Hey everyone. Welcome back and happy Wednesday. Good to have you here.
Our top story today: the Pentagon is quietly drafting a new nuclear strategy for a possible war with China or Russia. And it’s all happening under a Defense Secretary so unserious that his own party won’t even let him pick the general to run the Army. In such a dangerous moment, Pete Hegseth is failing this country. We’ll get into more about that in a second.
We’ll also get into Max Miller going on CNN and somehow making everything worse, voters in Trump country rejecting two GOP power grabs, a judge fuming as he’s forced to drop the last Oath Keeper cases, and a 60 Minutes investigation into Epstein that mysteriously vanished.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Pentagon Plans Nuclear War While Hegseth Flounders
First, NBC News is reporting that the Defense Department is drafting a brand-new nuclear strategy. And this one breaks with decades of settled policy. It leans into the idea of using smaller, shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons in a regional war with China or Russia. The whole theory of a “tactical” nuke assumes the other side responds proportionally. But nobody knows that. Once the first one goes off, every assumption about escalation goes out the window.
And here’s the thing: it feels like every week there’s a new report of this administration drawing up plans for another war. Maybe we could finish the one we already started first?
At the same time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, can’t even get his choice to lead the U.S. Army through the Senate, because his own Republicans are blocking it.
His pick has been a four-star general for…six months. Most Army chiefs of staff spend at least a year and a half at that rank before they’re trusted to run the entire Army. Senator Joni Ernst, a combat veteran herself, and who is a Republican, looked at that thin resume and said it wasn’t enough. And reporting is suggesting that Hegseth’s pick was on his radar partly because he once nicely greeted Trump on a video call. And Trump thought he looked the part, because of, quote, “central casting.”
The job is open in the first place because Hegseth fired the last Army chief, a respected general, back in April, after that general reportedly refused to strip two Black officers and two female officers off a promotion list.
So put these two stories together. We are already in one war, the Pentagon keeps sketching out new ones, and the person running it all treats four-star generals like contestants on a casting show.
This is no longer the same military I served in. My experiences, friendships, hardships and moments where I learned what it truly means to serve in the United States military are, unfortunately, a thing of the past now. We have to accept that even the military isn’t untouchable when it comes to the rot this president has inflicted on this country. We are going to have a lot of cleaning up to do.
2. Max Miller Makes Things Worse on CNN
We’ve talked a good bit about this story but we need to talk about it again because Miller seems to be going on a media tour to try and make things better. But it’s just making things much, much worse.
Yesterday, he sat down with Jake Tapper on CNN. It was quite the interview. Things started out with Miller explaining why he is resisting calls for his resignation, and even gave a shout out to his personal role model:
That right there is a Freudian slip of epic proportions. He’s telling you Donald Trump is the reason he thinks he can get away with this. Trump, who was found civilly liable for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll. Trump, who has been caught on tape bragging about touching women without consent. Trump, who has been implicated in the Epstein files. Trump, who has been accused by dozens of women for sexual misconduct going all the way back to the seventies.
But the interview just kept getting even worse from there. Tapper asked him when the last time he took illegal drugs was. Should be a simple question, right? Not for this guy. Look at what he said:
The guy couldn’t give a straight answer on if he’s done illegal drugs recently, then pivoted to blaming testosterone treatments.
Then he went on Newsmax today and topped it all off:
That’s not how that works, but nice try. This guy has the worst excuses of all time.
So Miller went on TV, called his accusers liars, and told you his hero for doing so is the President of the United States. That’s not resilience, like he said it is. This is another of the side effects of allowing Trump to become President. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl is stuck in the middle of it this time. And for some reason Republicans are allowing this man to remain in the government and calling it a family matter. It’s sickening.
3. Trump Country Rejects Republican Power Grabs
For years, Republicans in Kansas have been furious at the state Supreme Court for protecting some abortion rights. So they came up with a plan. Stop letting a nonpartisan commission help pick judges on merit, and switch to partisan elections instead. That way, they could pack the court with justices who’d rule their way.
So they put it on the ballot. The state GOP chair called it, quote, “the most important election of our lifetime.” And on Tuesday, Kansas voters rejected it by more than 20 points. Kansas is a state Trump won easily, and voters looked at a Republican proposal and flat-out rejected it.
Another result from last night comes out of Missouri, another deep-red state. Right now, a citizen amendment passes with a simple majority of the whole state. The Republican state legislature wanted to require citizen amendments to win a majority in every single congressional district, whose boundaries they control. Missouri voters shot that down by a sixty point margin. Eighty percent said no.
Trump’s Republican Party has been trying to do these referendums behind the scenes. But the moment you put them directly in front of the people, even conservative people, they fail. Because most Americans, left and right, don’t want rigged politics. They don’t want to put more power in the hands of politicians. They want a fair fight. Kansas and Missouri are great examples here because they just proved that even in some of the darkest red states in the country, democracy will defend itself.
4. A Judge Is Forced to Free the Oath Keepers
Yesterday, a federal judge granted the Justice Department’s request to drop the seditious conspiracy case against Stewart Rhodes and seven other leaders of the Oath Keepers for their role in the January 6th insurrection. It was the same judge who originally sentenced Rhodes to 18 years, and he made clear he strongly disagreed with the dismissal. But with the DOJ pulling the case, he acknowledged that “the court cannot write a different ending.”
This follows a similar pattern from three weeks ago, when another judge was forced to dismiss charges against five Proud Boys leaders. Those two rulings officially closed the book on the January 6th investigation, the largest criminal inquiry in the Justice Department’s history. Every last case. Wiped out.
I sat on the January 6th committee. I went through the evidence myself. On that day, Rhodes and the Oath Keepers stashed an arsenal of rifles at a hotel just outside of DC, ready to use force to keep President Trump in power. That is seditious conspiracy. Plain and simple.
So why was it all erased? Not because of new evidence. Not because of flawed convictions. In an interview with MeidasTouch back in January, Rhodes revealed the real reason himself:
Loyalty. Not innocence. Loyalty. Rhodes thinks he’s earned this, because he stayed loyal to Donald Trump and paid the price. This week, the Justice Department agreed. And all we can do is make sure the next DOJ answers to the Constitution and the law, not one man’s roster of loyalists.
5. 60 Minutes Buried Its Epstein Bank Story
Yesterday, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden released a major investigation into how Wall Street banks enabled Jeffrey Epstein for decades, and the findings are damning. According to the report, Deutsche Bank failed to promptly report more than 250 million dollars in suspicious transactions tied to Epstein, some of it cash used to pay women in Russia and Eastern Europe. JPMorgan Chase processed more than a billion dollars for him despite internal alarm. Bank of America flagged 170 million in related transactions that it later admitted had “no apparent economic, business, or lawful purpose.”
In other words, the money that powered Epstein’s crimes ran right through the biggest banks in America, and they looked the other way. That sounds like a big scoop, right? Well, apparently Bari Weiss didn’t think so. 60 Minutes had this exact story, months ago. One correspondent had interviewed Senator Wyden and was building the investigation, until she was fired after criticizing Weiss’s takeover. So a Trump ally takes over a major news network, and suddenly their Epstein banking exposé quietly disappears. What a coincidence.
And while this all came out yesterday, can you guess what the President was doing? He was on Truth Social, enthusiastically promoting a new book from Alan Dershowitz.
You know, the lawyer who defended Epstein, helped negotiate his infamous plea deal, flew on his plane, and shows up throughout the Epstein files. And the same one who defended the President during his first impeachment. Trump called him a “Great American Patriot.”
Look, connect the dots, because they’re not subtle. Every single lever of power is being pulled in the same direction, away from the truth about Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. When this many people work this hard to bury a story, the story is almost always worth digging up. And we’re going to keep digging.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12 to 10 yesterday to send Todd Blanche, President Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, one step closer to permanently running the Justice Department. The last Republican holdouts, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, came aboard after Blanche put it in writing that Trump’s $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund is dead, and Blanche says his team spent weeks answering every senator’s concerns. But critics say the fund could come back with a single new order once he is confirmed. The vote landed days after leaked audio from a private White House Faith Office call caught Blanche promising anti-abortion activists that the Justice Department is working so the Dobbs decision becomes “permanent in every single state,” starting with blocking abortion pills from being mailed into states with bans. Susan Collins, staring down a tough reelection in Maine, has announced that she will vote no, while Lisa Murkowski and Bill Cassidy appear undecided. Senate leaders are still pushing for a confirmation floor vote before the August recess begins at the end of this week, and a no vote from a vulnerable incumbent usually means leadership already has the votes it needs.
President Trump has ordered contractors to redo weeks of work on the new White House helipad, frustrated with how it looks and questioning whether the slope of the South Lawn needs to change. Crews have been on the job since June, working around the clock for the past month, and had just installed a 100-foot granite presidential seal that is now being pulled apart. Trump wants the pad to sit level with the horizon, so engineers are weighing whether to regrade the lawn itself. The White House says the grounds have long needed a proper helipad to protect the South Lawn grass from Marine One’s exhaust, and that the complex has never looked better. The project already topped $5 million, paid for by Lockheed Martin, and a July rush order to finish by September 17, ahead of Xi Jinping’s expected state visit, added an estimated $875,000. It is not clear what the do-over will cost or who covers it.
