Hey everyone. Welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today: a federal judge just blew up Trump’s plan to take nearly two billion dollars of your money and turn it into a slush fund for his allies. And she didn’t stop there. She voided the sweetheart deal that gave Trump immunity from the IRS, said the lawsuit behind all of it was never real to begin with, and opened the door to sanctions and bar discipline for his lawyers.
We’ll also get into more breaking news that ICE has suspended most traffic stops following the second deadly ICE shooting in a week. Also, how the White House plans to dump “classified documents” about the 2020 election before the midterms, Trump announcing, then abandoning, a twenty percent toll on the Strait of Hormuz, and his administration vowing to tear down the International Criminal Court.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Judge Voids Trump's $1.8 Billion Slush Fund
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams completely nullified the settlement behind Donald Trump’s so-called anti-weaponization fund. That settlement did two things. It set aside 1.8 billion taxpayer dollars for a fund to pay off people who claim the government was “weaponized” against them, including January 6th rioters. And it gave Trump, his sons, and his companies a sweetheart immunity deal shielding them from the IRS forever. The judge just took a torch to all of it.
In a 56-page order, she wrote that the lawsuit was brought for an “improper purpose,” and that it produced “a settlement that had no viable basis in law or fact.” Think about what she’s saying there. There was never a real fight. It was one team playing both sides, using the legal system to make a handout look legitimate.
The judge also pointed out how Trump waited years to sue the IRS. His tax records were leaked in 2019, but he didn’t sue until he was back in the White House. Because that was the whole trick. He needed to own both sides of the table before he could “settle” with himself.
And she didn’t let his lawyers off the hook either. She sanctioned them, referred one to the Florida Bar, and flagged her ruling to the bars where Todd Blanche and Stanley Woodward already face disciplinary proceedings. She pointed out how Woodward represented many of the January 6th rioters, the very people this fund was built to pay. And she cited Blanche, Trump’s personal lawyer for years, publicly speaking for both sides of the case as proof the whole thing was coordinated.
And the timing here is brutal. Blanche sits in front of the Senate this week for his confirmation hearing to be Attorney General, permanently. Somebody in that room should ask him why he helped run a fake lawsuit to hand your tax dollars to Trump’s friends.
The judicial branch of the government has so far been the only barrier to Trump’s constant abuse of power. Congress won’t do it. His party won’t do it. But the courts are the one place his usual playbook doesn’t work. You can’t bully a ruling. You can’t primary a judge. He ran his favorite scam and a judge threw it in the trash. That still counts for something in this country.
2. ICE Suspends Vehicle Stops After Second Deadly Shooting This Week
As of today, ICE agents across the country have been ordered to largely suspend vehicle stops, the tactic behind so many of these deadly encounters. CNN and CBS both have it from law enforcement sources. For an administration that has treated ICE as untouchable, this is a full-blown retreat. And we need to talk about what forced it.
Yesterday morning, in Maine, an ICE officer shot and killed a 26-year-old man from Colombia. He was authorized to work in this country, had a Social Security number, and wasn’t the person ICE was there to arrest.
Witnesses described agents driving an unmarked SUV chasing a white sedan and eventually rammed it to a stop in the middle of an intersection. They surrounded the car with guns drawn. When the driver tried to pull away again, at least one agent fired on him.
Video shows the agents pulling the man, limp, out of the car and handcuffing him. He died right there on the pavement. His daughter, about 3 years old and still in her Bluey pajamas, watched her father get shot. Absolutely terrible.
This is the second person ICE has killed in a single week. Last Tuesday it was in Houston, a 52-year-old father who also was not the target. Just a reminder: not one of these officers has been charged across any of these killings.
But that may change soon, too. Yesterday, the federal government finally handed Minnesota prosecutors the evidence in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens shot by agents back in the winter, including the body camera footage. Prosecutors there can now finally decide whether to bring charges.
Let’s put this in perspective. You’re driving to work. An unmarked van cuts you off, boxes you in, like you’re being kidnapped. And then a group of masked strangers, no uniforms, no badges you can see, are yanking at your door trying to pull you out of your car. What would you do? Would you panic? Would you try to get away? Because that split-second reaction is what is getting people killed.
And that’s why suspending these stops is an admission. They’ll never say the words, but you don’t retrain agents on something they were doing correctly. This is a win for America against one of the most heinous efforts we’ve seen from a president in a long time. And it’s proof this thing can be stopped.
3. Trump Plans Thursday Speech to Relitigate His 2020 Loss
Reporting this week reveals that a new White House task force is about to start releasing thousands of pages of supposedly classified intelligence documents, claiming they show foreign interference and irregularities in past U.S. elections.
Leading part of this effort is none other than Bill Pulte, the acting Director of National Intelligence. Remember him? He’s the housing agency official with zero intelligence background who now oversees the most powerful intelligence apparatus on earth.
And the President, no surprise here, isn’t being subtle about the timing of this. He’s announced a prime-time speech to the nation this Thursday night, and he’ll be flanked by the CIA Director, the FBI Director, Pulte, and the head of Homeland Security, to roll out documents the White House claims prove foreign nations plotted to interfere in 2020.
We’ve been down this road so many times. The 2020 election is the most scrutinized in American history. It was audited, recounted, and litigated, and Trump’s own homeland security agency called it the most secure election ever. The president just cannot handle accepting the loss.
Trump wants you to believe this is transparency. It’s not. It’s him using the CIA and the FBI, which he controls, as props for a prime-time show, to make you doubt the next election before a single vote is cast. It’s been his strategy every election year. We’ll see what ridiculous claims he makes on Thursday and break it down right here on the show on Friday.
4. Trump Announces a 20 Percent Hormuz Toll, Then Abandons It
This weekend, with no announcement and no speech, the White House sent Capitol Hill a formal war powers notice that we are again in armed conflict with Iran. It followed three straight nights of American strikes, while Iran hit our bases across the region.
That piece of paper starts a new 60 day clock. Sixty days in which he can wage this war with no vote, no authorization, and no debate. And yesterday, he announced how he intended to fund it.
Trump declared that the United States would now be known as, in his words, “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT.” And as the guardian, he said America would charge a toll. Twenty percent of the value of all cargo on every ship that passes through.
Experts said the toll would add around sixteen dollars a barrel to oil moving through the Strait. And that didn’t even factor in the toll’s risk of escalating military confrontation, which could take more barrels off the market.
And remember when Iran tried to do the same thing? This administration lined up, one after another, to explain to the world exactly why they couldn’t:
So if Iran charges a toll it is a violation of international law, but if we do the same it is protecting the region. Same water. Same ships. Same toll. Just a different flag.
That hypocrisy was indefensible, and apparently he knew it. Just twenty four hours later Trump backed down, again, and the toll plan was gone.
And you’ll love the reason. He said that “based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership,” he’s replacing the toll with trade and investment deals from the Gulf states. Deals he says will be, quote, “MASSIVE.” No details though.
We’ve seen this before: he announces something without thinking about it for more than two seconds, and definitely without talking to the people who are paid to advise him on decisions like this. Everyone panics, he retreats, and tries to call it a win to avoid being embarrassed or looking like he has no idea what he’s doing. But he’s not fooling anybody. He has no idea what he’s doing.
5. Rubio Declares War on the International Criminal Court
On Monday, Marco Rubio announced a full effort to, in his words, “dismantle the International Criminal Court, brick by brick.” Take a look at his justification:
American self governance, threatened by what Rubio described as “so-called international law”. Same man, just three weeks later. When international law restrains Iran, it is a rule the world must respect. When it might restrain this administration, they label it a tool of “leftist NGOs, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments.”
But the United States has never joined the ICC. Presidents of both parties, Bush, Obama, Biden, all kept American service members out of its reach. So what’s the danger here?
Well, look at the timing. This lands just as human rights groups are asking the ICC to examine this administration’s own conduct: the boat strikes, the deportations to El Salvador, the Maduro abduction, you name it. And it lands as the court’s warrant against Vladimir Putin, a case the Biden administration helped build, sits on the books.
Wanting to protect American troops from a court we never joined is a defensible position, and reasonable people hold it. But setting out to destroy the one institution built to hold war criminals accountable, at the exact moment people are raising questions about you and your Russian friends, is something else entirely. And it leaves me wondering what they are afraid of.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The federal government has paid back $81 billion in tariffs it collected before the Supreme Court ruled them illegal, according to Treasury figures released yesterday. That is up from $5 billion in refunds over the same stretch of the last fiscal year. In June alone the government collected $23.6 billion in customs duties and refunded $49.2 billion, a net loss of $25.6 billion, which flipped what had been a $27 billion surplus in June 2025 into a $120 billion monthly deficit. Customs and Border Protection has said it could ultimately owe as much as $166 billion to more than 330,000 importers, and a federal judge has already warned that the administration’s appeal is slowing down payments to businesses that are owed the money. Trump sold the tariffs as the policy that would bring factories home and close the deficit, which now stands at $1.367 trillion nine months into the fiscal year.
President Trump signed two proclamations in the Oval Office yesterday gutting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, the two largest national monuments in southern Utah’s red rock country. Bears Ears shrinks to roughly 121,000 acres and Grand Staircase-Escalante to about 181,500 acres, stripping federal protection from close to 3 million acres, about 90 percent of the two monuments combined. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who stood beside Trump with the state’s all-Republican delegation, argued that the Antiquities Act calls for protecting the smallest area necessary and that multimillion-acre monuments do not meet that test. Land stripped from the monuments will stay federally owned, but lose its protections against drilling, mining, and road building under ordinary public land rules. Trump originally cut both monuments in 2017 before Biden restored them in 2021, and now Trump has cut them again, deeper than before. These are ancestral lands for several Native American tribes, who say they were not consulted before the signing. Conservation groups are already promising lawsuits, arguing the President has no authority to undo what his predecessors set aside.
