effectiveness of the actual 1950s Red Scare, pointing out how blacklists and McCarthy-era prosecutions managed to gut the Communist Party USA. That’s not a subtle comparison.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been building toward this, recently leading an international summit on what the administration is now calling “Far-Left Terrorism,” which no one actually defined. The summit mostly name-checked groups from the 1970s, outfits like the Symbionese Liberation Army, because there really isn’t a modern equivalent that matches their scary rhetoric.
This new report fixes that problem for them. It lists names of real, current, living people. Some of them are sitting elected officials. And the “evidence” tying them to a foreign government is often nothing more than the fact that they traveled to Cuba, or that they hold opinions the current administration doesn’t like.
One example is the section on DSA. The report itself admits the group wasn’t shaped by direct Cuban influence and has its own organic political commitments. Then it turns around and says none of that matters, because some DSA members have traveled to Havana.
That’s the entire architecture of the report. Visit a country, agree with a government on one policy, or show up at the wrong wedding, and you’re accused of being part of a subversion campaign.
None of the 43 people and groups named in this report are accused of taking orders from the Cuban government. They simply disagree with Trump’s Cuban policy, and they’re active in leftist causes. That’s not evidence of a foreign plot. That’s called having an opinion, which, last time I checked, is still legal in America.
Back in 1958, when Alabama tried to force the NAACP to turn over its membership rolls, the Supreme Court struck it down cold, because the justices understood something this administration has forgotten. When a government starts writing down the names of the people it doesn’t like, the point was never information. It was always fear, and a list of names is just a warning shot aimed at everyone who might speak next.
Trump White House Staffers Admit Iran War Has Become a ‘Quagmire’
Last weekend, multiple American service members died in the Iran war, and there may be additional undisclosed injuries the public hasn’t been told about yet according to new reporting. One person close to the White House bluntly told Politico: “This is what a quagmire looks like.”
Trump promised Iran would pay “many times over,” and U.S. Central Command announced new strikes aimed at Iran’s ability to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. But gas prices just crossed four dollars a gallon again, and oil is creeping toward ninety dollars a barrel just over 100 days before the midterms.
Republican strategists aren’t optimistic about their party’s political future. One conservative commentator observed that if a barrel of oil is more than $90 heading into an election, the party in power loses. If it’s below $70, they win. Right now the numbers are trending in exactly the wrong direction for Republicans, who are trying to cling to their slim majorities in the House and Senate.
Former officials say Iran’s goal isn’t to “win” the war in a conventional sense, but just survive it by bleeding the U.S. of critical resources while Americans’ patience runs out. That’s a tough position for any president.
Some Republicans in Trump’s orbit say the president has no interest in deploying ground troops in Iran. Mediators have reportedly floated a ten-day ceasefire proposal to try to revive last month’s agreement that has since fallen apart. However, a planned dignified transfer ceremony for the fallen service members at Dover Air Force Base got postponed Monday night, even as Trump prepares for a rally in Georgia.
Republicans in Congress aren’t exactly eager to help the White House. The Trump administration’s massive defense budget request, along with another $67 billion specifically to cover the cost of the war, is currently in limbo after Senate Democrats blocked it, saying it was little more than a blank check for Trump’s recklessness.
More than a century ago, Senator Robert La Follette stood almost alone against the stampede into World War One, warning that the men who profit from a war are never the men who bleed for it, and that the bill always lands on working people at the pump and the grocery store. They branded him a traitor for saying it. Watching gas cross four dollars while the caskets come home to Dover, he looks more right every single day.
Democrat Announces New Investigation Into Who Epstein Really Worked For
Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is opening a new investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. He wants to know whether the deceased convicted sex trafficker was operating as an unregistered foreign agent for multiple countries.
In a new letter to the Justice Department, State Department, and agencies within the intelligence community, Raskin says there’s already mounting evidence that Epstein was working to advance the interests of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, advised the Kremlin, and consulted for a former Israeli prime minister. Raskin says none of that was ever properly disclosed the way federal law requires for anyone acting on behalf of a foreign government.
Because Republicans control the House, Raskin’s request likely won’t get acknowledged as there’s no subpoena power behind it. But that’s arguably the point: this is a dry run showing exactly what Democrats plan to do should they retake the House of Representatives and control committees again.
And there’s still a lot more to uncover. The Justice Department is still holding onto roughly two and a half million pages of Epstein-related documents that have yet to see the light of day. Raskin wants access to anything in that pile touching Epstein’s contact with foreign governments, and he wants direct answers on whether any federal agency has ever investigated Epstein’s status as a foreign agent. Given how much of the Trump administration seems to want to bury this story don’t expect a quick answer.
Congress wrote the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938 to drag foreign influence into the sunlight, so Americans could see who was really whispering in the ear of power. Back then it was aimed at Nazi propagandists. The fact that we’re now asking whether a man with a direct line to the president was quietly serving four foreign governments tells you the rot that law was built to fight never left. It just bought a better suit.
Yet Another Trump Judge Hands Him a Loss on Immigration
Another one of Donald Trump’s appointed federal judges just ruled against the administration’s immigration policy. This time it’s U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud, who is the chief judge of the Minnesota District Court. This particular case involved the Trump administration’s attempt to overrule Minnesota’s sanctuary laws.
The Justice Department argued that Minnesota’s sanctuary provisions — which limit local and state law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities — violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. The government asked the court to declare Minnesota’s laws unconstitutional and block them outright. But Judge Tostrud threw out the case, ruling that the state’s laws don’t single out the federal government for worse treatment in any way that would justify striking them down.
This isn’t the first time Tostrud disagreed with the Trump administration on immigration. Back in February, he held the Department of Homeland Security in civil contempt after it shipped a detainee off to a facility in Texas in violation of a court order, and made the government pay for the man’s flight back to Minnesota. Tostrud noted the detainee had been released in Texas without his belongings, and that federal officials never gave a full explanation for what happened.
We all watched as Minnesota was ground zero this winter for one of the ugliest chapters of Trump’s ICE crackdown, when over 3,000 federal agents flooded the state and killed two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, in Minneapolis. ICE has continued killing people with impunity in Texas and Maine.
There’s a proud American tradition of a state refusing to turn its own people into deputies for a federal manhunt. In the 1850s, Northern states passed personal liberty laws so their sheriffs and courts couldn’t be drafted into hunting down escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act. That was the original sanctuary movement, and it rested on the same principle a Minnesota judge just affirmed, that Washington doesn’t get to commandeer your state to do its dirty work.
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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:
Pentagon Running Out of Money as Iran War Heats Up. The Department of Defense is ramping up its pressure on Congress to pass a new appropriations package as its funds have been rapidly depleting due to President Donald Trump’s renewed war with Iran. The White House is pushing Congress to approve $67 billion in new funding specifically to cover the cost of the war, as debate continues over the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. However, Republicans running for reelection in tight races are wary of voting for the legislation, given how unpopular the war is with their constituents.
Republicans Caught in No-Win Situation on Iran War Funding. The Trump administration’s pressure campaign on Republicans in Congress has become complicated by the upcoming midterm elections, which are a little more than 100 days away. Republicans are hoping to cling to their slim House and Senate majorities, and they’re expressing growing concerns about the runaway cost of the Iran war. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who lost his reelection bid to a Trump-backed Republican in Louisiana’s U.S. Senate primary, is calling on the White House to be more transparent with Congress if it hopes to get GOP support in advancing the war funding bill.
John Fetterman Suggests He May Switch Parties Over Democrats’ Israel Stance. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who routinely votes with Republicans on legislation pertaining to the Iran war and the Middle East, recently suggested he may end up switching parties if Democrats waver in their support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government. Fetterman’s ultimatum comes amid speculation that the immensely unpopular freshman senator may have difficulty winning Pennsylvania’s 2028 Democratic U.S. Senate primary.
Zohran Mamdani Announces Rollback of Red Tape for Small Businesses. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced this week that he would be rolling back more than 50 regulations including fines, fees, permits and other bureaucratic red tape for small businesses across the city. Mamdani’s “Open for Small Business” initiative is primarily targeted at easing restrictions on the approximately 180,000 restaurants, bodegas, barbershops and ice cream parlors in the five boroughs.
