The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Angrboda]

Can Blanche Actually Give Trump Immunity from IRS Audits?

Worth a read.

[Angrboda]

Early last year, when America’s measles outbreaks were still being counted in three-digit numbers, we talked about how RFK Jr. and his misinformation campaign were making things worse. A lot of focus has been on Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer views, and for good reason. If people would just get the MMR vaccine, and had done so in the last couple of decades while Kennedy has been on his anti-vaxxer crusade, none of this would have happened. We eliminated this disease more than two decades ago. It’s back because of vaccine skepticism and Kennedy, now Secretary of HHS, is perhaps more responsible for that skepticism than any other human being on the planet.

But his misinformation campaign didn’t focus solely on attempts at discrediting a good, effective vaccine against measles. He also spouted bullshit when it came to treatments for the disease. One such example was him touting, in March of last year, a combination of Vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments for measles. It’s not the first time Kennedy advocated for this, either. He’s been at it since the beginning of the outbreak, and even before. In the wake of his public advocacy for those treatments, others picked up the story and ran with it, notably podcast-bruh Joe Rogan.

The result? According to one study, a massive uptick in Vitamin A poisoning.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/04/stud...last-year/

[Angrboda]

https://www.newsweek.com/why-us-not-dril...r-12030144

According to this graphic, consumers in red states have paid an extra $200-300 over the course of the war, or $65-100 a month.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Trump Tries To Stop Coal’s Death Spiral

The U.S. is stepping up its investment in coal as President Trump doubles down on his commitment to bolster the fossil fuel industry. 

During an event on Thursday, Mr. Trump announced that his administration would commit $700 million in funding for coal plants and a new export terminal.

Environmental groups criticized Mr. Trump's coal plan ahead of its official release, noting it could drive up pollution, raise electricity costs for Americans and prop up a declining industry. Coal provided 15% of energy production in 2024, down from 45% in 2010. Natural gas provides about 43% of U.S. electricity, with the rest rounded out by nuclear energy and renewables.

Boru

[Fake Messiah]

Trump is sending ships in June to remove over 900 deep-sea instruments from the Atlantic and Pacific, dismantling a $368 million monitoring network built over a decade that was meant to last 25 years. It will be dismantled in just 15 months.

The station in the Irminger Sea has been key to understanding changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a global conveyor belt of water that some scientists are concerned may be weakening as a result of climate warming. A collapse of the current could have severe and far-reaching weather effects.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/clima...ative.html

[Angrboda]

A judge has dismissed a lawsuit against a musician who canceled his Kennedy Center performance after Trump added his name to the center. The Kennedy Center alleged breach of contract in spite of the fact that he never signed the contract.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

A recent CNN poll has Trump's net approval rating in Iowa at -19. That's kind of impressive - he's managed to pull off the feat of being underwater in a cornfield.

Boru

[Angrboda]

Davis' experience reflects a trend experts have noticed across the country: Since the 2020 election, local law enforcement has increasingly been playing a bigger role in helping local officials secure elections.

"The number of threats that election officials face, that jurisdictions face, that election workers face all mean that law enforcement does have a heightened role to play and a longer-term role to play," said Katie Reisner with the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center. "It's not a matter of just tapping in for Election Day and tapping back out."

According to a survey of local election officials conducted earlier this year by the Brennan Center for Justice, 32% of local election officials reported experiencing "threats, harassment, or abuse because of their job."

Threats and harassment increased notably for election officials after President Trump's unfounded claims that the 2020 election was rife with fraud. The last few years have also seen historic rates of turnover among voting officials.

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/07/nx-s1-576...nforcement

[Angrboda]

[Angrboda]

On July 14, barely a month after Mr. Patel told millions of podcast listeners about a supposed vault of dirty secrets, Todd Gilbert became the interim U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Hours after he was sworn in, Mr. Gilbert got a phone call from Mr. Patel that would wreck his new job. On his first day, when most employees are still getting their work email set up, the new U.S. attorney was told by Mr. Patel to pursue the grand conspiracy.

Mr. Patel instructed him to investigate how classified documents had been placed inside the burn bags found inside Room 9582 of F.B.I. headquarters.

Some of the documents related to events from 2016 and 2017 that Mr. Patel wanted examined, specifically the actions of James B. Comey, who was the F.B.I. director at the time, and John O. Brennan, who had been the C.I.A. director. Mr. Patel wanted both men investigated for lying to Congress and suggested that the documents supported charging them.

His call to Mr. Gilbert was unusual. F.B.I. directors do not typically assign U.S. attorneys to open cases. Such a directive, particularly for high-profile investigations, would normally come from Justice Department headquarters. And investigations that involved purported lies to Congress were assigned to prosecutors in Washington, not in Roanoke, Va. It was also strange to give such a weighty assignment to a U.S. attorney with little authority to question orders because he was still awaiting confirmation by the Senate.

But the administration had good reason to think of Mr. Gilbert as a loyal and willing hunter. A lifelong Republican with strong ties to Virginia’s G.O.P. leaders, he had given up a powerful position in the state legislature to become the U.S. attorney.

The premise of the “grand conspiracy” was that Mr. Comey and his allies had concocted the F.B.I.’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential contest to damage Mr. Trump, and that conspiracy extended into the 2020 election and the 2022 appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate him.

To Mr. Patel, the case consolidated years of his complaints and accusations about Democrats and national security officials.

To many career Justice Department veterans, the case looked more like Frankenstein’s monster — a motley assortment of long-dead investigations that were now supposed to be stitched together and brought to life.

From the start, F.B.I. leadership wanted near-daily updates on the case — a level of attention usually reserved for national crises. The Virginia prosecutors were confused why the case received so much interest from Mr. Patel and so little from their actual boss, the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who had been Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.

Mr. Gilbert tried repeatedly to get advice and instruction from Mr. Blanche, even driving to Washington unannounced to try to speak to him. Instead, one of Mr. Blanche’s deputies, Aakash Singh, urged Mr. Gilbert to pursue the case aggressively. But Mr. Singh did not address many of Mr. Gilbert’s legal and factual questions. One senior Justice Department official said Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Blanche eventually did speak about the case.

Mr. Gilbert’s team decided that the law gave his office jurisdiction over only one of the issues Mr. Patel had directed him to investigate — whether the documents in the burn bags had been mishandled as part of a criminal scheme to hide them.

The other two prongs he was assigned — whether Mr. Comey had lied in congressional testimony in 2020 about leaks and Russia-related intelligence, and whether Mr. Brennan had lied to Congress about a 2017 intelligence assessment of Russian election interference that referenced a dossier compiled by a former British spy — had no legitimate venue in western Virginia, they concluded.

Mr. Gilbert angered the administration by resisting pressure to impanel a grand jury to investigate the burn bag case, since he and his team did not believe there was yet a sufficient factual basis for that step.

A related disagreement over personnel assignments in his office also hurt his standing. In mid-August, Sergio Gor, a powerful White House official, called Glenn Youngkin, then Virginia’s Republican governor, and told him that Mr. Gilbert was going to be fired and that the governor should not try to stop it.

Mr. Gilbert lasted just 37 days as a U.S. attorney. After his departure, prosecutors in his office wrote a lengthy legal analysis, called a declination memo, detailing why no criminal charges were warranted in the burn bag case. The senior F.B.I. agent on the investigation endorsed the memo’s conclusions.

At that point, a number of current and former law enforcement officials concluded that the administration had embarked on a new kind of fishing expedition — not for dirt on the people they did not like, but to find a prosecutor willing to file charges based on the threadbare evidence they already had.

How the Drive to Find a Conspiracy Against Trump Rocked the Justice Dept.