Hey everyone. Welcome back.
Our top story today: House Democrats are launching an investigation into the White House’s efforts to suspend core constitutional rights in order to speed up Trump’s deportation program. They want to know how far it went. And come November, they may finally have the power to make this administration tell us.
We’ll also get into JD Vance’s messy book tour, Trump blowing up a bipartisan intelligence deal, an update on Iran, and yet another screwup from Kash Patel.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Democrats Launch Investigation Into White House Plan to Bypass the Courts
This morning, thanks to exclusive reporting from Scott MacFarlane, we know that Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are now demanding answers from the White House. They want every document, every memo tied to two things: suspending habeas corpus, and invoking the Insurrection Act.
This was set off by a New York Times report earlier this week that revealed Stephen Miller had repeatedly pushed these ideas to the President to speed up his deportation program. If he had gotten his way, immigrants in custody could’ve been blocked from getting a hearing. Blocked from standing in front of a judge. The whole point was to take people out of the country before the legal system could weigh in.
The effort was stopped by one of the President’s own lawyers. But now that it’s public, Democrats want to know how close it came, and who else was in the room.
To be fair, Democrats are in the minority right now. That means no subpoena power. No say in which hearings get scheduled. So for today, this is a records request and nothing more. And we have all seen how this administration handles these sorts of requests.
But we are less than five months away from November when Democrats are favored to take back the House. If that happens, everything changes. A records request that the White House can shrug off today becomes a subpoena with the force of law behind it.
The Democrats know they can’t force anything right now. But they can start building a record. They’re putting the White House on formal notice to preserve these documents, because once you’ve been told in writing to keep something, destroying it is a much bigger problem.
They’re laying the foundation for an investigation they can only run with real power behind them. And that power doesn’t come from them. It comes from us. If we don’t put them back in a position to force answers, this administration will keep running out the clock.
2. JD Vance Spends His Book Tour Doing Damage Control
The Vice President’s new memoir came out yesterday, and the press tour hit every network. He went to Fox News, CNN, NBC, even The View. But instead of discussing the book’s details, Vance ended up defending the President’s record at every stop, starting with the war in Iran:
“Additional destruction.” He’s even starting to talk like Trump.
But the war has been at the cost of American lives and record-high inflation that the President said he “loves.” Which is another blunder that Vance tried, and failed, to spin:
And finally there was the deal. Asked why it hasn’t been made public, Vance blamed, in his words, “some diplomatic protocols that I don’t fully understand”.
The deal, the war, the inflation, all of it belongs to the man he works for. Trump knows these positions are indefensible. So he sent his yes-man Vice President out to face the wolves, and wished him luck.
3. Trump Tied Surveillance Powers to a Bill Everyone Knows Is Dead
When Trump tapped his housing official, Bill Pulte, as acting director of national intelligence, both parties objected. He has no intelligence background and really is just a Trump operative. Democrats said they would not renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a key surveillance authority, with Pulte in that role.
So Trump nominated Jay Clayton, the former SEC chair and a federal prosecutor. A bipartisan deal was struck. A confirmation hearing was set for today. Pulte would go. FISA would be renewed.
Then, just before four in the morning, Trump called it off in a Truth Social post. He announced he was stalling Clayton’s nomination and said he would not back FISA renewal until Congress passed the controversial SAVE America Act. That’s his voter ID bill that requires proof of citizenship to vote, which does not have the sixty votes it needs to pass the Senate.
So in yet another masterful display of “the art of the deal”, Trump has tied a critical intelligence program to a bill that everyone in Washington knows cannot pass.
And by the way, this intelligence program is not partisan. It is the legal authority that lets U.S. intelligence agencies collect information on foreign targets. It has expired. And the President is now holding it hostage to force a voting bill through a Senate that has already said no.
4. The Iran Deal Is Falling Apart Before Anyone Reads It
On Tuesday, the Iranian Foreign Minister stood before foreign ambassadors in Tehran and said the deal needs to include Israel leaving Lebanon.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israeli forces will stay in Lebanon “as long as necessary.” And a U.S. official told the AP the deal has no withdrawal requirement.
The Iranians have since gone further and said any continued Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory would constitute a violation of the memorandum of understanding.
Then came the text of the MOU which we’ve been in the dark on for days. Iranian state media posted a fourteen-point draft of the MOU. Bloomberg published what it said was the U.S. version. They don’t match.
The White House said Tuesday the text wasn’t final. The president himself said nobody even knows what’s in it. Take a look:
“Nobody knows what it is.” We can only wonder if he’s also talking about himself here.
U.S officials are saying not to “read into the MOU language.” And the president was pretty clear about the stability of the document and confirmed why we maybe shouldn’t take it seriously.
I’ll be honest with you, it’s difficult to decipher what is real and what to believe at this point. But it feels like there is a real chance this deal falls apart and gets added to the long list of times we’ve “almost” had a deal. There does seem to be a real deadline in Geneva on Friday, so we’ll see what happens with that. But there has been so much back-and-forth on this that there is no guarantee anything will go right.
The president appears to just not want to wait until anything is confirmed, and instead announce half-baked developments that spur confusion and distrust in the administration. It’s an interesting strategy, to say the least. We’ll do our best to help you understand as things develop even more. Stay tuned.
5. FBI Director Kash Patel Keeps Messing Up
As we all know, the White House hosted a UFC fight on the South Lawn on Sunday. It was a spectacle. The President was there. But the scary part is that according to the FBI, there was a group of people who had been plotting a drone attack on the event.
The FBI and Secret Service had been working this case together. They had identified over two dozen suspects. They even had somebody in custody. The case was sealed and the agencies were still in the middle of arresting everyone else.
Then, Tuesday morning, FBI Director Kash Patel went on X and posted about it.
Secret Service officials woke up to find their sealed investigation publicly announced before all of the suspects had been taken into custody. Three sources told reporters the case was still sealed in court when Patel posted. The Secret Service deputy director alluded to the problem at a press conference without naming Patel directly.
The DOJ did eventually announce the arrests Tuesday afternoon. But the joint announcement the agencies had planned for that afternoon was preempted by Patel hours earlier.
This is not the first time that Patel has made a mistake like this. Or the second.
Shortly after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, Patel announced the suspect was in custody. Less than two hours later, Patel said the person was innocent and was being released.
After the mass shooting on Brown University’s campus, Patel immediately shared that somebody was detained. But he quickly had to reverse course once officials realized they had nothing to do with the case.
And when two National Guard members were shot in Washington, Patel held a news briefing where he said resources would be allocated to finding the shooter. But the shooter was already in custody. The DC police chief had to correct the FBI director’s statement right after he spoke.
For a while now, there have been reports that Kash Patel is in the hot seat. And it shows. He’s so desperate for a win that he keeps stepping on the very investigations he’s supposed to be protecting. At some point, the question stops being whether or not he made another error, and starts being why he still has the job.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Georgia Republicans split their ticket on Tuesday night. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones had backing from both Trump and Governor Brian Kemp, and he still lost the governor’s runoff to self-funded billionaire Rick Jackson, 53 to 47 percent. Jackson will face Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms in November. The Senate runoff broke the other way. Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins beat Kemp’s pick, former coach Derek Dooley, and now takes on Sen. Jon Ossoff. Georgia hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1998, but both the governor’s race and Ossoff’s seat are rated among the most competitive in the country this cycle.
Reagan National’s flight schedule will be critically affected for the better part of two days around the Fourth of July. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority said Tuesday that flights will pause for several hours on July 3 and stop entirely after noon on July 4, with normal service not resuming until July 5. The closures are tied to America’s 250th anniversary celebrations in Washington, which include military flyovers, parachute jumps, and a fireworks show organizers are billing as record-breaking. Airport officials say terminals will stay open with reduced services, but they’re telling ticketed passengers to watch their flights closely.
