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[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Last week, the Trump administration spent $1.5 billion of your taxpayer money to buy two immigration detention centers in California from a private prison company called CoreCivic. The deal closed on July 2.

The government now owns the Otay Mesa facility in San Diego County and the California City facility in Kern County. CoreCivic still runs both places under its existing ICE contracts. This sale demands many questions about what it means for immigration enforcement in Southern California, and I’ll be asking them.

As part of the deal, CoreCivic walks away with an estimated $1.1 billion in profit.

Here’s the corrupt part.

President Trump’s own 2025 financial disclosure lists CoreCivic among the stocks he holds. His administration decides how many billions of dollars flow to CoreCivic. When CoreCivic’s stock rises on a government decision, the president personally benefits.

A president should never be able to enrich himself through a choice his own government makes. That is the entire reason conflict of interest rules exist in the first place. Every modern president before this one either sold off their holdings or used a real blind trust to put a wall between the Oval Office and their portfolio. Trump did neither, and holds stakes in dozens of companies that carry federal contracts, from defense firms to detention operators, and his administration keeps directing public money toward them.

Republicans in Congress need to wake up and open a full and public investigation. Not into one company, but into the entire web. Who across this administration holds a financial stake in the contractors their own agencies pay? Who profited, and by how much, from decisions they had the power to shape?

The American people funded these deals.

They have every right to know who else was cashing in.

https://t.co/7LfTca8og1

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

[Daniel Dale @ddale8]

Greenland isn’t surrounded by Chinese and Russian ships. There hasn’t been $19.2 trillion invested in the US under Trump. Trump hasn’t settled eight wars. Biden’s military aid to Ukraine wasn’t worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The 2020 election wasn’t rigged.

Fact check of Trump’s remarks from…a single meeting with Erdogan today: https://t.co/IKaWUW5CR3

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

We just hit a harrowing milestone. There are now 1,000 hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics that have closed or are on the verge of closing since Republicans gutted Medicaid and the ACA to fund tax cuts the wealthy.

Billionaires over patients. With deadly consequences.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The strongest thing Smith said isn't the headline line. The strongest thing is about the pardons. He noted the obvious recidivism concern, people who committed crimes in Trump's name and had that favor returned. But the message that equally concerns him is what those pardons tell every prosecutor and law enforcement officer still employed: the system will not protect you for doing the right thing, and will reward you for doing the wrong thing in the right person's interest.

Smith also said the DOJ has jettisoned expertise and that losing people who know how to protect national security will have consequences for national security. That's not a political claim. That's an operational warning from someone who relied on DOJ institutional knowledge to run sensitive investigations for years.

The judge who blocked his classified documents report is still sitting. The pardons are issued. The prosecutors who refused retribution prosecutions in Minnesota are, per Smith, the exception now.

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Psaki: “Today MSNOW’s Vaughn Hilliard…reports that Trump’s new Acting DNI Bill Pulte has carried out another PURGE within the intelligence community firing dozens of career officials. One official told MSNOW that the administration is targeting people who they believe are Deep State.  Remember that Bill Pulte is a 38 year old home construction nepo baby who had ZERO intelligence experience before being appointed to this role. That’s his background, everyone, he has only had the job for two weeks. But somehow he has already decided that dozens of career intelligence officials are part of the so-called Deep State and fired them. As one former official told MSNOW, and this is quite a quote: ‘This isn’t a guy who’s familiar with intelligence. It would be like me taking over a hospital and firing dozens of surgeons in a matter of days.’”😳

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Psaki: “You wrote this incredibly powerful piece for Substack. It was kind of an intro to a letter that you sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee about your concerns about @DAGToddBlanche being nominated to be the Attorney General. You include a reference about something that’s very personal. You talk about how Blanche subjected you and your family to an extended course of RETALIATORY CONDUCT, including attempting to PREVENT you from informing Congress about his actions. U.S. Marshalls delivered an intimidating letter to your home. What should people understand about the DANGER it would pose for Blanche to be confirmed as the Attorney General? 😳

[Acyn @Acyn]

Gavin Newsom goes off on the Trump Family corruption:

Newsom: And I’m not talking about the $100,000 watches. I’m not talking about the guitars that he’s selling that you didn’t even know about, or the Bibles, or the sneakers. I’m not talking about all that.

I’m talking about what’s happening substantively with these kids and these investments, and the Pentagon contracts they’re receiving on rare earth minerals and drone companies, and all the stuff that’s happening with the Kushner family, the Witkoff family, the “Board of Peace,” which is about getting a piece of the Middle East.

Let’s talk about the UAE and high-value chips, where they’re getting a piece of our national security, where the Biden administration held off. But as long as you can get a deal done with the UAE on the private family businesses, then all of a sudden national security becomes less of an important talking point.

Or how about the tariff relief in places like Vietnam for the golf courses and the development deals, and the dozen other countries that he’s doing business in? How about all the corruption as it relates to the self-dealing with his resorts and all of his assets that the Secret Service and taxpayers are subsidizing? Or directing G7 investments? Or the emoluments issues across the spectrum every day? Or just the day trading literally behind the Oval Office desk, or showing up on your calendar at a company that you just invested in because you know that stock’s going to pop because you’re going to promote it the next day?

All of this happening—this open sewage system. You talk about draining the swamp. He gave it a presidential suite with gold leaf.

And you’re seeing this gross corruption at a scale and scope never before seen in modern American history. This is stuff I don’t even imagine exists at this scale in a year and a half, even in Putin’s Russia or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Chris Christie tears into Trump’s unprecedented grifting:

“He and his family believe they are entitled to this… This is Putin-esque type of corruption and self-enrichment.”

[Michael Steele @MichaelSteele]

We question Mr. Secretary because we know that ish did not happen. You know there are cameras on the Pool 24hrs, right?You do not have photographs of anyone submerging in the Reflecting Pool to cut a gash longer than a football field. But we do have video and photos of the liner peeling from the floor of the pool. Stop it. As soon as you are asked to prove vandalism, you whine about why are you being questioned about it.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

Absolutely chilling words from Jack Smith:

“I think we are facing an attack on the rule of law that is different in kind and scope to anything I've seen in my lifetime".

Remember, this man saw firsthand how corrupt and crooked Trump was.

[Rep. Jamie Raskin @RepRaskin]

Liz Oyer, former Pardon Attorney, describes how Todd Blanche fired her when she refused to do a dangerous official favor for Trump friend Mel Gibson. The actor lost his federal firearm rights after committing domestic violence. Gibson assaulted his girlfriend while she was holding their baby daughter, smashing her in the mouth, breaking her teeth, threatening her with his gun. Gibson asked Trump’s DOJ to reinstate his federal firearm rights despite his criminal conviction. Although Blanche had the power to do it on his own, he tried to force Oyer to give her stamp of approval. Not convinced of Gibson’s rehabilitation or his lack of dangerousness, and knowing that over half of women murdered in the United States are killed by a current or past intimate partner, and the presence of firearms in an abusive household increases the risk of murder by 500%, Oyer refused to have anything to do with Blanche’s dangerous and unethical suggestion. Blanche sacked her.

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

And there it is: With just hours remaining until deadline to release more Epstein Files under lawsuit filed by @KatiePhang — Justice Dept asks judge for two-month delay, claiming it risks revealing victims’ identities..

… (which the Trump Admin has already done)

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

BREAKING: Congressional probe alleges massive fraud in Trump-aligned Freedom 250

And a damning reveal about the Great American State Fair flop

https://t.co/DnrggmSRO4

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Any other FBI Director would have resigned before this story broke. The real news here is that Trump is willing to tolerate this.

[Michael S. Schmidt @nytmike]

NEW/EXCLUSIVE: The White House secretly pressured arm of the govt that is supposed to be independent and protect federal workers from unfair political firings. After WH pressure the board made monumental decision in Trump’s favor, expanding his power to fire fed employees like DOJ prosecutors.

https://t.co/n4GmDgosFd

[Fred Wellman @FPWellman]

This is monstrous. We were once the beacon of freedom. A home for the oppressed. This is a perversion of all the values we built this country on. These racist policies must be stopped.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

The parks you and your family visit this summer are short funding because the money is going to Trump's pointless vanity projects.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie:

“I think it's ironic that we control the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and the White House, and we're yelling 'election fraud'? I mean, we won all the damn elections."

[Bill wolf @Wwolfhunt]

@RepRaskin @FrankReiser2 Raskin is of course, correct.
Mike Johnson is wrong.
Even though Republicans control, all three arms of government, they have managed to accomplish nothing.

Vote the bums out