NEWS: Cops Use Flock Cameras To Stalk Their Exes, Ballroom Donors Score $50 Billion In Government Contracts

As our government violates our rights and does massive corruption, sharing and supporting public interest journalism is literally an action you can take to fight for democracy.

Jun 12, 2026

I point readers toward journalism and research that actually improves understanding. If this work makes staying informed easier for you, support it here.

A note on media diet: Sometimes in these summaries you’ll see articles from corporate or legacy newsrooms with anti-democracy owners and corporate agendas. It’s important that you pay attention to the agendas of media owners, and use that understanding to bring skepticism to your news. But more important is that we engage with fact-based, public interest journalism wherever we find it, and spread it as widely as we can in order to strengthen public understanding and make the best decisions at the ballot box.

This week, the outlets most worthy of your financial support are: 404 Media, The Intercept, Truthout, Common Dreams, ProPublica, All Rise News, and Public Citizen.

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Here’s what you may have missed:

Corruption & Self-Dealing

Public Citizen, Corporate Donors to Trump’s White House Ballroom have Received $50 Billion in Government Contracts Since the East Wing was Demolished

A new Public Citizen report finds that 14 of 27 known corporate donors to Trump’s $400 million White House Ballroom project have received more than $50 billion in new government contracts in the months since donating. Amazon, Palantir, NextEra Energy, and Lockheed Martin are among those donors. 16 of the 27 are also facing federal enforcement actions that the Trump administration has suspended or declined to pursue. The White House signed a secret funding agreement that allows donors to remain anonymous, meaning the full donor list has not been disclosed.

Why this matters: Corporations are funneling millions into a bullshit project and receiving billions in government contracts in return. On top of that, they’re being freed from the consequences of government investigations and penalties for alleged wrongdoing. This is the definition of pay-to-play corruption. And some ballroom donors are remaining anonymous? This leaves the public with no way to track who is buying government officials and getting kickbacks.

The Washington Post, Spike in border wall spending goes mostly to 2 firms with GOP, White House ties

The Trump administration has awarded more than $19.4 billion in border wall contracts in the past six months, compared to $2.1 billion over the entire period from 2016 to 2024. Nearly all of it has gone to two companies: Fisher Sand & Gravel ($7.8 billion) and Barnard Construction ($4.5 billion). Fisher’s CEO is a prominent GOP donor, and Barnard’s chairman and his wife gave $1.1 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign. Contracts are being awarded through a pre-vetted pool rather than open bidding, limiting public transparency. Costs are also ballooning well beyond original contract amounts, with one Fisher contract growing by $629 million after modifications were added.

Why this matters: Billions in taxpayer dollars are flowing to major Trump donors through a contracting process stripped of transparency safeguards. Companies are funding the president’s campaign and getting inflated government contracts as payback. Our government has become an ATM for political allies of the president and your tax dollars are what comes out of the machine and into their hands.

KFF Health News, Trump Bought Tobacco Stocks and Raked In Industry Donations as FDA Eased Standards

President Trump grew his stake in tobacco giant Philip Morris to as much as $1.64 million this year while his FDA pursued a sweeping pro-tobacco agenda. The administration fast-tracked nicotine pouches, waved through flavored e-cigarettes over the objections of career scientists, and gutted the public health offices that fight smoking. The money flowed both ways: tobacco interests gave more than $20 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. since late 2023, and Reynolds American dropped $5 million into its coffers just a week before the FDA issued guidance that boosted the industry. Trump went on a tobacco stock-buying spree in March, making eight separate purchases of Philip Morris or Altria shares. A former FDA tobacco official called the policy shift “a gift on a platter with a side of public health malpractice.”

Why this matters: The public can no longer trust that health policy serves the public rather than the president’s portfolio. The president personally profits from the stocks of an industry his own government is regulating and that industry funnels millions to his political operation. The offices and programs that warn people about a product that kills half a million Americans annually are dismantled as a result of the corruption.

Surveillance & Policing Gone Wrong

404 Media, Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People

Police across the country are repeatedly using Flock, the automated license plate reader network that logs the movements of nearly every passing car, to stalk their partners and exes. In one case detailed in court records, a Florida officer ran his ex-girlfriend’s plate through the system at least 69 times over a single summer, then invited a colleague to join him on a “stakeout” to find her. He was charged with stalking and hacking and sentenced to probation. An April study by the Institute for Justice found at least 18 officers caught using Flock to track a romantic interest in recent years, but the real number is almost certainly far higher, since known cases surface only when the abuse is egregious enough to trigger firing or arrest. Most of these cases were not caught by police audits but by stalking victims, journalists, and citizen groups digging through public records. Police do not need a warrant to look up anyone they want, and one officer logged 395 searches of a single plate over ten months before anyone noticed.

Why this matters: A surveillance dragnet that tracks where everyone drives is being used by unaccountable police officers to do creep crimes. Victims and reporters are doing the work of exposing the abuses of the system, not police departments.

Wired, Wrongful Arrest Exposes Failures in One of the Oldest Police Face-Recognition Tools in the US

The ACLU is suing two Florida police departments after Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old commercial crabber, was wrongfully arrested (for trying to lure a child) based on a faulty face recognition match. Police ran cellphone photos of surveillance footage through FACES, a Pinellas County system holding tens of millions of mugshots and license photos, and got a “93 percent match” to Dillon, who lived more than 300 miles away and says he’d never been to the city where the crime happened. That score measures only how similar two images look to the algorithm, not whether they show the same person. Several facts pointing away from Dillon, including a witness calling the suspect a “regular customer” and license plate readers placing his vehicles nowhere near the scene, never reached the judge who signed the warrant. Charges were dropped weeks after he pleaded not guilty, but the officer who built the case was promoted by year’s end. The ACLU says it’s at least the 15th known wrongful arrest in the US tied to face recognition.

Abuse, Impunity & Political Power

The New Yorker, Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse

Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan built a fortune by coercing women into online sex work. Tate ran a paid network called the War Room, where members were taught his recruitment method: fake romantic feelings, get a woman isolated and financially dependent, then chip away at her resistance to performing on camera. In private messages, Andrew Tate bragged about doing this to more than 100 women and described beating, choking, and raping recruits. Romanian prosecutors charged the brothers with running an organized crime group to traffic women, some of them minors. The Tates boosted Trump's 2024 campaign, and after he won, his administration pressured Romania into lifting their travel ban.

After the travel ban was lifted, the Tates flew from Romania to Florida in late February 2025 and were welcomed in MAGA-world. They were photographed with Roger Stone, greeted ringside at a UFC event by UFC president Dana White ("Welcome to the States, boys!"), and met with various allies.

Why this matters: The guy running the UFC event on the White House lawn this summer and the president of the United States are friends with men credibly accused of trafficking minors.

The Immigration Machine & State Violence

KFF Health News, Festering Infections to Untreated Cancer: ICE Detainees Describe Medical Neglect Across US

Hundreds of immigrant detainees across at least 33 states allege in sworn federal court filings that ICE facilities failed to provide adequate medical care. The accounts are harrowing: an Albanian man said he pulled out his own tooth after months without dental care, and a Venezuelan man said flesh-eating bacteria turned his leg purple after staff skipped his doctor’s appointment. ICE custody is now deadlier than it has been in two decades, with 51 deaths since Trump’s second term began and suicides spiking to record numbers. The detained population has nearly doubled to more than 75,000, about 70% of whom have no criminal conviction, while DHS shut down the office that once investigated neglect complaints.

Why this matters: The government is failing to provide the basic medical care the law requires. This investigation, built from detainees’ own sworn testimony, documents a system where denying medicine and ignoring obvious suffering has become routine. We taxpayers are paying for all this cruelty. Meanwhile study after study has shown the harm to the economy, families, and communties wrought by our white supremacist immigration policy.

Common Dreams, Despite Court Protection Orders, Trump Admin Deports Refugees to War-Torn Central African Republic, Putting ‘Lives at Risk’

The Trump administration deported nearly two dozen people to the Central African Republic, a country so dangerous the State Department tells Americans not to go there “for any reason” because of war, kidnapping, landmines, and terrorism. Several of those on the flight were refugees who had won court orders barring their deportation home, including an Iranian pro-democracy activist, a Syrian torture survivor, and others from Afghanistan. To get around the judges’ protection orders, the administration is dumping people in “third countries” where they have no ties, no legal status, and no support. Lawyers fear the migrants will ultimately be forced back to the very countries they fled. According to Human Rights First, the US has paid governments $44 million to take more than 19,000 deportees across 24 countries, some of whom have faced arbitrary detention, torture, or return to their persecutors. Senator Chris Murphy called the policy “deeply evil.”

Why this matters: These people did not lose their cases; they won them, proving to a judge they would likely be persecuted if sent home, only to be abandoned in a foreign war zone. The government is using secret deals with unstable nations to bypass court orders meant to protect the vulnerable. The Trump administration is not enforcing the law, it’s evading it.

The Intercept, Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking

The US military has carried out more than 60 strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing over 200 people without trial. One strike stands apart: the first, on September 2, 2025, killed 11 people, far more than the one to four killed in nearly every other attack. In a classified briefing, a top Joint Staff officer admitted that some of those killed “could be” victims of human trafficking. Smuggling experts told The Intercept that no one packs 11 people onto a cocaine boat, and that the vessel’s profile matched a ship carrying mixed cargo, likely including people, from a Venezuelan region that is a known human trafficking hub. The military has since shifted its story, now claiming just one of the 11 was a confirmed terrorist and the other 10 mere “affiliates,” a status one official said might be conferred by little more than a conversation. Multiple lawmakers say the government never knew the identities of most of the people it killed, and Coast Guard data shows about 1 in 5 boats it suspects of drug-running carry no contraband at all.

Why this matters: The government is carrying out extrajudicial killings at sea based on intelligence so thin it cannot name most of the dead, and now concedes some may have been trafficking victims, the very people these operations claim to protect. When the government can kill people without knowing who they are or proving they did anything wrong, what stands between any of us and a missile?

Government Capture & Regulatory Failure

CNN, EPA scientists say they are being pushed to downplay potential risks of household products

Scientists at the EPA’s chemical safety office told CNN they are being pressured to rig safety reviews so that risks from chemicals in products like cleaners and cosmetics vanish on paper. To make a chemical look safe, staff said they were told to test unrealistic scenarios. Employees said that the moment a scientist found a real risk, managers would convene a meeting to figure out how to erase it. Scientists were also ordered to stop accounting for how some racial groups are more vulnerable to certain chemicals, a standard scientific practice that leadership dismissed as “DEI.” Many of the political appointees now running these offices are former chemical industry lobbyists. One is Nancy Beck, a former American Chemistry Council official who reopened a finished assessment of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, after which the agency proposed nearly doubling the amount it considers safe for exposure.

Why this matters: The agency meant to protect public health is steered by former industry lobbyists to do the opposite, protect corporate profits at the expense of public health.

The Guardian, Hard-right groups have expanded their influence across US government, report finds

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual Year in Hate and Extremism report identified 1,263 hate and anti-government groups operating in 2025 and found that the Trump administration has reshaped federal policy to serve far-right interests. The report notes that 23% of all FBI agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement, pulling personnel away from counter-terrorism, white-collar crime, and cybercrime. The administration also dismantled a national database tracking domestic terrorism and hate crimes, and removed a peer-reviewed DOJ study finding that far-right attacks outpace all other forms of domestic violent extremism.

Why this matters: Gutting the agencies and databases that track far-right violence, while pardoning January 6 participants and redirecting law enforcement toward immigration raids, leaves the public less protected from the domestic threats the government is actively choosing to ignore.

Truthout, Under Trump, Corruption and Governance Have Become Indistinguishable

In this op-ed, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes argues that the Trump administration has normalized corruption as a governing model, pointing to a string of industry-insider appointments with direct financial conflicts. Former GEO Group executive David Venturella, who was a paid GEO consultant until less than two weeks before returning to lead ICE, had his standard ethics cooling-off period waived. Border czar Tom Homan, who was recorded accepting $50,000 from undercover FBI agents in a 2024 corruption sting, also worked as a paid GEO consultant. Hayes catalogs similar patterns across the cabinet: a fracking CEO now heads the Energy Department and has canceled billions in clean energy funding; a timber industry executive with no prior agency experience now runs the Forest Service; Mehmet Oz, who held UnitedHealth stock, now oversees Medicare and Medicaid. Hayes argues these conflicts aren’t aberrations, they are the policy.

Why this matters: Trump World is set out to destroy government oversight and instead wield regulatory agencies in a way that benefits cronies and donors.

Elections & Democracy

Democracy Docket, Postal Service moving forward with Trump’s attack on mail voting

The U.S. Postal Service has proposed a rule to implement Trump’s March executive order restricting mail voting, requiring state officials to submit voter lists to USPS at least 30 days before ballots go out, and refusing to send ballots to anyone not on those lists. The rule relies in part on Department of Homeland Security databases that have documented flaws, and it assigns a unique barcode to each mail voter’s ballot to “facilitate law enforcement efforts.” Legal experts say the order is unconstitutional, since, under the Constitution, states run elections and only Congress, not the president, can set national standards. The move came one day after a federal judge declined to block the executive order, but specifically noted that agency action was needed to give plaintiffs legal standing to sue.

Why this matters: Stripping millions of voters of mail ballot access before a midterm election, using flawed federal databases and without congressional authorization, is a direct attack on voting rights. The barcode tracking of individual mail voters raises additional alarm about using the postal system as a surveillance tool against the electorate.

Tech, Media & Accountability

Wired, Threats Against Politicians Skyrocketed After Meta Changed Its Speech Rules

New research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed nearly 8 million Facebook comments on posts by 100 members of Congress and found that violent threats and hate speech quadrupled in the six months after Meta relaxed its content moderation rules. Comments violating Meta’s own policies on violent threats jumped from 1,800 to 7,600; hate speech comments rose from 6,900 to 30,000. Threats against President Trump more than doubled, with many comments potentially rising to the level of felony offenses. Meta’s own transparency reports show the company cut proactive content moderation by roughly half over the same period. Hours before the report was published, many of the cited comments were deleted from Facebook.

Why this matters: Meta’s rollback of content moderation isn’t a free speech win, it’s a business decision that trades public safety for engagement. Election officials are leaving their jobs over threats. Zuck’s unleashing of more chaos, extremism, and hate into our information ecosystem only benefits Trump’s fascist movement.

The Decoder, Landmark German ruling declares Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own words and makes it liable for false answers

The Regional Court of Munich ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims its AI Overviews generate, rejecting the limited legal protections that normally shield search engines. Google’s AI had falsely tied two Munich publishers to scams and shady business practices, drawing connections that appeared in none of the linked sources. The court found that AI Overviews are Google’s own content, not a list of third-party results, because the AI rewrites and judges information “in its own words.” It dismissed Google’s defense that users can check the sources themselves, noting that the summaries read as self-contained statements, and that studies show users almost never click through to sources. The court also gave AI-generated opinions weaker free-speech protection, reasoning that an algorithm’s output is not a person expressing a genuine conviction. The ruling is not yet final, and Google says it is reviewing the decision.

Why this matters: As AI-generated answers replace links as the public’s main way of finding information, this ruling forces the companies behind them to own the falsehoods their systems produce. Holding platforms accountable for AI defamation is a critical check on a technology that can smear people and businesses at massive scale with no human author to sue.

A Tool for the Public

ProPublica, Nursing Home Inspect

This is a free public tool, not an article, that lets anyone search more than 90,000 nursing home inspection reports to evaluate a facility near them or compare homes by state. Drawing on data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it covers each home’s last three years of inspections and flags the most serious violations, those that put residents in “immediate jeopardy” of injury, harm, or death. You can search by home, state, county, or even by keyword inside the inspection reports themselves, so a search for a term like “choke” surfaces every report mentioning it. The tool also ranks states and individual homes by serious deficiencies, average fines, and delayed inspections, and marks facilities the government has flagged for a history of quality problems. It’s a practical way for families to vet a facility before trusting it with a loved one.

Why this matters: Choosing a nursing home is one of the highest-stakes decisions a family makes, and the government’s own inspection records are the clearest warning system available, if you can find them. By turning dense federal data into a searchable public resource, ProPublica puts the power to spot a dangerous facility directly in the hands of the people who need it most.

Be sure to drop other public interest journalism and research that you saw this week in the comments so I can put add it to the next one.

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