Seymour Hersh

Charles: Yesterday afternoon The New York Times reported a new wave of air strikes on Iran after Donald Trump complained that Iranian leaders were “taking too long” to negotiate.

But veteran investigator Seymour Hersh reported that, to the dismay of others in the White House, Trump was once again raising the idea of using a nuclear weapon. He wrote:

It was amid what could be called a “what to do” meeting that a frustrated and angry Trump, perhaps only thinking out loud, raised the issue of using low-yield nuclear weapons to destroy “some” of Iran’s underground missile factories. I was told by someone with extensive knowledge of nuclear weaponry that it was “a very scary and very serious moment.” The president was depicted at this point to be “desperate not to lose in Iran.” His idea was to warn the Iranian leadership that “we are very seriously” considering such an escalation. I was told that the president apparently “was talked out of” any thought of nuclear escalation.

Seymour Hersh

HOW FAR WILL TRUMP ESCALATE THE WAR IN IRAN?

Four months into a difficult air war with Iran, President Donald Trump’s popularity is sinking among American voters. I have been told that in a recent secret meeting in the White House, he began speculating, albeit vaguely, about a nuclear option that could perhaps bring a quicker end to the war…

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15 hours ago · 191 likes · Seymour Hersh

Two Federal Judges Condemn the Pentagon’s Anti-Trans Policy

The Guardian

Charles: Nothing about Project 2025 is more vile than its approach to trans people. As I wrote back in the fall of 2024, “The most extreme language in Project 2025 is aimed at transgender people. The ‘propagation of transgender ideology’ is called ‘pornography,’ and that is an essential reason why pornography ‘should be outlawed.’.. Telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

At the time, Wendy Via, president and cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, explained that while pornography and trans issues may seem unrelated, the connection made by the authors of Project 2025 was intentional because they see the deviance associated with pornography as akin to identifying as LGBTQ. “Their message is that pornography is obscene,” Via said. “Being transgender is obscene. Teaching our kids about affirming their identities or orientations is obscene.”

At the same time, in the fall of 2024, the Trump campaign and its allies spent an astonishing $250 million on television ads demonizing trans people.

In his first term as president, Donald Trump tried to expel all trans people from the military, but after extensive litigation, the Pentagon allowed those currently serving to stay and continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. It barred new enlistments of anyone with gender dysphoria who was taking hormones or had transitioned gender.

Joe Biden removed the ban on trans troops in 2021. And then as soon as Pete Hegseth became secretary of defense, he tried once again to expel all trans people from the military.

28 active trans service members sued the government to overturn the ban and US District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, concluded that Trump’s executive order to exclude transgender troops from military service likely violated their constitutional rights.

This month, two of the three judges on a federal appeals panel ruled that there was no legal basis for the Pentagon’s policy excluding trans people. Judge Robert Wilkins wrote that Trump and Hegseth had declared that persons afflicted with gender dysphoria are unfit for military service because “the character of such persons “inconsistent” with the “high standards . . . [of]honesty, humility, . . . and integrity.”

But he found that the government has presented no evidence whatsoever to support its proposed ban:

The government has not attempted to defend or provide any factual basis for these disparaging characterizations of American citizens. Indeed, the government has not contested that the Plaintiff-Appellees who are currently serving (and who have collectively earned more than 80 commendations) have served honorably and pose no threat to national security, even though they happen to be transgender and have suffered from gender dysphoria.

Instead, the government contends that this case is solely about whether, pursuant to the Hegseth Policy, the military can disqualify persons from military service because they have gender dysphoria, a mental health condition. But the record shows that the purpose of the Hegseth Policy is to target applicants and servicemembers who express what the Administration believes is a “false gender identity,” and the Policy goes far beyond disqualifying persons currently or recently suffering from gender dysphoria. Some of those disqualifications are completely unexplained and have no reasonable justification. The sharp contrast to the Mattis Policy, adopted in the first Trump Administration, which allowed servicemembers who were transgender or who had suffered from gender dysphoria to remain in the military, appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: Persons who identify as transgender…

As a result, and for separate reasons, Judge Rogers and I vote to affirm the District Court’s preliminary injunction enjoining the Hegseth Policy as it relates to those Plaintiff-Appellees already in the military, while Judge Walker and I vote to vacate the preliminary injunction as it relates to the

The Pentagon made no official statement about the judges’ decision, but Hegseth wrote on social media “See you at SCOTUS,” indicating the decision would be appealed.

Mastering the Art of the Space Grift

MarketWatch

Scott: Elon Musk goes boldly where no prior market scam artist went before. And indeed, his SpaceX IPO, with its $1.79 trillion notional market valuation is a work of art—from the perspective of grifting, in any event.

Brett Arenda deconstructs the offering, identifying the key factual assumptions on which it is based, while Financial Times puzzles over all the Middle Eastern sovereign interests scurrying about to acquire stakes in it.

Right now, SpaceX as a business is simply a mobile network, Starlink, that uses satellites. The Starlink division generates 70% of all revenues and far more than 100% of all net income, given that the rest of the company loses money. Starlink currently has 10.3 million customers and generated $3.3 billion in revenue in the first quarter. For comparison, the three main US terrestrial mobile networks, Verizon , T Mobile and AT&T, had in total 40 times as many customers and 30 times as much revenue. Meanwhile their aggregate market values add up to less than one-third of the SpaceX IPO valuation…

How do you ask $1.8 trillion for a mobile operator with 10 million customers? By promising trillions in future profits from other, completely unproven, businesses. In the case of SpaceX, the big promise relates to artificial intelligence…

Many of these “initiatives” or dreams, the company admits, “involve significant technical complexity, unproven technologies, or technologies that do not exist or may require significant advancement, and such initiatives may not achieve commercial viability.” In other words, the company plans to target markets that may not even exist using technologies it does not have.

Perhaps Musk will flee to Argentina, like his long-time partner Peter Thiel. But for the moment, at least, he firmly believes that he controls the US government and has nothing to fear.

Moreover, he’s busy working to add other captured governments to his portfolio.

The Tech Bros Guide to Riot and Mayhem In Belfast

The Independent

Scott: “A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city. Where it comes from or whither it goes, few men can tell. Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable, or more cruel.” So wrote Charles Dickens in 1841, in his study of the Gordon riots of 1780.

The Gordon riots didn’t spring out of nothingness, of course, they were provoked by Lord Gordon, as pogroms targeting British Catholics. In Britain today, the tech bros face a dilemma in the form of a government crackdown on the dissemination of AI-generated pornography (the signature social media contribution of Elon Musk) to children.

How to respond?

Taking the ban on child pornography head on is unlikely to be successful. So other measures will be used. Elon has an idea.

Use the stabbing of an 18-year-old Hampshire man and a similar incident in Belfast to incite riot and mayhem targeting the “other.”

After all, it’s a proven approach to taking down governments at least since 1780. To this end, Musk is busily mobilizing his assets (with a help from long-time business partner Peter Thiel), including J.D. Vance, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage.

His social media platform provides the launching platform for the whole venture.

Billionaire X owner Elon Musk, who continued overnight to promote calls for people to take to the streets in response to Monday’s knife attack, has hit back at accusations he is inflaming tensions, and instead blamed immigration policy.

At Prime Minister’s Questions, Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey spoke of “extremists who exploit that grief and anger to spread hatred and violence, aided and abetted by social media barons like Elon Musk and their divisive algorithms.”

Musk shared lists on X of locations where protests could take place and retweeted Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe’s post saying “Millions must go.”

But he supported a post by GB News presenter Matt Goodwin saying it was not social media or him inflaming tensions in the UK, but “the very deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration and open borders.”

Sir Keir Starmer said: “We will crack down on anyone who is fuelling this division.”

Asked what he would do, No 10 referred back to actions the PM had taken over the last year on social media and said he “won’t hesitate to do that again.”

The Horton-Kaiser Report Is Independent, Different From Other US Media.

Scott: On the issue of the journalist and the journalist’s responsibility, I’m really quite struck by something that Pope Leo said. That the moral, ethical and professional responsibility of journalists is not to be regurgitating the views of people in power—like political figures and wealthy corporate interests that control commercial media—but to be an independent voice.

To assess carefully whether the things that are claimed as facts really are facts, and to discover what the facts are.

Charles: Scott Horton and I first bonded 20 years ago when we were each blogging about the horrendous torture being carried out by the second Bush administration during the so-called War on Terror. The New York Times news department never called torture torture. They always called it ‘enhanced interrogation.’

We both thought it was a terrible thing.

Listen to Scott speaking to NPR’s On The Media in 2009 about torture.

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Mother Jones

Scott: Jared Kushner has been raking in billions and most of the money is coming from foreign governments anxious to have access to and influence over his father-in-law, led by the Saudis and now including an ever lengthening queue potentates and strong men from natural-resource rich nations around the world.

It’s a scandal of a magnitude much greater than anything that ever preceded it. And the Beltway world is largely oblivious to it.

Casey Michel previews his forthcoming book on Kushner, the king of grifters, in Mother Jones:

In scale and audacity, what Kushner has attempted—and achieved—is on another level entirely. He asked foreign regimes to trust him with billions of dollars even though he’d never managed an investment fund. One former Republican official, as The New York Times noted in April 2024, “could recall no precedent for a government official leaving office and starting an investment firm that would immediately receive billions of dollars from foreign governments with which the official had been working while serving in government.” And that was before Trump placed Kushner—who had zero diplomatic or foreign affairs expertise until his father-in-law rose to power—at the center of every international crisis, elevating him to the role, arguably, of the nation’s leading diplomat.

Even Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who led the charge against Hunter Biden, was taken aback: Kushner’s Saudi funding arrangements, he said, “crossed the line of ethics,” and when a consultant close to Kushner called and asked him to tone down his criticism, Comer said he instructed the intermediary “to tell Kushner to fuck off.”

Kushner was denied top-secret clearance until Trump overruled intelligence officials. “There was a risk the Saudis were playing him,” said a former White House official.

Of course, it wasn’t just Saudi Arabia that saw Kushner as a pliable source of influence. The United Arab Emirates, whose own despot had cultivated Kushner years before, began tossing money at Affinity Partners around the same time. So did the Qatari regime, which slipped back into America’s good graces as it was helping bail out Kushner’s family company. To date, firms linked to the UAE and Qatar have invested at least $1.5 billion in Kushner’s fund. With more modest infusions from smaller investors, nearly all foreign, Affinity’s asset pool grew and grew, topping $6 billion and generating more than $100 million in management fees for Kushner and his partners. (Affinity’s fee structure, the Saudi investment officials wrote in their analysis, seemed “excessive.”)

The HKR Look Back (2)

Charles: If you were not alive when Jack and Bobby Kennedy were running for office it is almost impossible to imagine the quality of devotion they inspired. For millions of Americans their age or thirty years younger they has elegance and intelligence and a magnetism none of their opponents could match. Millions of us invested our whole beings in their destinies. After Jack was murdered in 1963, millions waited for the restoration. Fifty-eight years ago this week it was closer to happening than ever before, when Bobby Kennedy strode into the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to claim victory in the 1968 presidential primary in California. It wasn’t clear that he could defeat Hubert Humphrey two months later at the Democratic National Convention, but he carried the magic of a Kennedy’s momentum.

As soon as he left the stage, he was shot. Twenty-six hours later he was dead.

When his body was lowered into the ground of Arlington National Cemetery it took with him the hopes of millions. And when 1968 ended with the election of the deeply hated Richard Nixon, a huge portion of two generations of Americans were never able to invest that much of themselves in any candidate again.

Justin and Janet Feldman were great New York liberals–reform Democrats–and good friends of Bobby Kennedy. They were also close friends of my parents, and Justin was already my political mentor when I was ten.

Both of them were on the train that took Bobby’s casket from Penn Station to Washington D.C. The train ride was supposed to last four hours, but the crowd surged on to the adjoining track in New Jersey, and two spectators were killed by a northbound train. That made the Kennedy train four hours late on its voyage to the nation’s capital.

The Feldmans wrote this piece, planning to offer it to The New York Times, but it was never published. This week their daughter Jane Feldman shared it with me for the first time. It has never been public before. Here are some excerpts.

We were on that Saturday train. All of us on that train were there because we were friends of Bob Kennedy. Everyone had been associated with him in different way sand in various contexts. We had been his friend for many years and in many causes.

Others for shorter periods and only in a specific way. But we were all bound together because we not only believed in him and followed his political leadership, we loved the man himself. We loved the depth of his commitment and the strength of his resolve. And we loved him for his compassion, his friendliness,his humor, and the hand of friendship he had extended to each of us. And we loved him for what he meant to people and for what people meant to him.

As we waited to board that train at Pennyslvania Station many of us felt that we had suffered as much grief as we could stand. Many of us had stood vigil at that casket at St. Patrick’s at various times from the time it arrived from California. We felt a compulsion to go back time and again and stand there to be close to him while the people who stood in line for seven hours and more filed past to say their good-byes.

We were numb. We had been drained of all emotion by the three days that had passed, by the moving service we had witnessed and by the eloquence of Ted Kennedy’s eulogy.

And below the numbness was a deep despair of the future.

In the beginning of this trip we were all absorbed with the past, with our private memories, with our sorrow and with the defeat of our dreams for the future. In the very beginning of that trip we were really unaware of the existence of any world outside of that train. But then we started looking out of the windows. The grief was there. Looking at the people brought tears to everyone. But the people outside the train mdse us realize that the only way we really could show our love for Boy Kennedy was to continue to carry some of those obligations which he so deeply felt.

Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser Are Veteran Authors and Journalists.

Charles: I came to this originally as a metro reporter for the New York Times where I covered all the city beats, including real estate where I met one Donald Trump in the 1970s. Then I was a media reporter at the Wall Street Journal after which I got into the business we’re still in as the press critic at Newsweek.

Since then, I’ve written books about the 1960s, about gay life in the United States since 1940 and about a family in the French resistance who I’ve known all my life.

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Charles: Particularly in the last year, The New York Times has probably published more stories about the corruption and venality of Donald Trump than any other outlet.

From a fine summary by Steve Rattner a year ago (“Mr. Trump’s blatant transgressions have swamped those of any modern president and even those of his first term”) to an oral history of the destruciton of the Justice Department, the paper has aggressively covered the Trump corruption waterfront.

Last month even White House correspondent Peter Baker pointed out that “Trump has used the federal government to advance his own personal interests and those of his family and allies more expansively and openly than any past occupant of the White House. Any review of history would suggest that it is not even close.”

This excellent record only makes it all the more baffling when the paper completely fails to convey the insanity the president displays in real time.

Sunday’s example was its appallingly anodyne account of Trump’s appearance on Meet the Press. Around the 37th minute of his interview with Kirsten Welker, Trump had a full meltdown, but the NYT account never gave the slightest hint of that. When Welker pointed out that 170 people had pled guilty to assaulting police officers on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump said there had been “FBI agents ushering them into the building.”

The NYT omitted every one his most outrageous quotes, and never suggested the insanity of his performance.

To get that, you had to read The Guardian:

When Welker asked the president for any evidence on the California gubernatorial race being fraudulent, he also accused the veteran reporter of being “crooked”.

“They’re crooked, just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And Meet the Press is crooked,” said Trump.

Welker then defended herself and tried to ask additional questions, with Trump replying: “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged.”

Trump then brought up previously repeated false claims that he won the 2020 US presidential election.

When Welker later tried to ask additional questions, Trump continued to assert that NBC was “crooked” and ended the interview. “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough,” said Trump, taking off his microphone. “Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

Watch as Trump cracks under pressure from Welker:

Starmer Takes on the Tech Bros

The Independent

Scott: The tech bros are determined to take down Sir Keir Starmer and his government.

How? Any pretext will do.

For the last weeks, they have been mobilizing their resources and stoking violence and anger against Starmer, using whatever comes to hand. A violent incident in which a mentally ill Sikh kills an 18-year old white man in Hampshire, for instance. But this is the real reason: Starmer is—like his counterparts in France—acting on public outrage over Elon Musk’s decision to flood European social media with pornography.

Today he has issued a 3-month ultimatum: They need to self-regulate the situation in 90-days or the penalties will be put in place, and they will (as in France) be criminal in nature.

Don’t expect to read or hear about this in US media. They’ll just be reporting on how those damned Europeans are encroaching on free-speech rights, which is how the tech bros have decided to code this whole controversy.

Starmer has handed tech companies a three-month ultimatum to introduce device controls to prevent children sending, receiving, or viewing nude images.

Firms such as Apple and Google will face legislation forcing them to activate the tech if they do not comply with the changes by September, the prime minister has warned.

In a speech at London Tech Week, Starmer declared that “standing by is not an option”, adding that “the pace of change cannot be an excuse for harm”.

But the prime minister has been urged to go “much further” on the measures, as he was criticised by some political opponents who called his delay in introducing the ban until a leadership contest was on the horizon “desperately sad”.

“One issue is the ability for children with phones to send and receive nude images,” Starmer said on Monday. “For too long, people have been told that is simply the price of modern tech, that nothing can be done, that government is powerless, that parents just have to accept it.

“I reject that completely, because tech should adapt to the needs of society, not the other way around.”

He added: “That is why today I am calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce device controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images.

Meanwhile French prosecutors say they have secured internal documents showing that Musk opted to enable the pornography flood because it would bolster the profits of his social media operation.

Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser Are Veteran Authors and Journalists.

Charles: I came to this originally as a metro reporter for the New York Times where I covered all the city beats, including real estate where I met one Donald Trump in the 1970s. Then I was a media reporter at the Wall Street Journal after which I got into the business we’re still in as the press critic at Newsweek.

Since then, I’ve written books about the 1960s, about gay life in the United States since 1940 and about a family in the French resistance who I’ve known all my life.

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Scott: It’s best to look at your country and its problems through the eyes of a complete outsider, someone from a different culture. Doing so enables you to see more truth and avoid the yoke of two-sided analysis that we’re usually subjected to.

I approach searching for the news you need by paying much more attention to professional journalists from other societies and looking with some care at how they view the United States and what is going on here.

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Credits

Host

Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser

Guest

Tom Burgis

Producer

Imogen Sayers, Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser

The Guardian

Charles: Almost every time the right-wing extremist who is America’s Secretary of Defense opens his mouth, the civilized world recoils with horror. On Saturday Pete Hegseth managed a new all-time low by besmirching the honor of the heroes who died on the beaches of Normandy to liberate Europe from fascism.

Speaking at the Normandy American Cemetery overlooking the sacred ground of Omaha Beach, Hegseth compared modern day immigrants to the Nazis.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.

The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe, That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war fighters, or what they fought for was merely temporary.”

Historian Simon Schama identified Hegseth’s remarks as a

special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance.

As if the little people’s rage against immigration somehow is superior to the war against the Third Reich and entitles this comic book nobody to lecture the actual heroes.

From Jerusalem, the Israeli human rights lawyer Daniel Seidemann declared, “This is an obscene desecration of the memories of those who stormed the beaches of Normandy, and especially of those who fell.”

Anders Åslund, a Swedish economist and former senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, contrasted the comments with Hegseth’s later remarks on the US standing alongside its allies. “So much nonsense,” he wrote. “‘We stand by our allies!’ No you don’t. You just attacked them. Immigration policies are internal matters.”

Åslund said Hegseth’s comments were particularly “clueless” given his recent decision to skip a key NATO meeting and Donald Trump’s vows to cut the number of troops in Europe. “Doesn’t Hegseth know that the most unreliable ‘ally’ by far is the US?”

French journalist François Clemenceau, the great great nephew of World War I prime minister Georges Clemenceau, demanded:

“How could they dare? What an insult, on our own soil, to the liberators of D-Day. What an insult to the migrants driven from their homes by scourges that great America prefers to ignore.”

Never forget that Hegseth was banned from guard duty at Joe Biden’s inauguration after he was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member because of a tattoo on his bicep associated with white supremacist groups.

Hegseth accused the Pentagon of over-reacting by taking steps to address extremism, and attacked the the military’s efforts to remove people it deemed white supremacists from the ranks. Hegseth wrote that the problem is “fake” and “manufactured” and characterized it as “peddling the lie of racism in the military.” He said efforts to root extremism out had pushed “rank-and-file patriots out of their formations.”

How will change come in Russia?

The Observer

Scott: Death comes for all things, and as the Wall Street Journal told us last week, few leaders are more obsessed with their own mortality than Vladimir Putin (though his sidekick Trump gives him a run for the distinction). An embarrassing St Petersburg Economic Summit, horrific setbacks for Russia on the Ukraine front, and calamitous reports about the state of the Russian economy are now fueling a great deal of speculation about Putin’s end phase. How will be disappear from the scene and what will replace him? Andrei Soldatov, a leading student of Russia’s national security apparatus, offers some historically informed thoughts on this topic in The Observer.

Modern Russia has experienced three revolutionary crises (in 1905 and two in 1917), but the systems built in their aftermath left virtually no room for more popular revolt. The leaders of the new regimes made sure of it – from Lenin and Stalin to Yeltsin and Putin.

The sudden political upheavals of recent Russian history have been driven by elites: by the KGB and the military in 1991; by the parliament and Yeltsin’s vice-president in October 1993; and by Putin’s closest crony, Prigozhin, in 2023.

There were mass protests in Moscow in 2011–12 but they were never violent or numerous enough to threaten Putin. Since then, every segment of Russian society has been systematically pushed towards apathy and political disengagement.

That does not mean the mood in the country is unchanged. Drone attacks have had an effect, as has the growing disappointment in Donald Trump’s ability to make Putin accept a ceasefire.

But it would be naive to expect drone strikes on Russian cities to drive ordinary people into the streets or increase sympathy for Ukraine. They are irritating and frightening; they make people think that perhaps it would have been better not to start the war in the first place, and that ending it may now be the best option. But those who have such thoughts keep them to themselves. Russians have been given too many examples of what can happen to those who break their silence…

After more than four years of brutal trench warfare, it may be wiser to limit expectations to what appears realistically achievable. Drone strikes can reduce Russia’s offensive capabilities and, combined with sanctions, slow its war machine. But they are unlikely to do much more than that.

Surprises are possible. A coup d’état is always a possibility in a closed political system such as Russia’s. The problem is that Putin could just as easily be replaced by someone even more hostile to the west and Ukraine.

Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser Are Veteran Authors and Journalists.

Charles: I came to this originally as a metro reporter for the New York Times where I covered all the city beats, including real estate where I met one Donald Trump in the 1970s. Then I was a media reporter at the Wall Street Journal after which I got into the business we’re still in as the press critic at Newsweek.

Since then, I’ve written books about the 1960s, about gay life in the United States since 1940 and about a family in the French resistance who I’ve known all my life.

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Israel Just Quintupled Its Propaganda Budget

The New York Times

Charles: Here’s why that won’t be enough to change the narrative.

At 10:39 last Saturday night (EDT) these were all stories on the home page of The New York Times:

Pentagon Sees Growing Espionage Threat From Israel

The Defense Department has increased the threat assessment to its highest level, and Israel is believed to have eavesdropped on U.S. talks with Iran.

Israeli Strike Kills 3 Lebanese Soldiers, Days After Truce Was Signed

Infant Killed as Israeli Military Fires on Car in West Bank, Palestinian Officials Say

And then there was this one:

What Visual Evidence Tells Us About Israel’s Use of White Phosphorus in Lebanon

New York Times

Plumes of smoke with the distinctive shape of white phosphorus are shown over the border between Israel and Lebanon in late April. Photo: Ayal Margolin/Reuters

Scott: The Trump administration’s position on the use of white phosphorus in wartime is very clear—it’s a war crime if deployed against the US or US forces, but it’s perfectly okay if the US does it. As in so many areas, this has brought the US into line with Israeli practice, which has been to use white phosphorus with gusto while generally disclaiming the fact that it’s being used. For the massive Israeli military operations in Lebanon—which aim to occupy the country’s southern third at least, to depopulate it and to level existing cities and towns—white phosphorus has been a staple, as a New York Times study makes clear. The NYT study fully validates and expands on reports by Human Rights Watch concerning Israeli use of white phosphorus against civilians in connection with Lebanon operations. This war crime is supported and funded by US taxpayers, in violation of US law.

The Israeli military has deployed white phosphorus, an incendiary substance that can be extremely harmful, over populated areas in Lebanon in its battle against Hezbollah, according to experts, aid groups and visual evidence collected by The New York Times.

Distinctive smoke trails from this type of munition were seen as recently as May 30 in Nabatieh, a city of roughly 40,000, in social media footage verified by The Times, which was filmed as Israeli forces captured Beaufort Castle, a landmark in the area.

Other verified footage showed that white phosphorus had been used in the vicinity of the coastal city of Tyre, as well as near three small towns — Qlayaa, Khiam and Yohmor — in the months since fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, began again in March. The latest fighting erupted after Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, following joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

Once exposed to air, white phosphorus spontaneously ignites and is exceptionally difficult to extinguish…

“The harm that white phosphorus causes is horrific,” said Bonnie Docherty, a senior arms adviser at Human Rights Watch. “It inflicts burns that can penetrate to the bone.” The dense smoke it produces, she said, “causes severe respiratory damage, and organ failure. Wounds can reignite when bandages are removed and remnants of the substance are exposed to oxygen.”

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Der Spiegel

Scott: In a wide-ranging interview with the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, Hungary’s new prime minister Péter Magyar, explains how he and his Tiszla party took on Viktor Orbán at the polls and won a decisive electoral victory… and how he is now dismantling the Orbán state and reinvigorating Hungary’s democratic institutions.

DER SPIEGEL: Viktor Orbán consistently won previous elections on the strength of extremely polarizing slogans targeting Brussels or migrants. Most recently, he invoked the alleged threat of a Ukrainian attack. Why did voters not believe those lies this time?

Magyar: People get used to constant propaganda and eventually see through it. Propaganda only works when it contains a grain of truth. We were able to show that Orbán’s claims had no basis in reality. The end of a regime comes when people are no longer afraid of it – when they even laugh at it. That is exactly what happened here. My motto from the very beginning was: “Have no fear!” Even two years ago, I said that Viktor Orbán’s power appeared far stronger than it actually was.

DER SPIEGEL: What lessons for dealing with autocrats can convinced democrats in other countries draw from your success?

Magyar: I don’t think there’s a specific recipe that applies to every country. We simply worked honestly and hard. Politics is about people. For voters to believe you, you have to go to them, look them in the eye, you have to listen to them. During the campaign, I visited more than 700 different towns and villages. I appeared five or six times in some places. I was on the road more than I was at home. The others apparently thought they only had to go on social media and television. But that’s not enough.

Knowledge Is Power

Scott: I believe passionately that one of the really poor items in media coverage in the United States is science reporting.

I am routinely pulling things out from major science journals that are significant news in themselves but haven’t really been covered as news.

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The HKR Look Back

Fifty-Eight Years Ago Today

The Mutual Broadcasting System

Charles: THE liquor flowed happily in suite 516 of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that evening. Bobby Kennedy had won the 1968 presidential primary in California, and his defeat in Oregon was just a distant memory. Jimmy Breslin was there, with George Plimpton and Teddy White, and occasionally Kennedy would retreat into the bathroom with one of them for a moment of privacy. South Dakota had also voted that day, and Bobby had won big there, too, with 50 percent of the vote, compared with 30 percent for a delegate slate allied with Humphrey and just 20 percent for McCarthy. Teddy White went on television with Walter Cronkite and called the two results “the most complete repudiation of the administration…. This is the clearest revolt yet of a new kind of politics against an old kind of politics.” CBS kept projecting wider and wider margins of victory for Kennedy—now Cronkite was saying he would beat McCarthy by fourteen points, 52 to 38.

CBS went off the air at 11:13 P.M. in Los Angeles, when it was 2:13 in the morning on the East Coast. Kennedy still hadn’t made his victory speech, but at this hour CBS figured even the most serious political junkies wouldn’t mind waiting to watch that part of the celebration the next morning. A reporter in Kennedy’s suite thought the young candidate finally seemed “liberated.” The Kennedy magic was back, and it was definitely Bobby’s magic. He was forty-two, but he still looked barely over thirty. Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnel, “I feel now for the first time that I’ve shaken off the shadow of my brother. I feel I made it on my own.”

By midnight the crowd downstairs was getting rowdy. They were singing “This Land Is Your Land” and chanting, “We want Kennedy!” Bobby told Ethel he was ready to go. Inside the ballroom he stood behind a lectern with a single KENNEDY sticker stuck on it, under the logo of the hotel. He began with baseball: “I want to express my high regard to Don Drysdale, who pitched his sixth straight shutout tonight, and I hope that we have as good fortune in our campaign.” He said California had voted “for peace and for justice and for a government dedicated to giving the people mastery over their own affairs.” He praised McCarthy for “breaking the political logjam” and making “citizen participation a new and powerful force in our political life.” And he asked McCarthy’s troops to join him—“not for myself, but for the cause and the ideas which moved you to begin this great popular movement.” Most people thought it was his best speech of the campaign. Then he thanked everyone: the blacks, the Mexicans, his siblings, his mother, “and all those other Kennedys”; even his dog, Freckles.

“What I think is quite clear is that we can work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country.” There were no policemen or Secret Service men inside the hotel. The crowd went wild, and in the film clip that would be repeated endlessly on television, dozens of white boaters emblazoned with Kennedy’s image bobbed happily up and down in the ballroom.

Finally he was done. “My thanks to all of you. And now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there!” He gave the V sign, for victory—which also meant peace in 1968—pushed his hair off his forehead in a familiar gesture, then turned to exit through the kitchen. Andrew West, a radio reporter for KRKD, trailed Kennedy as he left the podium. West had an old-fashioned radio voice: slightly theatrical. This is what his listeners heard: “How are you going to counter Mr. Humphrey as far as the delegate vote goes?” West asked. “We’re just going to start to struggle for it,” said the candidate.

It was 12:16 A.M., and Bobby paused in the kitchen to shake hands with Jesus Perez, a dishwasher. Then West started speaking again—rather hysterically: “Senator Kennedy has been shot. Is that possible? Is that possible? Is it possible ladies and gentlemen? It is possible he has—not only Senator Kennedy. Oh, my God. Senator Kennedy has been shot, and another man, a Kennedy campaign manager—and possibly shot in the head. Rafer Johnson has a hold of the man who apparently has fired the shot.”

In the ballroom next door bewilderment turned into terror. A young girl screamed, “No, God, no! It’s happened again.” A black man pounded the wall. “Why, God, why? Why again? Why another Kennedy?” Six people in the kitchen were hit by the barrage of bullets, but only one was fatally wounded. Most people believed Bobby never regained consciousness, but two witnesses insisted that he had spoken with them. When Ethel leaned down over him, she thought she heard her husband ask, “How bad is it?” And Max Behrman, an ambulance attendant, swore Kennedy spoke again when he tried to pick him up. “Please don’t,” said the stricken man. “Don’t lift me.”

Twenty-six hours later Bobby Kennedy was dead.

Adopted from 1968 In America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture and the Shaping of a Generation.

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Xi’s surveillance state seeks to identify future dissidents

The Times

Scott: CCP-ruled China is the world’s premier surveillance state, devoting immense resources to keep track of its own population. Many of the tech bros, particularly Peter Thiel and his Palantir, see China as a model for the future; they have worked hard to emulate China’s surveillance technology, sensing that the same systems will be in demand across the globe quickly in China’s wake. And now China is focusing heavily on predictive technologies that will allow the CCP to identify their future enemies even in childhood. Does this ring a bell? It’s the premise of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report (1956), and it’s now approaching reality.

A massive leak of documents from two firms set up by the Chinese state scientific apparatus and deployed as part of the country’s “Great Firewall” internet management system have given an unprecedented understanding of the way in which it operates.

An analysis by a US academic unit, the Institute of National Security at Vanderbilt University, has found that one of the firms is using AI to analyse vast amounts of data covering individuals’ daily habits, travel, relationships and browsing histories.

The firm, known as Geedge Networks in English, appears to be trying to develop a system to predict future habits.

“The goal was to build behavioural profiles of individuals deemed ‘harmful’ — not simply to understand what people have already done, but to anticipate what they might do next and with whom,” the study says…

“The trigger for state action is no longer something the citizen did,” the study says. “It is something the state believes the citizen will do.”

The power of the internet to generate data about its users, and particularly users of social media sites, has already been widely exploited across political systems to target them as both consumers and voters. However, as the researchers noted, it is much easier to analyse what people have done, such as items they have bought, or things they have said, than to predict what they will do. That requires either huge human “inputs”, or AI, whose superpower is to work out patterns from large banks of data.

Knowledge Is Power

Scott: I believe passionately that one of the really poor items in media coverage in the United States is science reporting.

I am routinely pulling things out from major science journals that are significant news in themselves but haven’t really been covered as news.

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Four Sane House Republicans

The New York Times

Charles: Ever so slowly it is dawning on Republican members of the 119th Congress that they have nothing to sell to any voter in November who has a net worth of under $1 billion.

It took the most idiotic war of choice of the 21st Century (a very high bar indeed) and gas at $5 a gallon, but yesterday four Republicans actually voted “to direct President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from the conflict with Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war.”

Until now, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania has been the only reliable voice of reason within the Republican caucus. But yesterday he was joined by Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania:

This was a most encouraging sign of life for our struggling democracy. The Times even pointed out that

It came after Senate Republicans have in recent days forced Mr. Trump to abandon his request for $1 billion in security funding for his ballroom project and a plan that the Justice Department announced to create a federal fund to pay claimants who accuse the government of having victimized them.

But for some reason the reporters writing this story then added this bit of idiotic both siderism to their piece:

Many have dismissed Democrats’ war powers measures, which call for the removal of most U.S. forces from hostilities in Iran, as politically motivated attacks on the president that would leave American interests unprotected.

A Guide for the Perplexed on AI

Financial Times

Scott: Right now, global equity markets are dominated and distorted by artificial intelligence and extreme expectations surrounding its economic benefits. Meanwhile, legacy media is notably bereft of serious critical discussion of this entire phenomenon—something which reflects among other things the rising influence of the tech bros over major media, particularly inside the US. Martin Wolf comes to the rescue, asking the right questions and presenting well reasoned responses.

How should someone who knows next to nothing about artificial intelligence think about its implications for humanity? While it is cheeky to use the formulation of the Jewish sage Maimonides when tackling the relationship between revelation and philosophy, it is not absurd. After all, even the greatest sage cannot fully understand divinity. So, the fact that I do not understand the implications of AI should not prevent me from struggling to do so. Maybe my struggles will also help others.

So, here goes. The question I wish to consider is: “AI boon, bane or bubble?” Moreover, once we have considered the answers, are there any choices humanity can realistically make to ensure it is far more of the first than the second, or are we doomed to be dragged behind the AI chariot, willy-nilly, wherever it goes?

The answer to the question about whether it is merely a bubble will help to set the ground for answering these as well. So, what might it mean for AI to be a bubble? There are two possibilities.

One is that something important is indeed happening. But markets cannot estimate the returns and are being driven into a speculative frenzy. This, in turn, is fuelling an unsustainable (and to some degree unprofitable) surge in investment. Sooner or later, this bubble will burst, stock prices will collapse, many old and new businesses will go bankrupt and the investment will subside. But we will be left, as we were after, say, the railway booms of the 19th century and the dotcom bubble of the 1990s, with useful infrastructure: tracks, in the case of the former, and fibre optic cable, in the case of the latter. Such bubbles can transform the world.

The other possibility is that AI is nonsense. The Mississippi and South Sea bubbles of the early 18th century in France and England come to mind: they burst, ruined some, and changed little.

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Except, it isn’t.

The Guardian

Charles: Todd Blanche, the most proudly duplicitous acting Attorney General in American history, grabbed the news cycle yesterday by teliing Congress, “We’re not moving forward with the fund, period.”

That was the first sentence of the second graph of the story in The Times, which did the worst job of covering this story.

By announcing the end of a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off convicted criminals who also happen to be Trump supporters, Blanche spared Republican Senators the possibility of the harshest attack ads, which had inspired some of them to actually disagree with something done by the Trump administration.

But beyond noting that Blanche refused to put his promise in writing, the lead story in the Times completely missed the meaninglessness of his testimony.

The Guardian and The Washington Post did not make that mistake.

The Guardian explained:

Even though the federal government is scrapping its plans to create the fund, individual victims may be able to seek compensation by filing administrative claims for damages against the government. The justice department has broad discretion to choose how to settle those cases, so January 6 and other defendants could still conceivably receive compensation. Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the far-right Proud Boys who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, told a reporter for PBS News Hour that was a possible path for January 6 defendants to continue to pursue compensation.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche

And The Washington Post made the even more important point that despite the supposed demise of the fund, all of its intended beneficiaries could still be paid off–in secret:

Even if the administration follows through with abandoning the fund, Trump could find other ways to reward allies who claim they were victims of a weaponized Justice Department.

For example, under the Federal Tort Claims Act, people are entitled to file claims against the federal government if they think they were wrongly hurt by government actions. Thousands of such claims are filed each year, including many that have come from Jan. 6 defendants.

Those claims have kept coming amid the uncertainty on the payout fund. Peter Ticktin, an attorney who has filed for compensation on behalf of Jan. 6 defendants, said he sought payments Friday for nine more clients, arguing in a court filing that each was owed more than $1 million for medical bills, lost income, pain and suffering, emotional distress, loss of liberty, and damage to their reputations.

“If there’s a fund, that makes it all a little bit easier,” Ticktin said. “But if there’s no such fund at all, the government needs to settle these lawsuits.”

The Justice Department could decide to settle such claims before they are brought to court, effectively deciding who deserves to be paid for damages by the federal government. That claims process is typically not made public.

The one thing that all three newspapers made clear was that Trump and his family retain the most outrageous benefit of the “settlement” between two different sets of lawyers, all of whom were working for the president. Nothing has changed with the order Blanche signed last month blocking all previous IRS audits of Trump, his company, and his family. After analyzing Trump’s tax returns in 2020, the Times guessed that he might have owed as much as $100 million in back taxes.

The Post noted that several Democrats pointed out Blanche’s outrageous conflict of interest, since he was Trump’s personal lawyer in multiple matters in the period between his two presidencies. With his usual glibness Blanche asked his interrogators:

“What are you saying is a conflict of interest? The fact that I used to have a job, and I now have a current job?”

The only answer is “yes.”

Epstein’s Modeling Machine

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Scott: In what capacity, exactly, was the Slovene model Melanija Knauvs introduced by Jeffrey Epstein to Donald Trump?

Among the materials that should have been released by the Department of Justice, but which mysteriously disappeared, related to an investigation into Jean-Luc Brunel and his modeling agency. Brunel trafficked many Eastern European women to Paris, and then to New York—where they found themselves ‘entangled in the web of Jeffrey Epstein,’ as Süddeutsche Zeitung’s exposé puts it.

One of these women was Melania. And much of the Brunel operation with Epstein sits at the heart of a criminal inquiry that Paris prosecutors are now pursuing, and with which Trump’s Justice Department is declining to cooperate.

Jean-Luc Brunel had become one of Epstein’s key accomplices in the recruitment of young women from Europe. He would later deny having supplied women to Epstein for sexual exploitation. Yet the narrative of his life can hardly be interpreted any other way.

When the two men first met—sometime in the late eighties or early nineties—Brunel was already an internationally successful modeling agent who liked to claim credit for having launched the careers of Monica Bellucci, Milla Jovovich, and Sharon Stone.

Brunel was famous for his parties at nightclubs such as “Les Bains Douches” and “Folies Pigalle,” and Paris was, at the time, still the undisputed fashion capital of the world. The most beautiful girls in the world flocked there; it was where supermodels were made—at least, that is, if they were also available at night, as a critical documentary produced by the American television network CBS in 1988 revealed.

“It’s a meat market,” an American model states in the film. She claims that at Brunel’s parties, the girls were present solely so that someone could take them home. “He has the agency; he has the girls. People ask him: ‘Jean-Luc, we’re partying tonight—can you bring a few girls along?’” If you said no, the model adds, “then you wouldn’t get any work.”

Even back then, the allegations involved far more serious matters: Another model, interviewed anonymously in the documentary, accused Brunel of having slipped drugs into her drink and subsequently raped her. Thysia Huisman, however, was unaware of this documentary when she accepted Jean-Luc Brunel’s invitation to Paris in 1991.

On a rainy Friday afternoon in May, Huisman sits at her high kitchen table in a spacious modern home in a suburb of Amsterdam. Now 53, she is a successful TV director; her bracelets jingle, and occasionally, as she speaks, her large rings tap against the marble tabletop.

Jean-Luc Brunel had taken notice of her through her modeling agency in Brussels, she recounts, and had invited her to come to Paris.

The Dutchwoman was eighteen years old at the time—in the autumn of 1991. The fact that she was expected to sleep in Brunel’s own apartment struck her as odd, Huisman says; yet her agency boss reassured her. It was an honor, she had said. Brunel—a friend—would take especially good care of her.

“Take care”—of all phrases, that was precisely how she had put it.

Knowledge Is Power

Scott: I believe passionately that one of the really poor items in media coverage in the United States is science reporting.

I am routinely pulling things out from major science journals that are significant news in themselves but haven’t really been covered as news.

Try getting the news you need from Charles and I, free for two weeks.

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How Netanyahu Successfully Blocks Trump’s Peace Plans

Financial Times

Scott: It’s really all about Lebanon. From the beginning Lebanon has played a central role in what we call the “Iran War.”

And its centrality boils down to this: By pushing his invasion of Lebanon ever more aggressively, Benjamin Netanyahu has the ability to collapse any peace initiative that Donald Trump pursues with Iran and achieve his obvious objective: Keeping America locked into a war with Iran that has no boundaries and no obvious conclusion.

Lead Israeli Iran strategist Danny Citrinowicz expresses this clearly:

Trump’s Iran pity party last night puts the blame for the failure of his efforts on “unpatriotic Republicans,” who give voice to all his efforts shortcomings, echoing for the most part what Netanyahu thinks but does not say.

Netanyahu responds to a deal he doesn’t like by forcing the evacuation of Lebanon’s second city, threatening to “flatten” south Beirut, and pushing his ground invasion far beyond the boundaries he first laid out for it.

His strategic objective in doing this is neither “peace for Galilee” nor the eradication of Hezbollah—rather it is simply to collapse any peace talks. His plan is well crafted, and it is successful.

If you can call the miasma and misery of endless war a success.

Iran has suspended its back-channel negotiations with the United States and warned that it could “complete the closure” of the Strait of Hormuz, the latest sign of escalating tensions between the warring parties.

Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, said the decision was taken in response to Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon against Hizbollah and “ceasefire violations” on all fronts.

The response of that consummate master of the art of the deal, Donald Trump?

In an interview with CNBC, he remarked: “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly.” “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less,” adding he thought the protracted talks “started to get very boring.”

The War at CBS News

New York Times

Charles: Most serious journalists—and virtually all CBS News alumni—assume that anyone who is willing to run 60 Minutes for editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is by definition unqualified for the job.

That’s because of Weiss’ pristine ignorance of broadcast news and the disastrous news judgement she has displayed since assuming her current job last October. Worst of all is her eagerness to please her Donald Trump-supporting boss David Ellison, and his father Larry, who helped bankroll his son’s purchase of Paramount (which included CBS) and the pending merger with Warner Brothers, which will bring CNN and HBO under the Ellisons’ control. The Wall Street Journal reported that as part of its campaign to get the Trump administration to approve its takeover of Warner Brothers, both Ellisons have already promised the White House a deep overhaul of the CNN network Trump has long said he loathes.

Last week Weiss fired the much loved 60 Minutes Executive Producer Tanya Simon, her deputy Draggan Mihailovich and 60 Minutes correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. She simultaneously announced the hiring of Nick Bilton as the new boss of 60 Minutes.

Like Weiss, Bilton has zero broadcast news experience.

That was enough to guarantee one of the most vitriolic meetings in the history of broadcast news, according to the tape of it which was promptly leaked to The New York Times.

Bilton opened the meeting with his new staff by declaring that Weiss “loves” CBS News and 60 Minutes.

Then veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley exploded.

She is murdering ‘60 Minutes, the correspondent said. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.

She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?

I care so deeply about this institution,” Mr. Bilton said, to which Mr. Pelley interrupted: Oh, please.

At one point, Charles Forelle, a top deputy to Ms. Weiss, urged Mr. Pelley not to act “rude” toward Mr. Bilton.

“I’m not being rude,” Mr. Pelley responded. “You know what was rude? Black Thursday was rude”—referring to the day of the most recent 60 Minutes firing.

A CBS executive told the Times Weiss had been prepared to attend the meeting, but given the animosity of the staff towards her, she was warned that would be a very bad idea.

At this point if Weiss fires the rest of the people who hate her, there won’t be any 60 Minutes left worth saving.

Melania Named in Bombshell New Epstein Claims

Daily Beast

Scott: Amanda Ungaro has started making her disclosures about Melania Trump (née Melanija Knavs) and Jeffrey Epstein.

A former associate of Melania Trump has sensationally claimed the first lady was an “escort” for Jeffrey Epstein and met the president through the notorious sex offender.

Former Brazilian model Amanda Ungaro dropped the bombshell allegation on a taped recording, accusing her ex-partner, modeling agent-turned-presidential envoy Paolo Zampolli, of lying about introducing Melania and Donald Trump at a party in 1998.

The story of how Melania Knauss later met her future husband while working as one of Zampolli’s models in New York is now part of MAGA folklore.

It is also something the first lady referenced when she held a surprise press conference in April, mysteriously denouncing what she claimed were “mean-spirited and politically motivated lies” linking her to the late child sex trafficker.

But in her recording posted on X overnight, Ungaro, who has been locked in a bitter custody battle with Zampolli for months, disputes this version of events.

“Let’s tell the public you never was the one introducing Melania to Trump. It was Jeffrey Epstein, as she was escort of Jeffrey Epstein. That’s how she met Donald Trump,” Ungaro claims in the WhatsApp recording.

“And I know, because I was with you 20 years and you always told me it was not you—it was Jeffrey Epstein,” she added.

Knowledge Is Power

Scott: I believe passionately that one of the really poor items in media coverage in the United States is science reporting.

I am routinely pulling things out from major science journals that are significant news in themselves but haven’t really been covered as news.

Try getting the news you need from Charles and I, free for two weeks.

Get 14 day free trial

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Trump Corruption Watch Jr.

Qusay Keeps Racking Up Pentagon Contracts, and Now We Know How

ProPublica

Scott: How does he do it?

Donald Trump Jr keeps racking up lucrative no bid Pentagon contracts. And now ProPublica shows how it works: A strategically timed phone call from the White House to the Pentagon makes all the difference.

Pure corruption and graft.

When the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr., defense officials and the company tried to tamp down suspicions of cronyism…

Interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it. The staff worked late nights and with little sleep to get the loan through in a matter of weeks, the source said.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

How China is Systematically Destroying the Uyghurs: The People and Their Culture

Financial Times

Scott: No place on earth has as much prison space reserved for its population as China’s Central Asian province of Xinjiang, historically better known as East Turkestan or Uyghuristan. The home of the Uyghur people.

This fact is an ominous sign of the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions with respect to the Uyghurs and their homeland, which is a combination of ethnic cleansing and brutal psychological warfare designed to efface every trace of their identity as a nation. All in the interest of converting them into model subservient Chinese subjects.

In this essay, the Financial Times has undertaken a remarkable study of the Chinese formula for heavy handed repression, which is somewhat less bloody, but certainly just as brutal as that practiced today in spots as varied as Gaza and the West Bank or Sudan.

This ruthless brutality is the defining trait of Xi Jinping and the CCP regime.

In late 2019 the Chinese government announced they were closing the camps which had drawn so much condemnation. Shohrat Zakir, Xinjiang’s governor, said detainees had “graduated”.

But FT analysis suggests that the Chinese state’s campaign of oppression against Uyghurs and their culture and identity has in fact entered a new phase. While many camps have shut, a vast network of prisons and detention centres remains, alongside pervasive surveillance and systems of coercive social control…

Beijing has expanded labour transfer programmes that move Uyghurs into factory work elsewhere in the country—schemes United Nations experts say can amount to forced labour. This places multinational corporations that work in China in a challenging situation, as Beijing is also making it increasingly difficult and dangerous for companies to perform due diligence in their supply chains so they do not target Uyghur rights.

The employment scheme is Beijing’s new priority, says Adrian Zenz, director of China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a US non-profit. The camp system acted as a “catalyst” for policies including “birth prevention, parent-child separation, boarding schooling . . . and labour transfer”.

What the state orchestrated through the boarding school system amounted to a “dramatic tearing apart of Uyghur society”, Zenz adds. He says children are separated from families at increasingly young ages, while the Uyghur language and cultural practices are heavily restricted.

Researchers say the campaign reflects Beijing’s drive to assimilate Uyghurs into mainstream Han Chinese identity amid rising nationalism under Xi Jinping.

Uyghurs’ distinct language, culture and Islamic faith create a “degree of insecurity that has only intensified as China has begun taking this profoundly nationalistic turn,” says historian Hannah Theaker. “They just want to force them to be Chinese,” adds Peter Irwin, co-executive director of the Network for Uyghur Rights.

Bringing Hope to America from Hungary

New York Times

Charles: Last month journalist M. Gessen won the Pulitzer Prize for opinion writing, and last week they proved again how richly they deserved it with a magnificent essay about the most important feel-good story of our time.

Gessen traveled to Hungary to witness the inauguration of the new prime minister, Péter Magyar and to dissect exactly how he was able to overwhelm the most entrenched authoritarian regime in the European Union: At the ballot box.

The story has a special urgency for everyone in America who is desperate to rid our nation of the monsters now running our government. Decent Americans are craving new ideas about how to do that, and that’s what Gessen’s piece offers us.

As Gessen wrote, Magyar’s victory over Viktor Orbán “was stunning—unique in our era of democratic backsliding—and it holds clear lessons for the United States.”

The best news here is that very old-fashioned politics can still triumph in an era almost fatally polarized and dumbed down by the algorithms of social media.

• Magyar had traveled to an estimated 700 locations, turning many of them into “Tisza islands”—outposts of support for his party.

• One obvious lesson of Magyar’s success lies in the scale, reach and relentlessness of his organizing network. “They had 2,000 Tisza islands with between 30,000 and 50,000 volunteers,” Balint Magyar told me, in evident awe. “Just in their call centers, they had 3,000 to 4,000 people in the last week of the campaign.”

• This is another lesson of Magyar’s success: Old-fashioned in-person politics can be a powerful antidote to media fearmongering.

• Magyar called Orbán’s Hungary a mafia state—a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third lesson: Don’t mince words.

• Magyar’s politics are aspirational and inspirational, a tone that is an antidote to the cynicism and vulgarity of autocracy. It is the opposite of, say, the approach taken by California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who trolls Trump by trying to outperform him in the debasement of political language and political life

• Like Zohran Mamdani, Magyar excelled at converting potential supporters into campaign volunteers.

It should be a particular source of joy for all of us that the last American to campaign in Hungary for Magyar’s opponent is the next man we most desperately need to consign to the dustbin of history: J.D. Vance.

My father, Philip Kaiser, was Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to Hungary. As soon as he learned that this would be his next post, he resolved to convince Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that America needed to return the Crown of St. Stephen to Hungary.

The crown has been the symbol of Hungarian nationhood since the 12th Century. At the end of World War II, right-wing Hungarians delivered it into the hands of the US 86th Infantry Division in Austria in 1945. After that it languished in Fort Knox for 33 years.

My father believed the crown had to be returned to Hungary to increase its sense of independence from the Soviet Union when it was still part of the Soviet bloc.

On Jan. 6, 1978, Vance and Kaiser returned the crown to Hungary. The Times reported, “Many Hungarians in the hall had tears in their eyes as they stood rigid and gazed at the crown, displayed on a red velvet cushion.”

My father died at 93 in 2007. He had been decorated by the Hungarian government, but he was already distressed by the right-wing path Hungary was embarking upon back then.

Nothing in the world would have made him happier than the triumph of Péter Magyar.

Nothing except the demise of Donald Trump.

Knowledge Is Power

Scott: I believe passionately that one of the really poor items in media coverage in the United States is science reporting.

I am routinely pulling things out from major science journals that are significant news in themselves but haven’t really been covered as news.

Try getting the news you need from Charles and I, free for two weeks.

Get 14 day free trial

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Trump Threatens to Blow Up Oman

The Independent

Scott: In the course of Donald Trump’s ritual cabinet meeting yesterday, Trump suddenly threatened to “blow up” Oman, a country which has been one of America’s oldest and most faithful allies in the region.

It should have been on the front page, above the fold, in every major US newspaper.

It was on the front pages of newspapers around the world, but not in the US.

Why?

US editors are afraid to run it.

The US president on Wednesday threatened Oman if it didn’t agree to his demands around control of the Strait of Hormuz, after Iranian state TV said it had obtained a draft of an agreement to restore commercial shipping with Iran and Oman jointly managing traffic.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei responded with indignation, warning the comments represented “another dangerous sign of the normalisation of lawlessness and bullying in international relations.”

Gambling on 60 Minutes’ Future

The Guardian

Charles: The odds against 60 Minutes remaining a pillar of American journalism grew longer yesterday with the ousting of executive producer Tanya Simon, the deeply respected CBS news producer who, in 2025, became the first woman to hold the position.

60 Minutes just completed its 58th season, with its ratings up 9% over last year, bringing it as many as 9.7 million viewers every week. It remains the fifth most watched show across all of television.

But for two years it has been in a fierce fight for its journalistic independence. Last year the network’s previous owner, Shari Redstone, was publicly unhappy over a segment featuring former State Department officials attacking the way the Biden administration had handled the war in Gaza. After executive producer Bill Owens was warned against doing any more stories about Gaza—and told to limit the number of times Donald Trump’s name was mentioned on the program—Owens quit the program.

The pressure on the program’s independence only increased after Redstone sold the network to David Ellison, whose father is one of Trump’s closest allies. Ellison installed right-wing pundit Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Yesterday Weiss announced she was replacing Tanya Simon with Nick Bilton.

The British-born Bilton is a former designer and tech columnist for The New York Times, and a former Vanity Fair editor who has produced documentaries for HBO and Netflix.

However, like Weiss, Bilton has no previous TV news experience.

In an interview with The New York Times yesterday, Bilton said it was necessary to bring in an outsider to revamp 60 Minutes for the rest of the 21st Century. “When you take an insider and you put them inside a company, nothing changes,” he explained.

The Times said Bilton also promised to “experiment with new voices from outside traditional broadcast news.”

Besides Owens and Simon, Anderson Cooper announced he was leaving the show after Weiss had tried to make him the CBS News anchor. Correspondent Cecilia Vega was abruptly fired in May and Sharyn Alfonsi’s contract expired this week after she got into a battle royal with Bari Weiss over her segment about Venezuelan people who were deported from the United States to El Salvador.

Alfonsi called her de facto firing “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting. It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”

The news you need, five days a week.

Charles: In this period of news overload, we can perform a particularly important service by giving you the news you need, which you may not have seen or not had the proper analysis of. You can’t truly understand what’s going on if you’re only a consumer of American media today.

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Ha’aretz

Scott: Perhaps to mark the feast of Eid al-Adha (The Feast of Sacrifice), one of the most sacred days of the Muslim calendar, Israel’s military have demanded the complete evacuation of Lebanon’s second-largest city in preparation of massive bombings intended to reduce it to a pile of rubble.

This in the midst of a “ceasefire” in hostilities between Israel and Lebanon.

The announcement comes as defense minister Israel Katz clarifies the Netanyahu government’s broader plans for a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians: “The plan for voluntary emigration from Gaza will also be implemented, all at the proper time and in the proper manner.”

Tyre is home to 174,000 people, with about 200,000 residents including those in adjacent refugee camps. All throughout Tuesday and into Wednesday, Hezbollah attack drones struck Israel’s northern border.

The Israeli military said it began striking “Hezbollah command centers in the area of Tyre” on Wednesday, two hours after issuing an evacuation order for the Lebanese coastal city’s 200,000 residents.

“Evacuate your homes immediately and proceed north beyond the Zahrani River,” the IDF’s Arabic-language Spokesman Avichay Adraee said to residents of the second largest city in the country, after Beirut, earlier on Wednesday.

“Be warned – any movement south of the Zahrani River may put your lives at risk.” The Zahrani River flows north of the Litani and is roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Lebanon’s border with Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel

New York Times

Charles: When the history of our time is written, the longest-serving Israeli prime minister will be remembered as a corrupt, bloodthirsty extremist who turned Israel into a pariah state without any allies.

Maryland Sen. Chis Van Hollen has written a cri de coeur for The New York Times decrying the way apartheid and ethnic cleansing have become the hideous hallmarks of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.

He notes that in the last twelve months the number of Democratic senators voting against unfettered weapon transfers to Israel has grown from 15 to 40. But, Van Hollen, says Democrats must do much more:

“The Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.”

[F]or too long most Democrats have unquestioningly accepted Israel’s argument that American weapons are needed and used solely for its defense. We have not yet fully confronted the fact that Israel has used its strength not only as a shield, but also as a sword to bury the two-state solution and advance the far right’s vision of a “Greater Israel.”

The evidence on the ground is overwhelming: Violent settlers in the West Bank have attacked Palestinians with impunity, and Israeli security forces are increasingly complicit. Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank has pushed Palestinians into shrinking enclaves. Mr. Netanyahu’s government has sabotaged the Palestinian Authority, which, unlike Hamas, has accepted Israel’s right to statehood. Anyone who visits the West Bank under Israeli occupation can see an apartheid system at work…

I’ve seen these developments with my own eyes. I’ve visited Israel and the West Bank seven times and witnessed the rapid expansion of illegal settlements across land that was supposed to be part of a Palestinian state. I’ve spoken to Palestinian families pushed out of their homes and off their land. I’ve sat down with families, both Israelis and Palestinians, who have lost loved ones to violence. In Ramallah, I spoke with Palestinian American parents who can’t get justice for their children killed by violent settlers or Israeli security forces. I’ve seen aid trucks turned back from Israeli checkpoints while children in Gaza were starving on the other side. And I’ve seen how the once bustling city of Rafah was reduced to rubble by the Israel Defense Forces with American bombs and bulldozers.

It is these experiences—and watching this dangerous trajectory accelerate—that have shaped my growing alarm, which the American people increasingly share. They do not want to be complicit in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, or what human rights organizations and scholars have determined to be genocide in Gaza.

Israel’s Colonization of Southern Lebanon Is Already Under Way

Middle East Eye

Imogen: Today, on Eid-al-Adha, Israel has ordered Lebanese people to flee their homes as it “expands ground offensive.”

Writing in Middle East Eye, Lebanese journalist Paul Khalifeh offers a warning about what Israeli ministers truly have planned for southern Lebanon.

Despite official Israeli denials and the refusal of some Lebanese to acknowledge the reality, the colonisation of south Lebanon is neither a myth nor a fantasy. It is a concrete and structured project.

On 14 May, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir revealed that Israel had a “settlement plan for Lebanon”. The far-right minister made the statement on the very day Lebanon and Israel were due to resume direct negotiations in Washington under US auspices aimed at normalising relations and reaching a comprehensive agreement.

Several weeks earlier, on 26 March, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that “the Litani must be our new border with the state of Lebanon, just like the ‘Yellow Line’ in Gaza and like the buffer zone and peak of the Hermon in Syria“.

Donald Trump Is Finally Cracking Up for Real

The New Republic

Scott: In the erstwhile in-flight magazine of Air Force One—not in the Trump age, however, since no one can afford to be caught reading—Michael Tomsky and Molly Jong-Fast tackle the most underreported story in the US media today.

What makes this piece effective is the reliance on a stream of quick clips of Trump, furnished by Angelo Carusone and Aaron Rupar, who form a modern documentation center for Trump’s public appearances.

The pair faithfully preserve precisely what The New York Times and other legacy media scrupulously elide: Every manifestation of senile dementia, Freudian slip and brain fart. And what emerges is this: It’s a colossal undertaking to make Trump seem sane, because he plainly isn’t.

Dementia. No one can say, of course, whether Trump has dementia, an umbrella term for a range of mental conditions, among which Alzheimer’s is the most notable. The common visible symptoms, according to the website of the Alzheimer’s Association, include difficulty performing a number of tasks Trump hasn’t had to perform in years or perhaps ever: Paying bills, preparing meals, remembering appointments. The symptoms listed on the Mayo Clinic website are, for present purposes, more on point: Problems communicating or finding words; issues with reasoning or problem-solving; confusion and disorientation.

So: Is the president demented? Harry Segal is a clinical psychologist at Cornell University and a former co-host of the podcast Shrinking Trump. (His co-host was psychologist John Gartner, who in 2017 started an organization of mental health professionals, Duty to Warn, that sought to caution Americans about Trump’s unfitness for office). Shrinking Trump ran for 70 episodes, from May 2024 until October 2025, when it was stopped out of fear of being sued by the president. In an interview, Segal was quick to note that he is not offering a clinical diagnosis of Trump. That, he said, would be unethical. But it’s not unethical to comment on “behaviors so striking that you would recommend an assessment for someone in your family who demonstrated” them.

What has he seen? Three concerning things. One: “He began to have odd quirks of speech where he would begin a word or a phrase and seemingly lose his place, slur, and end up with some kind of compromise word,” Segal said. This is called phonemic paraphasia. It’s a possible sign of dementia (though it could have other sources), and Trump has been doing it for a long time: He coined the “word” “infantroopen,” for example, back in 2019. The same year, he referred twice to the need to look into the “oranges” of the Robert Mueller investigation. He finally carefully enunciated “origins” on the third go.

Second, Segal “began to notice the tangential digressions.” After the mainstream media picked up on how aggressively random and disjointed his stump speeches had become, Trump gave it a name, “The Weave,” and said it was all intentional. But the claim was nonsense. The pattern has continued into his second term—recently, for example, in a late-March Cabinet meeting about the war, when he got lost in a five-minute digression on how much money he’d saved by using Sharpies to sign legislation and executive orders.

The third thing that caught Segal’s ear was that, on certain occasions, Trump said or posted something really shocking even for him: “The outlandish things he’s been saying when people died, right? Like Robert Mueller, I am glad he’s dead, or Rob Reiner.” Maybe that’s just an older man losing patience with decorum, Segal said; but “this feels a little bit more like dysregulation. Like, ‘I have a wildly aggressive thought, I am just going to say it.’”

After Trump’s crazed post on Easter Sunday, Vin Gupta made national headlines by posting on X: “Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused. Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening gradually over time. The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”

In an interview, Gupta kept returning to the word “impulsivity.” Speaking the week after Easter, he said: “I think his impulsivity and his erratic behavior, as we’ve all seen just in the last two weeks, seems like it’s getting worse. Like he just has less of a filter. Even at baseline, he had no filter. But it seems like the disinhibition is worse. And when you think about the family history, I think reasonable people can ask reasonable questions.”

What’s missing in this piece is clinical diagnostic rigor, though that would hardly appeal to the audience it targets.

Still, it’s a solid start.

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Charles: Scott Horton and I first bonded 20 years ago when we were each blogging about the horrendous torture being carried out by the second Bush administration during the so-called War on Terror. The New York Times news department never called torture torture. They always called it ‘enhanced interrogation.’

We both thought it was a terrible thing.

Scott: On the issue of the journalist and the journalist’s responsibility, I’m really quite struck by something that Pope Leo said. That the moral, ethical and professional responsibility of journalists is not to be regurgitating the views of people in power—like political figures and wealthy corporate interests that control commercial media—but to be an independent voice.

To assess carefully whether the things that are claimed as facts really are facts, and to discover what the facts are.

Listen to Scott speaking to NPR’s On The Media in 2009 about torture.

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Charles: Whenever I’ve read Scott Horton on Bluesky, I was the best educated person in the room that day. This is because he’s not only a great lawyer and fine journalist, he’s also the most assiduous consumer of media who I’ve ever met.

This means that when you get the news you need from us, you’ll get the benefit of his reading of newspapers in Italy, France, Germany, Russia and many other places.

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To the Contrary

Scott: Wisconsin Republican analyst Charlie Sykes has increasingly become a voice to turn to for a clear understanding both of Donald Trump and his cult-like control over the GOP.

His latest column explores the fairly dramatic collapse of the pillars of Trumpism, one after the next, accelerating with the failure of the war on Iran. But at its outset, Charlie offers this:

Before we try to parse the latest on-again-off-again imaginary Peace Deal, take a moment to reflect on this: Donald Trump saw what Putin did in Mariupol and Netanyahu did in Gaza, and thought, “I’d like to do that in Iran. But I can go even further by wiping out an entire civilization, one of the oldest in the world.” In the end he backed off, but his threat opened a portal into the mind of the man we have entrusted with the nuclear button.

Charlie is right. Trump’s threats got fleeting coverage in US media, mostly along the lines of “there he goes again with that childish nonsense.” Media who do this are enabling the worst.

European allies were sufficiently alarmed by Trump’s tweets (and there were, as I count, at least four that implicitly threatened to employ nuclear weapons against Iran) that they turned through diplomatic channels to the State Department asking Marco Rubio to clarify that no, Trump was not threatening to use nukes.

But the main response in places like Japan, Korea, Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Uunion was focused on the American public and media: How could an American president make a cavalier threat involving nuclear weapons while the supposedly “serious people” in the United States say nothing about it?

It points to a moral collapse than cannot be undone simply by replacing Trump by President B some years from now.

Grand Juries Revolt Against Trump “Justice”

The New York Times

Charles: As Trump’s lackeys across the country transform the Department of Justice into the Department of Revenge, ordinary citizens sitting on Federal grand juries are defying prosecutors more frequently than ever before.

Times reporter Alan Feuer reports “a flurry of no true bills in federal courts across the country,” especially in Los Angeles and Washington where grand juries have rejected several cases “involving people accused of protesting the administration’s immigration crackdowns and surges in federal law enforcement.”

• Other high-profile failures have involved grand juries hearing cases against Mr. Trump’s political foes — among them, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and the six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video reminding military and intelligence personnel of their obligation to disobey illegal orders.

• In Wyoming a panel of three federal judges threw out nine indictments — including some for murder — after an examination of the grand jury proceedings revealed misconduct by Darin Smith, the state’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney. In the end, a new grand jury — one that Mr. Smith had never spoken to.

U.S. Attorney Darin Smith of Wyoming

The most flagrant recent case of prosecutorial misconduct was in Chicago, where Judge April M. Perry

cited a remarkable list of grand jury errors in a case that was dismissed against four Democratic activists about to face trial for impeding the police during a protest last fall at a suburban immigration detention facility. . .Prosecutors had spoken to grand jurors outside the grand jury room — a major breach of protocol — and had improperly coached them that the evidence they had presented was particularly strong.

The prosecutors also stacked the deck in their own favor by removing from the panel some grand jurors who had voted against them when considering an earlier version of the charges.

The Times story doesn’t mention it, but my partner Scott points out the dismissal of grand jurors by a prosecutor is flagrantly illegal.

Under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 6, only a federal judge has the authority to excuse a grand juror for “good cause” (such as illness or extreme hardship). Prosecutors cannot arbitrarily dismiss jurors whose votes they disagree with.

Judge Perry said, “I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

The Remnants of Assad’s Chemical Weapons Program Discovered

Reuters

Scott: Over many years, Bashar al-Assad and his Russian patrons managed a remarkably resourceful push back against accusations that he developed and had used chemical weapons in violation of international law.

But now the gig is up. Assad lives a life of seclusion in Moscow as his successors in Damascus managed a investigation into the program, which has yielded results, Reuters reports.

Syria’s transitional leadership has located ​remnants of former Syrian ‌president Bashar al-Assad’s clandestine chemical weapons program, including ​raw materials and munitions ​similar to those used ⁠to carry out ​deadly gas attacks during the ​country’s long-running civil war, a Syrian official told Reuters ​on Tuesday.

Syrian authorities ​have also taken into custody 18 ‌suspects ⁠for alleged involvement in Assad’s chemical weapons program, including high-level military, ​political ​and ⁠technical officials, said Mohamad Katoub, Syria’s ​permanent representative to ​the ⁠Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in ⁠The ​Hague, in ​an interview.

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Charles: As we explained in our statement of principles, we are above and beyond anything else relentless critics of the press who believe that the frank facism and shameless corruption of the Trump administration make the old customs of deference incompatible with the kind of journalism the United States needs right now.

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The Late Show

Charles: He was intelligent and he was funny. He was a good comedian; he was also a terrific journalist. If you wanted to see the most important Washington sound bite of the day, your best bet was to tune in to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

He had a special place in my heart, because he had great politics, because we are both the youngest, and because my seven minutes on The Colbert Report were my very best moments on television.

Last week CBS shuttered what had been the late night leader for nine seasons in a row, and threw away the 33-year-old show altogether, replacing it with an anodyne collection of second tier comedians.

For sixty years late night with Johnny or Dick or David or Stephen has been a little part of the glue that held America together. Joe and I were devoted fans; we both thought Colbert was the last network TV show that was really necessary.

But the atomization of network TV into YouTube atomized its audience and ruined the business model. At least that was the official story: CBS claimed Colbert was losing $40 million a year, although nobody outside the company could verify that number.

However, the chronology of its collapse proves the show’s profitability was hardly the main reason for killing it July 18 2025.

It was really all about billionaire Shari Redstone holding on to her billions. And it happened like this:

• July 7, 2024, Redstone—who was at the time president and CEO—announces a deal to sell National Amusementsl to Skydance-RedBird, which would then merge Paramount with Skydance. Redstone has to sell the company she inherited from her father because it has reportedly accumulated $1 billion in debt. It controls Paramount and CBS.

• Oct. 31, 2024, Donald Trump sues CBS News for $10 billion, claiming deceptive editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. No serious libel lawyer thinks Trump can prevail in court. 60 Minutes staffers pray their corporate parent will stand up to him.

• Nov. 5, 2024: Trump is elected president for the second time.

• Jan. 20, 2025, Trump is inaugurated as president and Brendan Carr becomes chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr immediately reinstates an FCC investigation of alleged “news distortion” by 60 Minutes, putting the $8.4 billion Paramount merger in jeopardy.

• July 1, 2025, Redstone caves and settles Trump’s case against 60 Minutes for $16 million. A grievous blow to the First Amendment, but she sees it as a pittance that will make sure her merger goes through.

• Still thinking his ratings make him invulnerable, Colbert calls the settlement “a big fat bribe.” Two days later the empire strikes back—and his show is killed. This was the final lubricant Redstone’s lieutenants deemed necessary to make sure the merger went through: The slaying of a famous Trump enemy.

• One week later the FCC approved the merger.

As usual, everything was for sale in the Trump administration.

Colbert’s show was a safe space for members of the Resistance: A place where you could rely on a really smart man to reassure us that there were still millions of Americans who agreed that this president was a surreal catastrophe. Annette Bening put it best: We spend every day watching the world fall apart, and then we tune in to you and you make everything better.

Especially after the monster returned to the White House, I worried that Stephen was the modern day emcee in Cabaret—the last man who could still get away with mocking fascism. Then my worst fear came true: Just like the Joel Grey character, Stephen had his time limit.

Howard Lutnick’s Epstein Class Maneuvers

New York Times

Scott: The timeline is simple and clear: Howard Lutnick made a $5 million donation to House Republicans on April 1—four weeks after his Epstein testimony before a congressional committee was on the books. But just a day after the quarterly filing deadline, ensuring the donation wouldn’t be disclosed before his testimony.

His objective: To insure a friendly, non-inquisitive reception. Which he secured.

This is a signature maneuver of the Epstein Class. It flows from a recognition that every man can be bought at the right price.

And for House Republicans it’s remarkably cheap.

Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump’s secretary of commerce, made a $5 million donation last month to a committee supporting House Republicans, an unusually large contribution for a sitting cabinet secretary.

The donation was made on April 1, four weeks after the House Oversight Committee arranged to interview Mr. Lutnick about his ties to the sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. The closed-door interview took place on May 6.

Mr. Lutnick gave the money to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main super PAC behind House Republicans and Speaker Mike Johnson, according to a new filing made public on Thursday. Mr. Lutnick has recently been a major Republican donor, but this was his first contribution since being named commerce secretary. It ties his largest-ever federal donation, $5 million he gave to Mr. Trump’s super PAC in 2024.

“Mr. Lutnick made a political donation in his personal capacity, just as many Cabinet Secretaries from both parties have done in the past,” said Kristen Eichamer, a spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce.

The Infantilism of An ‘Ungovernable’ Britain

Financial Times

Scott: The brilliant BBC series ‘House of Cards’ built on this inexorable truth: At the core of modern British parliamentary democracy are a group of people who like to behave like figures from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. People who are driven by the basest of political motives and showing no respect for the spirit of democratic institutions.

This explains why 11th century Scotland was what it was—brutish, violent and bleak. But does it really provide a rational model for governance in a post-industrial democracy?

Of course not.

It’s not merely inefficient, it provides a steady stream of distraction from the nation’s real problems, economic and social. The Macbeth model of politics is extremely useful for amoral press lords like Rupert Murdoch, but not really for anyone else.

Martin Wolf here examines in some depth the economic challenges and how Britain’s political infantilism is bound to make them far worse, and Britons far poorer.

The United Kingdom has had six prime ministers since May 2010. In contrast, it had just four in the 31 years after Margaret Thatcher took office. Now the number seems set to rise to seven, as Keir Starmer, who won a huge majority less than two years ago, appears likely to lose his position as leader of the Labour Party. No wonder people call the country “ungovernable”. What has made British politics so capricious? What does this mean for the country’s future?

I would not claim that everything comes down to economics. People care about other things, too—immigration, crime, health, education and so forth. But a good economy—one with widely shared economic growth—is, I would argue, a necessary condition for political stability in a liberal democracy. The fundamental problem is that the UK has not had that for two decades. It is not alone in this. But the deterioration in its performance since 2007 has been enormous (as has been also true of other large European economies).

Put simply, a bad economy creates bad politics and bad politics create a bad economy. According to “The UK Productivity Slowdown” by Josh Martin, the slowdown in productivity growth began a year before the 2007 financial crisis. His conclusion is that in 1976-2006, trend annual growth in output per hour had been 1.9-2.1 per cent and, in the market sector, 2.2-2.4 per cent. The slowdown since then has been roughly 1.5 percentage points for the whole economy and 2 percentage points for the market sector.

This collapse in economic growth is the most important fact about British economics and politics. It has been made worse by the pressures of ageing and a succession of big shocks, from the global financial crisis to today’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It has in turn made politics a nightmare of fiscal pressures and “affordability crises”, without end.

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Charles: As we explained in our statement of principles, we are above and beyond anything else relentless critics of the press who believe that the frank facism and shameless corruption of the Trump administration make the old customs of deference incompatible with the kind of journalism the United States needs right now.

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New York Times

Scott: Donald Trump’s war on Iran of 2026 is one like no other in US history. Fought as a war of choice but without significant preparation, explanation or delineation of objectives, it stalled out in two months with Trump telling his entourage he was losing interest.

On Saturday, Trump announced he had “largely” completed a peace agreement with the Iranians, something against which the Iranians quickly pushed back. Its terms are less than sketchy, but Republican hawks surrounding Trump—from Lindsey Graham, to Roger Wicker and Mike Pompeo—immediately started expressing alarm, suggesting that the terms would leave the United States in a worse position than it had before the war.

So what is pressing Trump to make a deal on whatever terms Iran is prepared to offer?

At this point three things appear to be driving Trump towards a peace deal:

1. Expiration of the War Powers Act authority, as defecting Republicans furnish an anti-war majority. A point dramatically brought home on Thursday when Speaker Mike Johnson cancelled an Iran War resolution vote after doing a count and seeing that Trump would lose. As he also did a few days earlier in the Senate.

2. Republican electoral anxiety about facing voters with $6–7 per gallon of gasoline.

3. And Gulf Arabs concluding that Trump is not a reliable or desirable partner and they would prefer to take their chances with the Iranians.

Maybe this peace effort will fail, but if it proceeds on the terms now being suggested, it would be the most clear-cut defeat for the United States in a military confrontation in modern times.

It will be the hallmark of Trump’s foreign policy.

The United States and Iran have agreed in principle to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with a commitment from Iran to dispose of its highly enriched uranium, although exactly how and when that would happen is still up in the air, a US official told reporters on Sunday.

The official said a formal deal has not yet been signed and is still subject to final approval from President Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, which could take days. The official said the US believes the supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has endorsed the broad template of the plan, but there is not yet a specific document for him to sign…

What have Trump and US officials said?

In his social media post, Mr. Trump said he had spoken by phone with the leaders of several Arab leaders, and the leaders of Pakistan and Turkey about a memorandum of understanding “pertaining to PEACE.” He said the agreement was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries, but did not provide any details.

Two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a key element of the proposed agreement was an apparent commitment by Tehran to give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. The officials said questions about how that would occur would be deferred to a later round of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program…

What has Iran said?

Iran had not formally responded to Mr. Trump’s comments. But three senior Iranian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that Tehran had agreed to a memorandum of understanding that would stop the fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon, where Israel is fighting with Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militant group; reopen the Strait of Hormuz without any tolls; lift the US naval blockade on Iran; and release $25 billion in Iranian frozen assets.

It was unclear whether the proposal described by the Iranian officials was the same one Mr. Trump referred to in his social media post. The officials told The New York Times that the proposal said nothing about the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, only that a plan for dealing with the country’s highly enriched uranium would be negotiated within 30 to 60 days.

And here’s how the Kobeissi Letter summarizes the draft Memorandum of Understanding drawing on both Iranian and US sources:

1. Extension of Iran War ceasefire for another 60 days.

2. Strait of Hormuz reopened for the 60-day period.

3. Iran would be able to freely sell oil during the period.

4. US would lift blockade on Iranian ports and unfreeze some Iranian funds.

5. US would issue some sanction waivers on Iranian oil.

6. Draft MOU includes statement that war between Israel and Lebanon would end.

7. Negotiations would then be held regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

The situation remains fluid amid the high-stakes negotiations.

Then There Were Four

The Atlantic

Scott: Donald Trump has now ousted a fourth member of his cabinet, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Her letter of resignation letter says she’s leaving as of the end of June in order to support her husband, who is suffering from a rare form of blood cancer—but Reuters quickly found a White House insider clarifying that no, she was fired just like the others.

Gabbard had repeated friction with Trump and was sidelined, often simply searching for something to do. At one point she injected herself into an FBI scheme to seize ballots in Fulton County, GA. On no point did she and her staff differ more seriously than on the war on Iran, which she has long stridently opposed.

Scott Shane has chronicled Gabbard’s last days for The Atlantic:

It’s a measure of Trump’s low regard for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as its soon-to-be former occupant, that while the commander in chief was making final preparations to invade Venezuela and kidnap its president, Tulsi Gabbard was posting photos of herself from a beach in Hawaii.

Gabbard, who informed Trump of her resignation today, spent 15 months as the director of national intelligence—on paper, at least. By law, the DNI is supposed to serve as the president’s chief intelligence adviser. Gabbard never was, and many of her stances were at odds with administration actions. Trump was contemptuous of even her modest efforts to speak truth to power. In the spring of 2025, when Gabbard testified to the intelligence community’s consensus view that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon,” Trump replied, “I don’t care what she said.” Gabbard has long opposed U.S. military intervention in Iran and did not publicly come out in support of Trump’s decision to go to war…

Because the president was not interested in Gabbard’s views on intelligence, she tried to get his attention in other ways. Gabbard accused former U.S. officials of mounting a “yearslong coup” against Trump. She railed against the so-called Russia Hoax and attempted to undermine the conclusion, by a bipartisan Senate committee, that Russia had indeed interfered in the 2016 presidential election. And she took revenge on Trump’s perceived political enemies by revoking the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials. None of this won the president’s public admiration, and it did lasting damage to the intelligence community. Gabbard’s decision to place politics ahead of objectivity has deterred intelligence analysts from making assertions that might run counter to the administration’s preferred storylines, current and former officials have told me.

To bolster her baseless claims, Gabbard declassified U.S. intelligence material—sometimes over the objections of the CIA—and publicly misrepresented what those documents actually said. Gabbard’s claim to have “uncovered weaponization” in the intelligence community gave Trump another dubious talking point in his unrelenting campaign of political revenge. Gabbard fired two senior intelligence analysts after they wrote an assessment that contradicted Trump’s efforts to link Venezuela’s president to a criminal gang. Trump’s tortured claims played a role in justifying his attack on Venezuela—a supreme irony for the supposedly anti-interventionist DNI.

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Charles: As we explained in our statement of principles, we are above and beyond anything else relentless critics of the press who believe that the frank facism and shameless corruption of the Trump administration make the old customs of deference incompatible with the kind of journalism the United States needs right now.

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Charles: In this period of news overload, we can perform a particularly important service by giving you the news you need, which you may not have seen or not had the proper analysis of. You can’t truly understand what’s going on if you’re only a consumer of American media today.

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On April 29, a major Voting Rights Act case that came out of Louisiana. The Supreme Court and the decision that was authored by Samuel Alito essentially administered a death knell to what had survived from the Voting Rights Act.

The decision invited states—particularly the 11 states of the old Confederacy, which had engaged in extreme acts of disenfranchisement of Black citizens ever since the end of Reconstruction—to do as they like as long as they cited partisan politics rather than racial animus as their grounds.

“Much of the major-media coverage is casting this in purely political terms,” says Dan Froomkin, editor of Presswatch in an op-ed entitled It’s Black disenfranchisement, not ‘partisan warfare.’ “Just another part of the partisan battle for the House in November.”

Publications like The New York Times are obscuring the issue, says Froomkin:

A May 13 New York Times article started off like this:

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia on Wednesday called lawmakers back to the capital next month to redraw the state’s legislative districts for the 2028 election cycle, and to work on changes to the state’s voting system.

The call for a special session, which will begin on June 17, comes as Southern lawmakers have been rushing to reconfigure congressional maps to be more favorable to Republicans for this year’s midterms in response to the recent Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But in the South, the significance of redistricting goes far beyond any partisan issue.

So let me rewrite that for you:

In a stunning display of racism, white Republican leaders throughout the South are stripping Black people of their franchise in order to retain political power.

The catalyst was a 6-3 Supreme Court decision on April 29 that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, landmark legislation that gave Black people the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

Six right-wing justices insisted that intentional voting discrimination is a thing of the past. Southern legislators immediately responded by redrawing election boundaries to dilute the Black vote, in many cases making it virtually impossible for Black people to be elected to Congress.

What has happened in a matter of days amounts to a wrenching reversal of 60 years of racial progress—a revival of the Jim Crow era when Black people had no political power, no matter their number.

On a personal level, Black voters in the South are struggling with the repercussions of having one of their essential rights being brutally ripped away from them.

In states like Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, where they make up more than 30 percent of the population, Black Americans will have little to no say in who is elected to Congress. And as the effects of the court decision trickle down to the local level, they may get shut out of some of those elections as well.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the white nationalist movement known as MAGA are celebrating. In some cases, their racism is expressed openly. “For too long, Tennessee politics has been dominated by cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers imposing their corrupt will on a deeply rural and conservative state,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted on social media.

For the authoritarian leaders of MAGA, the dilution and nullification of Black votes is a crucial step in their quest to remain in power—even as most voters have turned against them.

MAGA’s future depends on suppressing the votes of groups that don’t support its white-male dominated Christian nationalist ideology. Reducing minority representation, to them, is essential to destroying majority rule. Destroying Majority rule is how they win.

Gerrymandering that leads to Southern states being almost entirely represented by white, right-wing elected officials dramatically improves MAGA’s political calculus. In the short run, it improves the odds of retaining Congress in November. MAGA’ strategy to keep the White House in 2028 includes yet more Black disenfranchisement, through voter intimidation, deception and disruption.

So far, MAGA’s plan is working, raising the prospect that Trump and his successors may remain in power for the foreseeable future.

But another way to characterize the current drive to disenfranchise Black voters is that it is the desperate—and maybe final—act of a white nationalist party that is being rejected by increasing number of voters.

Final Coup de Grâce to the Voting Rights Act

Scott: On April 29, the Supreme Court, speaking through the voice of its single most corrupt justice—Justice Samuel Alito—delivered its final coup de grâce to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the crown jewel of the nation’s civil rights legislation.

Its ruling is an invitation to the Republican-ruled states of the Old Confederacy to reintroduce the regime they followed before the Civil Rights Era of gerrymandering congressional districts so as to eliminate any district that could be won by a Black candidate, including in states like Mississippi and Louisiana where Black people account for more than a third of the population as a whole.

The only requirement is that the Republican-controlled legislatures must say they are motivated by partisan politics rather than racism. To reach this conclusion, the Court set aside its own precedents stretching back over a period of sixty years, making a mockery of the rule of stare decisis.

This ruling’s rationale is brazenly partisan, its motivation to give the GOP another dozen seats in Congress and to hinder what appears to be an approaching blue wave in the midterm elections.

Editors’ note: This episode of The Horton-Kaiser Report was recorded on May 19, 2026.

Credits

Host

Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser

Guest

Dan Froomkin

Producer

Imogen Sayers, Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser

Music

Kinan Azmeh

Clips

What the Supreme Court Voting Rights Act ruling is really all about

Selma native Rep. Terri Sewell on GOP’s new voting rights assault: ‘We have to mobilize & organize’

Blame John Roberts For Destroying the Voting Rights Act - YouTube

Trump, DOJ settle $10 billion lawsuit against IRS and Treasury Department over leaked tax returns

Justice Department sets up ‘anti-weaponization fund’ after Trump drops IRS lawsuit

Lawmakers react to Trump’s IRS settlement

‘Crisis for the rule of law’: Why Trump’s IRS settlements is be called a ‘defacto pardon’

‘WE NEED TO WATCH OUT’: Maddow sounds alarm on ICE surveillance as Trump wields new weapon

AI Chatbots: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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Scott: Donald Trump has a novel idea: Why not fund his next insurrection or auto golpe with money lifted straight from the US Treasury?

(Maybe it’s not so new. If you’re keen on modern German history, then you may know about the Adolf-Hitler-Spende der deutschen Wirtschaft, established by the Nazi Party on June 1, 1933, on more or less the same premise—though it was essentially a shake down of German industrialists, not as audacious as Trump’s treasury raid.)

He announced the plan as a “settlement” of his already dismissed IRS suit, and clueless media simply regurgitated the lies emanating from Trump’s Department of Justice about it for three solid news cycles.

Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck digs into this latest act of unprecedented corruption with a focus on the major question: What is to be done about it?

Every so often a story comes along that is so brazen, so cleanly emblematic of the moment we are living through, that staying quiet about it feels like a kind of complicity unto itself. Monday’s announcement by the Department of Justice that the Acting Attorney General has unilaterally created a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate so-called “victims of lawfare” is one of those stories. And the reason I want to write about it here, in a newsletter ostensibly devoted to the Supreme Court and the law and politics surrounding it, is that I’m increasingly worried that we’re asking the wrong institution to save us from one of the most offensive, alarming, and anti-constitutional things we’ve seen from any president in American history.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund is not principally a legal problem awaiting a judicial fix. It is a shockingly egregious political abuse—the President suing his own government, purporting to settle with himself, and routing nearly $2 billion from the Treasury to his own supporters as a not-so-subtle (and not-so-formal) reward, if not an incentive, for political violence. And the Constitution’s answer to political abuses of this kind and magnitude is a political remedy, not a legal one…

The real upshot of this latest headline (among so, so many other similar headlines) is that it is past time to reinvigorate impeachment—not because conviction is realistic in this Senate, or even because impeachment itself is feasible in this House, but because forcing every member of Congress to vote on the record whether this brazen, corrosive, and affirmatively dangerous corruption is impeachable is itself a point worth fighting for (and fighting with our friends over). Assuming the courts will save us absolves our political leaders of both responsibility and accountability for allowing this kind of mischief to continue, and it absolves all of us of our responsibility to refuse to tolerate those who would just as quickly shrug their shoulders and move on.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and other Founding Fathers labored faithfully for years to weave protections against tyrannical rule into the US Constitution and legal institutions.

The most ancient of those protections was against the King using the treasury as his private bank account. Should we now say that their project has failed? That’s what European scholars of the US constitution have, at this point, largely concluded. And I believe they are likely right.

Look out tomorrow, Saturday for our discussion of Trump’s new white grief fund with Dan Froomkin, editor of Presswatch.

Democracy at Work: Killing AI At Its Source

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Charles: Anti-artificial intelligence activists stood and cheered and hugged after the St. Charles City Council voted 7–1 to permanently ban all large-scale data centers.

“The City Council listened to the voices of the people,” said Kara Elms, a leader of St. Charles Clean Water Advocates.

The vote came nine months after CRG—the development arm of construction giant Clayco—first pitched plans in early August of 2025 to transform a series of farm fields along Highway 370 in the suburbs of St. Louis into a 440-acre data center campus.

The plan was killed by a wonderful combination of fears over “irreversible pollution” and the dangers of huge amounts of diesel fuel, combined with the revelation that the site was largely owned by a relative of Dan Borgmeyer, mayor of St. Charles.

St. Charles, located on the Missouri River, is famous as the final jump off point for the Lewis & Clark Expedition, which departed from there on May 21, 1804.

Native American tribes like the Osage, Kickapoo Sauk and Fox, arrived in the area 11,000 years before white settlers did. The ghosts of the native people may have contributed to the margin of the vote to prevent the area’s latest desecration by white settlers.

Genuine bi-partisan opposition to insanely large data centers across America is one of the most encouraging political developments of our time.

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Scott: I quickly came across Charles Kaiser as someone who thought about things almost exactly the same way I did. We have a kindred spirit and perspective that we share up until this day.

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The Economist

Scott: Is the United States a nation controlled by a conspiracy of white male billionaire pedophiles? That sounds like a nutty conspiracy theory worthy of QAnon.

But since Donald Trump came to power, the conduct of his Department of Justice under Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche tallies perfectly with this assertion. The DOJ insists there is no crime to be found in those files.

Police and prosecutors outside the United States have already opened eleven prosecutions targeting individuals based on crimes that are documented in part by the DOJ files, with significant elements of the crimes—including the sexual abuse of minors, acts of torture, assault, the misuse of official information and espionage—occurring inside the United States.

Seemingly at Trump’s order, the US authorities are systematically refusing cooperation with the foreign prosecutions, even though they are conducted by close US allies with criminal justice systems that meet the highest standards. If America’s justice authorities continue to behave as they are now, belief in this conspiracy theory will solidify.

Indeed, it no longer seems objectively appropriate to call it a conspiracy theory.

This Economist essay was published earlier in the year, but developments in the past week—especially the sworn evidence of Howard Lutnick and the Palm Beach victims’ hearing—shows that its conclusions are correct.

Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been careful about mixing his prolific sexual abuse with his broad network of influence-peddling. We scored each of the 1.4 million emails by how relevant it was to his crimes. Around 1,500 threads belong to the most severe category—where, for instance, a correspondent made light of abusing Epstein’s “littlest girl”.

Nearly 60% of the emails were to people Epstein paid to make his life easier. Some handled the bureaucratic complications from his record as a sex offender. Others scrubbed the web of references to his plea bargain over child prostitution and soliciting in 2008. Because of this concealment, a number of Epstein’s social contacts who today protest that they did not grasp the extent of his crimes may be telling the truth.

The rest of the emails depict an astonishing network of influence—and favour—trading. Of the messages to his 500 main correspondents, excluding his own staff and business partners, almost 20% involve financiers; 10% scientists or doctors; 8% media, entertainment and public relations; and 6% each lawyers, politicians, academics and businesspeople. Although some of his contacts were from countries like Britain and Norway, the vast majority were American.

In the worst cases, some members of those networks appear to be implicated in sex trafficking. Others, such as the physicist Lawrence Krauss, may not be criminals, but deserve opprobrium for their moral failure. Still others, like the commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, have lied about relatively minor dealings with Epstein—even if no more damning evidence turns up, they should answer for their dishonesty. Some, such as the author J.K. Rowling, have been pilloried despite the evidence being that the contact was one-sided and came from him.

The files tend to mash these different categories together. That is partly because when Epstein makes allegations it is hard to know if he is lying. It is also because the DOJ’s haphazard redactions have shielded criminal abusers, revealed those who briefly came into Epstein’s orbit and too often exposed the identity of victims.

Redactions are essential to protect innocent victims. But blacked out faces and names of women and girls inadvertently exacerbate how these vast files, detailing the routine abuse of over 1,000 victims, tend to make the story all about the men. Female bodies are turned into objects in what is a tragic echo of Epstein’s own abuses.

The duty to those women and girls is to bring their abusers to justice without delay. It is reprehensible—and, indeed, hard to understand—why the DOJ has made so little progress filing charges over the past seven years. The delay is as baffling as the leniency of Epstein’s original plea bargain 18 years ago.

“Are you gay?” the reporter asked Barney Frank.

“Yeah, so what?” the Congressman replied

The New York Times

Charles: Barney Frank was brilliant, funny, scathing; the second openly gay man in Congress, and my good friend and comrade-in-arms for four decades. He was closer even longer to my brother Bob Kaiser.

He died in home hospice on Tuesday at the age of 86.

Joe and I cherished our lunches with him every summer in Ogunquit where he retired to live with his husband Jim Ready after serving 32 years in the House.

To me he was a hero of our movement because he was regularly voted the smartest AND the funniest member of Congress by its staff.

In The New York Times, Kit Seelye did a fine job of highlighting his many virtues:

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Mr. Frank bristled with intellectual firepower, acidic turns of phrase and a zest for verbal combat.

Referring to the Moral Majority, the conservative Christian organization that opposed abortion but also opposed child nutrition programs and day care, Mr. Frank said in 1981: “From their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Of the flawed intelligence behind the US-led invasion of Iraq that led to nearly a decade of combat, he said the problem “is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.”

In Washingtonian magazine’s annual poll of Capitol Hill staffers, he was frequently voted the “brainiest,” “funniest” and “most eloquent” member of the House.

Despite his abrasive manner and his inability to suffer fools, he served the purposes of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, who appointed him as the Democrats’ chief negotiator with the Bush administration to address the crises in the banking and auto industries.

“The quarterback for us is Barney,” Ms. Pelosi told Jeffrey Toobin for a 2009 New Yorker profile of Mr. Frank. “He’s solution-oriented, respectful of different perspectives and brilliant. And it’s brilliance that saves time, because he simplifies the complex for us. He is an enormously valuable intellectual resource for the Congress.”

He was slower than some in advocating for marriage equality. But as its chief advocate Evan Wolfson wrote on Facebook yesterday, “he was a giant, a pioneer, and a hero.” And he was great: “Brilliant, skillful, courageous, and, of course, endlessly witty. My favorite personal moment with Barney was when he confessed to me, years down the road, that in our fight to win the freedom to marry, over which we had tussled, he had been ‘under-optimistic.’ Congress needs the likes of him. And I will miss him.”

Some people attacked Frank for comparing the delay gay people accepted before marriage equality became the law of the land to the patience he thought trans people should have before insisting on the rights of trans women to compete in all college sports.

Imogen, our editor, says that Frank’s comparison misrepresents the issue, which was itself created as a political wedge: Trans women have been able to compete in women’s sports for decades. Renée Richards first played in the women’s US Open in 1977 and Meghan Cortez-Fields, a college student from New Jersey, swam on an NCAA women’s team in 2024. But Cortez-Fields became one of the last to do so after the NCAA banned trans women from competing in Feb. 2025.

At least one prominent trans activist I spoke to last night was more sympathetic to Frank. “It’s been too easy for our opponents to weaponize what they think is common sense about ‘fairness’ in sports. By ignoring the data and research and science about biological diversity across athletes, our opponents create a huge barrier to progress. We are not wrong about sports—we have the morally right and logically right position—but that doesn’t mean we are winning in the court of public opinion yet.”

In a profile of him in The Washington Post after Frank announced he was retiring from Congress, my brother Bob wrote Frank had learned the game of politics first by running the office of Boston Mayor Kevin White in his first term. “He learned how to make things happen before he held an elected office or had a formal responsibility. This gave him an appreciation for accomplishing things… But he was also an accomplished legislator, a congressman who made a difference. He was usually the smartest man in the room, and the funniest.”

His co-authorship of the Dodd–Frank Act was his biggest legislative accomplishment.

He couldn’t prevent the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which prevented the Federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. But he did have the best line about it: “If gay marriage becomes legal, are all these guys going to wake up the next morning and say, “Wow, I could have married a man!?’

Trump Corruption Watch

With the War on Iran on Hold, Trump Prepares His Next Invasion

Der Spiegel

Scott: “Cuba’s next” says Trump. With the war on Iran on temporary hold, the Trump administration is seized with a strange fixation on Cuba, the next big move.

Marco Antonio Rubio, born in South Florida to two Cuban émigrés who never became US citizens, is the presumed coordinator of the operation, though CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and others have all made plays for the lead.

What emerges now is a likely replay of the Venezuela operation of which Trump is immensely proud: The Department of Justice has secured an indictment of Raúl Castro; the indictment of other Cuban leaders may follow. US special forces will then be tasked to seize them and bring them back to the US to face trial. In the penumbra of these operations, the CIA and State Department will attempt a regime change operation.

In the meantime, outspoken opposition to US maneuvers has come from the other prominent American on the world stage, Pope Leo XIV, who calls it unwise, immoral and disrespectful of the Cuban people.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised the Cuban population $100 million in humanitarian aid in a video message. At the same time, he blamed the leadership in Havana: They were the reason for the current supply crisis in Cuba, Rubio said in Spanish.

Rubio published the video message on the X platform for Cuban Independence Day. Regarding the help offered, he said that the money had to be distributed by the Catholic Church “or other trustworthy aid organizations.” He didn’t get any more specific.

The Cuban embassy in the US strongly rejected Rubio’s criticism of Havana. The minister repeatedly and unscrupulously lies to justify the cruel and ruthless aggression against the Cuban people, the representation also said on X. The embassy did not comment on the aid deliveries offered.

Washington is pursuing a strategy of carrot and stick with regard to Cuba: While Rubio is holding out the prospect of help, it is currently expected that the US government will bring charges against former Cuban President Raúl Castro. This is said to refer to an incident in 1996 in which Cuban fighter jets are said to have shot down planes belonging to a group of Cuban exiles, reports the Reuters news agency, citing sources from the US Department of Justice.

Trump Just Created A White Grievance Reparation Fund

The Nation

Charles: On Monday, the Department of Justice said it was creating a $1.8 billion slush fund to compensate Donald Trump supporters who have been “mistreated” by previous Democratic administrations.

The fund is the first time the Justice Department has tried to pay off convicted felons simply because they are supporters of the president—the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who have already been pardoned by Trump.

Elie Mystal explains it all in The Nation:

The program amounts to a white grievance fund paid for with money stolen from the public.

The fund was announced as part of a “deal” Trump made to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump had accused the IRS of illegally leaking his tax returns. The Trump administration seems to want people to report these two events as if they are linked—the DOJ has framed the slush fund as a way to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare”—but, in reality, they are connected only by the fact that they are both ways for Trump to try to steal money from the government.

The IRS lawsuit would have been thrown out of court if Trump had not dismissed the case. Trump controls the IRS and the Treasury Department. To the extent that the IRS did anything wrong (and the IRS didn’t do anything wrong), Trump’s case against it should have been moot, as he now oversees the agency. There cannot be a “case or controversy” for the courts to adjudicate when one party controls both sides of the litigation. “Trump v. Trump” is not a case. Trump was just trying to extort the government he now runs for $10 billion.

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Scott: I quickly came across Charles Kaiser as someone who thought about things almost exactly the same way I did. We have a kindred spirit and perspective that we share up until this day.

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Trump’s Stock Trades Reveal a Keen and Well-Timed Interest in Pharmaceuticals

KFF Health News

Scott: A few things became much clearer with Donald Trump’s latest quarterly stock trading disclosure.

One is that Trump seems to be spending a sizeable chunk of “executive time” that fills much of his daily schedule playing the stock market.

The other is that he has a real penchant for figuring out when a company is about to benefit from a decision he is on the verge of taking, and rushing to buy their stock before his decision becomes public, so he can benefit from it too. And that’s the very definition of insider trading.

This in turn explains why Trump has been so fixed on disabling insider trading detection and enforcement mechanisms at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice.

Here’s an excellent first take at Trump’s very well timed plunge into the pharmaceuticals market.

The trades for Lilly—a company valued by the stock market at just under $1 trillion—stand out. That’s because the timing of Trump’s purchases coincides with several favorable government decisions benefiting the drugmaker’s GLP-1 business, including progress toward a long-held goal: qualifying the drugs for reimbursement from Medicare, the government health insurance program primarily serving seniors, when they are prescribed for weight loss.

The disclosure forms—which bear Trump’s distinct signature—give ranges rather than exact dollar amounts for the trades. They show seven purchases of Lilly stock made on the president’s behalf through the end of March, the first of which occurred on Jan. 6.

During that period, and just afterward, several Trump administration initiatives ultimately benefited Lilly. Perhaps the biggest was an initiative from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which was proposing a pilot program—a temporary “bridge,” potentially followed by permanent reimbursement—through which Medicare patients would pay $50 a month for GLP-1 drugs.

The deadline for drug manufacturers to submit applications indicating their interest in participating was Jan. 8. Lilly has since been named as a participating manufacturer in the program, calling it a “significant milestone.”

If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears

Forbes Breaking News

Charles: Every single day there are too many Donald Trump scandals for anyone to focus on all of them.

J.D. Vance and Eric Trump want you to know that even though 3,700 transactions were made for Donald Trump’s account during the first three months of this year, a huge number of which looked like they were timed to presidential actions, there is nothing to see here.

Yesterday a White House reporter told Vance that the president’s financial disclosure showed “a lot of stock trades in companies that he had talked up at official events and on his Truth Social account–sometimes even putting the stock ticker symbols in his posts and encouraging people to buy their stocks… How can you and your administration argue to Americans that you’re cleaning up corruption… when the president seems to be talking up stocks that he owns, selling them and enriching himself?”

Vance said the question was a “doozie.” Then he swore that Trump “doesn’t sit at the oval office on his Robinhood account buying and selling stocks” because he has “independent wealth advisors” who do that for him. The Vice President added he was eager to “lead by example”—by banning senators from trading in the stock market.

Senator Elizabeth Warren had a different point of view on X: “The President’s corruption is a national security disaster.”

Eric Trump insisted all of his father’s assets were in “a blind trust,” but The New York Times usefully pointed out that there is no evidence that there is any such thing:

There is no indication that a blind trust actually exists; that would require the president to have no knowledge of his portfolio contents. The Trump Organization later confirmed in its statement that the investments are in fact “maintained exclusively in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party” brokerages.

On the very same day, after announcing a $1.8 billion slush fund to use your tax dollars to pay off the president’s most dubious friends, Trump’s acting Attorney General refused to promise that none of that money would end up in the pockets of people convicted for beating up Capitol Hill policemen.

The final kicker: Another signature from acting AG Todd Blanche on an addendum to the slush fund deal which states the government is “forever barred” and “precluded” from examining the tax returns of Trump, his family, company and “related companies”. The agreement applies to anything filed before the agreement was reached. It was posted on the justice department website on Tuesday morning, a day after the department announced creation of the fund.

The ultimate goal of every career criminal: The power to ban your own prosecution.

The news you need, five days a week.

Charles: In this period of news overload, we can perform a particularly important service by giving you the news you need, which you may not have seen or not had the proper analysis of. You can’t truly understand what’s going on if you’re only a consumer of American media today.

Subscribe the Horton-Kaiser Report for a review of the day’s latest news from US and foreign media, free for two weeks.

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