Hey everyone. Happy Monday, and welcome back. Lots to cover today.
It’s been a busy morning over at the Supreme Court, where Donald Trump was handed a string of big losses. The justices refused to let Republicans throw out mail ballots that arrive a few days after Election Day. And they let stand a jury’s finding that Trump sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll, which means he now has to pay her the $5 million that the jury awarded her.
We’ll also get into yet another example of the President’s family cashing in on his presidency. A GOP “election-integrity” operative landing a top intelligence job. The cruel hoax that dragged Pete Buttigieg’s kids into a police interview. And the President’s big birthday fair on the National Mall that nobody went to.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Brutal Morning for Trump at the Supreme Court
Let’s start with mail ballots. In a 5-to-4 ruling, the Court upheld a Mississippi law that lets officials count ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they show up a few days later. The Republican National Committee brought the challenge to wipe those grace periods out, and the President’s own Justice Department backed them up. They lost. The opinion was written by Amy Coney Barrett. That’s Trump’s own appointee, joined by the Chief Justice and the three liberals.
And this isn’t some fringe rule. Think about whose law this even was. A red state that passed this back in 2020 with both parties on board. And it was a Republican secretary of state in there defending it. Eighteen states and territories have grace periods like this. And the logic isn’t complicated. Once you drop your ballot in the mail, you don’t control when it shows up. Service members voting from overseas, they count on exactly that cushion.
This fits a pattern. Back in March, the President signed an executive order trying to force every ballot in the door by Election Day. Courts blocked it. And this whole push to choke off mail voting, it rests on a claim we’ve all heard before. That mail ballots are riddled with fraud. There’s never been any evidence.
And if you want to know where that claim lives now, listen to the man Republicans just nominated for the Senate in Georgia, Mike Collins, talking with CNN’s Manu Raju:
For the record, he did not. Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020. The vote was counted, then recounted by hand, then certified by a Republican governor and a Republican secretary of state. But that lie is the engine behind the entire effort to make your vote harder to count.
And the President responded to the ruling about how you’d expect. He posted that counting these ballots is part of a Communist movement more dangerous than both World Wars, Pearl Harbor, and September 11th. Where does he even come up with this stuff?
Then there’s the E. Jean Carroll case. The Court refused to hear the President’s appeal, and that means a New York jury’s verdict stands. That jury found he sexually abused Carroll in a department store dressing room back in the mid-1990s, and then defamed her by calling her a liar. Trump now owes her the 5 million dollars that the jury awarded.
He wanted the justices to throw the verdict out. But they refused. Not a single justice noted dissent.
Remember, this is a court with three justices Donald Trump picked himself. And it still handed him some big losses this morning. We’re expecting a ruling on birthright citizenship this week, so stay tuned.
2. The Trump Family Found Another Foreign Government to Cash In On
Over the weekend, The New York Times published an investigation into a deal the Trump administration struck with Kazakhstan, and who stands to profit from it.
Last September, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met the president of Kazakhstan in New York. President Trump joined by phone. Together they locked in access for a little known American company, now called Kaz Resources, to one of the largest untapped reserves of tungsten in the world.
Tungsten matters. It is a metal we need to build missiles. With China controlling most of the market, this is a real national priority.
Here is Lutnick making the pitch:
Within weeks of the meeting, a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed inside Trump Tower and partly owned by Don Jr. and Eric Trump, took a 20% stake in an entity tied to the project. Before that deal was even signed, the administration had approved up to 1.6 billion dollars in federal financing for it. Taxpayer money.
Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald — the firm run by Lutnick’s own two sons — helped a lead investor on the deal raise 210 million dollars. The deal was eventually signed on November 6th. That was six days after the Trump sons’ investment, which, by the way, was never publicly disclosed at the time.
And this isn’t some one off that can be looked over. According to federal filings, one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals. The total federal money provided or under consideration for those companies tops 8.9 billion dollars.
The Commerce Department says neither Lutnick nor anyone there ever discussed the minerals business with the Lutnick family’s firm, and notes that the Commerce Secretary has sold his stake in the firm.
This is corruption, plain and simple. The Trump family, including the president himself, are benefiting from these deals, and the public only finds out through investigative work conducted by journalists months after the fact.
It isn’t the first time we’ve seen this and unfortunately it’s unlikely it’ll be the last, but it’s my job to call out each and every time we see this with the Trump administration. We can’t let this level of corruption go unannounced and become normalized in politics.
3. An Election Operative Just Landed a Top Intelligence Job. That's Not an Accident.
Bill Pulte took over as acting Director of National Intelligence just last week, replacing Tulsi Gabbard. Pulte, as I’ve said, has no background in intelligence. Zero. He ran the federal housing agencies, and he got the job the way most people in this administration get their jobs, through cozying up to the president.
This week, Pulte named his chief of staff for the nation’s top spy office. Her name is Christina Norton. And wait for it…just like her boss, she has never worked a day in national security or intelligence.
What is her hopefully robust background? Elections work for the Republican Party! In 2024, Norton was the party’s election integrity director, overseeing a massive poll watcher operation. That program leaned on a roster of activists who were still pushing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, including Jack Posobiec, the man behind the fake Pizzagate child abuse story.
Trump has openly said he expects Pulte to work on “election security.” And remember, in his first days on the job, Pulte fired more than 50 intelligence officials, including the senior officers tracking Russia, Ukraine, China, and East Asia.
Look, you do not put a 2020 election denier in charge of the staff at the nation’s top intelligence agency because you are worried about Moscow or Beijing. You do that because you want to refocus the scope of national security to controlling your elections. Oversight of election security is common across the world. However, these bodies, at least in free democracies, are independent of the sitting president in order to prevent the weaponization of federal authority to influence elections.
Not in this country. This is the machinery of doubt being carefully constructed in advance, by the president of the United States of all people. And we should all be paying attention to it now, not after the fact.
4. Anonymous Hoax Triggers CPS Interview of Buttigieg's Children
Last week authorities came to the home of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and told him he could not be with his children until they were interviewed by Child Protective Services. Buttigieg waited a full day to be reunited with his family, a period he called “among the darkest hours of my life”.
The source turned out to be an anonymous caller with allegations of violent crime, which State police confirmed were completely fabricated. No merit at all. And one officer told Buttigieg he believed it was politically motivated.
While that has not been officially confirmed, it is clear that this did not come from nowhere. For years MAGA has spread dangerous lies about Buttigieg and his family, simply because he is a gay man raising children with his husband. Take a look at what Marjorie Taylor Greene alleged back in 2022:
And two years later, Trump whisperer Laura Loomer tweeted that the Buttigiegs “psychologically abuse” their own kids, telling her MAGA followers that “someone should call CPS”. Looks like someone followed through on that call to action.
This is what happens when you build your politics on hate and cast your opponents as predators. Four year olds are separated from their fathers and interviewed by strangers, without any clue why. If this country ever had a line that politics were never supposed to cross, MAGA has blown right past it.
5. The President's 250th Celebration Has a Crowd Problem
The Great American State Fair began last week, a sixteen day event on the National Mall leading up to America’s 250th birthday. The event is run by a Trump-created group called Freedom 250, instead of the bipartisan America 250 commission that Congress set up years ago. That part was pretty clear in Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s kickoff speech:
And if that wasn’t enough political embarrassment, sponsors pulled out of the event after the North Carolina booth managed to display a Confederate flag.
This absurdity is not what America deserves for its major milestone, and it seems like Americans have caught on. Crowds have been thin, as reporters describe empty benches and deserted walkways. A number of states refused to take part in the clearly partisan event, leaving empty stations. But on Fox News it still sounded like a huge success, even with no one in sight:
Look, the country’s 250th birthday was supposed to be a chance for all of us, left and right, to celebrate what we share. And it started out that way. The commission to plan it was created back in 2016, on a bipartisan basis, while I was in Congress. A Republican wrote the bill, a Democratic president signed it, and it passed without a single no vote.
But the President had a very different vision, and most of the country stayed home. And I don’t blame them.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Last week, the White House formally notified Congress of a plan to sell Turkey more than $700 million in jet engines for its homegrown KAAN fighter. The State Department said it cleared the Turkey sale after weighing political, military, economic, human rights, and arms control concerns. The move drew bipartisan pushback, as Republicans Nicole Malliotakis and Mike Lawler of New York lined up alongside Democrats questioning the reliability of Turkey’s President Erdogan as a strategic partner. Officials cast it as a gesture to Erdogan ahead of next week’s NATO summit in Turkey, which now sits under the shadow of a US-Iran shattering ceasefire, with both sides trading fire again over the weekend before standing down on Sunday.
The Supreme Court ruled this morning that President Trump cannot fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for now, while it gave him broader power to remove officials at other independent agencies in a separate decision. Both opinions were written by Chief Justice John Roberts. In the 5-4 Cook ruling, Roberts called the Fed’s independence a “special arrangement sanctioned by history” and was joined by Justice Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices. In the second case the court let Trump fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter and overturned Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent that had protected such officials from removal at will. Trump moved to fire Cook last August over mortgage fraud allegations she denies, and she says she was actually targeted for refusing to cut interest rates on command. Cook is the first Fed governor a president has ever tried to remove.
