Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. Before we get to the news, take a few seconds to click the ❤️ and restack this post. That’s the most effective way to make sure these stories reach the people who need them most.
A federal judge Trump himself appointed to the bench just blocked his last-minute attempt to make it harder for people to vote in the midterms. CBS insiders are now calling 60 Minutes a “propaganda tool” for the White House after its new season premiered last night. Don Jr.’s lavish wedding in the Bahamas was partially funded by a Russian billionaire with close ties to Vladimir Putin. And the Trump family is quietly making moves to cash out their billions of dollars in cryptocurrency, even as ordinary investors lost their shirts.
One more thing: Raw America is getting under this administration’s skin. The Trump White House is locking out our reporter, Brian Karem, and our Capitol correspondent Luke De Cresce got an exclusive quote from Thomas Massie about his latest efforts to expose Epstein’s associates. This is proof that independent journalism is succeeding in ways the billionaire-owned outlets aren’t. Help keep us in the fight for just 22 cents a day.
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One of Donald Trump’s own appointed judges handed him a major loss last night.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who Trump appointed to the bench in 2019, smacked down the administration’s attempt to curb mail-in voting in a ruling handed down Sunday night. The U.S. Postal Service had adopted Trump’s new rule in August that required mail ballots to only go out to voters listed in a federal database, with envelopes that meet specific guidelines almost certainly to disenfranchise millions of voters.
That rule relates to an executive order Trump issued earlier this year. But the Constitution explicitly makes it clear that states, not the federal government, have jurisdiction over elections. The White House doesn’t get to dictate how ballots move through the mail just because the president doesn’t like it when people vote by mail. By the way, it’s worth pointing out that Trump has voted by mail in the last several elections.
Judge Nichols wrote in his ruling that the Postal Service never had the legal authority to issue the rule under the Constitution, as Congress never gave it the power to do so. He also dismantled the administration’s main argument that any harm to voters from the new mail-in ballot rule was merely “speculative.” Judge Nichols wrote for the record that because the rule makes it harder for some people to vote by mail, the attack on the right to vote was obvious.
The rule had taken effect on August 21, which was only just a few weeks before many states legally had to start mailing out ballots. A separate federal judge in Massachusetts — U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who was appointed by Barack Obama — had already blocked the rule from taking effect.
Trump has spent years claiming mail voting enabled fraud without offering any evidence of widespread fraud in mail ballots. Independent audits and court records keep coming to the same conclusion that there is simply zero evidence of voter fraud when examining millions of mail ballots. Not one election has been swayed by voter fraud, let alone mail-in ballot fraud.
A recent whistleblower report obtained by the office of Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut recently revealed that the U.S. Postal Service was ramming through a flawed new system that could have resulted in millions of ballots being thrown out this November. The Postal Service says the new system is voluntary. And thanks to Judge Nichols’ ruling, it’ll stay that way. For now, at least.
Voting by mail isn’t some newfangled liberal scheme. In 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, Union soldiers cast their ballots from the battlefield by mail and helped reelect Abraham Lincoln, and no president since has dared to suggest that a vote sent through the post is somehow less American than one cast in person. When a president tries to shut down the very channel that let men fighting for the Union have a voice, he’s not protecting elections, he’s attacking the idea that every citizen gets a say.
The new season of CBS’ “60 Minutes” premiered last night, and people inside the network are already sounding the alarm that the show as we knew it is long gone.
Sunday night’s episode featured an interview that longtime CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell conducted with an Air Force pilot shot down during Trump’s war with Iran. According to Zeteo’s Justin Baragona, a senior CBS staffer said the show is “dead,” calling it a Frankenstein monster made up of mismatched pieces hastily stitched together.
Another CBS source lamented to Baragona that O’Donnell was willingly allowing herself to be used as a “dimwit reporter” to be used as “a propaganda tool” for the Trump administration.
CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss — who was handpicked by MAGA billionaire owner David Ellison — has been drastically reshaping the network since she took over the newsroom. She began her chaotic tenure by firing veteran journalist Scott Pelley, killing a “60 Minutes” investigation into how the Trump administration was deporting people to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison and allegedly pushing a false report attempting to link New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to the 9/11 attacks, even though he was a child at the time.
This is the same network where Edward R. Murrow went on the air in March of 1954 and took apart Joe McCarthy piece by piece, at a moment when doing so could’ve ended his career. Murrow understood that a free press exists solely to make powerful people uncomfortable. But a “60 Minutes” that’s afraid of the White House isn’t journalism anymore, it’s stenography with professional lighting.
Raw America will never bow before the White House, because we don’t have a pro-Trump billionaire calling the shots. We have you. If that matters to you, become a paying subscriber for just 22 cents a day.
Earlier this year, Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., got married to model Bettina Anderson on a private island in the Bahamas. The lavish celebration included three full days of parties, a five-tier cake flown all the way from Florida and even a fireworks show over the ocean. Anderson called it a dream wedding on her Instagram.
Now, ProPublica is reporting that Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wedding expenses for the president’s son. He rented out one of the private islands, paid for the fireworks and even had his team plan several parts of the wedding itself.
Kremlev runs the International Boxing Association (IBA), which is largely financed by the Russian state-owned natural gas company Gazprom. He’s also a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who awarded him with Russia’s Order of Friendship just a month before the wedding. A few days before the actual ceremony, Kremlev was seen with Putin’s delegation in China.
Retired FBI official Frank Montoya Jr. observed that if someone is paying for your wedding, at some point they’re going to call in a favor. He told ProPublica it was unthinkable for the son of a current U.S. president to be in the position of being beholden to a Russian billionaire.
A spokesperson for Trump Jr. confirmed that Kremlev bankrolled some of the biggest wedding expenses, but insisted that Kremlev was a personal friend of the president’s son who bonded with him over hunting and boxing, rather than a business associate. Kremlev’s office made a similar argument, saying the relationship between the two was cordial and that Kremlev never talked politics with his American friends.
But that all ignores the fact that Kremlev has a long history of building political influence on Putin’s behalf using sports and money. Former IBA officials said Kremlev is guided by Putin, and that he uses boxing as a means to exert soft power. He’s also linked to an organization sanctioned by Ukraine for allegedly helping to transport Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied regions.
Trump Jr. himself said on his podcast that people on the guest list for his wedding knew they weren’t to discuss any of it. And none of the Russians who attended the wedding are seen in any of the photos or videos released by the Trump family.
And a favor could be called in sooner than we think. After a joint appearance with Trump Jr. in Turkey last year, the IBA suggested in press release that more could be coming from its relationship with the president’s son, and that its alliance would not remain symbolic. Keep a close eye on this one.
The framers were so worried about exactly this that they wrote the Emoluments Clause into Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, forbidding anyone holding federal office from accepting any present of any kind whatever from a foreign state without the express consent of Congress. They’d watched European kings buy the loyalty of ministers with gifts and pensions, and they knew a republic can’t survive if the people at the top owe favors to foreign governments. Routing the gift through the president’s son doesn’t change what the founders were afraid of. Rather, it shows just how easily their guardrail can be circumvented.
A jaw-dropping new report from the Washington Sun sheds light on just how deep the corruption at the top really runs.
On May 19, four anonymous digital wallets moved more than $20 billion worth of World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency into a new vesting contract that starts a countdown allowing holders of the tokens to sell after enough time has passed. For those unfamiliar, World Liberty is the crypto company owned by the Trump family, run by his adult sons Donald Jr. and Eric.
One of those digital wallets held the same exact amount of cryptocurrency the president was given when the company was first established. The other three are exact matches for the amounts given to Don Jr., Eric and Barron Trump.
A World Liberty attorney is arguing that new governance rules required the move, and that there is no pending sell-off. But according to three separate crypto experts who reviewed those same governance rules, the move was entirely optional. If they wanted to, Trump and his sons could have instead kept their tokens locked indefinitely. Crypto researcher Molly White told the Sun that the Trump family is almost certainly laying out the groundwork to eventually cash out their holdings.
The president could make around $1 billion if he sold off his own personal stake, while his sons’ combined shares of World Liberty are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Trump has already sold more than $550 million worth of tokens, while ordinary investors collectively lost approximately $1 billion dollars on World Liberty Financial products. That has all the characteristics of a classic rugpull scheme.
World Liberty also has a pattern of allowing massive amounts of foreign money to flow into the company. Chinese crypto billionaire Justin Sun bought $75 million worth of WLFI tokens just before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dropped a fraud lawsuit against him. And a company with the financial backing of several top officials in the United Arab Emirates bought a 49 percent stake in the company just days before Trump’s second inauguration. Former SEC senior advisor Corey Frayer accused the Trump family of “trying to turn their monopoly money into something that’s real.”
After Watergate, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 so Americans could see where a president’s money came from, and who he’s indebted to. Nearly half a century later we’ve got a sitting president running his own currency, foreign governments buying into it, and ordinary investors left holding the bag. That’s the clearest sign yet that the post-Watergate guardrails are no longer sufficient, as we no longer have a president who can even pretend to be embarrassed.
Raw America White House reporter Brian Karem has covered every administration since Ronald Reagan, but Trump is the only president who’s gone out of his way to bar him from the grounds. Karem has sued him before over stripping his credentials and won. We haven’t ruled out doing the same, because we can’t allow this president to get away with attacking the First Amendment. But because we have no billionaire backer behind the scenes, we’re counting on readers like you, who believe in independent journalism, to chip in. All it takes is 22 cents a day to ensure we stay in the fight. That’s less than a cup of coffee. We’re counting on you.
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