Hey everyone. Welcome back.
Before we get to the news, I want to take a moment to recognize the Americans who lost their lives in the B-52 crash yesterday at Edwards Air Force Base in California. They served this country, and they gave everything for it. To their families, and to everyone at Edwards, you are in our hearts today.
Our top story today: the President’s Justice Department is now investigating California Governor Gavin Newsom and his wife. It’s not entirely clear what he is being investigated for, but Newsom says federal agents are knocking on his friends’ doors, digging through years of documents, looking for a crime. And he says the reason is simple: he might run for president in 2028.
We’ll also get into growing doubts on the Iran deal, new details on Trump’s financial disclosures, updates on the “free” ballroom, and the President shrugging off Ukraine as our allies scramble to keep him at the table.
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Okay, let’s get to it.
1. Newsom Joins the List of Trump Rivals Under Investigation
On Monday, Gavin Newsom said he and his wife are under federal investigation. He’s the Democrat most people expect to run in 2028, and he did not mince words. Here’s Newsom:
To be fair, the investigation runs out of Sacramento, in the Eastern District of California, not D.C. According to reports, the part involving his wife centers on her taxes and began last year, growing from whistleblower complaints inside state government. His own former chief of staff pleaded guilty to federal charges there last month. So I’m not going to jump to any conclusions and call the whole thing a setup. I don’t know that, and we’ll have to see what comes out of this.
That being said, it’s hard not to see the pattern here. Newsom joins a growing list of Trump’s enemies that are being investigated. We’ve seen the DOJ go after former FBI Director James Comey, Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff. In each case, Trump demanded the prosecution first. Two of those cases have already been tossed out.
An investigation is not a conviction, and if anyone broke the law, they should answer for it. But when a President spends years demanding his rivals be jailed, and the cases keep arriving right on cue, the burden is on him to prove this is about the law and not a list. We will keep a close eye on this story and keep you updated as we learn more.
2. Even Trump's CIA Director Doubts the Iran Deal
On Sunday, the President announced his Iran deal is done, and of course, he’s calling it historic. But new reporting from Axios shows his most senior people aren’t sold on it. CIA Director John Ratcliffe told the President directly that U.S. intelligence raises serious doubts about whether Iran will ever make the nuclear concessions we are demanding. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth raised concerns too. In public, the pitch keeps shifting.
On Hannity, the Vice President was asked a simple question.
The technical details. As in, whether Iran actually stops enriching, and who inspects it. The President himself has called getting that uranium back unnecessary, except from a “public relations standpoint.”
Even Senator Lindsey Graham worries that Iran’s read of this deal does not match what our negotiators claim, drawing the ire of the president in yet another revealing moment where we see the control Trump has over the current Republican party. Take a look:
From the very beginning of this conflict we’ve been told a war is necessary to stop the production of a nuclear weapon. But that part of the deal has not been settled. It’s been kicked to a round of talks nobody’s started yet, and some of the President’s most senior cabinet members doubt Iran will ever agree to it.
So the President gets his signing ceremony and his victory lap. What he doesn’t get, what we don’t get, is the thing the war was supposed to deliver. The thing that made the war necessary and “worth the cost.”
3. No President Has Ever Traded Stocks Like This
This week, CBS News went through the President’s latest financial disclosure, and the scale is staggering. In the first three months of this year, his investment accounts made more than thirty-six hundred trades, worth somewhere between two hundred million and nearly seven hundred million dollars. No sitting president has ever traded like this.
The Trump Organization says he has no say, and that independent managers handle it with no advance notice.
But the timing is impossible to ignore. On January 6th, his accounts bought up to a million dollars of Nvidia, and the next week his administration loosened the rules letting Nvidia sell its best AI chips to China. In March they loaded up on Palantir, the defense contractor, and weeks later the President praised it by ticker on Truth Social. They also bought hundreds of thousands in Eli Lilly, right as the government made calls that helped its weight-loss drugs.
At a Senate hearing, Elizabeth Warren put it bluntly to the Treasury Secretary, saying the President “is enriching himself by taking advantage of his position.” Scott Bessent waved it off, saying the President was not the one day-trading. But the truth is, most presidents put their money in a blind trust, so they can’t see it and be tempted. This President chose not to.
Trading stocks as president isn’t illegal, and that is exactly the problem. The one man who can move a stock with a sentence is allowed to own it. Even if every trade is clean, you at home should not have to take this president’s word for it.
4. Surprise! We’re All Paying for Trump's Ballroom
For months, the President has insisted his giant White House ballroom, under construction where the East Wing used to stand, would be paid for entirely by private donors. In the Oval Office in March, he could not have been clearer:
Not 10 cents, he said. But the contractor’s own internal estimate, prepared for the White House weeks before he said that, set the cost for taxpayers at over three hundred million dollars. And by the time he claimed taxpayers would pay nothing, his government had already cut more than a dozen checks to the builder.
The White House says the public money is only for security, not the ballroom itself. But a former Pentagon official who reviewed the plans said you cannot separate the two. As he put it, “it’s one structure”.
I don’t know about you, but the images of the White House this past week have been stuck in my head. A fighting cage going up on the South Lawn for a UFC night — and right next to it, the East Wing, gone. Just gone. Rubble where part of the people’s house used to be.
He may not know this, but the White House isn’t one of Donald Trump’s gold-plated mansions. It belongs to us, and he’s just the current tenant. Tenants don’t get to bulldoze the place and send the landlord the bill.
5. Allies Spent the Day Trying to Keep Trump at the Table on Ukraine
With the Iran deal announced and Russia escalating its attacks by the day, leaders like Macron wanted a clear signal that Washington still wants in on the fight to stop Putin. The President was glad to pivot from his failure in Iran, saying the war would soon be “in the rearview mirror”, even with the ink barely dry and his own CIA director voicing doubts. But on Ukraine, he sounded skeptical:
What the President doesn’t seem to understand is that Ukraine matters to us far beyond the weapons we sell. Think about who Russia actually is. A nuclear superpower that’s already hitting us with cyberattacks, interfering with our elections, and arming our enemies. Russia won’t stop at Ukraine, it will lean on the next border, towards NATO allies we are required to defend. The same allies this President keeps writing off as freeloaders.
But NATO has never been charity. It is the most successful security bargain in our history. It has kept the peace on a continent that dragged us into two world wars. And the only time the alliance’s mutual-defense promise has ever been invoked was after 9/11, when NATO troops fought beside Americans like myself in Afghanistan.
So if Putin tests that line, the question is simple. Will this President defend our allies, the way they once defended us? Or will he treat them as customers for our weapons and nothing more?
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen to 340.3 million barrels, the lowest level since 1983. That’s the smallest emergency oil cushion America has had in 43 years, right as the U.S. and Iran sign off on a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The administration’s explanation is straightforward: they’re releasing 172 million barrels by July, part of a coordinated drawdown with the International Energy Agency to offset the disruption from Iran’s closure of the strait. For context, the Reserve was created back in 1975 for exactly this kind of emergency, and analysts say the reserve needs a floor of 150 to 200 million barrels just to function. Using the reserve for an actual national security crisis is exactly what it’s there for, but we drained it close to the bottom in a matter of months.
On June 15, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that Britain will ban children under 16 from using a range of social media apps, including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. The ban will not cover YouTube Kids or messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal, and Starmer said enforcement will target tech companies, not children. He framed it as protecting young people from harmful content and excessive screen time, and said he would fight back if technology companies resist. The move follows Australia, which in December became the first country to impose sweeping curbs on teenage social media use.
