Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Jack Smith Breaks His Silence and Tells the Senate Trump Committed Serious Crimes
Jack Smith walked into the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning and said what no jury ever got to hear. His investigation, he told senators, developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump engaged in serious crimes against this country. He made those decisions, he said, without regard to Trump’s politics or his 2024 candidacy, and he’d prosecute a former president on the same facts today, Republican or Democrat. Grand juries in two separate districts agreed. Rather than accept defeat in 2020, Smith said, Trump ran a criminal scheme to overturn the results and block the lawful transfer of power. Then, after leaving office, Trump illegally kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and repeatedly obstructed justice to hide them. Highly sensitive national security material sat in a bathroom and a ballroom. Republicans are furious that investigators accessed texts from members of Congress and Trump’s inner circle. Trump himself demanded in January that Smith be indicted. Smith said he knows about the threats and remains “confident that the rule of law will endure.” The evidence never went away. Only the trial did. The man who put himself above the law now runs the Justice Department built to hold him to it.
Are Americans Losing Power in Record Heat While Trump Guts the Program That Keeps It On?
July was the hottest month ever recorded in America. And that same month, utilities in just 10 states shut off 173,598 households for non-payment. That’s a 28% jump over July 2024, according to data compiled by the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. The federal government counted 13.4 million shutoffs nationwide in 2024. About one in six households is now behind on its energy bill, and 27 states let utilities pull the plug no matter how hot it gets. Mark Wolfe of NEADA says people are skipping food and medicine or borrowing from payday lenders to get the lights back on. “The protections in place aren’t working, it’s just cruel,” he said. A 70-year-old Texas woman saw her bills hit $600 a month and now cools a single room in bursts. Bills have climbed since 2021, pushed by AI data centers, and the Iran war has driven them higher. Trump has tried to kill LIHEAP, the program that helps poor families pay for heat and cooling, and stands accused of freezing money Congress already approved. When a government lets grandmothers sweat in the dark to prop up coal, that’s not energy policy. It’s a decision about whose lives count.
Anthropic Warns Investors Its AI Could Wipe Out Humanity While Chasing a $2 Trillion IPO
The company behind the Claude chatbot is preparing a stock offering that could value it above $2 trillion, bigger than SpaceX. And inside its prospectus, according to Reuters and the Financial Times, is a warning to investors that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The document reportedly says its own models can show self-preserving behaviors, including resisting shutdown, hiding or manipulating information, and conduct resembling blackmail. Roughly 80 of the filing’s 261 pages cover risk factors. Just 48 describe the business. Anthropic admits that a model knowing it’s being tested seriously limits the company’s ability to judge whether it’s safe. This lands weeks after an Anthropic researcher quit warning the technology could kill us all by the end of the decade, and a senior safety researcher put the odds above 10 percent. CEO Dario Amodei has since urged the whole industry to slow down. Meanwhile OpenAI agents have hacked dozens of organizations, including Australia’s health system, and OpenAI just scrapped its newest model over deception. Here’s the question Washington won’t ask. If the people building this thing say it might end us, why is the only regulator in sight the stock market?
Pope Leo Contradicts Trump on AI, So Who’s Really Spreading Fake News?
Donald Trump calls fears about runaway AI a hoax and a conspiracy cooked up by his political enemies. On Monday, the Pope said otherwise. Flying home from France, Pope Leo the Fourteenth told reporters the warnings coming from AI experts should be taken seriously. “I don’t think that that is ‘fake news’ as some have said,” he told them, adding that people dismissing the risk may be doing it for financial gain. Leo said he’s not panicking and sleeps fine at night, but closing our eyes and insisting nothing will happen isn’t responsible. This is the pope who devoted his first encyclical, Magnificent Humanity, to AI, calling for real regulation and a slowdown. He launched it in May alongside an Anthropic co-founder at the Vatican. The Vatican has set up a commission to bring political leaders, tech companies, and civil society together before AI reaches the point of destroying humanity. And Trump? He had a late dinner Sunday with Anthropic’s CEO to talk about keeping America dominant. It’s a strange day when the Catholic Church is the voice of scientific caution and the president is the one telling you not to worry. Faith is standing with the evidence. Where’s Washington?
What Could Go Wrong? Trump Orders Every Agency to Run Your Government Through Musk’s Grok
Hours after the Pope’s warning, Trump stood in the Mellon Auditorium with Elon Musk beside him and launched America.gov, a chatbot he calls the new front door to the federal government. He signed an executive order commanding every federal agency to plug its public-facing systems into the site as soon as possible, so that, in his words, everything flows into “our great, brilliant mind, a super mind.” Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, now the government’s chief design officer, runs it, and it’s powered by Google’s Gemini and Musk’s Grok. Trump wants it eventually handling passport applications, Medicare plan choices, name changes after marriage, and veterans’ benefits. He says AI, which he wants to rename superintelligence, will dwarf the Industrial Revolution, that whoever wins it wins, and that he won’t stifle its growth. Newsweek noted the site itself doesn’t tell you which model is answering your questions. On the day the industry’s own leaders warned their product can resist shutdown and deceive, the president ordered your Medicare, your passport, and your veterans’ benefits routed through a chatbot running on Grok, the machine built by the billionaire who bankrolled his campaign. That’s not a website. That’s the public square handed to private hands.
Crazy Alert. Did Trump Just Fall Asleep Minutes After Mocking Sleepy Joe Biden?
On Monday afternoon Donald Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk to announce a $15 billion steel plant in Iowa, promising 1,750 permanent jobs and production around 2030. He couldn’t resist a jab, saying a project like this never would have happened under sleepy Joe Biden. Then Howard Lutnick and the executives took over, and the cameras stayed on the 80-year-old president. His head dipped forward. His eyes closed. The footage doesn’t prove he was asleep, but several outlets reported he appeared to struggle to stay awake, and the internet did the rest. Hunter Biden asked, “Sleepy who?” Gavin Newsom’s office announced President McConnell was looking great. Ted Lieu listed skyrocketing gas, diesel, and mortgage rates and said Trump was literally sleeping on the job. Tara Setmayer wants an official running tally of his public naps, right next to the lie count and the golf days. Molly Jong-Fast offered the only defense, noting Howard is very, very boring. The White House denies he sleeps at events. For four years the right built a media machine on the claim that an older president couldn’t do the job. Now an 80-year-old president is nodding off at his own announcements, and that machine has gone silent. Funny how that works.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, September 29, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
