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Friday Afternoon Updates: Gabbard Out and a DOJ Scandal That Could Change Everything — 5/22/26
Consumer confidence hits historic lows, the Iran blockade crumbles, and the Broadview Six scandal blows the lid off DOJ corruption.
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Hi all, Ben here. It’s Friday. It may be the end of the week, but the news certainly isn’t letting up. Let me give you a quick rundown of the major stories we’re tracking this afternoon, then we’ll get into the details. Remember to like and re-stack so this reaches as many people as possible.
Top Stories Today:
Tulsi Gabbard resigns as Director of National Intelligence, effective June 30
U.S. consumer sentiment crashes to its lowest level ever recorded, worse than the 1973 Oil Crisis, the Dot-Com crash, and the inflation shocks of the 1980s
Iran has destroyed over two dozen U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones, costing nearly $1 billion
The IRGC Navy is escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz, the one Trump falsely claims the U.S. controls
Foreign diplomats report the U.S. negotiating team in Geneva couldn’t explain basic uranium enrichment concepts
Pakistan’s Field Marshal Munir and a Qatari delegation have both traveled to Tehran in a push for a deal, reports say
Israeli intelligence claims Iran is planning a major surprise strike on Israel and Gulf states. How convenient.
Trump will not attend Don Jr.’s wedding, citing “circumstances pertaining to Government”
Trump’s anti-weaponization slush fund faces new scrutiny as he defends the $1.776 billion theft of taxpayer dollars
All charges against the Broadview Six have been dismissed and the grand jury misconduct scandal is now threatening to unravel the entire DOJ’s prosecution strategy against Trump’s political enemies
NATO Secretary General Rutte breaks from his usual deference to Trump, and Rubio makes threats about the alliance
Jeff Landry returns from Greenland and accidentally admits the whole point was the oil
A federal appeals court allows Rep. Jamie Raskin to file arguments opposing the DOJ’s attempt to dismiss seditious conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers
Before I go any further, if you haven’t yet joined as a paid subscriber, consider doing so now by clicking here to support our work. This is how we grow. If you’re already a Meidas+ paid Substack subscriber, thank you for your support of pro-democracy media!
Let’s get into it.
Tulsi Gabbard Resigns as Director of National Intelligence
We have breaking news this afternoon. Tulsi Gabbard has resigned as Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, effective June 30. According to Fox News, Gabbard’s resignation letter states that her husband Abraham was recently diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer, and that she is stepping away from public service to focus on supporting him through treatment.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the White House forced Gabbard to resign from her post, per a person familiar with the matter.
The timing and the context here matter and we’d be doing you a disservice not to note them. This is the second high-profile departure from the intelligence community tied to Trump’s Iran War in a matter of months. Gabbard’s own deputy, Joe Kent, resigned earlier this year in protest of the war, stating plainly that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. And before she joined the Trump administration, Gabbard herself was one of the most vocal critics of military adventurism in the Middle East. She spent years warning against exactly the kind of conflict that Trump has now launched. Whether her resignation is purely personal, or whether the weight of what this administration has done in the Middle East is also a factor, only she knows. But the DNI’s office has now lost two of its most significant figures amid a war that was launched on false pretenses and is going badly by every measurable metric.
As Americans Feel Economic Pain, Trump Brags about Stocks
U.S. consumer sentiment has plunged to the lowest level ever recorded in data going back to 1952. That is a historic low. We have never seen numbers this bad. Sentiment is down 21% since February of this year, before the Iran War began. Americans right now feel worse about the economy than they did during the 1973 Oil Crisis. Worse than the Dot-Com crash. Worse than the inflation shocks of the 1980s. Worse than the Great Recession.
And what are consumers expecting going forward? Inflation hitting 4.8% over the next twelve months. Frankly, I think that’s a conservative number. We’ve been seeing month-over-month increases of 0.3 to 0.6%. Do the math and you get to 5% fast.
So how does Donald Trump respond to the worst consumer sentiment report in American history? He posts on Truth Social: “NEW STOCK MARKET RECORD!” And then, conveniently, Barak Ravid at Axios posts that Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir is traveling to Tehran to broker a deal. The market jumps. Reuters follows with word that a Qatari delegation has also arrived in Tehran, in coordination with the U.S. The market surges more.
Then Trump holds a press conference to swear in his new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh and brags again about the Dow Jones being over 50,000. We know that during the first quarter alone, Trump made over 3,700 stock trades. That’s a new trade every nine minutes, in companies whose CEOs he regularly meets with at the White House. And the is practically flaunting it in public.
And then, Trump again pushed lies that he has brought $18 trillion in investment to the United States in eleven months. The entire U.S. GDP is roughly $30 trillion. Our national debt just hit $39 trillion. He’s not even in the right universe. And when someone eventually asks about the debt, he says, “We’re going to grow our way out of it.” Sure you are, Donald.
Iran War Updates
Here’s what we know today about the ongoing, catastrophic, and unlawful war in Iran. Over two dozen U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones have been destroyed by Iran since the conflict began, nearly $1 billion in losses, representing roughly 20% of the Pentagon’s entire pre-war fleet of these aircraft. That’s a staggering military and financial loss that the administration has been slow-walking to the public.
And the blockade Trump boasted about? It’s not working. The IRGC Navy reported that 35 ships, oil tankers, container ships, commercial vessels, passed through the Strait of Hormuz in the past 24 hours, under Iranian coordination and escort. Trump literally claimed yesterday that the U.S. controlled the Strait. He just made it up (again). The radar tracking data tells a completely different story.
Making matters worse, Reuters is reporting that during nuclear talks in Geneva, European officials were stunned to find themselves explaining basic uranium enrichment concepts to the American negotiating team. Experienced Iran nuclear experts were pushed out of the government when Trump took office, replaced with loyalists. One diplomat reportedly questioned aloud how the U.S. could negotiate a nuclear deal without understanding the underlying science.
Meanwhile, Israel is moving into war posture. Israeli intelligence officials are claiming Iran is planning a major surprise missile and drone attack against Israel and Gulf states following the collapse of negotiations, and are pressing for Israel to strike preemptively. Here we go again. We’ve read this book before…
Trump Skips Don Jr.’s Wedding
Donald Trump announced he will not be attending his own son Don Jr.’s wedding to Bettina. His explanation, posted on Truth Social, was that “circumstances pertaining to Government” and his love for the United States require him to remain in Washington.
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Now, we’re not in the business of armchair psychoanalyzing family dynamics. But Donald Trump has spent the past several months finding time for golf, rallies, ceremonial events, and extended Truth Social posting sessions. He could not find a weekend for his son’s wedding.
South Carolina Republicans Fumble Their Own Redistricting Power Grab
The South Carolina State Senate today killed a motion to fast-track debate on a Republican-drawn redistricting map that would have favored the GOP in all seven of the state’s congressional districts. The vote was 25-15 — falling short of the two-thirds threshold needed to suspend Senate rules and allow immediate action.
Six Republicans crossed over and voted with Democrats to kill the motion: Rex Rice, Shane Massey, Sean Bennett, Chip Campsen, Tom Davis, and Greg Hembree. Former State Rep. Adam Morgan, a Republican, said the failure “puts the entire effort in serious jeopardy.” Without expedited action, Republicans won’t be able to get a new map in place before early voting begins this Tuesday, May 26.
This is a significant moment. Republicans in South Carolina were attempting a last-minute gerrymander to lock in a 7-0 congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterms. The fact that six members of their own party stepped in to slow it down, at least for now, is notable. The fight isn’t over, but the clock is now working against them.
NATO Is Fraying in Real Time
There was a significant NATO meeting today in Helsingborg, Sweden, and for the first time it seems, Secretary General Mark Rutte said something that wasn’t entirely flattering to Trump. He openly acknowledged that it is strange for Europe, one of the wealthiest regions on the planet, to be so dependent on the United States for its own defense. That’s Rutte, the same guy who has been bending over backwards for months, finally saying what everyone has been thinking and what other world leaders have been saying.
And then there was Marco Rubio, who suggested that because some NATO allies denied the U.S. use of their bases during the Iran War, the value of those alliances needs to be “discussed.” He said NATO allies’ responses to U.S. operations in Iran are “well documented” and will have to be “addressed.”
Someone asked Rubio whether NATO should play a role regarding Cuba, since we’ve got a carrier group sitting nearby. His answer was that NATO is “far from Cuba.” Which, yes, geographically true, but also a window into the incoherence at the heart of this foreign policy. NATO is a defensive alliance. It was never designed for offensive military adventures in the Middle East or the Caribbean. Rubio seems to not fully grasp this. At least, he is pretending not to.
Jeff Landry’s Disastrous Greenland Trip
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, Trump’s envoy to Greenland, is back home after a humiliating trip. He was followed through the streets by Greenlanders booing him and telling him to go home. There were mass demonstrations. He made a fool of himself and of this country.
In his post-trip interview on Fox, the truth finally slipped out. He wanted to know about Greenland’s oil. That’s what this was all about. Trump realizes the Strait of Hormuz gambit isn’t working out as planned, and now the play is to seize Greenland’s energy resources. The Trump regime, true to form, is looking at a sovereign territory with a thriving population and seeing a resource extraction opportunity.
The Broadview Six Scandal Is Bigger Than One Case
Yesterday, all remaining charges against the Broadview Six defendants were dismissed and the story of how we got here is one of the most significant DOJ misconduct revelations we’ve seen. Federal Judge April Perry reviewed the grand jury transcripts in this case and said she had never, in reviewing thousands of such transcripts throughout her career, seen prosecutorial behavior this bad.
What happened? Prosecutors engaged in “vouching,” putting their personal credibility on the line to push the grand jury toward indictment. They dismissed grand jurors who disagreed with the government’s case. They had improper substantive communications with grand jurors outside the grand jury room. And then they redacted the transcripts to hide all of it. When the full transcripts finally came out, the judge was, in her own words, “incredibly shocked.” You may remember that former congressoinal candidate Kat Abughazaleh was among the defendants.
Here’s why this matters beyond the Broadview Six. This is now the second major Trump DOJ prosecution, following the James Comey case, where a federal judge has found serious grand jury misconduct. People have rightly asked how a grand jury could have returned indictments in cases with no real legal foundation against Trump’s political enemies. This is how. Defense attorneys have already announced a motion for sanctions. There will be testimony. There will be cross-examination. And the emergency motion filed today seeking preservation of all emails and texts from the prosecutors involved suggests this is far from over.
The whole scheme is starting to unravel. We’re going to stay on this one closely.
The Slush Fund Continues to Melt
Trump today defended his $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund, which, let’s be clear, is a slush fund designed to direct taxpayer money to January 6th insurrectionists and provide Trump himself with immunity from future IRS audits and tax fraud investigations. In his post, he claimed he could have settled his own legal cases “for an absolute fortune” but chose not to out of generosity. This is a lie. His claims were time-barred. He wouldn’t have gotten anything. And 450,000 other people were affected by the same IRS data breach he’s citing, a breach that happened under his own administration in 2019.
That’s the Friday afternoon rundown for now. Ron Filipkowski will be back later with a comprehensive breakdown of all the news, so stay tuned. Thank you for subscribing!
