Hey everyone. Welcome back. Happy Friday.
Before we get started, I want to point you to something special on the Substack today. After we covered the USS Abraham Lincoln, our inboxes were flooded with messages from people deployed in the Iran war. One of them, a Guard member, agreed to answer my questions anonymously. They were told a few months. But there’s no end in sight. Go read it at AdamKinzinger.com.
Now, our top story today: Trump’s own officials are backing away from the effort to prosecute Anthony Fauci. Republicans spent three years promising to put him in handcuffs, but now that the referral is actually at the Justice Department, nobody wants to touch it. Turns out it’s a lot easier to threaten a prosecution on cable news than to defend one in a courtroom.
We’ll also get into the President’s focus on important issues like naming lakes, the six-month mark of a war he said would take five weeks, the Trump donors now courting Democrats before the subpoenas arrive, and the journalists who sued Pete Hegseth for firing them over the truth.
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Okay, let’s get to it.
1. Trump Officials Back Away From Fauci Prosecution
Earlier this month, Rand Paul’s Homeland Security Committee voted along party lines to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress. The offense? Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment during a hearing on the pandemic. Paul has spent years publicly calling for Fauci’s prosecution. Now he claims that because of Fauci’s pardon, he had no right to stay silent. And he gave a clear warning about the consequences:
“Repercussions.” That was Rand’s promise. But three weeks later, it doesn’t seem like those repercussions are coming. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump officials are privately questioning whether the case will hold up in court. And if Trump’s lawyers are worrying about whether something is legal, you know there’s a problem.
So what went wrong? Well, a contempt resolution typically goes to the full Senate for a vote before it heads to prosecutors. But Paul skipped that step, knowing it would never pass the 60-vote threshold. Instead, he sent a committee recommendation straight to the Justice Department, and he’s asking JD Vance, as president of the Senate, to certify it as if the whole chamber had voted. That unprecedented move would force the White House to defend the referral in court, and without the full Senate vote, administration officials doubt it could survive a motion to dismiss.
And even if it did, the case itself is very weak. Convincing a grand jury to indict an 85-year-old man for invoking his constitutional right, at the request of the man who’s been chasing him for years, is not a case you’d want to bring to trial. Even Trump himself, who’s never shy about telling the Justice Department who to prosecute, hasn’t raised this one with his attorney general at all.
Look, this administration has treated the law as a suggestion for a year and a half. And with the midterms approaching, they’d love nothing more than to put Fauci in handcuffs to motivate the MAGA base. But after looking at Rand Paul’s referral, they won’t even touch it. If that isn’t proof there’s no case here, I don’t know what is.
2. Trump Renames Lake Ontario "Lake America"
Lake Ontario has had its name for more than 400 years. But as of yesterday, according to the federal government, it’s Lake America. Trump signed the executive order Thursday and directed the Interior Department to make the swap in their official database.
It seems he’s still not satisfied. Listen to him in the Oval Office:
An ocean. Sure. Why not?
This is obviously a swipe at Canada, which has been hitting back with reciprocal tariffs after Trump reignited a trade war this month. He said Thursday that Canadians are “nasty people” and “the worst to deal with on trade.” Prime Minister Mark Carney responded by pointing out that the lake’s original name comes from a native word, and predates both the Declaration of Independence and the Confederation of Canada. Canada will keep calling it Lake Ontario.
So Trump is childish and vain and has no respect for history. We know all that. But look at the big picture here: Prices are up. Trump’s polling is underwater, and the Republicans are bracing for a disaster in November. This Presidency is out of control, and Trump knows it. So he’s reaching for something he can control, however meaningless it is.
He’s also reaching for a distraction. We talked about Steve Bannon yesterday. He once said that Trump’s strategy was to flood the zone: to overwhelm the media with so many wild stories that the stuff that really matters falls through the cracks.
So what does Trump not want you to see? Well, a lot of things; we talk about them on this show every day. But there’s one story in particular he’d love to bury this week.
3. Trump's Five-Week War Hits Six Months
On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched their joint war on Iran. The next day, Trump told the American people to expect four or five weeks of fighting. Six months later, there’s no exit ramp in sight. We’re stuck.
Above all, there’s the people. Eighteen American service members have been killed. More than 750 have been wounded. 37 billion of your tax dollars have been spent, and another 67 billion is on the way.
And for what? The regime in Tehran is still standing. The Strait of Hormuz is still not open, and Americans know it because they’re paying over four dollars for a gallon of gas. Asked about the impact of the war in May, the President said he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation at all. Those are his words. Some economic pain would be easier to swallow if Americans were more secure, but if anything it’s the opposite: We’re burning through our missile stockpiles, and our adversaries know it.
So that’s what he’s trying to distract you from. But if that doesn’t work, he’ll just tell you the war is over. Take a look at what he posted yesterday.
In front of a picture of George W. Bush, a sign reads: “Mission Not Accomplished, 2001 to 2021.” But then there’s Trump, posing in front of an aircraft carrier and a picture of the now deceased supreme leader of Iran. His sign reads: “Mission Accomplished, 2026.” What bothers me isn’t the bold faced lie. I’m used to that from Trump. It’s the audacity to post this while service members are still out there putting their lives on the line for this operation.
I actually spoke to one of those service members recently. We talked about the conditions in the Middle East, how service members are dealing with burnout, and what the administration could be doing for them if it wasn’t so focused on naming lakes. They don’t want you to know the truth about this war, which is exactly why you should go read it. I posted it on my Substack earlier today.
Back at home, only 25 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling Iran. Even Mike Johnson says we’ve “got to wrap it up.” But the President says he’s in “no rush.” Something tells me he would feel different if he was the one on the ship.
4. Corporate America Braces for the Subpoenas
Remember the Wall Street Journal story about President Trump’s fundraising operation? The President calls his fundraiser nearly every night, asking which companies have paid and which should cough up more.
For Trump, there is never enough money to line his pockets.
And corporate America paid. According to reports from the New York Times, companies have donated a record 646 million dollars this cycle, with Republican megadonors outraising the Democratic ones by more than two to one.
Reports from the Journal suggest that this funding advantage might be shifting. Companies that donated tens of millions to the White House Ballroom and other Trump projects are quietly writing checks to Democrats ahead of the midterms. And some have started hiring former Democratic aides to help them navigate what’s coming.
What explains this shift? These companies hope to curry favor with the Democrats out of fear. They were afraid of Trump. Now they are afraid of the reckoning that will follow a blue wave in the midterms. And of the investigations into every check they wrote this administration.
What were they promised in exchange for those checks? House Democrats will soon find out.
5. Stars and Stripes Journalists Take Hegseth to Court
Stars and Stripes has been covering the American military since the Civil War. While the newspaper is partly funded by the Pentagon, it is editorially independent. It answers to service members, not to the Secretary.
That changed earlier this month. The newspaper published a report on the USS Abraham Lincoln, at sea for nine months because of the Iran War. As we all know, the picture was bleak. Roughly 5,000 sailors faced dwindling supply shortages and deteriorating health.
The next day, the Pentagon ordered the paper to fire its editor-in-chief and Middle East reporter. When the publisher refused, they forced him out as well. That’s three careers ended for one honest story.
Telling the truth? That’s now insubordination. And Pete Hegseth has no problems punishing anybody who defies his lies.
On Thursday, all three of them fought back with a lawsuit in federal court. Here is what the publication’s Middle East reporter, Lara Korte, had to say:
Secretary Hegseth and other Pentagon members, she argues, fired her and her colleagues in violation of their First Amendment rights. And she intends to preserve the independent journalism that Stars and Stripes brought to the public, and especially to service members.
While Hegseth is firing independent reporters without just cause, he’s been hiring people who’ll give him favorable press. We talked yesterday about DataRepublican. And now the Bulwark is reporting she’s not alone: an active-duty Army lieutenant colonel in Hegseth’s office is posting attacks on Democrats and his critics to a hundred thousand followers.
For Secretary Hegseth, this process is the only way to fuel the delusions of his success. Fire journalists committed to telling the truth. And hire influencers willing to manipulate it.
For Stars and Stripes, meanwhile, this lawsuit is only the beginning of a campaign to restore its mission of providing free and independent journalism about the military. For the sake of our brave service members, I hope they succeed.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
A federal judge in California ruled yesterday that the Trump administration broke the law when it blacklisted the AI company Anthropic as a national security “supply chain risk.” Back in the spring, Anthropic told the Pentagon it would not let its technology be used in fully autonomous lethal weapons or for mass surveillance of Americans. The Pentagon wanted no such limits. When talks collapsed, Pete Hegseth slapped the company with a label the government normally reserves for foreign intelligence entities and saboteurs, not American firms. Judge Rita Lin ruled the designation unlawful retaliation under the First Amendment, found that the company was denied basic due process, and wrote that an empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish government critics. She also flagged an obvious contradiction: before the blacklist, Hegseth had threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act, the Cold War era law that lets the government force a company to keep supplying the military. But that only makes sense if Anthropic is considered essential to national security, rather than a threat to it.
The Trump administration is pressuring the National Park Service to hand over a roughly quarter-mile strip of Yosemite National Park to Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a Nevada real estate developer, NOTUS reported today. Under the proposal, the Park Service would either give up the land outright or grant the developer a permanent right to cut a road through it, in exchange for land somewhere else in California of supposedly equal value. Kingsbarn already owns 83 acres just outside the park boundary, five miles from the giant sequoias, and wants that road to connect its property to one of the main routes inside the park. The company hasn’t said what it plans to build there. But the proposal has the full backing of the Interior Department’s political leadership, which is reportedly leaning hard on the Park Service to make it happen. Cicely Muldoon, a former Yosemite superintendent and 40-year Park Service employee, noted that their basic mission is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, not to let go of them for private profit.
