curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – August 1, 2026
…
The disparity between the fantasy Trump and his cronies sold to their supporters and the reality of the situation when they were forced to prove their allegations in court matters. Administration officials insisted before the media that the project had been a great success, hurt only by “Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country.” In order to prove their lie, administration officials used the power of the government to harass, indict, and threaten a random individual whom they could blame for their own failures. Then, when forced to prove their allegations in a court of law, they withdrew the claim entirely.
This has always been the pattern of Trump and his cronies: weave a fantasy story in front of friendly media cameras, a fantasy of their own great success undercut by haters, then abandon—or lose—the legal cases based on the fantasy.
For all the bluster before the cameras of Trump cronies insisting the 2020 election was stolen, Trump’s attorneys backed away from the claims. They either withdrew or lost all but one of the 60 lawsuits they brought over the election. As a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it in 2020: “Trump Cries Voter Fraud. In Court, His Lawyers Don’t.”
The one case Trump’s lawyers won found that the Pennsylvania secretary of state overstepped by allowing voters extra time to provide missing identification for mail-in ballots. Even with that ruling, Daniel Barnes of NBC News reported, Biden still won the state by more than 80,000 votes.
Even as reality makes it clear that his claims are a fantasy, Trump continues to spin his yarns, seeming to have little else to convince voters to support him. Today he doubled down on his insistence that vandals caused the problems with the reflecting pool. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM…. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
Chris Geidner: Jeanine Pirro’s motion to dismiss the Reflecting Pool case is going to have ripple effects
The decision to end the case against former Olympian David Hearn is already making a big splash — and this is likely just the beginning, not the end, of the matter.
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Polly Mosendz, Todd Woody @ Bloomberg:
This Arctic Road Shows How Trump Is Rewriting the Rules of BusinessThe federal government issued a permit for a road long in the making in exchange for a stake in a mining company.
(Polly Mosendz, Todd Woody @ Bloomberg more…)
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Michael Fanone: No Name, No Evidence. Armed Troopers Took Pete Buttigieg’s Kids Anyway.
One anonymous tip — no name, no witness, no proof — put state police at the Buttigieg family’s door and their four-year-olds at their grandparents’ overnight. Nobody asked who called for a week.
…It gets worse. The Post tracked down the apparent caller — living in Alabama. Confronted by reporters, she couldn’t provide basic details supporting her own accusation, and accused the reporter of colluding with Buttigieg. She claimed she’d encountered him in Florence, Alabama; his travel records reportedly show he wasn’t there during the period she described. And weeks before she ever called a child welfare hotline, the same woman had publicly urged people not to vote for him.
Then the experts looked. Vivek Sankaran, one of the country’s leading child welfare law scholars at the University of Michigan, reviewed the records and called it “incredibly poor investigative work.” He saw no indication a child was in imminent danger. And he said the thing every parent should hear: “It should scare all of us.”
He’s right. Michigan State Police defended their response — they moved fast because protecting kids requires immediate action. And nobody disputes that authorities should move fast when a child is in genuine danger. But speed doesn’t cancel out basic judgment, especially when what’s on the table is pulling children away from their parents.
Here’s what sticks with me, and it’s the whole point: this isn’t really about Pete Buttigieg. He’s famous, wealthy, well-connected, has the best lawyers and a platform to tell millions of people what happened to him. Most people have none of that. Most parents don’t get national headlines when an agency gets it wrong, and most families don’t have The Washington Post digging through records to reconstruct the truth. If an anonymous accusation with no corroboration can trigger this, the average family has far less protection than he did — not more.
(Michael Fanone more…)
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Al Jazeera: New York Times reveals Trump administration subpoena over North Korea story
The US Justice Department faces criticism for its increasing use of subpoenas in attempts to compel journalists to reveal their sources.
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- July 14: Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran
- July 13: Joan Sebastian Guerrero
- July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
