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[Jake Offenhartz @jangelooff]

On Saturday, while covering a protest at Delaney Hall for the AP, Angelina Katsanis' camera bag went missing.

Inside was $10K worth of gear, her biz cards and an Airtag -- which soon began to ping from home of a NJ sergeant. He's now facing charges.

https://t.co/fCHmWnJETI

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it.

More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months.

And here’s the part that should make your blood boil.

Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.

The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it.

Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price.

We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us.

https://t.co/4MGFzSseFl

[FactPost @factpostnews]

Unearthed footage shows Elias Irizarry, who was recently appointed to a top counterterrorism job, climbing through a Capitol window on January 6th

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: The House voted to end the war in Iran, as four Republicans sided with Democrats in a striking rebuke to President Trump. https://t.co/Oeeox0iq9q

[Forbes @Forbes]

A new genre, new records and a new milestone. @Beyonce became the fifth musician to reach billionaire status after a year that included Grammy wins for Cowboy Carter and the highest-grossing concert tour of 2025. https://t.co/npegh7oECw

#ForbesIconoclast50
📸: Justin Sullivan via Getty Images

Presented by Corient

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers in a move that targeted women and minority officers. https://t.co/1vww7IxOf1

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

As President, I would read 10 letters a day sent to me by ordinary Americans. At the Obama Presidential Center, we’ll have some of the letters I read — and responded to — every night. I still get emotional reading them, and it’s one of my favorite exhibits.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.

The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.

It had fewer than 50 employees.

And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.

Here is the part the administration tried to bury.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.

One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.

A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.

This is public money. Your money.

Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.

And there is more coming.

A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.

This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.

https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE

[philip lewis @Phil_Lewis_]

Trump bought stock in the UFC’s parent company while promoting fights set to take place at the White House on his birthday, HuffPost has learned https://t.co/giO1zkDIGV

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Donald Trump Jr takes a financial stake in a company…

3 months later, the Pentagon gives it $620 million…

after Trump’s White House told them to…

And the company’s valuation rose from
$200 million to $2 billion as a result.

This is corruption.
https://t.co/TLcOxyzOWO

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

Trump could have presided over a very strong economy. All he had to do was...nothing: Inflation was trending downward, the AI boom was raising growth.

Instead, he engineered a global trade war and energy shock, while shrinking America's labor force. https://t.co/JvvlsQ83R8

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

The Republican Party quietly deleted their own ad attacking Ken Paxton's record on crime... because Paxton is now the Republican Party's nominee to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate.

Figured if the ad is important enough to delete, it's important enough to see...

[ABC News @ABC]

Fred Kerley ran 100 meters in 9.97 seconds Sunday night to win the Enhanced Games.

Kerley, who predicted Usain Bolt's world record of 9.58 seconds would get “destroyed,” ran a time that would have placed him last at the Paris Olympics two years ago. https://t.co/TD1JQuhqh0

[Big Boi @BigBoi]

Took a field trip to the @Pokemon museum in Chicago today …. Before the gig 🔥

[Axios @axios]

Trump is cashing in on the presidency like no president ever has https://t.co/zHGBYYpNlG

[Rolling Stone @RollingStone]

COMMENTARY: Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump.

There is no close second in our history.
https://t.co/RRV6gbiZi1

[ABC News @ABC]

Elon Musk’s DOGE “blatantly used” race, gender and other protected characteristics to execute the largest mass termination of federal grants in the history of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal judge ruled on Thursday. https://t.co/hwzwfkkLBS

[Jeremy @Jeremybtc]

A man with no working truck convinced Wall Street he had built the next Tesla. His company hit $30 BILLION. All he did was push it down a hill with no engine.

> Trevor Milton founded Nikola in 2014, named after the same inventor as Tesla.

> The goal was to build hydrogen powered trucks that would make diesel obsolete. He had no trucks.

> In 2018 he released a promotional video called Nikola One In Motion. It showed a sleek semi truck accelerating smoothly down an open highway.
Investors went wild.

> What nobody knew was that the truck had no engine, no fuel cell, and no propulsion system of any kind.

> Milton's team towed it to the top of a hill, tilted the camera to hide the slope, and let it roll.

> He spent the next four years doing the same thing with words. On podcasts, television and social media.

> Investors were told Nikola could produce its own hydrogen. It could not. They were told the trucks were ready for production. They were not. They were told orders were flooding in. They weren't.

> In June 2020 Nikola went public. Within days the company was worth $30 BILLION, more than Ford.

> Milton's personal stake hit $7.3 BILLION overnight.

> A $32.5 MILLION ranch in Utah followed. A record for the state at the time.

> In September 2020 Hindenburg Research published a report calling Nikola "an intricate fraud" built on "an ocean of lies." Milton resigned within ten days.

> A federal jury convicted him of securities fraud and wire fraud in 2022. Sentenced to four years in prison the following year.

> He never went. He was free on $100 MILLION bail pending appeal.

> He and his wife donated $3.2 MILLION to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.

> In March 2025 Trump gave him a full pardon. The pardon erased $168 MILLION in restitution to defrauded shareholders.

> Nikola filed for bankruptcy the following month, leaving thousands of investors with nothing.

The company never had a product. The only thing that was real was the $30 BILLION valuation, the $7 BILLION that landed in his pocket and the pardon that made sure none of it had to be returned.

[Blue Georgia @BlueGeorgia]

CNN montage of Trump saying he and private donors are going to pay for the ballroom, followed by clips of him lying about the cost: "$250 million... about $300 million... approximately 400 million."

Now taxpayers are going to get a bill for $1 billion.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🔥🇺🇸BOMBSHELL: The US and Iran are close to a 14-point deal.

The terms:

Iran pauses uranium enrichment.

US lifts sanctions and releases frozen funds.
Both sides reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
12-15 year moratorium on Iranian nuclear weapons.

30-day negotiation period begins.

Sound familiar?

It should.

This is Obama’s Iran deal.

The JCPOA.

The same deal Trump called the worst deal ever made.

The same deal he tore up in 2018.

$25 billion spent.
Thousands dead.
A UAE oil port on fire.
Oil at $119 a barrel.

To get back to where we started.

Never stop connecting the dots.