Political News

On Tuesday, eight protesters who the Justice Department accused of having connections to antifa were sentenced to decades in federal prison over a shooting outside a Texas immigration detention center that left one police officer wounded. 

The demonstrator who was convicted of shooting and wounded the officer, former US Marine Corps reservist Benjamin Song, was convicted of attempted murder in March and received a 100-year prison term. Seven other protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 70 years. 

US District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush nominee, said the defendants in what has become known as the Prairieland trial, didn’t participate in a protest but “an assault on democracy.”

Justice Department prosecutors under the Trump administration have made extensive use of wide-ranging conspiracy charges in cases like Prairieland, where some of the defendants who received decades-long sentences were not involved with the planning of the protest in question and left when guards at the facility asked them to.

As my colleague Schuyler Mitchell wrote in September, the Trump administration signed a September 22 executive order designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization and a memo three days later, known as NSPM-7, assigning federal agencies to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” protesters engaging in “anti-capitalism,” “anti-fascism,” and “anti-Americanism.” The Prairieland trial was one of the first tests of the White House’s ability to make such claims stick.

The defendants, who were protesting the Prairieland immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas, denied that they were affiliated with antifa, a decentralized term for various left-wing activists and anti-fascist groups, and were demonstrating in support of immigrants being detained at the facility.

In November, seven other defendants who were present at Prairieland pleaded guilty to federal charges of providing material support for terrorism or damaging property. 

The Trump administration has deployed allegations of terrorism against protesters at an unprecedented scale. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz pointed out, the Justice Department charged 15 Minneapolis-area residents last week with felony “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers,” and secured a conviction on the same charges against three Spokane, Washington, protesters. Both groups protested ICE facilities.

President Donald Trump is once again floating the idea of running for an unconstitutional third term.

At a speech in Macungie, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Trump fell back on one of his favorite talking points: winning elections.

“We won it by a lot,” he said, referring (hopefully) to the 2024 election. “Maybe we should run again. Should we run again?”

The crowd at the Mack Trucks facility responded with cheers. Chuckling, Trump continued, “I’d like to do it. I’d like to do it.”

Trump in Pennsylvania: "Maybe we should run again. Should we run one more time? I'd like to do that" pic.twitter.com/wPewSq7oEX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2026

As the president knows, running for a third term would violate the Constitution. Even if it was allowed, it seems unlikely that the 80-year-old could physically manage it: Trump regularly dozes off during Cabinet meetings, and his health status is murky at best.

Trump has repeatedly referenced running for a third term, and has said in the past that he is “not joking” when he brings it up. The president has also reportedly discussed running again with his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who’s writing a book about that very scenario.

The Trump Organization even sells “Trump 2028” hats for $55. Last year, the price was $50, but the Trump family is clearly in a hard spot financially: They’ve only made $4 billion since Trump’s second term.

President Donald Trump is threatening to sue ABC News over its reporting on his administration’s ongoing failure in renovating the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial. He is now pushing the outlet to repeat his lies about renovations to the monument during the Obama and Biden administrations. In a social media post, Trump claimed that ABC “failed to report that their close ‘friends,’…

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A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | Trump deflects from Reflecting Pool failure by arresting ‘vandals’…

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President Trump claimed Tuesday that Iran had “no missile capability”—one of six bold-faced lies that directly contradicts what he said last week.

“Now we’re leaving Iran with no Navy, no Air Force, no antiaircraft, no missile capability, no nuclear program. We’re leaving them without any nuclear capacity, and they’ve agreed to that. And we’re getting along quite well,” Trump said at a rally in Macungie, Pennsylvania on Tuesday. “We can fly over Tehran just at will. Nobody’s gonna do anything to us.”

Trump: We're leaving Iran with no navy, no air force, no anti-aircraft . no missile capability, no nuclear program, no nuclear capacity, and they've agreed to that, and we're getting along quite well pic.twitter.com/Fw0pEx3sKD

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 23, 2026

First off, Iran still has a navy. Even though the U.S. has sunk multiple Iranian naval ships, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps still have active naval units—they wouldn’t be able to control the Strait of Hormuz if they didn’t. Iran’s nuclear energy program remains intact, as does their capacity to develop it in the future. They also still maintain an aging collection of aircraft. Last month, The New York Times reported that Iran still had “substantial missile capabilities,” including ballistic missiles. Trump admitted as much last week, much to the chagrin of war hawks both at home and in Israel.

“We’ll be working on a parallel effort with the Gulf nations to address nonnuclear issues, such as [Iran’s] conventional ballistic missiles,” Trump said at the G7 summit on Wednesday. “I mean, they have to have some. Because other people have some. You gotta have some. Somebody said ‘You shouldn’t give them more … sir, you shouldn’t let them have any missile.’ … What am I gonna do? I’m gonna let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?”

Trump can’t even keep his lies straight. He and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed the U.S. had decimated Iran’s entire military in Operation Epic Fury back in the spring, and that they weren’t a threat. Since then, Iran has continued to either use, hold, or develop every single thing Trump said he had taken away from them.

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani was facing federal fraud and bribery charges in the U.S. Then he met privately with Donald Trump Jr.

Adani is the second-richest Asian in the world with an estimated net worth around $88.6 billion, according to a Forbes analysis. In November 2024, Adani and two other executives at the Indian Energy Company were indicted in Brooklyn for allegedly bribing Indian government officials in order to secure large solar energy projects and lying to U.S. investors about it, according to a Justice Department press release.

Adani and his co-conspirators were charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, an anti-bribery statute passed in 1977 that Trump paused for “national security” purposes in February 2025.

Adani’s fortune changed after he met with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., in Ahmedabad, India, last November. What was discussed during the meeting is not known, but the meeting itself was not previously reported until Bloomberg got the scoop Tuesday.

Seven months later, in May 2025, the DOJ dropped its charges against Adani. In a brief filing, prosecutors wrote that the department had “reviewed this case and … decided, in its prosecutorial discretion, not to devote further resources to these criminal charges against individual defendants.”

The billionaire’s sudden good luck was met by an excited market, which surged stocks in his companies and temporarily skyrocketed Adani’s wealth, pushing him into top spot as the wealthiest person in Asia.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr. told Bloomberg that the meeting had “zero to do” with the DOJ’s decision to drop its case against Adani.

Federal law enforcement were spotted installing AI-powered surveillance towers at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the latest escalation of President Donald Trump’s weird obsession.

In one video shared by TMZ Tuesday, U.S. Marshals escorted an LVT Mobile Security Unit to the edge of the Reflecting Pool.

President Trump looks like he's trying to catch pool vandals with some fancy new technology because new A.I. surveillance systems were just installed at the the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. 📹 pic.twitter.com/BM9An5g3Jz

— TMZ (@TMZ) June 23, 2026

In another video a day earlier, Daily Mail reporter John Michael Raasch witnessed a surveillance tower being towed in circles around the supposedly embattled landmark by U.S. Parks Police.

US Park Police have a mobile surveillance truck circling the Reflecting Pool after Trump said it was vandalized.

I’ve asked Park Police, National Park employees and local authorities about the 300ft gash Trump says is here.

No one knows or won’t comment. I don’t see a gash. pic.twitter.com/wa6hAmwl8Z

— Jon Michael Raasch (@JMRaasch) June 22, 2026

These towers do more than just record passerby: They automatically detect and alert so-called threats, and use AI-powered audio alerts, strobes, and a powerful spotlight to deter crime. Most likely, it will just catch tourists.

The installation of security equipment is a significant escalation, after several people, including a U.S. Olympian, were arrested for allegedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool. Trump has nonsensically claimed that vandals cut a massive slit in the bottom of the pool, but has refused to provide any evidence of the crime, which no one else has spotted. Now, it seems that he doesn’t want anyone to get too close.

Trump has directed more than $16 million in renovations, but just days before the country’s 250th anniversary, the Reflecting Pool was once again filled with algae and appeared to be literally falling apart.

“CNN was right about the war, and I was wrong,” reads the Hill headline of a column by Becket Adams. “When it comes to President [Donald] Trump’s disastrous attempt this year at playing war chief, a whole lot of conservatives got it wrong, this author included,” Adams writes. Like many conservatives, Adams was furious at media reports that Trump had failed to prepare for the consequences…

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The size of the “slit” cut into the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool just keeps growing, according to President Trump in interviews and his own social media posts. But so far, no one has been able to find any evidence that it exists at all.

On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social that “vandals” had damaged the pool, and that they would now have to drain it in order to make repairs. He claimed it “worked perfectly” before it was attacked.

“They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work,” Trump wrote.

But by Monday, the size of the “gash” had grown to 300 feet, according to another post. And on Tuesday, the president said that the cut was 350 feet long.

Q: You mentioned yesterday that the Interior Dept has video and photos. We reached out to them and they haven't shared it with us

TRUMP: They will share it. They've arrested I think 6 people on the reflecting pool. So, the reflecting pool looks fantastic. Somebody went in with a… pic.twitter.com/tsIGNDlo2L

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 23, 2026

Though Trump’s claims keep getting more and more outlandish, he refuses to share photos of the problem, or any evidence that anyone vandalized the pool. CBS News went and inspected the pool and found no evidence of the gash, whether it be 250, 300, or 350 feet.

We checked again and still no sign of a 350-foot gash as President Trump alleges. Our @CBSMornings 🌞 report: pic.twitter.com/h2WA9L6ZrF

— Ed O'Keefe (@edokeefe) June 23, 2026

“One thing we still can’t find is any evidence of a gash along the floor of the pool,” said CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Tuesday morning. “Despite that, the Interior Department is taking steps to drain the pool again, and fix it again.”

Trump has already spent over $16 million renovating the pool—who knows how much it will cost to drain and repair it all over again? American taxpayers continue to shoulder the financial burden of another of Trump’s slapdash vanity projects.

In a single opinion, the Supreme Court on Tuesday took a swipe at Congressional authority while at the same time stripping some victims of religious violations the ability to sue over illegal treatment. The decision weakens a law guaranteeing freedom of religious expression in federally-funded prisons. But with time, the ruling may prove far more disastrous and far-reaching, unleashing illegal behavior that both Congress and the victims are powerless to prevent.

The decision achieves this dual result by limiting Congress’ authority to require that terms in its funding laws can be enforced through private suits against the individuals who violate them—making it harder for Congress to give these laws teeth and for victims to seek damages. The Constitution “may confer on Congress the power to spend money for the general welfare,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his majority opinion, but “it does not ‘endow Congress with [any] power to regulate conduct.’”

The majority’s decision demotes certain legislation to a mere contract.

This attack on Congress and the victims of unlawful behavior stems from a violation of one man’s religious rights while in a federally-funded prison. A former inmate with the Louisiana Department of Corrections, Damon Landor is a devout Rastafarian who follows the religious command not to cut his hair. When he was transferred to a new facility, Landor worried that the intake guards might shave his head, so he brought along a paper copy of a court case explaining his right to keep his hair long. The prison guards threw it in the trash, held him down, and shaved his head. Congress had passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to protect inmates against such abuses, and in that law, gave inmates like Landor the right to sue the individual guards who violated his rights. So in this case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, Lander sought damages under RLUIPA from the guards who shaved him.

Critically for this case, Congress enacted RLUIPA in 2000 under its broad Constitutional authority to spend money for the “general welfare,” or what is known as its Spending Clause authority. In today’s 6-3 decision along partisan and ideological lines, the court’s Republican appointees threw out Landor’s suit and, more broadly, limited Congress’ authority under the Spending Clause. In time, Landor and RLUIPA may prove to be vehicles through which the court’s conservative wing limits Congressional authority—while leaving victims of illegal behavior, like Landor, unable to seek damages.

Spending clause legislation is a common exercise of Congressional authority. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent points out, Congress has used the clause to protect people in federally funded nursing homes and people receiving emergency care at federally funded hospitals. It powers the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination in federal assistance, combats pollution under the Clean Air Act, and protects Medicare and Medicaid patients’ rights.

Yet the crux of the majority’s decision in Landor is to demote Spending Clause legislation to, essentially, a mere contract between the federal government and the party that receives the funds. Even though the Constitution says no such thing, the Roberts Court declares that Spending Clause legislation can only be enforced against violators who consent to be held liable, in the same way a contract is only valid of both parties consent. Under the court’s new holding, if, as in this case, prison guards violate RLUIPA, Congress’ only enforcement mechanism is to withdraw the prison’s funding. It’s a cramped vision of Congressional authority that could ultimately allow states and individuals to overrule Congress’ ability to govern.

The Democratic appointees found the notion ridiculous. The Spending Clause gives Congress the “power to legislate, not merely to negotiate,” read Jackson’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. “The Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party.”

This case is in line with the Roberts Court’s broader project to grow the powers of the president and Supreme Court while limiting Congress’ authority. Often, this happens through decisions that take powers once exercised by Congress and hand them to the president or the courts. But in this case, the court went directly after Congress’ power to pass laws.

It’s possible that Congress can get around this swipe by adding language to spending laws requiring, in the case of RLUIPA, that guards at federally funded prisons explicitly consent to personal liability under the law—providing that ingredient necessary to a contractual obligation. The majority decision acknowledges such a workaround could allow Congress to once again authorize private suits. But as the court pursues its limited view of legislative authority, such promises are unlikely to broadly preserve Congress’ Spending Clause powers.

One reason to be suspicious is that the majority’s decision invokes paeans to federalism and states rights—principles that the court has turned to in the past to gut civil rights laws. If Landor prevailed in his argument that the guards are liable under RLUIPA, Gorsuch writes, it “would be inconsistent with principles of state sovereignty and a federal government of limited and enumerated regulatory powers.” Perhaps, consent alone, achieved by Congress tweaking the language of Spending Clause legislation, will be enough to satisfy the majority’s objections to Landor’s suit and others like it.

But Landor‘s limits on legislators and citizens are no outlier. Just one year ago, the court, in another Gorsuch opinion, limited individuals’ ability to protect certain rights as Medicaid recipients through private suits. And on the same day as Landor, the same six-justice majority broadly interpreted one law in order to green light certain suits by oil companies, while shutting the courthouse doors to victims of human rights abuses under another law, the Alien Tort Statute.

“So tally today,” University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman posted after the court released its opinions, “victims of human rights violations & beneficiaries of public benefits programs can’t sue. oil companies can.”

The “Arc de Trump” could have had a giant fist attached to it.

One design that President Donald Trump proposed for his $15 million glamor project involved placing an enormous fist atop the 250-foot Arc de Triomphe dupe, according to a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan titled Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

The fist would have served as a visual reminder of Trump’s response to his attempted assassination at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024.

“As the president showed off his models to a visitor one day in October, he puzzled over the details, including whether the arch should include a platform to take in the view,” Haberman and Swan wrote.

“Privately, he had also been asking confidants what he should have on top of the arc,” the section continues. “Should it be, he mused, a large replica of his ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ fist?”

The book also highlights the arch’s enormous size, which would “dwarf” both the original, 162.5-foot arc in Paris, which was built at the direction of Napoleon Bonaparte to commemorate the military achievements of the French empire, and the 200-foot Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, which was erected to commemorate the 70th birthday of North Korea’s totalitarian founder Kim Il Sung, as well as the nation’s resistance to Japanese occupation during World War II.

Other suggestions that have been since removed from the proposed design include a replica of Lady Liberty and a pair of eagles sitting atop the proposed arch, which would have added to its height.

The project is still going through a review cycle, but Trump officials have indicated that they want the site up and running by July 2028, six months before Trump’s term is set to end.

Trump’s arch has faced enormous opposition. If it breaks ground, it will physically situate Trump’s legacy between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, interrupting a hallowed conversation between the president that ended slavery and the soldiers that sacrificed their lives in order to do so.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has known for nearly a decade that an influential 2013 scientific paper that concluded glyphosate is safe was actually ghostwritten by developer Monsanto. But the agency never informed the public and continued to rely on it, according to an EPA memo obtained by Mother Jones and revealed here for the first time.

The EPA cited the compromised paper as evidence that the world’s most widely used herbicide glyphosate—the key ingredient in Roundup—is safe to use in its 2020 assessment, despite its own internal investigation that concluded the research paper hid Monsanto’s role as an author. Now, nearly ten years after the agency came to its conclusion, the paper’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, said it has opened its own investigation into whether the paper was ghostwritten following a formal request made by a Harvard professor and her research associate to retract the study, as first reported by Retraction Watch last week. 

The EPA’s Inspector General’s Office opened its investigation into the research paper in 2017, a few years after the paper was published in the influential science journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology with independent toxicologists Larry Kier and David Kirkland listed as its authors.

The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct.”

But the EPA memo concluded that Monsanto and one of its employees—with the financial backing of a consortium of other glyphosate manufacturers—seemed to have contributed key criteria including the “intellectual content” of the report. The Monsanto employee was therefore a “‘ghost writer’ which is a form of research misconduct,” according to the memo, which was written by a US special agent in the EPA Inspector General’s Office’s crimes division. The memo does not make clear whether Monsanto disclosed to the consortium, known officially as the Glyphosate Task Force, that it would be a “ghost writer” on the report. 

This is the latest example to emerge of Monsanto’s concerted efforts to sway public understanding of its blockbuster herbicide glyphosate. In December, another influential review article that had found glyphosate to be safe was retracted after the publisher announced the paper’s authors had not disclosed Monsanto’s role. And a Mother Jones investigation about glyphosate being sprayed in forests found other examples of Monsanto’s hand in secretly orchestrating research papers. Now, Taylor & Francis said it is investigating both the 2013 research paper and a second peer-reviewed 2015 article also published in its journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology to assess whether they were ghostwritten by Monsanto employees.

Bayer, the German chemical company that purchased Monsanto in 2018 and continues to generate billions of dollars of revenue from Roundup every year, said in a statement that the EPA memo’s “allegations about the Kier & Kirkland paper was based on a limited set of documents that didn’t include elements such as sworn testimony from the authors.” Aside from the sworn testimony, it’s unclear what, if anything else, should have been included given the Inspector General relied on company emails and documents made public during litigation.

Since the late 1990s, studies by non-industry scientists showing glyphosate can damage genetic material in lab tests have set off a debate about whether the herbicide can cause cancer. According to the EPA Inspector General memo, a consortium of 25 glyphosate manufacturers wanted to publish their own research paper citing unpublished internal studies conducted by company scientists that showed glyphosate does not damage DNA. 

“But once they had pulled all of the various studies together on genotoxicity for this review paper,” wrote the special agent in the EPA memo, “it was hard to present a ‘story’ that glyphosate was not genotoxic, because of ‘…the complicated ‘noise’ out there,’”—meaning the growing debate about whether it causes cancer—and “‘the story as written stretched the limits of credibility among less sophisticated audiences.’”

So “to add credibility to the proposed manuscript” they decided to pay a scientist named David Kirkland—considered a “heavy-hitter in the area of genotoxicity”— to be one of the named authors, along with scientist Larry Kier. The report that was eventually published presented Kier and Kirkland as the “sole” two authors who were “independent” of Monsanto and the consortium.

Yet there was another person helping shape the paper’s assessment: a Monsanto employee named David Saltmiras, according to the EPA memo. While all three of their names are redacted in the memo, they are found in now-public company emails that were exposed during litigation brought by people who said glyphosate made them sick. 

In one of those emails from 2012, Kier said they should include Saltmiras as a co-author. “He is very deserving of this recognition and he was a co-author on the original literature review manuscript which was a predecessor to this publication,” Kier wrote.

Kirkland, in an email response, replied that if they included Saltmiras as a co-author they would no longer be “independent” of the company, and in that case he doubted the scientific journal would publish their report.

The Inspector General determined they hid Saltmiras’s contributions. “Because [Saltmiras] does not appear as a co-author on this manuscript, Monsanto’s involvement is also hidden,” wrote the US special agent, whose name was also redacted from the memo. The EPA memo continued: “Monsanto does have a vested interest in portraying glyphosate as a safe to use herbicide…By not making their involvement known in the manuscript discussed above, and the revenue generated by the sales of glyphosate products on a global basis, Monsanto appears to have a conflict of interest.”

The EPA memo concluded that the study’s named authors, Kier and Kirkland, “were not ‘the authors [which] had sole responsibility for the writing and content of the paper.’” The unnamed Monsanto employee Saltmiras “was a co-author of this report” for his substantive contributions on behalf of Monsanto, but was only named “in the acknowledgement section of this manuscript.” 

“Why cite this paper when they knew that it was ghostwritten?”

Kier could not be reached for comment, and Saltmiras referred questions to Bayer, his current employer. Kirkland disputed the EPA memo’s findings. “I believe the memo is incorrect and I reject the claim. Our 2013 paper was NOT GHOSTWRITTEN,” he wrote an email. Saltmiras “did not contribute to or influence the analysis of the reports I reviewed,” he added in a later email.

Yet two researchers, Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes and Alexander “Sasha” Kaurov, who study corporate influence on science and who looked at the company emails made public during litigation came to a similar conclusion that the paper was ghostwritten. “The authors tried to mislead the public intentionally,” said Kaurov, a research fellow at Motu Economic & Public Policy Research in New Zealand. 

And he questions why the EPA would have continued to rely on it. “It’s upsetting. Why cite this paper when they knew that it was ghostwritten?” asked Kaurov.

For instance, in the EPA’s revised “Evaluation of Carcinogenic Potential,” issued as part of its glyphosate assessment that concluded the herbicide was safe in 2020, the agency relied on the 2013 report for its data and its summaries of 16 other studies, meaning the agency accepted the compromised review as essentially a collection of studies finding that glyphosate was safe to use.

An EPA spokesperson in a statement wrote that its review of glyphosate “evaluated more than 6,000 studies across human-health and ecological disciplines, and its determinations reflected that full body of evidence.” But the agency did not respond to the question of why it continued to rely on the 2013 study despite concluding it was ghostwritten. The spokesperson confirmed that the agency never informed the public or other regulatory agencies abroad about that discovery.

The 2013 paper did make its way abroad: The European Food Safety Agency also cited the Kier and Kirkland study for its 2023 re-assessment of glyphosate that determined the herbicide is safe. 

Evidence that glyphosate may be harmful to health continues to mount: Recent studies suggest the herbicide could contribute to metabolic disorders, brain inflammation, and damage to the gut microbiome. Notably, after a group of environmental and labor groups filed a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s 2020 assessment that glyphosate was safe to use, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the EPA’s safety assessment, ruling that the agency’s “errors in assessing human-health risk are serious” and “most studies EPA examined indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” a type of cancer. The EPA, which is currently relying on its 1993 safety assessment of glyphosate, is expected to release an updated review of the herbicide this year.

And Bayer is now on the hook for more than $12 billion in payouts to people who say the herbicide made them sick. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to shield Bayer from some of these lawsuits. The Trump administration, which reportedly said in 2017 that it had “Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation,” also intervened in the Supreme Court case to support Bayer. As Bayer argued in court, the company believes it should largely have immunity from lawsuits since the EPA concluded that glyphosate products were safe.

But it’s now becoming clearer that the EPA came to that conclusion based in part on compromised scientific research that Monsanto secretly orchestrated.

“It’s just sad,” Kaurov said. 

The Department of Homeland Security is finally allowing the Iranian World Cup soccer team to travel to match locations a day early—something that nearly every other participating country in the tournament has been able to do. But, they still won’t be allowed to stay overnight after their games on U.S. soil.

“Ahead of the match in Seattle on June 26, the Iranian team will be allowed to come in match day minus two, so two days before the match. They’ll be asked to leave the day that the match wraps up, so the evening of the match,” a DHS spokesperson told NBC. “Again, the President wants to make sure that we’re talking about what actually happens on the pitch … A lot of that is making sure that things are safe and secure, not just around the stadiums, but around base camps and training sites.”

This decision comes after the Trump administration first denied the visas of 15—then 11—team assistants, blocking them from even entering the U.S.. And the team itself was essentially booted from the country right after their matches in Los Angeles on June 15 and June 21, forcing them to stay in Tijuana, Mexico, rather than their abandoned base camp in Tucson, Arizona, as originally planned, or actually near the city they’re playing in. And they still have to go through hours of security checks each time they enter the U.S. from Mexico.

This constant back-and-forth is detrimental to both the performance and the morale of the players, who have nothing to do with the U.S.’s ongoing war on Iran.

“I think it’s not good for the football,” said team captain Mehdi Taremi last week. “In [the] World Cup, you have to prepare good for the next game, which is a lot of stress for the players and the staff and everyone. But we don’t have that support, and I think FIFA have to help us more than this. Let’s see what’s going to happen in the future.”

Iran qualified for the World Cup in spring of 2025, months before the joint U.S.-Israeli attack that started the war in February.

It was clear, almost from the start, that President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to launch a war against Iran would be his greatest strategic blunder yet. Nearly four months later, Tehran’s repressive regime remains entrenched and more radical than ever. The mullahs still have their enriched uranium and plenty of drones and missiles, and now they’ve shown the world they have a kill switch for the Strait of Hormuz—and much of the global economy.

If the current peace negotiations stick, they likely will leave us where we were before, only at the cost of more than $100 billion, thousands of Middle Eastern lives—and 13 American ones, plus hundreds injured—and whatever bit of our allies’ goodwill Trump hadn’t squandered already.

Yet Trump isn’t the sole owner of this fiasco. There was Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who helped cajole him into greenlighting the attacks. And closer to home, there were the two inexperienced US envoys who led the pre-war negotiations with Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and whose bumbling talking points accelerated America’s lurch into armed conflict—and strategic calamity.

“I’d describe [the MOU] as a strategic defeat for Kushnerism…It shows the catastrophe of this war.”

Kushner and Witkoff’s starring role has been nearly forgotten in the months since Iran backed the United States into a corner by closing the strait. Kushner in particular brought epic conflicts of interest to the negotiations, not only because of the billions of dollars he was soliciting from Iran’s regional foes for his investment fund, Affinity Partners, but also because of his cozy, decades-long relationship with Netanyahu, who even visited the Kushner family’s home when Jared was a kid. (Here’s a timeline.)

Kushner proselytized Bibi’s claim that Iran was weeks, if not days, away from building a nuclear weapon—a view widely dismissed by nuclear experts—and appeared naive as to how the Iranians negotiate. His antipathy toward Tehran was no secret. According to author Andrea Bernstein, Kushner bonded with the dictator of the United Arab Emirates over their mutual loathing of Iran long before the UAE began bankrolling his firm. But Trump wasn’t troubled by his team’s inexperience, ineptness, or conflicts of interest. Kushner, Netanyahu, and the other Iran hawks got their way, resulting in America’s greatest humiliation on the global stage since the Iraq War.

The widely discussed Memorandum of Understanding has only confirmed this defeat. Among its 14 points are assurances that the United States will begin lifting its punishing sanctions on Iran—which it just did, at least temporarily—and that Tehran will regain access to frozen funds worth at least $24 billion. The MOU also says that US and regional allies will develop a “definitive, mutually agreed plan” for Iranian reconstruction that’s worth at least $300 billion.

This leaves questions aplenty: Who will cover the $300 billion tab? How will that money be dispensed and to whom? What restrictions will be placed on the funds? How much of it will be shouldered by the US public, which has already paid at least $132 billion, per Moody’s Analytics, for Trump’s unnecessary war?

Kushner has kept largely mum about the MOU, even amid suggestions that he could profit personally from the deal. But experts familiar with his role in pre-war negotiations had some thoughts. “I’d describe [the MOU] as a strategic defeat for Kushnerism, if we can talk about Kushnerism,” Jonathan Guyer, program director at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, told me. “The way I’d conceptualize it is sort of this mix of pro-Israel policies and corporate transactionalism…It shows the catastrophe of this war, and the failure of the negotiations that he and Witkoff were pursuing with the Iranians.”

Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Israel all came to view Kushner as an asset they could cultivate—one who would represent their interests to the president.

The lead-up to the war helped make Kushner, now a billionaire, even richer, but the outbreak of armed conflict, and its outcome, has dealt a blow to Kushner’s geopolitical worldview. “If you go back to Breaking History, his memoir, one of the core arguments is that Iran is a bad actor that can’t be dealt with, and we have to muster this coalition against them,” Guyer said. “That’s why I think this is really a strategic defeat, because all these ideas that Kushner has been putting across since Trump’s first term have been totally shown to be not workable.”

The memo, notably, does nothing to lessen Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon in the future. It “kicks the most difficult nuclear issues down the road,” Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told me. “The scope of Iran’s nuclear program remains unclear, there is no defined process for eliminating the highly enriched uranium, and there is little detail about US priorities for verification. The United States and Iran still need to overcome significant gaps to reach a deal.”

The US lifted sanctions against Iran temporarily on Monday as high-level talks continued in Switzerland, the New York Times reported. The status of the talks remains unclear; Kushner is present, but has refrained from commenting on negotiations, while Vice President JD Vance and the regime were sending opposing public signals on Iran’s willingness to allow UN inspectors into their nuclear facilities. (“Progress on Nuclear Issues is Muddy,” the headline noted.)

There’s a two-month timeline set for the negotiations, and with Kushner still deeply involved, no telling whether they will succeed. “It is possible to get an effective nuclear deal in the next 60 days, but it will require the Trump administration to rethink its negotiating process,” Davenport said. “Witkoff and Kushner need to engage in direct, sustained negotiations and listen to nuclear experts who understand what is necessary for an effective nonproliferation agreement. In past talks, Witkoff and Kushner’s technical incompetence led the Trump administration to miss critical opportunities to engage Iran and recognize where Tehran was demonstrating flexibility.”

The bungled negotiations, with Kushner at center stage, were but the latest in a litany of failures attached to him. As I wrote in an excerpt of my upcoming book for Mother Jones, Kushner has a knack for failing up. He flopped as a media owner and made a badly timed bet on a New York City office tower that became a financial albatross around his family’s neck for more than a decade.

Indeed, his attempts to bail his family out of that reckless investment helped seed the foreign financial entanglements that have made his role as a US diplomat so problematic. Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Israel all came to view Kushner as an asset they could cultivate—one who would represent their interests to the president.

Kushner’s sole diplomatic achievement during Trump’s first term was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states. But the accords sidelined Palestinian interests and thus have been cited, alongside normalization talks with Saudi Arabia, as a primary factor in Hamas’s catastrophic attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which prompted Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Even Trump’s Board of Peace, with Kushner as an executive board member, has been little more than a pay-to-play racket for foreign regimes to remain in the administration’s good graces.

With the Iran War, Kushner has unleashed yet another costly failure—this time, for all of us. The only shock is that anyone familiar with his story would be surprised by the outcome.

The health-focused news outlet STAT on Tuesday published a bombshell report that suggests President Donald Trump may have used his position of power to obtain a powerful new obesity drug not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration. According to the report, the FDA in April allowed one 79-year-old man to obtain Eli Lilly’s retatrutide, an experimental weight-loss drug…

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A White House spokesperson flipped out Tuesday after he was quoted failing to deny a report suggesting President Donald Trump may have been given early access to a weight loss drug.

A STAT report Tuesday found that one 79-year-old man had received special access to retatrutide, a powerful new weight loss drug—prompting speculation that the individual in question was none other than the president of the United States.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai publicly lashed out at STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence, who in her original report, noted that Desai did not explicitly deny that Trump was the patient in question.

“Because this has to be spelled out for @LizzyLaw_, who has proven herself to be an unserious gossip columnist, this application was not for the President,” Desai wrote on X Tuesday after the story quickly gained national attention.

“Thank you for clarifying. I asked you, the FDA, and HHS multiple times yesterday whether this application was for the President. No one answered my question directly,” Lawrence replied.

“We shouldn’t have to bat down baseless speculation for you to not print it. Any reporter with standards would understand this,” Desai wrote. “Are you going to now go ask this idiotic question to the ~4 million Americans in this age cohort and then speculate about them being the application?”

As a White House spokesperson, it’s Desai’s responsibility to respond to queries from the press. As TNR contributor Nina Burleigh pointed out on X: “If you don’t want to do your job, maybe stop taking taxpayer funds…”

Desai did little to dismiss the story when it first came across his desk and originally referred STAT to the Department of Health and Human Services, which didn’t offer a denial either.

In fact, Desai may have fueled further questions about the president’s health. When the 79-year-old patient requested “compassionate use” access to retatrutide in April, it was to treat refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension.

Asked whether Trump has obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, Desai originally told STAT a White House memo on Trump’s most recent medical evaluation “covers this.” It does not.

When Aliya Rahman’s lawyers approached her about filing a complaint with the civil rights office of the Department of Homeland Security, she almost laughed in their faces.

“It’s hard to imagine that sending a letter to DHS to ask them to respect our civil rights will do anything,” said Rahman, a disabled US citizen who was dragged from her car and detained by DHS agents during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Today, Rahman, who also has an ongoing civil tort claim against DHS, filed that complaint anyway. 

On January 13, ICE agents detained Rahman as she tried to drive to a doctor’s appointment, punching out the window of her car and carrying her by her arms and legs, ignoring her requests for mobility and communication aids, which Section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act is meant to guarantee. Eventually, the pain caused her to black out in her cell. Rahman contends that the agents’ aggressive treatment violated her civil rights as a disabled person.

“I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms, and prodded forward in leg irons by an agent saying ‘Walk! You can do it. Walk.’”

“We request that DHS take corrective action to not only redress these violations, but also to ensure all individuals with disabilities who interact with DHS officers are treated with dignity and respect,” Rahman’s lawyers wrote in their complaint.

Rahman described how ICE agents harmed her in congressional testimony organized by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.): “Shooting pain went through my head, neck, and wrists when I hit the ground and people leaned on my back…I was carried face down through the street by my cuffed arms and legs while yelling that I had a brain injury,” Rahman said:

“Agents repeatedly had to stop and ask how to do tasks. I received no medical screening, phone call, or access to a lawyer. I was denied a communication navigator when my speech began to slur. Agents laughed as I tried to immobilize my own neck. I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms, and prodded forward in leg irons by an agent saying “Walk! You can do it. Walk.” Agents did not know if the facility had a wheelchair. When I was finally placed in one to be taken to interrogation, an agent taunted: “You were driving right? So your legs do work.”

Section 504 prohibits discrimination against disabled people in programs and organizations that receive federal funding, which includes ICE. But Rahman’s experience, her lawyers said, was “not an aberration.” In one 2022 complaint, a Border Patrol officer allegedly took away the crutch of a child they apprehended and didn’t provide an alternative. Between 2019 and 2023, at least seven people with mental health disabilities were placed in solitary confinement in ICE custody. And in 2025, a Deaf DACA recipient was reportedly denied access to an American Sign Language interpreter for weeks. 

DHS’ Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), an internal body meant to investigate exactly these types of abuses, was gutted by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March 2025, reducing its workforce from over 150 full-time federal employees to fewer than 40 a year later, nearly all of whom are contractors.

DHS spokespeople did not provide current employment figures when asked, but stated that all of the office’s “All of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ “legally required functions continue to be performed, but in an efficient and cost-effective manner and without hindering the Department’s mission of securing the homeland,” further alleging that “these offices obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often functioned as internal adversaries.” 

Before CRCL was functionally dismantled, a complaint like Rahman’s would be read by its staffers, who would then issue recommendations. Now, though, she doesn’t necessarily expect that it will be read at all. “I don’t think I’m going to hear from these folks,” Rahman said. “Typically, what they do is put out social media content when they’re mad at me.” (DHS has issued posts implying that Rahman’s conduct was criminal.) 

“I’m still rocking my supervillain braces, my shoulders aren’t healed yet,” Rahman told me June 22, showing off her shoulder support gear. “I’m just trying to put my body back together.”

Thanks to her injuries, Rahman can only leave the house two or three days per week, she said. But as she heals, she’s become an advocate for others who have been detained or harmed by ICE, particularly those who are also disabled, many of whom don’t have the privileges she does: that she is a citizen, that she has savings, that she speaks English and has access to lawyers. 

“Many of them also had disabilities or chronic illnesses that were impacted by how they were handled, or they developed them afterwards,” Rahman said, and have learned—like her—that disclosing their disabilities can draw officers’ ridicule rather than accommodation. 

“People will say things like, you’re not disabled, you wear eyeliner,” Rahman said. “The guy inside [Whipple Detention Center] was like, ‘Your legs work, you were driving, right?’” Online, she sees families with autistic kids saying that they are terrified of any interaction with law enforcement. She doesn’t blame them. 

“I experienced people doubling down on violence when I raised that I was disabled, and that is not a society we can live in,” Rahman said.

Anti-ICE protesters in Texas were sentenced to at least 50 years in prison Tuesday on terrorism charges, The Guardian reported. The case was widely seen as a test of whether the Trump administration would be able to enact its crackdown on dissent over its immigration policies.

Last July 4, activists set off fireworks at a detention center in Alvarado, Texas, and some of them vandalized cars, slashed tires, and broke a security camera. When a police officer arrived and drew his weapon, one person shot him in the shoulder from the woods.

Five of the protesters were sentenced to 50 years in prison and one was sentenced to 70 for providing material support to terrorists. The person who shot at the police officer was sentenced to 100 years for attempted murder, according to the Texas Standard.

President Donald Trump and his administration have claimed that the activists were part of an “antifa cell” in north Texas, even though antifa is not one specific group or organization. Most of the protesters didn’t know each other well, and were connected through a local left-wing book club and gun group.

This case was the first time that federal prosecutors have attempted to convict protesters against the Trump administration on charges related to domestic terrorism. With the White House’s attempt to criminalize protest, it likely will not be the last.

Trillionaire Republican donor Elon Musk is threatening to sue California congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat, after Khanna mentioned the death toll associated with Musk’s actions at the Department of Government Efficiency. In an appearance on the “I’ve Had It” podcast, Khanna said that DOGE, the project launched by President Donald Trump and overseen for most of its existence by Musk…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Trump wants July 4 to feel more like Jan.

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