Jesse Jackson Told Me Why He Really Ran for President

Word of the Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson’s death last week transported me back to the summer of 1987, when I was the editor of Mother Jones, and met him in person for the first time at the start of his second campaign for the presidency. One of his generation’s greatest orators, he blended Bible verses and calls for social justice like Dr. King. Invocations of self-affirmation, though, were distinctly Jesse. On Sesame Street he once taught a multiracial group of children to shout: “I AM SOMEBODY.” The son of an impoverished single mother from South Carolina, Jackson was a key figure in the struggle for racial equality by the time he was 23. Two decades later, he turned that slogan on himself by launching an improbable bid to run the country.

If you’d seen him thundering before massive crowds on television or in person during the ’60s and ’70s, as I had, you never forgot his booming baritone and rhythmic wordplay. So when I met him at his headquarters on the South Side of Chicago, Jackson was a familiar figure. At 6’4”, he towered over me, with the bruiser build of his father, a onetime boxer, and broad shoulders of the football player he’d been in college. That was the first impression—larger than life—no surprise. But the sound of his offstage voice was muted and even whispery, hard for my tape recorder to pick up. He was blunt about the business at hand. “What are we doing?” he rasped.

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Read Foster's 1987 cover story, "He Thinks He Can Win"

In the weeks ahead, Jackson would prove the most challenging subject for a profile I ever encountered. He had a skeptical squint and used it strategically, with long pauses and silence that telegraphed he wasn’t yet sure this interlocutor was worth his trouble. “That’s not fair! That’s not fair!” he grumbled when pressed on the wisdom of attacking the very media companies whose airwaves he needed to carry his campaign message to voters. “I have an analysis of the role the media play in the power structure of this country. Our press is privately owned by wealthy people who have substantial investments in the world economy. And they have power without accountability. Any publisher can make a political judgment and unleash the hounds. That power is real.” When I asked another question he didn’t like on our way to the airport, he began his reply, took a catnap midway, and roused himself at the terminal to finish—less gruff, without ever losing the thread. As we spent more time together—in town cars; on a flight from San Francisco to New York; and at many events—he seemed to unwrap himself, layer by layer, a little like the pastor portrayed in Purpose, the Pulitzer Prize–winning play more than loosely based on his sometimes tumultuous family life.

Jackson wasn’t the first Black person to mount a nationwide campaign for president. Shirley Chisholm, bold and brilliant, ran for the Democratic nomination in 1972. In 1984, he’d upped the ante, though, earning about 3.3 million votes, nearly one-in-five Democratic primary voters. He outlasted five famous officeholders, including a former nominee for president; an astronaut who became a senator from Ohio; the former governor of Florida; a well-known senator from South Carolina; and Sen. Alan Cranston, a political powerhouse from California. Former Vice President Walter Mondale won the nomination, but got flattened by President Ronald Reagan’s reelection apparatus in the general election.

Jesse Jackson delivers a speech during his 1984 presidential campaign in Chicago. Walter Mondale eventually won the nomination, but got flattened by Ronald Reagan in the general election.David Hume Kennerly/Getty

It still irritated Jackson four years later that his first run should be referred to as a failure, just as he would bristle years later that his second run was also dismissed as a “failed campaign.” The biggest challenge he faced was turning an audacious move into something perceived as plausible. He had never been elected to anything before. (This was Before Times, when a candidate for president thought experience in public office mattered.) With just one Black senator out of 100, the field remained tilted against the very notion of Black eligibility for generations. (Four decades later there are five.) The first primary of the season, then, took place in the realm of the imagination.

Against that backdrop, coverage of his second campaign orbited around speculation about his underlying motivations. Headlines for stories ran along these lines:

JESSE JACKSON
“What Does He Really Want?”

That was the headline we also used at Mother Jones when we put the accompanying story on the cover. “To win,” he kept repeating at campaign events. “Not as in place well, not as in good showing, not as in making a difference! Not nothing like that! As in win. We can win!” He knew his job as a candidate was to deny any doubts, but of course he carried them. Even one of his friends considered the presidential run a vanity project, telling Jackson he had zero chance. (He predicted, accurately, that all the other candidates would coalesce around an elected officeholder when they dropped out.)

“We can win!”

His status as a celebrity proved doubled-edged. Jackson drew high-wattage attention, which kept an underfunded campaign in the news, but celebrity treatment also yielded superficial coverage. On the flight, I watched this dynamic play out, listening as Jackson and his top aide labored over a major address he would give the next day. That speech heralded a set of detailed proposals he called “New Internationalism.” It was anti-protectionist and pro-worker, calling for a new global effort to prevent union-busting worldwide and to punish corporations for divesting in the U.S. He favored a nuclear freeze; reversal of Reagan’s tax cuts for the top 10 percent; revival of New Deal–era Public Works Administration and farm programs; reparations for slavery; a single-payer health care system; a 15 percent cut in military spending; ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; and establishment of a Palestinian state—proposals that also proved ahead of their time.

Our October 1987 cover story by Mother Jones editor Douglas Foster profiled Jesse Jackson as he mounted his 1988 presidential campaign./Mother Jones

After his powerful address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention, he looked spent but reassured that he’d made clear his candidacy was no vanity project. Early the following morning, though, Jackson looked low ebb. A story about Sen. Joe Biden, one of his early primary adversaries, was on the front page of the New York Times and a shorter piece about his appearance at the NAACP convention was buried deep inside the paper. “I gave a major address about the uneven playing field that American workers are forced to play on, caused because multinational corporations have incentives to move capital abroad and no incentives to reinvest, redevelop and retrain workers,” he pointed out. “Yet the coverage was: ‘He came, they cheered, they sang, they prayed, he got rousing applause.’” That experience only deepened his skepticism about the willingness of journalists to treat him fairly.

“To make progress we have to forgive each other, redeem each other, and focus on common ground.”

“Why do you speak so much about the farm crisis?” I asked on the way back to the airport for his flight to Chicago. “Because I know that can turn its back on the family farmer, it’s open season on everybody,” he replied. That led to a kind of meditative free association about what had happened on the campaign trail so far. In Wisconsin, he mused, he’d seen posters for his campaign on porches where the Confederate flag also flew. I must have looked jolted, thinking of the physical attacks he and Dr. King withstood by people waving that flag. The sight of his own face beside the Confederate flag had not unsettled him. “A sense of gratification, a sense of vindication. A sense of joy,” Jackson explained. “To make progress we have to forgive each other, redeem each other, and focus on common ground.”

For a year he kept up the same kind of schedule and ended up earning nearly 7 million votes in 1988, more than twice what he achieved four years earlier, but short of the 8 million to 10 million votes he calculated he would need to become the nominee. His chief adversaries had been white men with distinguished careers in elected office—an eventual majority leader in the House of Representatives, three senators, and Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. (Dukakis was nominated but then lost in a rout to Vice President George H.W. Bush.) Jackson showed up at the nominating convention, looking buoyant and sounding like a victor. He closed his speech there by thundering: “We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive!”

“I know what my job is. It’s to bang on the door. Kick at the door. Bang on the door harder and push harder still. Someday, someone else will walk through it.”

Twenty years later, on election night in November 2008, we stood in Chicago’s Grant Park, waiting for the Obama family to appear so a newly elected president—the first Black chief executive—could claim his victory. Nearby, Reverend Jackson clutched a small American flag and wept unashamedly. Watching him, I was carried back to the weeks we spent together on the campaign trail in 1987. During our final conversation on the road, in an unusually guarded off-the-record moment, Jackson admitted: “I know what my job is. It’s to bang on the door. Kick at the door. Bang on the door harder and push harder still. Someday, someone else will walk through it.”

Many of his contemporaries preceded him in death, too many of them assassinated in their prime. It’s a little miracle that Jackson, the target of so many threats, managed to play such a pivotal role in politics through six decades and survived into his 80s. When I moved to Chicago 20 years ago, it was easy to find an aging Jesse Jackson. If you joined, or reported on, any protest about injustice, odds were that you would bump into him. A rare neurological disease called supranuclear palsy left him wobbly on his feet and nearly mute for years. Critics, as always, considered him a showboat addicted to the limelight. Who cares? He showed up over and over in the right places anyway, even when there was little coverage.

“He was the free-est Black man I ever met,” Deborah Douglas, a Chicago journalist and friend of the family, told me. “And he outlived so many who were gunning to take him down.” For that last decade of his life, Jackson no longer mesmerized crowds with his boyish baritone. Whispers faded to a distant mumble. He marched as far as he could each time, then stood at the edge of the crowd, looking as if he was holding auditions for a successor. Whenever some emerging talent launched into a particularly effective peroration, he marked it with a tight smile and quick nod. Jesse Louis Jackson, still somebody, could see there was a new generation stepping up to speak in his place.

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Trump Media’s Stock Price Is Falling Even Faster Than His Poll Numbers

Donald Trump’s media corporation told investors on Friday that it is considering spinning off his Truth Social platform into its own company—a move that comes after years of struggling to make money from the business. The president founded Trump Media and Technology Group in 2021, portraying it as a giant-killer that would one day displace the major social media platforms, streaming platforms like Netflix, and Amazon’s AWS web hosting platform—all of which the then-former president declared to be too woke.

So far, the company has achieved none of those things and has instead bounced from investment idea to investment idea—stockpiling Bitcoin, launching MAGA-themed financial products, and even announcing plans to merge with a fusion energy company and beginning to build power plants. This month, the company’s share price has flirted with all-time lows.

Trump’s company is expected to announce it’s fourth quarter earnings soon. Judging from the numbers it produced through the first three quarters of last year, the results could be unimpressive. In September, Trump Media said that it had pulled in only about $2.6 million in revenue in the first nine months of the year. And this time last year, the company reported losing $400.9 million in 2024—it attributed those losses in part to difficulties in going public that it blamed on the Biden administration. Meanwhile, the company reported just $3.6 million in revenue for all of 2024. For context, a well-run McDonald’s franchise averages a roughly similar level of revenue.

These numbers are not totally surprising. The company’s core product—Truth Social—is almost entirely reliant on one super-user: the president. To say the platform is rarely used besides Trump’s postings is an understatement. Last May, the platform reportedly had just 359,000 active users. For comparison, X has roughly 600 million active users. Left-leaning social media startup BlueSky, often derided for its relatively small user base, has around 3.5 million active users.

Trump Media and Technology Group doesn’t have much else in the way of products, which is not the way things were supposed to go. When it launched in 2021, the founders imagined the company would have $1.8 billion in revenue by this point and 69 million active users on Truth Social. They also envisioned a streaming service to rival Netflix and Amazon Prime. The streaming platform does exist, but Truth+ hardly compares to its competitors. The content selection is anemic and largely consists of videos that are available for free elsewhere—the most-watched list on the platform recently included an Elon Musk hagiography and a documentary about the Illuminati, both of which are available on YouTube. In the original investment pitch, the streaming business was supposed to have more than 32 million users by now.

With the original plans seemingly not materializing, the company has attempted other strategies. Earlier this year, it announced it would begin accumulating bitcoin, in an attempt to build a “bitcoin treasury”—essentially tying part of the company’s value to the then-increasing value of bitcoin. After purchasing more than 11,000 bitcoins for a total of $1.2 billion in September, the company initially saw its investment pay off. The price of bitcoin rose, and the company’s stockpile at one point was worth roughly $173 million more than what it had paid. But the price of bitcoin began collapsing in the fall. Trump Media sold off some of its bitcoin in late December; the rest is now worth about $658 million—a loss of roughly $428 million.

Trump still owns approximately 59 percent the company—a stake worth about $1.63 billion. But on paper, at least, those shares were once worth a whole lot more. The company began its life on the stock market in 2021 with a share price of $10 but quickly soared to nearly $100, before falling precipitously. It rebounded to above $60 in March 2024, as Trump was campaigning for president. It is currently languishing below $11 per share, and briefly dipped under $10 several times in the past week.

So an investor who bought Trump Media when it launched and has hung onto the shares since then has, at best, broken even. Unless, that is, they were able to purchase shares at a discount. Trump received his shares for free, meaning that as long as the shares are worth anything, he’ll make a profit.

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Agriculture Is Consuming Grasslands and Wetlands at Alarming Rates

_This story was originally published b_y Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Agriculture is widely known to be the biggest driver of forest destruction globally, especially in sprawling, high-profile ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest.

But new research published this week finds that non-forest ecosystems—the world’s grasslands, savannas, and wetlands—are being devoured for agriculture at nearly four times the rate as forests. As with forests, the primary driver is livestock.

“The takeaway from this is that livestock and dairy play an outsized role in the loss of our non-forest ecosystems.”

“The goal of this research was really just to understand where in the world this is happening,” said Elise Mazur, a researcher with the Land and Carbon Lab at the World Resources Institute and one of the report’s authors. “We know where deforestation is occurring. But we were less sure about where non-forest ecosystems are being lost.”

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a unique attempt to analyze which types of agriculture are forcing the conversion of natural ecosystems on a global scale, and then to attribute that conversion to demand for specific commodities.

Making that link is critical. Grasslands occupy more of the world’s surface than any other ice-free land, and store a significant chunk of terrestrial carbon—about 34 percent compared to 39 percent for forests. Researchers say they are the most at-risk ecosystems on Earth and yet get relatively little policy attention relative to forests, largely because their disappearance and the causes behind it are not as well understood. Wetlands are being converted to crop and pastureland at about half the rate of dry lands, the researchers found, but are especially important climate sinks.

The new study, which looked at the period from 2005 to 2020, found that, as with forests, the biggest driver of grassland loss is livestock production—from both conversion into pasture for grazing and cropland for growing feed. About half of all non-forest conversion is to pasture, 27 percent to cropland for food and 17 percent into cropland to grow feed for animals, including corn and soybeans.

“When you add together how much conversion there is to pasture and to cropland that’s being used for animal feed, that’s the majority of the conversion,” Mazur said. “The takeaway from this is that livestock and dairy play an outsized role in the loss of our non-forest ecosystems when compared to other commodities or foods.”

The researchers found that feed for livestock accounted for more than one-third of the overall cropland conversion globally, yet in certain growing regions, including Brazil, Argentina, the United States and China, that percentage reached more than 50 percent. More than 30 percent of those crops were destined for export, driven by demand for livestock-based food elsewhere.

“Forests and non-forest ecosystems need to be addressed together.”

The researchers found that biofuels, including ethanol and biodiesel, were major drivers of grassland loss, especially in countries with high demand linked to policy incentives, like the Renewable Fuel Standard in the US. So while just over 12 percent of global non-forest land was converted to cropland for biofuels, that percentage rose to 28 percent in the US., mostly in the prairies of the upper Midwest.

Globally, food consumption accounted for 54 percent of cropland-driven land conversion, meaning much of the world’s finite arable land mass is not being used directly for calories.

The team behind the report, which also included experts from the Rainforest Alliance and Germany’s Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, looked at extensive land-use change datasets, then used models to allocate the change to particular types of agriculture. Finally, they analyzed trade data to determine how market demand contributed to the conversion.

Land-use datasets, historically, have been unable to adequately distinguish pasture from cropland, mostly because one is often converted to the other and existing measurements aren’t sensitive enough to determine the difference. That has meant previous research either focused just on conversion to cropland or failed to capture the distinction between pasture and cropland or the contribution of particular agricultural commodities to either.

Mazur says her hope is that policy makers and companies that depend on agricultural commodities start to incorporate grassland conversion into conservation targets. Some voluntary initiatives, including the Soy Moratorium in Brazil, were credited with reducing deforestation there, but also pushed agricultural expansion into the neighboring Cerrado, a vast savanna.

“Both forests and non-forest ecosystems need to be addressed together,” Mazur said. “If you only look at one, it can push the conversion to another ecosystem. We want to make sure that any policy or voluntary targets address all natural ecosystems.”

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How Trump Will Fill His Gulags

The United States has welcomed refugees fleeing persecution under the same law for 45 years, following a tradition dating back to World War II. Through an orderly process, applicants for refugee status undergo extensive federal vetting before arriving. A year after entering the US, they can apply for a green card, and barring any issues, receive one. But late last year, the administration quietly changed the rules.

People protected by the laws are suddenly subject to arrest and detainment.

On January 9, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began putting its changes to work, seeking out and detaining lawful refugees who have broken no laws and followed DHS’ processes to the letter. One moment they were law-abiding refugees, the next many were arrested, shackled, and interrogated. DHS calls it Operation Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening (PARRIS), and its first targets are some 5,600 lawful refugees in Minnesota. Nationwide, the new rule means some 100,000 refugees could be locked up—and alongside another, even broader, change initiated by the Trump administration, it suggests that the government’s plan to fill the warehouses it is buying and converting to detention centers rest on ignoring the laws that control its operations.

On January 28, John Tunheim, a federal district judge in Minneapolis, ordered DHS to stop detaining refugees under the new policy in Minnesota as the case proceeds, finding it is likely illegal. It is also a particular brand of authoritarian. The idea of the dual state, developed by Jewish-German labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel in the 1930s to explain the legal system of the Third Reich, describes an authoritarian state divided into two realms: the normative state and the prerogative state. In the former, the rules are followed and the laws upheld. In the latter, the state simply imposes its will, and no law or right or freedom can protect its victims. Frankel described how most Germans in the 1930s lived in the normative state where life and commerce continued to feel normal, while Jews, political dissidents, and other disfavored groups were in the prerogative state, subject to the violent recriminations of the regime. The regime is able to accomplish the goals of the prerogative state because most people lived in the normal of the normative state.

The Trump administration’s treatment of refugees and other immigrants echoes the dual-state model. People who were protected by the laws are suddenly subject to arrest and detainment, possibly for a long time. The scaffolding of their rights is collapsing, and they are now subject to the dark underbelly of Trump’s lawless detention regime.

“ICE is the face of a prerogative state, emerging or actual,” Evan Bernick, a constitutional law professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, explained to me last year. “It swoops in, it ignores safeguards, you can’t escape it.”

Courts in a burgeoning dual state are left to either push back or validate an unlawful policy. To justify the PARRIS detentions, DHS lawyerspoint to a section of the 1980 Refugee Act which allows them to take refugees into custody in order to assess their eligibility for a green card. In a new memo released this month to bolster its case, DHS claims that that is an open-ended authority to detain refugees for days, months, or even years as they are vetted again. In his initial order, Tunheim disagreed: “On the plain reading of these statutes, the Court concludes that none of these provisions authorize the prolonged detention” of the plaintiffs. The authority the government cites, Tunheim found, simply isn’t there.

Tunheim also found the government’s argument would lead to absurd results. Because the law “makes refugees ineligible for adjustment [to lawful permanent resident status] until one year after entry, Defendants’ interpretation would subject every refugee to detention, unless USCIS conducted the inspection and examination precisely at the one-year mark,” he wrote. “That outcome is nonsensical and would cause many unadjusted refugees to celebrate their one-year anniversary in this country in a jail cell.” This is obviously not what the law requires. But the administration is asking the courts to apply the judicial stamp of approval to its cruel and absurd policy anyway.

This is not the first instance in which the administration has announced new interpretations of decades-old statutes in order to fill its new detention facilities. In a tortured reinterpretation of a 1996 immigration law, the Trump administration announced in July that anyone who entered the country without permission, no matter how long ago, must be detained without bond for as long as it takes for the government to get their removal order—a process that can take years. As with the new refugee policy, the detention policy makes a hash of the statute. It dares the courts—which have almost uniformly ruled that a bond hearing is required—to interpret a law in a nonsensical and gratuitously cruel fashion. As of early January, some 300 federal judges had found the policy illegal; only around 30 have agreed with the government.

This month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the administration’s July policy. Suddenly, people who at any point entered the country without permission are subject to months or years of detention if they are in the three states within the circuit: Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In these states, the grounds for release in federal court have now shrunk considerably. Moreover, engaging a lawyer to file a case is a tall order for the millions of people who could be locked up under the policy.

The Fifth Circuit decision came from a three-judge panel in the nation’s most reactionary appeals court, which Trump appointees have turned into a proving ground for far-right and MAGA-aligned priorities. “Congress did not secretly require two million noncitizens to be detained without bond,” Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee on the circuit, wrote in dissent, “when nothing like this had ever been done before, and the whole history of American immigration law suggested it would not be.” Indeed, her colleagues’ ruling didn’t just change the law but, for millions of people now at risk of detainment without bond, effectively nullified it.

To attain detention numbers, the administration must suddenly claim that their own rules no longer apply.

Douglas also hinted at the slippery authoritarian slope of the government’s policy, the way in which it will pull more and more people, and eventually citizens, into its lawless vortex: “With only a little imagination, the government’s and the majority’s reading means that anyone present in this country at any time must carry the precise kinds of identification they would otherwise have only carried to the border for international travel, lest they be mistaken for an inadmissible noncitizen,” she wrote. “The majority seems to be unable to imagine what it might mean to be detained within the United States without the appropriate proof of admissibility, and, without a bond hearing, to require the services of a federal habeas corpus lawyer to show that one is entitled to release and deserves to see the outside of a detention center again.”

A key facet of a dual state is that the normative state is not truly safe. At any moment, one can fall from its protections into the prerogative zone. Racial minorities are certainly more likely to lose their rights in a system that will slowly suck more people into its lawless operations.

In the short term, the decision will incentivize the government to whisk people to the 5th Circuit as soon as they are apprehended, beyond the reach of all the district court judges around the country who have found the policy illegal. But at some point—and it may be soon—the Supreme Court will have to decide whether to help the administration push millions into its growing network of concentration camps, or whether it will call out a blatantly illegal policy. As Bernick warned, “A Supreme Court that gets out of the way” of ICE, “where the state is at its most brutal, and tries to manage everything else as normal, is a dual state Supreme Court.”

Trump campaigned for president on deporting violent wrong-doers. But as both of these new detention programs demonstrate, the administration’s ambition to fill warehouses with millions of humans can only be achieved by locking up people without criminal records. As of November, just five percent of ICE detainees had committed a violent crime. To attain their numbers, the administration must suddenly claim that their own rules no longer apply.

The effect of the mandatory detention policy now sanctioned by the 5th Circuit is to detain people who could otherwise be allowed freedom while removal proceedings take place. According to a brief submitted in the case by the American Immigration Council, a legal and advocacy group, tens of thousands have likely already been the victims of this new policy in recent months. These include people without any criminal history and adults who have been in the US a long time and have deep ties to their community, including children whom they care for and support.

DHS is detaining people who are coming in for immigration appointments, meaning they are specifically targeting people who are already following government orders. This alsoincludes Dreamers, people brought here as children who gave their information to the government in exchange for lawful presence in the country. The government is likewise locking up young people who had assurances against deportation because they crossed the border alone or were abused or abandoned by their parents. Suddenly, all these groups who entered into an agreement of protection from deportation with the government—what is called “deferred action”—are being locked up despite the government’s own rules to the contrary.

Suddenly deprived of the protection of the law, the immigrants and refugees whose detention has been ushered in by these new DHS policies do not enter a civilized detention program, but one that operates with life-threatening cruelty. Accounts from inside detention centers detail conditions of torture. People are fed little, and what they do receive is often moldy, or seems, as a detainee in New Jersey described it in a lawsuit, “identical to cat food.” People with serious health conditions are denied medications. At a detention center in Dilley, Texas, children enter healthy, then soon fall ill, and then are denied care. In Illinois, a woman was detained two weeks after giving birth via cesarean section; while her newborn daughter was away in a hospital NICU, she slept on a bench without access to a breast pump or pain medication. A Cuban man detained at a tent camp in El Paso died in what ICE claimed was “medical distress” but the county medical examiner determined was homicide.

These conditions are so dangerous that people give up and agree to leave the country rather than waste away, making the torture a form of coercion forcing people to give up their legal rights. “People are being deprived of due process already because detention is so coercive,” says Rebecca Cassler, an attorney at the American Immigration Council. “You don’t have access to a lawyer. In many cases, your family might not know where you are for a couple weeks. You’re not getting enough food, you’re not getting medical attention.”

Dual states are characterized by “systematically a domain of lawlessness and systematically a domain of lawfulness,” explains Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago constitutional law professor writing a book about the theory. “You only get that when you have a multiplicity of measures that move people across the line from the world of legality to the world of lawlessness.”

“People are being deprived of due process already.”

It seems clear that, whether or not Trump will fully achieve this, his administration is trying to create a domain of lawlessness around immigration enforcement. ICE ignores constitutional constraints as a matter of policy, operating as a thuggish paramilitary force. The Trump administration wants to trap more and more people in its immigration enforcement apparatus—and keep them there. A Supreme Court that has allowed this legal black hole to expand is aiding in such a state’s creation. And almost certainly, the nation’s highest court will be asked to decide the fate of Trump’s new mandatory detention policy, and likely its novel refugee policy as well.

The Supreme Court has already stepped in to essentially pause constitutional protections that have gotten in the way of the administration’s immigration crackdown. Last June, it allowed the government to proceed with deporting immigrants with final removal orders to so-called “third countries”—a country that is not their home country or another designated in the removal order—even though the law requires a different outcome and the Constitution requires due process, allowing the immigrants to object that they might be tortured in the new country. On Wednesday, a district court judge in Massachusetts issued a ruling against the policy, which means it will wind its way back to the Supreme Court in the coming months. But he stayed the ruling pending appeal, meaning people can still be sent to third countries without an opportunity to object, and where they are likely to be imprisoned, tortured, killed, or returned to their home country for a similar fate.

And last September, the Supreme Court allowed ICE to continue a policy of racial profiling in its detention sweeps and stops, even though the court has repeatedly ruled against the use of race in government policy. Notably, the decision expanded ICE’s terror to US citizens and others people lawfully present, based solely on how they look or talk.

These policies, alongside the new mandatory detention policies, track Trump’s attempts to carve certain disfavored groups out of the protection of the law since his first day back in office. On January 20, 2025, he issued an executive order denying citizenship to certain people born on US soil, despite the clear language of the Constitution’s birthright citizenship clause. In the face of more than a century of near-unanimous consensus, the administration simply declared that the law wasn’t what it said.

On April 1, the highest court will hear arguments over that executive order, which attempts to revoke birthright citizenship for thousands by fiat; to take a class of people clearly entitled to all the protections of citizenship and turn them into a stateless underclass. As Trump attempts to ethnically cleanse the nation through a lawless detention and deportation regime, the birthright citizenship case is one especially high profile test, among many more to come, of what the administration will be allowed to get away with. The contours of a dual state are coming into view, one in which anyone targeted by Trump’s deportation and detention program have no rights that can save them.

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Trump’s War on National Park Signs Is Even Dumber Than You Think

Last fall, an informational sign vanished from a patch of grass across from Chevy Chase Circle in Northwest Washington, DC. The placard—installed in 2022 by the National Park Service after much discussion—described the career of Sen. Francis Newlands, who represented Nevada in Congress for a quarter century and championed irrigation projects in the American west.

In early November, without any announcement from the Park Service, neighbors noticed that the sign was gone. “It just disappeared one day,” said Stephanie Rigaux, a local historian whose Facebook post about the removal is one of the few records of the incident.

The Interior Department, which runs the National Park Service, wouldn’t answer my questions about what happened to the sign. But the mystery doesn’t seem hard to crack. It was evidently a casualty of Donald Trump’s campaign to bar the government from presenting American history in “a negative light.”

“It just disappeared one day.”

The timeline is instructive. In 1932, Congress approved naming a fountain in the circle, which sits on federal land, after Newlands. Ninety years later, in the wake of a nationwide racial reckoning, the Biden administration’s National Park Service installed the offending sign in an effort to add some context regarding Newlands’ legacy. It noted that in addition to his legislative accomplishments, Newlands was a white supremacist who advocated denying citizenship and voting rights to people of color.

Then last March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order instructing government agencies to purge “improper ideology” and “divisive narratives” from federal lands and museums and to ensure that those sites are “uplifting.” The Trump administration appears to have determined that the Newlands sign violated that policy.

Chevy Chase Circle is far from alone. Last May, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum moved to implement Trump’s order, directing the Park Service to scrutinize more than 400 national parks, monuments, battlefields, and historic sites—as well as federally controlled DC green space—for insufficiently patriotic material. The Park Service is removing and altering signs, exhibits, and other media deemed to be “non-conformant” with Trump’s wishes. So far the department has reviewed more than 2,000 pieces of media, according to a person with knowledge of the effort, and has ordered the removal or alteration of at least a few hundred signs and exhibits.

The Interior Department is keeping the precise figures under wraps, and it declined to provide specifics about why the material being targeted is objectionable. “Because this work is still underway, there is no finalized or comprehensive list of changes, and it would be premature to speculate about specific wordage, images, or exhibit content that may or may not be revised,” a spokesperson said.

The Trump administration, that is, is attempting to remove public information in secret.

“It’s left everybody who is concerned about this in the dark,” Alan Spears, senior director at the non-profit National Parks Conservation Association, told Mother Jones. “There is no transparency. We don’t know where these sign removals are going to happen.”

The Trump administration plans to remove this sign from Fort Laramie National Historic Site in Wyoming because it references the persecution of American Indians.Charles E. Rankin/Historical Marker Database

As Trump’s clandestine censorship campaign proceeds, displays that focus on persecution and environmental degradation have become particular targets. But the Park Service is also planning to remove signs that merely acknowledge the existence of controversy or conflict.

At Fort Laramie National Historic Site in Wyoming, the National Park Service plans to alter or remove a sign, titled “A Father’s Grief … A Soldier’s Honor,” that sits alongside a burial marker for Mni Akuwin, the daughter of Lakota chief Spotted Tail. The placard consists mostly of quotes from Army Colonel Henry Maynadier describing a funeral service he arranged at the fort for Mni Akuwin, who had died a few months earlier. The elaborate funeral, which Maynadier reported had moved Spotted Tail to tears, likely helped secure a peace deal with the tribe.

A Park Service official told me that the sign had been flagged by the Interior Department due to a line it quotes from a letter Maynadier sent his wife. Maynadier wrote that after the funeral service, “I can never be willing to see these people, swindled, ill-treated and abused as they have been.” (You can read the full text of the sign here.)

“How stupid can we get?”

Charles Rankin, a longtime editor and historian of the American West who has written about Mni Akuwin’s funeral, finds the decision galling. “That signage celebrates the fact that these people, over her grave, came together,” Rankin said in an interview. “It celebrates reconciliation. How stupid can we get?”

At Montana’s Glacier National Park, the Park Service is preparing to remove signs telling visitors why the eponymous glaciers are shrinking, as well as placards about declining air quality. The agency has taken down a season of a podcast, called Headwaters, that was produced by park employees. And Interior has ordered employees to remove or alter a film about the park shown to visitors. Written guidance from the department said the changes are necessary due to “scientific inaccuraries [sic]” in the film, but it did not specify what is supposedly incorrect.

Glacier is also removing a sign that attributes a sharp increase in wildfires in the American west to “hotter and drier conditions,” as well as a sign that describes the “controversy” over the hunting of wolves. The department did not explain those decisions.

The Trump administration has targeted signs explaining the impacts of climate change.National Park Service

The department was more forthcoming with its reasoning for replacing a different sign at Glacier. That placard, titled “Blame It on the Grain,” describes the construction of a dam that created a reservoir in the eastern part of the park to support farming. “Rename it something else,” Interior guidance sent to the park says. ”’Blame’ has negative tone to it, when the actual reality is the dam was created to help support American Agriculture and feed America’s growing population.”

The Interior Department ordered Glacier National Park to rename this sign because of its “negative tone.”National Park Service

Some of the administration’s efforts to implement Trump’s order—such as the removal of exhibits in Philadelphia about people enslaved by George Washington and of panels citing the effects of climate change at Acadia National Park and Fort Sumter—have already drawn attention and outrage. On February 16, federal District Court Judge Cynthia Rufe ordered the Park Service to restore the Philadelphia exhibits. Rufe said the removal violated agreements requiring the city’s consent, and compared the Trump administration to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. (After restoration began, a federal appeals court gave the administration a partial stay, freezing the exhibits as they are while the court considers the case.)

Still, NPS is moving ahead with sign removals at an industrial scale. The process, launched with Trump’s executive order in March, accelerated in May when Burgum issued a memo implementing the president’s plans at the Park Service and other Interior agencies. The memo instructed NPS to “remove content” that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).” Burgum also ordered the removal of information regarding natural features of the American landscape if it “emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance or grandeur of said natural feature.”

Burgum did not elaborate on that latter instruction. But current and former parks employees described it as ill-advised, and baffling, since applying it literally would require removal of many signs providing basic scientific information. At Muir Woods National Monument in California, for example, the agency recently covered a sign explaining how carbon emissions harm redwoods. And Big Bend National Park in Texas plans to remove signs related to geology, prehistoric times, and fossils, according to the Washington Post.

What remains might not be especially enlightening. “You don’t really need an exhibit at a historic viewpoint to say, “Hey, that really looks good,” said Bill Hayden, Glacier’s former head of interpretation.

In June, Park Service staffers across the country were instructed to post QR codes and signs encouraging visitors to report any material they felt should be altered. Burgum also ordered the heads of national parks units to submit for review their own lists of signs or other media that might run afoul of Trump’s executive order. The Interior Department sent back decisions in September and then made additional rulings in January.

Current and past parks employees derided these commands. “I think it’s stupid,” said Hayden. “The goal was to explain the nature and cultural resources to the visiting public—and a lot of those concepts and ideas are not just readily apparent to someone stopping on the side of the road and looking at something.”

The Trump administration’s attempt to remove exhibits about slavery from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia have sparked a legal battle.Michael Yanow/NurPhoto/Getty

Responding to widespread criticism, an Interior spokesperson said that the department’s review “is not about removing history or advancing any single political ideology. It is a collaborative process designed to ensure that the full and accurate history of America is presented, grounded in professional standards and inclusive of multiple perspectives, including those of tribal nations.”

But Park Service employees, who spoke to Mother Jones on the condition of anonymity, described this process, as it has played out nationally, as haphazard, top-down, and far from collaborative.

“It’s childishly unprofessional,” said one current NPS employee involved with producing public material. “It’s not like a serious engagement with the process, or an attempt to educate the public about science or our world.”

This sign at Glacier National Park describing controversy over wolves is too controversial for the Trump administration.National Park Service

Employees said the Interior Department’s instructions are vague, leaving senior career officials, who in many cases are worried about their jobs amid mass firings of government workers, to decide how much self-censorship to engage in.

The department’s demands “paralyzed a lot of the parks, because there was no guidance,” one employee said.

According to material obtained by Mother Jones, some park units, like Yellowstone, submitted few or no signs for review by Interior Department officials in Washington. But some other park superintendents generated extensive lists of potentially non-compliant signs. Department officials designated many of those submissions for removal, often without explaining their reasoning, park employees said.

Mother Jones obtained a spreadsheet summarizing the Interior Department’s review of submissions from 33 sites in NPS’ Intermountain Region, which includes some of the most-visited parks. Of 81 submissions, the department said 46 should be altered or removed. The document does not include the department’s reasoning beyond declaring the items to be in “non-conformance” with Burgum’s order. Those include the signs slated for removal at Glacier, the Fort Laramie sign, the Big Bend signage related to dinosaurs and geology, and a panel at Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park describing the role of a cavalry captain who explored the region in an 1870 massacre of Blackfeet Native Americans.

“We are being undermined by a clown show of greedy billionaire priorities that are not of service to the parks or country.”

Park service employees described the sign removals as part of a string of interference from Washington that has crushed NPS morale.

“We are being undermined by a clown show of greedy billionaire priorities that are not of service to the parks or country,” one employee said.

A former NPS employee who was laid off last year characterized the department’s management style as “bullying and demoralizing,” carried out “in an idiotic and not thought-through way.”

The Park Service had lost around a quarter of its workforce by July of last year, due to firings and other causes, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. And attrition continues as the agency struggles to replace departing staff, employees said.

The Interior Department meanwhile is moving to increase its control over various park service communications. The department has shifted hundreds of employees in public outreach jobs into what it calls a “Consolidated Office of Communications.” Last month, it imposed “a strategic pause” on website updates by NPS staffers as it installed a system in which department officials sign off on new online content. And it recently announced that the department’s press staff will review publication of all social media produced by national parks, according to employees and internal material shared with Mother Jones. “Social media needs to be reviewed and published by someone trained and educated and aligned with NPS and the department as a whole,” Elizabeth Peace, a senior public affairs specialist at the Interior Department, said during a January 15 call with Park Service employees.

NPS employees have even received directions on how to respond to questions about sign removals. Internal guidance instructs them not to “reference media stories, leaked documents or internal reviews”; suggests they “redirect calmly and consistently”; and says that they “do NOT need to engage in conversation about individual signs or parks, which signs are from [Burgum’s order] vs weather or damage. The comms team will take those.”

The department’s communications team did not answer my questions about individual signs and parks. In response to a detailed list of queries, a spokesperson wrote: “Mother Jones is a failing liberal blog that has this story completely wrong. This blog is too small and insignificant to waste our time correcting them when we are focused on implementing the agenda of President Trump – the most iconic and accomplished President in the history of our great nation.”

The iconic president’s war on park signs isn’t slowing down. Many of the removals the Interior Department has ordered in colder locations will not be executed until spring. In guidance sent to NPS employees in January, Burgum said the department is still reviewing material and instructed parks “to work with regional offices to review next steps for their non-conformant media items.” Interior Department officials have recently visited sites throughout the Park Service’s Washington, DC, region, according to an NPS employee, generating worries they will demand additional alterations.

The sign describing the legacy of Sen. Francis Newlands disappeared from National Park property in November.Devry Becker Jones/Historical Marker Database

This chaotic process, current and former agency employees said, contrasts with the deliberative efforts through which the signs and exhibits were originally created. The Newlands sign, for instance, was installed in 2022, the culmination of a multi-year project. Its design and brief narrative were influenced by an expert group convened in 2020, following nearly a decade of debate over public calls to rename the fountain.

The sign disappeared, however, without notice. The removal came during the government shutdown last year, when federal employees were furloughed, raising the question of who actually dislodged it. An NPS employee told Mother Jones that Frank Lands, the Park Service’s deputy director for operations—the top career employee at the agency—personally removed the sign to comply with White House wishes.

Lands, whom I contacted directly, didn’t respond to my questions about this claim. An Interior Department spokesperson said only that the agency “does not comment on specific personnel,” and wouldn’t even confirm that the department was responsible for the sign’s removal.

That is how the United States government is implementing a presidential directive to “restore Federal sites dedicated to history.” The administration appears to have removed a carefully created piece of public information—with no announcement or explanation for why Americans should not be informed that a prominent US senator was a racist.

Now, where the sign once stood, all that remains are two small holes in the ground.

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DHS Abducts Columbia Student From College Housing

Federal immigration agents detained aColumbia University student on Thursday morning after reportedly gaining access to university housing by falsely claiming they were looking for a missing person, according to Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president.

The Department of Homeland Security went after Ellie Aghayeva, a senior majoring in neuroscience and political science, according to a statement released by her friends to a faculty organization, the American Association of University Professors. The statement said that Aghayeva, who is from Azerbaijan, is an international student with a visa.

Aghayeva posted a photo of what appears to be her sitting in a car on her Instagram story Thursday morning with an overlay of text: “Dhs illegally arrested me. Please help.”

Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal wrote on X that federal agents “used a phony missing persons bulletin for a 5 year old girl” when they “purposefully deceived campus housing/security to gain entry to the student’s apartment.”

Shipman, in her statement, said the university was “working to gather more details.” New York outlet The City is reporting that Aghayeva has already filed a habeas corpus petition asking a federal judge to order her release.

Barricades are installed in front of Columbia University in New York after federal agents detained a student o Thursday.Ryan Murphy/Getty

Aghayeva was detained the morning after an “ICE Off Campus” protest demanding that Columbia “establish stronger protections for international students and declare itself a sanctuary campus,” according to the Columbia Daily Spectator.

The detainment also comes close to a year after Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident who had just graduated from Columbia, was detained by plainclothes officers in university housing. Khalil became one of the highest-profile detainees in the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against non-US citizens and students who displayed pro-Palestinian views. Khalil was released from detention over the summer, but is still actively fighting deportation.

Related

Mahmoud Khalil, Finally Free, Speaks Out

It’s not clear whether Aghayeva has any connection to the Columbia encampments or campus protests against ICE.

In a joint statement Thursday, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin and council member Shaun Abreu, whose district includes Columbia, wrote: “ICE has no place in our schools and universities. These activities do not make our city or country safer, but rather drive mistrust and danger.”

Aghayeva, who has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, often posts influencer-style videos about studying and her dedication to schoolwork. In a video she posted in August of last year, she compiled a supercut of her studying in the library with the caption, “Studying is hard but my parents sacrificed everything across the ocean for me to be here. They deserve a successful daughter.”

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The Trump Administration’s Favorite Nuclear Startup Has Ties to Russia and Epstein

At 26, Isaiah Taylor hadaccomplished more than most people do by the time they’re twice his age. The founder of Valar Atomics, a Southern California-based company that aims to make small-scale nuclear reactors, Taylor, a father of four, has government contracts, invitations to Mar-a-Lago, and investments from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley venture capital. His goal is nothing less than to usher the United States into an era of nuclear power domination—becoming the next Elon Musk while he’s at it. “We do not appreciate SpaceX enough,” he tweeted last year. “If it were not for a single highly motivated American startup, China would be preparing to simply own outer space. Now they’re playing catch-up. I plan to make Valar Atomics the equivalent for energy.”

The political winds appear to be at his back. “Unleashing nuclear energy is how we will power American artificial intelligence,” posted US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on X last year. “Nuclear energy provides the constant energy needed to power data centers and release the full potential of American innovation.” Last September, the DOE named Valar as one of four companies to participate in a pilot program to build nuclear fuel lines; two months later, the company became the first-ever venture-backed startup to reach the nuclear milestone of splitting atoms using its own reactor.“This moment marks the dawn of a new era in American nuclear engineering—one defined by speed, scale, and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership,” Taylor said of the achievement in a press release. Max Ukropina, Valar Atomics’ Head of Projects, added, “America should be thrilled but wanting more.”

Taylor’s trajectory has been as unconventional as it is meteoric. The high-school dropout’s path to success included a controversial Christian nationalist church and an assist from a Russian-American power broker with ties to both the Kremlin and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—but practically no experience with nuclear energy. Nuclear experts have raised red flags about both the feasibility of Valar’s goals and its safety claims—but those concerns do not appear to faze Taylor, who went on the offense last year, entering Valar into a lawsuit against the US government over what it considers a prohibitively restrictive interpretation of US nuclear safety rules. As Taylor put it in a tweet last November, “Civilization is an inconceivably precious thing. But the way to keep it alive is by continually treating it as a frontier, not covering everything in bubble wrap.”

“Civilization is an inconceivably precious thing. But the way to keep it alive is by continually treating it as a frontier, not covering everything in bubble wrap.”

But those rules have not stopped the Trump administration from working with Valar—earlier this month, the US government announced a partnership with the company to test its reactor for government use. “President Trump promised the American people that he would unleash American energy dominance,” US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright enthused about the partnership with Valar on X. “This is the next chapter for U.S. energy.”

Since the advent of nuclear energy in 1942, the field has been controversial, largely because of high-profile accidents such as the disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Tight safety regulations make large-scale reactors expensive and cumbersome to build, and people don’t exactly jump at the chance to host one in their neighborhood.

Taylor founded Valar to address these barriers—smaller, more nimble reactors, he reasoned, would be both safer and more convenient. While the larger, traditional reactors typically produce enough power to fuel up to a million homes continuously, Taylor’s units are much more modest, big enough to power only about 5,000 homes.

Small-scale nuclear reactors like the ones that Taylor aims to build are not new—in fact, during the Cold War, both the United States and Russia used them to power satellites. Building them on land, however, has always proved prohibitively expensive; it’s much more cost-efficient to build one big reactor than a series of small ones, explains Nick Touran, a nuclear engineer who runs the informational site whatisnuclear.com. But that thinking is beginning to change: Small reactors could come in handy for AI data centers and also on remote military bases, where shipping fuel is both expensive and dangerous. In theory, small, portable reactors could act like batteries, powering a data center or a base for years without the need for more fuel.

The handful of nuclear experts I spoke with all acknowledged that small reactors would be desirable, but they weren’t sure Valar could manage to make them both cost-effective and scalable. “It’s not a new technology, but nobody’s been able to make it successful in electricity markets,” said Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission who currently heads the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She referred to Taylor and other nuclear start-up founders as “nuke bros” who “don’t know what they don’t know.” Touran said he thought it was possible for Valar to make good progress on small reactors, but he had his doubts that they would succeed in making them profitable. “I think high risk, high reward,” he said. “It’s unlikely to be economically competitive, in my opinion.”

The long odds don’t seem to bother Taylor, who sees himself as fitting in the grand tradition of an old-fashioned rags-to-riches American story. In a 2024 post on X, Taylor described growing up poor in Kentucky and teaching himself to code on the family computer before he was even in high school. When he was 12, he wrote, his father promised to buy him a laptop if he would agree to pay his own way through college. Taylor took him up on the offer and proceeded to drop out of high school. By 16, he claimed that he was “making six figures.” By 17, he had moved with his family to Moscow, Idaho, where he started an auto-repair shop while living on his friend’s couch. “The business was deep in the red and barely hanging on,” he recalled in the post on X. But he persevered, and eventually the shop succeeded. “My software career did well too,” he wrote. “Life is more comfortable now, monetarily. I still work like a dog, but I don’t think about the next rent payment as much as I did.”

Small-town Idaho may seem like a strange place for an ambitious young coder, but he stayed there for a compelling reason. As Taylor explained on X in 2023, he lived in Moscow “in order to be part of a medium-sized church community.” That community was the fiefdom founded by Doug Wilson, the self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor of Moscow’s Christ Church. In a 2023 tweet, Taylor described Wilson as “a huge influence on me regarding wealth.” In an email to Mother Jones, Wilson said he first met a teenage Taylor when his family relocated to Moscow; Wilson described Taylor as “a go-getter.” Taylor didn’t respond to our request for comment on his relationship with Wilson and other details of this story.

Wilson has attracted widespread media attention for his controversial statements, including his remark to CNN last year that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.” As I wrote in 2024:

He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me.

While running the auto repair shop, coding, attending Wilson’s church, and starting a family, Taylor spent the next six years on “nights and weekends of research,” he told the tech publication Infinite Frontiers in 2024, he decided to tackle the problem of making nuclear power profitable—large reactors often scare off investors because they can cost billions to build and can take more than a decade to come online. Taylor says his interest in nuclear power runs in the family; his great-grandfather, Ward Schaap, worked on the Manhattan Project as a nuclear physicist. In 2023, Taylor founded Valar Atomics in the Southern California defense tech hub of El Segundo. Although Taylor hasn’t explained publicly why he chose the name, in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, the Valar are angelic guardians who helped create the world and control nature.

In El Segundo’s macho scene of young, conservative Christian founders, Taylor fit right in. With his friend Augustus Doricko, founder of another buzzy El Segundo startup, the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, he began attending a nearby church in the denomination Wilson founded. On social media, Taylor sometimes posts scripture—for Christmas last year, a bible verse about the birth of Jesus appeared on the Valar house account, accompanied by a photo of its nuclear reactor prototypes wearing Santa hats.

In El Segundo, Taylor quickly scored connections to an exclusive network of high-powered tech investors. He secured a pre**–**seed round of $1.5 million from the firm Riot Ventures, and just over a year later, in 2025, he announced a seed round of $19 million, with funding from Silicon Valley power players such as investor and author Balaji Srinivasan. Later that year, he obtained a $130 million funding round.

Isaiah Taylor, CEO of Valar Atomics, left, speaks as Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, center, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, listen, at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, on Feb. 15. Matthew Daly/AP

And here is where the story departs from the more familiar tech entrepreneur-scores-a-big-win narrative, with an unusual Venn diagram of Taylor’s professional, religious, and personal interests converging on an unexpected protagonist.A co-leader of that round was Day One Ventures, a firm that says it aims to “back early-stage companies with customer obsession in their DNA.” Day One’s founder, visionary leader, and sole general partner is Masha Bucher, a one-time pro-Putin Russian political activist-turned Jeffery Epstein publicist-turned Silicon Valley kingmaker.

Before Bucher came to the United States in 2014, she still lived in Russia and was an enthusiastic supporter of Putin. There is a well-circulated 2009 photo of her as a teenager kissing Putin on the cheek; it became the subject of the 2011 documentary Putin’s Kiss. It’s unclear how she landed a gig doing publicity for convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in 2017, but her name comes up several times in the recently released batch of files of Epstein’s communications. On one occasion in 2017, when she still had her original last name, Drokova, she asked Epstein to connect her with “adequate Russian oligarchs.” In 2018 Epstein wrote in an email to Bucher that her friend had “told me about the project she is doing researching a really bad guy that gets children for sex sent to his island…she almost fainted when I told her that person is me.” He asked her for nude photos of herself 11 days before he was arrested for the second time in 2019. Bucher, who did not respond to our request for comment,has claimed that she was never paid by Epstein for the work she did.

Bucher apparently already had some of those connections to wealthy Russians that she had asked Epstein to arrange—and in fact, she introduced Epstein to one of them. Her first boss in the world of tech venture capitalism was Serguei Beloussov, who later changed his name to Serg Bell. “Connecting you here,” she wrote to Epstein and Bell in 2018. “You both are one [sic] of the most intelligent and fun people I met in my life. Super smart and special.”

Bucher worked for Bell at two firms Bell had cofounded: Runa Capital and Acronis. In 2022, Bell was one of a handful of Russian expats living in the US who were tracked by the US government for allegedly attempting to export US tech developments to Russia. The government did not find evidence of a security breach, but it did bar Acronis from sensitive government contracts last year. (Bell recently told the Washington Post that he never worked for Epstein, and that he advised others against doing business with him; he has also disavowed his Russian connections.)

“I gave up my Russian passport years ago, can’t return without risking my freedom, and have publicly opposed the Putin regime.”

According to reporting by the Washington Post, early fundraising materials for Day One Ventures show Bucher boasting of her connections to Russian billionaires Alexander Mamut and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, though she later denied writing the fundraising materials and has said she never took money from Russian oligarchs. She has said she left the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi in 2010, and she recently posted on X that was branded a traitor by Russian state media in 2017. “I gave up my Russian passport years ago, can’t return without risking my freedom, and have publicly opposed the Putin regime,” she wrote. Yet sleuths on X have found evidence that those statements may not be true. Reporting by Russian-British investigative journalist Maria Pevchikh shows Bucher speaking at a pro-Putin event in 2019, years after she claimed to have disavowed him. According to records obtained by Pevchikh, she still holds a valid Russian passport, though she told the Washington Post in 2022, “I deeply regret ever joining Nashi and supporting Putin and his government.”

Bucher, who has also invested in Taylor’s friend Doricko’s company, seems to be more than just a funder for the companies she supports. A Day One pitch deck boasts that the firm is “actively involved in its portfolio companies and play a real, tangible role in helping them grow.” In an interview last year with TechCrunch, Bucher said her goal in founding the firm was to provide not only funding but also PR help to the companies she invested in. She also appears to enjoy a close relationship with Valar executives, posting photos of herself on social media attending parties with them. While Doricko cut ties with Bucher after the most recent Epstein disclosures, Taylor has done no such thing.

Bucher said that Taylor himself drew her to Valar. “I can’t think of a better founder,” she told TechCrunch. The decisions she would trust him with, she added, are “literally life-and-death.”

Not everyone is as bullish as Bucher about Valar’s prospects—nuclear experts have raised serious questions about the safety of the company’s technology and the qualifications of its leadership. In April 2025, Taylor boasted in a post on the Valar website that the company’s spent fuel was so safe that holding it in one’s bare hands for five minutes would result in a dose equivalent only to that of a CT scan. On X, Touran, the nuclear engineer, challenged the claim. “This statement cannot possibly be true,” he wrote. “Any nuclear reactor of the power you’re referring to makes spent fuel [that] would give a person a fatal dose within a few seconds if they were to hold a handful of spent fuel.” Another nuclear engineer, Gavin Ridley, chimed in with his own calculation: He found that Valar’s spent fuel would deliver a lethal dose in 85 milliseconds of direct contact. Taylor posted in response, “I will follow up with a detailed writeup tonight or tomorrow, back to back today. Should be fun…” He never did.

Although there are now some seasoned nuclear engineers in the company’s leadership, some of the top brass appear to have as little nuclear experience as Taylor. Kip Mock, a fellow member of Wilson’s Idaho church and a co-founder of Taylor’s auto repair shop, is now Valar’s head of operations. Another church member, Elijah Froh, serves as Valar’s director of business operations. (A story last year by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project revealed that Mock accidentally set Froh on fire in 2021 when he poured old diesel into a wood-burning stove and caused an explosion.)

Questions about safety apparently have not deterred Taylor, who appears to be as determined as ever to forge ahead. Last April, Valar announced it was joining several other companies and a handful of states in filing a lawsuit against the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission over what they claim is an overly broad interpretation of safety regulations around testing nuclear reactors. In a post about the lawsuit, Taylor argued that the rules should allow Valar to test its reactor prototype, the Ward One. “Operating Ward One in a remote testing area within the United States would not pose a threat to the health and safety of the public or impact national security based on any reasonable accident scenario,” wrote Taylor. “However, because the NRC has failed to implement rules which would exempt this small test reactor from full NRC regulations, we are building and testing this reactor in the Philippines instead.” Mock, Taylor’s employee who accidentally set his buddy on fire in Idaho is heading the Philippines project. Taylor told Business Insider that the company planned to move “really fast” on it. Separately, last May, the state of Utah, a fellow plaintiff in the lawsuit, announced that it had won a “tight race”—through its Operation Gigawatt program aimed at attracting nuclear companies—with other states to host Valar’s first test reactor for the DOE.

The Trump administration is on board with nuclear, too. In an executive order last May, Trump vowed to have three test reactors up and running by July 4th of this year. In a recent interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan, Taylor called that goal “unbelievably exciting.” Last fall, the Trump administration quietly pushed through a suite of major changes to the laws that govern US nuclear facilities. The new rules, which weren’t made public but were only shared with companies with government contracts, dramatically loosened requirements around safety, accidents, and environmental protections, according to reporting by NPR.

In his interview with Ryan, Taylor lavished praise on Trump and his administration. “You have to give President Trump credit for that in bringing this unbelievably talented, motivated group of people together,” he said. “Listen, I think this Trump administration is going to usher in the nuclear golden age.”

“Listen, I think this Trump administration is going to usher in the nuclear golden age.”

His enthusiasm turned out to be warranted. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that it had chosen Valar’s reactor for a contract with the Department of War and the Department of Energy. On February 15, the reactor was transported on a special flight from March Air Reserve in Riverside County, California, to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. “The successful delivery and installation of this reactor will unlock significant possibilities for the future of energy resilience and strategic independence for our nation’s defense,” a DOW press release stated. “This event is a testament to the ingenuity of the American spirit and a critical advancement in securing our nation’s freedom and strength for generations to come.”

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Trump May Force Banks to Demand Your Papers. Survivors of Abuse Will Pay.

The Trump administration is considering an executive order that would compel banks to collect citizenship information from customers, new and existing, who want to maintain service in the United States, according to new reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

This potential escalation in the administration’s campaign against non-US citizens wouldalso add more hurdles for victims of domestic abuse who are trying to leave their unsafe circumstances—whether they’re citizens or not.

While banks are required to collect some personal information to protect themselves from fraud, “banks don’t routinely share that information with the government,” and there “is no prohibition on banks opening accounts for noncitizens,” per the Journal.

White House spokesman Kush Desai told the Journal that “Any reporting about potential policymaking that has not been officially announced by the White House is baseless speculation.” But banks, the paper reports, are “alarmed.”

It’s unclear what exactly the administration would demand from banks and their users, though the action could impact those who are in the country legally but aren’t citizens and those without access to key documentation that could prove citizenship—a category that includes many survivors of intimate partner violence, up to 99 percent of whom also experience some kind of financial abuse. Teal Inzunza, associate vice president of justice initiatives at the Urban Resource Institute in New York, works with survivors of domestic violence. Financial abuse, she told me, can look like “withholding documentation.”

“An abusive partner will hold somebody’s ID, their passport, their immigration information, as a form of power and control in an abusive relationship,” she said. If the Trump administration were to require banks to confirm citizenship, Inzunza continued, it would “add another layer of difficulty for survivors and immigrants to access a necessary part of our economy” and “will make getting a bank account nearly impossible for many of them.”

Having access to an independent bank account for those experiencing financial and domestic abuse can be paramount for making a plan to leave. Proof of income is often required to secure housing; courts discerning custody agreements want parents to illustrate that they can financially support children; employers might ask for a direct deposit form or banking information; getting access to a vehicle may require a bank account or credit information. It’s also safer for survivors to siphon money away into a bank account than to depend on hoarding cash in the same home as their abuser.

Even if President Donald Trump doesn’t move forward with an executive order, others in the GOP may take up the cause. After the Journal’s initial reporting on Tuesday, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas was quick to show his support for the potential bank requirement. “I strongly support President Trump taking action to prevent illegal migrants from accessing our banking system,” he wrote on X, adding that he “will be introducing legislation on this issue shortly.” Cotton also shared a letter that he wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in October of last year, urging the department head to “undertake a comprehensive review” to prevent “illegal aliens” from accessing US banks. The senator wrote that “we are permitting illegal aliens to establish financial roots and integrate economically.”

As Trump and his administration continue to detain tens of thousands of non-US citizens, an already complicated reality for immigrant survivors of abuse has become even more fearful.

In January of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was rescinding protections for “sensitive zones,” which can include domestic violence shelters. In the spring of 2025, The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors surveyed over 170 advocates and attorneys nationwide. When asked, more than three in four advocates reported that the immigrant survivors they work with have concerns about contacting the police. As The Marshall Project noted, several victims of domestic violence were killed by their abusers last summer after reportedly not reaching out to law enforcement because they feared deportation.

Because of the imminent fear of violence, victims often need to flee quickly—sometimes bringing very little with them. Needing those documents to prove legal status, should the banking rules change, could mean trying to get an abuser to hand them over or paying large sums to have them replaced. Gaining access to documents can be complicated and dangerous, especially, Inzunza said, if “your abusive partner is holding those hostage.”

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Nurul Amin Shah Alam, Blind Rohingya Refugee Dumped by Border Patrol, Dies in Cold

On Tuesday evening, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Blind, seriously ill Rohingya refugee from Burma who does not speak English, was found dead in Buffalo—five days after Border Patrol dropped him off on a street corner without notifying his family, who had moved away from the area. He was 56.

The story of Shah Alam’s arrest in February of last year, as reported by the Investigative Post, reads as a situation all too familiar for disabled people who interact with the police—particularly disabled people of color. His original violent arrest, by police who apparently saw his walking stick as a weapon—and who, like the Border Patrol officers who dumped him, apparently made no attempt to reckon with his disability, his inability to speak English, or his mental state—set off a chain of events that ended in his death.

In need of a walking stick, he managed to find his way down the block to a shop that sold curtain rods, where he purchased one. Curtain rod in hand, Shah Alam strolled his Black Rock neighborhood until the weather turned colder, [his attorney Benjamin] Macaluso said. He attempted to walk home, but, confused, ended up at a stranger’s house instead.

He found himself on a woman’s porch just as she was letting her dog out, Macaluso said.

“He comes from a place where people don’t keep dogs,” Macaluso said. “The dog’s freaking out. He’s freaking out. She calls the police and says there’s an unidentified Black man in my driveway.”

When Buffalo police arrived, Macaluso said, they ordered him to drop his curtain rod. But Shah Alam was not able to understand them—or even see them clearly. After not complying with repeated orders, the two officers Tasered him, tackled and beat him, Macaluso said.

Shah Alam took a plea deal earlier this month, which led to his release. His attorney Macaluso and his family, newly back in town, spent Friday through Sunday looking for Shah Alam. “He cannot use a phone,” Macaluso told Investigative Post. “He doesn’t know his address, he doesn’t know phone numbers, he can’t communicate, he can’t see. And they just left him.”

A missing persons case was opened by the Buffalo Police Department on Sunday, but the Buffalo Police Department closed it the following day, operating on the incorrect assumption that Shah Alam was in ICE detention.

House Rep. Tim Kennedy (D-N.Y.) has called for an investigation into Shah Alam’s death. “Mr. Alam should be alive and with his loved ones today. Instead, after days of fear and uncertainty, his family is now grieving an unimaginable loss,” Kennedy said, according to news station WIVB. “There must be a full and transparent investigation at the local, state, and federal levels. The public and Mr. Alam’s family deserve answers immediately.”

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Trump’s Surgeon General Pick Proves Devoted to MAHA’s Dangerous Talking Points

President Donald Trump’s pick for surgeon general, wellness influencer Casey Means, parroted various MAHA talking points throughout a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, while deflecting on key issues such as vaccines and birth control. Some of Means’ responses even appeared to contradict previous public health-related statements she’s made in order to fall in line with the administration.

The MAHA talking points included a push for “informed consent” where “patients [or parents] need to have a conversation with their doctor” to ensure “faith in public health.” Then, “I don’t think it’s responsible to make a blanket statement for all Americans” when discussing the safety of vaccines and birth control pills. Instead, Means claimed, that public health officials should “focus on the root causes of why we are sick.”

Her remarks on vaccines and birth control pills were particularly troubling. She largely disregarded decades of overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines do not cause autism, insisting that “we should not leave any stone unturned” to promote further investigation. Means also backed her previous claim that birth control represents a “disrespect for life” and carries “horrifying health risks” for women, telling senators Wednesday that “all medications have risks and benefits” and provided the example of “blood clots and stroke risk in women who have clotting disorders, who are smokers, who have obesity.”

In a telling exchange, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) cited a newsletter from August 2024, in which Means pointed to the World Health Organization’s warning against glyphosate and argued that people should avoid conventionally grown foods that hurt, among several other reasons, “your cellular health.” But when asked about Trump’s executive order last week that sought to ensure “an adequate supply” of glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Roundup, Means appeared to deflect. Instead, Means backed her previous claims on removing toxic chemicals from food but refused to note the difference in the Trump administration’s position.

“I’m just trying to help you to agree with yourself,” Markey said.

“We are in a very complicated moment for agriculture and food,” Means responded. “We cannot overturn the entire agriculture system overnight.”

As my colleagues Kiera Butler and Anna Merlan wrote last May after Means’ nomination, the wellness influencer was a campaign adviser during now-Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential bid and a key promoter of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.

Means has even appeared to alarm some of Kennedy’s allies, who have criticized her as “sinister [functionary] of Big Pharma, Big Food, or something much worse.” At Wednesday’s hearing, Democrats pointed to Means’ history of promoting products while rarely disclosing that she was earning financial compensation from their developers.

MURPHY: Your filings show you started receiving compensation in spring 2024, yet in Sept 2024 you posted a video saying you had 'no financial relationship w/ the company, just a big fan.' You weren't telling the truth.MEANS: If I said I wasn't receiving money, I wasn't receiving money at that time

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-02-25T16:25:24.209Z

In little over a year, Kennedy has proven that, in the Trump administration, what is said during one’s confirmation hearing testimony can’t exactly be relied upon. The secretary hasn’t followed through with many of the promises he made last year, including supporting childhood vaccines and not scaling back vaccine funding. Taken together, there might be little to believe when Means claims that she will protect things like birth control or that “anti-vaccine rhetoric has never been a part of [her] message.”

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Watch: Gregory Bovino Asks Our Journalist to Bake Him a Pie

It all started when Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker tweeted that “Gregory Bovino has to go.” Bovino—the erstwhile roving warlord atop President Donald Trump’s Border Patrol junta—had other ideas. And those ideas involved armed federal agents. And pie.

“Nah, gubner, too busy leading agents to arrest illegal aliens,” Bovino responded. “Besides, Chicago may need another double digit drop in a whole smorgasbord of violent crime, compliments of the Green Machine. Perhaps we could meet for a sugar-free slice of heirloom apple pie -on me!”

Bovino’s threat to launch a renewed Border Patrol occupation of Chicago, apparently as retribution for a politician criticizing him, was certainly news. And journalist Amanda Moore—who has spent months covering Bovino and federal law enforcement for Mother Jones and other outlets—quickly pointed that out.

What happened next was bizarre—and a bit creepy.

“Perhaps you could make the pie for us,” Bovino tweeted at Moore.

You didn't say it correctly – a sugar-free slice of HIERLOOM apple pie. Perhaps you could make the pie for us

— Commander Op At Large CA Gregory K. Bovino (@CMDROpAtLargeCA) February 12, 2026

“Commander it would be my honor, just tell me where to go,” Moore responded.

“Most excellent,” Bovino wrote. “I’ll let the gubner know you’ll be taking care of his appetite, in a healthy way.”

Things got even weirder from there, with Bovino at one point writing, “I’d love to see you bustling around the gubner’s kitchen fixing us a pie.”

I'd love to see you bustling around the gubner's kitchen fixing us a pie. I truly would.

— Commander Op At Large CA Gregory K. Bovino (@CMDROpAtLargeCA) February 12, 2026

Moore asked for an interview. “Would love to also talk about all your accomplishments!!!” she wrote.

This time, Bovino didn’t respond.

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Inside Epstein’s Very Own “Oval Office”: Power, Peacocking, and Printer Toner

Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump shared a lot of things, especially chasing women through New York City high society of the 1990s and early 2000s. But this detail caught my eye in the Epstein files. They also shared, in two different cities and times, the name for their respective command centers: the “Oval Office.”

One is the very real seat of American presidential power currently occupied by Trump. The other was the nickname for Epstein World’s operations hub—the study in his infamous Upper East Side townhouse, through which his every bidding was executed by longtime assistant Lesley Groff.

Like a lot of journalists, I’ve found myself scouring the Epstein files—3.5 million poorly organized pages cataloging cloying elites and the misdeeds of the deceased financier. The disclosures have already claimed a Rolodex of executives and politicians, and led to the first arrest of a British Royal since Charles I in 1647. They’ve also become a near-hourly drumbeat of scandal encircling the real Oval Office, the one with the president who is named “more than a million times” times (according to Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who’s seen more of them than most.)

As I built timelines and pried open money trails for a separate investigation I’m working on, this phrase kept reappearing: “Oval Office.” At first, I was stunned that Epstein was talking about carpets in the real Oval with such familiarity. Then it clicked: Was this a nickname for something else? I used the AI tool Claude to sweep the trove for the term and its variants, narrowing findings down to 5,162 pages worthy of deeper analysis. Plenty referenced the actual Oval Office. But mixed in—plain as day—was Epstein’s own pet name for the beating heart of his global operation.

Once I realized this detail, it was a key to unlock a newly intimate, and oftentimes banal, view of everyday life at the gargantuan French neoclassical townhouse at 9 East 71st Street. Track the phrase through the documents and it begins to map the contours of Epstein’s influence network: how it worked, what it procured, and which men came through his “Oval.” Daily reports, scheduling, and household management all routed through the “Oval.” It’s where Epstein kept his passport in an unmarked hanging folder and his credit card details, and once stashed the key to the office of Martin Nowak, a professor whom Harvard sanctioned for his Epstein ties. (Nowak didn’t comment on the arrangement.) The Oval was also where Epstein’s “girls” slung purses and prepped for trips to Little St. James, a.k.a. Epstein Island, and where the bold-faced names of Epstein’s circle lounged underneath standup comic Bobby Slayton’s mounted guitar. (Slayton said he gifted Epstein a guitar decorated to honor his birthplace, Coney Island, as thanks for the use of an apartment between gigs. “I’m only guilty of being friends with that idiot,” he told me, calling Epstein “repulsive.”)

Much is already known about what could be found inside Epstein’s mansion: the sculpture of a bride clinging to a rope above the grand stairway; the life-sized stuffed tiger on a rug in what Vanity Fair described in 2003 as “an enormous gallery spanning the width of the house”—Epstein’s opulent personal office stuffed with rococo collectibles. A sideboard displayed a first edition of Lolita and a framed photograph with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. But this exploration of the files placed me deep inside the Oval, the lesser-known but perhaps most functionally critical of all the mansion’s 40 rooms.

Epstein and his staff referred to this study variously as the “Oval Office,” the “Oval Room,” and simply “the Oval,” so much so that the name appears to have been adopted in redesign proposals for the townhouse (“Oval Study Room”)—according to a 2014 rendering included in the trove as part of a proposal by AC Atelier, a Chicago-based interior design firm. (When called, the firm declined to comment on confidential client work.) Was it, in fact, ovoid? Yes, an FBI warrant in July 2019 described it as so.

A floor plan of Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, found as part of a redesign proposal in the Epstein Files, shows the oval study room, bottom right, where visitors waited, bags were stored, and assorted Epstein World business was conducted.Department of Justice

The nickname appears in some of the earliest documents in the trove: a Skype call was arranged for Lord Peter Mandelson to take from the “Oval Office” in June 2009, when he was Britain’s First Secretary of State to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. In September 2025, Mandelson was dismissed as Britain’s ambassador to the US. He is accused, among other things, of sharing government secrets with Epstein, and was arrested on Monday by British police “on suspicion of misconduct in public office.”

But the Oval Office was also the heart of the humdrum home office needs. Take this request from one aide, familiar to office-goers everywhere: “Do you know if we have any toner anywhere for the printer in oval office?”

By 2010, the term was completely routine: Epstein discussed wallpaper choices “for the oval office” and pressed the staff about the whereabouts of his new oval office lamp (“The tall, thin, clear acrylic thing??” an apparently freaked-out assistant asked Groff). In Epstein’s personal digital address book, his own contact entry included a dedicated line labeled “Oval.” An Office Depot invoice—for a dozen Sharpies, a duster, and a box of bubble wrap, among other stationery—was shipped directly to “OVAL OFFICE” at the mansion’s street address. In a separate email, Epstein instructed staff that “phones need to be programmed to call oval office,” as part of a punch list of home renovation tasks that also included changing the carpet in the elevator.

“There is a package in the oval office on the coffee table marked for Ehud Barak.”

The Oval was the operations center for Epstein’s wide network of granting favors—and gifts—to the rich and powerful. An email dated May 13, 2012, instructed household staff that “There is a package in the oval office on the coffee table marked for Ehud Barak,” the former Israeli Prime Minister. Someone was to “put it in a shopping bag and label the bag for ‘Judith Tiomkin’ and drop the bag off at 880 Fifth Ave.” In other correspondence, Barak’s wife, Nili Priel, organized to pick it up from the intermediary. (This mysterious Tiomkin could not be reached for comment.)

In October 2016, staff were dispatched by Groff to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue to pick up a Hermès-branded Apple Watch (2016 starting retail price, $1,149) for Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife. Emails note that the watch was to be gift-wrapped with a watch band found in the Oval’s desk drawer and delivered to Previn for her birthday. Two years earlier, Groff told Karyna Shuliak, Epstein’s last known girlfriend, to pick up “2 bags in the Oval Office both labeled for Soon Yi,” insisting they “need to go on the helicopter tomorrow!” In follow-up logistics, Groff outlined an East Side helipad departure to “Woody’s house,” noting that “Woody’s shoot is at Salve Regina College”—a Newport, Rhode Island, location Allen used for Irrational Man (2015), starring Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix. (I asked Previn if she’d received the watch but I didn’t hear back.)

I was surprised to learn there was a regifting operation, too. To thank a photographer, staff were instructed to strip any indication that a case of wine came from a Rothschild family member and to create a new “from” card, this time from Epstein, using Oval Office stationery.

The Oval Office, Jeffrey’s Version: Visible on the wall is a collage guitar, a gift from comedian Bobby Slayton. The room, photographed as part of a 2019 FBI raid, was the domain of Lesley Groff, explaining the more subdued design choices compared to Epstein’s office upstairs./Department of Justice

As is the case for its namesake, security for the Epstein version of the Oval Office was top of mind. Instructions went out in January 2014 to lock the Oval Office door every night, along with other heightened security procedures. The household memo said those measures were meant to keep out Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business mentor and an imprisoned fraudster, who was found dead in Hoffenberg’s apartment eight years later. “He is crazy and is NOT to be let into the house under any circumstance,” Groff wrote.

“It has been brought to my attention we need to be careful how we keep the Oval Office.”

It wouldn’t be an office of any shape without a passive aggressive note being sent around about general tidiness. “Hi girls,” wrote Groff in 2014. “It has been brought to my attention we need to be careful how we keep the Oval Office.” She goes on to instruct the recipients to “keep purses, computers, clothes, extra shoes, bags, etc off of the furniture in the Oval Office. We need to keep the sofa and chair available for guests to sit on…”

“Please pick up after yourselves when it comes to coffee cups, plates, etc,” the memo went on. “Take them to the kitchen and put them in the dishwasher.”

“Jeffrey is also requesting to please keep the noise down in the kitchen… conversations, laughter, etc can get very loud and distracting…” she added.

The Oval was also a site for meetings with Epstein’s business partner, the French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who, like Epstein, took his own life while awaiting trial for sex crimes in France in 2022. Four years after Epstein was released after serving 13 months of an 18-month sentence in a county jail in Florida for soliciting a minor, Brunel being in the Oval was treated by staff as an urgent notification. On September 27, 2013, a staff member emailed Epstein with the subject line “Jean Luc is in the house!! in oval office.” A contemporaneous email to another staffer, Mark Tollison, bore the subject: “i told JE that Jean Luc is in the Oval Office!”

Calendars were also littered with references to the Oval Office. Epstein was scheduled to be the interviewer of a candidate for investor Leon Black’s family office in April 2014, and the woman’s résumé was waiting for Epstein in the Oval. Black was scheduled for lunch with Epstein hours later. His spokesman, Whit Clay, told me Black had no record or recollection of these events. “It’s well acknowledged that Epstein played a role in providing tax and estate planning to Mr. Black’s family office,” Clay said. “He would also embellish his roles and responsibilities and be disruptive, and that, along with his requests for more and more money, is the reason why Mr. Black ultimately fired him.”

Epstein also used the “Oval” to dangle his abilities to arrange visas; Groff invited one person to bring her “documents” so she could see “whether the work authorization would be possible.” The entire trove contains similar references to Epstein’s circle arranging visas for young women, including models linked to Brunel’s Epstein-backed agency, MC2.

The now-infamous hanging bride sculpture, above the mansion’s main stairwell, suspended in her trompe l’oeil cloudscape.Department of Justice

During the 2019 FBI raid of the mansion, the Oval was an obvious target—and agents weren’t there for any gift-wrapping operation. They seized three Seagate external hard drives from a compartment inside a bookshelf cabinet. Their broader haul included erotic sculptures, sex toys, a massage table, and more than 1 million images and videos extracted from Epstein’s devices.

Was the “Oval Office” moniker just an in-joke? Elsewhere in the Epstein Files, documents suggest the real Oval Office was never far from Epstein’s mind—or his reach. Epstein personally emailed Soon-Yi Previn offering tours of the actual White House: “do you want the east wing state rooms or west wing.. oval office cabiet room situraion room?” (Spellings, his.) Earlier that year, Epstein had leveraged his friendship with Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel under former President Barack Obama, to arrange a DC trip. (Allen and Previn ultimately visited the White House in December. Ruemmler had earlier deemed Epstein too “politically sensitive” for his own tour, according to emails cited by CBS.)

Previn replied to Epstein’s question playfully: “I guess we should see the Oval Office to make sure that it’s really oval.”

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Leaked Documents Show Meta Cracking Down on Access to Abortion Information

Leaked documents reveal that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, has blocked its AI chatbot from discussing topics including abortion with minors—a blanket policy that contrasts sharply with the firm’s handling of child sexual exploitation claims, and that may also inadvertently affect its content for adults.

Internal Meta documents obtained by Mother Jones, containing a comprehensive list of policy guidelines for Meta’s chatbot interactions with users under the age of 18, shed light on how the company is training its chatbots to respond to children’s questions on issues ranging from sexual health to suicide and self-harm, eating disorders, and other mental health issues.

The revelations come as the company faces a landmark trial accusing it and other social media platforms including TikTok—which settled before the trial could begin—of deliberately designing features they knew would harm children’s mental health, following a series of whistleblower allegations that Meta’s traditional platforms knowingly aggravated teenage body image issues and promoted content that led to bullying, drug abuse, and self-harm.

More recently, the company has been accused of allowing children to flirt with its chatbots and of further failures around self-harm content; in response to pending lawsuits and criticism of its youth content policies, Meta has said it will block teenage users from accessing character chatbots modeled after celebrities or fictional characters. However, those users will retain access to Meta AI, which the company said provides “helpful information and educational opportunities” to teens.

The documents provided to Mother Jones show that as of September 2025, in response to public scrutiny, the company started to prohibit “content that discusses, describes, enables, encourages, or endorses sensual acts, sex acts, sexual arousal, or sexual pleasure” with teenagers, which it was previously criticized for allowing. Similarly, if teenagers ask questions related to suicide or self-harm, the chatbots are designed to point children to mental health resources; if teenagers ask questions about eating disorders, Meta’s policy is to have the chatbots direct users to a hotline and encourage them to reach out to a trained counselor.

But while Meta has strengthened safeguards for youth users around eating disorders and depression, its policies have simultaneously cracked down on information around abortion and sexual health.

According to the company’s policies, chatbots are prohibited from offering underage users “content that provides advice or opinion about sexual health,” including “anatomy and physiology of reproductive organs, puberty education, menstrual health, fertilization and reproduction, STI and HIV prevention, contraceptive methods, consent education and abstinence.” The company also bans the chatbot from encouraging teenage users to use condoms or menstrual hygiene products.

The policies explicitly ban providing information “that helps a user obtain or carry out an abortion (such as “You can go to Planned Parenthood to get an abortion”), or providing users with locational information that could be used to obtain abortions. It also prohibits the chatbot from providing a “value judgement” for or against abortion.

Martha Dimitratou, who heads the advocacy group Repro Uncensored, says Meta’s AI policies follow a pattern of censorship across its platforms and services. Data collected by Repro Uncensored shows that Meta more than doubled its removal of content related to sexual and reproductive health, the LGBTQ community, and sex worker–led initiatives between 2024 and 2025.

“Every organization and individual on our platforms is subject to the same set of rules, and any claims of enforcement based on group affiliation or advocacy are baseless,” a spokesperson for Meta said in response to a request for comment. “We allow posts and ads promoting health care services like abortion, as well as discussion and debate around them, as long as they follow our policies. We also give people the opportunity to appeal decisions if they think we’ve got it wrong.”

Dimitratou says that the nonprofit, which advocates and researches access to reproductive health information online, has met with Meta for years to urge that the platform “consider abortion as health care and direct to accurate health care resources,” treating abortion-related and reproductive rights content in the same way it treated Covid-19—including by proactively correcting misinformation—but that Meta has “categorically said that this is not a priority.”

And in the face of attacks by conservative influencers and politicians like House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Mark Zuckerberg has walked back even those steps, characterizing Meta’s Covid information policies as a regrettable cave to Biden administration pressure.

In the last year, however, the Republican crusade against Big Tech’s perceived woke bias has grown to include an obsession with chatbots. In July, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” calling among other things for AI companies to suppress information related to gender and sexuality.

While the executive order pertains to AI use by the federal government, the leaked policies show that Meta is willing to capitulate to conservative policies even in its consumer products, says Jacob Hoffman, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We’re particularly concerned when it seems like tech companies are developing products that censor certain information at the request of the government,” Hoffman says. “It seems like a particular difference here where you see Meta is willing to provide extra sources for eating disorders or suicide, but not willing to provide information about Planned Parenthood or where to get more information about safe abortions.”

“Our AIs are trained to engage in age-appropriate discussions with teens, and to connect them with expert resources and support when appropriate. They provide factual information on sexual health but refrain from offering advice or opinions. We continuously review and improve our protections so that teens have access to helpful information with default safeguards in place,” Meta’s spokesperson said.

Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, twenty states have implemented total bans or restrictions beyond Roe v. Wade’s standards, while the Trump administration has further restricted access nationwide by withdrawing federal guidance requiring emergency abortion care, defunding Planned Parenthood clinics, blocking Veterans Affairs coverage even in cases of rape or health risks, and launching investigations into abortion medication. “It is worrisome in a context where the state governments and the federal government are putting a lot of pressure on people’s access to information about reproductive health and in particular abortions,” Hoffman says.

At the same time, according to Dimitratou, more users are requesting information from chatbots. Repro Uncensored estimates that search traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT as much as doubled in the US and in Europe in 2025. The need for AI-based searches to offer reliable information on abortion, she says, is becoming inescapable. But tests conducted by Repro Uncensored call Meta’s AI the “most unreliable” of comparable consumer AI products like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The repercussions of American tech platforms’ policies on abortion-related information, Dimitratou says, can be felt globally. Even for adults, she says—to whom it’s designed to return accurate information—Meta’s AI often provides responses about more resource-intensive options like cross-border travel, even when telehealth and abortifacient pills are legal in a user’s jurisdiction.

“The pattern is always the same,” Dimitratou says. “Partial information and a tendency to scarcity framed as inevitability.”

When Dimitrou tested Meta’s chatbot through WhatsApp from Brussels, it refused to engage in abortion-related conversations, even though abortions are legal in the country for both adults and minors with the consent of their parents.

In my own testing of Meta’s AI with an account emulating a youth user, the chatbot imposed stricter restrictions than those documented in the company’s internal logs, declining to discuss topics including menstruation, contraception, and abortion—even though abortions are legal for teenagers without parental consent in New York, where the test took place. In the same run of tests, the chatbot also sometimes started to offer answers barred by Meta’s policies—before erasing those responses and providing default censorship language.

In response to a question on whether the chatbot endorsed abortions, the chatbot began to print what appeared to be a thorough answer on the legality of abortion and the impact of the Dobbs ruling on access—only to erase the response within seconds and replace it with “Sorry, I can’t help you with this request right now,” mirroring some Chinese chatbots’ replies to queries on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre or the status of Taiwan.

Dimitratou says Meta’s choice to treat abortion information foremost as a political issue, rather than a health issue, has already had a chilling effect on sexual and reproductive health information access around the world. “Many young people get their information from Meta,” she says. “We’re seeing a growing information and a health crisis where people aren’t getting the help they need.”

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Farmers Were Promised $400 Million in Drought Aid. Trump’s USDA Ghosted Them.

_This story was originally published b_y Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For those coaxing thirsty crops like alfalfa from the parched fields and withered pasturelands in Eloy, Arizona, water is as good as gold—and just as scarce. “We’ve had nothing from the Colorado River for the last two or three years. I mean, we’ve had to cut back the volumes to the growers and have had to reduce acres and stuff to make it work,” said Ron McEachern, former general manager of the Central Arizona Irrigation and Drainage District, which serves the Eloy area.

The agricultural hub draws from the Colorado River basin through a vast canal network, but drought, overexploitation, and aging irrigation equipment are draining what little remains. “We got gates that are leaking and leaking downstream,” McEachern said. “The water spills and it spills, and nobody’s getting any use out of it.”

Nearly two years ago, the irrigation district was invited to apply to a new non-competitive grant program that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) under the Biden administration was launching to help farmers in areas grappling with devastating droughts. McEachern collaborated with the federal agency to identify what his team would do with the grant: replace and upgrade the 35-year-old deteriorating radial arm gates in their local canal system. The district needed the components to more precisely regulate water levels in the canals, but they are much too expensive for them to buy and install on their own.

“We had the signed agreements…Everything was done, vetted, and reviewed.”

Then, in late 2024, they got the break they’d been hoping for. The Central Arizona operation was one of 18 irrigation districts spread across 12 western states initially selected to receive up to $15 million each from the USDA. The agency’s Water-Saving Commodities program also earmarked grants for three tribal communities and two state associations of conservation districts. In total, the USDA planned to spend a $400 million pool of funds on the initiative.

Gloria Montaño Greene, who served during the Biden administration as Deputy Under Secretary for USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation, told Grist that the idea for the program started back in 2021, as severe drought conditions enveloped agricultural powerhouse states across the country. The $400 million, according to Montaño Greene, was set to be distributed through the Commodity Credit Corporation, a financial institution used to implement specific agricultural programs established by the federal government. By the close of 2024, she said the Biden administration had entered final agreements with selected recipients and notified Congress of how they intended to use the money.

“When we left the administration, we already had the signed agreements and the commitments that were going to be going through with the process,” said Montaño Greene. Based on those final agreements, the money, which was structured to be either reimbursement-based or in the form of advance payments—or both, depending on the agreement—should have started flowing last year, as part of a five-year payment plan. “Everything was done, vetted, and reviewed,” she said. But because this money wasn’t voted on by Congress, the USDA may have the authority to backtrack on its commitments under an earlier administration.

Another former top USDA official familiar with the program, who requested anonymity, confirmed that the agreements were “100 percent” finalized before the end of 2024—with the expectation that the incoming administration would need to honor them. “I can speak to the assumptions and guidance that we were working on from legal counsel at that time, which was by entering into these agreements with the districts and other partners, we’re committing those dollars to this purpose,” the former official added. “From our perspective, we were operating under a framework and counsel that we were committing those funds to the USDA partners.”

Beginning last January, the Trump administration threw that into a tailspin. Federal monies were frozen, grant programs culled, and an unprecedented number of federal staffers were forced out of work. Many operations at USDA have since resumed to some semblance of normalcy. But the $400 million promised to the irrigation districts, associations, and tribes in 2024 remains unaccounted for, and the grant recipients have received no indication of whether the program would start or the money would be paid out.

“I really wasn’t allowed to communicate with [farmers] directly. Like, I couldn’t tell them ‘Your grant is frozen,'” says a former USDA staffer. “It was just: ‘Tell them it’s under administrative review.’”

In fact, McEachern no longer even knew whom at the USDA to ask for help. The last he heard from the agency about the water-saving grant was an email from his former point of contact to let him know they were leaving the USDA. That was over a year ago. “I think some of the people that were involved are probably no longer there, and nobody was really kind of pushing to get this off the ground,” said McEachern. “One thing is, they haven’t swept the money. So the money is there. It’s just getting them to release it.”

Dan Crabtree, superintendent of Palisade Irrigation District, based in Colorado, one of the other 18 irrigation districts, has had much the same experience. “Since the election, we have not heard anything from USDA, other than to say they were evaluating the program and the application,” said Crabtree. Another recipient—Greybull Valley Irrigation District in Wyoming—told Grist in an email that it also knew nothing about the program’s status.

Randall Winston, general manager of Hidalgo & Cameron Counties Irrigation District 9, in Texas, another of the USDA’s selected recipients, said that while they’ve been waiting, the severe drought in the Rio Grande Valley has only gotten worse. As a result, they have been forced to dramatically reduce how much agricultural land the district is able to irrigate—last year, they supplied water for roughly 8,000 acres, when on a typical year they irrigate 120,000.

“Every drop of water, we’re trying to maximize that and save as much as we can,” said Winston. Prices for the equipment they need to manage the water they do have have also continued to climb, according to Winston, further setting them back. “We are concerned because we need to know the direction to take…We’re not mad at USDA, we just need to find out where we’re at with this,” he said.

Exactly why the administration has kept the funding locked without any communication to grantees for over a year is difficult to discern, according to Food & Water Watch research director Amanda Starbuck. “Is this specifically because it’s intended to help farmers adapt to climate change, and climate change is a bad word in the administration, or it’s simply just trying to cut corners wherever they can?” said Starbuck.

The USDA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

During one former USDA staffer’s last few months working at the Farm Service Agency, they claim they were forced to partake in information “gatekeeping” as it related to the water-saving program. According to the staffer, who left their role in 2025 and asked to remain anonymous, “I was getting a lot of questions about, like, ‘Can we start or not?’ and I didn’t know the answer. I couldn’t get an answer. I really wasn’t allowed to communicate with them directly. Like, I couldn’t tell them ‘Your grant is frozen. Don’t spend any money because the money may never come to you.’ It was just ‘Tell them it’s under administrative review’…And then I couldn’t get a clear answer out of my leadership, or my direct manager, or my manager’s manager, about where the program was in the review process.”

As for the suspicion that the program may have been targeted in the way that other Biden-era programs geared toward mitigating climate change have been, the former staffer isn’t convinced. “To me, it does seem pretty neutral from a climate perspective, because a lot of the states that have water problems are not necessarily blue states,” they said. “So I don’t think it was something that someone, like a high level official, would come in and say, ‘That’s the program I want to gut.’”

Although they can’t be certain, the former staffer believes the explanation is actually quite simple: There are no employees left to distribute the money.

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Ibram X. Kendi vs. America’s “Antiracism Backlash”

Just a few years ago, historian and activist Ibram X. Kendi seemed to be everywhere. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, he became one of the leading voices on racism in America—and particularly what he described as antiracism. In 2019, his book How to Be an Antiracist became a bestseller. And later, just months after the death of George Floyd—a Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis—Kendi founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, receiving $55 million in funding.

But over the last few years, as a backlash grew against the BLM movement, Kendi also came under attack. His ideas urging people to be actively antiracist were often the target of conservative critics fighting against DEI policies and the teaching of critical race theory. Kendi was also accused of mismanaging the antiracism center at BU, which laid off much of its staff before closing last year. (BU cleared Kendi of financial mismanagement.) Kendi now leads another academic project, this time at Howard University’s Institute for Advanced Study, that focuses on racism and the global African diaspora. And next month, Kendi will release a new book called Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, which examines what’s known as the “great replacement theory” and its links to authoritarian regimes around the world.

As the Trump administration eliminates DEI initiatives and erases parts of Black history throughout the federal government, Kendi places this moment alongside two others in American history: the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the racial violence that marked the segregation era during the 1920s. “These are moments in which you had very powerful racist forces who were seeking to eliminate policies and practices and ideas that had been created to bring about more democracy and equity and equality,” Kendi says. “We’re literally right now in a very pitched battle for the future of justice in the United States and, frankly, around the world.”

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2025.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

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Ilhan Omar to Trump: “You Have Killed Americans”

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night toggled between being remarkably dull and profoundly racist. During a screed against undocumented immigrants, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) shouted at Trump, yelling, “You have killed Americans,” and “You should be ashamed.”

The confrontation began after Trump scolded Democrats for not standing and applauding during a portion of his speech during which he claimed that the “first duty of the American government is to protect American cities, not illegal aliens.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up,” Trump said to Democrats in the audience, as the rest of the room rose to their feet and applauded for over a minute. “That is why I’m also asking you to end deadly sanctuary cities that protect the criminals,” he continued. As he spoke, Omar could be heard shouting from the gallery, “You have killed Americans,” and “You should be ashamed,” while jabbing her finger in Trump’s direction. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), seated next to Omar wearing a pin that read “Release the Files,” a reference to still-unreleased Epstein files, also briefly yelled something in the direction of the dais.

ICE agents killed two people in Minnesota, the state Omar represents: Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both of whose executions were captured on video. Omar’s guests for the State of the Union were four constituents from Minnesota who were impacted by ICE’s brutal raid on the state. They include Aliya Rahman, a Minneapolis woman and United States citizen who was dragged from her car and violently arrested in mid-January. Thus far, at least eight people have died nationwide this year at the hands of ICE agents or in ICE custody.

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We Now Know What Trump’s “Locker Room Banter” Looks Like

It seems quaint to think about now. But in October 2016, just one month away from the presidential election that would fundamentally warp American politics, the biggest threat to Donald Trump’s candidacy was a 2005 Access Hollywood recording that caught Trump bragging about “grabbing” unconsenting women “by the pussy.” As a celebrity and a man of prominence, Trump claimed that he “could do anything” and get away with it.

At the time, the backlash was fierce, prompting a scrambled Trump to justify his comments as “locker room banter.” He also claimed, with the classic whataboutism that has become a hallmark for this political era, that “Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course.”

And it was effective, a neat shorthand for “boys will be boys,” a genre of apparent comedy where some level of lewdness should not only be free, but protected. It previewed a misogyny that would only get worse through anti-abortion policies, dozens of sexual assault allegations, and eventually, the Epstein files. Fast forward to 2026, and we have another glimpse of what the president means by “locker room banter.”

They share the same misogyny familiar to many of us. That men are owed by women to accept insulting banter. That they are entitled to have their disrespect overlooked.

“I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that,” Trump toldthe US Olympic men’s hockey team after they won gold on Sunday. The men in the room, who had just received an invitation to the State of the Union, laugh boisterously, maybe in agreement. Trump then takes another crack: He’d “probably be impeached,” he said, if he didn’t extend an invitation to the US Olympics women’s hockey team, which, as it happened, also won gold at the Milan Cortina Olympics last week.

The moment has since ignited an outrage, not because it was especially offensive; it wasn’t. But for women watching, Trump’s remarks and the ensuing laughter felt specific in its familiarity, a classic case of men telling a woman one thing to her face and something hurtful or untoward when it’s just the guys. That includes Jack Hughes, who scored the winning goal for Team USA and said the first person he thought of after scoring was Megan Keller—only to laugh along as the president insulted her team.

For Trump, his remarks are fitting for a man caught bragging about sexual assault. Though Trump’s call with the men’s hockey team is not the same as the Access Hollywood recording—one is dismissive, the other sexually violent—they share the same misogyny familiar to many of us. That men are owed by women to accept insulting banter. That they are entitled to have their disrespect overlooked.

Some people may argue that it’s better not to make a fuss, that this is a rare moment of unity for the country, so why spoil it? But consider that the women’s team has declined Trump’s invitation to attend the State of the Union. It may be an act of defiance, a shot-in-the-arm kind of rejection we crave to see of Trump. But any relief found in such defiance disappears because it necessitates a woman opting out and foregoing what is deserved. This is how the logic of misogyny works: a masculine-coded joke, said within the confines of a masculine-coded room, for women to then adjust and lose out.

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Red States Are Doing What Trump Won’t: Going After Abortion Pills in Court

When the US Supreme Court unanimously blocked a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration in 2024 over the agency’s regulation of the abortion drug mifepristone, conservatives were disappointed but undeterred. The justices ruled that anti-abortion doctors didn’t have standing to sue. But in a hopeful sign for those opposed to abortion, they left the courthouse doors open to other parties who might be able to make a more convincing case.

Louisiana eagerly took up the challenge. On Tuesday, that lawsuit—another potential blockbuster—has its first major test, when lawyers for the state and a woman who says she was coerced into having an abortion by an ex-boyfriend will try to persuade a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction against FDA rules that allow abortion pills to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail.

The case is part of an increasingly urgent—and panicked—anti-abortion campaign to make abortion pills much harder to obtain, not just in Louisiana but nationwide. “Telemedicine has been a game changer for abortion access since Roe v. Wade was overturned, which is exactly why Louisiana wants to eliminate it,” Rachana Desai Martin, chief US program officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “They see what a lifeline abortion pills have become—especially for people in states that ban abortion—and they want to squash it.”

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has asked the judge to halt the proceedings until the FDA finishes a review of mifepristone’s safety that it launched last fall. The Louisiana case “threatens to short-circuit” that study, Department of Justice lawyers contend.

Louisiana bans abortions with almost no exceptions, classifies mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled substances,” and equates abortion providers with “drug dealers.” But nearly four years after Roe was overturned in June 2022, out-of-state abortion providers are mailing hundreds of boxes of abortion pills to Louisiana patients every month. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill blames this state of affairs on a rule change by the Biden administration that permanently ended the FDA’s requirement for in-person dispensing of mifepristone.

“Telemedicine has been a game changer for abortion access since Roe v. Wade was overturned, which is exactly why Louisiana wants to eliminate it.”

The 2023 rule change was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and “avowedly political,” Murrill claims, pointing to an executive order by President Joe Biden after the Dobbs decision that directed his administration to “identify all ways to ensure that mifepristone is as widely accessible as possible.” She says the rule change exceeded Biden’s authority and violates the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era obscenity law, unenforced for decades, that prohibits the mailing of abortion drugs, supplies, and equipment.

Echoing the claims of abortion opponents going back to the 1980s, Murrill insists abortion pills are too dangerous to be prescribed to women under any circumstances, much less remotely. Fact check: Scores of studies from around the globe have shown that mifepristone is safe and effective.

Murrill also argues that telemedicine makes it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want. That’s what Murrill’s co-plaintiff in the case, a Louisiana woman named Rosalie Markezich, says happened to her in 2023. Markezich alleges that her boyfriend at the time used her email address to order drugs from a California doctor, then forced her to take the medication against her will. “The trauma of my chemical abortion still haunts me,” she says in court documents. “Had the FDA required an in-person visit with a doctor…my boyfriend would never have been able to obtain the drugs that he made me take.”

Murrill’s efforts to prosecute the California physician, Dr. Rémy Coeytaux, and another abortion doctor, New York–based Dr. Margaret Carpenter, have been thwarted by shield laws in those states that protect telemedicine providers. For all these reasons, Murril argues, the FDA’s 2023 changes “must be held unlawful, stayed, set aside, vacated, and preliminarily and permanently enjoined.”

Louisiana’s suit reflects widespread anger within the anti-abortion movement over the continued availability of abortion pills in the post-Roe era, even in states with near-total bans. According to the most recent data, medication now accountsfor almost two-thirds of abortions in the US. More than a quarter of all abortions occur via telemedicine.

Anti-abortion leaders’ frustration with President Donald Trump has also been growing as he has ignored the pleas of his conservative allies to crack down on the pills. The FDA study on mifepristone announced last fall, for example, was widely seen as a delaying tactic to avoid more sweeping action. Last October, Trump’s FDA went so far as to approve a new generic form of mifepristone, potentially making the drug more, not less, available.

Trump’s foot-dragging is thought to be predicated on his concern that federal limits on abortion would further harm Republicans’ rapidly eroding prospects in November’s midterm elections. As abortion historian and law professor Mary Ziegler told me recently, “I think that, left to his own devices, Trump might just run out the clock on abortion stuff for the entirety of his presidency.” But abortion opponents like Murrill aren’t going to sit back and let that happen, Ziegler adds. “He’s not going to be left to his own devices.”

On the contrary, lawmakers across the country are passing increasingly severe laws, like Texas House Bill 7, which gives private citizens broad new powers to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers. Activists have mounted new attacks on the safety of mifepristone, including a campaign pushing false claims that the drug is contaminating drinking water. If Murrill’s lawsuit isn’t successful, several other deep-red states have their own cases advancing through the courts.

Mifepristone, approved by the FDA in 2000, is the first of two drugs that make up the standard medication-abortion protocol. It works by blocking the production of progesterone, the main hormone that supports the developing pregnancy. The second drug, misoprostol, causes the uterus to contract, expelling the pregnancy.

As Smith College professor Carrie N. Baker, author of __Abortion Pills: US History and Politics_, told me last year, the FDA’s initial approval was under “a very restrictive protocol.” The rules became even more stringent in 2011 when mifepristone was consigned to a program—known as Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS—normally reserved for the most dangerous drugs. Only doctors could dispense the pills during in-person visits to clinics or medical offices. Patients were required to have three appointments and could only use the medication through seven weeks of pregnancy. Inclusion in the REMS program “wasn’t because mifepristone was unsafe,” Baker told me, but because it was so controversial:

“There was an enormous amount of research showing that it was safe, including widespread clinical trials. The FDA was worried if something went wrong, the drug would lose approval and go away forever. The restrictions were a way of closely monitoring the abortion pill, not because it was dangerous, but because they wanted to have a good, solid safety record so that they could then justify expanding access. The theory was that they would loosen that protocol after a couple of years of evidence showing how safe it was.”

In 2016, the FDA began relaxing some of those rules, allowing mifepristone to be used up to 10 weeks’ gestation. In 2021, as the pandemic wreaked havoc on medical and reproductive care, Biden’s FDA said it would no longer enforce the in-person office-visit requirement, opening the door to telehealth consultations and mailed pills. After still more study, the Biden administration permanently dropped the in-person requirement in January 2023, six months after Roe was overturned. The new FDA rules also made mifepristone more readily available in pharmacies.

By then, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a coalition of anti-abortion medical groups and doctors, had already gone to federal court in Texas, seeking to overturn the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone as well as the more recent rules’ changes. Representing the coalition was the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal behemoth that has played a pivotal role in most of the significant anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ policy and court battles of recent years.

The judge in that case, anti-abortion ideologue Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, gave the doctors what they had been hoping for, issuing an unprecedented nationwide order that suspended the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. His decision, subsequently scaled back by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, went to the US Supreme Court, which ruled 9-0 that the doctors lacked standing to bring the lawsuit because they could not show that the FDA regulations caused them any direct harm.

The justices, however, left open the possibility that Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas—which had intervened in the case in 2023—might have standing to sue the FDA on their own. Louisiana and Texas had also sought to intervene, but the two states were too late in joining the suit. Last fall, Louisiana brought its own case in federal court, as did Texas and Florida in a separate lawsuit.

The case being heard on Tuesday has key similarities to the Hippocratic Medicine lawsuit. The Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Rosalie Markezich. As in the doctors’ suit, Louisiana argues that the mailing of abortion pills violates the Comstock Act, which, if enforced, would amount to a national abortion ban.

But the Louisiana case is narrower than the earlier one, focusing on the 2023 Biden rule change and telemedicine. Markezich’s allegations are also a new addition, although her story echoes a growing theme among abortion opponents. Telemedicine, ADF’s senior counsel, Erik Baptist, told States Newsroom, “enables and emboldens people in coercive situations.”

“This goes beyond arguments about safety and efficacy to claims that it’s being widely misused, which there really isn’t evidence of,” says University of Texas law professor Rachel Rebouché. To the contrary, she says, women are more likely to be coerced or tricked into getting pregnant and staying pregnant. “They’re more likely to experience domestic violence and coercion during pregnancy.”

“The FDA is basically saying, you haven’t connected the dots and shown that their lifting of a restriction [in 2023] is what has caused these harms. “

For its part, the Justice Department argues that Murrill doesn’t have any more right to sue the FDA over its regulation of abortion pills than the anti-abortion doctors did. “Louisiana suffers no sovereign injury because it remains free to make and enforce its pro-life policies,” the DOJ says. Regarding Markezich’s claim, it argues, “That past injury (though of course tragic) is not redressable by the prospective relief she seeks.” The idea that Markezich’s injury was caused by the FDA’s rules—rather than, say, by her ex-boyfriend—”is exactly the kind of attenuated theory” rejected by the Supreme Court in 2024, the DOJ contends.

The surprising part of the argument is that Trump’s DOJ is taking the same position that Biden’s DOJ might have taken, Rebouché says. “The FDA is basically saying, you haven’t connected the dots and shown that their lifting of a restriction [in 2023] is what has caused these harms. So what you’re asking the court to do”—issue a preliminary injunction—”is not going to fix the problem.”

In requesting a delay in the legal proceedings until the FDA study is concluded, the Justice Department says the preliminary injunction “may prove as unnecessary as it is disruptive, if FDA ultimately decides that the in-person dispensing requirement must be restored.” The Biden rule has been in effect for three years, the DOJ notes, which undercuts Louisiana’s argument that the need for an injunction is urgent.

“Ordinarily, I’d assume the judge would just grant the request for more time,” says abortion historian Ziegler. “The request is pretty nebulous, though—is it for a year? More? So that makes it more unpredictable.”

As in the Hippocratic Medicine case, the Louisiana lawsuit is being heard by a Trump appointee, US District Judge David Joseph. Last year, Joseph ruled that the EEOC’s inclusion of abortion as a pregnancy-related medical condition under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act was contrary to the legislative intent of the law. But he has also decided against GOP attorneys general on immigration asylum procedures, and gun rights supporters on gun silencers.

In a sign of the high stakes, numerous groups have filed amicus briefs as if the arguments were taking place before the Supreme Court instead of in the Western District of Louisiana. Lining up for Murrill and Markezich are such anti-abortion stalwarts as Students for Life of America and Heartbeat International. In the FDA’s corner, supporters include former FDA officials, domestic violence organizations, disability rights groups, and Medical Students for Choice.

“The abortion pill is an existential threat to the anti-abortion movement,” Rebouché says. “If you want to end abortion in America, mail-order pills are a huge impediment to doing so.”

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Trump Business Partner Promises New Tower Won’t Be as Tacky as Australians Fear

Donald Trump’s newest business partner is assuring Australians that the Trump Tower he’s building Down Under won’t be nearly as tacky as they fear.

On Monday, David Young—who runs the Queensland-based Altus Property Group—announced that the $1 billion Gold Coast development would contain 91 floors, 270 apartments, and a “6-star” resort. It will briefly be the continent’s tallest building, though a neighboring property, already approved for construction, will quickly surpass it. Young said his deal with the Trump Organization was signed earlier this month at Mar-a-Lago.

It’s just the latest foreign business entanglement from the Trump Organization, which is run by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. but is still owned by the president. Recently, the Trump brand has launched real estate projects in Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.

Importantly, Young wants to make clear that the Australian development won’t actually be ugly. In a statement trumpeting the deal, he noted there were certain “misconceptions” about Trump properties.

“Firstly, the file footage that Australians see, of Trump hotels and resorts with gaudy gold-plated bathrooms fixtures, mirrors and heavy chandeliers, is old footage from the 1980s and 90s,” Young said. “The modern Trump package is high-end design and fit outs, with a premium feel. It’s tasteful and expensive – when you walk into a modern Trump property, the impression is ‘quality’ and ’boutique.'”

According to Young, the new property “will follow the same Trump design manual” as the ongoing Trump projects in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Based on renderings in an Instagram post from Eric Trump, it will also be very large and gold-colored.

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The terms of the deal are not clear. Trump has historically licensed his brand to foreign partners, with upfront payments for the use of his name, followed by years of royalties and a management deal, under which the Trump Organization gets paid to run properties. In his statement, Young specified that the project would be Australian-owned and built. “It is an Altus subsidiary, Altus Resorts Pty Ltd, that makes the decisions on the fit-out, within the Trump design requirements,” he said. “It will be an Australian, not American, project. It won’t have a Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton brand above the front door, but it will say ‘Trump.'”

Still, the magnates involved in the deal hail from places far beyond Australia and Florida. Young disclosed in his statement that the financing would come from unnamed investors in Singapore, Hong Kong, the UAE, and the United States. Meanwhile, it appears that the property the building will be built on is currently owned by a casino titan from Macau.

Neither the Trump Organization nor Altus responded to requests for comment on the terms of the deal or the identity of the investors.

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Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Fossil Fuel Firms’ Bid for Climate Immunity

_This story was originally published b_y the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The US Supreme Court has decided to hear arguments in a climate accountability lawsuit, marking the first time the high court has weighed in on such a case. The decision could potentially hinder the wave of climate litigation the US has seen in recent years. “It’s not a good sign,” said Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

The lawsuit in question was filed by the city of Boulder, Colorado, against two major oil companies: Suncor Energy USA and ExxonMobil Corporation. After Colorado’s supreme court refused to dismiss the lawsuit, the defendants filed a petition with the US Supreme Court asking them to shut down the case, arguing that it is pre-empted by federal laws.

If the Supreme Court rules against the defendants, that could be boon for climate accountability cases, allowing not only the City of Boulder but also those who have launched similar cases to breathe a sigh of relief. It could also inspire other governments to file similar litigation.

“Local communities are living with the mounting costs of climate change,” said Aaron Brockett, mayor of Boulder. “The Supreme Court should affirm Colorado’s right to hold these companies accountable for the harm they have caused in Colorado.”

But if the justices agree with the oil companies, it could void the Boulder case—and potentially more than a dozen others that make similar claims. “The expectation is that [the justices] are probably going to give the oil companies some kind of win,” said Parenteau.

The defendants are asking the Supreme Court to decide if federal law should preclude the claims made in the lawsuit. The question could be complicated by a decision made by Trump’s EPA last week to repeal a foundational legal determination which gave the federal government the ability to regulate climate-warming pollution.

In reviewing the oil companies’ petition, the Supreme Court could decide that, before weighing in, it must determine whether or not the endangerment finding repeal affects whether or not federal law pre-empts the case. Or it could proceed as though the rollback will not change the legal argument, Parenteau said.

In addition to reviewing the arguments, the Supreme Court justices said they would “brief and argue” whether or not they have the authority to take up the case at this time.

“Today’s announcement makes clear the justices do not agree whether the court even has the authority to hear Boulder’s case at this time,” said Alyssa Johl, vice-president of legal and general counsel at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit that tracks and supports the climate accountability cases. “The court should uphold what the Colorado Supreme Court and others have made clear: Communities like Boulder have the right to seek accountability in their state courts when corporations have knowingly caused local harms.”

If they decide they do not have the jurisdiction to do so, the petition could be dismissed, emboldening the plaintiffs. “This is an unprecedented situation,” Parenteau said. “I don’t know how they’re going to handle this.”

But in the meantime, the court’s decision to take up the petition at all could slow all climate accountability cases’ proceedings toward trial as courts around the country await the Supreme Court’s decision.

“At a minimum, it’s going to freeze all these cases, because the state courts are going to say, ‘why should we go to the trouble of having trials in these cases if, in fact, the Supreme Court might throw them all out,’” Parenteau said.

In recent years, states, cities, and other local governments have brought lawsuits against Big Oil for allegedly deceiving the public about the planet-heating nature of their products. The most recent to join the wave of litigation was the state of Michigan, which filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and the nation’s biggest fossil fuel lobby, the American Petroleum Institute.

Last year, the Supreme Court denied a plea to kill a Honolulu lawsuit and turned down an unusual attempt by red states to block the cases.

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What Was Bill Pulte’s Charity Really Funding With This Mystery Donation?

In the wake of the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, Donald Trump and his close associates found themselves mired in lawsuits that, among other things, sought to hold them accountable for inciting the violence that resulted in injuries to more than 140 police officers and likely contributed to the deaths of five. By 2023, the legal fees had ballooned into the millions, all while Trump also was mounting an expensive presidential campaign.

At the same time, a charity run by construction heir, private equity mogul, and Trump donor Bill Pulte—who now runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)—made a mysterious, previously unreported donation that raises serious questions about whether it was an effort to quietly funnel money to the legal defense of Trump, other January 6 defendants, or another purpose entirely.

In 2023, Pulte’s charity donated $65,000 to a nonprofit called One World Love LLC for “assistance to underserved people,” according to annual tax filings. But searches of the IRS’s nonprofit database, Virginia’s database of charities, and several third-party services that collect nonprofit filings nationally, like Guidestar and CitizenAudit, turn up no charities with a matching employer identification number (EIN) or the name “One World Love” anywhere in the country. Instead, financial filings show that One World Love LLC is a Wyoming corporate entity tied to the Binnall Law Group—which represented Trump in his efforts to prove election fraud and to avoid paying damages after the January 6 attack.

Mother Jones reached out directly to Jason Greaves, the Binnall firm partner who formed this entity, and to Pulte via the FHFA for comment for this story. Neither responded to our repeated requests.

“There’s a strong indication that something fishy might be happening, but because of secrecy jurisdiction rules, we don’t know.”

Filings don’t show what the LLC spent Pulte’s donation on, but they do show that Trump’s team was accruing large bills with the Binnall Law Group: Trump’s PACs paid the firm more than $4.5 million in legal fees between 2022 and 2024. Experts who spoke to Mother Jones outlined several potential reasons for the mystery donation, including the possibility that Pulte was trying to spend this money on private expenses—legal costs or others—while disguising it as charity to the poor. But experts also noted that the LLC was likely created with an eye toward keeping its true purpose hidden from the public because it was incorporated in a state that is a known hub for corporate secrecy.

“There’s a strong indication that something fishy might be happening, but because of secrecy jurisdiction rules, we don’t know,” says Poppy Alexander, an attorney who specializes in matters that involve cutting-edge financial frauds. “We shouldn’t have corporate entities where we can’t trace ownership, and this story illustrates that perfectly: I don’t know where the money is going, and none of us can.”

The tale of the donation began in 2019, when Pulte started doing what he deemed “Twitter philanthropy,” handing out money on social media and amassing millions of followers in the process. Eventually, several people started a formal charity in the same vein, with seed funding from Pulte himself. Tax filings and financial disclosures show that Pulte later became the charity’s president, almost single-handedly funding it with $200,000 from the Bill Pulte Foundation, a separate charity, and ultimately renamed the group Team Pulte, Inc.

Not only was Mother Jones unable to find the name “One World Love” or its EIN in nonprofit databases, but we also were unable to identify any for-profit US businesses with this EIN number.

By 2023, though, Pulte’s foundation had stopped funding Team Pulte, according to tax filings, leaving it with just a fraction of the funds it had brought in the prior year. As a result, the charity scaled down its giving. It donated about $50,000 in small amounts to 85 recipients. And then it made one unusually large donation: $65,000 to One World Love LLC, which the filing lists as a nonprofit. Team Pulte did not respond to repeated requests for comment on a detailed list of questions. The charity did, however, change its public X feed to private after we contacted them, and it appears to have taken its recently active website offline.

Team Pulte’s 2023 tax filing says that One World Love is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered at an apartment complex on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia. The nonprofit’s paperwork includes an EIN—a number that the IRS assigns to every US business as a tax identifier. Not only was Mother Jones unable to find the name or EIN in nonprofit databases, but we also were unable to identify any for-profit US businesses with this EIN number. We also reviewed lists of people and businesses associated with this Alexandria apartment building, but none of them appear to have anything to do with a business called “One World Love.”

When a Mother Jones reporter visited the building, an employee said he had never heard of One World Love, noting the building is solely residential.

The only relevant hits that existed in 2023, when Team Pulte recorded its donation, were two corporate, for-profit entities called One World Love LLC. The first, registered in Arizona, belongs to a therapist. In a phone call with Mother Jones, she said she had never heard of Pulte or received money from any people or organizations bearing that name.

Over the next two years, the annual reports filed in Wyoming by One World Love were either signed by Binnall partner Jason Greaves or listed him and another Binnall employee as the LLC’s main contacts.

The second is registered in Wyoming, where it was created in 2021. The main office listed has a similar address to Binnall’s law firm in Alexandria. (Binnall Law Group’s office is on King Street, Alexandria’s main thoroughfare; the LLC’s founding documents list its address incorrectly as Main Street, which doesn’t exist in Alexandria, but with the same street number as the Binnall firm, and the same suite number that the Binnall firm lists on LinkedIn and elsewhere.) Over the next two years, the annual reports filed in Wyoming by One World Love were either signed by Binnall partner Jason Greaves or listed him and another Binnall employee as the LLC’s main contacts. In December 2023, the end of the year when Pulte’s charity made its donation, Greaves signed the paperwork to dissolve One World Love.

The year that Team Pulte donated to One World Love was also when the pressures of Trump’s legal bills began to escalate. In the first half of 2023, Trump’s Save America PAC reported about $20 million in legal spending, despite having only $18 million on hand at the beginning of the year. Soon the PAC was forced to request a refund of $60 million it had poured into Trump’s reelection effort, according to the New York Times. Trump’s team then diverted yet more money from his presidential campaign and even created a separate legal defense fund to fundraise for bills.

During this time, Greaves and other Binnall attorneys were enmeshed in several lawsuits representing Trump himself, along with key supporters and allies. Court filings show he was one of the attorneys who represented Trump in his failed 2022 effort to sue Hillary Clinton for allegedly orchestrating a conspiracy to connect him to claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Greaves has also represented Trump allies including Michael Flynn, Devin Nunes, Kash Patel, Richard Grenell, and former North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson in defamation lawsuits against critics and media outlets.

The reason why Greaves created One World Love is a mystery—it could have been at the request of a client, or for a purpose tied to the firm. But regardless of the LLC’s purpose, the $65,000 donation to it from Team Pulte presents several possible issues, explains Joan Heminway, a professor at the University of Tennessee’s Winston College of Law who specializes in business law. Nonprofits are required to spend money on things that complement their public mission. The one that Team Pulte lists on its financial filings is simple: “provide financial assistance to low-income individuals in need of food and supplies through donations and crowdfunding.” If One World Love LLC spent the money received from the charity on work that aligns with this mission, they haven’t done anything wrong other than erroneously listing the company as a nonprofit, says Heminway.

Philip Hackney, a professor of the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in nonprofit law, agreed: “A 501(c)(3) can make payments to groups that are not charitable as long as the dollars are ultimately being used in a charitable way.”

“They have a lie on their form, and the question is: Why are they lying on their form?”

But if that were the case, there should be documentation. Neither Team Pulte nor the Binnall firm responded to questions about whether such documentation exists. “In these more unusual cases where a 501(c)(3) gives money to a for-profit entity, there would be some sort of an agreement as to how those funds are to be held, who controls them, who makes sure that they’re released to the right thing—because otherwise you’re just completely running around the nonprofit charitable status of the entity,” Heminway says.

The other option, Heminway says, is potential fraud. “They put that it was a nonprofit on there to hide the fact that they were giving money to a firm that doesn’t meet their purpose,” she says. “That could be a fraud on all of the donors and on the IRS. That could be not just reckless or negligent, but actually willful to hide something.”

Hackney named two similar possibilities: a filing error where Team Pulte incorrectly called One World Love a 501(c)(3)—or an intentional deception. “They have a lie on their form, and the question is: Why are they lying on their form?” he says. “It might be that they just don’t realize that they’re lying: They might not know they don’t actually have a (c)(3). Or they’re willingly doing this, but that can be hard to prove.”

It is common for law firms to create LLCs for their clients for various purposes, notes Eric Amarante, a professor at the University of Tennessee’s Winston College of Law who also specializes in nonprofit law. So the fact that the Binnall firm’s lawyers created One World Love LLC and are its point of contact does not confirm that money went to pay the firm. But the fact that the LLC was dissolved at the end of 2023—the year that Team Pulte made its big donation, while Pulte himself controlled the charity as its president, according to its tax filings—suggests an effort to quietly pull money out of the charity for a private purpose unrelated to the Team Pulte charity’s mission. (Neither the FHFA nor Team Pulte responded to questions asking about the extent to which Bill Pulte controlled donations in his role as the charity’s president.)

“If you are just brazen and you wanted that $65K—the charity could donate it to the LLC. The LLC shuts down, and when the LLC shuts down, they just divvy up the money to their owners,” Amarante says. “There’s no subterfuge at all, but that may have been what happened here.”

It is also possible that Pulte’s motives with this donation were personal: to build goodwill toward a future Trump administration role. For years before his reelection, Pulte was trying to win Trump’s attention—and to support his rise to power. From 2019 to 2021, he and his wife donated more than $650,000 to Trump’s reelection efforts. Pulte met with Trump a few times, and he often praised the president to his millions of Twitter followers. In July 2019, Pulte tweeted a promise to give $30,000 to a veteran in exchange for a Trump retweet and later posted an offer to donate cars to two veterans. Both times, Trump happily obliged with tweets thanking Pulte. “You’re welcome, Mr. President,” Pulte replied. “I look forward to catching up with you soon.”

The donation is the latest in a growing list of dubious financial transactions that conflict with Pulte’s self-anointment as Washington’s fraud sheriff.

“Pulte conducted a campaign to make himself a visible figure to MAGA, presumably with an eye toward getting a big job—and it was an overall successful effort,” says Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a political corruption watchdog. “That suggests that this was a form of individual lobbying for a job. The obvious first guess is that this donation is an effort to curry favor with powerful people who want to see legal work done for the types of clients that this law firm represents—people who kind of took the fall for Trump, both Flynn and the January 6ers.”

This donation is also the latest in a growing list of dubious financial transactions that conflict with Pulte’s self-anointment as Washington’s fraud sheriff. He’s dug up old mortgage documents and used them to accuse the president’s political foes—from New York Attorney General Letitia James to Fed governor and economist Lisa Cook—of financial crimes, referring them to the Justice Department for investigation. Throughout, his own actions have also come under scrutiny for errors or misrepresentations, including a federal watchdog investigation into whether Pulte has improperly accessed confidential mortgage information to go after Trump’s political foes.

One of those transactions is reminiscent of the scenario with One World Love LLC—where Pulte or his family used a complex financial transaction to quietly steer funds to Trump and obscure their origins. As we reported last year, Pulte and his wife, Diana, appear to have used an LLC they controlled in Delaware to funnel a $500,000 contribution to a pro-Trump PAC in 2021. That contribution came while Trump was struggling to win support following his 2020 defeat and his role in the January 6 insurrection.

The gift drew a complaint from a campaign finance group alleging that Bill Pulte violated campaign finance laws by obscuring the source of the funds sent to the PAC. A resulting Federal Election Commission investigation, concluded only last year, said that he had not broken the law, and it did not accuse Diana Pulte of wrongdoing. But the FEC found the Trump-controlled PAC had erred by failing to properly disclose the real source of the donation. The agency also said that Diana Pulte had incorrectly filled out a form to indicate the money came from an LLC rather than a member of the Pulte family.

Mother Jones also has uncovered other questionable financial transactions by Bill Pulte, including a missing SEC filing and his promotion of a memecoin created by an influencer facing financial fraud charges.

None of this appears to have slowed down Pulte’s efforts to help launch criminal probes into Trump’s enemies. Last month, the Trump administration served Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with a subpoena stemming from a first-in-history criminal inquiry by the Justice Department. Bill Pulte was the driving force behind that decision, according to reports and a court filing, fueling a dramatic escalation of Trump’s ongoing vilification of the Fed that shocked economists and financial markets. On the day that the document was served, Pulte flew down to Palm Beach, Florida, with the president, for a stay at Mar-a-Lago and a visit to Trump’s nearby golf course.

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US Ambassador to Israel: “It Would Be Fine” If Israel Took Over Most of the Middle East

On Sunday, more than a dozen Arab and Islamic governments condemned statements made by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee after he said in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Israel had the biblical right to take over land belonging to other states in the Middle East.

“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee told Carlson in the interview released on Friday when questioned on whether Israel had been promised almost all the land in the Middle East in the Bible. The statement was part of a heated exchange where Carlson pressed Huckabee on his beliefs in Christian Zionism. (Huckabee later added that Israel was not interested in acquiring other countries’ land.)

In a joint statement released by the United Arab Emirates’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, several governments—including US allies like Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia—called Huckabee’s remarks “a flagrant violation of the principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations” that threaten security in the region. The countries stated that the ambassador’s statements “directly contradict” Donald Trump’s 20-point plan from last October to end the war in Gaza.

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a longtime supporter of the country’s expansion in the Middle East, had another response. He posted on X on Saturday: “I [heart emoji] Huckabee.”

Huckabee clarified later on in his Friday interview on The Tucker Carlson Show that his statement that Israel could take it “all” was “hyperbolic.”

In July 2024, the United Nations’ top court, the International Court of Justice, said that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem violate international law by infringing on the Palestinian people’s rights for self-determination.

Despite that, Israel and US policy has facilitated the expansion of settlements. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote in February 2025, Trump has not just supported permanently displacing Palestinians from Gaza—he has also stated that he wants the US to take control of the region and have a “long-term ownership position,” manifesting in his administration’s “New Gaza” real estate project, complete with skyscrapers and industrial centers.

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Armed Man Fatally Shot at Mar-a-Lago, Secret Service Says

An armed man was fatally shot on Sunday after driving into the secure perimeter of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as another vehicle was exiting, according to a spokesperson for the US Secret Service.

“The individual was observed by the north gate of the Mar-a-Lago property carrying what appeared to be a shotgun and a fuel can,” the Secret Service’s press release reads. “US Secret Service and a [Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office] deputy confronted the individual and shots were fired by law enforcement during the encounter.”

The president and First Lady Melania Trump were at the White House at the time of the shooting.

At a press conference on Sunday morning, Palm Beach County Sheriff Rick Bradshaw said that the man was ordered to drop the two pieces of equipment that he was carrying. In response, “he put down the gas can [and] raised the shotgun to a shooting position.”

According to Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service’s Chief of Communications, the suspect was in his early 20s and from North Carolina. He was reported missing a few days ago by his family.

Guglielmi said that investigators believe the man picked up a shotgun on the way to Florida. Law enforcement recovered a box for the gun in the suspect’s vehicle.

The Sunday incident at Mar-a-Lago took place a few miles from Trump’s West Palm Beach club, where a man tried to assassinate him while he played golf during the 2024 campaign.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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Putin Tried to Freeze Ukraine. Instead, He Sparked an Energy Revolution.

_This story was originally published b_y Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Russian air strikes knocked out Ukrainian power plants earlier this winter, much of the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv went dark, and indoor temperatures plummeted. Just 60 kilometers from the front, Tornado rockets, cruise and ballistic missiles, and attack drones have been raining down on the city of 450,000 for the last four years. Now, during the coldest winter in more than a decade, most of Mykolaiv’s citizens are once again enduring bitterly cold homes and, when electric water pumps fail, dry taps.

“Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational.”

But there are new glimmers of hope in Mykolaiv. Last November, 26 newly installed photovoltaic roof panels, paired with 100 kilowatt-hours of lithium battery storage, began to power heat pumps and generators to keep the city’s Urban Rehabilitation Center for Children and Persons with Disabilities up and running. Thanks to the Danish Refugee Council and Denmark’s foreign ministry, the project’s donors, the center continued operating even during a 32-hour stretch of shelling in mid-December. In addition to treating 70 patients a day, the center has opened its doors to at-risk Mykolaivians who lack heat. Several other institutions in Mykolaiv have also jettisoned their exclusive reliance on the national grid, which is mostly powered by large natural gas, coal-fired, and nuclear plants, and now draw energy from small-scale distributed systems that produce electricity at or near the point of use.

Since the war’s onset, Russia has targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure—its old-school fossil-fueled power plants, substations, and transmission lines—in an effort to advance its offensive and beat down the Ukrainian people. Before this winter even set in, half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure lay in ruins. Economists estimate that total damage to the nation’s energy sector now exceeds $56 billion.

This winter is the most devastating yet: Attacks have left giant swaths of the country with irregular electricity and heat as temperatures have plummeted to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The bitter conditions have left many schools and other public services closed since Christmas. In Kyiv, as well as in Kharkiv, Poltava, and Dnipro, more than 1,000 public heating tents, powered by diesel generators and wood-burning stoves, offer residents warmth and a place to charge their phones. But these improvisations aren’t enough. On January 14, President Volodymyr Zelensky declared a state of emergency in the energy sector.

While Ukraine’s energy system, which had a pre-war generation capacity of 60 gigawatts, scrambles to keep the lights on, grid operators are also looking past the next drone swarm, pushing to diversify the country’s energy sources, says Lars Handrich, a German energy expert who works closely with Ukraine. The plan is to replace the bulky thermal plants and centralized grid, which are vulnerable to drone and other attacks, with distributed renewables and modestly sized gas-fired plants that make less attractive targets for incoming fire. According to estimates from the Solar Energy Association of Ukraine, the nation installed at least 1.5 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2025—enough to power roughly 1.1 million homes—and grid operators intend to almost double the country’s renewable energy production over the next four years.

Ukraine is revamping its power sector as rapidly as it can, not for climate protection but for energy security. “Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”

Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”

Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.

Ukraine’s shift away from fossil fuels began before Russia’s full-scale invasion: To join the European Union, the nation must adopt the bloc’s climate criteria, and in 2021, Ukraine pledged to be coal-free by 2035. The war interrupted this phaseout, but it also accelerated Ukraine’s adoption of renewables, despite its strapped budget.

European countries are bankrolling most of Ukraine’s energy makeover, including all of the Mykolaiv solar installations. West of Kyiv, the city of Zhytomyr plans to run entirely on renewables by 2050 with the help of the Rebuild Ukraine initiative, which is largely European-funded. And in the Kyiv region and beyond, solar systems supported by the Solar Supports Ukraine program are keeping schools open during blackouts. A self-financed exception: Before the war began, the Sunny Citycooperative in Slavutych, a town near the Belarus border, crowdfunded to create a solar power plant on the roofs of three municipal buildings.

According to the International Energy Agency, Ukraine made “strong strides” in rebuilding and bolstering its system’s resilience this past summer. The renewables rollout was—and still is—dominated by rooftop solar, small photovoltaic arrays, wind, local storage, and biomass combustion.

Some self-sustaining energy zones combine renewables with conventional energy. The central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, for example, boasts five microgridst that combine local generation, including solar, gas, and hydroelectric power, with energy storage systems. Five major wind farms will join the energy mix in the next two years. In Khmelnytskyi, the national university’s 4,400-kilowatt microgrid includes a natural gas-fired cogeneration unit (it produces both electricity and heat), a 264-kilowatt solar array, a diesel-powered plant, and a gas-fired boiler house, which generates heat.

Before Russia seized territory that hosted more than half of Ukraine’s wind power capacity in 2014 and 2022, including major wind farms on the Sea of Azov coast, Ukraine had 34 wind parks, comprised of nearly 700 turbines. Since wind generation is so central to its decentralized energy strategy, Ukraine has sought to increase wind generation even in the midst of Russian attacks.

Just 65 miles from the front, DTEK is installing the 500-megawatt Tyligulska Wind Power Plant, the first wind park ever built in a war zone. It is a crucial source of electricity in southern Ukraine and will supply 900,000 households when it’s finished. The country currently has 7 gigawatts of wind power in the pipeline that could be installed this year, according to Andriy Konechenkov, of the Ukrainian Wind Energy Association, should conditions on the ground allow it. The new turbines would more than triple the country’s current wind-power capacity.

While the war has sidelined the rollout of utility-scale wind farms, solar installations atop households, businesses, and public institutions have continued at an unprecedented rate. Ukraine’s YASNO utility, which supplies electricity and gas to millions of Ukrainians, says its customers are snapping up the solar and storage packages that it offers. On sunny days, Ukraine even boasts energy surpluses.

The German-Ukrainian Energy Partnership, a platform for intergovernmental dialogue on energy matters, estimates that Ukraine’s long-term technical solar potential exceeds 80 gigawatts, on par with the output of 80 medium-sized nuclear reactors. “The sector is emerging as one of the fastest-developing renewable markets in Eastern Europe,” according to its website. A University of Technology Sydney study suggests Ukraine could meet 91 percent of its energy needs from a combination of solar and onshore wind using 1 percent of its land.

“Individual consumers want to get off the grid any way that they can,” explains Andriy Martynyuk of Ecoclub, a Ukraine-based NGO that helps communities develop renewables. “It’s largely a grassroots phenomenon and a bit chaotic now,” he says. But Martynyuk expects the demand for renewables will further surge when state subsidies for fossil energy, which have priced Ukrainian energy significantly below market rates, are eventually phased out.

This boom, of course, begs for storage options, and there, too, Ukraine has moved quickly. In 2024 and 2025, the country’s national grid operator invested in half a gigawatt of storage capacity—an impressive amount according to experts, who note that it is just under a quarter of Germany’s total storage supply. The battery projects that in Europe take two years to roll out, the Financial Times reports, take just six months in Ukraine.

In terms of a new, cutting-edge distributed energy system, Ukraine may be racing forward with the zeal of a new convert, but even the planned rollout of renewables in 2026 won’t keep most of the Ukrainian population safe from Russia’s depredations next winter. Wartime Ukraine has the will but not the financial resources to revamp its energy production on its own. The nation’s largest donor, the E.U., is already contributing nearly $200 billion to Ukraine’s budget for military expenditures and humanitarian aid, including energy. The speed with which Ukraine blankets its territory with distributed energy systems could make the difference between surviving another punishing winter—or succumbing to its cruelty.

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Measles Cases This Year Near 1,000. That We Know Of.

There have been nearly 1,000 confirmed measles cases in the US in 2026 so far, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s more than four times the amount of cases as this time last year.

It’s unclear how much larger the spread could be, as the CDC’s number refers to reported and confirmed cases.

Many of the current cases stem from an outbreak in South Carolina, with the state nearly reporting around 800 cases since January. Twenty-six states have reported cases this year, spanning the entire country—from California to Maine and from Texas to Wisconsin.

Related

HHS Wasn’t Worried About South Carolina’s Measles Outbreak. It’s Now Enormous.

During 2025, there were 2,281 confirmed cases of measles. The country is now at risk of, if not on track to, losing its measles elimination status that it’s held since 2000. Two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine**,** usually administered in children, provides 97 percent protection, though distrust of vaccinations, fueled by mis- and disinformation, has risen in the past few years.

The surging 2026 numbers come after more than a year of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. serving as the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services. He, along with key allies, has led the agency toward an unprecedented reshaping of the nation’s vaccination system for children—a mission he began prior to becoming secretary.

There are no current death reports from 2026, though at least three people died from measles in 2025. As more Americans are at risk of becoming sick from the illness, Kennedy has continued to spread false information about alternative remedies like cod liver oil.

Despite the record numbers and quick spread in 2025, HHS told Mother Jones back in December that they weren’t especially worried about the brewing South Carolina outbreak. The CDC was “not currently concerned that this will develop into a large, long-running outbreak,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard wrote.

To date, that outbreak has led to at least 20 hospitalizations. Though, according to reporting from ProPublica, that number is likely much higher as hospitals in South Carolina aren’t required to report when they admit patients with measles-related illnesses.

Dr. Leigh Bragg, a pediatrician in South Carolina who is board certified in pediatric infectious disease, told ProPublica that she didn’t even know that anyone had been hospitalized due to the illness in her state until she saw it on social media.

“It’s a very big disservice to the public not reporting complications we are seeing in hospitals or even ERs,” Bragg said. “Measles isn’t just a cold.”

Even if reports of measles were required, the chaos the Trump administration has rained down on the federal workforce could make it hard to understand and address the scope of the issue.

In October, more than 1,000 CDC employees were laid off, only for some 700 to be rehired the next day. As Americans face another widespread public health crisis, the pinned post on Kennedy’s X account isn’t about how to protect yourself or your children from measles. Instead, it’s a video of himself working out in a sauna, shirtless, with Kid Rock.

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Trump’s Favorite Appointee Right Now Is the One Who Didn’t Challenge His Power

President Trump’s favorite Supreme Court justice right now is the appointee who refused to restrict the president’s tariff agenda.

After the high court ruled against him in his tariff case on Friday, Trump has repeatedly singled out Justice Brett Kavanaugh in praise—the only one of Trump’s three appointments to dissent against the majority opinion that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, does not give Trump authority to impose tariffs.

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump appointed in 2017 and 2020 respectively, sided with Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal justices in the majority opinion.

“I would like to thank Justice Kavanaugh for his, frankly, his genius and his great ability. Very proud of that appointment,” Trump said during the press conference following the Friday ruling. During that address, Trump claimed, without providing details, that the loss in the Supreme Court “made a president’s ability to both regulate trade and impose tariffs more powerful and more crystal clear rather than less.”

Trump initially announced that he would impose a global tariff of 10 percent, invoking a law never before utilized by a president which allows the executive to “impose an across-the-board tariff for 150 days unless Congress agrees to extend it,” according to the New York Times. On Saturday, per a Truth Social post, Trump raised the amount to 15 percent—the cap for this kind of tariff imposition.

It’s unclear how this global tariff will impact trade negotiations with world leaders. It’s also unclear, and not covered in the ruling, if the executive office will be refunding any retailers impacted by the previous tariffs. Estimates place the total amount that Trump has collected under IEEPA between $133 billion and $175 billion.

Related

Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariff Regime

Amid Trump’s strong rebukes of the justices who opted to deny the overarching presidential authority, he continued to lavish praise on Kavanaugh, who, according to a recent Marquette Law School poll, has the lowest net favorability among all of his peers.

“I’m so proud of him,” Trump said of Kavanaugh on Friday, repeatedly citing his dissent.

“My new hero is United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning, before mentioning the other two men who sided with him: “and, of course, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.” Despite dissenting from his liberal colleagues in the recent tariff case, Kavanaugh is the conservative justice most likely to side with liberals in outcomes, according to an analysis by SCOTUSblog.

Trump has long championed Kavanaugh, providing strong support for the appointee during his controversial approval process in 2018. When Christine Blasey Ford had accused then-nominee Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school, Trump called for his followers to pray for him and his family. After Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the alleged assault, which she reportedly detailed to her husband and therapist several years prior, Trump wrote that Kavanaugh “is a fine man and great intellect.”

President Trump with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before a ceremonial swearing in on October 8, 2018Susan Walsh/AP

Around a year later, in 2019, the Times published another sexual misconduct allegation against him, spurring calls for his impeachment. Kavanaugh denied both of the women’s accounts.

Trump again came to the rescue: “Can’t let Brett Kavanaugh give Radical Left Democrat (Liberal Plus) Opinions based on threats of Impeaching him over made up stories (sound familiar?), false allegations, and lies. This is the game they play. Fake and Corrupt News is working overtime!,” Trump wrote at the time, adding the hashtag “#ProtectKavanaugh.”

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Federal Program That Helps Cities Prep for Disaster Stays Frozen Despite Judge’s Order

_This story was originally published b_y Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When it comes to adapting to the consequences of climate change, the federal government has relied heavily on one flagship program: Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. Administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), BRIC has doled out $4.5 billion in grants to help states and cities prepare for future disasters. Wildfire retrofits in Washington State, safe rooms in Oklahoma, and sewer systems in Detroit have all benefitted from the program.

Despite bipartisan support for the effort, the Trump Administration issued a memo announcing its intent to shut down BRIC in April. Then, in December, a federal judge ordered FEMA to restore the program’s funding and “promptly take all steps necessary to reverse” the termination. The agency had two months to appeal.

Though that deadline passed last week, the Trump administration is still holding out. Two FEMA officials told Grist that the agency has taken no apparent steps to revive BRIC in compliance with the December court order. As a result, state and local governments across the country are holding critical projects in limbo as they await a resolution.

“It boggles the mind that almost two dozen states had to go back to court to ask Judge Stearns to enforce the existing court order.”

The officials who spoke to Grist requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from agency leadership. Separately, a FEMA spokesperson said the agency complies with court orders, but did not respond to questions about the future of BRIC.

FEMA’s deadline to appeal the judge’s ruling was February 9. On Tuesday, a coalition of state attorneys general accused the Trump administration of dragging its feet on compliance. (Those attorneys represent the states behind the original lawsuit over BRIC, which resulted in the December ruling.)

“Over two months have passed and Defendants have offered no indication to Plaintiff States, the public, FEMA’s regional offices, or apparently even Defendants’ own attorney that they have complied with the Order,” attorneys for almost two dozen states wrote in a court filing on Tuesday. The states asked the judge to compel FEMA to follow the order and make BRIC funding available.

BRIC actually launched during the first Trump administration, but most of its funding came from the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That money endowed more than 2,000 projects nationwide. At the time of the April memo shuttering the program, FEMA told Grist that BRIC “was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program.” (The acting FEMA director who issued that memo, Cameron Hamilton, lost his job a few weeks later after telling Congress that he didn’t think Trump should abolish his agency.)

The BRIC pause is one part of an overall freeze on FEMA’s disaster mitigation spending. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, has placed it under a de facto spending moratorium, requiring Secretary Kristi Noem’s sign-off for any expenses over $100,000. FEMA has not approved any new disaster mitigation projects, has refused to process paperwork for projects that were already in progress, and has been slow even to reimburse communities for the cost of disaster recovery, a core activity mandated by Congress.

When a group of around two dozen states sued to stop the cancellation of the program in a Massachusetts federal court, FEMA claimed that it was not canceling BRIC. Instead, it said in a court filing that it “ha[d] not ended” the program and “continue[d] to evaluate whether to end the…program or to revise it,” even as it acknowledged it had not made new funding available.

The judge rejected that argument and issued an injunction preventing the agency from stopping the program. Judge Richard Stearns, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, wrote in an order that the law “entitle[s] the States to a certain measure of funding for mitigation projects each fiscal year.”

The state attorneys general allege that FEMA has not provided states, grantees, or regional offices with any new information about the future of the program—nor has it made two years of suspended BRIC funding available to states. The plaintiff states said in Tuesday’s court filing that a senior agency official had told them FEMA is “still in the process of connecting with leadership about how BRIC will operate and on what timelines.”

“If they’re really concerned about the escalating cost of natural disasters and the burden on the federal government, they should be concentrating on resilience.”

Two agency employees who work on disaster adaptation confirmed the states’ allegation that FEMA has not yet restored the program. The decision on how to proceed appears to rest with senior Homeland Security officials, they added.

“I haven’t heard a word internally, at all,” one of the officials told Grist.

The December court order found that the states could suffer irreparable harm if BRIC projects that were already underway lost funding or collapsed due to an abrupt shutdown. The state attorneys general are now arguing that FEMA’s recent delays further threaten those projects. Attorneys for the states said that FEMA has refused to provide updates on the status of frozen projects, even when state officials have warned that projects are in jeopardy. The states submitted more than a dozen affidavits showing that FEMA has declined to provide updates for stalled projects, including a seismic retrofit for a rural California hospital and a pair of public school safe rooms in Wisconsin.

The Massachusetts cities of Chelsea and Everett, just outside of Boston, were relying on around $50 million in BRIC money to fund an ambitious flood protection project. The cities were going to build a flood barrier and storm surge control project that would prevent tidal flooding in a floodplain that contains a high school, a rail line, and a regional produce distribution center. The barrier would have doubled as an expansion of a park that will be submerged by high tides in the coming years.

But FEMA paused the project’s funding last spring, after the April memo. Since then, the effort has been in limbo. The pause has meant that the two cities lost out on $50 million in matching money from a state fund. After a year in stasis, local officials are weighing whether to split the project into separate stages, pursuing the storm surge system alone while punting on the other parts.

“We could just put it on a shelf and wait for federal funding, or we could attempt to break the project into phases,” said Emily Granoff, who leads the project and is the deputy director of housing and community development for the city of Chelsea. “This project needs to happen,” she added, “but we don’t have the information we need.”

Disaster experts said the delay amounts to dereliction of duty. “It boggles the mind that almost two dozen states had to go back to court to ask Judge Stearns to enforce the existing court order against FEMA,” said Shana Udvardy, a senior policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy organization. “What we’ve seen when it comes to this BRIC case [and others] is this Trump administration’s willingness to either outright ignore the law or suggest it has a plan in place to implement the law, an obvious delay tactic to get away with doing nothing.”

President Trump and Secretary Noem have said they want the federal government to play a smaller role in disaster recovery, but experts told Grist that destroying BRIC will jeopardize that goal. That’s because BRIC projects ultimately reduce disaster recovery costs by funding more resilient infrastructure before it’s needed.

“If they’re really concerned about the escalating cost of natural disasters and the burden on the federal government, they should be concentrating on resilience,” said Leo Martinez-Diaz, the director of the climate and sustainability program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s the only thing that ultimately reduces the losses.”

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As the Trump Administration Erases Black History, These Writers Are Keeping It Alive

One of the unmistakable throughlines of the second Trump administration is how it’s overhauling policies that directly affect African Americans, most notably by targeting programs and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

For journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, it’s an attempt to take the country back to an era before the civil rights movement. “A lot of folks are saying, you know, that this administration is rolling back the ’60s, but I’m like, he—this administration’s actually going back further than that.”

The administration is also removing references to Black history from the nation’s museums, parks, and schools. When history itself is being erased at the highest levels, who’s left to tell us where we’ve been and where we’re headed?

This week on Reveal, as part of Black History Month, we’re bringing you conversations from our sister podcast, More To The Story, with three prominent Black writers who are fighting to tell a more inclusive American story.

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Trump Wants You to Forget That George Washington Owned Slaves

On Thursday just before noon, bundled up couples and small groups of people wandered through the President’s House on Independence Hall, some snapping photos and others inquiring what was happening as four National Park employees worked in tandem, behind a barricade, to reattach panel after panel of the President’s House slavery exhibits. They worked in the cold, lifting the massive glass squares up onto the brick wall and then screwing them into place. Philadelphia’s mayor Cherelle L. Parker approached, admiring the exhibit for a moment before shaking hands with the workers and thanking them.

“I want you to know I’m grateful,” Parker said. “It’s our honor,” one of the employees responded.

They continued to work until at least 16 panels of the memorial were reinstalled. The exhibits had been removed on a Thursday afternoon nearly a month before, in accordance with Trump’s 2025 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order to rid “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties” of content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” But after the city sued, US District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe issued an injunction ordering the government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026.” That order was overruled on Friday, just one hour before the deadline Rufe had set for the exhibit’s reinstallation. Now, the National Park Service must maintain the status quo—leaving 16 of 34 panels up—while the federal government appeals the initial injunction.

For a community that fought to restore history, the initial order to restore the President’s House exhibit had been cause for celebration. “We need to understand what we’ve done here. This is actually a moment in time; your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, are going to be talking about this for years and decades to come,” said Michael Coard, attorney and founding member of Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), a broad-based Black-led coalition of activists, on Thursday as the the National Park Service initially started to restore panels. “This here, right now, what we’ve done is people power.” As Coard spoke, he stood in front of a wall engraved with the names of the nine people enslaved by Washington. At the bottom of his podium rested the 1863 image “Scourged Back,” which was marked for removal from Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park last year.

ATAC had been an instrumental part of establishing the exhibit in 2010 and had filed an amicus brief in support of the city’s lawsuit on January 27.

The exhibit in Center City was one of a dozen other signs and materials from national parks removed after Trump’s executive order. The Washington Post reported that park staff interpreted the order as including “any references to historic racism, sexism, climate change, and LGBTQ+ rights.” As America approaches its 250th anniversary this year, these removals foreshadow a celebration that, on the national level, excludes underrepresented communities’ contributions to American history, refuses to reckon with its more difficult periods, and ultimately obfuscates the truth of our collective past.

When Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, the President’s House was the site where Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived and worked. The original building was demolished in 1832, but visitors today can still walk through its foundation, which sits near the Liberty Bell Center. The slavery exhibits at the President’s House include displays that memorialize the names and experiences of the nine people enslaved under Washington, along with relevant historical moments like Washington’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793.

After the exhibit’s removal in January, the ATAC kept the space alive with numerous rallies. A few days prior to the court’s order to reinstall the panels, despite the leftover snow that piled along the sidewalks and on the lawn, hundreds of concerned Philadelphia community members gathered at the President’s House demanding the restoration of the slavery exhibit.

“African American history is American history, and we stand and continue to fight to make sure that Donald Trump will not whitewash the history here in the city of Philadelphia,” said Kenyatta Johnson, Philadelphia’s 2nd Council District President, as the crowd applauded. “It’s shameful that as we celebrate the 250th celebration of the birthplace of America that we have to be out here today advocating and fighting to make sure our true history—our true history, not his story—is known.”

Other speakers included a direct descendant of Black founding father Bishop Richard Allen, city council members, a historian, and a George Washington reenactor. They all echoed a similar message: the history presented by these panels needed to be restored because they tell an intrinsic part of American history, despite the current administration’s view that they were “disparaging.”

Before a federal judge ordered the restoration of the slavery exhibit, community members filled the space with their own. Jeffrey Kelly

​The main brick walls, where two long horizontal silver slabs hung covered in glue residue—a reminder of what had been there—had been plastered with various handmade flyers protesting the erasure of history and even recreating parts of the exhibit for those who came to view the site.

The City of Philadelphia filed their federal lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior and the National Park Service the day the panels were initially removed, arguing the removal of the exhibit was “arbitrary and capricious,” violating a 2006 Cooperative Agreement between Philadelphia and the federal government.

“This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again.”

“This action is a disservice to our city, our nation, and it denies future generations the chance to learn from our history, fostering an environment of ignorance rather than understanding,” said Catherine Hicks, the president of Philadelphia’s NAACP branch, to the crowd. “We must confront the complexities of our past, honoring the lives and legacies of those who suffered under the institution of slavery.”

​Hannah Gann, a high school African American history teacher attending the rally, said every year she’d teach her students about the people Washington enslaved, particularly Ona Judge, a young woman who escaped to New Hampshire. This year, when her students heard the memorial was torn down, they were “upset that their real history was being erased and a huge part of our city’s history was being taken away and covered up.”

​Gann said the exhibit’s removal reminded her of how vital educators are.​ “We can’t just feel satisfied that we’ve done enough,” she said. “Every year we have to renew our energy, our commitment to the truth, our commitment to Black uplift and celebrating stories of Black resilience and power and having our students see themselves in those stories.”

As the rally to restore history took place in Philadelphia, in Washington, the House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held an oversight hearing titled “All in for America250: Public-Private Partnerships Supporting America’s Semiquincentennial on our Public Lands.”

During the hearing, Alan Spears, National Parks Conservation Association’s Senior Director for Cultural Resources, recalled that when he was young, his parents would take him to places like Gettysburg. He said it was there that his passion for American History manifested, but it didn’t “take hold” until he started seeing people who looked like him in those spaces.

“I think what we’re looking at right now is the danger of taking that in a completely opposite direction, where people don’t see themselves reflected or are seeing themselves actively removed and excised from our shared national narrative,” Spears said during the hearing. “We don’t need to go in that direction. This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again, about the times when we failed to live up to the better angels of our nature. That’s us too.”​

John Garrison Marks, a historian and ​the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory, had hoped that America’s anniversary would be an opportunity to “establish a more complete, more inclusive and more widely shared understanding of the nation’s history,” including the history of slavery.

Marks said people have debated Washington’s involvement in slavery for almost 250 years. The founding father enslaved people right up until the day he died, while privately writing about becoming “uneasy” with slavery and hoping that the institution would be abolished in southern states. Washington even circumvented a Pennsylvania law by deliberately moving the people he enslaved in and out of the state every six months to ensure they wouldn’t be freed by the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. Marks noted that the president understood the hypocrisy of leading a revolution to found a nation dedicated to the ideas of liberty and equality while enslaving people.

Marks said you can’t to talk about Washington without talking about his involvement in slavery. He argued that some people struggle to see Washington as “an actual human being” with “egregious flaws,” and instead see him as a symbol of the nation itself; for some, “criticizing Washington is criticizing America.”

​“There are a lot of people whose sense of patriotism, whose sense of self, is tied to the idea that America is the land of the free, is tied up in the idea that this is a nation that should only be celebrated,” he said. “And when you try to introduce this idea that we need to reckon with the history of slavery to understand Washington, there are a lot of people who view that as kind of a personal attack.”

With Philadelphia having the potential to see so many visitors this year, not only for the 250th anniversary, but for the FIFA World Cup or the MLB All-Star Game, the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House was “a huge missed opportunity” to give people an uncensored history, one that Marks believes most people want to learn.

“On the eve of the 250th there are going to be people who are now waving the flag talking about how they love this country, and my thing is this: you can’t love a thing or a person until you know the good, the bad and the ugly,” Coard said after the rally. “So, the 250th shines a spotlight about the absolute necessity of knowing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about your country.”

Following the initial legal victory, community members werecautiously hopeful.

“My heart is really exploding with joy, but it’s the type of joy that we often experience as Black people in this country,” said Michelle Flamer, a retired attorney, who helped get the exhibit installed over 15 years ago. “Where is the permanency? I want to make sure that this is permanent and not to ever be taken away. This history belongs here. There have been many people who have talked about moving it somewhere else or telling it, and I support efforts to continue to tell this history as broadly and as widely as possible, but it belongs here on this ground, because this is actually where the president’s house existed.”

Whatever the result of the administration’s fight to change the signage at the President’s House and other sites across the country, nothing can change what happened at these places, and who it happened to.

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Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariff Regime

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that most of President Donald Trump’s world-wide tariffs are illegal, dealing a setback to one of the president’s top priorities. Since his second month in office, Trump has set about to impose drastic, varying, and haphazard tariffs on countries across the globe. Trump purported that most of these tariffs were authorized under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But in a 6-3 decision, the justices ruled that IEEPA did not give the president power to impose tariffs. Trump will now have to turn to other, more limited statutes to impose his unilateral tariffs.

Although the outcome is a clear loss for Trump, the court is likely doing him a favor.

IEEPA authorizes the president to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad, including through the power to “regulate… importation or exportation.” The Trump administration argued that the word “regulate” encompassed “tariff regulation,” which Solicitor General John Sauer described during oral arguments as “the quintessential, most historically-tested method of regulating imports.” But the justices disagreed, finding the words “regulate” and “importation” are not enough to give the president uninhibited tariff power.

“Based on two words separated by 16 others in Section 1702(a)(1)(B) of IEEPA—’regulate’ and ‘importation’—the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “Those words cannot bear such weight.”

To use IEEPA, Trump had taken a capacious view of the meaning of “unusual or extraordinary threat.” For tariffs on Canada and Mexico, he said it was because they were letting fentanyl across the border. For dozens of other countries, he seized on decades-old trade deficits that most economists agree are not a big deal. For Canada (a second time), he pointed to a World Series TV ad that offended him. For Brazil, it was the gall to prosecute a former president for trying to overturn the results of an election. Trump argued that it was his power alone to declare such emergencies, and that these declarations were unreviewable, even by the courts.

Roberts dispatched with this argument by saying that Congress could not have handed the president such broad powers over matters generally reserved for itself—the power to impose tariffs—without more explicit language: This view “would replace the longstanding executive-legislative collaboration over trade policy with unchecked Presidential policymaking,” Roberts wrote. “Congress seldom effects such sea changes through ‘vague language.'”

Although the outcome is a clear loss for Trump, the court is likely doing him a favor. Trump’s sweeping and erratic tariffs are a drag on the economy. They increase uncertainty and stymie investment. They raise prices and decrease employment. The result is a weaker economy heading into this year’s midterms**—**a downward trend that is likely to continue throughthe 2028 elections.

The Republican-appointed 6-3 court majority depends on Republicans winning at the ballot box, as does the pro-business, pro-Christian nationalist, anti-democratic agenda the conservative justices are enacting. They surely understand that this project could be undermined by a tariff-fueled recession, even if Trump himself doesn’t seem to get it. To bring the point home, the case was argued the day after Democrats overperformed in November elections in New Jersey, New York City, and Virginia, winning voters worried about high prices.

The best way to understand this case was not as a tricky task of legal or constitutional interpretation, but rather as an attempt to mediate between two competing factions of the Republican firmament. On one side is Trump, who has used tariffs to dole out rewards and punishments on businesses, individuals, and other countries. On the other side were some of the biggest GOP funders, including the Koch network, who are generally committed to a pro-corporate, libertarian capitalism. These longtime GOP funders prefer Trump to a Democratic president, but they don’t want him to completely take over the levers of the economy. Groups funded by the Kochs and likeminded tycoons funded some of the libertarian legal nonprofits that launched lawsuits challenging the tariffs. These same funders also poured millions into the Federalist Society and other outside groups that helped ensure each of the six Republican appointees made it to the high court.

The result is that the court’s GOP-appointees were mediating a disagreement between two parents who maintain a sometimes rocky marriage—the funders who enabled their majority, and the president who will protect it and who personally appointed three of them. The justices had to pick a parent in this fight, and enough of the conservative wing picked the billionaires and big business over Trump.

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