Hey everybody. Welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today: more corruption coming out of the White House. This one centers on a Venezuelan billionaire who needed a pardon. His family gave Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, a 50 million dollar job while she was still a U.S. attorney. Or at least still calling herself one. A judge had already ruled she was in that office unlawfully. Two weeks after she started working for the billionaire, he had his pardon. What a coincidence!
We’ll also get into Steve Witkoff calling Vladimir Putin a humanitarian, the president’s new round of election-season bribes, a look inside the obscure DOJ office greenlighting Trump’s worst ideas, and the president’s own son breaking with him over the Iran war.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Habba’s $50 Million Pardon Payday
Julio Herrera Velutini is a billionaire banker from one of the oldest families in Venezuela. In 2022, he was charged with felony bribery for trying to get the governor of Puerto Rico to fire the regulator who was investigating his bank. In August 2025, his lawyer, who had been on Trump’s personal legal team, got that knocked down to a single misdemeanor campaign finance count. Career prosecutors were furious. Herrera wasn’t satisfied either. He wanted the record wiped clean.
So his 27-year-old daughter gave 3.5 million dollars to a Trump super PAC. Still no pardon. Then, in late October 2025, she registered a company in Florida called Concord Partners. Nobody seems to know what it does, including people inside the family’s own business empire. Within days, Alina Habba signed on as general counsel with a contract for ten million dollars a year for four years. The New York Times got a look at the terms. Once you add in bonuses, the total was around 50 million dollars. At that moment she was the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, a job a federal judge had already ruled she was holding unlawfully.
She started the Concord job January 1st. By then she was a senior adviser to the Attorney General, overseeing U.S. attorneys, with an office at the Justice Department and a Marshals protective detail. So she was working for the Herreras and the Justice Department at the same time. Two weeks later, on January 15th, Trump gave Herrera a full and unconditional pardon. The governor he was accused of bribing and the former FBI agent who worked for him were pardoned the same day, right before they were due to be sentenced.
Habba says any suggestion her job had anything to do with the pardon is “false and defamatory,” and that the DOJ knew about the job and signed off on it. The department says she never spoke to anyone about a pardon. The White House says she had nothing to do with it. People who know the terms of her contract told the Times they believed she was hired to help get the pardon, and were surprised at the size of the number.
Look, maybe a 27-year-old started a company nobody can describe and decided the first thing it needed was a 50 million dollar general counsel who happened to be the president’s former lawyer, and the pardon two weeks later is just luck. That’s what Habba and the White House want you to believe.
But the Times reports there’s now a whole pardon industry in Washington, where wealthy criminals pay fixers big money to get the president’s attention. For Herrera, the person he paid just happened to be working inside the Justice Department when the check cleared. How convenient!
2. Witkoff Calls Putin Humanitarian
Before we get into the shameless flattery, some good news: Stephen Hubbard is free. In 2022, he was living in Ukraine when the Russians invaded. They accused the 74-year-old of being a mercenary and sentenced him to nearly seven years in a Russian jail. The State Department called it what it was: a blatant wrongful detention. But after a phone call between Trump and Putin, he’s finally on his way home.
This is a good thing, but it doesn’t make Putin a good person. It doesn’t erase the four years this man spent locked up. When terrorists release hostages, we breathe a sigh of relief. We don’t praise the captors. But that’s exactly what Steve Witkoff, the president’s point man on Russia, did today in St. Petersburg. Have a listen.
A humanitarian. If you’re a regular listener, you can probably guess what I have to say about that. But I’ll say it anyway. This is the man who constantly bombs Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. This is the man who has kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children. This is a man who runs a brutal authoritarian regime that captures dozens of Americans just like Hubbard as bargaining chips. And that’s all these people are to Moscow. Just two weeks ago, a top Russian official posted that the Kremlin needed to stock back up.
This time around, there wasn’t a prisoner swap. Trump bragged about that, claiming we gave up nothing. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that couldn’t be further from the truth. Trump has been on a gift-giving spree for Putin lately, and every one of those gifts is worth more to him than a hundred Russian prisoners. This is not a guy who cares about his own people. If he did, he wouldn’t be sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to die in Ukraine.
This goes deeper than Witkoff. Flattery has been the strategy at every level of this administration from the beginning. If it was getting us somewhere, that would be one thing. But it isn’t. It’s been two years. There’s always just one more meeting. One more trip to Moscow. One more excuse for Witkoff and Kushner to dine at the Kremlin. Peace in Ukraine is always around the corner, but it never comes.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope that peace really is around the corner. But as long as we’re calling Putin a humanitarian, I don’t have high hopes.
3. Trump Holds Veterans Hostage
We’ve already talked about the 5,000 dollar checks, and the 90 dollar bonuses to seniors on Medicare. We also talked about the 500 dollar Obamacare checks that came with letters bragging about Trump’s healthcare record. More recently there was the 8 billion dollar bailout for farmers suffering from the Iran war’s effect on diesel. Last night in North Carolina, Trump indulged in a little more shameless bribery. But this time was a little different. Have a listen.
He then said “We will never abandon the heroes who served America.” Unless the GOP loses, of course. We’re talking about Marines and their families who were poisoned by water contaminated with industrial solvents, and Trump is holding their rightful settlements hostage. It doesn’t get more shameless than that.
He used a similar strategy in Kansas, telling corn farmers he’d approve E15 sales year-round to boost their profits, but only if the Democrat lost. The farm bailout also came with a promise of more “when the Republicans win.” The handouts were bad enough. But now Trump is telling voters he’ll refuse to do his job unless the GOP keeps their majorities.
He’s clearly getting more desperate by the day. Considering the polls that have been coming out, it’s no wonder. The New York Times and Siena had another bruiser for the GOP this morning. Trump’s approval at a record low 36 percent. Democrats up 11 on the generic ballot. And a few very revealing questions.
Which party understands people like me? Democrats 53, Republicans 39. Which party is the party of the working class? 53 to 40. Which party can fix my problems? 51 to 40. Democrats had a small lead on these questions in 2024. In two years, those leads have expanded to huge gaps. On which party keeps its promises, voters flipped altogether. Democrats now lead 46 to 38.
Voters don’t trust Trump any further than they can throw him, which, thanks to those Big Macs, isn’t very far. That lack of trust has trickled down to the GOP at large. Nobody is buying Trump’s promises. But he’ll make them anyway, and disrespect our veterans in the process.
One thing I can promise him: that strategy isn’t going to turn out so well in November.
4. DOJ Rubber Stamp Exposed
Every president has a small team of about two dozen lawyers on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. It’s called the Office of Legal Counsel. And its job is to tell the executive branch whether what it wants to do is legal, especially when it’s never been tried before.
For decades, that office was a real check. Its legal opinions bind the entire executive branch. And since President Kennedy, it has reviewed executive orders before the president signs them.
That changed in Trump’s second term. His team never sent his day-one executive orders to the office for review. In fact, the office went months without anyone even leading it. And when reviews resumed, it could offer comments but no longer had the final word.
Jack Goldsmith, who ran the office under President George W. Bush, said sidelining it was part of a strategy to ensure the president “can do whatever he wants.”
That might as well be true, as far as the office is now concerned. The Washington Post reports that the office is now run by Elliot Gaiser. He’s a lawyer from Trump’s 2020 campaign and, to this day, he refuses to say who won that election. Asked directly, he said Biden was sworn in and certified. What he privately thinks, he said, is privileged legal advice.
That’s the man who decides what’s legal for this White House. And his answer is almost always yes.
According to the Post, his office has signed off on global tariffs, on blowing up boats in international waters, on refusing to spend money Congress appropriated, and on deploying the National Guard.
And that’s just the start. It declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. It said the government can seize state voter rolls and hand them to immigration agents. And in August, it stretched executive privilege to cover outside advisers, shielding people who don’t even work for the government from having to testify.
A former lawyer in the office said its opinions are usually based on shoddy legal arguments. Under previous administrations, the lawyer said, “you have opinions that at least try to grapple with counterarguments.” Not anymore.
We’re two weeks away from the midterms, and the man in the White House has a history of refusing to accept election results he doesn’t like. If that happens again, this is the office that’ll tell him whether he can follow through on whatever crazy idea he comes up with. Which is a problem, because so far this office hasn’t told him no.
5. Don Jr. Splits With Dad
Since the 2024 presidential campaign, Don Jr. has held a simple vision on foreign policy: keep America out of another war in the Middle East. That’s the same promise his father made on the trail. And a promise Don Jr. fully expected him to keep.
When Iran fired missiles at Israel in April 2024, Don Jr. posted on X: “Remember when they said Trump would get us into a full-blown war with Iran?” Then he added, “Times like these should make us all realize how lucky we were to have Trump, his strength and his resolve.” Nearly eight months since it began, President Trump’s war with Iran continues with no end in sight.
And Don. Jr. isn’t happy about it. The Atlantic reports that Don Jr. opposed the war from the beginning and even advised his father against it. One person close to him said, “Don Jr. has kept his views on the subject private, as he would never publicly break with his dad on an issue like this. But I can’t imagine anyone who knows Don would be surprised by his personal views.” Another remarked, “Don Jr. is the most MAGA of them all.”
That’s just the point. This isn’t a Never Trumper. This is the president’s son. The man who helped sell the movement on the idea that his father was the one who’d keep us out of a war. And it’s not just him. The Atlantic says Vance opposed the war privately. Meanwhile, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubted Netanyahu’s pitch that you could change the regime from the air.
Trump didn’t listen. And he broke the campaign promise he made again and again to voters. Now he owns the consequences. A Pew Research survey found that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of how he’s handled the Iran War. Nearly half think it drags on for more than a year. That’s far beyond the administration’s initial estimate of four to six weeks.
And every day it drags on, more of the people who believed his promise will turn against him at the ballot box. Which is bad news for Trump, but good news for the country.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Albertans voted overwhelmingly on Monday to stay in Canada, rejecting a push to start the process of separating the oil-rich province from the rest of the country. 76 percent chose to remain over holding a second, binding vote on secession. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who grew up in Edmonton and rallied remain supporters in the final week, welcomed the result Tuesday. “It’s a great result for Canada, thrilled that Albertans have chosen unity,” he told reporters in Ottawa. Carney has made national unity and cutting Canada’s economic dependence on the U.S. central to his agenda. That push is largely a response to President Trump, who has hit Canada with punishing tariffs and repeatedly floated annexing it as the 51st state. Separatist leaders even traveled to Washington three times last year to meet with low-level State Department officials. Premier Danielle Smith added the question to the ballot after a court blocked a separatist petition to force a vote. Some separatist leaders had signaled before the vote that they might not accept the results.
FEMA is telling states to get ready to handle most disasters without federal help. Politico reports that administrator Cameron Hamilton laid out the plan Tuesday at a private conference of state emergency managers in Little Rock, Arkansas. He said changes could begin within six months. Hamilton pitched the shift as a way to speed up recovery, since states would no longer wait weeks or months for a federal disaster declaration. “Federal dollars should be building greater capability, not creating greater dependency,” he said. In place of federal aid, the administration wants states to help each other through what it calls “national mutual aid.” President Trump threatened to abolish FEMA early in his term and has pushed states to shoulder more of the cost. But FEMA’s own report, released Friday, found state disaster agencies are typically understaffed, underfunded, and heavily dependent on federal money. One longtime emergency manager warned that many states have thin rainy-day funds and no way to cover recovery costs without raising taxes.
