Hey everybody. Happy Friday. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today. Last year, a private prison company offered to sell an empty prison in rural Minnesota to the state for 75 million dollars. Minnesota said no. This summer, the Trump administration bought the same building for almost 500 million. The difference is bigger than the losses in the Minnesota fraud scandal Republicans can’t stop talking about. So if they want to talk about fraud in Minnesota, JD Vance’s fraud squad should be all over this. Right?
We’ll also get into Trump blowing up over his former lawyer’s 50 million dollar payday, a new book alleging Jared Kushner got paid to have a Secretary of State fired, JD Vance answering a question about the cost of a home with a joke about a senator’s butt, and a new report on how Todd Blanche kept Ghislaine Maxwell from talking about Trump.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Donor Gets Sweetheart Deal
In Appleton, Minnesota, a town of fewer than 1,400 people, there’s a prison that has been sitting empty since 2010. It belongs to CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison companies in the country.
In August, the Department of Homeland Security bought it to turn into an ICE detention center. The price, according to the company’s own filings: a whopping 495.6 million dollars.
Now KARE 11, the NBC station in Minneapolis, has obtained an email from May of last year. In it, CoreCivic tells Minnesota’s Department of Corrections it would be willing to sell the state that same prison. The asking price? 75 million dollars. That included the upgrades necessary to get the facility back up and running.
Minnesota passed. But fifteen months later, federal taxpayers paid more than six times that price for the same building. The state’s corrections commissioner, the man who turned the offer down, couldn’t believe it. He told KARE 11, “It’s unexplainable!” And then added, “I still can’t figure it out.”
So what changed? You know what I’m about to say. CoreCivic gave half a million dollars to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee. That bought them more than just a sweetheart deal in Minnesota. CoreCivic also sold the government a prison in Kansas and two in California. Those four deals add up to more than 2.2 billion dollars.
What’s more, the company still gets paid to run them. In Appleton alone, it expects about 75 million dollars annually. That’s the original asking price, every single year.
CoreCivic has defended the deals. It says the federal government set the price after its own assessment. As for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin? His office hasn’t commented. No shock there. And the Government Accountability Office warned last month that ICE is buying these buildings without figuring out whether it can afford to own them.
Keep in mind, Minnesota is a state Republicans have been hammering on fraud after the Feeding Our Future scandal. If you haven’t heard of it, long story short, a nonprofit in Minneapolis billed the government for meals it was supposed to give to kids during the pandemic. But the meals were never served. And it cost taxpayers about 250 million dollars.
Obviously, the whole thing is despicable and it’s good they got caught. But that’s the point. They were held accountable. More than 70 people have been charged.
Meanwhile, taxpayers just paid more than 500 percent over last year’s asking price for a prison. JD Vance swears his fraud task force is cracking down. So they should be all over this, right? Don’t hold your breath. It’s a donor!
Look, the list of things the Democrats need to investigate is very, very long. And it keeps growing. But they need to find out who signed off on this deal, and why.
2. Trump Wants His Cut
We talked about this when it broke, but as a refresher, Alina Habba is Trump’s former personal lawyer. Last year, while she was still advising the Justice Department, she took a job as general counsel for a company tied to a billionaire Venezuelan family. The head of that family had been charged with bribery and was looking for a pardon. Trump gave him one a few weeks after Habba started her new role.
Habba says there was no conflict of interest. That she had nothing to do with the pardon. But they are paying her 10 million dollars a year for four years, plus bonuses. More than 50 million dollars guaranteed. For a general counsel job.
There has been an update since we last talked about this. It turns out that when Trump found out, he erupted. Not because of how it looked. Because of how much she made. And he wanted his cut on the spoils. According to people briefed on his calls, he told aides and allies Habba should donate some of that money to his presidential library. Or at least to another Trump cause. And he said the family shouldn’t pay out the rest of her contract.
When Senator Jon Ossoff was asked about the Habba story on MS Now, he put it perfectly.
Look, Trump tries to talk a big game about fraud. But he isn’t fooling anyone. Trump has been using the presidency to make money for himself and his family since day one. And everybody around Trump can line their pockets, too. All they have to do is make sure the boss gets his cut.
3. Kushner’s Foreign Payday
This comes from a new book, Princes and Thieves, by investigative journalist Matthew Cole. It’s about Kushner and the ruler of the United Arab Emirates. It uncovers a lot of shady deals. But here’s a big one.
In 2017, Saudi Arabia and the UAE cut off their neighbor Qatar with a blockade. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, publicly opposed it. The Saudis and Emiratis wanted him gone. In March 2018, Trump fired him by tweet.
According to the book, there was a middleman. Kushner had been pushing for Tillerson’s exit behind the scenes for months. After he was out, a source told the author, Kushner pressed the UAE ruler to speed up the payment they had already agreed on. A month later, the UAE sent 50 million dollars through Azerbaijan into a bank account in Cyprus for Kushner.
It gets stranger. Tillerson’s firing sent Qatar into a panic. So the Qataris decided to take care of Kushner too. In the spring of 2018, they told him they would help save his family’s troubled Manhattan skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue. After that, Trump softened his hard line on Qatar. It isn’t clear what the president knew.
Now, these are just allegations. Kushner’s lawyer denies he had an account in Cyprus or that he has asked for money from the UAE’s ruler. Innocent until proven guilty, I suppose.
But this is the third story on today’s show about someone getting rich off this administration. Would it be that surprising if true? That a foreign government paid the president’s son-in-law to influence American diplomacy?
Americans stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt a long time ago. And there’s no going back now.
4. JD Vance Is Weird
On Thursday night, Fox News aired a town hall with the vice president. Once again, he made a fool of himself.
Take the case of a young woman who stood up and asked him how Americans her age are expected to raise a family given the cost of living.
Bizarre. You would think he would at least have a decent answer for a question most young Americans are asking right now. Instead, the vice president deflected by going for a running bit about Senator Jon Husted’s behind.
After chuckling to himself, his actual answer wasn’t much better. He said his job is to make life more affordable. Great job on that front. And his personal advice? “It’s never the right time.” He said his one regret is that he and his wife didn’t get married and have kids sooner.
Yeesh. She didn’t ask for marriage advice. She asked how anyone is supposed to buy a house when the average home costs more than 415,000 dollars.
When Vance did get around to housing, he played the blame game.
Now we’re back to the same old excuses. It’s the illegal immigrants fault. Of course it is.
Look, Vance has been telling young Americans to have more babies since before he got to the White House. When one of them told him to his face that she can’t afford to, he cracked a joke and blamed immigrants. That’s not an answer. And if he wants to run for president in 2028, that moment is going to follow him.
5. Blanche Silenced Maxwell
In July of last year, Todd Blanche sat down for two days with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted accomplice. Blanche was the number two at the Justice Department at the time, having once served as Trump’s personal defense lawyer.
On Monday, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a 50-page report accusing the administration of covering up Trump’s ties to Epstein.
One detail stands out. The FBI had on file a woman, identified as Jane Doe, who alleged that Trump tried to assault her when she was 14. Blanche never asked Maxwell about her directly. And according to the report, when Maxwell started to talk about Jane’s claims on her own, Blanche cut her off. He told her not to share specifics. That he didn’t want to get into “he said, she said.”
The report’s conclusion is that the interview was never meant to uncover information. It was meant to discourage Maxwell from sharing it. Trump has denied any wrongdoing. But he has fought the release of the Epstein files every step of the way. That’s a man who has something to hide.
When a prosecutor sits down with a witness, the job is to figure out what she knows. You don’t cut her off the moment she starts talking about the most serious allegation in the file. Not unless finding out is the last thing you want to hear.
So why would Blanche do that? Remember what he said in a recent interview: “I work for President Trump.” And remember what Trump said about him: “He kept me out of jail.” Blanche swore an oath to the Constitution, not to Donald Trump. But he has never stopped acting like Trump’s lawyer. Not even when tasked to investigate allegations as heinous as these.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
A CBS News investigation published Tuesday found that Trump’s pardons and commutations have wiped out at least $119 million in court-ordered restitution owed to crime victims since January 2025. CBS reviewed more than 160 clemency orders and found at least 18 recipients with ties to the White House, including people who hired Trump’s former lawyers as lobbyists or whose families gave big money to pro-Trump groups. The White House says the president is simply exercising his constitutional authority at his discretion, and spokeswoman Lauren Bis insisted that anyone paying to lobby for a pardon is wasting their money. Roughly 70 percent of these clemency grants skipped the Justice Department’s pardon office entirely. For comparison, Biden’s clemency orders over four years erased about $14,000 in restitution.
Hackers published a searchable database on Wednesday with the names, job titles, work emails, phone numbers and office locations of more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors. About 21,000 of them work at Customs and Border Protection and another 10,000 at ICE and its investigative arm, including dozens of agents flagged in the records as certified undercover. The data appears to have been pulled from DHS’s Okta login system back in August, and the files also show which surveillance tools each employee is cleared to use, with Palantir and PenLink named outright. A hacker calling themselves the Department of Peace claimed credit and left a note saying DHS has everyone else’s information, so it’s only fair the public has theirs.
