AdvntrRob

Think. it’s the one thing you can do with absolute freedom unless you give up that freedom. Thinker, trader, adventurer. All posts and info are opinion only.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Schiff: This story about how you can pay a premium to get a first access to his social media posts that move markets—this is the president saying, give me a cut and I'll give you the opportunity to make money off my statements, just as I make money off my own statements.

[Variety @Variety]

Paramount Skydance chief David Ellison and his dad Larry Ellison have been sued by a Paramount shareholder who alleges they cut an “illegal” deal with Donald Trump to secure U.S. governmental approval for the takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Per the lawsuit, the Ellisons’ side deal with Trump included “the opportunity to improperly funnel cash” to to the president by settling his legal claims against the CNN, as well as the alleged firing of CNN anchors whom Trump does not like.

https://t.co/EiVW2XjPam

[Acyn @Acyn]

Ossoff to Clayton: What is going on here? You've said at the beginning of this, you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee. I'm asking a very simple question. Are you aware Gabbard was present at the Fulton County raid earlier this year. Yes or no?

Your answers lack credibility. Your testimony lacks credibility. You're being evasive and you're not being candid or forthright, and everybody across the country is going to watch this and know that

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

OMGGGGG -- Clayton is reduced to sitting in silence instead of acknowledging Joe Biden won the 2020 election

OSSOFF: Who won the 2020 election?

CLAYTON: Uhm, you know, I'm not going to do this with you

OSSOFF: This is a job interview. You have an obligation to be honest with the committee. Who won the 2020 election?

CLAYTON: I'm not gonna get into that with you

OSSOFF: You're not being honest or forthright

CLAYTON: ...

[CDC @CDCgov]

E. coli Outbreak: 12 people sick in 2 states with 4 hospitalizations.
Do not eat recalled Frozen GreenWise Organic IQF Blueberries with best by date Feb 9, 2028.
See the notice for full details: https://t.co/I767ih7hPE

[Adam Mockler @adammocklerr]

17 Republicans voted NO ON WHAT???

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Last year, Microsoft made $101 billion in profits, got a $12.5 billion tax break from Trump & paid its CEO $96 million.

This year, it’s raising the price of an Xbox by $150 & eliminating 3,200 jobs.

Please don’t tell me corporate tax breaks create jobs. It never trickles down.

[Owen @Owennfa]

BOOMER: "Just buy a house. Stop renting and build equity."

ME: "Houses are $450,000."

BOOMER: "So get a mortgage."

ME: "I need a $90,000 down payment."

BOOMER: "I bought my first house with $5,000 down."

ME: "What did your house cost?"

BOOMER: "$60,000."

ME: "So you put down 8% of the price. I need to put down 20%."

BOOMER: "Well your salary should be higher."

ME: "I make $70,000 a year. Banks say I can afford a $280,000 house max."

ME: "Everything in my area costs $400,000+."

BOOMER: "You should move somewhere cheaper."

ME: "All the jobs are here. If I move, I make $35,000 and houses still cost $250,000."

BOOMER: "It's about discipline and sacrifice."

ME: "You bought a house for 3 years of salary. I need 6 years of salary."

ME: "Plus I have $50,000 in student debt you didn't have."

BOOMER: "Well I worked hard."

ME: "So do I. I'm just playing a different game with worse odds."

BOOMER: *silent*

You didn't buy a house because you were smarter. You bought it because it was actually affordable.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July. I know @realDonaldTrump and family did.

250 years ago we declared independence from a king who ran the colonies as a family business. In just 18 months the Trumps have made King George look like an amateur.

A $620 million Pentagon loan, the largest in the program’s history, to a company Don Jr.’s firm bought into three months before.

An Air Force drone contract to a startup the princelings took public through a golf course company they own a piece of.

The Army’s largest drone motor order ever, to a company where Don Jr. sits on the board and holds millions in stock.

A $24 million Pentagon robotics contract to the company that employs Eric as Chief Strategy Advisor.

A stake in the largest undeveloped tungsten deposit on earth, in Kazakhstan, backed by $1.6 billion in US government support.

Jared’s fund seeded with $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince, now $6.2 billion, 99% of it foreign money from Gulf governments. Over $110 million in fees collected from the Saudis alone. He negotiates American foreign policy with the governments that pay him.

$2.3 billion from crypto ventures their father regulates. More than a million people bought in and lost $2.3 billion. The money didn’t grow. It simply moved from the subjects pockets to the crown’s coffers.

And the next one is already drafted. A proposed ATF rule that will allow guns to be shipped straight to your front door. The government’s own estimate is 3.3 million home gun deliveries a year. Don Jr. sits on the board of the online gun megastore built to cash in. He holds 300,000 shares.

And that’s only the fraction they’ve allowed us to see. Not one subpoena served. Not one search executed. Why hide anything when you own the investigators?

Me? They searched a laptop for six years. Federal prosecutors. Grand juries. Subpoena power. Congressional hearings. They found nothing. I made about $200k a year selling paintings when my Dad was President, and they made my paintings part of an impeachment inquiry.

For six years they’ve asked Where’s Hunter? What about the laptop?

Wrong questions. The right one is 250 years old. Does America belong to a family?

They’ve given their answer. Long live the King.

[Political Punk @actingliketommy]

Karoline Leavitt went to an expensive private high school, then worked in the White House immediately out of college, then married a billionaire her daddy's age. What kind of spoon is that?

[Patrick S. Tomlinson @stealthygeek]

Literary what Martha Stewart went to federal prison for and he just announces his kids are all guilty.

[Liz Oyer @lawyeroyer]

As Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche fired me for doing my job, then subjected me and my family to months of retaliation. My story is one of many reasons the Senate should not confirm Blanche again. Read and share my letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. https://t.co/g8bFrhZ9Dg

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Republican Rep. Kean voted against 40 hours of paid medical leave for workers, then took 4 months paid leave himself.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: Look at this.

The day before Trump paused tariffs, triggering a historic 10% market rally, his accounts purchased 327 stocks worth up to $12.8 million.

The trades were disclosed more than a year late, resulting in a $200 penalty.

Unusual.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

This you?

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

Elon, I can give you many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts.:
*Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because you stopped paying for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.
*Gbessey Kiadu, age 1, died of malaria because of your cuts in Liberia. I talked to his mom in her village.
*Ibrahim Koroma, an infant, died of AIDS in Sierra Leone after you interrupted HIV supplies. I talked to health workers who cared for him.
*Achol Deng was an 8-year-old girl with HIV in South Sudan who died when you cut funding for the health care worker who provided her medicines. I talked to him.
I could go on and on. In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts. I challenge you: Come with me on a reporting trip, and we'll talk to these moms and dads, and you'll see the dying children themselves. I think if you see the kids whose lives are at stake, maybe you'll change your mind.

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

TPUSA, you may want to pay attention to this one.
April 26, 2026 the US Treasury said they were cracking down on tax exempt non profits, specifically those that "hide fraud, abuse, and extremist activity behind complicated nonprofit arrangements,” and said every tax-exempt organization should be able to show “who controls the money and where it goes.”

Let's talk fraud. Wire fraud is lying to get money, using a wire. Mail fraud is lying to get money, using mail services (USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc). That’s it. The legal name is 18 U.S.C. § 1343. Each email, each letter can be an instance of fraud, so ten misleading fundraising emails can be ten counts of wire fraud.

How a charity commits it:

A charity commits fraud when it raises or moves money on a false premise. The two classic versions:
(1) Telling donors one thing and doing another, ie you solicit money “to educate students,” then route it somewhere else.
(2) Self-dealing dressed up as charity, ie you move the money to companies and people connected to the insiders, and label it a “program expense” or a “vendor payment.”

Intent is what separates aggressive bookkeeping from fraud. But both are exactly what investigators like myself look for. Typically, red flags are identified, then Investigators would go in and pull the bank records, transfers, etc. and that's how it's proven.
Now let's look at some red flags I identified in TPUSA's filings that could flag an investigator to seek further documentation. This is not proof of a crime, this is a roadmap of where I'd recommend investigating if Treasury ever decided to.

- Red Flag #1: TPUSA raises over $85 million a year in tax-deductible donations to “educate students.” But based on my forensic examination of their 990s, only 63 cents out of every $100 reaches an actual student as a grant (and that's being generous). What they did is tag roughly $57 million as "grants" for their mission, but that $57M actually got parked in the organization’s own endowment, a savings account that’s grown to ~$70 million. (I have done a deep dive on this endowment and it's shady behavior if you want to go look a few posts back)
~$62.6 million, 95% of all their grants, went to entities the same people control. That’s the gap between their pitch to get donations and the actual use.

- Red Flag #2: A related Turning Point charity paid a Las Vegas shell company $999,000 for a “research project” with no product, at an amount $1,000 under the million-dollar line that triggers review. Vague service, no deliverable, dissolved vendor. This is the hallmark indicator of a fake invoice.

- Red Flag #3: Over $20M funneled back to insiders. $128,101 to a company owned by the treasurer, for t-shirts. More than $2.7 million to one staffer’s rotating LLCs. Fundraisers who kept more than they raised. And three private companies, Resolute Media, Superfeed, and TPUSA Merch, owned by the people who run the charity. TPUSA Merch and Resolute Media profit off the TPUSA name while not appearing on none of its books.

- Red Flag #4: No independent audit on an $85 million organization in 2024, and for years before that, the "independent auditor" was in a reciprocal business relationship with the co-founder, not very independent if you ask me. The control that’s supposed to catch all of this wasn’t there.

Those are just a few. So, now let's look at the charges an investigation would actually test.

These are the specific federal and tax exposures a prosecutor or the IRS would line this conduct up against:

(1) Wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343). If donations were solicited over email/online on a false premise, or money was moved by wire as part of a scheme to deceive, each communication is a potential count.

(2) Mail fraud (§ 1341). The same idea for direct-mail fundraising.

(3) Conspiracy (§ 1349). If more than one person agreed to run the scheme.
- Filing false tax returns (26 U.S.C. § 7206). A Form 990 signed under penalty of perjury that misstates how money was spent, or hides who controls it, is its own offense.
- Money laundering (§§ 1956–1957). Routing the proceeds through related entities to obscure the source and destination, the “conduit” pattern, is the textbook fact pattern.
- Private inurement / excess-benefit (IRC § 4958).Civil, not criminal, but powerful: the IRS can impose penalty taxes on insiders who got an improper benefit and on the managers who approved it, and can revoke tax-exempt status.

That’s the menu. Which, if any, applies depends on the one thing a public-records review can’t see: intent, and the bank records that prove it. That evidence lives behind a subpoena that would be part of any discovery.

Next up we have Rob McCoy and TPUSA Faith coming tomorrow, stay tuned.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

here's the full clip of Rep. Emilia Sykes's brilliant line of questioning that made Chris Wright squirm by confronting him with the completely unhinged comments Trump just made in the Oval Office about inflation and the war in Iran

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Today the EPA proposed repealing limits on multiple types of “forever chemicals” in drinking water.

If finalized, the Trump administration proposal would end drinking water limits for four toxic PFAS.

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

Can't stop thinking about Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive worth $828 billion, spending $290 million to elect Trump, becoming $563 billion richer since Trump was elected and ending humanitarian aid that will lead to the deaths of 4.5 million of the poorest kids on the planet.