NEWS: Director of National Intelligence accepted award saying he "only f*cks the young", Trump cronies sold warehouses to ICE for 10x list price

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Jun 05, 2026

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A note on media diet: It’s a defining paradox of our times that great journalists work at normalizing, corporate outlets. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Fortune broke important stories in this edition, yet operate under ownership structures that create real editorial pressure to sanitize anti-democratic agendas. A healthy, pro-democracy media diet draws from the full spectrum of fact-based reporting while remaining clear-eyed about who owns what and why that matters. Discernment, the kind you'd use while reading labels in the store when seeking to feed your kids, is a must. This week, the outlets most worthy of your financial support are: West Virginia Watch, Truthout, The New Republic, ProPublica, Spotlight Delaware, The Intercept, Law Dork, Current Affairs, 404 Media, and More Perfect Union.

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Here’s what you may have missed.

Corruption & Self-Dealing

The Bulwark, Bill Pulte Was a “Degenerate” Buffoon. Now He’s Head of U.S. Intelligence.

Before becoming America’s acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte spent 2023 convincing retail investors that he had a secret plan to resurrect the already-bankrupt and delisted Bed Bath & Beyond. Investors paid $500 each to attend events to hear what Pulte supposedly knew about the stock’s future. At a December 2023 event in a Florida hangar, a promoter slapped an audience member in the face with a green dildo before presenting Pulte with a trophy inscribed “Bill Pulte fucks only the young.” Pulte accepted it, saying “That looks pretty badass.” Bed Bath & Beyond did not come back. Pulte entered Trump’s orbit through Mar-a-Lago membership and presidential retweets. He then used his housing regulator post to refer Trump’s political enemies to the DOJ for mortgage fraud while declining to refer Trump’s own chief of staff and four cabinet members for identical paperwork issues. He fired the inspector general investigating how he obtained those records.

Here’s video of the event. Remember, this man is now the acting DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE.

Why this matters: Bill Pulte built his public profile misleading small investors, presiding over dildo ceremonies, and weaponizing a housing regulator against Trump's political enemies. Now he oversees the entire U.S. intelligence community. Former National Security Council member Brett Bruen warns that Pulte now has access to "the crown jewels of our most protected secrets." Instead of merely using mortgage records, now Pulte can go after Trump’s opponents with the full force of American surveillance capabilities, covert sources, and signals intelligence—the most powerful tools our government has. Bottom line: a degenerate Trump enforcer is now our spy chief.

More Perfect Union, We Tracked Down Who’s Getting Rich Off ICE Warehouse Deals

People close to Trump were stuck with warehouses that were losing money every year. Then the federal government bought those same properties—at up to ten times their list price—to use as ICE detention facilities. More Perfect Union investigated and found a pattern of politically connected insiders flipping properties to the government at massive markups. American taxpayers are footing the bill.

Why this matters: When government contracts go to insiders at prices that bear no relationship to market value, that’s a corrupt, taxpayer shakedown.

Wired, He Blew the Whistle on DOGE. Then His Brakes Were Cut

Dan Berulis worked in IT at the National Labor Relations Board. In April 2025, he filed a Congressional whistleblower complaint saying DOGE had accessed agency data and that login attempts from a Russian IP address appeared minutes afterward. The day after he went public, a threatening note with drone photos of him walking his dog was taped to his door. Five days later, his brake lines were cut. His car had also been tampered with to prevent safety systems from detecting the damage. The night before the accident, Elon Musk had reposted content calling Berulis a liar. Replies included calls for arrest and one user writing “Snitches get stitches.” Berulis has now filed a defamation suit against Musk. If he wins, he says, the money goes to defending other whistleblowers.

Why this matters: A federal employee reported what looked like a serious government data breach possibly involving a foreign actor. Then the world’s richest man publicly targeted him by name and someone cut his brake lines. Whistleblowers are democracy heroes who deserve protection.

The New York Times, How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is supposed to police crypto and prediction markets. Instead, it has been systematically dismantled to benefit industries in which the Trump family holds direct financial stakes. Under acting chair Caroline Pham, senior career officials who raised concerns about Polymarket, Crypto.com, and a Winklevoss brothers crypto venture were placed on leave and put under investigation without being told what they’d done wrong. Pham and her top counsel intervened to fast-track approvals for all three companies, then left to take jobs at those same firms. A settlement with KuCoin—which listed Trump family crypto coins during negotiations—was reduced to a $500,000 fine from an expected multimillion-dollar penalty. At least five other crypto investigations were dropped. The agency’s current sole commissioner, Michael Selig, is the only board member Trump appointed, giving him unilateral authority to sue and set rules over industries at the center of the president’s business empire.

Why this matters: This is textbook regulatory capture: officials cleared the way for industries enriching the president’s family, then walked through the revolving door to work for those same companies. The public has no functioning watchdog over a crypto and prediction market sector processing tens of billions of dollars in trades each month.

The New York Times, Lutnick Donated $5 Million to House Republicans Before Epstein Testimony

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made a $5 million donation to the Congressional Leadership Fund (the main super PAC backing House Republicans and Speaker Mike Johnson) just weeks before the House Oversight Committee was set to interview him about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. It is the first seven-figure disclosed federal donation made by any Trump cabinet official after being confirmed. Lutnick’s name appears in more than 250 Epstein-related documents. Records showed he visited Epstein’s private island in 2012, contradicting his earlier claim that he had not been in the same room as Epstein since 2005.

Why this matters: A cabinet secretary writing a $5 million check to the super PAC that funds his investigators, just weeks before testifying, is not a coincidence; it’s a transaction intended to ensure a light touch. And Lutnick’s corruption runs deeper than the Epstein timeline. While serving as the architect of Trump’s tariff policy, his sons were reportedly buying up tariff refund claims at steep discounts, positioning the family to profit enormously when the tariffs fell. The Commerce Department is supposed to protect American economic interests. Lutnick appears to be using the office to enrich his family.

Via US Congressman Mike Levin:

The New Republic, The Shady Way Trump’s Board of Peace Is Collecting Money

Four months after Trump launched his Board of Peace, a Gaza reconstruction initiative run by Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and other Trump allies, the official World Bank fund set up for it has received exactly zero dollars. Instead of using that transparent, UN-approved account, the board has been collecting donations through a JPMorgan account with no public reporting requirements. Of the billions pledged by ten countries, Morocco contributed $20 million for office and staff costs, and the UAE provided $100 million to train Gaza police, but that program hasn’t started and the funds are frozen. A congressional aide told the Financial Times that $1.2 billion in State Department aid promised to the board isn’t going there at all.

Why this matters: A foreign policy initiative funneling international donations through a private bank account with no transparency requirements is a corruption red flag. The American public and U.S. allies have no way to know where the money goes, who controls it, or who benefits.

Truthout, Trump White House Advances Plan Requiring Federal Workers to Sign NDAs

The Office of Personnel Management has posted a draft proposal requiring all current and former federal employees to sign nondisclosure agreements covering “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information.” Former employees would need written agency approval before speaking to journalists. The administration cited leaks about a U.S. military raid in Venezuela as justification. The Freedom of the Press Foundation called the proposal “dangerously secretive,” saying its real purpose is shielding the administration from embarrassing, politically damaging, or potentially unlawful conduct being revealed to the public.

Why this matters: A free press depends on federal employees being able to report government wrongdoing without legal threat. Blanket NDAs applied to the entire civilian workforce would gut whistleblower protections and give the executive branch an unprecedented tool to bury misconduct.

White Nationalist Government Capture & Regulatory Failure

ProPublica, “No One Is Watching”: How Trump Reversed Biden’s Crackdown on Gun Trafficking

The Trump administration has dismantled the Biden-era crackdown on illegal gun trafficking. It repealed the zero-tolerance policy for dealers who broke the law, invited previously revoked dealers to reapply for licenses, and shifted nearly 1,800 of the ATF’s roughly 2,500 agents to immigration enforcement. License revocations dropped 69% in 2025. ATF referrals for trafficking-related charges fell 15%, and the DOJ declined 30% more of those referrals than the year before. One Baltimore inspector was told to spend six hours a week scanning gun purchase records for buyers with “foreign-sounding names” to send to DHS, work so removed from his actual duties that he took early retirement in protest. Research shows trafficked guns typically take up to three years to appear at crime scenes, meaning the worst effects are still ahead.

Why this matters: The administration that ran on restoring public safety has gutted the only federal agency tasked with keeping illegal guns off the street and redirected its agents to hunt immigrants instead. As one 21-year ATF veteran put it: “Just because no one is watching the trafficking pipelines right now doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through it.”

The Washington Post, Pentagon hires convicted Jan. 6 rioter for sensitive counterterrorism job

Elias Irizarry, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for participating in the January 6 Capitol attack at age 19, has been hired as a political appointee at the Pentagon, assigned to its irregular warfare and counterterrorism section. The team of roughly 40 people handles embassy security, personnel recovery, and hostage rescue—all requiring top-secret clearances. Federal prosecutors noted that FBI agents found a gap in his phone data between January 1 and January 8, 2021, suggesting he had deleted records of his involvement. Irizarry was among the more than 1,500 rioters pardoned by Trump in 2025.

Why this matters: The same Republican lawmakers who demanded the suspension of a Middle East scholar’s security clearance over alleged ties to Iran—calling her background “disqualifying for anyone seeking such a sensitive position of trust”—are remaining silent as a convicted Capitol rioter is handed access to the government’s most sensitive special operations portfolios.

Balls and Strikes, How Trump Is Making the Federal Judiciary White Again

Forty life-tenured federal judges have now been confirmed in Trump’s second term. Ninety percent of them are white. Only one is a woman of color. In states like Kansas and Montana, Trump has now appointed more white judges than the total number of judges of color who have ever served there. Many of these nominees were active participants in the anti-diversity legal movement before their confirmations—challenging DEI programs, partnering with Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, and refusing at their hearings to say that Trump lost the 2020 election. The reshaping of the judiciary is happening alongside the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the rollback of affirmative action, and the Pentagon’s moves to block promotions of Black and women officers.

Why this matters: The lawyers Trump is rewarding with lifetime judicial appointments are the same ones who spent their careers dismantling civil rights protections. They will still be on the bench long after this administration ends, ruling on who gets to vote, work, attend school, and access justice in America.

NPR, Study: National Guard does little to reduce violent crime in D.C. despite $1.5 million cost

A new study finds that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. has had little measurable effect on violent crime, despite significant cost to taxpayers. The troops were deployed in August as part of a federal task force, and their numbers are set to double as the country prepares to mark its 250th anniversary.

Why this matters: A study showing the National Guard isn't meaningfully reducing crime in Washington, D.C. raises an obvious question: what is it actually for? Deploying military forces in American cities normalizes what the founders explicitly warned against—the use of standing armies to police civilian populations. It's less a crime policy and more like an exercise in conditioning Trump's base to accept his potential use of the military in the streets during the midterm elections.

ICE & Immigration Enforcement

Brookings Institution, Shock, awe, and economic fallout

A Brookings Institution study compared 86 cities that experienced sharp ICE enforcement surges in 2025 against 255 that did not. They found the raids cost 668,000 jobs, including between 51,000 and 297,000 held by American-born workers. For every additional arrest above normal enforcement levels, researchers found 13 jobs lost overall. The administration’s “shock and awe” tactics caused immigrant workers of all legal statuses to stop reporting to work, businesses to scale back or shut down, and consumers to stay home. Construction lost 2.2% of employment across surge cities. Arts and entertainment commerce also contracted sharply as people stopped going out. One in six Americans overall reported avoiding public venues due to enforcement fears. Among Hispanic adults, the share rose to one in four.

Why this matters: The administration sold mass deportation as a jobs program for American workers. The evidence shows the opposite: ICE raids shrank local economies, destroyed businesses Americans own and run, and cost American-born workers their jobs.

Bloomberg, The DOJ Wants to Know Who on Reddit and X Is Criticizing ICE’s Tactics

The Justice Department has subpoenaed Reddit and X for the names, addresses, and banking information of at least two anonymous users who posted criticism of ICE online. Neither user has been told what crime is being investigated. One user’s posts were described by their attorney as “as simple as ‘expletive ICE.’”

Why this matters: The right to criticize government agents anonymously is as old as the republic—the Federalist Papers were published under a pseudonym for exactly this reason. Using the criminal justice system to unmask online critics of ICE isn’t law enforcement. It’s a threat to every American’s right to free speech and dissent.

Elections & Democracy

Wired, Ballots Have Been Seized Across the US. No One Knows What Will Happen Next

Since January, the Trump administration and allied local officials have seized or demanded ballots in four states. FBI agents raided a Fulton County, Georgia election facility and grabbed 600 boxes of 2020 ballots using a warrant built on conspiracy theories that nonpartisan experts call factually groundless. The DOJ subpoenaed 2020 digital ballot images from Arizona. It demanded all 865,000 ballots from Michigan’s 2024 election while citing only debunked 2020 fraud claims. A Republican California sheriff launched an unauthorized recount of 600,000 ballots from a redistricting election that passed with 64% of the vote. In each case, the stated justifications have been disputed or debunked. Election law experts warn the seizures may be dry runs for seizing ballots during an active vote count, which would amount to direct federal interference in a live election..

Why this matters: Seizing ballots from elections that were independently audited and certified. and using debunked claims as justification, is not fraud prevention. It is a blueprint for stealing future elections by manufacturing the appearance of past ones being stolen.

Law Dork, The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees end civil rights redistricting protections

Using the shadow docket— unsigned, with no public argument—the Supreme Court’s six Republican appointees allowed Alabama to use a congressional map that has been blocked twice by lower courts as racially discriminatory. The ruling eliminated one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts. The lower court had found that Alabama acted with intentional racial discrimination, designing redistricting criteria that made remedying that discrimination mathematically impossible. The Supreme Court majority overrode that finding anyway. In dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that the ruling “debases democracy” and “corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”

Why this matters: The six Republican-appointed justices have effectively ended the legal framework protecting minority voters from discriminatory redistricting. A Black member of Congress will likely lose their seat as a direct result. Election law scholar Rick Hasen warns the ruling goes further: by allowing states to impose new maps at the last minute while barring federal courts from remedying violations close to an election, the Supreme Court has handed bad-faith state legislatures a tool to manufacture chaos in the final weeks of any election cycle with no legal recourse available in time to stop it. Again, cue the midterms.

Surveillance & Privacy

Wired, US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

More than 1,000 pages of DHS, FBI, and fusion center documents obtained by Wired through FOIA requests show federal law enforcement building a new domestic surveillance category: “anti-tech violent extremism.” The effort tracks not just violent actors but peaceful protesters at data center hearings, Tesla Takedown demonstrators, and an advocacy video from the nonprofit More Perfect Union, none of which involved calls for violence. The push follows Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the DOJ to target people holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. A private intelligence contractor has been flagging content critical of tech companies, including a video about data center harms to a Georgia community, as potential threat indicators and circulating those reports to fusion centers nationwide.

Why this matters: A fusion center is a post-9/11 intelligence sharing hub where federal agencies like the FBI and DHS share information with state and local law enforcement. They were created to help catch terrorists by connecting federal intelligence to local cops—but civil liberties groups have long criticized them for surveilling lawful protest activity and treating dissent as a threat indicator.The government is using counterterrorism machinery to monitor and chill constitutionally protected dissent against industries in which the president and his allies are financially invested. Legitimate, constitutionally protected AI skepticism and data center opposition is being criminalized to make the president and his cronies more money.

The Intercept, Philly Cops Admit That They’re Tracking “First Amendment Activity” Critical of AI

A confidential bulletin obtained by The Intercept shows the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center, a fusion center inside the Philadelphia Police Department, combing social media for posts critical of AI data centers and flagging “disruptive First Amendment activity” as an indicator of potential domestic terrorism. The report admits it lacks “specific information on plans to target AI data centers,” yet identifies three proposed Philadelphia-area data centers as likely protest targets. Evidence cited includes a Facebook meme, a reference to the novel Dune, and a post on an anarchist blog. Seven out of ten Americans now oppose having data centers as neighbors, making the surveillance net extraordinarily broad.

Why this matters: Law enforcement is systematically treating opposition to industries in which the president and his allies are financially invested as a precursor to terrorism. Boycotts, online complaints, and criticism of utility bills are now officially “indicators” of extremist threat. It’s the same playbook used against Black Lives Matter and pipeline protesters.

Whistleblowers & Press Freedom

Current Affairs, How Elon Musk Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People

Nicholas Enrich served as USAID’s Director of Policy, Programs, and Planning for Global Health until he was removed for speaking out. He describes watching an agency that saved 92 million lives over 20 years — on less than 1% of the federal budget — be dismantled in weeks by DOGE operatives who didn’t know what it did. One senior political appointee told him the only thing he assumed USAID did in global health was abortions. Another told Enrich that Ebola is “a scam.” Staff were blocked at every turn: payment systems broken, contracts terminated, and even airport screening for an active Ebola outbreak in Uganda was refused. Conservative estimates now place the death toll from the cuts at 750,000 people in the first year — most of them children.

Why this matters: USAID was a congressionally authorized agency with bipartisan support, destroyed in weeks by people who didn’t know what it did and didn’t care who died. When the world’s richest man can personally dismantle a life-saving institution while lying publicly about it — and face no legal consequence — the vulnerability of every other democratic institution becomes impossible to ignore.

The Guardian, Police want to decide which journalists can cover the Delaney Hall protests. That’s not their job

In one week of protests outside Delaney Hall, an ICE detention facility in Newark where detainees were on hunger strike, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented 30 assaults by officers on journalists. ICE pepper-sprayed and beat photographers with batons. State police yanked an WNBC crew from their vehicle. Newark police pushed Ali Velshi and his crew beyond sight of the protest while he was live on air. At least three journalists were arrested and held for a full day while lawyers were denied access. One was injured and taken to the hospital. The city’s curfew exempted journalists with “verified credentials,” but neither the governor’s office nor the mayor’s office would define what “verified” meant, leaving individual officers to decide on the spot who counts as press.

Why this matters: When police control which journalists can witness their conduct, accountability journalism becomes impossible by design. The First Amendment’s press protections mean nothing if an officer can simply point at a reporter and say they don’t qualify.

Media & Journalism

Wired, AI Just Isn’t Right

A Wired fact-checker tested AI tools against her own professional standards and the results are alarming. A March 2025 study from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found more than 60% of responses from AI-powered search engines were inaccurate. A BBC study puts the error rate closer to 45%. On benchmark tests designed to measure factual accuracy, the best-performing model scored 73%, meaning it was wrong more than one in four times. No model tested on OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark exceeded 50% accuracy. When the author gave all four major chatbots a professional fact-checking test, every one described what it would do, then stopped short of actually doing it. ChatGPT fabricated a paragraph that didn’t exist in the source material. Sixty percent of AI researchers surveyed in a 2025 report doubted the hallucination problem would be solved anytime soon.

Why this matters: Nearly half of Americans now use AI to find information, and they’re doing so as newsrooms shrink and fact-checking disappears. A tool that’s wrong up to half the time, presented with the confidence of a search engine, is not a neutral information source. It’s a misinformation machine with a friendly interface.

404 Media, Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search

Moderators of r/Biohackers banned peptide and hormone replacement therapy posts after discovering companies were systematically spamming the subreddit to manipulate AI search results. Because ChatGPT and Google’s AI search frequently cite Reddit as a source, a cottage industry called “AI-engine optimization” has emerged. Firms openly advertise armies of automated accounts publishing Reddit posts to get their brands cited by AI tools. The manipulation goes beyond simple product plugs; agencies reverse-engineer the prompt patterns that AI models prioritize, seed vague high-engagement questions to draw real user responses, then embed brand mentions at precisely the locations most likely to be scraped. The accounts doing this are built with authentic-looking posting histories, making them nearly impossible to detect.

Why this matters: When companies can poison the source material that AI tools cite as fact, the information people receive in response to health questions it’s paid placement wearing a human mask. The same AI tools half of Americans now use to find information are being gamed by the very industries those Americans are trying to research.

On with Kara Swisher, Brendan Carr's FCC Is Coming For Information Pipelines

Nilay Patel, host of the Vergecast and Decoder, warns that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s attacks on broadcast media are a test balloon for something far more dangerous—using regulatory pressure to control the “actual distribution points of the content people actually watch.” Patel says the real targets are platforms like Google. As a major defense contractor facing profit pressure, Google may succumb to administration attempts to “threaten Google into changing the YouTube algorithm.” From there, the same playbook becomes a test for claiming “Hey, how can we pressure Verizon or AT&T into throttling content on their networks” that the administration doesn’t like.

Why this matters: This is a direct threat to the ability of Americans to inform themselves. If the administration can leverage regulatory threats to reshape what algorithms surface and what content gets throttled at the network level, it gains effective control over the information environment without ever passing a law or winning a court case.

Public Health

West Virginia Watch, Most of WV Medicaid recipients aren’t aware that work requirements are coming, survey finds

Starting January 1, 2027, more than 161,000 West Virginians on expanded Medicaid will have to document 80 hours of work or job training per month to keep their coverage—and 55% of them don’t know it’s coming. The requirements come from the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law by Trump with support from all four of West Virginia’s Republican congressional representatives. A study projected that between 40,000 and 75,000 residents will lose coverage once the rules take effect.

Why this matters: People losing health coverage they don’t know they’re about to lose can’t fight back, appeal, or find alternatives in time. This is a window into how poorly Americans inform themselves, and how difficult it may be to stay informed of things that directly impact us in our toxic information environment.

Environment

The Guardian, Dismay as Trump officials to dismantle key ocean monitoring system

The National Science Foundation plans to remove all in-water infrastructure from the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368 million network of more than 900 instruments that has continuously monitored ocean health, climate variability, and marine biodiversity since 2016. The announcement came days after Trump fired the entire independent board overseeing the NSF. Instruments will be pulled from sites off North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland over the next 15 months. The network has contributed critical research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a system of ocean currents whose potential collapse could have severe global climate consequences. The institutional knowledge required to operate the system is being dismantled alongside the hardware.

Why this matters: Destroying a decade of continuous ocean data collection, while simultaneously pushing to expand deep-sea mining and loosen fishing regulations, isn’t just an attack on climate science. It’s a deliberate erasure of the evidence base societies need to understand what’s coming. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse put it plainly: “Fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors.” Also, I guess we spent $368 million dollars on nothing now?

That was a lot! 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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