The New Republic

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

A mysterious, well-connected 79-year-old man has gained sole access to an experimental obesity drug created by Eli Lilly.

The outlet that first reported the early access, STAT, speculated that the patient could be Donald Trump, in no small part due to the president’s unabashed support for weight-loss drugs, which has extended to suggestions that he and his staff should take what he calls “the fat drug.”

In January, the president told The New York Times that while he hadn’t yet taken Ozempic or Wegovy, he “probably should.”

Trump tips the scale at 224 pounds, according to his 2025 physical results published by the White House. At 6-foot-3, that puts his Body Mass Index in the overweight category. The data suggests Trump has slimmed down since his first term: In 2020, he weighed 244 pounds, which placed him firmly within the BMI’s obesity range.

Throughout his second term, Trump has expressed a keen interest in weight-loss drugs and has even directed his administration to lower their costs.

In April 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr told CBS Mornings that Trump had “ordered” his department to bring the costs of GLP-1 drugs down in America to compete with European prices.

Months later, in November, Trump announced that the prescription costs of Ozempic and Wegovy would come down by hundreds of dollars if purchased through his discounted prescription drug marketplace, TrumpRx.

Trump has even used his own officials as props to promote the drugs. During the White House event unveiling the TrumpRx arrangement, Trump said he was “thrilled” with manufacturers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, and proceeded to conduct a fat-shaming round-robin of his underlings to determine who was already on the weight-loss drugs.

“Secretary Howard Lutnick. You take any of this stuff, Howard?” Trump asked his Commerce Secretary at the time.

“Not yet,” Lutnick replied.

“OK, good,” Trump said before going back to reading names of people on his team. “CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz—he doesn’t take it. Food and Drug Administrator, Commissioner Marty Makary, and Director of Medicare Chris Klomp. And we have Steve.… Where’s Steve? Is he here? Head of public relations for the White House? He’s taking it.”

President Donald Trump blatantly lied about how much oil is actually traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, amid growing backlash to his peace deal.

In a post on Truth Social Tuesday, Trump bragged that the 19 million barrels of oil that flowed through the strait on Monday constituted “an all time RECORD.”

That’s a complete lie. Before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 20 million barrels of oil passed through the strait every day, according to the International Energy Agency—more than Trump’s so-called “all time RECORD.”

Plus, Trump’s numbers don’t seem to add up anyway.

From Saturday to Monday, only 109 vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz, The New York Times reported, citing Kpler, a global maritime data firm. That’s the largest three-day number since the war began in February—but still less than the nearly 140 ships that once passed through the strait on a daily basis. It seems unlikely that 19 million barrels could have passed through in one day with the strait still facing restrictions.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Trump pushed phony numbers about oil. Trump previously claimed that he’d directed the military to conduct a “secret mission” to send more than 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz without anybody knowing—including his own energy secretary!

Trump’s latest lies were part of a larger meltdown Tuesday, as Iran denied having made commitments the Trump administration had touted as a done deal.

President Trump is practically begging Illinois Governor JB Pritzker to allow a federal takeover of Chicago.

“At least 39 people injured, 4 dead, in Chicago weekend shootings. Governor Pritzker, I, as President, can fix this, FAST and Permanently. D.C., Memphis, New Orleans, all down to record lows, and quickly!” Trump wrote just after midnight Tuesday on Truth Social. “CALL ME!”

Trump said the same thing out loud on Monday, calling the city of Chicago a “shooting field.”

“If the governor would call me … I would solve the Chicago problem in three, four months,” he said in the Oval Office.

While talking about the reflecting pool, Trump says if Governor Pritzker calls him, he could solve the Chicago problem. pic.twitter.com/EQNRL7ynoN

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 22, 2026

Chicago has long been on Trump’s radar for a federal takeover, and he has exchanged barbs with both Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson since his return to the White House last year.

President Trump has already brought federal takeovers to Washington, D.C., Memphis, and Minneapolis, with varying results. His claims of cleaning up each city are tenuous at best, as each city has had violent and negative experiences with the influx of federal agents and the National Guard.

Pritzker has yet to respond, while Johnson spoke out Monday after the president’s comments.

“Trump has worked overtime to defund the agencies and programs that actually build safer communities. Whether it’s by defunding the ATF—the federal agency tasked with getting illegal weapons off our streets—stripping our community violence intervention partners of their funding, or starting illegal wars that send prices skyrocketing, Trump has completely betrayed his promise to working Americans and is making all of our lives less safe,” Johnson wrote on X.

The Pentagon wants $80 billion from Congress, mostly to cover the cost of the U.S. war against Iran, the Associated Press reports.

This is on top of the White House’s request to boost defense spending in the 2027 budget to $1.5 trillion—nearly 50 percent more than current allocations. Increased military spending in the budget would come alongside cuts to housing, health care, and green energy programs.

Given that, it’s even more galling that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been reportedly making his way around Capitol Hill, asking senators for an additional $80 billion to cover war expenses.

When Hegseth testified to Congress last month, he estimated that war costs would be around $29 billion—far lower than today’s asking price. But that estimate didn’t include the cost to repair or rebuild damaged U.S. military sites in the region, which may require extra cash, according to the AP.

However, the estimates for how much this war will cost American taxpayers have been all over the place: The Pentagon’s initial estimate was a whopping $200 billion. Whether Hegseth will actually get this money is a different story. The Iran war is opposed by a majority of Americans, and the Pentagon may struggle to get congressional support.

“You’re spending families’ hard-earned tax dollars on a war that many strongly oppose,” Democratic Senator Patty Murray told Hegseth last month.

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz hasn’t polled his fellow Democrats, but he told the AP, “I haven’t found anyone who wants to do this.”

When 14-year-old Mehjabin Habib took the microphone at an early June meeting held by New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board in Queens, her legs shook. She was there to give testimony as a rent-stabilized tenant from a largely Bangladeshi neighborhood in Astoria (Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s former New York Assembly district), and she wanted to get it right. Rent-stabilized housing is one of New York’s bright spots in a city otherwise notorious for its sky-high cost of living, but for years, Habib had lost neighbors—and friends—pushed out by increased rents. “I love New York City, and I don’t want to leave,” she said. To Habib, the more than 12 percent increase in rents under former Mayor Eric Adams constituted “a threat to our safety.”

But at the top of her mind was not just the undue budgetary pressures placed on her family, a latent anxiety for parents that children so often absorb. Habib’s community has faced harassment from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; having a home to run to was the “first line of defense” when federal agents came knocking. “As a U.S.-born citizen who comes from an immigrant family, I am still afraid of ICE,” she told the board. “When ICE is detaining any person of color on the street, I fear being outside my home.”

Habib is a youth member of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, or CAAAV, one of many groups organizing tenants to demand a rent freeze. This Thursday, June 25, New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board will hold its final public meeting and vote to determine whether this cornerstone of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign will become a reality. The RGB regulates annual lease adjustments for rent-stabilized apartments, affecting 2.4 million tenants—arguably the most organized group of voters that helped lift Mamdani into power. A rent freeze was, for many, the campaign promise that elevated him beyond the likes of Andrew Cuomo. Today, however, those I spoke to say freezing the rent is all the more necessary, particularly for a sizable contingent of immigrant tenants facing threats from their landlords by ICE.

The overlap is hardly surprising; working-class New Yorkers, immigrant or not, rely on rent-stabilized housing to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. But immigrant tenants are particularly vulnerable right now, and to some landlords, that added vulnerability is an asset. It’s illegal in New York to retaliate against anyone who reports housing issues. Yet, for decades, the business model many rent-stabilized landlords have followed has relied on pushing longtime tenants out, often through neglect or overt abuse. To Irene Hsu, communications manager at CAAAV, ICE has become another tool in landlords’ toolkits: They “stand to profit from the displacement and deportation of working-class tenants.”

The RGB is a nominally independent body, though it tends to follow the proclivities of whichever mayor is in office. Just before exiting Gracie Mansion, former Mayor Eric Adams attempted to stack the Board with pro-real-estate members. Ultimately, Mamdani was allowed to choose six board members. Since then, he’s mostly kept mum on the RGB’s work; in early May, after the board’s preliminary vote capping rent increases between 0-2 percent for one-year leases and 0-4 percent for two-year leases, he only said he was “encouraged” to see them “taking seriously the data around affordability, operating expenses, and the pressures facing both tenants and small property owners as it sets this preliminary range.” For Mamdani, this was a notably cautious statement, a far cry from his campaign trail pronouncements.

His tact is, frankly, necessary, if only to avoid drawing further ire from local real estate groups practically frothing at the mouth over a potential rent freeze. In mid-June, for instance, Gotham Housing Alliance hired fifty or so counterprotesters dressed as zombies outside an RGB hearing, warning that a rent freeze would mean more “zombie” properties—that is, empty buildings due to the landlord’s inability to maintain them.

But as J.W. Mason, an economics professor at John Jay College, recently showed, the “great majority” of residential properties generate income well above their operating costs, even with rents much lower than today’s. Under Mayor Adams, operating incomes actually rose by roughly 30 percent. The problem is that many landlords borrowed too much money at inflated prices, based on the hope that rents would increase faster than they actually have. If landlords are having problems maintaining their buildings, it’s because, by and large, their financial gambles didn’t pan out. “No matter what landlords say, the data supports a rent freeze, and the majority of New Yorkers support a rent freeze,” Sumathy Kumar, executive director of Tenant Bloc, said in a statement to The New Republic. “A blanket rent hike for 2.4 million rent-stabilized tenants would simply reward landlords for long-term neglect.”

For rent-stabilized tenants like Parveg Hasan Dolar—a Bangladeshi immigrant in his early 70s, also a CAAAV organizer living in Astoria—this meant a roughly $400 rent increase within the past four years. Dolar, who worked in a Halal cart until he required heart surgery in 2024, isn’t in a position to leverage his finances to own a building, let alone multiple buildings in New York like his landlord. But today, he and his neighbors carry the brunt of the responsibility to bail their landlord out. For his family, this means rationing food to accommodate rent increases; he says the stress of working additional hours to make ends meet is what contributed to his heart condition.

At a New York City Council joint oversight hearing on Housing and Immigration in April, officials heard testimony from tenants threatened with deportation for simply asking their landlord for repairs. One tenant in the Bronx reportedly refused to go to housing court because his landlord said ICE would be there. Since then, there have been multiple cases of management companies posting signs in the lobby encouraging tenants to report immigrants to ICE—“a pretty clear retaliation” against organizers, said Joanne Grell, a tenant organizer in the Bronx working with Community Action for Safe Apartments, but, she added, “The buildings we want to shame are never going to be secret.”

While New York isn’t seeing the kind of ICE occupations witnessed in Chicago or Minneapolis, a recent investigation by The City Reporter, a local nonprofit newsroom, showed street arrests clustered around Canal Street in Manhattan, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and Corona, Queens: immigrant neighborhoods with a sharp overlap of rent-stabilized apartments. When ICE recently visited Dolar’s building, knocking on the doors of tenant leaders at around 5 a.m., “none of us opened our doors,” he said. But the threat alone was enough to change the feeling in the neighborhood. “People are afraid.”

Tenants in New York have reached a high-water mark of mobilization not seen in decades, but the terrain is shifting. Suddenly, door-knocking takes on a different valence: Many working-class immigrant households are no longer opening their doors, for fear of ICE. New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is already taking efforts to make immigrants feel safer when answering the door for apartment inspectors. “When I got people to come testify at the RGB, I told them we would have marshals there to keep an eye out… If I ever see cops in the neighborhood, I call my neighbors to see if anything happened.”

All of this combined is “making a crisis for working-class people.” A rent freeze would be “a good first step, but we know it’s not enough. I want to decrease my rent. I pay around $2,200 on rent, and all of that money is for my landlord’s luxury. We, as tenants, need so much more.”

President Donald Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, has wasted no time purging staff members from his new office.

Pulte, a housing regulator with no experience working in intelligence, has already begun implementing sweeping personnel changes in the intelligence community.

“The deep state firings have begun,” a source familiar with the matter told NBC News. Pulte formally assumed his new post on Friday, and the firings reportedly began Monday.

These are significant changes made by a temporary lackey. Pulte has none of the military or intelligence background necessary to lead ODNI, instead making his name by targeting the president’s political enemies while leading the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The day before Pulte started at his new post, he directed ODNI staff members to identify 400 employees to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center in the coming weeks, another source told NBC News. The agency was previously headed by Joe Kent, who abruptly resigned earlier this year in opposition to Trump’s war in Iran. CNN reported that Pulte had requested a list of every employee at ODNI so he could determine who to purge.

Earlier this month, Trump selected Pulte’s permanent replacement: Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York responsible for the shoddy redactions in the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. The president then upended Clayton’s Senate confirmation hearing, messing up Republicans’ chances at renewing a key spy bill.

A special 79-year-old man has received unparalleled access to Eli Lilly’s obesity drug.

Millions of Americans are eagerly awaiting access to retatrutide, a powerful new drug from the pharmaceutical company. But one unidentified person has been able to gain premature access to the drug via the FDA’s “compassionate use” program, STAT reported Tuesday.

The FDA program is designed to prioritize access to experimental drugs for patients with grave or life-threatening medical issues. And while the name of the individual is not known, several signs indicate that they are likely very well-connected.

A senior clinician at the National Institutes of Health, Ranganath Muniyappa, requested access to the drug for the unnamed patient in April. Muniyappa cited a diagnosis of refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, a potentially life-threatening disease characterized by high blood pressure in the lungs. The request reportedly drew the attention of top health officials, which STAT noted was indicative of the patient’s influence.

Based on the vague parameters of the patient’s identity, STAT reached out to the White House to see if the recipient could possibly be Donald Trump, who similarly suffers from obesity and has publicly expressed interest in obesity drugs. The White House did not explicitly deny the patient was Trump.

When asked if Trump was the 79-year-old man in question, White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not say no, and instead referred STAT to the Department of Health and Human Services. When asked if Trump had obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, Desai offered Trump’s latest medical evaluation as a counter, which he falsely claimed “covers this,” according to STAT. It does not—the memo makes no mention of either disease.

HHS did not address the issue of the retatrutide application or the patient’s identity.

“The FDA supports expanded access programs that can provide patients with serious or life-threatening conditions access to investigational treatments when no comparable or satisfying approved therapies are available,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told STAT. “Each request is reviewed on a case-by-case basis based on the clinical circumstances and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.”

Whoever the patient is, they had been previously treated with other obesity drugs such as tirzepatide, though sources who spoke with STAT indicated the patient experienced only moderate weight loss as a result. Muniyappa reportedly recommended against bariatric surgery because of the patient’s age and comorbidities.

The Trump Justice Department planned to subpoena journalists at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, attempting to force them to testify before a grand jury for vague national security concerns. The subpoenas were eventually withdrawn this month without any explanation after news organizations pushed back.

This was an extremely unprecedented decision that follows the all too familiar trend of weaponizing the DOJ against whomever President Trump is upset by that day.

Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima—who covers the security and intelligence community, including the present war on Iran—was subpoenaed this spring. The Post was in the process of fighting Nakashima’s subpoena before the DOJ suddenly rescinded it.

“The unwarranted subpoena of our reporter Ellen Nakashima — a clear violation of constitutionally guaranteed press freedom — was another sign of the government seeking to compel journalists to become instruments of its investigations,” a Post spokesperson said. “We will continue to stand fully behind the journalism of The Washington Post and fight all efforts by any administration that violate our First Amendment rights.”

Three Wall Street Journal reporters, who also cover national security issues, received grand jury subpoenas from the DOJ, according to the Post. In May, the DOJ also subpoenaed the Journal’s reporters over leaks from the Department of Defense related to the Iran war.

The DOJ has yet to comment on or explain its decisions to file and rescind the grand jury subpoenas.

“The potential of the government intruding into the newsgathering process is even greater when you are in the grand jury than it is for a subpoena for documents,” said Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “The administration has taken a number of extremely aggressive steps in respect to the press … These are all aggressive attempts to target journalists reporting on the actions of the Trump administration. They are a dangerous intrusion of the independence of the press.”

After watching President Donald Trump nod off during meetings over and over and over again, we may finally have some answer as to why.

In Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, a new book by New York Times writers Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump’s bizarre sleep schedule has been exposed, reports The Daily Beast.

According to the new book, the octogenarian reportedly barely sleeps at all. He goes on Truth Social posting sprees at all hours of the night—something we’ve all had the misfortune of witnessing—and stays up late watching TV.

The president has grown even more erratic since his last term in office.

More than just gilding fireplaces and building ballrooms, the authors describe how Trump has fundamentally changed “the rhythms and structures and operations” of the White House. Where the president used to arrive predictably by 10:30 or 11 a.m., now it’s anybody’s guess. Sometimes he’s up in the morning making phone calls, and other times White House staff find him still asleep between 8 and 10 a.m.—a sign that he probably stayed up all night watching TV and scrolling.

Privately, aides told Swan and Haberman that, for the first time, Trump was “beginning to seem old.”

“Those who spent time with him could see the signs—the moments of fatigue, the cupped hand behind the ear.… The repeated bouts of drowsiness during mid-afternoon public events,” the authors write.

Regime Change also revealed that the president and his wife, Melania, sleep (or in Trump’s case, don’t sleep) in different bedrooms.

Donald Trump began his Tuesday morning by melting down over the status of his agreement with Iran.

“Despite their protestations and false statements to the contrary, coupled with the drumbeat of the Fake News, which is doing everything possible to make the U.S. Victory as small and insignificant as possible, Iran has fully and completely agreed to highest level Nuclear inspections long into the future (Infinity!!!). This will insure ‘Nuclear Honesty,’” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations!”

Well, Mr. President, I have some bad news …

Speaking at a press briefing Tuesday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei denied the Trump administration’s claim that the country would allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit its nuclear bombed sites.

“We have not had a meeting with the director general of the IAEA, nor do we have any plans for the agency to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities damaged by the US and Zionist military aggression,” Baqaei said.

That also contradicts Vice President JD Vance’s claim on Monday that Iran had agreed to allow IAEA inspectors, who could visit Iran “this week, maybe as soon as today.”

The vice president did not offer specifics on what kind of access IAEA inspectors would be granted, or how frequently their inspections would take place. Last week, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly assured U.S. lawmakers that in agreeing to the MOU, Tehran had drafted a letter inviting IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi to bring inspectors into the country.

In the 14-point memorandum of understanding, Iran has only agreed to commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the supervision of IAEA inspectors. In return for that commitment, the U.S. has offered Iran unprecedented waivers allowing them to sell their previously sanctioned oil.

As New Yorkers head to the polls on Tuesday, a crowded Democratic primary in the state’s 12th congressional district could serve as a referendum on tech money in politics. But why this race has drawn quite so much money is a little mysterious. To some, it’s an intra-industry disagreement about the best approach to regulation—or, more cynically, a fight about which companies will get to influence future law. To others, it’s a sign that certain pro-AI interests want to make an early and brutal example of anyone who stands against them.

AI industry political action committees have flooded this race with cash since it started. Leading the Future, a PAC funded in part by tech giants like Andreessen Horowitz and the co-founders of OpenAI and Palantir, has spent over $7 million against one particular candidate: two-term New York Assemblymember Alex Bores. Other PACs then jumped in on Bores’s behalf, including Public First Action PAC, which is supported in part by Anthropic and spent $10 million in Bores’s race.

Bores, a former Palantir employee himself, might seem like an oddly small-fish target for one of the country’s richest, most powerful industries. His troubles with the PACs started with the Responsible AI Safety and Education, or RAISE, Act, an AI regulation bill he co-sponsored last year in the state legislature.

The act, Bores’s own team acknowledges, is merely a “first step” toward robust AI regulation. Yet it’s also one of the strongest AI oversight laws currently on the books in the U.S.

The bill, which New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law in December 2025, is somewhat aligned with California’s Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, signed into law earlier that year. Both laws only apply to the largest AI companies, like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. New York’s RAISE Act requires these large frontier developers to write and publish a yearly framework that explains how the company will assess risk, mitigate any safety threats, and comply with national and international standards. The law also requires these companies to disclose serious safety incidents within 72 hours of learning about them, and introduces an enforcement mechanism, empowering New York’s attorney general to bring civil actions against companies that fail to submit the required reporting or make false statements. Bores and State Senator Andrew Gounardes—the bill’s other champion—originally wanted the penalty for the first violation to be $10 million, with up to $30 million in fines for subsequent violations, but the lawmakers brought those fines down to $1 million and $3 million to better align with California’s law.

The bill was wildly popular with New Yorkers—84 percent of respondents supported it in a June 2025 poll—and it passed handily in both the state Senate and Assembly. But it quickly received pushback from the AI industry; Leading the Future announced its plans to target Bores in November 2025, before the bill had even been signed.

“They want to send a message to any member of Congress that the cost of trying to regulate the AI oligarchs is complete political destruction,” said Alyssa Cass, a communications strategist working with the Bores campaign.

The Trump administration also attempted to get out in front of the law, publishing an executive order on AI regulation just eight days before Hochul signed the RAISE Act. The executive order directed the Department of Justice to challenge “onerous” state AI laws that it believes conflict with a “minimally burdensome” national AI policy. In the order, the administration specifically said that state AI regulation hampers the country’s ability to “win” its “race with adversaries for supremacy” and called state laws “cumbersome.”

Asked about the PAC’s heavy spending against Bores, a Leading the Future spokesperson provided a statement arguing that “Anthropic and its allies” started the spending war: “Their network of outside groups has spent $21 million across 5 dark-money super PACs to prop up Alex Bores’s campaign. Leading the Future is proud to stand against that unprecedented effort and for a transparent, national AI framework that serves workers, families, and the country.” The statement added that “any claim that we oppose regulation is flat wrong.”

Public First Action explicitly markets itself as a pro-regulation PAC. One of its main principles is to support federal AI regulation, but ensure that it would not preempt state laws until the federal guidelines are robust enough to stand on their own. Anthropic, which has positioned itself as the safety-first tech company, gave $20 million to the PAC this February. The PAC’s other funders are less clear.

Asked about Public First’s involvement in Bores’s race, a spokesperson for Jobs and Democracy, a subsidiary of Public First Action, wrote that opposing PACs were trying to “end [Bores’s] political career” in retaliation for the RAISE Act. “We’re in this race because candidates who champion AI guardrails shouldn’t have to stand alone against Big Tech. The fact that this race has gone from a crowded primary to a two-way race between the author of the RAISE Act and a cosponsor is proof that Leading the Future’s plan has backfired.”

While Bores is betting that his strong stance on AI and public battle against AI PACs will win him the election, his opponents are focusing on other issues. Bores has three main competitors—State Assemblymember Micah Lasher, Jack Schlossberg of the Kennedy family, and the formerly Republican, anti-Trump crusader George Conway (once-husband of Trump 1.0 adviser Kellyanne Conway).

Lasher—who also supported the RAISE Act—has been described in the media as a “nerd” or “wonk,” and is running a strong if somewhat bland campaign. He was in the lead in one mid-May poll. Schlossberg’s campaign has reportedly been disorganized, and the candidate seems to be banking on his family legacy to overcome his relative lack of political experience. Conway has framed his campaign as an effort to impeach Trump.

If Bores loses, it may simply be because voters were drawn to the allure of a Kennedy or inclined to vote for a policy wonk. Then, too, some voters may remain put off by Bores’s former work for Palantir—a company whose AI software has reportedly been used to identify military targets. To his supporters, though, a Bores loss would show that the AI industry has a powerful grip on our elections, and can push out any candidate it doesn’t like. And if that message gets around, Cass said, it will be that much harder to get politicians to stand up to the industry.

“Members of Congress are rarely known for their acts of political bravery,” Cass said. “And there is a really limited window, given how fast this technology is moving, for regulation.”

CBS News is losing heads, both in the newsroom and across America.

Viewership plummeted at CBS News weeks after its chief, Bari Weiss, fired numerous producers and correspondents from 60 Minutes, according to Nielsen ratings data obtained by Status.

Damage was particularly bad at CBS Mornings, hosted by Gayle King, which has long held the third place ratings spot among network morning shows. But that changed dramatically: CBS Mornings averaged 1.8 million total viewers earlier this month, and then immediately dropped to 1.59 million following June 3, the day after executives fired Scott Pelley, the de facto face of CBS News.

That amounted to an 11 percent slip in audience following what was already the “worst-rated May on record” in CBS Mornings history, according to the ratings data.

The dip was short-lived, but nonetheless “alarmed some officials” since morning shows typically produce the lion’s share of ad revenue for the major news networks, according to Status reporter Oliver Darcy.

Change at 60 Minutes, the network’s famed investigative weekly program has been rapid and corrosive. Late last month, Weiss simultaneously fired executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on Trump deportations to the notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. That same day, she appointed Nick Bilton—a former Vanity Fair columnist with no broadcast experience—to lead the venerated newsmagazine.

But Weiss may not be running the place for much longer at all. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, a monumental industry shift that could see Weiss’s brief tenure atop the network come to an end, according to some longtime 60 Minutes staffers.

“I have a feeling that Bari will not be overseeing 60 Minutes for very much longer. I think once the deal gets done with Warner Bros., people will demand that she be let go or move into another position,” Steve Kroft, a 30-year veteran of the show, told Variety earlier this month. “Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. Everything she’s touched has gone colossally wrong. And I don’t think she’s showed any talent for this position. She’s only fulfilling other people’s agendas.”

It’s one of the Supreme Court’s most palpable fears: Somewhere, somehow, a government official might one day be held personally accountable in some way for their official conduct—or, more accurately, their misconduct. A new case at the court will likely be the latest demonstration of the court’s pro-impunity mindset.

The justices agreed on Monday to hear Nielsen v. Watanabe in the upcoming term, which starts next October. The case will give the court an opportunity to further narrow what are known as Bivens claims, which allow for people to sue federal officials for damages under increasingly narrow circumstances.

The plaintiff in the case, Ketei Watanabe, was a prisoner at a federal prison in Honolulu in 2021. During that time, he was “brutally assaulted” in a “gang-related fight,” according to his brief for the justices. After the fight, he told multiple prison officials, including nurse Francis Nielsen, that he had suffered significant injuries and was in a great deal of pain.

Nielsen and other officials declined to obtain specialist treatment for Watanabe or to transport him to a local hospital for treatment. Instead, his filings said, Nielsen gave him over-the-counter pain medication. “Several months after the attack, Watanabe finally received an x-ray: It showed that he had a fractured coccyx and that bone chips had migrated to surrounding soft tissue areas,” his brief explained to the court.

Even after this diagnosis, Watanabe alleged, Nielsen and other officials refused to provide him with outside medical treatment and he did not obtain proper medical care until his release from prison three years after the initial fight. The Supreme Court has previously held that prisons have a duty to provide medical care for prisoners under the Eighth Amendment. Accordingly, Watanabe sued the officials in federal court for their alleged mistreatment.

What happens when a government official violates your constitutional rights in some way? If they are a state or local official, like a police officer in a major city, you might file a Section 1983 lawsuit in federal court for damages. That Reconstruction-era law allows people to sue state and local officials in federal court in their personal capacity for violating a federal constitutional right. (More on this later.)

If a federal official violates your constitutional rights, on the other hand, there are very few ways to hold that official personally accountable. Congress has not enacted a Section 1983-style law for suing federal officials, though there have occasionally been proposals to do so. Nor do other congressionally enacted remedies, like the Federal Tort Claims Act, allow people to pursue damages against specific officials who violate their constitutional rights.

Watanabe instead relied upon an implied cause of action rather than an explicitly created one. This approach became more common after the 1971 case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Most people just call the case Bivens for short. In Bivens, federal agents searched the home of a New York man without a warrant and arrested him on drug-related charges. Bivens sued the agents in question in federal court for violating his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unconstitutional searches and seizures.

The narcotics agents argued that they could not be sued in their personal capacity because Congress had not created a cause of action to do so. The Supreme Court, led by Justice William Brennan, sided with Bivens. While Brennan acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment “does not in so many words provide for its enforcement by an award of money damages for the consequences of its violation,” he concluded that Bivens could rely upon an implied cause of action instead to vindicate his violated rights.

Between 1971 and 1980, the Supreme Court applied that reasoning to two other contexts: gender-discrimination lawsuits by congressional staff under the Fifth Amendment and, as relevant for Watanabe’s case, prisoner lawsuits over improper medical care by prison officials under the Eighth Amendment. The latter is grounded in the 1980 case Carlson v. Green. In Carlson, prison officials effectively killed an asthmatic prisoner by holding him in conditions over doctors’ protests, denying him treatment for an asthma attack for roughly eight hours, and then giving him substandard care until he died.

Since Carlson, the Supreme Court’s increasingly conservative majority has gone out of its way to clip the wings of Bivens claims. Justices ranging from Warren Burger to Neil Gorsuch have argued that, under the Constitution’s separation of powers, it is Congress’s responsibility to create causes of actions to vindicate constitutional rights, not the judiciary’s. To that end, they have effectively refused to extend Bivens to new contexts while also—for reasons known only to the justices—declining to overturn Bivens altogether.

In the 2017 case Ziglar v. Abbasi, for example, the justices imposed a new test on Bivens claims that required lower courts to consider whether they arose in a “new Bivens context,” which is highly disfavored, or if any “special factors” should deter courts from extending Bivens to that new context. In practice, this gives lower courts a variety of tools to block new Bivens claims and narrow the handful of existing grounds for them.

In Watanabe’s case, Nielsen and his co-defendants argued that the Bivens claim against them should be rejected under the Supreme Court’s recent tests. Watanabe’s experience is a far cry from the sustained and deliberate misconduct that led to Carlson’s death in the 1980 case that expanded Bivens to the Eighth Amendment context, they claimed. They claimed that Carlson was merely a “wrongful-death case” rather than an overarching cause of action for insufficient medical care. Alternative dispute-resolution mechanisms, the defendants argued, should also count as a “special factor” against expanding Bivens to this supposedly new circumstance.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals saw things differently. “Watanabe alleged official action to the same degree of specificity as that alleged in Carlson—‘acts and omissions’ that were deliberately indifferent to Watanabe’s serious medical condition,” a three-judge panel concluded. “Such alleged official actions include the refusal to transport Watanabe to an outside hospital and the failure to provide him competent medical attention.” Accordingly, they sided with Watanabe.

Nielsen and the other prison officials have good reason to think that the justices will now side with them. If there is one word that sums up the Roberts Court’s approach to power, it is “impunity.” Over the last few decades, the justices have used qualified immunity to greatly weaken Section 1983, the statutory analogue to Bivens for claims against state and local officials in federal court, despite an avalanche of criticism for the judge-made doctrine by academics, lower-court judges, and even a few members of the high court itself.

Taken together, the justices’ position is that Bivens is unacceptable because it is Congress’s responsibility, not the courts’, to create federal causes of action. When Congress does create those claims, however, the justices’ position is that the courts must sharply narrow them through judicially-created doctrines like qualified immunity. Judicial power can only make it harder, not easier, for people to hold accountable those officials who violate their constitutional rights.

Even beyond that specific context, the justices have consistently made it harder to hold government officials accountable over the last 20 years. They have repeatedly struck down criminal convictions of state and local officials under federal anti-bribery laws. They have closed the doors of the federal courts to those disempowered by racial and partisan gerrymandering. They even ruled two years ago that presidents can commit crimes without fear of prosecution, in part because the Supreme Court had previously held that presidents cannot face civil lawsuits either.

The overall effect of the Supreme Court’s rulings is a government where officials can often inflict incredible harms on people without any meaningful recourse—in the courts, at the ballot box, or through later prosecutions. Nielsen’s argument, stripped down to its barest essentials, is that prisoners under his care should only be able to invoke the Eighth Amendment against him if they die. I am skeptical that the Bill of Rights’s drafters went to the trouble of ratifying ten amendments for such paltry protections.

In Bivens, Justice Brennan quoted Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison to explain the fundamental reasoning of his decision. “The very essence of civil liberty,” he had written, “certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury.” The court may ultimately side with Watanabe. After all, they have maintained recently that Bivens and Carlson are still good law. But it is hard to not doubt that they will move further away from Marshall’s simple wisdom—and from the basic protections of the Constitution itself.