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Good morning. The Trump administration has had an extremely rough morning in Congress, the courts, and the war.
In Congress, the SAVE America Act is dead, and Republican leadership is confirming it. The filibuster will not be nuked.
In the courts, Trump missed a late night deadline to seek a rehearing of his birthright citizenship case.
In the war, despite claims that talks were underway, Iran launched a surprise attack, and the Pentagon faced ridicule for using AI to “generate a war.”
I’m heading to Capitol Hill right now to be with Epstein survivors who are bringing the Epstein files directly to members of Congress. It’s going to be a busy day, so stay tuned.
Some people have unsubscribed because I talk about Epstein too much. Well, I am not going to stop talking about Epstein and uplifting the survivors. So if you can, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. It doesn’t just support me, it sustains a kind of journalism that refuses to surrender, that refuses to normalize corruption, and that insists on telling the stories that matter.
Here’s the news:
The Epstein files are coming to Capitol Hill today. A mobile version of the Epstein files reading room, which holds millions of printed pages of Jeffrey Epstein’s records, is going on tour, partly to spotlight what organizers say is mishandling of the files by Trump attorney and AG nominee Todd Blanche.
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SAVE Act:
The SAVE Act is completely stalled and will not pass before the November midterm election. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s monthlong absence from the Senate, with no set return date, is complicating Trump’s push for the SAVE America Act since McConnell chairs the Rules Committee that would draft the reconciliation-ready version of the bill. That uncertainty, compounded by the death of Budget Committee chair Lindsey Graham, has left Sen. Ron Johnson (Graham’s likely successor on Budget) expecting to draft the bill’s language, though he says the process is still in early, unsettled stages.
Majority Leader John Thune is prioritizing a bipartisan deal to avert a government shutdown and has signaled he could hold up the House’s budget framework until that’s resolved, while acknowledging Republicans currently lack the votes for either the SAVE America Act or a budget resolution. Thune says the bill would likely still need 60 votes even under reconciliation unless narrowly restructured around state grant incentives, but Trump is demanding the GOP pass its own budget resolution before Labor Day to fund defense and agriculture and advance as much of the SAVE America Act as possible.
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Sen. John Kennedy disagrees with Thune’s shutdown-first approach, arguing reconciliation is the only path forward and that he’s developing a plan he believes has roughly a 50/50 chance of surviving the Senate’s Byrd Rule test.
Department of Defense AI:
A Pentagon social media post promoting military AI adoption included a photo showing a laptop with a Google Gemini prompt that appeared to begin “I NEED HELP BUILDING AN AGENT TO CREATE A WAR.” The image came from the Department of Defense Chief Technology Office, showcasing its GenAI Task Force deployment at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii. The team reportedly built more than 20 custom AI agents for sailors, automating tasks like operational reporting and briefing preparation. The user was identified as Navy Lieutenant Commander Brandon Mizuhara of U.S. Pacific Fleet, with the photo dated July 21.
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The screenshot surfaces amid a broader Pentagon push to integrate AI across military, intelligence and administrative functions, led by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO). In January, the Defense Department announced an AI Acceleration Strategy covering more than 3 million personnel, organized around seven “Pace-Setting Projects” including battle management, simulation tools and enterprise AI agents. One project, Agent Network, aims to expand AI agent use for battle management and decision support, from campaign planning to “kill chain execution.” Another, GenAI.mil, gives personnel access to frontier models like Gemini and Grok at certain classification levels. Anthropic has separately studied how the U.S. military already uses AI for intelligence analysis and planning, and the Pentagon has weighed expanding Gemini use after Anthropic scaled back some military applications.
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The photo also lands within the Trump administration’s wider effort to expand federal AI use, building on the July 2025 “America’s AI Action Plan,” which included over 90 policy actions and a dedicated section on Pentagon adoption. In June 2026, Trump signed a national security directive aimed at putting advanced AI systems into the hands of warfighters and intelligence professionals while preserving accountability through the chain of command. Trump has personally embraced AI-generated content, recently posting an AI image of himself traveling through time to save George Washington. Not all reactions have been positive: in March, protesters placed AI-themed robot signs on the National Mall criticizing OpenAI’s decision to let the Pentagon use its technology. The demonstration reflected broader unease among activists and researchers about AI’s expanding role in military planning and battlefield operations.
Iran’s surprise attack:
Iran launched ballistic missiles at a U.S. base in Jordan in what CENTCOM called an attempted surprise attack; all missiles were intercepted and no casualties resulted. The strike came a day after Trump claimed the U.S. paused bombing Iran because the regime “wanted to talk,” a claim Iran’s foreign ministry denied. Pressed on Fox News about the contradiction, Trump insisted Iran was negotiating and said their nuclear program would never be allowed to advance. Netanyahu met Trump at the White House to present fresh intelligence claiming Iran was moving centrifuges and enriched uranium to the fortified Pickaxe Mountain site, but Trump dismissed it as unnecessary since he already knew “what’s going on.” Separately, U.S. and Saudi jets carried out joint strikes on Iran-backed militias in Iraq, which CENTCOM said have launched over 600 attacks on U.S. citizens and facilities there since February.
The US intercepted an Iranian ballistic missile barrage on a base in Jordan and, alongside Saudi Arabia, struck Tehran-backed militia sites in Iraq, killing at least 20 members of the Popular Mobilisation Forces. The flare-up shattered a weekend pause in fighting, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards separately claimed to have struck three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, pushing Brent crude to around $88 a barrel. The US and Saudis said the Iraq strikes targeted militias behind recent drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities, though the groups denied involvement and pointed instead to Yemen’s Houthis, who have been blockading Saudi shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb strait. Amid the escalation, Netanyahu met Trump at the White House for nearly ninety minutes, their first sit-down since the war began, calling it “excellent” as both leaders face domestic pressure — Netanyahu from a strained relationship with Trump ahead of re-election, and Trump from an unpopular war driving up prices before the midterms. Washington warned that any further attacks on US troops or Saudi energy infrastructure would trigger retaliatory strikes.
CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper has warned US troops that their own cellphone videos and social media posts are handing Iran real-time battle damage assessments, potentially helping Tehran plan follow-on strikes. Some troops in Jordan have reportedly been told their phones could be confiscated as the military weighs tighter operational security after recent attacks. Cooper noted that footage revealing whether Iranian missiles hit their targets gives Tehran intelligence “free of charge.”
Supreme Court/Legal:
The 25-day deadline for the Trump administration to seek a rehearing of the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling passed Tuesday without any filing, despite Trump vowing on Truth Social to appeal “IMMEDIATELY.” The Court struck down Trump’s executive order in a 6-3 decision last month, with Trump appointees Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices, while only Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito dissented. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion affirming that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee extends to “every free-born person in this land.” A rehearing petition now would be a long shot: it would require at least one justice to reverse course and a majority to agree, and the Court hasn’t reheard an argued case in over 50 years. Trump’s order, issued on his first day back in office and blocked by lower courts before ever taking effect, sought to end automatic citizenship for children born to parents in the U.S. temporarily or illegally, a policy Trump falsely claimed was uniquely American even though birthright citizenship is enshrined in more than 30 other countries’ constitutions.
Trump and the DOJ separately petitioned the Supreme Court on Tuesday to overturn the $83.3 million defamation verdict a Manhattan jury awarded E. Jean Carroll in January 2024, over statements Trump made denying her sexual assault claim while he was president in 2019. Trump’s lawyers argue he has presidential immunity for those remarks, citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling that found most presidential public communications qualify as official acts, and calling this “the first case in our Nation’s history” imposing damages liability on a president for in-office conduct. The DOJ’s petition separately argues it should have been allowed to substitute the U.S. government as defendant, which under the Westfall Act would have shielded Trump from the claim and led to dismissal. Trump’s team also faults the 2nd Circuit, which upheld the award, for ruling he’d forfeited the immunity defense by not invoking it by name in his first pleading, despite raising it later in his answer and summary judgment motion. This follows the Supreme Court’s rejection last month of Trump’s appeal in a related case, where Carroll already collected $5 million plus over $600,000 in interest, though Trump is separately pursuing a longshot bid to get that refusal reconsidered.
James Comey’s lawyers filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss his indictment over last May’s Instagram post of seashells spelling “86 47,” arguing prosecutorial vindictiveness given Trump’s history of pursuing him and that the post fails the Supreme Court’s “true threat” standard. The filing revealed federal agents used emergency, warrant-free phone tracking to follow Comey from North Carolina to Virginia even though officials internally acknowledged no one’s life was in danger, with one Secret Service official admitting “it was a bad idea to ping the phone.” To argue “86” meant murder, prosecutors interviewed former mobster Sammy Gravano, who said real mobsters wouldn’t use the term since it’s too obvious, and prosecutors also got an unsolicited rebuttal from veteran prosecutor John Gleeson calling the mafia-jargon theory “preposterous.” An unnamed Comey associate told the FBI that Comey’s wife was informed of the term’s meaning shortly after the post, but that belief reportedly traced back to a Rudy Giuliani podcast rather than direct knowledge, and the associate is estranged from Comey. Judge Louise Flanagan has set an October 21 trial date, and the case follows a related indictment last September that was thrown out after a judge ruled Trump-appointed prosecutor Lindsey Halligan had been illegally installed.
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A federal judge dismissed FBI Director Kash Patel’s 2023 defamation lawsuit against blogger Jim Stewartson, who had accused Patel of being a “Kremlin asset” and helping plan the January 6 Capitol attack. Patel had sought $10 million over a series of Stewartson’s X posts, including ones calling him an “incompetent chud” and alleging he’d helped ensure the Capitol was undefended, and initially won a $250,000 default judgment in August 2025 after Stewartson failed to respond. Stewartson later moved to dismiss, arguing he was never properly served and lacked meaningful ties to Nevada, and Judge Andrew Gordon agreed in a July 25 ruling, finding that tagging Patel in posts unrelated to Nevada activities didn’t establish jurisdiction there. Stewartson celebrated on X, telling followers they’re now free to call Patel a “chud,” a “Kremlin b---h,” or a “traitor” without legal consequence, and previously told the New York Times it was “hysterical” that Patel’s own suit forced him to try to prove he wasn’t a “chud.”
Other news:
Sen. Rand Paul released over 1,100 pages of diary entries he says were written by Dr. Anthony Fauci, spanning December 2019 to December 2022, ahead of Wednesday’s Senate hearing where Fauci will testify before Paul’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Paul posted the documents over the weekend, pulled them down Monday, then reposted a redacted version Tuesday morning, along with a separate 465-page “prequel” of Fauci records from 2001 to 2015; he claims the entries show Fauci privately entertaining the lab-leak theory while publicly downplaying it, though it’s unclear how he obtained them (RFK Jr. said they were dug out of “11 separate servers”).
Fauci’s team pushed back, calling Paul’s effort a “years-long public crusade,” and virologists who reviewed the specific entries Paul cites say they reflect normal scientific uncertainty in the pandemic’s early days rather than any cover-up. Scientific consensus still leans toward a natural, animal-to-human origin, though the lab-leak theory (centered on the Wuhan Institute of Virology and gain-of-function research once linked to EcoHealth Alliance) has drawn mixed conclusions from different U.S. investigations, including a 2023 low-confidence DOE lab-leak assessment and a 2024 Republican-led House subcommittee report favoring that theory. Trump released the following ahead of Fauci’s hearing today:
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Trump denied disaster aid to New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York this month even after FEMA and NOAA field offices verified all four states met federal snowfall and cost thresholds following February’s record-breaking East Coast blizzard. A former FEMA official said they couldn’t recall another instance of a state being denied after meeting agency standards, and a POLITICO analysis found presidents since George W. Bush approved all 69 qualifying snow-assistance requests except one 2016 New Mexico request under fraud investigation.
Each state’s documentation showed damage costs far exceeding FEMA’s thresholds, Rhode Island’s validated $19.3 million was nine times its $2.1 million threshold, Massachusetts’s $45 million nearly tripled its $13.6 million threshold, New Jersey’s $84.4 million was more than four times its $18 million threshold, and New York’s $79 million was double its threshold, yet all four were rejected. The White House denied politicization, while FEMA argued snow removal is a “routine function” states should handle themselves and that record snowfall alone doesn’t guarantee aid, a position that contrasts with FEMA’s 2022 approval, in 23 days, of a similar request from then-North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, now Trump’s Interior Secretary. The dispute follows a FEMA leadership memo from a year ago that floated eliminating snow assistance entirely to cut spending, an idea Congress explicitly rejected, with the Senate Appropriations Committee affirming that snowstorms should remain eligible for federal disaster relief.
A magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto prefecture on Japan’s Kyushu island Tuesday afternoon, killing at least 13 people, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi calling rescue efforts a “race against time” as people remain trapped in collapsed buildings. Three people died and three remain missing at a partially collapsed Aeon mall, where officials are investigating whether a gas leak caused an explosion, while five more were killed by a collapsed chimney at a Nippon Paper Industries factory in Yatsushiro. The shallow 6-mile-deep quake triggered brief tsunami warnings, damaged Kumamoto Castle (still under repair from a 2016 quake), derailed a freight train, suspended all Kyushu train and some airport services, and left roughly 35,000 households without power amid dangerous heat. Japan’s meteorological agency warned of possible aftershocks up to magnitude 7 over the next two to three days, and thousands of troops have been.
Uganda declared itself Ebola-free on Tuesday after discharging its last patient on June 16 and completing the WHO-recommended 42-day waiting period, or two incubation cycles, without further transmission. Uganda’s 20 cases were all linked to a documented importation event from the larger outbreak in eastern Congo’s Ituri province, with authorities saying all identified contacts completed 21-day quarantine follow-ups and enhanced surveillance found no unexplained community spread. Uganda acted quickly after May’s cases were confirmed, urging residents to stop shaking hands, postponing a major religious pilgrimage near Kampala, and suspending transportation and flights with Congo. Congo’s own outbreak, by contrast, remains dire, with 3,262 confirmed cases and 1,437 deaths in just 10 weeks, making it the fastest-moving Ebola outbreak on record and likely soon to surpass the country’s previous highest toll. Response efforts in Congo are complicated by unreachable or abandoned communities amid attacks from residents and rebels, with only the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak (28,000 cases, 11,000+ deaths) having a higher toll historically.
Russia’s FSB charged Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism on Wednesday and placed him on an international wanted list, accusing Telegram’s administration of failing to remove channels used by Ukrainian intelligence and extremist groups to coordinate sabotage, terrorism, and cyberfraud in Russia. The agency also claimed Ukrainian security services used a Telegram dating chatbot to recruit young Russians, aged 12 to 22, for sabotage and terrorism, with 46 users detained since July 2025. Durov, who lives in Dubai and holds French and UAE citizenship, earlier this year accused Russia of fabricating pretexts to restrict Telegram as part of a broader crackdown on privacy and free speech; he faces up to life in prison if convicted. The charges are part of Russia’s long-running internet censorship push under Putin, which has banned Facebook, Instagram and X, throttled YouTube, blocked Signal and Viber, and restricted WhatsApp and Telegram, while promoting a state-linked “national” app called MAX that shares user data with authorities and lacks end-to-end encryption.
Former Citigroup managing director Edward Gene Smith, 50, was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to sex crimes, receiving child pornography, and obstruction of justice, in a case Manhattan federal Judge Paul Engelmayer oversaw. Prosecutors said Smith, who worked at Citigroup from 2021 until his 2024 arrest, committed crimes spanning 2015 to 2024, luring financially vulnerable young women from abroad or distant U.S. states to his Central Park residence, drugging them, and raping and sexually abusing them while secretly photographing them nude and unconscious. He also admitted drugging one woman with intent to rape her and enticing another to travel to New York, where he assaulted her, and prosecutors said he possessed tens of thousands of child sexual abuse files depicting toddlers and infants. His lawyers argued autism was the “primary driver” of his behavior, but prosecutors called that claim “inflammatory nonsense” and “an offensive smear” to the autistic community, noting it was incompatible with the calculated way he used his executive persona to draw in and evade detection of victims.
See you soon.
— Aaron
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