Good morning. Happy Saturday! I’m John Byrne. Before we get going, tap that ❤️ and restack this edition. The algorithm is built to bury reporting like this, and your share is what drags it back to the surface.
YouTube, TikTok and Meta have all refused to run paid ads for Alex Gibney’s new Elon Musk documentary, and X won’t even return the distributor’s calls. Attorney General Todd Blanche says he’s handed a federal judge the unredacted FBI notes from interviews with a woman who says Trump abused her when she was 13. David Ellison is weeks from taking over CNN, and the woman who was supposed to run it may be on thin ice. And the Trump administration is deporting LGBTQ refugees who’d already won protection in American courts to countries where their sexuality puts their lives at risk.
Quick message before we get to the news. September is nearly up and we’re well behind our paid subscriber goal for the month, which matters more than usual right now because Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution and Elon Musk is doing the same on X. Meta made that choice after we called Mark Zuckerberg out for cozying up to this president, and Musk is squeezing us while pouring money into Republican campaigns. The only reliable way this reporting reaches you is the one they can’t touch, which is your inbox. A paid subscription runs about 22 cents a day, less than you’d spend on a single cup of coffee each week, and it funds a newsroom that answers to readers instead of owners.
Here’s a sentence that should worry anyone who cares about free speech: you can’t buy an ad for a movie about Elon Musk.
According to * The Hollywood Reporter*, YouTube, TikTok and Meta have all declined to run the trailer for
All three platforms cited “political content.”
The trailer contains a shot of a 2024 rally and a reference to the 2024 election. That’s it. It isn’t a campaign ad, and YouTube accepts actual campaign ads.
Distributor Bleecker Street appealed. Meta said no. TikTok and YouTube are still thinking about it.
And X? X won’t take Bleecker Street’s calls. It’s also refusing ads for every other film the distributor has coming out.
The irony writes itself. Gibney’s film is about a man who allegedly suppresses speech he doesn’t like, and it can’t get its trailer onto the platforms that decide what Americans see.
Meanwhile, the trailer for Aaron Sorkin’s Mark Zuckerberg drama, The Social Reckoning, is sitting on YouTube right now.
Where was Musk on Thursday, while his documentary was getting frozen out? Mingling at the White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Musk, like Trump, is a friend of state propaganda. Not, apparently, the First Amendment.
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For months, Attorney General Todd Blanche fought a federal judge to keep a set of handwritten FBI notes out of sight. On Thursday, Raw Story reports, he apparently gave up. He just didn’t tell anyone.
The notes come from four FBI interviews in 2019 with a woman who alleges Donald Trump sexually and physically abused her when she was between 13 and 15 years old.
They’re at the center of Substacker Katie Phang’s lawsuit to force the release of the Epstein files.
Blanche’s excuses have been creative. First, the Justice Department argued the notes were “substantially similar” to typed reports it had already released. Then it said redacting handwritten pages would be too hard.
Judge Emmet Sullivan wasn’t having it. He ordered Blanche to hand over redacted and unredacted versions for the judge’s private review by 11 a.m. Thursday.
Blanche appealed. The deadline came anyway. And nothing appeared on the docket.
“We were all waiting to see if it did, and nothing showed up,” Phang said Friday.
So her lawyers asked. A Justice Department attorney emailed back: “Yes, we complied with the court’s order.”
Now Sullivan gets to read them, and the judge, not the Justice Department, decides what the public eventually sees.
Phang is cautious. Sullivan hasn’t confirmed what was actually in the envelope. “We’ll find out from Judge Sullivan imminently,” she said.
Trump has long denied any wrongdoing connected to Epstein. If that’s true, you’d think his attorney general would be eager to prove it, rather than fighting to keep a teenager’s interview notes in a drawer.
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Last month, we told you David Ellison was whining about the “needless costs” of a lawsuit by 12 states trying to block his takeover of Warner Bros. and CNN.
This week, the whining paid off. The states settled without any structural changes. CNN won’t be spun off. Paramount is expected to take control of the network within weeks.
The original plan was that Bari Weiss would run CNN’s newsroom alongside CBS News and The Free Press.
“I’m told Ellison’s enthusiasm for Bari Weiss has cooled in recent months, particularly after the CBS News 60 Minutes disaster that she led there,” Status founder Oliver Darcy said on Saturday’s “Power Lines” podcast.
Darcy says Paramount’s spokesperson keeps telling him they don’t know who’s going to run CNN. If Weiss gets passed over, he argues, it’s “a vote of no confidence” in her.
CNN chief executive Mark Thompson is just as much in the dark. “I’m afraid this is one of those occasions where you’ll find the answers are slightly scarcer than the questions,” he told staffers this week.
Where was Weiss while CNN’s future hung in the balance? Posing on a red carpet in Berlin on Thursday with Peter Thiel.
Whoever ends up in charge, a MAGA billionaire is about to own two of the country’s biggest newsrooms. The only question left is which loyalist gets the keys.
Aylin is 28, and gay. She fled Turkey after a religious group and a close family member threatened her life.
A US immigration judge agreed it wasn’t safe for her to go back and granted her protection. Then she spent 18 months in American detention.
In July, she told CNN, she was shackled and put on a plane. Mid-flight, she learned where she was going: the Central African Republic. She’d never heard of it.
“I’m so scared,” she said from Bangui, the capital. “I want to go outside, because I’m human. But I cannot go outside here.”
She eventually went back to Turkey, which is in the middle of a sweeping crackdown on LGBTQ groups. She’s told her family she’s changed her sexual orientation.
Adwoa, 21, is a bisexual woman from Ghana. A US court guaranteed she wouldn’t be sent back there. So the administration sent her to Cameroon, where same-sex relations can land you in prison for five years. She’s been held in a government detention facility for months.
“It’s like you’re a criminal,” she said.
The administration has signed at least 35 of these third-country deportation deals. Nearly half the countries taking deportees are in Africa, many of which criminalize homosexuality.
“If you’re queer or trans and you’re being sent to a country that persecutes queer and trans people, it is just unconscionable,” said Bridget Crawford of Immigration Equality.
A federal appeals court this month upheld a ruling that parts of the policy are unlawful, and the case is likely headed to the Supreme Court.
A judge says you can’t be sent home because you’ll be persecuted. So Trump sends you somewhere else where you’ll be persecuted instead.
If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that’s exactly the point. A documentary about Elon Musk that no major platform will sell an ad for, an attorney general quietly handing over evidence about a Trump accuser without telling the public, and an administration deporting refugees to countries where being gay can get them killed. We’re nearly out of September and well behind our paid subscriber goal, and because Facebook and Musk’s X keep throttling how far this reporting travels, we’re betting everything on this page instead. At roughly 22 cents a day, a paid subscription costs less than a weekly cup of coffee and funds journalism that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it, because every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.
So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today’s the day. With two of the biggest platforms in the country working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here 👇
One more thing before you go: hit the ❤️ and restack this edition. It’s what pushes these stories past the algorithm and into the feeds of people who’d never otherwise see them.
I’m John Byrne. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.
