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Story by Lee Moran

MS NOW’s Jonathan Capehart struggled to stop laughing after airing a supercut of Donald Trump’s claims on Sunday’s broadcast of “The Weekend.”

The montage featured clips of the president repeatedly insisting that, under him, the “immense power of the state” would never again “be weaponized to persecute political opponents” and that his administration “has acted swiftly and decisively to restore fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

“Perhaps on Earth 2 that is what Trump did, but for those living here on Earth 1…” Capehart said, breaking into laughter, apparently at the contrast between Trump’s remarks and his actions since returning to office.
Story by Brandi Buchman

WASHINGTON — The final ruling of the Supreme Court term is over, but the stench of hypocrisy lingers.

If you were to read only one opinion that emerged as the final bell rung, it would likely be the birthright citizenship ruling that stopped President Donald Trump from telling people born on U.S. soil they aren’t Americans. From that ruling alone, one might believe the court’s image of itself as an unshakeable, immovable defender of the Constitution.

“The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

But the justices closed out their term with a handful of more questionable decisions.

They supercharged the power of the executive branch yet again by giving Trump — and any successor — nearly unfettered power to fire independent agency officials, upending 90 years of precedent and blowing apart congressional oversight. The court also removed limits on how much money political committees can spend when coordinating with single candidates during an election, meaning corporate donors and billionaires will have more opportunity to influence elections.

And in a final swipe — of many this year — on equal protection laws, the justices upheld a ban on trans girls’ and women’s participation in sports while openly disparaging transgender identity as a “lie to the public.”
Opinion by Sydney Lake

MacKenzie Scott has become one of the most affluent philanthropists of our time. After all, she’s given away more than $26 billion during the past few years to thousands of organizations through her organization Yield Giving.

While many of her recipients had never received a gift of that size and many have called them life-changing gifts, not everyone sees her work in the same way. Take Elon Musk, who recently became the world’s first trillionaire, who thinks Scott’s giving is actually making the world “worse off.”

On June 27, Pubity, a major viral media and social news brand, posted on X about Scott’s giving, saying her $26.3 billion in donations has made her one of the “biggest individual donors in history.” The ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was recently confirmed as the biggest megadonor in 2025.

Then, an account with 22,500 followers with the name @FrenlyOfficer whose bio describes them as a “Heterosexual Alpha Male,” replied to Pubity’s post about Scott saying “Unfortunately, she’s spending it making the world a worse place.” Musk then responded to @FrenlyOfficer agreeing with the sentiment, saying: “Sadly, yes.”
Story by Ewan Palmer

A woman who alleges she was sexually assaulted by Donald Trump when she was 13 years old has gone into hiding over fears of retaliation.

A family member of the woman, identified only as Jane Doe 4, told The Guardian that she is “staying off the grid” and away from the Trump administration amid the fallout from allegations that resurfaced in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Jane Doe 4 alleges she was abused and trafficked by Epstein, and that the disgraced financier took her to New York or New Jersey and introduced her to Trump when she was about 13 years old in 1984. The White House has described the allegations as “total baselessness,” a view it says is supported by the fact that the Biden administration was aware of the claims but did “nothing with them.”

The woman was interviewed four times by the FBI in 2019, when Trump was serving his first term, soon after Epstein was arrested on federal child sex-trafficking charges.

There is no indication that an official investigation into the allegation involving the president was conducted.
Story by TMZ Staff

The United States turned 250 on Saturday ... and a group of white supremacists celebrated by flooding the streets of the nation's capital -- much to the chagrin of their fellow Americans.

The Patriot Front -- a white supremacy group which was founded in the aftermath of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia back in 2017 -- showed up in full force in Washington, D.C. ... gathering outside a public transit station.
Story by Atlanta Black Star New

President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have been put on notice. Not by Congress or any court of law, but by a rogue military officer who couldn’t stay silent any longer.

Air Force Major Jason Watson risked his career to do what no one else in the military has done yet: call for the impeachment, conviction, and removal of Trump and Vance from office.

On Wednesday, Watson showed up at a news conference by the activist group Removal Coalition on the Capitol steps in full military garb in violation of Air Force rules. Removal Coalition lobbies members of Congress to impeach Trump.

Democratic Congressman Al Green, who has filed articles of impeachment against Trump at least a half-dozen times, escorted him to the gathering, according to NBC News.

“I’m here with him because Representative Green is the only member of Congress that has demonstrated the courage and conviction to … force a vote on articles of impeachment,” the service member stated.
Story by Matthew Chapman

Nobel Prize-winning economist turned political analyst Paul Krugman ran over the latest numbers on just how many people fell for President Donald Trump's self-enrichment scams — and came up with an astonishing figure.

This follows a New York Times report that details the losses to investors from Trump's cryptocurrency "meme coin" issued around his second inauguration.

That report estimated a loss of $3.8 billion — but more than that, Krugman noted, "even more surprising is the number of people who were in effect suckers here — almost a million. That’s really amazing."

Trump himself promoted the $TRUMP coin, noted the Times report, and while around 500,000 people did profit off the trades, it “reflects a small number of early buyers capturing enormous gains while the broad retail majority absorbed the losses,” said analytics firm Nansen — a classic hallmark of so-called "pump and dump" schemes, which are prosecuted as illegal when they occur in the stock market but are harder to police in the more lightly regulated crypto world.
Story by OK! Staff

President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosure is drawing sharp criticism for revealing the extent to which he and his family have profited during his time in office.

The mandatory annual filing showed the president reporting more than $2 billion in income, including around $1.2 billion from cryptocurrency ventures tied to his family. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, sharply criticized the Trump family for what it called “profiting off the Presidency in ways that demean the office.”

The disclosure showed Trump received $593 million from World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture he founded with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. The company’s CEO is Zach Witkoff, son of Steve Witkoff, the New York property investor Trump has used as a special envoy in the Middle East and Russia. Trump also netted $635 million from the $TRUMP memecoin he launched shortly before his inauguration.

The Crypto Windfall
The Journal’s editorial board argued that “The Trump clan is cashing in on the Presidency in big and sketchy ways,” pointing to World Liberty Financial deals with foreign actors and companies that may have been seeking influence.

The board cited past reporting on deals involving a crypto firm based in the United Arab Emirates and the government of Pakistan. It also noted that the UAE used World Liberty’s “stablecoin” to invest in Binance, whose co-founder Changpeng Zhao was pardoned by Trump after pleading guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act and serving a four-month jail term.

“A sitting president reporting more than $2 billion in income is not just unusual — it demands serious scrutiny,” said Christopher Lee, founder of Foresight Strategic Advisors, who has three decades of experience in political campaigns.
Story by Nicolai Haugsted

Donald Trump’s promise of hosting the biggest Independence Day fireworks celebration in American history produced an unforgettable night over Washington, D.C. — but not entirely for the reasons the White House had hoped.

According to Daily Beast, hours after hundreds of thousands of fireworks lit up the National Mall, city officials urged residents to stay indoors as smoke lingered over the capital, prompting a “Code Red” air quality alert warning of potentially unhealthy conditions.

Fireworks followed delayed celebration
Trump’s America 250 event was already running behind schedule after severe weather and evacuation orders delayed proceedings.

The president’s speech did not begin until after 11 p.m., pushing the 40-minute fireworks display well past midnight.

Around 850,000 fireworks were launched from ten separate locations across Washington in what Trump had promoted as the largest fireworks display ever staged.

“LET’S HAVE SOME FUN even if we are out late.”

By the time the finale ended in the early hours of July 5, thick smoke had spread across much of the city, partially obscuring the skyline and leaving a visible haze hanging over the National Mall.
Opinion by John Stoehr

I will spare you the details of the rightwing reaction to the Supreme Court's decision last week to uphold birthright citizenship. I will spare you because they are disgusting, especially on America's 250th anniversary. What you need to know is that the mainstream of the Republican Party is no longer flirting with the so-called "Great Replacement Theory." In GOP circles, the idea that immigration is "civilizational suicide" is now conventional wisdom.

I know the Democrats have a lot on their plates right now, but the rest of us need to push them into accepting this reality. Rightwingers no longer care, if they ever genuinely did, about the "illegal" part of "illegal immigration." As their reaction to the court should make clear, federal law and the Constitution are obstacles to overcome. To them, it doesn't matter what immigrants do or don't. What matters is who they are – namely their race, culture and religion – and from the viewpoint of these reactionaries, it's their humanity that's "illegal."

I think it's up to the rest of us to push the Democrats, because they tend toward inertia, not action. The party's mainstream – think Chuck Schumer – will interpret the Supreme Court's decision on birthright citizenship as the end of the story. Fact is, it's probably the beginning. First, because the court itself is corrupt and in need of punishment. It's only a matter of time before it strikes down 158 years of Constitutional law. Second, because we have been here before. Democrats used to think abortion was settled. Look where that perspective got us.
Elon’s Musk’s ‘DOGE’ cuts fleeced the government workforce during the beginning of Trump’s second term, eliminating tens of thousands of federal jobs and shrinking many agencies. NOTUS is reporting that now, the Trump administration is hiring again to address staffing shortages and operational problems. NOTUS also reporting that the Treasury Department has an internal report warning about the dangers of an ‘AI bubble.’ NOTUS reporter Eric Katz joins Way Too Early to discuss.
Fox News is drawing attention after repeatedly airing footage from Donald Trump's Great American State Fair that has fueled a new wave of online debate. This video examines the broadcast, the reactions to the crowd shots, and why critics argue the footage tells a different story than the event's public messaging. It also explores how the clips spread across social media and why the coverage has become a talking point for both supporters and critics. Watch the full analysis to see the footage, the surrounding context, and why this Fox News segment is generating so much discussion.
Story by RNS

(RNS) — It should be a contradiction that the Confederate flag was marched alongside the Betsy Ross flag through the streets near the U.S. Capitol on Independence Day.

The rebel banner was brought to the Capitol by hundreds of masked agents associated with Patriot Front, a white supremacist hate group founded after the 2017 showdown over a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia. It waved in the wind alongside the flag of the 13 colonies and upside-down U.S. flags — a symbol of national distress — seeming to imply they were calling a nation in peril back to, or closer to, the exclusionary democratic vision of its founders. They echoed this in their chants to “reclaim America.”

But the hateful demonstration recalled a dissonance that has always been present in America’s politics.

Erin Wilson, intelligence project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in response: “The white nationalist hate group, the Patriot Front, hid behind masks and marched the streets of Washington, D.C., ironically representing the opposite of patriotism.”

Many Americans fall prey to the temptation to agree with Wilson that overt racists marching Washington, D.C., streets on the nation’s birthday are “not us.” But these rebuttals are lazy at best.

One of the hardest parts about witnessing Patriot Front march the streets is knowing that they’re not entirely wrong. The United States was founded by racists and constructed through an unfathomable amount of racial violence, and its future continues to move forward on the tracks of racial discourse established by its founders. Just as they chanted in Charlottesville that they will not be replaced, and as they intruded upon the edited official story that officials would like to tell in the Capitol on America’s 250th birthday, Patriot Front stood in for all white supremacist groups saying they will not be erased from the story of how the U.S. became “great.”
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on June 9, 2026, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) addressed his Republican colleagues accusing the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of fraud and called out Trump University, which faced multiple lawsuits over alleged fraud.
Story by Ed Mazza

MS NOW host Chris Hayes on Tuesday said President Donald Trump “put his finger on the scale” to help the US team at the FIFA World Cup.

Last week, Trump personally called FIFA president Gianni Infantino after US star forward Folarin Balogun was given a red card and suspended. The decision was overturned after the phone call, prompting anger throughout the soccer community.

But the effort backfired, and the Belgian players mercilessly mocked Trump on social media in retaliation, doing his YMCA dance after they defeated the Americans on Monday.

“You could just say the US just had a bad game,” Hayes said. “Instead, a lot of people are wondering if Donald Trump curses sports teams ― if he has a sort of reverse Midas touch where everything in his grasp turns to, well, the opposite of gold.”
Story by Steve Benen

It’s been almost three years since Kevin McCarthy became the first sitting House speaker to be ousted in the middle of a congressional session, but the California Republican has nevertheless tried to maintain a public profile and has routinely appeared on conservative media to push partisan talking points.

So it wasn’t too surprising to see McCarthy on Fox News on Monday night, responding to the latest sexual assault allegations against Graham Platner, still a candidate for Senate at the time.

As part of an apparent effort to contextualize the scandals surrounding the Maine Democrat, the former GOP leader said, “One thing I know about Republicans is when we had a very bad candidate and found out, we didn’t vote for that person. We walked away.”

Moments later, McCarthy added, “When Matt Gaetz came forward, we got rid of him.”

As is too often the case, the failed former House speaker not only had it backward, but his mistake also offered a timely reminder of details that made him and his party look worse, not better.

Indeed, Gaetz offers a rather extraordinary example. The Justice Department investigated the Florida Republican over allegations of alleged sex trafficking, and while Gaetz repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and the prosecutors’ probe ended without charges, his House GOP colleagues made no effort to “get rid of him” as the scandal intensified.
New footage obtained by KHOU 11 News raises serious questions about ICE’s account of a fatal Houston traffic stop that left 52-year-old father of three Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dead.
Story by Marco Margaritoff

President Donald Trump on Wednesday made a series of claims about Iran while attending a NATO summit in Turkey that clashed with wholly opposite comments he made over the past month, which CNN host Abby Phillip highlighted with a damning split-screen.

The MAGA leader told reporters Wednesday that the memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the war is “over,” calling the leadership “sick people” and “scum” and reiterating his administration’s claims that Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons to attack the US.

“Iran’s deputy foreign minister said that the insults ‘are not a sign of strength,’” Phillip said Wednesday. “Instead, they show Trump’s policy, ‘based on brute force’ and sanctions and threats have failed. He then called Trump a ‘criminal’ and ‘murderous.’”
Opinion by Thom Hartmann

It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016, which Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency that time.

A peer-reviewed study released Thursday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.

Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day.
Story by Tom Boggioni

President Donald Trump's boast on Truth Social that his tariff war spurred Toyota to move its Tacoma truck manufacturing operations to the U.S. was drowned in derision by the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal this week.

The conservative WSJ board on Thursday rained on Trump's parade by pointing out that the manufacturing move should be celebrated, but, in the larger picture, his tariffs have been a disaster and Americans are still furious.

"The President is right that his tariffs are at work—in destroying U.S. jobs and raising prices," the editors wrote.

"Mr. Trump’s Section 232 national security tariffs on autos and parts have cost $35.2 billion through April of this year, and his steel and aluminum tariffs another $17.5 billion, according to U.S. government data."
A devastating new history lesson is drawing intense attention after Joy Reid appeared to reveal that violence against Black Americans was effectively not a crime until the 1960s — because pre-Civil War Black people were not legally considered human so killing one was a property crime, and post-Civil War any white man who killed a Black person knew he would face an all-white jury that would never convict him, which is precisely why the Klan used violence to prevent Black people from registering to vote, since voter registration was the only path to jury eligibility. The unfolding history is now fueling fresh urgency as Reid connects more than 4,000 documented lynchings during the Jim Crow era — for offenses including looking at a white woman, not crossing the street fast enough, or talking back — to the deliberate cultural mythology of Black hyper-violence that was invented specifically to cover up the fact that America is the most dangerous place on earth to be Black, not because of other Black people but because of violence directed at Black people.
Trump and Epstein’s relationship remains one of the most controversial elite connections in modern politics. Investigators point to shared social circles, overlapping interests, and decades of interaction. Experts argue that their link exposes deeper issues of power and influence. This report uncovers the truth behind their long-standing relationship.
Story by Jack Buckby

Trump and Iran Publicly Disagree Over Next Round Of Talks: U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday, July 10, that the regime in Tehran had contacted his administration and asked the United States to continue negotiations. Trump presented the news as a sign that the most recent round of American strikes, which hit 90 military targets inside the country, were working. But later that same day, Tehran was disputing reports that another round of negotiations or technical discussions had been arranged.

While Iran has so far not directly denied that talks may continue, a source close to the negotiating team told the state-linked Fars News Agency that talks of a new round next week had “no real basis.”

What Fars Just Revealed
The Fars news agency published an update on Telegram disputing claims made in Fox News and Al Arabiya that a new round of negotiations was due to take place between Iran and the United States next week. Citing a “well-informed source close to the Iranian negotiating team,” the outlet said the claim is not correct.

The outlet said that technical talks, which began as a result of Iran’s earlier round of drone attacks against commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, will not continue for the time being.

“This informed source, in an interview with a Fars reporter, denied the news published about the finalization of negotiations in Islamabad, as well as the claim that the technical talks will continue next week, and said: this news is a lie and has no real basis,” the outlet reported.
CNN split-screen: Trump praised an Iran MOU at G7, then called Iran 'scum' after Strait of Hormuz attacks.
Story by José Olivares

The three men who were in the van when federal immigration officials shot and killed a man in Houston, Texas, this week are strongly disputing the Trump administration’s narrative of the events and are being pressured to sign deportation orders, according to their lawyer and lawmakers.

The three men, who were arrested by immigration officials during the incident, denied that the driver of the vehicle, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, “weaponized” his vehicle against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. They also told their lawyer that there was never an ICE official in front of the van and that the shots that killed Salgado came from the “sides” of the vehicle.

On early Tuesday morning, while Salgado, his brother and two men were heading to work in Houston, he was shot and killed during a “targeted enforcement operation” by ICE officials. It is the latest shooting by federal immigration officials amid the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigrant campaign.

Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, a Texas attorney representing two of the men in the van, said during a press conference on Friday his clients “reiterated that at no point was there ever an agent standing in front of the vehicle, nor was an agent ever placed in the line of danger”. The men’s claims were first reported by the Washington Post.
Story by María Teresita Armstrong-Matta

Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson shared his speculations for MAGA ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

In a recent Substack post, Wilson wrote that MAGA cannot win a fair midterm election fight and plans to resort to cheating.

"Let me tell you a secret about the MAGA movement that isn’t a secret at all, because they keep saying it out loud: they know they can’t win a fair fight in November," Wilson wrote.
Opinion by Matthew Rozsa

A large number of President Donald Trump’s supporters began wearing masks in mid-2020 after their leader urged them to do so — and now, a scientific paper explains the psychology behind why they did so, per PsyPost.

“Political leaders play a potentially important role shaping behaviors and beliefs during crises. In the pandemic, a number of high-status politicians, notably leaders of populist parties, were seen to diminish compliance with institutional recommendations by casting doubt on COVID guidelines,” proclaimed the abstract of a recent study by Bartholomew A. Konechni, a sociologist at Sciences Po Paris, published in the journal American Sociological Review. “But what happens when such leaders change position and endorse previously discouraged behaviors?”

Konechni analyzed data of more than 5,000 patients from the Understanding Coronavirus in America panel to study how millions of Trump’s supporters switched from refusing to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic to embracing them, entirely because of Trump saying on July 1, 2020, that he started wearing them because he thought doing so made him look like the Lone Ranger. He learned that when Trump made his announcement that he would wear masks, it closed the gap between Republican and Democratic compliance by roughly 40 percent, particularly among individuals who were more exposed to the early-summer spikes in COVID-19. Yet this did not mean that they necessarily abandoned their original anti-mask views.
Story by Lee Moran

Political strategist and longtime Donald Trump critic Steve Schmidt published a blistering assessment Sunday of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), calling him a “parasitic sucker fish” and “the hollowest of hollow men.”

Writing in his newsletter “The Warning,” Schmidt attacked Graham, who died at age 71 over the weekend, as an “unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.”
Story by Lorena O’Neil

A moment that started out as a disagreement between Tracestin Shepherd and his girlfriend has been at the center of a swirl of questions about the tragic death of 18-year-old Mississippi football player Nolan Wells. The video posted to social media of a group of young people seemingly in a heated altercation has been believed to be the last time Wells was pictured or heard on video before his disappearance and death, which has made national news. But Shepherd, a close friend of Wells, says what really happened in the video isn't how it's been portrayed.  

At around 3:30 p.m. on July 4, Shepherd says he was with a large group of friends from high school, including Wells, to celebrate the holiday. Shepherd and his family took a boat over to Horn Island, a barrier island off the coast of Mississippi, where he planned to meet up with Wells and some other friends from high school - the friends often took the 45-minute ride over to Horn Island on weekends to hang out and had been there since that morning.
Story by TMZ Staff

Boosie Badazz says he paid big money for a presidential pardon ... but now he's claiming all he got was a massive bill and an empty promise ... and he wants a big refund.

According to a bombshell NOTUS report, the rapper is taking legal action against political operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman after allegedly shelling out $600,000 to help secure a pardon from President Trump -- one Boosie says never came.

The report says Boosie -- whose legal name is Torence Hatch -- struck a deal with the pair last fall after they pitched themselves as having major pull inside Trump's orbit. Boosie claims they were so confident, they acted like they had POTUS "on speed dial."

Things allegedly escalated on New Year's Day ... when Boosie's lawyer got a call claiming Trump had already signed the pardon and the White House just hadn't announced it yet. But according to the report, the pardon never surfaced ... and Boosie is now trying to recover $300,000 under a clause in the contract requiring half the fee be refunded if no pardon was delivered.
Trump claims a 300-yard gash in Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool; witnesses and photos find no sign.
Opinion by Thom Hartmann

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.

She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.

In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.
Bennito L. Kelty

A CNN anchor fact-checked President Donald Trump's election claims in a segment that prefaced the president's primetime speech about election meddling.

John King looked at Trump's insistence that the election was "rigged" and "stolen," as well as the dozens of lawsuits he's filed in battleground states. The only thing the Trump administration had said about his Thursday night speech was that it would focus on election meddling.

King noted that if Trump had won a lawsuit to overturn the results in Georgia, "That would have changed the math, but not enough. Joe Biden is still the president."
Story by David Edwards

Hawaii's highest Court launched a rare attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing the John Roberts-led bench of enabling "naked racism" and bending the Constitution to "whatever the Court needs it to be."

The broadside came buried inside a ruling handed down this week that threw out the controversial 1990 rape conviction of a Maui man. The court found that discredited FBI hair-and-fiber testimony was false and denied Daniel Granillo a fair trial, and ordered a new trial.

Using the ruling as a vehicle, Justice Todd Eddins explained why Hawaii no longer takes its cues on constitutional rights from Washington, and he opened with race.

"The Roberts Court sees only white," Eddins charged, opening with an attack on the chief justice.
Story by David Edwards

A federal judge struck down President Donald Trump's ongoing effort to "rewrite the history" of the Jan. 6 riot, using a court ruling to cement the facts of the Capitol attack.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper — the Obama-appointed judge who originally sentenced Jennifer "Jenna" Ryan for her role in the riot — issued the ruling Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, denying Ryan's bid to erase her conviction from the record.

Ryan, a Dallas-area real estate agent, was sentenced in 2021 to 60 days in prison after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor for parading inside the Capitol, according to CBS News. Trump pardoned her on Jan. 20, 2025, as part of a blanket clemency covering roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants, local outlets reported.

After the pardon, Ryan returned to court asking Cooper to go further. She sought to wipe her conviction from the record entirely, using a rarely granted legal remedy that allows a court to vacate a conviction due to a fundamental error in the proceedings.

Cooper denied that request and used the ruling to tear down Trump's reimagined version of Jan. 6.

"Given the historical significance of the events of January 6 and ongoing efforts to rewrite them, the Court will take the opportunity to set the record straight…" Cooper wrote, making clear the ruling was about more than Ryan's petition.
Story by Ray Sanchez, CNN

Days after Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco was arrested by federal officers in Nebraska last summer, government officials branded the Venezuelan delivery driver with incendiary labels: “a criminal illegal alien,” “a known Tren de Aragua terrorist” and even alleged he slammed one agent’s head into the ground and choked her.

But that version of events, reported by some news outlets, began unraveling when bystander videos contradicted accounts painting the immigrant as a villain, the officers as victims.

Then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called Hurtado-Cariaco a “vicious Tren de Aragua gang member” in a June 2025 Justice Department statement.

“Violent attacks from terrorists against those who serve our communities will be met with swift and decisive justice,” Blanche said. The attorney general at the time, Pamela Bondi, weighed in, announcing a charge of attempted murder.

To his public defender, Hurtado-Cariaco’s case is yet another instance where video footage or other evidence largely undercuts the government’s account of immigration enforcement actions.

“It certainly seems like a pattern to me,” Federal Public Defender Richard McWilliams told CNN, referring to recent immigration arrests where DHS’ narratives were at odds with the evidence or undermined by video footage.

“If no one had recorded it, we’d be going to trial,” McWilliams said of his client’s arrest, underscoring just how crucial such documentation can be in high-stakes cases with pliable narratives.
Story by Thomas Kika

More critics in the technology space have begun to get their hands on one of President Donald Trump and his family's biggest scams, the "Trump phone," and their reactions have been brutal so far, with some tarring the cheap device as "awful" and "deeply unserious."

First launched over a year ago, Trump Mobile was an initiative launched by The Trump Organization, claiming that it would be able to sell an affordable-yet-premium smartphone, the "T1," made entirely in the U.S., in keeping with the president's aggressive anti-imports agenda. In the months since then, the idea has appeared to devolve rapidly, with the design going from the one initially shown, looking like an all-gold iPhone, to the version that is now being sent to the press, which is an old HTC model with cheap plastic parts painted gold. The packaging also touts that it is merely "assembled" in the U.S., suggesting that the parts were made overseas.

Despite around 600,000 customers placing a deposit, phones have yet to actually ship to customers. Finished models have, however, gradually made their way into the hands of mobile reviewers, and the results have been rough.
Story by Lee Cowan

In downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, stands a memorial that's easy to pass – six bronze paddles stretching toward the sky. The plaque is hard to read in places, not because the words have washed away, but because what they say is so hard to believe.

There aren't many tours that tell the tale, but Cedric Harrison says he's determined to make it known. "The first thing we have to do to solve this problem is education," he said. "One of my elders always told me, if you knew better, you do better."

Not far away is Wilmington's First Presbyterian Church, where parts of that story live, too.

Lauren Collins, now a journalist at The New Yorker magazine, grew up in this church, and was baptized here. She pointed us to a stained-glass window in the back dedicated to Col. Walker Taylor. As a kid she didn't know the stories behind men like him, but she says, they weren't the only mysteries about her hometown. "I always had this sense that there was something a little off, a little amiss," she said.
Story by Matthew Rozsa

When rapper Boosie Badazz — a.k.a. Torence Ivy Hatch Jr. — announced he was suing a lobbying firm that he paid to get him pardoned by President Donald Trump for alleged unlawful firearm possession, the music star did more than air his own grievances. According to a recent report, Hatch also shed light on how Trump has systematically used his pardoning authority to enrich his allies and consolidate his power.

“$600,000: That's the amount rapper Boosie Badazz reportedly paid a Washington lobbying firm to secure a presidential pardon,” NPR's Ayesha Rascoe told NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright in a Sunday interview. “The rapper, whose real name is Torrence Hatch, was looking to overturn a federal conviction over the unlawful possession of a firearm. But the pardon hasn't happened. Now Hatch is reportedly looking to recover half of what he paid through arbitration. The rapper's case represents a growing industry in Washington, D.C.: wealthy clients paying to try to secure clemency from President Trump.”

As Wright explained to Rascoe, “There was an impetus by folks around the President, and the President himself, to do more of these pardons,” with the Justice Department’s pardon attorney Ed Martin losing much of his authority to the president and his inner circle.
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