Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Former federal officials are revealing that the White House already has a secure nuclear bunker, which undermines Donald Trump’s main argument for his $600 million ballroom. A Pentagon spokesperson just admitted that it keeps a secret blacklist of journalists who ask questions it doesn’t like. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries is now facing intense backlash from his own party after it was revealed that he held a secret meeting with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. And a sailor serving aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested his father while he was thousands of miles away serving his country.
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Trump has spent the last year telling us he needs his massive new White House ballroom because the president requires a secure, hardened facility for national security reasons. His lawyers are now making that argument in front of the Supreme Court.
There’s just one problem: the president already has a facility like that.
Three former federal government officials told the Washington Post that the Obama administration secretly built a highly protected bunker more than a decade ago. It sits over 60 feet underground, is designed to withstand a nuclear blast and can house dozens of people for weeks at a time in the event of an attack.
At the same time the Trump administration’s lawyers are telling judges the ballroom is a “non-discretionary prerequisite” for the safety of the president, these unnamed former officials are posing a legitimate question: why does the White House need a second one?
Trump has been battling a lawsuit challenging his destruction of the East Wing to build the ballroom despite never getting congressional approval. A U.S. district judge and a federal appeals court panel both paused construction, except for national security-related work. That uique carve-out is exactly what the administration is exploiting, insisting that both the ballroom and the underground complex are “inextricably intertwined.”
Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll told the Supreme Court the ballroom is necessary so Trump can maintain “uninterrupted command and control” in unforeseen circumstances. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made a similar argument in his own filing before the High Court.
What makes this all even more bizarre is that the two former officials who spoke to the Post said the existing bunker was built and protected under intense secrecy. The details of its construction are among the most highly classified government secrets. At the same time, Trump has been revealing the details of his ballroom’s “drone port” and medical capabilities on camera while construction takes place in full view of the public, where any foreign adversary with a pair of binoculars can watch it in real time.
The former officials also pointed out that the existing bunker is only about 20 feet away from what used to be the East Wing. When construction crews bulldozed it to the ground, they may have damaged or destroyed the very facility Trump claims doesn’t exist.
The White House has workers on site 20 hours a day, seven days a week, racing to get the project far enough along that a court order won’t matter anymore. The administration says it’s already about two-thirds of the way toward completion. The Supreme Court is allowing work to continue while litigation plays out.
The Framers put the power of the purse in Article One for a reason. They'd watched kings raise palaces on money nobody had voted them, and they wrote the Appropriations Clause so that no American president could ever do the same thing. When a president tells a federal court he can dig up the people's house on his own say so, he isn't just pouring concrete. He's testing whether that clause still means anything at all.
Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, reporters trying to cover the military have consistently faced stonewalling and hostility from the Pentagon. Now, the Intercept is reporting the DoD has an actual blacklist of reporters who ask uncomfortable questions.
Intercept reporter Nick Turse says a public affairs spokesperson with U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) named Richard Allee told him directly that his office keeps a “list of people to disregard.” When Turse asked him to confirm it, Allee said yes. When pressed further about who was on the list, Allee wouldn’t give names.
This came after a CENTCOM media operations chief repeatedly refused to answer Turse’s basic questions about Iranian attacks on American bases in the region and disputed casualty counts from the Iran war. She even hung up mid-question and told him “nothing for you.”
When Turse called back, Allee picked up and warned him to change his tone before revealing the existence of the media blacklist. CENTCOM later issued a denial, contradicting Allee by saying there’s no blacklist.
Seth Stern, from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said the existence of a blackist was unconstitutional at its core. He added that this exposes the Pentagon’s incredibly restrictive rules on reporters as simple retaliation against journalists asking questions the military doesn’t want to answer.
This is all part of a pattern at Hegseth’s DoD. The self-described “secretary of war” kicked legacy outlets like the New York Times and NPR out of their Pentagon offices and replaced them with MAGA propaganda outlets like One America News and Breitbart. He tried to force journalists to sign a pledge promising not to report unclassified information without express permission from the government, which drove most of the Pentagon press corps to hand in their badges rather than agree to let the government censor their work. A federal judge ruled that policy as unconstitutional. Hegseth responded to that court order by simply shutting down the Pentagon’s decades-old press room.
Trump has consistently called journalists the “enemy of the people,” which is eerily reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. His administration has upheld that attitude by blocking the Associated Press from covering the White House because it refused to use Trump’s chosen term for the Gulf of Mexico, tried to strip over a billion dollars in congressionally appripriated funding from NPR and PBS and even subpoenaed phone records between New York Times reporters and their families.
It’s important to remind everyone that Trump’s war on the free press isn’t because journalists are getting facts wrong, but because they’re asking questions that people in power don’t want to answer.
Back in 1971, the Nixon administration marched into the Supreme Court and argued that national security gave it the right to stop the presses. In New York Times against United States, the Court told them no, and Justice Hugo Black wrote that the press was meant to serve the governed and not the governors. A blacklist does the same work a prior restraint does. It just does it quietly, one unreturned phone call at a time, where no judge ever gets to see it.
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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York is now facing intense scrutiny from his own party.
The New York Times reported that Jeffries held a private meeting with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to talk about areas where they might work together in the 120th Congress, which would gavel into session the January after the midterms.
The timing is what has a lot of Democrats angry with their potential next speaker. Democrats are favored to take back the House of Representatives in November, which means Democrats would subpoena power. This would be a massive headache for both the Trump administration and Kushner, whose own financial dealings could lead to him being grilled by Congress next year.
Kushner has faced years of questions over the billions of dollars he’s gotten from foreign governments while working on American foreign policy in war zones like Ukraine, Iran and Gaza.
Former Obama administration aide Tommy Vietor, who co-hosts Pod Save America, said Kushner has used his family connections to get paid handsomely by autocrats in Gulf Arab nations. He added that the only appropriate way for Jeffries to deal with Kushner is through subpoenas and committee hearings, not friendly backroom dealings.
This spring, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee opened a formal investigation into Kushner’s financial dealings in the Middle East while he served as a special envoy. Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who would chair the committee if Democrats take back the majority, wrote in April that Kushner can’t credibly serve as a diplomat while being paid billions of dollars from the Saudi government
Jeffries defended the meeting by saying Democrats will continue fighting Americans regardless of who they meet with. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland was careful to toe the line, saying meetings by themselves were fine but that something tangible needs to come out of them.
Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who was one of Trump’s loudest critics before he retired from Congress, challenged Jeffries to “make this make sense.”
Even House Speaker Mike Johnson seemed caught off-guard by the news, telling Fox that he wasn’t sure why the two met, though he made sure to downplay Kushner’s role in the Trump administration.
This is the fight within the Democratic Party. Some want an aggressive approach to accountability ahead of a crucial midterm election. Others, like Jeffries, seem scared of confrontation.
In 1872 the country learned that the men running the Crédit Mobilier scheme had quietly handed discounted stock to the very congressmen who were supposed to be watching them. Nobody had to be bribed outright. The friendships did the work, and the investigations that followed never really recovered from having started too late. That's the trouble with a warm sit-down before the subpoenas go out. Oversight only works if it starts from a distance.
U.S. Navy sailor Joshua Aviles has spent the last nine months aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, serving at sea in the Middle East during the Iran war. He’s on the same ship that’s reportedly dealt with shortages of food, clean water and basic supplies. And now he just found out that ICE arrested his father.
Aviles wrote in a Facebook post over the weekend that his father has a driver’s license, a Social Security card and a work permit, and has been in the process of having his green card application approved when agents showed up to take him away. Aviles called his dad a hardworking, humble man who’s always willing to help anyone in need.
A DHS spokesperson defended the detention by saying the Trump administration is simply enforcing immigration law and that having work authorization or a pending application doesn’t grant someone legal status. But it’s worth pointing out that in prior administrations, the family members of active-duty service members were considered off-limits.
Aviles’ case is a great example of why that polict was in place. He wrote in his post that the news of his father’s detention has made it hard for him to function during 12-hour days at sea, as he doesn’t know how his father is being treated in federal custody.
Since Trump took office last year, ICE has arrested 125 veterans and attempted to deport at least 282 more veterans along with their family members. Democrats sent a letter to Pete Hegseth and other Trump administration officials warning this is leading to a chilling effect where military family members are afraid to access services like healthcare or housing on bases, out of fear that a routine interaction could lead to being handcuffed by ICE agents.
After the Second World War, more than a quarter million Filipinos who'd fought under the American flag were told by the Rescission Act of 1946 that the benefits they'd been promised didn't apply to them after all. Congress didn't send even a partial payment until 2009, by which point most of those men were dead. We've got a long habit in this country of taking the service and then arguing about the family, and every single time we've done it, we've ended up ashamed of it.
These stories prove why independent journalism is necessary. The MAGA billionaires who are snatching up legacy media outlets won’t cover how ICE is detaining the immediately family members of active-duty service members, or about how Trump’s son-in-law is trying to squirm his way out of accountability by having secret backroom meetings with the man hoping to be the next Democratic speaker of the House. But Raw America can, because we don’t have a billionaire telling us what to report and what to bury. We have you.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
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