Judge Tells Trump to Stop Hiding What He’s Doing With Taxpayer Money

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan on Monday issued an opinion for our times, ordering the Trump administration “to stop violating the law!”

Specifically, the Clinton-appointed judge ruled that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget broke the law by taking down the public apportionment website where, under a 2022 law that Congress made permanent in 2023, it’s mandated to report executive decisions on federal spending within two business days.

The administration removed the website in March, and, soon after, OMB Director Russell Vought sent a letter to lawmakers saying the office decided to flout Congress and scrap the database due to the purportedly “sensitive,” “pre-decisional,” and “deliberative” nature of the information it is required to reveal.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Protect Democracy—watchdog organizations that rely on the OMB database—challenged the move, and Sullivan on Monday issued a partial summary judgment ordering that the administration comply with the law and bring back the website.

According to Sullivan, Trump and Vought relied on “an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power” to “claim that their apportionment decisions—which are legally binding and result in the actual spending of public funds—cannot be publicly disclosed because they are not final decisions about how to administer the spending of public funds.”

While the Trump administration argued that the 2022 law encroaches on the executive branch’s authority, its objections amount to “a policy disagreement” with no “constitutional foundation,” Sullivan wrote.

“Defendants are complaining about the extra work the 2022 and 2023 Acts require. This is a management issue; not a constitutional one,” he wrote. And the fact that the office had previously maintained the database for nearly three years “further diminish[es] any argument that complying with the disclosure requirement is overly cumbersome or places an impossible burden.”

“The law is clear,” said Sullivan: “Congress has sweeping authority to require public disclosure of how the Executive Branch is apportioning the funds appropriated by Congress,” and “there is nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money. Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!”

Remember all of those hefty handouts Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski won in exchange for sealing the deal on Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill? It looks like the president has found a way to get out of delivering.

“I feel cheated,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News Friday. “I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”

Ahead of the bill’s passage earlier this month, Murkowski had co-sponsored an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. Her measure would ensure a 12-month window for clean energy projects, which would end in 2027. These tax credits would help to alleviate a looming energy crisis along Alaska’s Railbelt, the electrical grid that serves roughly 75 percent of the population, due to declining resources of natural gas.

Trump threw a wrench in that agreement Friday when he issued an executive order to “end market distorting subsidies” for green energy projects. The order directs Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.”

Now Murkowski claims that she and her pals were duped. “Do I feel like the administration was not being up-front with us? Yes,” she told the Anchorage Daily News.

She torched Trump’s order as “reckless,” claiming that it directly “goes against” what he signed into law earlier this month with the budget.

Murkowski was the deciding vote to pass Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the Senate, green-lighting the gutting of social programs such as SNAP and Medicaid while extending tax breaks for the rich, and agreeing to add trillions to the national deficit. She’d sent the bill back to the House with the hopes that lawmakers would continue to refine the massive tax and spending bill, only for it to be immediately passed and then signed into law.

But under the Trump administration, which regularly skirts congressional authority to withhold federal spending and obliterate government agencies, lawmakers should know better than to think the president actually cares about the law of the land.

The U.K.’s Stop Trump Coalition and other protesters are planning to put Vice President JD Vance’s luxury vacation spot on blast.

Vance and his family have a trip scheduled for the Cotswolds, a countryside region in Southwest England often frequented by the rich and famous (Ellen DeGeneres currently resides there). They’re expected to be met with a wide variety of demonstrators—anti-Trump, pro-Palestinian, trade union members, and environmentalists.

“JD Vance is every bit as unwelcome in the UK as Donald Trump,” a representative from the Stop Trump Coalition told The Telegraph. “We remember how Vance cut short his ski trip in Vermont because he was so enraged by the sight of a few protesters. We are sure that, even in the Cotswolds, he will find the resistance waiting.” The group also plans to protest President Trump’s upcoming visit to Scotland, which begins on Friday.

Vance will be in London in mid-August, then head to Cotswolds, and later to Scotland. The vice president has been met with vitriol on his vacations thus far, speaking to the mostly negative feelings that much of the public has for the current administration, both home and abroad. He and his family were booed ruthlessly while they were at Disneyland earlier this month.

“Hope you enjoy your family time, @JDVance,” California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on X. “The families you’re tearing apart certainly won’t.”

According to a new report, Jeffrey Epstein’s first accuser, on two occasions, mentioned Donald Trump’s name to law enforcement as an associate worth investigating. The revelation raises the possibility that files related to the case of the deceased sex trafficker contain information that would embarrass the president.

Artist Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein from 1995 to 1996 and says she was sexually assaulted by him and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, told The New York Times that, when she spoke to law enforcement about Epstein in 1996 and 2006, she urged them to investigate his associates, including now-President Trump.

The Times report describes an unpleasant encounter Farmer recalls with Trump at Epstein’s Manhattan offices in 1995.

After Farmer was called in to work by Epstein one night, she said Trump arrived and “started to hover over” her, while staring “at her bare legs.”

Farmer, who was wearing running shorts, grew frightened, before Epstein entered and told Trump, “No, no, She’s not here for you.”

Epstein and Trump then are said to have left the room, at which point Farmer heard Trump speculate that she was 16 years old.

While Farmer reports having no “alarming interactions” with Trump afterward and “did not see him engage in inappropriate conduct with girls or women,” her experience—which the White House fervently denies happened, but which is corroborated by accounts from her mother and sister—was apparently enough for her to bring up Trump’s name when speaking to the New York Police Department and FBI.

The report, as the Times notes, shows how the Epstein files may “contain material that is embarrassing or politically problematic to” the president, as he continues to dismiss the case as a Democratic hoax, disowning his supporters who remain invested in it after his DOJ effectively closed the case earlier this month.

Details about Trump’s long-documented relationship to Epstein are continuing to surface. Days before the Times report, The Wall Street Journal unearthed a sexually suggestive birthday card Trump reportedly gave Epstein in 2003. (Trump has denied the veracity of the report and is now suing the paper.)

Meanwhile, when asked whether his name appears in the Epstein files, Trump has insisted that the files were concocted by the previous two Democratic administrations.

Donald Trump has become so desperate in trying to change the subject from Jeffrey Epstein, that he’s now started ranting about imprisoning former President Barack Obama.

During a posting spree on Truth Social Sunday night, Trump posted a series of lame memes attacking Obama, after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard suggested last week that the former president should be prosecuted for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy.”

Gabbard released a declassified report alleging that members of the Obama administration had “manufactured and politicized” intelligence to create the narrative that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. It’s worth noting that shortly after the 2016 election, the Obama administration insisted that hackers had not affected the vote tallies.

Gabbard said she would deliver her findings to the Department of Justice to seek long-awaited accountability on behalf of Trump, who, despite twice finding his way back into the White House anyway, obviously never emotionally recovered from the so-called Russiagate “hoax.”

On Truth Social, Trump posted a Brady Bunch–style photo grid of Obama Cabinet officials wearing prison jumpsuits, and a video of different Democratic officials declaring that “no one is above the law” while circus music played. He also shared an AI-generated video of Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and donning prison orange.

This is the third week of fallout from the Trump administration’s disastrous rollout of the Epstein files—or lack thereof. The Justice Department announced earlier this month that the sex offender kept no incriminating “client list,” even though Trump’s attorney general claimed one had been sitting on her desk, sparking widespread backlash among Trump’s conspiracy-addled following. Now Trump hopes to shift the flames by tossing them another political enemy.