Hey everyone. Welcome back.
Before we start, I wanted to wish everyone a happy Juneteenth. Today we celebrate the day the last enslaved Americans learned they were free, two and a half years after the law said they already were. Freedom showed up late, but it showed up and made our country stronger.
Our top story today: the government just admitted that its seven hundred million dollar plan to lock people up in warehouses is falling apart. ICE bought buildings all over the country to stand up a network of massive new detention centers, and now it is trying to sell them off or hand them to other agencies. Americans rejected the cruel immigration enforcement under Kristi Noem, and now the administration is trying to retreat from those mistakes.
We’ll also get into the president’s dangerous new intelligence chief, a damning voting machine report the White House is hiding, the president comparing himself to Hitler and Stalin, and four former presidents gathering in Chicago for a night that felt like a window into a kinder America from the past.
Okay, let’s get to it.
1. After Spending $700 Million on Empty Warehouses, ICE Is Trying to Give Them Back
Last winter, Immigration and Customs Enforcement went on a buying spree. The plan, pushed by then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was to build a network of government-owned detention centers big enough to hold nearly a hundred thousand people.
Now, new reporting shows that ICE is planning to get rid of at least seven of those warehouses, either by selling them or handing them off to other federal agencies. After Noem left, the new Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, opened a review of the whole detention strategy, and the department is going right back to what it did before, renting space in jails run by private companies and local governments.
Here is the part that should make you angry. ICE didn’t just buy the buildings. It signed contracts worth more than $1.3 billion dollars to convert and run facilities. Now some of those buildings are headed back onto the market and taxpayers are on the hook for the costs anyway.
These empty warehouses are a symbolic sight. Massive empty buildings that have gone completely unused because the American people rejected the violent immigration enforcement they were witnessing. It may take a lot to force change, but this is an area where American public opinion won in the end. The president can pretend like his approval ratings are fake all he wants, but these empty warehouses prove there are times he and his administration still hear the noise and have no choice but to respond.
2. Trump's New Intelligence Chief Has Zero Experience and Asked to Take Classified Files Home
This week, Bill Pulte became the acting Director of National Intelligence, taking over from Tulsi Gabbard, who steps down today. Pulte is thirty-eight years old. What did he do before this gig? He ran the federal housing finance agency, where he made his name opening mortgage fraud investigations into people the president does not like. He has no intelligence experience at all.
The president told the Wall Street Journal exactly what he was looking for. He called the intelligence office “unnecessary and or too big”, and said he wanted it smaller. A source close to Pulte put it more bluntly to CNN. “President Trump wanted someone in that position who is a true loyalist, who will do what he wants him to do. He has that in Bill.”
So Pulte got to work. According to CNN, he showed up at the office a full day early, caught the staff off guard, and asked for a list of every single employee so he could decide who to cut. Sources say he is looking at firing hundreds of them. In an earlier briefing, he reportedly asked whether he could take the President’s Daily Brief, one of the most sensitive documents in the entire government, home with him. He also asked about his security clearance, and whether he had access to his own government plane.
Look, the Director of National Intelligence sits on top of eighteen agencies, including the CIA and the NSA. The job exists for one reason, to keep Americans safe. When you have this guy who is a loyal fanatic to the president asking to take classified information home and wanting access to private planes, it undermines the security of our country and basically gives our enemies the clear signal that stopping them is no longer our top priority.
3. Trump's Own Government Found No Evidence of Election Fraud — and Is Hiding the Report
For months, the White House has been delaying the release of a report on the security of America’s voting machines, led by Tulsi Gabbard’s national intelligence office. According to Reuters, the report did reveal some vulnerabilities, like software that could be updated. But it found no evidence of a single vote ever flipped, much less a stolen election.
Clearly, this is a big problem for the White House. For years, the president has claimed the 2020 election was rigged. But when his own government went looking for proof, they found nothing. And they’re too embarrassed to tell you.
With the report still waiting, the President decided to put Pulte in charge, and publicly told him to take a closer look at his election fraud claims. Sounds like he wants a do-over, run by an even more shameless loyalist, until the answer changes.
If that report actually backed up what the president has been saying since 2020, it would be the White House’s top priority. Instead, you are not allowed to see it. And that silence tells you everything.
4. Trump Says He's Greater Than Hitler and Stalin. His "Historian" Turned Out to Be a Golf Caddie.
Just after midnight on Thursday, Trump posted a long document on Truth Social from a supposed “Presidential Historian” named Dave King. In it, King argued that Trump is “the most powerful person that has ever walked this planet.” More so than Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Mao, Stalin, even Hitler. “Sounds good to me!”, Trump wrote in the caption.
In an interview yesterday, it was clear that King’s flattering words haven’t gone to the President’s head:
But after Trump proudly read the same document aloud to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Haberman and Swan were naturally skeptical. After a little digging, they found that King was not a historian at all. He was a former caddie of golfer Gary Player, a close friend of the President.
After the global embarrassment of Iran, it seems like the President’s ego was in dire need of a boost. But just like on the golf course, only the caddie will tell him how great he is.
5. Four Former Presidents Gathered in Chicago for a Night That Reminded America What Civility Looks Like
The Obama Presidential Center held its opening ceremony on Thursday, bringing together all four living former presidents. Joe Biden. George W. Bush. Bill Clinton. And of course, Barack Obama.
For one night, it looked like the country a lot of us remember. Hopeful. Decent. Proud of how far we have come. Presidents from both parties, on the same stage.
But not everyone saw it that way. Turn on Fox News, and you would think you were watching a completely different event:
A cage match birthday party and a presidential library, somehow the same thing on Fox News.
But that wasn’t all. New York Post columnist Lydia Moynihan called Obama a “very divisive figure”, pointing to the “woke policies” she said were on display at the ceremony.
Here’s the problem: a poll from that same day found that Obama is viewed favorably by fifty-seven percent of Americans, while the current president sits at thirty-four. But still they call Obama divisive.
This is the bubble MAGA lives in. A whole movement, seeing through the eyes of one man, imagining a country that simply does not exist. And in November, the rest of us will show them the America we never left.
That’s The Kinzinger Report for June 19th.
Other stories that caught my eye:
President Trump told Italian television channel La7 this week that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had begged him for a photo at the G7 summit in France, and that he agreed only because he felt sorry for her. Meloni fired back Friday, calling the account “completely made up” and adding that “neither I nor Italy ever beg.” Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani called Trump’s words “grave and offensive” and canceled a planned trip to the United States scheduled for June 21 and 22. Meloni had been one of Trump’s closest European allies, the only Western leader to attend his inauguration, and had worked to position herself as a bridge between the White House and Europe. That relationship had already frayed over the war in Iran, with Italy among the countries that restricted U.S. access to bases for strikes in the Middle East. Meloni said she didn’t understand why Trump “doesn’t show the same determination with enemies of the West” that he shows with established allies.
An outbreak of at least 159 flu cases has hit Air Force recruits at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, with two hospitalizations confirmed — and the timing is directly tied to a policy decision. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the flu vaccine optional for all military personnel in April, calling the previous mandate “overly broad and not rational.” The Pentagon has since granted exceptions allowing individual services to require the vaccine, and the Air Force, Army, and Navy are all among those that have done so. But vaccination rates at the San Antonio base had already dropped from nearly 100 percent to about 40 percent after the mandate was lifted. The flu vaccine has been required for the military since 1945, partly in response to the 1918 pandemic that killed more than 26,000 U.S. troops.
