Political News

New Mexico officials are accusing President Trump’s Department of Justice of obstructing the state’s investigation into billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch. 

The state’s Attorney General, Raúl Torrez, sent a letter to the DOJ last week accusing the department of withholding redacted records related to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch property, south of Santa Fe, The New York Times reports.  

“The U.S. D.O.J.’s continued withholding of unredacted records is causing real and escalating harm,” Torrez wrote to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in the letter, made public Thursday. “Every day that the U.S. D.O.J. withholds these records, the foundation upon which a New Mexico prosecution could be built erodes.”

In February, Torrez requested documents from the DOJ related to the ranch, but despite receiving assurances from department officials that they would send over the documents, nothing ever came. Torrez wrote that he even followed up five times over the next few months through different channels to no avail, impeding important leads in the probe. 

“Every avenue of investigation that begins with a redacted name, a blacked-out face or an obscured date is an avenue that ends before it begins,” Torrez wrote. He told the Times that he hasn’t received a response to his latest letter. 

Epstein’s ranch was never fully investigated by the federal government, and New Mexico authorities have said that federal prosecutors in New York asked them in 2019 to hold off, claiming that the DOJ was conducting its own probe. Nothing came of it, and the federal government never fully searched the property, which has new ownership.

Now that the state of New Mexico has decided to begin a new investigation, it’s not surprising that the Trump administration appears to be stonewalling once again. The ranch holds many secrets, including why a mansion on the property was built by military contractor Bradbury Stamm Construction, better known for building classified government facilities such as Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base. For now, those questions will remain unanswered as the Trump administration continues to try and wish Epstein away. 

Just one single person has enrolled in the GOP’s $3 million anti-woke program at West Virginia University’s Washington Center.

The taxpayer-funded Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship program has seen an abysmal level of interest ahead of the upcoming fall semester.

“I do think that it’s important for the legislature and for the governor to reflect on this.... There is a question about whether or not this is the best use of public funds,” WVU political science professor Erik Herron told West Virginia Watch. “I think the Washington Center, ironically, seems to be exactly what it complains that higher education has become. It was created in Charleston, and it was imposed on the university, so it’s a big government mandate.”

“I’m not happy about it,” said Democratic State Delegate John Williams, who voted against the center’s creation last year. “Now we’re in a position where we’ve allocated so much money towards this program, and only one person is taking advantage of it.”

Republicans have defended low enrollment by noting that the program does not count toward university credits for students yet—a fact that does not instill confidence.

The program, mandated in 2025 via a Republican bill, is intended to center the “great debates of western civilization,” “western history and culture,” and “the development of ideas across the political and ideological spectrum.” West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey put it more plainly, stating that the program existed to “push back on the woke ideology that has infected our schools and help return higher education to its true purpose.”

The fall curriculum includes classes titled “Woke,” “The New Right,” and “Nation and Migration.”

This is one of the more desperate cases of the right’s ongoing culture war in academia, the workplace, and beyond. Responding to what you perceive as ideological extremism in the classroom with your own ideological course—worth zero credits—is a decision steeped in delusion. We’ll see how many people are enrolled in the fall.

The Trump administration is attacking journalists for reporting on President Trump ditching his new Qatari jet for security reasons.

MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig reported Wednesday evening that the president abruptly swapped the new jet for his old Air Force One on his trip from the NATO summit in Turkey to the U.K. due to concerns about the aircraft’s defense systems. She noted the new Air Force One didn’t have the necessary communications and defensive capabilities for “safe travel amid Iran hostilities.”

Leonnig’s post was angrily singled out by White House communications director Steven Cheung, even though multiple other outlets reported the same information.

“Carol Leonnig is a liar and this article is complete Fake News. She has no idea what she is talking about. She says the White House declined to comment. Not true. We gave comment to The New York Times and many other outlets,” he wrote Thursday on X. “Carol is not a real journalist. A complete fraud.”

Cheung never actually disputed any of Leonnig’s reporting in the post—he just called it fake news without offering up any response. And if his issue is with Leonning not attributing his comment, all he said to The New York Times on a similar story was “the new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the president and his staff.”

He also mentioned that “there are many enemies of America who have their sights on [Trump], and we use every tool at our disposal—including distraction and misdirection—to address those threats.” But none of that language addressed the reason Trump switched planes.

Trump himself claimed rather unconvincingly that the Qatari jet was going to a U.S. military base in Europe “so the soldiers can see it.” In reality, the new jet simply doesn’t have the same command-and-control functions of the original Air Force One. And while experts have said that it would take years and billions of dollars to upgrade the Qatari jet’s defenses to the presidential level, the Trump administration did it in weeks—all before ditching it partway through its first official trip.

Trump officials are on the hunt for the person who leaked details about a hostile meeting between the Pentagon and the Vatican earlier this year.

In January, the Pentagon reportedly threatened an ambassador from the Holy See, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.

The U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Brian Burch, told The New York Times Thursday that the meeting had been “grossly mischaracterized.” The 51-year-old co-founder of CatholicVote presumed the story came from the Vatican’s side, and personally called Cardinal Pierre for an apology for what Burch described to the Times as “an attack on the United States.”

Burch told the national daily that he had also asked for the cardinal’s help in identifying “who was lying about the meeting.” The Times noted that Burch later posted a statement in which he claimed that Cardinal Pierre had “emphatically denied” reports of the confrontational exchange, and that the Vatican had confirmed the details of the meeting were exaggerated. The cardinal, however, did not respond to a request for comment from the Times. The Pentagon denied ever making such a threat.

Pope Leo XIV has continually upset the president and a number of Donald Trump’s underlings through his relentless advocacy for world peace, particularly as it relates to the president’s warmongering. The Chicago-born pontiff has thus far railed against the White House’s lethal and unproductive attacks on small watercraft in the Caribbean, the sudden infiltration of Venezuela, and the escalating conflict in Iran, the last of which he said in June was not a “just” war.

Trump, meanwhile, has not shied away from throwing his own fire at the religious leader. In May, Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he believed the pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people” by advocating for global peace and prosperity. “But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Trump, however, has not done a very good job himself of stripping nuclear capabilities from Iran’s theocratic regime.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran nuclear deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed later that year when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.

By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On Wednesday, Trump indicated that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the memorandum of understanding was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”

The Trump administration is reportedly trying to rally the rest of the world to help it in its fight against “antifa” activists, but the world isn’t answering the dubious call. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has circulated an invitation for foreign ministers of more than 60 countries to meet with him to strategize against the purported “resurgence…

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The Trump administration’s attempt to prosecute alleged “vandalism” at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool hit a snag Thursday.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro attempted to bar former U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn from the pool after he pleaded not guilty to damaging it, only to be rebuffed by D.C. Superior Court Judge Carmen McLean.

“The government’s evidence is weak,” one of Hearn’s attorneys, Mary Dohrmann, argued in court.

Another of Hearn’s attorneys, Norm Eisen, said, “Every American should be alarmed about this prosecution. It is not a crime to touch the Reflecting Pool.”

The government is accusing Hearn of destruction of property, which could send him to prison for 10 years if he’s found guilty. Pirro claims that Hearn “forcefully and violently” ripped two square feet of the pool’s newly added blue paint, while Hearn maintains that he only touched a piece of paint that was already peeling.

“The condition of the Reflecting Pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there,” Hearn said.

President Trump has spent more than $14 million on the Reflecting Pool, adding a blue coat of paint to the bottom and later dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill algae, which had the side effect of causing the new paint to peel. Unwilling to accept the consequences of his actions, Trump has blamed vandalism for the poor state of the pool, and Pirro has charged at least four people over it, including Hearn.

Many of Hearn’s supporters came to the courthouse on Thursday to cheer for him, including the former chair of the U.S. Olympic national governing body for canoe and kayak sports, Adam Van Grack, who said that Hearn has spent years voluntarily helping maintain National Park Service property near the Potomac River that canoeists use to train.

“This is a person who has devoted his life to representing the United States on an international stage, caring for the community, and protecting and caring for National Park Service property,” Van Grack told the Associated Press. “So the idea that he is a malicious destroyer of federal property shocks the conscience and makes no sense to anybody who’s ever known Davey Hearn.”

Trump now insists that the pool is fine, even as he is draining it once again.

Graham Platner, the scandal-ridden populist Senate candidate from Maine, suspended his campaign Wednesday night. His announcement came two days after a rape allegation against him was made public in a Politico report, and prominent Democrats—many of whom had looked the other way at Platner’s Nazi tattoo and prior abuse allegations—one by one dropped their endorsements.

In an eleven-minute video posted to social media, Platner categorically denied the allegation and lashed out at “the corporate media system and the political establishment,” which he said acted as “judge, jury and executioner.” He insisted that his video was not an admission of guilt—but after nine minutes, he nonetheless said: “I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw.” 

If Platner does file that paperwork before 5:00 PM Eastern Time on Monday, he will be leaving the Maine Democratic Party with just nineteen days to nominate a replacement. The Maine Democratic Party has released a statement saying it will hold a nominating convention before the July 27 deadline.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, the Maine Democratic Party’s executive director, posted a video to social media on Tuesday promising an “open, inclusive, transparent and fair” convention—and accused Platner’s team of trying to “manipulate this process” and select his successor themselves.

The Maine Democratic Party has approved plans for a nominating convention that will involve roughly 600 delegates, most of whom will be local party officials from around the state. They will pick a candidate to replace Platner—who got over 150,000 votes, the most of any Democratic Senate candidate in Maine primary history. Then, that candidate will face off against incumbent Senator Susan Collins in November.

At least eight candidates’ names have been floated to replace Platner: brewery owner Dan Kleban, social worker Paige Loud, former Maine CDC director Nirav Shah, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, and former political staffer Jordan Wood among them. But in Platner’s Wednesday night announcement, he said he believes his volunteers—not the Maine Democratic Party—should be the ones to choose his replacement. “These decisions need to be made in the open by the people of this state, the people who got us here,” Platner said. “My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine.”

“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” Maine Democratic Party leaders said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”

On Wednesday night, Graham Platner finally ended his campaign for Senate in Maine, after rape allegations from a former girlfriend caused even his own allies to denounce his candidacy and call for him to drop out. The move has Democrats feeling relieved and GOP Sen. Susan Collins and her allies panicked, as they viewed Platner and his personal transgressions as a weak nominee who she could…

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | RFK Jr. seeks to peek at Americans’ medical records for clues on autism and vaccines…

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After a federal agent killed an undocumented Mexican man in his van during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday, the government rushed to follow a familiar template. Just as it has after other shootings, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement insisting that the man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, had “weaponized his vehicle” against the officer, who then justifiably opened fire. DHS offered no evidence of this.

But it appears three other people were in the van with the now-deceased man, and they presumably could recount their version of what happened: the victim’s brother and two employees of the dead man’s construction business. They were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the encounter, and we haven’t heard from them publicly about what happened.

Now, in another potentially dark turn in the saga, those three men are under pressure from immigration officials to agree to self-deport, Juan Proano, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, claimed in an interview with The New Republic.

Proano—who regularly confers with the family members of the victim and the three detainees and organized a press conference on their behalf earlier this week—said the family members were able to reach the three detainees, who then related this situation.

“They’re being pressured to sign self-deportation orders,” Proano told me. “They’re currently in detention. These men hold the key to what actually happened.” Under self-deportation, detained migrants agree to leave the country voluntarily within a prescribed time period.

According to DHS, officers tried to stop Araujo’s vehicle as part of a targeted operation, after which the undocumented Araujo “attempted to evade arrest.” DHS claimed Araujo “refused to follow multiple verbal commands” before trying to “run over” an ICE officer, who then fired “in self-defense.” Araujo, struck in the abdomen, was transported to the hospital, where he died.

Yet Araujo, 52, had been in the United States for 35 years, raised a family, and didn’t immediately seem prone to attempting vehicular manslaughter of federal law enforcement. A business owner himself, he and his passengers were driving to a job: The encounter occurred at the early hour of 6:50 a.m. ICE reportedly hasn’t presented evidence of its version of events and didn’t provide any video camera footage.

But other video of the encounter, reported on by NBC News—which doesn’t include the shooting itself—shows several other men lying face down on the ground along with Araujo, who is lying wounded with two officers crouched over him and one radioing for help.

The three men are Araujo’s brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, and two workers, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego, Proano told TNR. Family members who are in touch with them confirmed the pressure to sign self-deportation orders, Proano says, adding that some of the men may be inclined to do so to avoid longer-term detention.

“We want full public disclosure of the eyewitness accounts of what actually happened on the day that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed,” Proano said. The pressure to self-deport, Proano added, looks like “an effort by DHS to get rid of the only eyewitnesses to what happened.” TNR emailed questions about this to DHS, which weren’t immediately answered.

There are other reasons to doubt that Araujo would attempt to kill an officer. NBC reports that DHS hasn’t said that the man has a previous criminal record. And Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, says that the family had actually been preparing for the possibility that he might be picked up by law enforcement, given increased ICE activity in Texas. The family had a plan, according to The Washington Post: He would comply if arrested, refrain from signing anything, and wait for the family to try to get him released.

A family man, Araujo also helped send his three U.S. citizen sons to college, as The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo reports. He was far along in the process of applying for legal protections, having even submitted fingerprints. And while Salgado, the victim’s son, is calling for a full investigation, the FBI’s local office is said to be focused mainly on establishing that an assault on a federal officer took place (the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is also probing the event).

A big question now, says Radley Balko, a criminal justice reform expert who writes about ICE abuses on his Substack, is whether these men are advised by lawyers to speak out about what they saw. (Proano told TNR he doesn’t believe they have legal representation yet.)

“You don’t pressure witnesses to a shooting to self-deport if your goal is to get to the bottom of what happened,” Balko said. “You pressure them to self-deport when you want to make sure that nobody learns what actually happened.”

Balko pointed out that with previous ICE shootings, the government has taken unabashedly heavy-handed steps either to suppress the truth of what happened or to rewrite it to cast the victims as instigators of violent confrontation.

For instance, a number of federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned in protest over a Justice Department push to criminally investigate the actions of shooting victim Renee Good, and over DOJ’s refusal to include state officials in probing the shooting itself. And Balko notes that in a different ICE shooting in Minneapolis, a migrant eyewitness was flown to a detention center hundreds of miles away, potentially to prevent him fom testifying.

“There is precedent for this,” Balko said of ICE’s apparent response to the Texas shooting.

All this comes as ICE is embarked on a massive new escalation of deportations nationwide. Yet in this case, ICE is very eager to keep the removal operations out of the news. The last thing Republicans want with the midterms approaching is another big backlash akin to what met ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis.

Yet as we’ve seen again and again, ramping up this level of paramilitary force—and unleashing it to violently extract longtime residents and business owners from deep within local communities—of necessity creates the tinderbox conditions that make deadly shootings a matter of when, not if. The authors of these conditions are Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

In Texas, this has now resulted in an unspeakable tragedy. What remains to be seen is whether we’ll ever learn the full, horrifying story.

The Trump administration is not looking to wind down the violence in the Iran war anytime soon.

The current escalation could last a day or a month, depending on whether Iran attacks more commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, according to unnamed U.S. officials who spoke with Axios Thursday. But the brutality and bloodshed aren’t expected to simmer down in the meantime.

“We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand we’re not fucking around,” one American official told Axios’s Barak Ravid.

The dissolution of the ceasefire reportedly stems from frustration inside Iran’s theocratic regime, with more radical components of Tehran’s leadership unconvinced that the previously arranged peace deal would benefit their nation.

U.S. officials told Axios that Iran saw its grip over the strait slipping as ships began to travel through the waterway’s southern route, closer to the Omani coast. The economic incentives of the memorandum had also lost their allure for Tehran as the country found it remarkably difficult to sell oil even after the U.S. lifted economic sanctions. Financial institutions and countries were reluctant to participate in trade that was based on temporary waivers.

Iranian officials were also reportedly vexed that the billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets held in international accounts had not yet been unfrozen, despite stipulations requiring that Iran first meet nuclear thresholds as required by the memorandum of understanding.

“Part of the Iranian leadership was not happy about all of those things,” a U.S. official told Axios. “They started shooting and we decided it’s time to slap them back hard. It’s a process. We have patience. If we don’t feel we’re getting the deal we want, we are not going to do it.”

It is not clear exactly how long the current flare-up will last, but Donald Trump signaled Wednesday that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021 and, during that period, dismantling the previous Iran nuclear deal—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the MOU was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”

Also at the NATO summit, Trump openly pitched the idea of committing war crimes against Iran, claiming that the U.S. could “knock down every single bridge in Iran” in a single day.

“There’s not a thing they can do about it,” Trump said, seated feet away from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “If we have to, we’ll take them out. I don’t want to do that. They have desalinization plants, we’ll take them out if we have to.… Maybe we’ll take over Kharg island. We may take over Kharg Island, there’s not a thing they can do about it.”

President Donald Trump is using the fallout from Graham Platner’s failed Senate campaign in Maine to remind everyone that when it comes to sexual assault, he comes down on the side of assaulting women. Platner, a Democrat, announced on Wednesday night that he would end his campaign after he was publicly accused of rape earlier this week. He denies the allegation. When Trump was asked…

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Multiple victims of billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are accusing his assistant of lying to Congress.

Several Epstein survivors, including four who spoke publicly and two others who did so anonymously, told CNN that Lesley Groff’s assertions last month were outright false. Groff testified before the House Oversight Committee on June 9 and claimed that she never met any of the girls and young women who gave Epstein massages and did not know anything about their backgrounds.

The victims said that was not the case, describing meeting Groff in person, telling her their ages, and being paid by Groff directly. Epstein survivor Marina Lacerda said she saw Groff regularly after first meeting Epstein in 2002, when she was not yet 14 years old.

“She’s lying,” Lacerda said. “Just me and my friends, she’s met at least three or four of us.”

Sharlene Rochard, who told CNN she was a young New York City model when she met the billionaire, said that she met Groff “multiple times in different locations.” Lara Blume McGee, who said she was abused from 2001 to 2003, described meeting Groff at Epstein’s New York townhouse at least twice.

Several of these women told CNN that Groff was well aware of their ages. Lacerda said that Groff asked detailed questions about new girls and ordered her to tell her friends to bring school IDs to sessions with Epstein because of his preference for younger girls.

“She would ask, ‘What does the girl look like? Where is she from? How old is she?’ over the phone,” Lacerda said. Rochard said that she and other girls would give Groff their passport information and identification to book flights, which plainly showed their ages. One anonymous victim said Groff helped her fill out her passport application at Epstein’s New York City office.

“I sat with her and she took all my information in person. She obviously knew my age,” the woman said. But when Democratic Representative Suhas Subramanyam directly asked Groff in June if she handled or viewed any of the girls’ or women’s passports, Groff said no.

“I may have seen a passport—a picture of a passport, but I never had anything to do with their passports,” Groff said.

Multiple women, including Lacerda, said that Groff was also directly involved in cash payments, putting $100 bills in long white envelopes and handing them to them. Groff denied paying anyone on Epstein’s behalf, telling the committee that she sometimes arranged for money to be picked up or delivered.

All of this suggests more lies out of Epstein’s inner circle, joining those from Epstein’s longtime fixer Ghislaine Maxwell. Despite new revelations from Congress and the Justice Department, though, no new charges have been filed in the U.S. against anyone involved in Epstein’s massive abuse operation.

President Donald Trump got four Supreme Court justices to pretend that the Constitution doesn’t guarantee birthright citizenship, despite the 14th Amendment’s plain language: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.“ Their reasoning boiled down to two arguments: One of the amendment’s drafters supposedly…

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Donald Trump is absolutely, finally, paying E. Jean Carroll.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied the president’s emergency motion to temporarily suspend the court-ordered payment late Wednesday.

The decision came shortly after Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered the release of $5 million in court-held funds to the beleaguered columnist, more than three years after Trump was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting Carroll in a department store in late 1995.

The last-minute stay was a Hail Mary thrown by Trump’s legal team, who had tried to appeal the case to the Supreme Court earlier this week. But the nation’s highest judiciary ultimately rejected the request on Tuesday.

Despite the high court’s decision, Trump’s legal team wrote to Kaplan asking him not to release the funds, claiming that the president’s Supreme Court petition for a new hearing was still pending.

By Wednesday morning, the SCOTUS docket had been updated to reflect that it was anticipating a corrected petition from the president’s team. But hours later, it appeared that Kaplan had gone ahead and ordered the release of the funds to Carroll despite Trump’s pending filing, anyway.

In a six-page memorandum penned Wednesday, Kaplan noted that Trump “has been stalling this case for years.”

“It is time for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgment,” Kaplan ordered.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals clearly agreed.

Carroll has a long and grim history with the president. After the 2023 civil case, Trump tried and failed to sue Carroll for defamation. Kaplan later ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the rape on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the sexual assault allegations against him for the benefit of her book. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case, though Carroll has not yet seen any proceeds from that decision, either.

Late last month, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the New York–based judge) asked a judge to implement an expedited payment schedule for the sum that Trump owes Carroll, noting that by this point, the president owes Carroll interest on the original amount.

“It is time for this case to come to an end,” Carroll’s attorney wrote in a Tuesday legal filing.

ICE is making people’s worst fears a reality.

The family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican man who was shot and killed Tuesday by immigration enforcement agents in Texas, is calling for a full investigation into his death.

Speaking at a press conference Wednesday, Ronaldo Salgado, the deceased’s son, gave an emotional account of how he learned of his father’s death.

“I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognized him immediately,” Ronaldo said, his voice breaking. “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street, bleeding out.”

Salgado set off for the area where his father was working construction in North Houston, and remained on the site for hours looking for answers. League of United Latin American Citizens Representative Conchita Reyes connected him to Texas Representative Sylvia Garcia to locate his father at Ben Taub Hospital.

“With all the hope in the world I drove to Ben Taub Hospital, the hospital that I was born in, my brother Lorenzo Jr. was born in, and my youngest was born in. I went to Ben Taub Hospital, demanded answers, but no one could give them to me,” Salgado said.

“I learned of my father’s passing from a news report on social media, not the hospital, not law enforcement,” he continued.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was undocumented, but his three children are U.S. citizens. His son said his father had completed the paperwork for a legal work permit, submitted good character affidavits and fingerprints 18 months ago, and was awaiting a response.

In the hours after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed the officer had fired in self-defense after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo refused to comply with orders and “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”

But that’s a familiar refrain used by ICE agents to skirt legal issues, as the agency’s use-of-force policy bars agents from firing at a vehicle unless there is an imminent threat to their safety.

DHS made similar claims about the shooting of Marimar Martinez and the fatal shooting of Renee Good. The claims about Martinez quickly fell apart when her lawyer showed footage of immigration agents steering their vehicle into Martinez’s truck. While the investigation into Good’s death has gone nowhere, DHS’s claims are highly disputed.

His family believes that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who had no criminal record, would have complied with orders if he’d known that the officers pursuing him in unmarked vehicles were federal immigration authorities. The family even had a plan in place in the event that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was picked up by ICE.

“He did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican Man Shot and Killed by ICE.’ He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, a father, and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream,” his son said.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death marks the tenth fatal shooting by federal immigration enforcement during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Graham Platner continued to deny his sexual assault allegations, lambasted “larger forces” against him, and demanded that the Maine Democratic Party allow him a say in his replacement upon announcing his withdrawal from the Senate race. The angry video went against everything his closest aides advised. 

“Accusations are supposed to be the beginning of things, not the end,” Platner said in his 11-minute video, posted Wednesday evening on X. “This was the last week to try to get me off of the ballot. That’s why this is occurring.... [The allegations] are being used by the political establishment to put structural pressure on us.... It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish. That if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.” 

“They are going to take everything away from us. Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things we need to run a campaign,” Platner continued in his vertically shot video. “They would rather see Susan Collins win than have me be the next senator from Maine.”  

My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine. pic.twitter.com/RKVyLU76tm

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 9, 2026

His indignant rhetoric was also mirrored in his claims that national Democrats were trying to choose his successor behind “closed doors” and his insistence that they choose a fellow progressive. In reality, Maine’s Democratic Party is planning to hold a nominating convention with about 600 delegates later this month.

According to Politico, several of Graham’s closest advisers begged him not to take this approach with his resignation video, urging him to center “gratitude” and to to strike a “conciliatory” tone instead. But he refused to take their advice.

Platner was accused of sexual assault by Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident who dated him on and off for two years, in a Politico article published on Monday. She alleged that the former Marine drunkenly entered her home uninvited five years ago and forced himself on her even as she asked him to stop. Platner continued to profusely deny these allegations in his resignation video. 

Blaming the larger political establishment for your rape allegation with an 11-minute long video does not seem particularly gracious. Now Maine’s Democratic Party has until July 27 to pick a candidate—and to try and clean up Platner’s long mess of a campaign.

FBI Director Kash Patel’s lavish spending spree and misuse of government planes has now attracted Republican ire.

Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Patel asking for information about his use of FBI jets and the bureau’s purchase of BMW cars, MS NOW reports.

“For each trip where you used an FBI aircraft for personal travel, have you reimbursed the FBI as required by law? If yes, please provide the records,” Grassley wrote in his letter.

Grassley wrote that while Patel is required to use FBI planes even for personal use, Congress needs the information to make an “independent and objective review.” The senator also asked Patel to explain “why you decided to purchase BMW vehicles instead of Chevy Suburbans.”

Grassley has defended Patel in the past against accusations that he misused government resources, telling the press in April that “I’ve never had an FBI director cooperate with me as much as Kash Patel has cooperated with me on my request for information, my request for documents. In fact, most FBI directors have been an impediment to my investigations.”

Now, though, Grassley is joining Democrats, such as Representative Jamie Raskin and Senator Dick Durbin, who wrote their own letter to Patel Wednesday saying that they “appreciate Chairman Grassley raising these concerns, which mirror those raised repeatedly by House and Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats.”

Raskin and Durbin’s letter raises concerns about Patel’s travel as FBI director, referring to an incident last year where the military allowed Patel to snorkel at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii around the wreckage of the USS Arizona, which sunk during Japan’s attack on the base in 1941.

“Your VIP snorkeling experience in Hawaii was not an isolated incident,” wrote Raskin and Durbin. “You frequently demand special perks on ‘official’ trips around the globe, such as a taxpayer-funded helicopter tour during your multi-country jaunt across East Asia and other recreational activities like jet skiing.”

“Your jet-setting and the lack of justification for these trips are ‘out of control,’ and the new attaché office you established in Wellington, New Zealand, may have been opened in part to justify a sightseeing trip you took there,” the letter added.

Grassley’s words may mean that Patel will now face bipartisan scrutiny for his actions on the job. In the past, he’s had support from Republicans in Congress, not to mention President Trump. But with the midterm elections approaching, Grassley and others in the GOP could be gearing up for a stronger Democratic presence in Congress that demands more oversight of Trump’s appointments, especially those that like to party on the job.

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán was a 24-year-old lawyer when he left Cuba for the United States and joined about 1,400 other Cuban exiles, who were known as Brigade 2506, to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the botched 1961 mission to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime.

Always a gifted swimmer, he was a frogman, and when he stepped on the shores of Playa Girón on the southern coast of the island, he was shot in the right knee by friendly fire. When the US government-backed incursion failed —largely due to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to withdraw plans to strike Castro’s airfields—the human cost was significant: about 100 exiles died during the attacks, and Zayas-Bazán was arrested along with hundreds of others. He had served for about a year when the Kennedy administration negotiated for the return of exiles from the island to the US. 

Fast forward more than half a century, and Zayas-Bazán is now a 90-year-old retired professor who taught at East Tennessee State University. His experience has become memorialized in the new Bay of Pigs Museum and Library in Miami’s historic Little Havana, which opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 17, the 65th anniversary of the disastrous invasion. After five years of planning, the 11,000 square foot building was erected on the site of the original Brigade 2506 meetinghouse, a one-story building with a Spanish-tile roof where veterans gathered regularly. At a cost of more than $8 million, the new two-story facility contains numerous glass displays, multiple screens playing interviews of veterans, and a towering mural of the Cuban flag that greets visitors near the entrance.  

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán, a Brigade 2506 veteran and retired professor, stands in the Bay of Pigs Museum and Library, which opened in Miami this year. Laura C. Morel/Mother Jones

The museum has been a rare point of unity for Florida Democrats and Republicans. President Donald Trump stopped at the original house during his 2016 campaign, and the site has also been visited by politicians like Marco Rubio and Florida Sen. Rick Scott. Eileen Higgins, who was elected last year to be Miami’s first Democrat mayor in nearly 30 years, secured funding for the museum. “We’ve got to put party lines aside,” Carlos Luis, the museum president, told me. “This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”

“We’ve got to put party lines aside. This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”

Most of the men involved in the mission were young with no military experience, many of whom received only a few months of training before the invasion. One of them was Luis’s father, René Luis, who ran an accounting firm in Cuba with his family. When the elder Luis was released from prison after 22 months following the Bay of Pigs, he settled in Miami with his wife. They had seven children. Before dinner, Carlos recalled, the family sang Cuba’s national anthem. His father didn’t open up much about his experience, apart from blaming Kennedy for the failed mission, and he died in 2024 without ever setting foot on the island again. “My involvement here,” Luis said, “is the least I can do for my father.”

For Zayas-Bazán, president of the Brigade’s association and a member of the museum’s board, the new building provides a vivid excursion through his memories. Wearing a crisply ironed guayabera, a traditional linen shirt popular in Cuba, he strode through the exhibits, stopping at the front entrance to point out a video playing black-and-white footage of Havana’s waterfront lined with hotels and bustling city streets; his glasses reflected images of a now-vanished Cuba. “This shows what Cuba was like,” he told me. “So that the people can see what Havana was like before 1959”—the year Fidel Castro took control of the island. 

He stopped at a glass display lined with photos from 1962, when hundreds of Brigade 2506 members who had been imprisoned in Cuba returned to Miami. The photos show young men stepping off airplanes and into the arms of loved ones waiting for them on the tarmac. One such photo is of Zayas-Bazán and his then-wife, her smiling face pressed against his chest. In another corner of the museum, he pointed to a collection of items that Brigade 2506 members kept from that era: metal bowls and plates, spoons, rosaries, and tattered books. Zayas-Bazán read Don Quixote while in prison. 

After the invasion, several men were captured and forced into a crowded truck with no ventilation in the blistering heat. The episode was known as La Rastra de la Muerte, the “trailer truck of death,” because nine men of the dozens who were trapped died of asphyxiation. One exhibit focuses on what happened. “As oxygen dwindled,” the display reads, “some prisoners scraped open tiny holes in the walls and moved dying prisoners to them, an act which saved many.” The names of the men who died were listed, and Zayas-Bazán brushed his hand over those of three of his friends who had perished.

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán points out a photograph taken of him and his wife after his release from a Cuban prison in 1962. Laura C. Morel/Mother Jones

As I reported in March, Cuba is in the midst of the worst economic crisis ever to grip the island. Food is scarce, blackouts are constant, the medical infrastructure is collapsing, and inflation is astronomical. In the spring, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed he was in talks with the Trump administration regarding the island’s future, a few months after the US government imposed an oil blockade, further harming the struggling nation. In recent weeks, the situation in Cuba has worsened as the population grapples with water shortages in the midst of the summer’s heat.

The new museum is a reminder for the Cuban exile community of “what could have been” if the Bay of Pigs mission had succeeded, Andy Gomez, one of the leading scholars on Cuba, told me. Without any major changes in the country, he worries that the next generation of Cuban Americans will not travel there and eventually lose ties with the island. “As the Eduardo Zayas-Bazáns of the older generations pass away, that will be another experience that will be lost,” he told me. “It’s important to somehow continue to tell that story.”

And that is what the museum strives to do. Its executive director, Yuleisy Mena, teaches a course about the invasion at the local Florida International University. The museum has also invited teachers from the Miami-Dade County school district to visit. “We have to start getting the next generation ready to take on the baton,” Luis told me. 

The Bay of Pigs veterans were among the first generation of Cubans to leave the island after Castro took power, and today about 200 of them are still alive. After Zayas-Bazán left his homeland more than six decades ago, he became chair of the Foreign Language Department at East Tennessee State University and co-authored Spanish language textbooks. In 1985, he became the first Cuban to lead the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

After retiring in 1999, he moved back to Miami to be within the Cuban exile community in case democracy returned to the island nation. “I came thinking that there had to be a change in Cuba,” he told me. “I don’t want to return until I can speak my mind without having to worry, until I can go everywhere I want to and see whomever I want to. I refuse to go and be spied on.”

Despite a life filled with professional and personal successes in the US, “I think about Cuba every day,” Zayas-Bazán said. 

For Brigade 2506 veterans like Zayas-Bazán and their families, the end of Cuba’s current government is more than half a century in the making. “I have never felt more optimistic about changes in Cuba than right now,” he told me, acknowledging that any changes may not happen in the near future with the ongoing disputes with Iran and the earthquake aftermath in Venezuela. “We, the Cuban people, have suffered so much in 67 years.”

Graham Platner’s exit strategy has apparently instilled a “#MeToo” mentality in the president. Or has it?

The Maine Democratic Senate candidate suspended his campaign Wednesday, days after more sexual abuse allegations emerged against him. The situation has pushed Maine into an unprecedented scenario, with questions swirling as to who the state’s Democratic Party intends to pick to replace Platner, in the hopes of unseating Republican Senator Susan Collins with just a few short months until the election. State Democrats have until July 27 to pick a new candidate.

Donald Trump was asked about the conundrum while traveling aboard Air Force One late Wednesday. At first, the president claimed that Platner’s future boils down to “whether or not you believe the woman,” not only misunderstanding that Platner had already left the race but also missing the painful irony of his suddenly supporting the “Believe Women” movement while he has used every tool available to him to shut down the voices of more than two dozen women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.

But soon he was back to casting doubt on the allegations: “A lot of people say big falsehoods. He’s in a bind, he’s in a bind. But should they be able to do it?” he continued, referring to whether state Democrats should be able to pick a new candidate. “Well, I guess he’s going to lose. I imagine he’s gonna lose.”

“It’s very interesting, when a Republican woman came out with the same charge, nobody believed her,” Trump noted, referring to the first woman that explicitly charged Platner with sexual abuse: his conservative ex-girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield. In an interview with The New York Times last month, Fifield charged Platner with being aggressive with her body, using misogynistic language, and fantasizing about rape. In another interview with The Washington Post published Tuesday, Fifield further accused Platner of removing condoms during sex without her knowledge or consent.

Major progressive figures tentatively stayed by Platner’s side despite Fifield’s allegations, in part due to suspicions about her political motivations as she had previously aided Republican campaigns. But the mood around Platner’s campaign changed suddenly when a second woman—Jenny Racicot—offered Politico explicit details about Platner’s violent propensities, including an incident in which he allegedly broke into her house and raped her during their on-and-off relationship.

“When this woman came out, everyone believed her,” Trump shrugged.

But even Trump couldn’t resist making an off-color remark about the situation.

“Did you get any pictures of her?” Trump asked a reporter, seemingly referring to Racicot. “You don’t wanna. They wouldn’t sell good.”