Is the White House Building a Case for a Lie?
Trump’s spies get drafted into an election-fraud fantasy, corporate cash floods democracy, Kushner may sink Albania, and a poisoned pool full of dead ducks. Buckle up.
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Is the White House Building a Case for a Lie?
A White House task force is quietly pulling thousands of documents out of our intelligence agencies so President Trump can, in NBC’s words, “amplify new accusations” about election fraud. According to NBC News, citing five people familiar with the effort, the team is combing through material from the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Justice Department and the office of the Director of National Intelligence, all tied to the 2020 election. Right-wing writer John Solomon and former Trump aide Derek Harvey are helping run it. And here’s the tell. Staffers have reportedly been told to limit redactions, even if that means exposing the names of government officials. A White House official called Trump “the most transparent president in history.” Six years after he lost to Joe Biden, there’s still no proof of the widespread fraud he keeps claiming. This isn’t transparency. It’s a machine built to manufacture doubt about elections themselves, and to soften the ground for whatever comes next. When a government turns its spy agencies into a propaganda shop, that should scare every one of us.
A Disaster for Democracy
Here’s what unlimited corporate money looks like. A new report from Public Citizen finds that corporations have already dumped five hundred seventeen million dollars into the 2026 midterms, and we’re still four months out from November. That’s more corporate cash than any full cycle in history, and it’s nearly one third of every corporate dollar spent since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling back in 2010. Since that decision, corporations have poured one point five eight billion dollars into our federal elections. Crypto, Big Tech and online betting companies are driving more than half of it. The single biggest winner is Trump’s own MAGA Inc., which raked in one hundred twenty million dollars straight from corporate donors. Report author Rick Claypool didn’t mince words. “This corporate spending is a disaster for democracy,” he said. When corporate money drowns out real voters, working people simply don’t get heard.
Did Jared Kushner Just Put Albania’s Future on the Line?
Now travel with me to the Adriatic coast, where Jared Kushner is threatening to derail an entire nation’s future. Albania has spent more than two decades cleaning up its courts and its laws to earn a spot in the European Union. Then Kushner and Ivanka Trump went for a swim, spotted a gorgeous protected lagoon, and decided it would make a lovely luxury resort. The site sits inside Albania’s only marine national park, home to flamingos and more than two hundred migratory bird species. Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, manages billions, including roughly two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Now the European Parliament has passed a resolution demanding Albania halt construction in protected areas, and Brussels is warning the whole one point four billion dollar project could jam up the country’s path into the EU. The head of the EU delegation warned it could create “serious problems” in the talks. Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors have opened an investigation into how that protected land changed hands. So an American president’s son-in-law, backed by Saudi money, may cost an entire country its future. That’s the reach of this family’s business.
Where Was Your Congressman for Four Months?
Now to New Jersey, where Republican Congressman Tom Kean Jr. simply vanished. For four months, starting in March, he missed more than one hundred votes and his staff offered almost nothing to explain it, all while collecting his taxpayer-funded salary. This week he finally returned to the House floor and told his colleagues he’d been battling depression, following his doctor’s orders. And on that, he deserves nothing but compassion. Depression is a serious illness, and it takes courage to say so out loud. But here’s the part The Lever dug up. This is the same Tom Kean who, as a New Jersey state senator, voted against paid sick leave twice, in 2008 and again in 2018. So a man who needed months to recover on the public’s dime spent years denying ordinary workers the right to a single paid day off when they get sick. “This is not an easy speech for me to give,” Kean said. It shouldn’t be easy. Working families never got the grace he just gave himself.
Are the Oceans Trying to Warn Us?
The oceans just broke another record, and the scientists watching are alarmed. Europe’s Copernicus climate monitors report that global sea surface temperatures hit their hottest June ever on June twenty-first, reaching almost seventy degrees Fahrenheit and beating the old record set just two years ago. Marine heat waves have now hit around eighty-two percent of the world’s oceans. And with El Niño building in the Pacific, they warn even more records will fall in the months ahead. Carlo Buontempo, who runs the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said we could be entering “uncharted territory.” The cause is no mystery. One expert put it plainly. “The planet is warming because we’re emitting vast quantities of greenhouse gases,” he said, mostly from burning fossil fuels. This isn’t some far-off worry. Hotter oceans mean fiercer storms, deadlier heat waves, and worse floods. In Europe last week, more than thirteen hundred people died in the heat. The ocean is sounding the alarm. The question is whether the people in power are willing to hear it.
Has the Reflecting Pool Been Poisoned?
And now for a Crazy Alert. You remember how Trump ordered the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool painted blue for America’s two hundred fiftieth birthday? Well, it turns out that was just the beginning. Raw Story reports that the pool was lined with a toxic epoxy resin, and the safety data sheet flat out warns the stuff is “toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects.” Since the renovation wrapped up, multiple dead ducks have turned up floating in the water, and the Center for Biological Diversity is now calling for a federal investigation. And who got the seven million dollar no-bid contract to do all this? A company called, and I am not making this up, Greenwater Services, run by a Republican donor named John Carafo. So the president spent fourteen million taxpayer dollars to paint a pool blue, handed the job to his pool guy, poisoned the ducks, and named the whole operation Greenwater. You genuinely cannot script this stuff. The liner company insists there’s no proven link to the dead ducks. The ducks were unavailable for comment.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, July 2nd, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.