Hello everyone. Today we have several stories that all lead me to hope one thing: that the blatant corruption of the Trump Administration is finally catching up to them.
First, Trump’s pay-to-play pardons are officially under investigation by both the House and the Senate. At the same time, DOJ has launched an investigation into the obvious insider trading on oil futures around Trump’s Iran announcements. And all this is happening as the deadly hantavirus continues to spread while the US refuses to cooperate with the World Health Organization.
Ok, let’s get to it.
1. Trump Pardons Are Now Under Investigation as a “Pay-to-Play” Operation
Senate and House Democrats sent letters Thursday to more than a dozen recipients of Trump pardons and commutations, opening a formal investigation into whether the clemency was driven by “pay-to-play dynamics.”
The targets include some of Trump’s most controversial pardons of the second term:
Cryptocurrency billionaire Changpeng Zhao (money laundering)
Nursing home operator Joseph Schwartz (tax fraud)
Nikola founder Trevor Milton (securities fraud)
Private equity executive David Gentile, who saw $15.5 million in restitution to victims of a $1.6 billion Ponzi scheme wiped away when Trump commuted his sentence.
The pattern is the story. Asked at the White House last year why he pardoned Milton — who was sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding investors — Trump’s answer was simple:
Loyalty is the standard. Milton and his wife donated nearly $2 million to Trump-aligned PACs in October 2024, weeks before he was pardoned. Real estate developer Timothy Leiweke was pardoned after hiring Trump ally Trey Gowdy as his lawyer. Paul Walczak was pardoned for tax crimes after his mother raised millions of dollars for Trump.
Democrats have already documented $1.3 billion in cancelled restitution to victims of these crimes — money that came out of the pockets of defrauded investors and nursing home patients and went into the pockets of donors. Democrats don’t have subpoena power right now, but every name on this list becomes a witness if (when) Democrats take back the House.
The pardon power exists in the Constitution to correct injustice. Right now it is being used to launder it. Should Democrats regain a trifecta in 2028, pardon reform should be at the top of the list for their early priorities.
2. As the Hantavirus Cruise Ship Approaches Spain, the Outbreak Is Now in Five Countries
The MV Hondius set sail for Spain Wednesday after the Spanish government overruled the Canary Islands’ regional president and agreed to receive the ship at Tenerife, where 146 people on board — including 17 Americans — will begin disembarking May 11.
The strain has been confirmed as Andes virus, the only hantavirus known to spread human-to-human. WHO reports five confirmed infections, three suspected cases, and three deaths. New cases have surfaced in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Singapore as passengers who disembarked earlier started showing symptoms or testing positive. Three patients were medically evacuated from the ship by air ambulance Wednesday and flown to hospitals in Europe.
The CDC issued a statement Wednesday calling the United States “the world’s leader in global health security.” That sentence sits oddly next to the fact that we formally left the WHO fifteen weeks ago. The actual response — five countries, contact tracing across continents, lab confirmation of the strain — is being run by the WHO.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he hopes the outbreak will make the United States and Argentina, the two countries that have withdrawn from the WHO, reconsider their decisions:
Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. Three people are dead. Five countries are tracing cases. And the country that built the original global pandemic response is on the outside, writing press releases about how good it is at responding. The damage the Trump administration has done to science and public health is immeasurable. And the cost is measured in lives.
3. Trump Says Oil at $200 a Barrel “Would Have Been Worth It”
Trump told the Wall Street Journal this week that even if oil prices had hit $200 or $250 a barrel because of the Iran war, the conflict would still have been worth it.
Oil was around $72 a barrel the day before the war started on February 28. It peaked at $117 this week and is sitting near $100 today. Gas at the pump is $4.54 a gallon — the highest since 2022, and Americans are already feeling it. But that’s nowhere near what the President said he was willing to accept. Here’s what he told the Journal:
This is the President of the United States telling working Americans that doubling the price of oil would have been a fair trade for his war. Do the math. At $200 a barrel, gas at the pump runs about $7 a gallon. At $250 — the other number he floated — it’s closer to $8.30. The all-time U.S. record was $5.02 in June 2022, and Republicans still cite that brief spike as a mark against Joe Biden’s economic legacy.
The people who actually pay that price — truckers, families heating their homes, the airline workers who lost their jobs at Spirit last week — don’t get a vote on whether it’s “worth it.” At least until November.
4. Trump’s Top Economic Adviser Is Bragging That Americans Are Maxing Out Their Credit Cards
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett went on Fox Business Wednesday and described surging credit card debt as proof the U.S. economy is firing on all cylinders.
Asked by Maria Bartiromo about the jobs outlook, Hassett pivoted to consumer spending. Watch what he tried to sell as good news:
Americans are not maxing out their cards because they’re confident. They’re maxing them out because gas is $4.53 a gallon, inflation climbed to 3.3% in March, and roughly three-quarters of Americans now use credit cards to pay for groceries, gas, and medical bills. Total U.S. credit card debt is $1.28 trillion.
Watch where this messaging goes, because if top administration officials are reading from the same script, this is Trump’s actual economic argument heading into the midterms. Recent polling shows 65 percent of Americans already disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, once his strongest issue. More analysis here
This is the same party that spent fifteen years calling rising consumer debt a national emergency. The only thing that changed is who’s in the White House.
5. The DOJ Is Investigating Suspiciously Timed Oil Trades Made Right Before Trump Announced Iran War Decisions
The Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are jointly investigating four oil trades — totaling more than $2.6 billion — in which traders bet prices would fall minutes or hours before Trump publicly announced major Iran war decisions, ABC News reported this morning.
The pattern is striking.
On March 23, traders bet $500 million that oil prices would fall — fifteen minutes before Trump announced a delay on planned strikes against Iran’s power grid.
On April 7, traders bet $960 million prices would fall — hours before Trump announced a temporary ceasefire.
Two more clusters have been flagged. Senators Warren and Whitehouse asked the CFTC to look at this last month, citing a “recurring pattern” of trades anticipating administration decisions.
Here’s a graphic from The Kobeissi Letter:
This is what insider trading looks like when the inside information is a presidential decision about a war. Oil futures collapse the moment Trump posts a ceasefire or announces a strike delay. Whoever placed these trades knew what he was going to say and when.
Watch the next 30 to 60 days, because investigators are now pulling trading records that will reveal exactly which firms placed these trades. If even one of them traces back to someone with access to the Oval Office, this becomes the biggest insider trading scandal in American history.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Trump’s Newest Surgeon General Pick Just Got Caught Deleting Anti-Trump and Anti-RFK Tweets. CNN reported Wednesday that Trump’s third nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Nicole Saphier, has quietly deleted dozens of tweets from the past year criticizing both the President and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The White House is standing by her, calling Saphier “an accomplished physician” and “an outspoken voice on breast cancer prevention.” The deleted posts, preserved by the Internet Archive, include Saphier accusing the administration of hiding the loss of measles elimination status until after the midterms, mocking Trump and Musk as “petty, loud, and obnoxious” during their public feud, questioning Trump’s MRI, and criticizing his Tylenol warnings to pregnant women. She also wrote that Kennedy’s hand-picked vaccine advisory committee was “lacking diversity of thought.” Saphier is Trump’s third surgeon general nominee, after the first two — Janette Nesheiwat and Casey Means — failed to make it through the process.
Epstein Suicide Surfaces that Federal Investigators Had Never Seen. A federal judge in New York unsealed a purported suicide note from Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday, dated to Epstein’s failed July 23, 2019 suicide attempt, less than two weeks before he was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell. The note was filed under seal years ago as part of the case of Epstein’s former cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, who said he was the one who found it. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas ordered it released after the New York Times requested it, finding no sufficient reason to keep it sealed.
The Times reported that the note was never seen by federal investigators and was absent from the millions of Epstein-related documents released by the DOJ. It surfaced publicly on the exact same day Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spent four hours behind closed doors on Capitol Hill answering questions about his own Epstein ties. And look, this story keeps not going away. Every time the White House tries to close the file, a new piece of evidence shows up that everyone except federal investigators somehow had access to.
