Closing with C.I.'s "The Snapshot:"
Donald Trump sounded much like an angry, jilted lover ranting on social media on Monday morning as he complained about Iranian officials denying that talks were underway with the United States for another ceasefire agreement.
The president would later address the situation at a White House event and was still fixated on the incongruent statements from Iran’s government as he said talks continued, facilitated and supported by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
On Truth Social, he unleashed on Iran for making him look foolish.
“Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous! They ask for a meeting, some would say ‘beg,’ talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that they’re not having any discussions, that nothing is being talked about, and they’re only dealing with ‘Oman,’” Trump griped.
“They then go on to give their usual blather in saying, the Strait of Hormuz will be operated powerfully by them, when it is already completely controlled by the United States Navy and our ‘Blockade’ or, as some say, ‘The United States Wall of Steel!’”
Then Trump complained about how Iran was still claiming that its forces would control the Strait of Hormuz and exact tolls from ships passing through the waterway. Hours later at the White House, he appeared to still be fuming about statements from Iran as he appeared before reporters during an executive order signing and subjected them to a dizzying rant about how Iran was describing the talks.
Americans picked Democrats over Republicans as better stewards of the economy for the first time in nearly a decade in a Reuters/Ipsos poll, which also found their approval of President Donald Trump's performance falling to 35%.
The finding, in a poll conducted Wednesday through Monday, showed how Trump's handling of the economy, including rising energy prices resulting from the Iran war, could weigh on his party's chances in the November midterm elections that will determine control of Congress for the next two years.
Legal experts told Newsweek there are some legitimate concerns about the deal on both the weaponization fund and the tax audit provision.
Former federal prosecutor Gene Rossi told Newsweek he believes the administration will still “try their best” to give January 6 defendants some sort of financial relief, and that the issue “probably will not go away.”
Neama Rahmani, another former federal prosecutor, told Newsweek that he is taking Blanche at his word that he does not plan to pursue the weaponization fund, but that a future attorney general could still revisit it because the underlying settlement agreement, which he described as a “sham,” still exists.
“Could potentially another attorney general try to reinstate the fund because the settlement agreement exists? I think, probably, yes. The best thing to do would be to rescind the settlement agreement itself,” he said.
Michael McAuliffe, ex-federal prosecutor and former elected state attorney, told Newsweek he has concerns about the deal.
“The clearest indications that nothing should be taken as a final pronouncement of the fate of [the] ‘fund’ is that the President can, and likely will, try to impose his will or wish, on any attorney general at any time on any issue,” he said. “It appears as if the ‘fund’ is off limits in order to achieve the confirmation of the president’s former personal lawyer as attorney general, but that’s for now and as a part of a previous AG order (not a court order).”
He said that nobody should “conclude its demise permanent,” given contradictory statements about it.
Another aspect of the agreement that has drawn legal questions is the fact that the second document posted by Blanche, pertaining to the tax audits against Trump, appeared to be unsigned by Blanche or any of the parties involved.
Rossi said it is “odd” that it was unsigned.
“I remain a little bit skeptical on this IRS document which is unsigned by the acting attorney general. That raises a red flag for me,” he said.
Rahmani said it was likely intentional that there was no signature because he still wants the fund to apply retroactively to Trump and his family.
Ben Meiselas, one of the founders of MeidasTouch, raised similar concerns in a post on X.
“This is also not signed by all the parties which is required to rescind under the terms of the original agreement, para. 8. This is an unenforceable sham document,” he wrote.
Legal experts and scholars were quick to agree, calling Blanche's pledge to Tillis and Cornyn a "sham" and highlighting that it is far from legally binding. The agreement also doesn't have any consequences if Blanche were to break it.
Ben Meiselas commented that the contract between the Justice Department, IRS and Trump makes it clear that all three parties must agree to edit the agreement. "This is an unenforceable sham document," he added.
Criminal Law Professor at the University of North Carolina, Carissa Byrne Hessick agreed, writing on X, "Others might have a different impression, but I see nothing in Blanche's letter that would prevent him from reviving the fund the moment that he is confirmed. Sen. Cornyn is a former state AG and judge on the TX Supreme Court ... so I imagine he is aware of this as well."
National security expert Marcy Wheeler similarly commented, "The order is not remotely binding. And you're still [clapping] that Trump will get excused from his $200 million known tax dodge, the money laundering Capital Bank just disclosed and the bribes he accepted between November 2024 and end of 2025. Why do you love crime so much, Tillis?"
The problem with Blanche rescinding the “anti-weaponization” fund order is that it wouldn’t seem to necessarily fully kill off the fund.
As the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy has explained, the settlement’s terms (see our annotation here) state that it could be “modified only with the written agreement of the parties.” That would include Trump.
So while Blanche has rescinded a separate order he wrote that actually created the fund under the terms of the settlement, the settlement itself still exists — and could seemingly be enforced.
In fact, Cornyn and Blanche basically explained all of this during an exchange at Blanche’s confirmation hearing in mid-July, before they agreed to greenlight his nomination.
When he started pressing Blanche, Cornyn asked whether the settlement agreement had been modified by the parties, including Trump. (It hadn’t, Blanche said.) Under Cornyn’s questioning, Blanche admitted that even if he verbally promised to fully kill off the fund, the settlement remained an “enforceable document,” and Trump could file a lawsuit seeking to enforce its terms.
“There’s no guarantee that he or one of the other plaintiffs might [not] raise that issue by way of a lawsuit and — a breach of contract lawsuit in the future,” Cornyn said.
To be clear: none of this erases the rot revealed by the deals that Blanche engineered and approved. Blanche has abused his power to mock the rule of law, enrich his most important client and betray American taxpayers in the process.
Remember, this all started with an extortion demand from the sitting president against the people he is supposed to serve. In January, Trump and family members filed a lawsuit demanding $10 billion from the taxpayers because a contractor working for the IRS had leaked some of their tax returns.
Blanche buys into that ideology. So there were never two sides to the lawsuit, only lawyers working for Trump inside and outside the government. There was never any question that the Justice Department would give Trump whatever he wanted.
What Trump got, just months after his bogus lawsuit was filed, was Blanche approving the creation of a massive taxpayer-funded slush fund that Trump could dole out to his allies — possibly even those who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Police. He also got an appalling immunity deal that would effectively make Trump, his family members and their business empire legally untouchable for any wrongdoing they had committed up to that date.
Blanche could never have gotten a deal like that for Trump when he was outside the government. And Trump would never have demanded a deal like that if he weren’t so reprehensibly committed to using the presidency for self-enrichment. The whole thing was a flagrant abuse of the legal system to benefit Trump personally and financially.
This is not AT ALL some enforceable guarantee that the American people will be protected from another slush fund dressed in a trench coat. There’s the, ahem, shaky legal ground of a unilateral modification to a settlement agreement. Plus an AG order rescinding a previous AG order can be superseded by — wait for it — another AG order! As Republican lawyer Mike Howell admitted, “Can be undone after Tuesday.” The slush fund is dead, long live the slush fund.
And then there’s what we actually know — Trump wants the fund back. He said so Saturday morning. Blanche wants whatever Trump wants, something he’s made abundantly clear for the last 18 months. This order is nothing more than a smokescreen, designed to get Blanche through the confirmation process. Nothing more. Pretending it is real is an insidious form of gullible that allows terrible abuses to occur.
Oh, and while we’re establishing that rumors of fund’s death are greatly exaggerated: Jezebel reported last week that anti-abortion extremist Paul Vaughn, one of 23 Trump pardoned activists convicted under the FACE Act for blocking access to reproductive health clinics, received a $1 million payout from the DOJ. “This unlawful seven-figure payout to an anti-abortion extremist is all the proof the Senate should need that the so-called anti-weaponization slush fund is far from dead,” the National Women’s Law Center told Jezebel. The fund doesn’t even need to formally exist to do its work.
All this is a familiar page of the Trump 2.0 confirmation playbook. Senator Bill Cassidy conditioned his support for RFK Jr.’s confirmation on specific promises about vaccines, promises Kennedy proceeded to break almost immediately after being confirmed, firing the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, cutting vaccine funding, and adding baseless content to the CDC website casting doubt on vaccine safety. Cassidy has declined to say whether Kennedy broke his commitments. Now Cassidy is watching Cornyn and Tillis extract written commitments from Blanche on the slush fund, and one imagines he has some institutional knowledge about how this plays out. But the GOP of 2026 has about as much spine as a wet noodle. When CBS News asked Cassidy last week whether he’d vote for Blanche today, his answer was: “I’m not going to answer that because I’m still in the information gathering stage.”
Journalist and political strategist Christopher Armitage expressed frustration Monday over a “very illegal act” allegedly committed by ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi, as well as how holding her to account remained “a single subpoena” away.
The act in question was Bondi’s sale of Trump media securities in April of 2025 – sales that she made just “hours” before Trump announced his so-called reciprocal tariffs that immediately “sank the stock she had just left,” Armitage wrote in an analysis published Monday on his Substack, The Existentialist Republic.
According to Armitage, Bondi sold “as much as $5.5 million” worth of Trump media securities, and as of August, 14 months after the incident, no case has been opened against Bondi on suspicion of insider trading.
“Martha Stewart went to federal prison for something smaller than this. Her case grew out of a stock sale worth $45,673,” Armitage wrote.
But others decided to stay and fight, taking their cases to special separation boards set up by the military.
In some cases, service members’ spouses and even the service members themselves are kept out.
What she has seen are troops who deployed around the world and earned the respect of their peers. They waited patiently, in some cases for years, until the Pentagon finally told them that they could serve openly.
Now, separation boards — afforded almost no leeway by the Trump administration — were punishing them for it.
“It’s in a lot of ways a public humiliation ritual,” Ms. Rashid said in an interview. “Going in, I had hoped I was paranoid, and boards’ outcomes were not predetermined. It turned out to be much worse than I thought.”
The Supreme Court has put a decisive end to one of President Donald Trump’s signature crusades after he missed the deadline to seek a rehearing.
When the court struck down Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship for millions of Americans in a 6-3 ruling at the end of June, it started a 25-day clock for the president to seek a reversal of the decision, which he vowed to do.
“I will be asking for a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY,” the 80-year-old president declared on Truth Social last month. “This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”
But that deadline came and went without the Trump administration submitting such a filing.
Now, the Supreme Court has put the final nail in the coffin, issuing a certified judgment and affirming a lower court ruling that had blocked the president’s executive order seeking to ban automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country temporarily or illegally.
David Venturella, now Senior Official Performing the Duties of ICE Director, was a former senior executive at GEO Group — one of ICE’s largest private prison contractors
In response to Warren’s oversight, Venturella details key ethics commitments including divestment and recusal, but left loopholes that could enable future conflicts of interest
Text of Letter (PDF) | Text of Venturella Response (PDF)
Washington, D.C. — After raising ethics concerns about top U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official David Venturella, a former senior executive at one of the nation’s largest private prison contractors, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a new response disclosing key ethics commitments from Venturella, including divestment and recusal from certain cases involving his former company. Senator Warren also pressed Venturella further, highlighting remaining loopholes that could enable future abuses — and may have already enabled at least one instance of apparent corruption — and pressing Venturella to fully address all possible conflicts of interest.
“Last month, in response to a letter from me, you indicated that you will recuse yourself from certain matters involving GEO Group and certain contractual decisions at ICE. But I remain concerned that you may still be making—or have very recently made—decisions in your roles both as an Advisor and now Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of ICE that are clouded by your conflicts of interest,” wrote Senator Warren.
In May, Senator Warren wrote to Venturella regarding concerns that his history as a former senior executive at GEO Group made him unfit to lead ICE and demanded that he recuse himself from all matters that could benefit the company. In his response, Venturella detailed commitments to divest all of his GEO Group stocks, fully recuse himself from all contracts and obligations related to detention, and recuse himself from participating in particular matters involving GEO Group.
“While these are important steps, they are insufficient to address the scale of your conflicts and leave key loopholes that would allow you to use your new position to financially benefit your previous employer,” wrote Senator Warren. “Transparency into the agency’s decisions—and its ties to GEO Group—is more important than ever, yet your refusal to fully answer all questions about this matter—in addition to the gaps in your recusal commitments—only add to the cloud of corruption surrounding ICE and this Administration’s immigration agenda.”
One key example where these ethics loopholes may have enabled Venturella to avoid recusal involved a recent revision to the ICE National Detention Standards (NDS). In June, ICE — with Venturella at the helm — reportedly made several revisions to its NDS at the request of the GEO Group, Venturella’s former employer.
“In particular, by restricting your recusal agreement to ‘particular matters involving the GEO Group,’ this arrangement could allow you to participate in activities that might still pose a conflict, such as the development of internal directives, guidance, or other policies that would affect all ICE contractors,” wrote Senator Warren.
The revisions appear to be designed to allow GEO Group to avoid liability in pending and future lawsuits brought by detainees who argue that the corporation may be committing unconstitutional labor violations.
“Federal detention standards are intended to safeguard the health, safety, and rights of individuals in government custody,” wrote Senator Warren. “Any revisions to those standards should be based on objective evidence, operational necessity, and the public interest—not influence-peddling by private contractors or abuse of the revolving door by government officials with glaring conflicts of interest.”
Senator Warren further argued that Venturella’s ethics commitments are insufficient, writing that Venturella has “made ethics arrangements to allow [him] to work on matters involving the company, and by extension, [his] potential financial interests.”
In his recusal memorandum, Venturella acknowledged that, despite federal ethics regulations requiring a one-year cooling-off period from working on issues involving a former employer, he had received authorization to work on matters involving GEO Group — and had refused to make the authorization and the justification for it public. Additionally, Senator Warren argued that the scope of the recusal does not sufficiently address the scale of Venturella’s conflicts, leaving open the possibility that Venturella may be continuing to benefit from his long career with GEO Group, even while serving in federal government.
“Given your conflicts of interest, your inadequate recusal requirements, and the cloud of corruption surrounding the Trump Administration’s immigration agenda, I again request that you recuse yourself from all matters that could directly or indirectly affect GEO Group,” concluded Senator Warren.
In addition to this recusal, Senator Warren requested answers to a series of questions regarding ethics arrangements and changes to the NDS by August 16, 2026.
Senator Warren has led the fight to root out corruption, close the revolving door between government officials and the private sector, and hold the Trump administration accountable for its cruel immigration agenda:
- In May 2026, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed the Acting Director-Designate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), David Venturella, on his decades-long revolving door career between ICE and the private prison industry and his reported use of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel and resources for personal or political favors.
- In May 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) introduced the Banning Lobbying And Safeguarding Trust (BLAST) Act, a bipartisan bill to impose a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress.
- In April 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), along with Representatives Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and Troy Carter (D-La.), urged the Inspectors General of the Departments of Homeland Security and State to open an investigation into the Trump administration’s attempts to deport people to countries they have no ties to.
- In March 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, launched an investigation into the diversion of military resources as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funneled billions of dollars through a Navy contract vehicle to build a network of migrant detention centers.
- In February 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.), along with Representatives Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) and Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) pressed the Inspectors General (IGs) of 16 key agencies to open investigations into senior Trump officials who were recently lobbyists or “shadow lobbyists” and may be using their roles to benefit their former employers and clients.
- In January 2026, Senators Warren (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Andy Kim (D-N.J.), pressed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on potential conflicts of interest surrounding the awarding of multiple lucrative Department of Defense (DoD) contracts and loans to companies associated with President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
- In December 2025, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) pressed the Trump administration to follow through on promises to limit defense companies’ stock buybacks and incentivize them to increase research and development spending.
- In December 2025, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called for then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to recuse herself from the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s review of any Warner Bros. merger due to potential conflicts of interest related to her former employer, lobbying firm Ballard Partners.
- In September 2025, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to Donald Korb, nominee for Chief Counsel for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), ahead of Korb’s confirmation hearing, pressing him on his stark conflicts of interest and urging him to make ethics commitments to mitigate these conflicts.
- In September 2025, Senator Warren (D-Mass.) led more than 60 members of Congress in opening a new investigation into the Trump administration’s practice of detaining and sending immigrants to countries where they have no citizenship or connections of any kind.
- In July 2025, Senators Warren (D-Mass.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) wrote to former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin seeking an explanation and further information on his recent decision to start a strategic advisory firm. Austin had publicly promised Senator Warren during his 2021 confirmation process that he would not become a lobbyist after his government service ended.
- In December 2020, Senator Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) reintroduced the Anti-Corruption & Public Integrity Act to strengthen ethics laws and crack down on government officials’ conflicts of interest across the government.
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