Hey everyone. Welcome back and happy Thursday. Good to have you here.
Our top story today: the President’s pick to run the Justice Department was supposed to get a committee vote this morning, but it got pulled off the calendar. Two Republicans want it in writing that the next Attorney General will stop shielding Trump’s family from the IRS. They’ve been asking for weeks. But they still don’t have it.
We will also get into Senate Republicans turning a Fauci hearing into an open mic night, Alex Jones calling for the President’s impeachment as new strikes land in Iran, Elon Musk writing another enormous check to the GOP, and a filing that says the Secret Service illegally tracked James Comey’s phone over that photo of seashells.
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Let’s get to it.
1. GOP Holdouts Pull Blanche's Confirmation Off the Calendar
Todd Blanche is the President’s personal defense attorney. He is also the acting Attorney General, and the nominee to hold that job for real. The Judiciary Committee was set to vote on him today, but Wednesday night Chuck Grassley’s office postponed it.
The holdouts are John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. They want written assurances about how the Justice Department settled the President’s ten billion dollar lawsuit against the IRS.
As a refresher, Trump sued over the leaking of his tax records, and his own Justice Department settled it by dropping the tax claims the government had against him. It also gave the President, his family, and his companies effective immunity from audits on any return filed before it was signed.
A federal judge in Florida has since ruled the lawsuit itself was brought in bad faith. She sanctioned the lawyers who filed it, and sent her findings to the New York bar, where Blanche is already facing discipline. She threw out the settlement too. But the immunity came through a separate release Blanche signed in May, and is still in place. That’s the part that Cornyn and Tillis are concerned about.
The President was asked about it in the oval office. He called Blanche outstanding, said he hadn’t heard there was any problem with his confirmation, and then made it about himself:
But Cornyn cleared that up a few hours later:
He does have leverage here. Cornyn lost his primary in May to Ken Paxton, the man Trump did endorse. So he’s out of here either way.
But let’s keep in mind what Cornyn and Tillis are really asking for here. They want it on paper that the President’s own lawyer, now running the Justice Department, will not keep the President’s family exempt from the tax laws the rest of us follow. Seems like a no-brainer to me. And the only ones asking are the two Republicans on their way out the door. Everybody else was ready to wave it through.
2. Senate Republicans Turn the Fauci Hearing Into a Fox Audition
Rand Paul chairs the Homeland Security Committee, and he subpoenaed Anthony Fauci over where COVID came from, which has been his white whale for six years now. Beforehand, Paul released eleven hundred pages of Fauci’s private diary notes, pulled off a government server after an eight month search inside HHS.
Fauci is eighty five. He showed up with lawyers, called Paul’s obsession with him unhinged, said the only reason he was in that room was to get him to say something that would land him behind bars, and then took the Fifth. The same sentence, over and over.
Biden pardoned him in January of 2025. But a pardon doesn’t cover fresh perjury, and Fauci’s attorneys had put that in writing to Paul a month ago. Nobody in that room was surprised. Paul knew exactly what he was getting before he gaveled in.
They held the hearing anyway. Paul had one of Fauci’s lawyers removed by Capitol Police. And then it turned into an open mic.
Bernie Moreno of Ohio put on quite the performance. He even asked Fauci to turn around and face the audience:
And yes, that is Laura Ingraham. Look at how she hesitated to make sure all of her friends stood up before she did. It’s all a performance for these people.
And by the way, Moreno’s daughter has accused her ex-husband, Republican Congressman Max Miller, of a long list of abuse. Including holding a gun to her head. Moreno has never said a public word about it. That is harsher language for an eighty five year old immunologist than he has ever used on his own son in law.
Ron Johnson said the vaccine injured are dying by suicide in large numbers:
I’m not even sure what to say about that one. Where is he getting this information? Johnson brought a big stack of papers as a prop though, so it must be true.
And then Peter Navarro went on C-SPAN to complain that Fauci cost him his hydroxychloroquine rollout:
I can’t believe we are still talking about this in 2026, but as a refresher, hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work on COVID. Every large trial says so, and the FDA pulled its authorization in June of 2020 over heart risk. Navarro wanted it in every pharmacy in the country anyway, and here he is, still angry that somebody slowed him down. These are the people telling you they would have handled it better.
Look, there are real questions about our response to COVID. The party that was running the government at the time is the one with the power to ask them so we can respond better next time. Instead they spent two hours bullying an eighty five year old man they knew couldn’t answer a single question. Nobody in that room wanted answers. They wanted the footage.
3. Trump's Oldest Ally Turns on Him Over Iran
Alex Jones posted a long rant to his four million followers on Tuesday. He accused the President of preparing a national draft ahead of a full ground invasion of Iran, called for Nuremberg style trials for administration officials, and then called for this:
That’s Alex Jones calling for the invocation of the 25th amendment and the impeachment of Donald Trump.
So what caused this? Tuesday night, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles at American forces based in Jordan. Central Command called it an attempted surprise attack. All of them were intercepted, and Jordan said its air defenses took down five.
The President told Fox News we were going to beat the daylights out of them, and I am cleaning that up considerably.
That response came last night. Two hours of strikes on dozens of Revolutionary Guard targets, including command centers and missile and drone facilities.
This war started at the end of February. It is now almost August. Eighteen American troops have been killed since, four of them in the last two weeks, and nearly five hundred wounded. Congress has never authorized any of it. The House passed a nonbinding resolution last week. The Senate killed its own version the same day.
I am not going to pretend Alex Jones is a serious analyst of anything, but he is right about the one thing that matters here. Congress has had five months and about a dozen chances to take a binding vote on this war. But it hasn’t.
4. Elon Musk Is Buying Back Into Politics
Remember when Elon Musk tried to buy the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court last year?
I certainly remember, but I’m not sure he does. Yesterday it was reported that Musk is planning to re-enter the political arena, with major midterm donations meant to turn out Republican voters. The exact amount he will spend is unclear, but we know it will be big. Musk’s America PAC spent more than 260 million dollars in 2024, making him the largest ever individual donor in a single cycle.
Look, that money will definitely matter. Especially when Republican committees and super PACs are already going into the fall with a huge advantage over the debt-ridden DNC.
But Elon has a problem that no amount of spending will solve. People don’t like him. At all. And when his name shows up in a race, voters notice. Wisconsin was the proof. He may turn out a lot of voters this November, but I’m betting it won’t be the voters he wants.
5. The Secret Service Tracked Comey's Phone
Last year, the former FBI director posted a photo of seashells arranged to form “8647.” It was a simple message protesting our 47th President, but MAGA immediately exploded with outrage, claiming it was a call for Trump’s assassination. Comey deleted it within hours, saying he didn’t realize some people connect those numbers with violence. But the President said Comey knew exactly what he meant.
According to new filings from Comey’s lawyers, the day after that post the Secret Service sent an emergency request to Verizon for Comey’s phone location, and tracked him and his wife driving from North Carolina to Virginia. No warrant. That emergency exception requires the government to believe someone is in danger of death or serious injury, which agents admitted they did not. Obviously.
But they had to do it anyway, because the President was watching. The Secret Service sent frequent updates on the investigation to Air Force One at Trump’s direct request. And that same day, the Secret Service started treating “8647” as coded language for threatening the President.
Look, none of this was ever about a threat. Agents said so themselves. It was about a President who got his feelings hurt by an Instagram post, and then used the entire federal government to settle the score.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The Commerce Department reported today that the U.S. economy grew at just 1.5% in the second quarter, down from 2.1% in the first three months of 2026 and below what economists expected. Core inflation came in at 3.3% in June, barely moved from 3.4% in May and still well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. A day earlier, the Fed held interest rates steady for the fifth straight meeting in a split vote, with three officials dissenting in favor of a quarter point hike. Chairman Kevin Warsh, Trump’s own pick installed in May, has now declined to deliver the rate cuts Trump has been demanding twice in a row. Analysts point to Trump’s tariffs as one of the drivers of the price pressures keeping rates high in the first place. Trump would not turn on him publicly, telling reporters in the Oval Office that Warsh would love to cut but “he’s got a board, and it’s a political board.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced plans to create a new federal agency dedicated to investigating corruption by this administration and future ones. The proposed agency, part of the Democrats’ corruption-focused midterm pitch, would carry subpoena power and could keep investigating the Trump administration after Trump leaves office. It would also let citizens and state attorneys general sue to recover money taken from the public through corruption. It would be run by a seven member board appointed by the president, capped at three members from either party with the seventh unaffiliated. The bill would also bar presidents, vice presidents, their spouses and adult children, and senior officials from accepting gifts worth more than $50,000.
