President Donald Trump publicly attacked his own U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia on Saturday morning, hours after her office admitted in a court filing that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by the administration’s own rushed renovation and not by a vandal.

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking?”

The post capped a six-week collapse of one of the administration’s loudest law-and-order stories, and it exposed something the White House has spent all summer trying to avoid admitting: the renovation Trump ordered, paid for with millions in public money, failed on its own.

How it started

Trump announced the project in April as part of a broader effort to spruce up the National Mall before the country’s 250th birthday. He wanted the bottom of the pool resurfaced in a shade he called American flag blue, and he told reporters the work would take about a week and cost roughly $1.8 million.

The actual contracts told a different story. Federal procurement records showed the government committed more than $14 million to the effort, including a contract to Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings to repaint and waterproof the pool floor. The work was awarded without competitive bidding on the grounds that it needed to be done immediately and that the company is led by a Trump donor.

Trump declared the project finished in early June. Within days, the water turned green with algae and sheets of the new blue coating began peeling off the bottom and floating in the pool.

How the blame shifted

Rather than acknowledge a failed installation, the administration reached for sabotage.

Trump told reporters in June that people had been caught damaging the pool with a box cutter and had thrown fertilizer into the water. The White House condemned what it called targeted sabotage as repairs slipped past the July 4 celebration. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the same contractor would handle the new round of repairs without seeking bids because, in his words, the company did a fantastic job.

At least seven people were arrested or cited in connection with alleged damage to the pool.

The highest profile target was David Hearn, a 67-year-old three-time Olympic canoeist from Bethesda, Maryland. Hearn stopped at the pool during a long bike ride on June 19. He says he reached into the water, touched a piece of coating that was already peeling, and let go when a park employee told him to stop.

Pirro’s office charged him with felony destruction of property. At a July 2 news conference announcing the indictment, she said prosecutors would prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hearn willfully destroyed property, described him as forcefully and violently ripping up the liner, and noted he faced up to 10 years in prison. Asked whether she was charging harshly at the president’s direction, she said she charges according to the evidence.

Hearn pleaded not guilty on July 9 and was released on his own recognizance.

How it fell apart

Pirro’s own account of the reversal is remarkable.

According to her filing, she visited the drained pool herself on July 17 and became aware of significant damage across the entire basin, not just the small patch Hearn was accused of touching. Her office then demanded records from the Interior Department about how the pool had been lined, and received 695 megabytes of documents in return.

Those records described repeated lining failures during installation, extensive peeling throughout the pool, and a scramble to finish before the holiday. A National Park Service engineer had observed the new lining peeling within two days of the final inspection on June 11, attributing the damage to overspraying and delamination.

“The rush to complete the project led to hasty and botched work that was not remediated before the project was finished and the fencing removed,” Pirro wrote.

She was blunter still about who misled whom, writing that the damage resulted from a botched installation and not vandalism, as the Interior Department had initially represented. Her conclusion: given the newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to vandalism at all, let alone prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Hearn’s attorneys called the prosecution an abuse of government power and said the administration owes their client an apology.

How Trump responded

Not with an apology. With an attack on the prosecutor who blinked.

“To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area,” Trump wrote in his Truth Social post.

Buried in the same paragraph was a concession he almost never makes. “There may have been some contractor difficulty,” Trump allowed, “but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

That is the whole story in one sentence. Faced with a filing from his own Justice Department that blames his own rushed project, the president gave up the smallest possible piece of ground and kept insisting on the version that lets him off the hook.

Three other people are still facing misdemeanor charges tied to the pool. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon has been pressing for answers about the cost of a renovation that peeled apart within weeks. Hearn is due back in court on August 5.

This is what accountability journalism is for. The Trump administration spent millions on a failed project, then tried to pin the failure on a private citizen riding his bike past a national monument. It took a court filing to force the truth out. Follow Democratic Reporter and help us keep the pressure on.

At a Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Friday, Donald Trump was asked about the attack that hit more than 30 community water systems across Minnesota. He did not describe it as an attack on Minnesota. He described Minnesota as the perpetrator.

“You know who’s behind it? Minnesota. Because they’re grossly incompetent. I think the governor’s behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack,” he said.

Read that again, because the distinction matters and it will get flattened in most coverage. Accusing a state of failing to defend itself is an ordinary political attack. Accusing a sitting governor of carrying out a cyberattack on his own state’s water supply is an accusation of a serious federal crime, made from the podium, by the president, against a political opponent, with nothing behind it. He went on to call Walz corrupt and to say Minnesota is one of the worst-run states in the country. He offered no evidence, no alternative theory, and no explanation for why the agencies he oversees are saying the opposite of what he is saying.

What actually happened

Hackers hit more than 30 Minnesota community water systems on the night of Sunday, July 26 and the morning of Monday, July 27. Minnesota IT Services described it as one of the largest attacks on local water infrastructure in the state’s history.

The attackers targeted operational technology, the category of equipment that performs physical work. Specifically, they targeted internet-facing programmable logic controllers, the devices that tell pumps, valves, wells, and treatment equipment what to do. In its public service announcement issued Thursday, the FBI identified the targeted hardware as Rockwell Automation and Allen-Bradley MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series controllers. Once inside, the actors changed IP addresses and passwords, locking utility operators out of monitoring and control of their own systems.

This is the part that separates a water utility hack from a data breach. When the compromised computer controls a valve, the consequences are left with the computer. A memo distributed by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, obtained by CNN, assessed that the attackers’ likely goal was to cause loss of system pressure and, through that, potential contamination of the water supply. The FBI’s own announcement makes the same point in plainer terms: pressure loss in a water system can allow untreated groundwater to seep into pipes.

Nobody in Minnesota got sick, and utility operators switched to manual control as the state activated its cybersecurity incident response, and state and federal teams spent the week helping utilities contain and remediate the damage. One community asked residents to conserve water for a couple of hours while crews figured out what was wrong. Minnesota health officials have reported no compromise of any municipal water supply.

It was not just Minnesota

The FBI and EPA announcement states that water and wastewater utilities in at least seven states have reported incidents since July 27, and that some of that activity degraded water operations. The announcement does not name the states. It does describe the effects: loss of pressure, flooding, operators locked out of their equipment, and utilities forced to run portions of their systems by hand. Some utilities issued boil-water notices. CISA said separately that it is seeing a significant increase in actors targeting these controllers in the water sector.

Wisconsin is the second state to surface publicly. Officials there detected malicious activity at water facilities on Monday and circulated a Department of Natural Resources memo, also obtained by CNN, urging utilities to take immediate action to prevent serious impacts to their systems.

Wisconsin also has a Democratic governor. Wisconsin is also a state Trump carried in 2024, with an open race for that governor’s seat on the ballot in November. The president has not said one word about Wisconsin.

The warnings came first

The most damning fact here is not that Trump lacks evidence. It is that his own government produced the evidence pointing the other way, and did it before the attack happened.

On April 7, the FBI, CISA, NSA, EPA, Department of Energy and US Cyber Command published a joint cybersecurity advisory, AA26-097A, warning that Iranian-affiliated actors were exploiting internet-facing operational technology across US critical infrastructure. The agencies updated it on July 22, four days before the Minnesota attack, to expand the range of affected manufacturers and add fresh indicators of compromise.

The advisory d states that since at least March, the authoring agencies identified an Iranian-affiliated group disrupting the function of PLCs across the Government Services, Water and Wastewater, and Energy sectors, with some victims suffering operational disruption and financial loss.

It describes attackers modifying the logic inside these devices and notes that, in observed cases, the changes disabled critical shutdown and alarm functions, allowing systems to enter unsafe conditions without alerting the operators monitoring them.

That is a document produced by six federal agencies under this president, describing this attack, four days early.

Federal and state investigators are now treating Iran as a leading suspect. Officials told the New York Times, which first reported the possible connection, that the tradecraft used and the complete absence of any ransom demand pointed toward Iranian involvement. Iran’s interest in American water infrastructure is not new. The Justice Department charged Iranian hackers in 2016 over an intrusion at a small dam outside New York City, and Iranian-linked groups have hit US water utilities repeatedly since.

It’s important to note that no formal attribution has been made,, and oofficials have been careful to call the assessment preliminary, while some are actively examining whether a different actor staged the intrusion to appear Iranian.

That caution is appropriate, and it’s also the exact opposite of what the president did. He did not withhold judgment pending forensics. He reached a conclusion instantly, and the conclusion was that the Democratic governor of a state he has lost twice attacked his own constituents’ water.

Why this is worse than a bad soundbite

It is tempting to file this under the usual heading of Trump saying something absurd and moving on. That undersells the damage, for three reasons.

First, it is a message to adversaries. If a foreign state probes American critical infrastructure and the American president’s public response is to blame the victims and deny the attack occurred, the deterrent value of the entire federal cybersecurity apparatus drops. There is no cost imposed on an actor whose intrusion the president refuses to acknowledge.

Second, it punishes disclosure. Minnesota did the right thing. State officials went public quickly, briefed the press, coordinated with federal partners, and shared threat intelligence with other states. The reward was the president of the United States calling them incompetent and criminal on national television. Every state emergency manager watching that exchange now understands that transparency carries a political cost. The next state may take longer to say anything.

Third, it is a substitute for a response. Water systems in this country are exposed for structural reasons. The sector is made up of thousands of small, underfunded utilities running aging equipment, many with no dedicated IT staff at all, and federal auditors have found for years that a large share of the systems they inspect fall short of basic cybersecurity requirements. That is a solvable problem, and solving it requires money, standards, and sustained federal attention. None of that gets discussed in a Cabinet meeting spent on a grudge.

Somebody reached into the machinery that treats American drinking water and tried to break it. The president of the United States watched it happen and went looking for a Democrat to blame.

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The list in question is the FCC’s Covered List, maintained under the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act. Equipment that lands on it cannot receive FCC equipment authorization, and most electronic devices need that authorization before they can legally be imported, marketed, or sold in the United States. Huawei and ZTE gear was added to the same list years ago. Now robots are on it, along with internet-connected power inverters, the hardware that ties solar panels, batteries, and data center equipment into the electrical grid.

The definition the FCC is working from is broad. It captures software-controlled robots that travel over the ground, weigh more than 4.4 pounds including any dock, can perceive their surroundings, and connect wirelessly. An FCC spokesperson confirmed that robot vacuums fall inside that definition, and so do robot lawn mowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the machines that move packages around warehouses.

What actually changes for households

Nothing you already own is affected. Models that have already cleared FCC authorization stay legal to import, sell, and operate. There is no recall and no forced retirement.

The restriction hits everything that comes next. And in this particular market, that is nearly everything. The five largest robot vacuum brands in the world, Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame, Xiaomi, and Narwal, are all Chinese companies. The Roomba brand is now owned by a Chinese firm called Picea, which acquired it after iRobot filed for bankruptcy. Even Dyson depends on Chinese manufacturing for its own robot vacuums.

Domestic assembly is not an automatic escape hatch either. Matic, a company that assembles its robot vacuums in California, said it may still need to apply for a waiver because it does not currently source at least 65% of its components from American suppliers.

The waiver is the point

Manufacturers frozen out by the rule are not without options. They can seek what the FCC calls conditional approval, which requires a favorable national security determination from the Department of War for robots and from either the Department of War or the Department of Homeland Security for inverters. Getting one, according to reporting on the process, generally means demonstrating domestic manufacturing or committing to invest in it.

That is the structure worth paying attention to. A federal agency has made an entire product category illegal to bring to market, and then created a discretionary exemption that companies can win by pledging investment on terms this administration approves. It is the same pattern visible across the administration’s trade and technology policy, where access to the American market has been converted into something firms negotiate for individually rather than something they qualify for under a published standard.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr welcomed the executive branch determinations in a statement announcing the additions.

The security concerns are real, which is exactly why the politics matter

There is a genuine need to ensure devices are properly being handled; we don’t deny that. The administration’s determination cites specific incidents, including a 2026 vulnerability that exposed thousands of home robots worldwide to remote access covering live camera feeds, microphone audio, and detailed floor plans of people’s houses.

Researchers found what appeared to be a preinstalled backdoor in Chinese robot dogs in April 2025. A separate flaw in certain humanoid robots could have allowed them to be commandeered and used to scan for other nearby machines. Security professionals and allied governments have also flagged power inverters as a mounting risk to electrical grids, and France and Lithuania have both restricted Chinese components on similar grounds.

Those are legitimate findings, but they also don’t explain why the remedy was designed the way it was. A rule aimed at insecure devices would set security requirements that any manufacturer could meet simply by working towards building safer products. This rule instead sets a country-of-origin test and then sells relief from it in exchange for capital commitments. The security case supplies the justification. The waiver process supplies the leverage.

For now, the biggest risk for Americans is that buying a robot vacuum next year will mean a thinner market and higher prices, and the same dynamic applies to the inverter rule right at a moment when households and utilities are trying to bring solar capacity online. The administration is describing that outcome as reshoring. For the people paying for it, it looks like another product category getting more expensive by federal decision.

The timing carries its own weight. The measures arrive ahead of a planned September meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, giving the administration fresh leverage to trade in a category that, unsurprisingly, China accounts for roughly 85% of global humanoid robot production.

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On the morning of January 22, a man being held by ICE inside an Indiana state prison waited for his medication, and nobody came.

He has epilepsy. He had been prescribed Keppra since 2020, two 1,000 milligram doses a day, and missing even one dose can trigger a seizure. He had gone nearly a year without one.

That morning there was no medical staff on duty in his building to hand out the breakfast doses. Hours later he seized, hit his head, and when officers finally reached his cell they found him lying in a pool of his own blood.

A hospital glued the wound on his head shut and sent him back to the prison the same day.

Here is where it turns from negligence into something uglier. Shortly after he returned, officers told him he was being moved to a different unit. He was still coming out of the seizure, still injured, having trouble standing. He asked why.

According to the complaint, he never threatened anyone, never resisted, and never left his cell. Officers opened the port in the cell door and sprayed him in the eyes. He was blinded, burning, struggling to breathe. Before he could rinse any of it off, they cuffed him and hauled him out.

They never gave him a shower. He tried to wash the chemical off in a sink.

The ACLU of Indiana filed two federal lawsuits on his behalf this week, one against the private company paid to provide medical care at the facility and one against the officers. Ken Falk, the group’s legal director, called what happened cruel and unconstitutional.

I want to be clear about why this is a constitutional question and not just a decency question.

This man was not serving a sentence. He was a civil immigration detainee. His asylum status, granted in 2000, was revoked in 2022 after a fraud conviction, and that is the entire hand the administration has to play here.

Civil detention is legally not punishment. It exists to make sure somebody appears at a hearing. That is the exact premise the government uses to justify holding tens of thousands of people, and it comes with an obligation to provide adequate medical care. He was released in May after winning a habeas petition.

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This was the second time medication went missing at that prison, and the first time somebody died

Indiana signed a two-year agreement with DHS in August 2025 to hold up to 1,000 ICE detainees at that facility. The state collects $294 per detainee per day. The first detainees arrived in October.

By February, one of them was dead.

Lorth Sim was 59, a Cambodian national who came to this country as a refugee in 1983 and became a lawful permanent resident three years later. He had Type 2 diabetes and had been prescribed metformin.

The county coroner ruled he died of cardiovascular disease with diabetes as a contributing cause. But a former nurse for the prison’s medical contractor told the Indianapolis Star that Sim never actually received the metformin, and an independent autopsy his family paid for found significant glucose in his blood.

Six weeks later, 55-year-old Tuan Van Bui died at the same facility. Two detainees who watched him collapse said help arrived too late.

When Congressman André Carson toured the prison in April, detainees told him a man had been screaming for help and staff assumed he was joking.

The same failure, over and over, in state after state

If Indiana were the only place this happened, it would be a scandal about one prison. It is not.

Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights published a joint investigation in June that walks through case after case with the same shape. Somebody says they are sick. Nobody takes it seriously. Then it is too late.

A 44-year-old Ukrainian man at the Krome facility in Florida repeatedly reported chest pain and an irregular heartbeat, and there is no record anyone prescribed him anything. When a nurse found him unresponsive with pupils that would not react to light, staff did not call 911. Workers at the facility chose to move him to the clinic and ordered non-emergency transport. He reached an emergency room four and a half hours after the first call, with a blood pressure over 280. The working theory among the staff was that he was high.

A 39-year-old Mexican man who was being held at Adelanto in California reported a fever, a cough, and a growing abscess. A provider gave him ointment and a fiber supplement and sent him on his way. No physical exam was ever documented, which is what would have found the infection. He died of septic shock. He had lived here since he was four and worked at the same car wash for 15 years.

A 42-year-old Honduran man at a county jail in New York was identified at intake as being in active alcohol withdrawal, a condition that kills people when it goes unmanaged and almost never does when it does not. He was cleared for detention within two hours. Nobody checked on him for the next 17 hours. A guard found him dead.

A 45-year-old Ethiopian man at Eloy in Arizona went to medical four separate times over six weeks and was treated for a pulled muscle every time. He had lost 20% of his body weight before anyone looked harder. He had tuberculosis, plus untreated HIV that had progressed to AIDS. He had been in general population that entire time with an active airborne infection.

Not one of those is a story about a rare disease. Every one is a story about somebody saying they were sick and being waved off.

The numbers are not close to normal

In the first 500 days of this administration, 52 people died in ICE custody. Thirty-nine people died in the first year alone, the highest annual toll since ICE was created in 2003.

The mortality rate is the highest in nearly two decades. It is roughly four times the rate under the previous administration. It is higher than it was at the peak of COVID, when detention was a documented public health disaster.

And this is not simply a function of holding more people. The detained population grew 77%. Annual deaths more than tripled.

For comparison, the average was 8.9 deaths a year between 2018 and 2024. ICE itself reported 11 deaths in 2024 and 32 deaths in 2025. At least 22 people have died so far in 2026, and we are only in July.

An earlier study of deaths between 2017 and 2021 concluded that 95% of them were preventable or possibly preventable with adequate care.

Three decisions made this happen

They deleted the penalties. The medical contractor in Indiana is Centurion Health, a subsidiary of the insurance giant Centene. It faces more than 150 active federal lawsuits in that state alone over conditions of confinement. Missouri has fined it every quarter since renewing its contract. A whistleblower suit in Delaware, in which the state attorney general joined, accuses it of falsifying records and concealing staffing shortages. When Indiana extended the contract, the state removed the clause requiring the company to pay back for missed staffing requirements, and it was renewed this March again for roughly $213 million despite all of the company’s previous issues.

They stopped paying for outside care. For more than 20 years, the Department of Veterans Affairs processed reimbursements to hospitals, pharmacies, and specialists for treating detainees offsite. ICE paid the VA for the service. On October 3, 2025, under pressure from a right-wing legal group, that arrangement was terminated. ICE handed the work to a private contractor called Acentra Health. In its own procurement documents, ICE called the situation an absolute emergency and specifically named dialysis, prenatal care, and chemotherapy as the care at risk. As of last month, Acentra had collected $44.6 million and paid providers exactly nothing. Not a reduced amount. Zero, for nine months running. Providers have started refusing these patients.

They fired the inspectors. Congress created the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman in 2019 specifically to investigate deaths, medical care, and misconduct inside detention. It was an effective agency that suddenly went from more than 100 at the start of 2025 to five at the start of this year, overseeing 220 active facilities. In May, DHS closed it permanently and blamed Congress. The department’s civil rights office was gutted alongside it, with its budget cut 77% in one year.

What that looks like when nobody is watching

Camp East Montana, the tent facility on the Fort Bliss Army post in El Paso, is now the largest immigration detention site in the country. The facility was quickly opened in August 2025 under a $1.3 billion contract awarded to a company with no prior detention experience.

An ICE inspection in February found 49 violations of detention standards at that facility, including 22 tied to use of force. Inspectors flagged a failure to isolate a detainee showing symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis and a failure to document suicide prevention checks.

At least three people have died there. One death was ruled a homicide by the El Paso County medical examiner. In that case, federal auditors reported in June that evidence was missing or destroyed.

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU interviewed 71 people held there. Roughly 90% said they had been assaulted by staff or watched somebody else be beaten.

The horrendous treatment of individuals housed in ICE detention centers reaches pregnant women too with DHS data provided to senators showing that the government deported 363 pregnant, postpartum, or nursing women between January 2025 and February 2026. As of February, 86 pregnant women were in custody, nine of them in the third trimester. Sixteen miscarriages were recorded.

ICE’s own standing policy says it generally should not be detaining these women at all.

Their answer is not surprisingly to shift blame and call it fake news

When reporters asked ICE about the deaths in Indiana, a spokesperson said claims of substandard conditions were false and added that this is the best healthcare many of these people have received in their entire lives.

When NPR asked DHS about the record death toll, the agency denied there was a spike, cited a death rate expressed as a percentage, and used the statement to encourage detainees to deport themselves. Being in detention, they said, is a choice.

Read that against the record and it’s a very different situation. A man with epilepsy seizing on a concrete floor because nobody showed up with his pills. A man with a brain bleed loaded into a van instead of an ambulance. A man with a raging infection sent back to his cell with ointment. A man dead of alcohol withdrawal 17 hours into custody. A man carrying active tuberculosis through a housing unit for six weeks.

And understand who is inside these facilities that are being run by unqualified companies and untrained workers. As of April, fewer than 18,000 of the more than 60,000 people in ICE detention had any prior criminal conviction. Roughly 24,000 had neither a conviction nor a pending charge.

None of this is an accident. Every piece of it was a decision somebody signed and decisions were made to fill facilities past capacity with people who have never been convicted of anything. The decision to hire contractors with documented histories of understaffing and then delete the penalty for understaffing. The decision to blow up a working payment system with nothing ready to replace it. The decision to fire the watchdogs.

Those choices have a body count, and it is climbing every week.

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The filing was first surfaced publicly by journalist Marcy Wheeler and reported in detail by Raw Story.

What the government said happened

Hearn was indicted July 2 on a single felony count of destruction of property. Prosecutors allege he pulled up part of the pool’s newly installed liner on June 19.

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced the charge at a press conference that same day, telling reporters that National Park Service employees had watched Hearn forcefully and violently pull the bottom liner up with both hands. She emphasized that he had used his bare hands to do it.

When a reporter raised the obvious implication, that tearing an intact liner barehanded would be difficult and that the material may have already been damaged, Pirro did not concede the point. She responded that Hearn damaged it, and that he damaged the pool. Her handling of the announcement drew immediate criticism from legal observers who questioned whether the conduct described amounted to a federal felony at all.

What the photographs show

Hearn has maintained a consistent account since the beginning. He says he noticed a piece of liner that had already come loose, touched it, and let go when a park employee told him to stop. He pleaded not guilty.

His attorneys argue the government’s own record supports him. The motion points to images the government itself submitted as part of its search warrant application, alongside a photograph Hearn took before he made contact with the liner. According to the filing, both sets of images depict identical damage to the same area of the liner before Hearn ever touched it.

That is the entire theory of the defense, and it does not depend on witness credibility or competing interpretations. It depends on the liner itself, which is why what happened next matters.

The evidence demand, and the draining

On July 8, defense attorneys sent the government a written demand to preserve all physical evidence in the case. The motion asserts that the government fenced off the pool that same day and began draining it again for repairs.

Eight days later, on July 16, the defense team was granted access to the drained pool with the government’s assistance. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Reddington accompanied them and pointed out the precise spot where Hearn allegedly touched the liner.

The sworn declaration attached to the motion describes what they found there. The entire section of pool liner is missing.

Hearn’s attorneys write that the government’s failure to preserve the evidence, in the face of an express demand, has destroyed his ability to collect material relevant to his defense. Their conclusion is that dismissal is the only appropriate remedy.

Why this case is bigger than a pool liner

Courts take spoliation seriously precisely because the alternative is unworkable. If a prosecuting authority can charge someone based on physical evidence, receive a formal demand to preserve that evidence, and then allow it to be destroyed while the case is pending, the defendant is left arguing against an accusation he has no way to test.

The scale here makes the dynamic easier to see, not harder. This is not a complex financial conspiracy or a national security matter where classified material complicates disclosure. It is a small piece of vinyl in a public reflecting pool on the National Mall, photographed by multiple parties, in a case announced from a podium with television cameras rolling.

A 67-year-old man with no apparent history of anything like this was publicly branded a violent vandal by the top federal prosecutor in Washington. He now faces a felony count over damage his own timestamped photograph suggests he did not cause, and the object that would settle the question has been removed.

Judge Edelman has not yet ruled on the motion. Whatever he decides, the record already shows a prosecution that moved faster than its own evidence could support, and a government that let the proof disappear after being told in writing to keep it.

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He delivered the news the way he delivers everything now by wasting taxpayer money on a two-camera video posted to X, captioned “The High-T Department of War.”

In the video, Hegseth said the screening would ensure troops have “the right testosterone levels” to perform at their best, framing the program as an investment in what he called the military’s most decisive tactical advantage: the individual warfighter. Service members flagged for low levels can choose to receive testosterone replacement therapy, which Hegseth insisted is “not about artificial enhancement.”

Set aside, for a moment, that the United States is currently at war. Set aside that the Pentagon is grappling with recruiting shortfalls, aging equipment, and an ongoing conflict in the Persian Gulf. The Secretary of Defense spent his Wednesday in hair and makeup, filming a wellness-influencer video about hormone optimization.

The hypocrisy is the headline

Here is the part Hegseth apparently didn’t think through: testosterone replacement therapy is hormone therapy. This is the same administration that banned transgender service members and stripped away gender-affirming care across the military — and it is now offering hormone treatment to troops, provided they’re the kind of troops Hegseth wants more masculine.

Critics were quick to point out that the program is, in a literal sense, gender-affirming care for men.

The internet noticed immediately.

— “the US military is creating officially designated ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ categories based on testosterone levels. do i even need to say it?” (25K+ likes, 920K views)]

The Pentagon has also declined to answer basic questions about how the program actually works. Military Times asked whether female service members — roughly 17 percent of active-duty troops — would receive hormone screenings or access to testosterone therapy. The Pentagon declined to elaborate. NBC News asked whether there would be repercussions for troops who decline recommended treatment. No answer there either.

Even veteran Pentagon reporters were left asking for a sanity check.

A solution in search of its actual problem

To be fair to the underlying medicine, because someone in this story should be — low testosterone is a real documented concern in one specific corner of the military. Researchers have observed hormonal dysregulation in special operations personnel exposed to chronic stress, repeated blast waves, and traumatic brain injuries, a cluster of symptoms some clinicians call “Operator Syndrome.” Congress asked the Pentagon to brief lawmakers on the issue back in 2024.

But that is a targeted medical question about a small, high-exposure population — not a rationale for blanket-testing every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine who has committed the offense of turning 30.

Roughly 5.6 percent of men between 30 and 79 have clinical testosterone deficiency. And since 2015, the FDA has required that testosterone therapy carry warning labels and be limited to men with both low levels and an associated medical condition — guardrails this administration has been actively working to loosen.

Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Army combat veteran who sits on the Armed Services Committee, offered a pointed counterproposal: if the Pentagon suddenly cares about hormones, it should extend screening to help identify fertility issues — a documented problem affecting both men and women in uniform at higher rates than the general population. Don’t hold your breath.

The clown show, reviewed by an actual soldier

The sharpest verdict came from Fred Wellman, an Army veteran and Democratic congressional candidate, who called the initiative “the absolute dumbest thing imaginable for the Secretary of Defense to be focused on,” noting that the country is literally at war while its Pentagon chief films makeup-and-lighting videos about testosterone. “What a complete clown show,” Wellman wrote. “I’m so sorry for our poor service members who have to deal with this ridiculous man.”

That’s the story in miniature. Hegseth, the man who declared, one week before his confirmation, that women shouldn’t serve in combat roles — has decided the military’s readiness crisis is a masculinity crisis. It isn’t. The crisis is a Defense Department run as a content studio, where policy is whatever makes the best caption.

The troops deserve a Secretary of Defense. What they have is a brand.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled the coin Wednesday morning, pitching it as a tribute to America’s 250th anniversary and “the enduring legacy of liberty.”

The Commission of Fine Arts cleared the way for the coin back in March. An earlier design showed Trump with his fists planted on a desk; the version Bessent shared opts for a simple portrait on one side and the presidential seal’s insignia on the other.

Strip away the ceremony and what remains is this: a sitting president putting his own face on American money to celebrate a revolution fought so that no man’s face would ever rule this country.

The Vanity Tour, Funded by You

The coin is not a one-off. It is the latest stop on what has become a systematic campaign to attach Trump’s name, face, and signature to government documents, federal buildings, battleships, and more since he returned to office in January.

The Treasury Department announced earlier this year that new currency would carry the president’s signature. Bessent himself teased a redesigned $100 bank note by sharing a screenshot of Trump’s own Truth Social post, promising “unprecedented economic growth” and “lasting dollar dominance” under the president’s leadership.

Then came the limited edition “Patriot Passport”, printed to mark the semiquincentennial. The sample Trump shared shows him standing with his fists on the Resolute Desk, the text of the Declaration of Independence rendered behind him — a document written to reject exactly this kind of self-glorification.

Kings put their faces on coins and passports. American presidents, historically, have not. George Washington understood the danger of that imagery so well that he refused the trappings of monarchy outright. Two hundred and fifty years later, the anniversary of that refusal is being commemorated with a gold coin bearing one living man’s face.

The Kennedy Center Rebuke

The self-branding campaign has not gone unchallenged. The administration’s push to bolt Trump’s name onto the Kennedy Center drew legal scrutiny almost immediately, and last month a federal judge ordered the name removed from the performing arts center’s facade.

Trump appealed. He lost. And soon after, photos surfaced online of crews prying the letters off the building — a removal delayed only by weather. A court had to force the President of the United States to take his name off a building that was never his.

“Beautifying” a Capital That’s Falling Apart

All of this has been marketed under a single banner: beautifying the nation’s capital. So it is worth checking what that beautification actually looks like on the ground.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the backdrop of the March on Washington, one of the most photographed sights in America, turned green with algae amid the administration’s controversial renovation work. The Kennedy Center, the very building the administration fought in court to brand, has seen its own renovation troubles pile up. And at the White House, the president’s ballroom project keeps growing more expensive, with rising costs landing on taxpayers.

This is the record behind the gold coin: an algae-choked national monument, a court-ordered name removal, and a ballroom bill footed by the public. That is not beautification. It is decoration — the difference between fixing what is broken and gilding your own image while the actual country deteriorates beneath the shine.

Liberty for Whom?

Which brings us back to the word stamped on that coin.

“Liberty” is a strange choice of branding from an administration that has presided over the steady erosion of it. Women have watched reproductive rights dismantled state by state with the White House’s enthusiastic blessing. Immigrants who came to this country legally — who followed every rule and filed every form — have been detained and deported as though their status meant nothing. The rights being celebrated on the coin are the same rights being stripped from the people expected to carry it in their pockets.

The Founders this administration claims to honor built a government specifically designed to prevent any one man from becoming its face. The 250th anniversary now being hijacked for a personal branding campaign exists because they succeeded.

A gold coin cannot buy back a reflecting pool’s dignity, a court’s respect, or a citizen’s rights. The next time someone holds one up and points to the word “Liberty,” the only honest response is a question: liberty for whom?

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The tweet Elon Musk deleted may finally have caught up with him.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has found probable cause that the billionaire violated the state’s election bribery law during the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, referring two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office for possible criminal prosecution. The commission — a bipartisan body composed of three Democrats and three Republicans — voted 5-1 in closed session on July 9 to make the referral, according to commission spokesperson Emilee Miklas.

The motion approved by the commission found probable cause that Musk broke Wisconsin law by making a social media post offering $1 million to individuals who voted in the Supreme Court election “in order to induce them to vote in that election.”

Brown County District Attorney David Lasee, a Republican, now has 40 days to report back to the commission on whether he will pursue charges. Lasee did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and neither did spokespeople for Musk.

The Deleted Post at the Center of the Case

The referral traces back to a post Musk published on X late on March 27, 2025, just days before the election. In it, Musk announced a rally in Green Bay open only to people who had already voted in the Supreme Court race and promised to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.”

Wisconsin law makes it a felony to offer, give, or promise anything of value to induce an elector to vote or refrain from voting. Legal experts flagged the post as a likely violation almost immediately, and Musk deleted it roughly 12 hours later. He then posted a revised version claiming the checks would instead go to two people serving as “spokesmen” for a petition against so-called activist judges.

The reworded offer did not stop the giveaway. At the Green Bay rally on March 30, Musk handed $1 million checks to two Wisconsin voters — one of them the chairman of the Wisconsin College Republicans. A third voter also received a check. Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, had sued to block the payments, but state courts declined to intervene before the event.

Musk’s attorneys have argued the giveaways were protected free speech intended to build a grassroots movement rather than to advocate for any candidate. A separate civil lawsuit pending in Brown County alleges that Musk and two groups he funds violated prohibitions on vote bribery and unauthorized lotteries.

A $20 Million Bet That Failed

Musk was the dominant outside force in the 2025 Supreme Court race, with the billionaire and groups he supported spending at least $20 million to back Brad Schimel, the Republican-endorsed candidate. Two weeks before the election, Musk’s political action committee also offered $100 to voters who signed a petition opposing “activist judges” — a tactic nearly identical to the $1 million-a-day voter sweepstakes his PAC ran in battleground states before the 2024 presidential election.

None of it worked. Schimel lost to Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford by 10 percentage points in a race whose total spending topped $100 million, making it the most expensive judicial election in American history. Crawford’s victory preserved the liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which expanded to 5-2 this year after Democratic-backed candidate Chris Taylor won her own race.

A month after the loss, Musk announced he would sharply scale back his political spending.

What Happens Next

The decision now rests with Lasee, whose county includes Green Bay, where one of the two confidential complaints originated; the other came from a Milwaukee voter. If the district attorney declines to act, the commission’s probable cause finding will still stand as a rare formal rebuke — a bipartisan panel concluding that the world’s richest man likely committed election bribery in a battleground state.

For now, the question is simple: whether deleting a tweet erases the crime it described, or whether accountability finally applies to billionaires too.

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Now he’s saying MAGA turned on the United States.

In his latest broadside, Carlson argues that after the Iran war, it’s impossible to claim Trump’s Republican Party is acting on behalf of the American people.

He says the party is serving Israel instead — that voters were promised one thing and handed the opposite, a movement that collapsed into cryptocurrency grifts and wars fought for another country.

He describes it as a betrayal of the people who believed Trump would at least try. And when Trump responded by questioning his loyalty, Carlson flipped the accusation around: the man who sold out his country to a foreign nation doesn’t get to lecture anyone about disloyalty.

This isn’t a one-off outburst. It’s the culmination of months of escalation.

The Breakup, in Stages

The fracture started with the Iran war. Back in March, Carlson told Piers Morgan that Trump’s decision to strike Iran was a betrayal of the non-traditional voters who actually got him elected, saying MAGA voters were telling him some version of “I can’t believe he did this to us.”

By April, it had turned into something closer to public penance. On his podcast, Carlson said he would be “tormented” by his role in returning Trump to the White House and apologized for misleading people. Around the same time, he suggested to Newsmax that Trump was effectively a “slave” to Israel, hemmed in by forces he couldn’t control.

In June, he made it official. Appearing on the Can’t Be Censored podcast, Carlson announced he was done with the Republican Party entirely, asking how any American could support a party that puts a foreign country’s interests above its own citizens.

He claimed Trump’s 2024 campaign was funded largely by donors loyal to Israel, called the party immoral, and warned that if he’s out, a lot of other people are out too. He has even floated the idea that Trump could be the “antichrist.”

And he keeps twisting the knife. In late June, Carlson mocked Trump for bragging about a 99% approval rating in Israel while sitting at roughly 35% at home, the president of the United States, Carlson noted, celebrating his popularity in the very country that dragged America into the war tanking his numbers.

Trump’s Response: Call Him Disloyal

Trump has handled the defection about as gracefully as you’d expect. He has claimed Carlson “lost his way” and is no longer part of the MAGA movement, branded him a “low IQ person,” and shared memes mocking him. The loyalty test, as always, runs in exactly one direction.

That’s what makes Carlson’s counterpunch land. His argument isn’t that he abandoned Trump, it’s that Trump abandoned the country. In his telling, the disloyal one isn’t the commentator asking why American foreign policy is being outsourced to Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s the president doing the outsourcing.

Let’s Be Clear About Who’s Saying This

None of this makes Tucker Carlson a truth-teller or an ally. This is the same man who mainstreamed the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, platformed extremists, and spent years selling his audience the very movement he now claims betrayed them. His current crusade comes wrapped in rhetoric about Israel that frequently veers into territory the Anti-Defamation League has flagged as trafficking in antisemitic conspiracy theories. Nobody should mistake him for a convert.

But that’s exactly why this matters. When the propagandist who helped build the throne starts telling the true believers that the king sold them out, for crypto money and a foreign government’s war, that’s not media criticism. That’s a structural crack in the movement itself.

MAGA was always sold as America First. Its most influential media voice is now saying, to an audience of tens of millions, that it was America Last all along. The people most likely to believe him are the people Trump needs most.

The foundation is giving way. And the man swinging the sledgehammer built it.

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Colorado Republicans have chosen their nominee to succeed Governor Jared Polis, and his name is Victor Marx, a self-described “high-risk humanitarian,” seventh-degree black belt in “Cajun Karate,” ministry leader, and Marine veteran whose extraordinary life story began falling apart the moment a local news anchor asked him to back any of it up.

The Associated Press called the race on July 9, and CNN’s Decision Desk noted that Marx would defeat two far more experienced rivals, state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer and state Rep. Scott Bottoms, both of whom have said they won’t endorse him as the party’s nominee. He’ll face Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser in November in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican governor in more than two decades.

To understand why his own party’s runners-up are refusing to line up behind him, you have to watch what happened in May.

The Interview

In late May, 9News anchor Kyle Clark sat down with Marx for a 30-minute interview on Next with Kyle Clark — conducted, notably, at Marx’s own Colorado Springs training facility, which Marx refers to as his “compound.”

Clark asked Marx about his claim that he had performed more than 130 missions across 30 countries rescuing trafficking victims. Marx denied ever saying it, “it doesn’t sound like me,” until Clark read him his own August 2024 post on X stating exactly that. Asked to name even one of the 30 countries, Marx couldn’t. His explanation: “I don’t memorize every place that we’ve gone. That’s why I got a passport.”

It didn’t stop there. Marx’s campaign website claimed his teams had “served over 45,000 women and children, many rescued from captivity,” a claim that quietly disappeared from the site. Marx suggested an independent contractor may have written it. When Clark asked how many people he had actually rescued, Marx refused to give a number, citing “security reasons,” before finally offering: “I would say it’s more than one and less than a bunch.”

Clark also pressed Marx on his claim that his team helped rescue 43 missing children in a Florida operation. The U.S. Marshals, who ran that operation, named 25 partner agencies — and Marx’s ministry wasn’t among them. Marx’s response was that his organization doesn’t require credit.

Then there’s the airstrike. Marx has claimed that, as a civilian, he once called in a U.S. military airstrike that killed roughly 70 ISIS fighters. Asked to explain how a civilian could possibly do that, he declined — again citing security.

“Does It Matter?”

The most jaw-dropping exchange concerned Marx’s foundational story: that his abusive stepfather forced him to shoot and kill a man when Marx was seven years old. Clark asked a question that rarely comes up in gubernatorial races: is that the only person you’ve ever killed?

Marx fell silent for more than ten seconds before answering: “Well, I would say, as a child, yes. Without question.” He then added that he’d “been in other situations where, you know, possibly people or persons died as a result of me defending myself in other countries.” Pressed on whether he’d killed people as an adult, Marx replied: “Does it matter?”

Governor Polis, for his part, responded to the viral clips with a quip: “I have killed zero people, and you can take that to the bank.”

The Debate and the Dog

At the lone primary debate Marx attended, Clark asked him directly how voters should decide “whether you’ve lived one of the most extraordinary lives in human history, or whether you’re a liar and a fraud.” Marx’s answer, in part, involved pointing to his small dog, Reagan, claiming she had been with him in Syria and Iraq, and asking Clark, “So is she lying, too?”

Clark’s reply: “Well, the dog’s not running for governor.”

His Republican opponents were less charitable. Bottoms, an evangelical pastor, called Marx a con man who “lied to me personally quite a few times.” Kirkmeyer called him a fraud to his face: “I can’t trust you. You’re unfit. You’re unqualified.”

Follow the Money

Marx’s campaign operation has drawn scrutiny of its own. His campaign raised $1.66 million in four months — significantly more than any primary rival — but spent 89 cents of every dollar as it came in, with nearly three-quarters of expenditures going to two fundraising firms and consultants. His contribution filings contained so many errors that the campaign asked the Secretary of State to “un-file” and replace the report entirely — a request the office granted while noting it was “not a common practice.”

Why It Worked Anyway

None of this stopped Marx. If anything, it may have helped. Colorado Sun columnist Mike Littwin predicted as much days after the interview aired, writing that plenty of GOP voters would agree with Marx’s own assessment that he “crushed it.”

Marx’s whole brand — the “Dangerous Gentleman” persona, the world’s-fastest-gun-disarmer routine, the war stories that can’t be verified, the exorcisms he performs over the phone — is engineered for an audience that has been trained to treat scrutiny itself as the enemy. It’s tough-guy mythology packaged for the podcast-bro ecosystem, and when journalists asked basic questions, Marx told his supporters exactly what that ecosystem has taught them to believe: “Our opponents have simply attacked me the entire time.”

A former assistant to James Dobson at Focus on the Family, endorsed by Rep. Lauren Boebert, Marx now carries the Republican banner into a general election against an attorney general with a long public record. Colorado voters will get to decide which of those two things matters more: a record, or a story.

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On Thursday, the White House ousted all three remaining commissioners of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — the bipartisan federal agency that helps state and local officials actually run elections. The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were fired via email from the White House Presidential Personnel Office. The lone Republican, Christy McCormick, got a phone call asking her to resign — and she did.

Read that again. Even the Republican had to go.

“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” read the termination email, reviewed by Reuters.

That’s it. That’s the whole email. A one-line dismissal for Senate-confirmed commissioners — all three of whom, by the way, were confirmed unanimously.

What the EAC Actually Does

The Election Assistance Commission isn’t some obscure bureaucratic backwater. Congress created it through the Help America Vote Act of 2002 after the 2000 election debacle, specifically to help states run elections better. It certifies voting equipment, accredits the labs that test voting systems, maintains the national mail voter registration form, and acts as a clearinghouse for best practices between states.

Between 2018 and 2025, it distributed more than $1 billion in election security grants, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

By law, the commission has four seats — two Democrats, two Republicans. One Republican seat has been vacant since April. As of Thursday, all four seats are empty. The agency has zero commissioners, and replacements require Senate confirmation — a process everyone in Washington knows will not happen before November.

That’s not a bug. That’s the point.

The Supreme Court Handed Him the Axe

The firings came just weeks after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled 6-3 to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, the 90-year-old precedent that protected officials at independent, bipartisan agencies from being fired at the president’s whim. The whole reason that precedent existed was to keep agencies like this one free from political interference.

The White House didn’t even pretend otherwise. “The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections,” a White House official said in a statement, citing the Supreme Court decision as precedent.

“Not totally aligned.” At a bipartisan agency. Where the law requires commissioners from both parties.

This Is Part of a Pattern

If Thursday’s purge feels familiar, it should. Trump already tried to commandeer the EAC once. His executive order last year directed the commission to add proof-of-citizenship requirements to federal voter registration forms — and it was largely blocked in court, with multiple judges ruling that the president simply doesn’t have the authority to order an independent commission to rewrite voter registration rules.

He lost in court. So now he’s firing the commission instead.

And it’s not happening in a vacuum. Just this week, the Justice Department warned election officials they could face criminal penalties if they fail to prevent noncitizens from registering or voting. FEMA has threatened to withhold federal funding from states that don’t comply with new election directives. Agency by agency, lever by lever, the administration is inserting itself into election administration — a job the Constitution largely leaves to the states.

“Irresponsible and Dangerous”

The reaction was immediate. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes called the move “irresponsible and dangerous”, saying the administration “remains dead set on causing chaos for our election officials across this country” and that the purge “undermines the integrity of nonpartisan election administration.”

Senator Mark Warner said removing every remaining commissioner months before the midterms “should concern every American, regardless of party” and raises “profound concerns about political interference.”

One source familiar with the firings put it bluntly to NBC News: “It’s purely political and will throw the country into chaos to not have a functioning commission four months before the midterm elections.”

The Human Cost

Hovland, one of the fired Democratic commissioners, learned he’d been terminated while at the airport — returning from a work trip helping a Missouri election office. He flew home in a middle seat on a commercial flight.

His warning is worth sitting with: “When you’re asking more and more of people without giving them the necessary resources, you know, mistakes happen. And so there’s this real risk of like self-fulfilling prophecies.”

Think about what that means. Strip election officials of federal support, wait for the inevitable strain to cause errors, then point at those errors as proof the system is rigged. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone of election denialism.

Even in defeat, Hovland’s ask was simple: sign up to be a poll worker this fall. “There’s a lot that Americans can do along those lines too.”

The people who protect our elections just got fired for doing their jobs. The least the rest of us can do is show up.

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