Hey everyone. Welcome back.
Today we start at the White House, where Donald Trump signed an order stripping job protections from 8,000 senior civil servants. These are the people who run the programs, write the rules, and manage your money. And as of this week, every one of them serves at the President’s pleasure.
We will also get into a new report showing that the pardoned January 6’ers keep getting arrested for new crimes. A flesh-eating parasite has reached Texas after the Trump Administration failed to stop it, the Senate’s all-nighter that failed to kill Trump’s slush fund once and for all, and an update on Trump’s new spy chief who was hired to do one thing: find the rigged elections.
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1. Trump Strips Job Protections from 8,000 Federal Workers
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order moving roughly 8,000 federal workers into a new category, meaning instead of being protected from political inference, as has been the case for decades, these experts now serve like political appointees — at the pleasure of the President.
Here’s a clip from the Oval Office:
These are not low level employees. Nearly all of them sit at the top layer of the civil service. They lead policy offices and regional offices, manage programs, and decide who gets federal grants. The idea was born in Trump’s first term and the original target was 50,000 positions. The White House scaled it down to 8,000 for now, and it has not ruled out going bigger.
The problem is we have already watched what happens to officials in this administration who tell the truth. A defense intelligence official whose assessment of the Iran strikes did not match the President’s story. A labor statistics commissioner who reported a bad jobs number. They presented facts, and they were fired or shoved aside. That was before this order. Now imagine when there are no protections left.
Unions are already suing, and the fight is headed toward a Supreme Court that has signaled real sympathy for sweeping presidential power.
The civil service exists so the facts do not change when presidents do. Make 8,000 experts fireable for telling the truth, and you will end up with 8,000 people who stop telling it.
2. Nearly 100 Pardoned Insurrectionists Charged with New Crimes
A new study from Lawfare tracked down what happened to the more than 1,500 people Trump granted clemency on day one. At least 97 of them have since been arrested, charged, or convicted of new crimes.
And these are not parking tickets. 41 cases involve violent crime. 28 involve guns. At least 14 involve sex crimes or child sexual abuse material. One pardoned rioter was convicted of child molestation in February and sentenced to life in prison. Another was convicted of reckless homicide.
Why are we only learning this now? Because there was no process. No pardon attorney review, no case-by-case vetting, no victim notification. Just a blanket order signed within hours of taking the oath. And once pardoned, nobody tracks these people. The New York Times counted 39 of these cases this spring. A watchdog group counted 33. The real number is more than double that, and Lawfare says even 97 is probably an undercount.
Remember, Todd Blanche would not rule out letting some of these same people collect from the weaponization fund.
Trump calls them hostages and patriots. But, surprise! Many are just criminals.
3. White House Fumbles Flesh-Eating Outbreak in Texas
On Wednesday, the USDA confirmed a case of New World screwworm in a young calf just southwest of San Antonio. It is the first confirmed case in Texas since 1966. And it is exactly as bad as the name suggests. The fly lays its eggs in open wounds, and the larvae eat living flesh. It can devastate cattle herds, kill pets and wildlife, and occasionally infect people.
America wiped this pest out decades ago by releasing sterilized male flies, and the USDA says it will rush that same playbook to Texas now. Officials also say the food supply is safe, and that is true.
But this didn’t come out of nowhere. Here is the Agriculture Secretary in November of last year on Fox Business:
But it was not under control. Since then, the screwworm has spent months marching more than 1,100 miles north through Mexico while the government dropped billions of sterile flies that did not stop it.
Don’t take my word for it. Take it from Sid Miller, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner, a Republican and about as MAGA as they come. He called the federal response “slow, bureaucratic, and incomplete.” He says he personally handed Secretary Brooke Rollins research on a USDA-built suppression system three separate times, and this week he publicly begged the President to cut through the bureaucracy and take charge himself.
The good news is we’ve killed this thing before, and we can kill it again. But when’s the last time this administration saw a problem coming and actually got ahead of it? Texas is about to live with the answer.
4. Senate Refuses to Kill Trump's Slush Fund
We’ve talked about how the so-called weaponization fund collapsed with the DOJ and White House both backing off. Still true. But the authority behind that 1.8 billion dollars stays on the books until Congress repeals it, and overnight, the Senate had three chances to do exactly that.
First: a Democratic measure to bar the fund outright. It would have sunk the whole bill, and it failed by a single vote, 49 to 50. Second, Thom Tillis tried to redirect the money to fraud enforcement. Voted down. Third, in the early hours of this morning: Bill Cassidy’s plan to give every penny to the police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6th. It won a majority, 52 votes, six Republicans included. But it needed 60 votes.
Which brings me to Cassidy. Yesterday, he and Cory Booker filed a court brief calling this fund “a dire threat to our constitutional democracy.” Strong words. So when the one vote arrived where his voice alone would have killed it, what did he do? He held the floor for a few hours, huddled with leadership, and voted no.
Cassidy’s own amendment needed 60 votes. Everyone knew it would never get there. So six Republicans got to vote yes, go home, and tell voters they stood up to the slush fund. A free vote. It cost nothing and it changed nothing. But on the motion that needed a simple majority, where Bill Cassidy was the deciding vote: He voted no and gave other vulnerable Republicans a free “yes” vote to help them in their campaigns.
Cassidy already lost his primary. He’s gone in January. The one Republican in that chamber with nothing left to lose saved the thing he calls a threat to constitutional democracy.
This was his moment. No primary to lose, no career to protect, one last chance to back up his own words. But he passed up on the opportunity.
And let me tell you something from personal experience, you may only ever get one chance to make a difference. And if you can’t bring yourself to take the tough vote then, you will probably spend the rest of your career, and maybe your life, rationalizing why it wasn’t the “perfect” moment to actually stand for something that matters.
5. Trump Tells Us What His New Spy Chief Is Really For
On Tuesday we told you who Bill Pulte is: a housing official with no national security experience, who was handed the keys to the nation’s intelligence agencies while keeping his day jobs at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yesterday, Trump told us what the appointment is actually for:
Think about what that means. That is the President telling you the nation’s spy agencies now have a new mission: rewriting the last election he lost, and laying the groundwork to contest the next one he loses.
And if you are wondering what “finding things about the rigged elections” looks like in practice, we have already seen the beginnings of it. In January, Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, personally showed up at an FBI raid on the Fulton County election office in Georgia, where agents seized records from the 2020 election. The Director of National Intelligence has no role in domestic law enforcement, but she was there anyway. And when the backlash came, her defense was that the President asked her to be there:
So this is not a hypothetical. The man who spent his housing tenure targeting a Federal Reserve governor, the New York Attorney General, and Senator Adam Schiff for President Trump now has the intelligence community at his disposal, and standing orders to chase 2020.
And it doesn’t stop there. This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is urging Pulte to start firing intelligence community employees — because, in his view, Pulte is “less shackled” than the people who came before him. The shackles were the rules.
So that’s the mission: chase the elections, and clear out anyone who gets in the way.
Our intelligence agencies exist to protect this country from its enemies. Turning them on our own elections — and our own people — is what failing states do.
Okay, that is it for June 5th.
If this hit home, hit the like button, share it with someone who needs to see it, and please subscribe so you never miss what is coming.
Hope you have a great weekend. See you Monday.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The House passed the Ukraine Support Act on Thursday by a vote of 226 to 195, with 18 Republicans joining Democrats to get it done. The bill provides more than $1 billion in security and reconstruction aid, makes another $8 billion available for Ukraine's defense through loans, and hits Russia with new oil and gas sanctions. Speaker Johnson urged his members to vote no, arguing the bill would undermine the President's negotiations with Russia. Here's why this matters. Leadership refused to bring the bill to the floor, so supporters forced the vote with a discharge petition, a tool that lets a majority of the House go around the Speaker. It's the first major Ukraine aid measure of Trump's second term, and the second time this week the House broke with him on foreign policy.
ICE is ending a policy that required the agency to report the deaths of former detainees within 30 days of their release. The Biden-era rule directed ICE to review and report all detainee fatalities, including the ones that happened after release. A DHS spokesperson called the change "common sense," saying ICE isn't responsible when someone dies weeks after leaving custody. Here's the context. Lawmakers say 49 people have died in ICE custody since the start of this administration. By ABC's analysis, the past 14 months have been the deadliest stretch for the federal detention system in years, with the only exception being 2020 during the pandemic.
