Phillip: They're saying you pay us $100,000 a month, we'll let you know first when Trump is about to tweet something that's going to move markets, how is that not insider trading?
Breaking News: Federal officials acknowledged in court documents that they canceled grants to states that didn’t vote for President Trump in 2024. nyti.ms/4gRd5Kb
"The sustained public hostility from Vance’s own side of the aisle is unlike that faced by other vice presidents in decades"Uh, remember when they tried to hang one?Knives are out for Vance in the GOP. His allies say it’s a coordinated ‘op.’ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202…
At some point JD Vance will attempt his highly technical separation from Trump, like a spacecraft separating from its spent and useless booster rocket. But it won't work. The release mechanism will fail. He'll tumble back to Earth and crash into the sea, entangled with the smoking remains of Trump.
That’s why I made sure owners of ultra-luxury second homes contribute more to the city that makes New York the greatest in the world. https://t.co/F9J2MVtrko
— Governor Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) July 23, 2026
Report: GOP Memo Says to Tie Democrats to Communism
Make it real BLUE!Jon Ossoff holds a 9 point lead over Mike Collins in a new poll, with less than four months remaining before voters decide. thehill.com/homenews/cam…
Joe Manchin is launching a new effort, the Independent Leadership Council, to recruit and support independent candidates across the country. https://t.co/ukFhoY8LPG
🚨 BREAKING — The DNC Rules and Bylaws committee has selected South Carolina as the first-in-the-nation primary in 2028, defeating NV and NH for the top spot.
🚨BREAKING: Trump DOJ appealed another round of voter roll losses, expanding its campaign for sensitive voter data into 8 federal circuits.The department is 0-17 in district court — with no court ordering a state to hand over its unredacted voter rolls.
Andrew Crapuchettes says his employment-matching company, RedBalloon, is the “anti-woke jobs board.”His firm won a no-bid $1 million contract to help the State Department recruit candidates earlier this year.
Gas prices are high. Americans think they’re even higher.3 in 5 Americans believe gas prices in their area have risen by more than they actually have, according to an analysis of results from our poll. And 46% say the change in gas prices will impact how they plan to vote in November.
BREAKING: @CDCgov has linked 4 more states to the multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak traced to shredded iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico, per sources. My story. https://t.co/eAcryYXb8I
NEW: Colt Gray just pleaded guilty to carrying out the deadliest school shooting in Georgia's history. I'm in court today covering the case. Follow along here:
Colt Gray, the teen accused of killing four students and injuring nine others in the 2024 shooting at Georgia's Apalachee High School, pleaded guilty to all 55 charges in court on Friday morning.
BREAKING:Trump just ordered warning signs and exhibits to be installed outside the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to alert the public that the museum does not, in his view, accurately reflect American history.For the record: It does.
Zanny Minton Beddoes, "You say things like: civil war in Britain is inevitable"Elon Musk, "On the current trends, yes"ZMD, "I live there, that is not true.. London is a much safer city than any city in the US"
Genuinely such a narcissistic twerp. Musk claims he has an excellent predictive batting average (lol) and then gets all weirdly serious while making claims about the timeline for civil war in Britain and AI singularity as if he’s some prophet and not just a dork with overinflated self worth
The U.S. DOJ is suing Milwaukee for daring to require that all law enforcement operating in the city – including ICE – identify themselves and show their faces.Armed thugs in masks who refuse to carry ID have no business in law enforcement.
Andrew and Tristan Tate have been indicted on horrific charges of rape, human trafficking, and the exploitation of minors.
Chair @RepJamesComer must swiftly open an investigation into the Tate brothers’ coordination and extensive relationships with members of the President’s… pic.twitter.com/FflTbMvgi1
— Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari (@RepYassAnsari) July 23, 2026
As South African televangelists André and Jenny Roebert divorce, court filings offer a glimpse into their finances — including a $6.45 million oceanfront home and a nonprofit that paid André $312,000 in 2024, to Jenny's $36,000.roysreport.com/prominent-so…
The Pentagon removed the names of 4 servicemembers who died in Jordan from their official list of casualties. They explain that this is because "their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April."
4 young people just died in Trump’s illegal war, and he struck them from the death toll.
They're fudging numbers because they got us into this war and don't know how to get us out. More Americans will die because these guys care more about their ego than our troops' safety. pic.twitter.com/MFRADH9TEi
FLASHBACK: Just two days ago, MeidasTouch reported that the official government website had mysteriously changed the number of American service members killed in the Iran war from 18 to 14. Now, the New York Times has confirmed this change was made. https://t.co/ywUFDrkpT2pic.twitter.com/cL3sIv9Dkr
Carney: "I'm going to take this opportunity to thank President Scheinbaum and the Mexican people for sending 200 firefighters to help us with our fires here. That's what friends do when you have crisis and fires." pic.twitter.com/AF8Rcr7pzt
House Democratic subcommittee report outlines web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes
The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).
The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.
‘A sanitized view of America’: inside Trump’s campaign to erase US history from national parks
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“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects”.
How Trump is making the US’s 250th anniversary about himself – video
In 2016 Congress established the US semiquincentennial commission, operating as the non-profit America250 Foundation, to plan the nation’s 2026 celebrations on a non-partisan basis. However, under Trump, the White House launched a sustained pressure campaign to subsume the commission.
When America250 leadership resisted its demands to shift focus toward partisan, campaign-style spectacles, the Trump administration created Freedom 250 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the congressionally chartered NPF.
The interim report finds that, by taking control of the NPF board and installing key campaign operatives such as Meredith O’Rourke and Chris LaCivita, the White House secured an opaque vehicle that enjoyed the NPF’s non-partisan credibility and tax-exempt status while operating outside standard government transparency laws.
Jared Huffman, a California congressman who is the top Democrat on the natural resources committee, said: “I can’t, in my time here in Congress, remember anything even remotely like this: watching this trusted, venerable charity organisation, the National Parks Foundation, literally be hijacked for a craven political agenda that tries to steal the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and turn it into something that’s all about Trump, advancing this very divisive agenda and even enriching Trump and those around him.”
The interim report alleges that Freedom 250 surreptitiously diverted resources intended for America250 for its own benefit, leaving America250 scrambling for funds.
Sources interviewed by Democrats on the committee said fundraisers including O’Rourke misled prospective America250 donors by providing them with Freedom 250’s banking and routing numbers instead. The report finds this could constitute wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud under federal and District of Columbia law.
This deceit extended to the entertainment industry. Artists recruited for the kickoff of the Great American State Fair – including Martina McBride and Young MC – were assured the event was non-partisan, only to face social media backlash when the event was revealed to be a Trump-backed rally. In the words of Young MC, the booking was a “bait and switch”.
The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.
The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a huge Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Fighters received bonuses in “USD1”, a cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial, a trust run by the president’s children, and Trump personally bought up to $50,000 in stock in the UFC’s parent company weeks before the event.
Freedom 250 has also functioned as a conduit for steering federal funds to Trump campaign loyalists. Event Strategies – the same firm that planned the January 6 rally that preceded the US Capitol attack – was awarded 18 federal contracts totalling roughly $40m, along with an indefinite delivery master contract worth up to $100m.
Beyond lucrative contracts, the administration is accused of building a partisan political database disguised as a government domain. Freedom 250’s website, initially managed by former “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge) employees known for past data leaks, extensively logs user data.
Event registration is powered by Campaign Nucleus, a firm founded by Brad Parscale, a veteran of Trump election campaigns. Campaign Nucleus openly boasts about using artificial intelligence to analyse personal data and target “persuadable” voters. Unsuspecting visitors, such as attenders of a free Fifa World Cup Fan Zone on the National Mall, unwittingly fed their personal information directly into this Republican campaign apparatus.
The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.
A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.
Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.
Concurrently, the administration aggressively moved to erase historical realities, removing national park signage detailing slavery, forced removal of Indigenous peoples and climate change. Huffman said it amounted to an attempt to reshape American identity to fit a narrow rightwing agenda.
“It’s a fantasy that airbrushes out the more complicated parts of our history – slavery, the Native American genocide, the actual secular ideals on which our government was founded. It wasn’t the opening of the clouds and some revealed covenant with God as they would have you believe.”
As Washington barrels towards Fourth of July, with another Trump speech and a big fireworks display planned for the national mall, Huffman acknowledges that Freedom 250 is unstoppable. But his goal now is exposure.
“The one thing we can do is make sure the American people know what they’re doing in our name and with our tax dollars,” the congressman said. “We should do that because what they have pulled off here is a potential template for other betrayals of public trust that they and maybe future generations will attempt if we don’t challenge them.”
A federal judge said a lawsuit challenging the Department of Justice’s creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund will proceed.
Judge Leonie Brinkema cited the DOJ’s refusal to confirm in writing to her that the fund is dead.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified to a House committee on June 2 that the fund is not going forward. DOJ lawyers have pointed to that statement in arguing to Brinkema and another federal judge that it is sufficient to dismiss suits challenging the fund.
Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks at a press conference at the Department of Justice on May 4, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images
A federal judge on Thursday said a lawsuit challenging the Department of Justice’s creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund will proceed, citing the DOJ’s refusal to confirm in writing to her that the fund is dead, as the department has verbally said it is.
Brinkema said that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s refusal to rescind his May 18 memo that set up the structure of the fund, as well as his and President Donald Trump’s continued interest in compensating purported victims of DOJ overreach, “all support this conclusion” that the lawsuit is not moot.
The judge ordered the DOJ to file its answer to the lawsuit by July 17.
Blanche created the fund as part of a settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over a leak of his tax records. The fund, whose total possible disbursements would be $1.776 billion — in a nod to the year in which the Declaration of Independence was signed — was designed to provide redress to people who allegedly “suffered weaponization and lawfare.”
Critics called it a “slush fund” that would pay allies of Trump, including potentially hundreds of people convicted of crimes related to their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Blanche testified to a House committee on June 2 that the fund is “not going forward, period,” after sharp criticism of it by Republican and Democratic lawmakers.
DOJ lawyers have pointed to that statement in arguing to Brinkema and another federal judge that it is sufficient to dismiss suits challenging the fund.
In a court filing this week, the DOJ said that written declarations that the fund is dead “are unnecessary,” and that Brinkema’s request that Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put in writing Blanche’s promise “implicates serious separation of powers concerns.”
But Brinkema, in her order Thursday, wrote, “That the defendants have refused to accord a genuine degree of trustworthiness to their representations about the Fund not going forward is particularly concerning because of the President’s consistent support for the Fund and Acting Attorney General Blanche’s acknowledgement that the Fund remains ‘important.’ ”
“Although Acting Attorney General Blanche reiterated several times during his testimony that the Fund was not going forward, when asked whether he would ‘issue a new memo in writing rescinding that May 18 memo,’ he replied, ‘I’m not committing to putting anything in writing. And I said it over and over again,’ ” Brinkema noted.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Andrew Floyd, a former federal prosecutor who has said he was fired for prosecuting cases against Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol. The other plaintiffs are Jonathan Caravello, a professor at California State University Channel Islands, and the city of New Haven, Conn.
If you click on the link you can read the entire article for free as a gift article. What a corrupt authoritarian wannabe dictatorship the US government is. Hugs
Illustration: Guardian Design
Key Points
