Democrats Moves to Subpoena Top Officials Behind Trump Slush Fund

Democrats are doing what they can to stop President Donald Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department and his self-serving use of taxpayer money.

On Wednesday morning, Representative Jamie Raskin, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, moved to subpoena acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and other officials involved in the creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund, which is expected to be used to pay out Trump allies who feel they were wronged by previous administrations.

The committee vote on the subpoena will be Wednesday afternoon. Republicans have the numbers to block it, though Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch noted that “it’s not a favorable vote politically.”

Trump’s slush fund was announced on Monday by the Department of Justice (remember when that used to be an independent body?) as part of a settlement in Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The lawsuit was filed over the president’s tax returns, which were leaked to the press by an IRS contractor in 2018 after Trump repeatedly refused to release them.

Critics and policy experts have labeled the slush fund one of the most blatantly corrupt moves the Trump administration has ever made, and Democrats seem to agree.

In addition to the subpoena, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee and the Ways and Means Committee submitted a congressional inquiry to the White House on Wednesday containing 10 questions about what the hell is going on. They are similarly questioning the president’s newfound immunity from any IRS investigations into his and his family’s tax returns.

“The American people and the world just witnessed one of the most brazen acts of public corruption and self-dealing in American history,” the inquiry reads.

The president said he is in no rush to end the Iran war—and could be about to drag his own party down in the process.

One day after promising to end his Middle East conflict in “two or three days,” Donald Trump told reporters that he is in “no hurry” to make a deal with Iran.

“Everyone is saying, ‘Oh, the midterms,’” Trump said to reporters at Joint Base Andrews Wednesday. “I’m in no hurry.”

It’s a dramatically different timeline from the one Trump offered Tuesday, in which the president stated in no uncertain terms that Tehran had until Sunday to come to the negotiating table.

“I’m saying two or three days. Maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday, something,” Trump said outside the White House as construction workers hammered away at his $1 billion ballroom project. “A limited period of time. Because we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon. If they had a nuclear weapon, they would start with Israel, they would blow it up and they would blow it up fast. But they would blow it up.”

“It would be nuclear holocaust,” Trump said, imagining the future if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon.

But now it seems the president is happy to take his time, a move that could hurt Republican candidates come November. The vast majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war. A New York Times/Siena poll released Monday revealed that some 64 percent of the country feels that going to war with Iran was the wrong decision, while more than half of respondents said that the war will not be worth its cost.

The war itself—which has so far lasted roughly 12 weeks—is costing the U.S. about $1 billion per day, according to early estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. But Trump’s warmongering has made life more expensive for people everywhere, due to the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on several major oil and gas facilities.

The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.55 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started.

Costs have also gone up for the rest of the world, a reality that has only aggravated U.S. alliances.

The situation has become so dire that Trump’s Cabinet members have stopped speculating as to when prices will actually go back down. Analysts, meanwhile, have projected that gas and oil costs will likely continue to climb—potentially even after midterms.

Republicans are already frustrated with Trump for backing primary candidates who openly support him, rather than candidates who are likely to perform well in a general election. If the war is still dragging on when voters head to the polls in the fall, who knows what will happen to the GOP.

Jeff Bezos is still sucking up to President Trump, even as his approval rating is at an all-time low.

In an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin Wednesday morning, the billionaire Amazon founder was asked about what he thought of President Trump’s second term amid tariffs and the war in Iran, and the tech CEO went out of his way to praise the president.

“I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term,” Bezos said. “Trump has lots of good ideas and been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.”

“I’m on the side of America, and that’s where business leaders should be,” Bezos continued.

Earlier in the interview, Bezos was asked point-blank whether he is trying to placate Trump, citing the Melania documentary Amazon Prime made about the first lady.

“The Melania thing is a falsehood that will not die,” Bezos said, denying that he personally had anything to do with producing the movie or that a deal was reached at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. But, he still defended the documentary as a “good business decision.”

“It did very well in theaters, it’s done very well on streaming, people are very curious about Melania, so even though I had nothing to do with it, you know, it appears that the Amazon team made a very wise business decision,” Bezos said.

Amazon spent $40 million to acquire Melania and spent $35 million to market the film, and only ended up making about $16.7 million from its worldwide theatrical release. Based on those figures, it can hardly be considered a good business decision, unless the goal was to curry favor with the White House.

Bezos is ignoring Trump’s negative effect on the economy, from his arbitrary tariffs to the impact of the Iran war, because he wants to benefit from being on Trump’s good side. Americans are struggling as a result, and they’ve lost confidence in the president. But not Bezos, who has gone for broke in currying favor with Trump. He’s shifted the newspaper that he owns, The Washington Post, further towards the right, losing thousands of subscribers, and has decimated the publication’s staff with layoffs. But none of that matters if it keeps the president from messing with your cash flow.

MAGA loyalists may be winning their primaries—but the Republican Party isn’t so sure that their winning streak will last through November.

Several of Donald Trump’s endorsees won their primaries over the last week, beating out prominent conservative Trump critics including Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie. But the president’s wins are creating a new headache for his legislative allies.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are concerned that Trump’s exclusive focus on pushing his political acolytes will come at a cost to their legislative majority in the upper and lower chambers, Politico reported Tuesday.

“Those so-called victories over the last couple weeks are just a mirage. They are self-owns,” one senior Senate Republican operative told the outlet. “We’re not actually beating Democrats, and we’re not actually advancing legislation. Instead, gas is up 45 percent due to our actions and the President’s decision to go to war with Iran. He’s focused on the ballroom. He’s announced a $1.8 billion restitution fund with zero details or congressional authority to do so. It just is crazy.”

Cassidy, in the few days since his recent loss, has morphed into something of a free agent apparently unbeholden to the Republican Party or the president: On Tuesday, the Louisiana lawmaker voted in favor of the war powers resolution for the first time, advancing the Democratic-led effort to end the Iran war.

“There are still many, many months to go before the election, and this president is going to have to continue to deal and work with, and partner with, or battle with this group of lawmakers,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters after the vote. “Even though Bill Cassidy lost his primary, he is still a voting member of the Senate until January.… So the president may have just opened some opportunities for people.”

Lawmakers are also reportedly grumbling about Trump’s choice to endorse Ken Paxton, Texas’s scandal-laden attorney general, for the Lone Star State’s GOP senatorial primary instead of Senator John Cornyn. Trump directly contradicted Senate Majority Leader John Thune by picking his own man in the race, and created new problems for the GOP’s fundraising arm, which had already spent some $90 million supporting Cornyn’s candidacy.

Trump’s preference boils down to loyalty, according to Punchbowl News: Paxton has been “extremely loyal” to the president, while Cornyn was apparently “very late in backing” Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.

It was a gamble and a loss for the nation’s conservative party, which had twisted and wrought itself in order to earn the president’s favor. Cornyn has done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his career, becoming one of the party’s biggest earners by bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races.

Paxton and Cornyn are slated for a runoff race on May 26. But Trump’s choice could cost Republicans more than the Senate seat as the party is forced to decide whether to divert more financial resources to Texas in support of Cornyn or to reserve the funds for battleground states such as Georgia, Michigan, Maine, and Ohio.

Further still, the president appears to be throwing caution to the wind as he fails to adequately address—or solve—the nation’s teetering oil and gas crisis. The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.53 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before Trump sparked a war with Iran. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are above $7 per gallon.

Meanwhile, Trump is planning to spend billions of dollars to reshape Washington in his image by way of his White House ballroom project, the “Triumphal Arch” near Arlington National Cemetery, repainting the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall, installing a golf course next to the Potomac, and plastering his face and name on federal buildings.

Donald Trump’s allies are racing to get a piece of his $1.8 billion slush fund.

Michael Caputo served in the Trump administration during his first term as a campaign strategist and spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he interfered with CDC findings on Covid. He is now seeking $2.7 million in damages from the government, claiming his life was upended after being investigated as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe in 2016.

“I was the target of the illegal Crossfire Hurricane investigation and our family suffered greatly during that dark era of political weaponization,” Caputo wrote in a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche obtained by CNN. He claimed he was still under FBI investigation as recently as December 2025.

“They found nothing; we lost everything,” he wrote.

Caputo resided in Russia in the 1990s while an employee of the U.S. government. The Mueller report determined he had helped arrange a meeting between Roger Stone—Trump’s campaign manager and close associate—and a Russian agent, for the purpose of sharing information about Hillary Clinton.

But who cares what FBI investigations say when your buddy is president? Now Caputo can get a huge chunk of taxpayer money because he thinks he was wronged by people Trump doesn’t like.

Caputo is the first to publicly seek damages after the slush fund was created, but he won’t be the last.

The Department of Justice has not said exactly who can profit off the fund, but hundreds of Trump allies—including January 6 rioters and members of Trump’s own super PAC—could theoretically get a piece of the pie.

Despite losing his primary battle Tuesday night, Representative Thomas Massie came out swinging in his concession speech. 

The Kentucky congressman came out to chants of “Massie, Massie!” from his supporters, and referenced AIPAC’s backing of his Trump-endorsed opponent, Ed Gallrein. 

“I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv,” Massie quipped. “I did get the call through though, I have called and conceded the race. We’ve been honorable the whole time, and we’re gonna stay that way.” 

Massie drew the ire of the president after breaking with him on key issues, including aid to Israel, the war in Iran, and perhaps most notable of all, the Epstein files. Trump attacked Massie relentlessly and practically campaigned in his backyard, but the congressman didn’t let up on his stances. Despite his loss,  Massie vowed to press on in his final seven months on the job. 

“By the way, today is the six-month anniversary of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. We’ve taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture, and that was just six months. I’ve got seven months left in Congress,” Massie said as the crowd began chanting his name. 

MAGA voters are becoming more and more disillusioned with the president’s performance.

“Matt from Las Vegas” tore into Donald Trump during a call-in segment on Real America’s Voice Tuesday, furious with the White House about how it has handled the Iran war—and the narrative the administration has packaged and sold to its voter base in the interim.

“If we so decimated Iran’s Navy and Air Force, how come we can’t get a ship through the Strait of Hormuz?” asked the caller. “Whose intelligence are they insulting?

“If they don’t have a Navy, how can they stop ships? What are they using to stop ships and redirect ships?” the caller continued. “I’m being lied to by my own government and, I hate to say, Mr. Trump. And I love Donald Trump. But you know, all this—they’re annihalating—they’re full of shit.”

“Iran won this round, as far as I’m concerned,” he added.

The cost of oil and gas has gone through the roof since the war began, a fact that has only been aggravated by Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for the region’s trade.

The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.53 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are above $7 per gallon.

The situation has become so dire that Trump’s Cabinet members have stopped speculating as to when prices will actually go back down. Analysts, meanwhile, have projected that gas and oil costs will likely continue to climb—potentially even after the midterms.

The strait has largely remained closed, despite several attempts to reopen the trade point amid rocky peace negotiations.

The war itself—which has so far lasted roughly 12 weeks—is costing the U.S. about $1 billion per day, according to early estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Matt from Las Vegas further claimed that Iran had Trump “by the short hairs” over the economic disruption, and had put the White House in a position in which it had to beg China for help.

“And I kind of think that we’re a paper tiger, just like Russia,” the caller concluded.

The show host, Eric Bolling, pushed back, claiming that Iran’s “mosquito boats” and underwater mining operation were sufficient to keep the area on lockdown.

“We didn’t lose, they got crushed, they’re clearly the losers on this,” Bolling said desperately.

Call it a Nordic hello.

When Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry—who is, for some reason, President Donald Trump’s new special envoy to Greenland—touched down in the capital city of Nuuk on Sunday, he got a frosty reception, including a middle finger from one resident, The New York Times reports.

Landry’s weird ideas of diplomacy probably didn’t help much. The governor went around offering local children MAGA hats—a few politely declined—and telling them that if they visited his Louisiana mansion, he’d give them “all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”

In response, Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told Landry to relax.

“We have our red lines,” he told the Denmark public broadcasting service. “No matter how many chocolate cookies we get, we are not going to change them.”

Landry was asked about the response by reporters. “There’s only one line and it’s red, white, and blue,” he shot back.

This isn’t the first time a Trump official has tried and spectacularly failed to charm the island. Vice President JD Vance toured a Greenland military base with his wife, Usha, for just three hours in 2025. He had reportedly planned a longer visit before being cold-shouldered by locals.

The people of Greenland clearly haven’t taken a liking to the Trump administration, which has repeatedly mocked their status as an autonomous territory with comments about making it the fifty-first state. Trump has an ongoing obsession with acquiring Greenland for supposed military and trade purposes, publicly musing about buying or just straight-up annexing the island.

The Danish military reportedly began preparing for a ground invasion of Greenland in January, shipping blood supplies to the island and cooking up plans to blow up its own runways if attacked.

Trump’s threat of invading the chilly territory has abated as the weather has warmed, but it’s good to see the people of Greenland continue to give his administration the reception they deserve.

The Trump administration is fighting a court order to bring back a Colombian immigrant it deported to the Democratic Republic of Congo, claiming it can’t do so because of the country’s Ebola outbreak.

Gothamist reports that the Department of Homeland Security is arguing that Adriana Zapata, 55, can’t come back to the U.S. even though she was deported to the country a month ago.

On Monday, DHS cited a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order preventing anyone from traveling to the U.S. from areas affected by the outbreak. Zapata’s lawyers say that she was deported to Congo well before the outbreak was announced, and she’s staying in the capital, Kinshasa, which hasn’t had any cases. On Tuesday, her lawyers pointed out in a court filing that Zapata already had medical conditions before being deported to a country that said it couldn’t care for her, and now she is particularly vulnerable in the midst of an Ebola outbreak.

At the time of Zapata’s deportation, Congolese officials said that they couldn’t care for her medical issues, which include “diabetes accompanied by black spots on her foot and back, peeling skin, blackened nails, and other manifestations consistent with severe vascular and metabolic disease.” In the U.S., she would get medical care with help from relatives in New Jersey. A federal judge ruled in 2024 that Zapata could not be returned to the country of her birth, Colombia, because she faced the likelihood of torture from her former intimate partner.

Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, appointed by President George W. Bush, ruled that the U.S. government had to bring Zapata back to the U.S. Zapata had sued the federal government, and described how her ex-partner, who has connections to the Colombian National Police, had physically and sexually abused her, including stabbing her in her genitalia, repeatedly raping her, breaking her teeth, and cutting cross-shaped scars into her chest.

On Friday, lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security responded to Leon’s ruling and claimed that they didn’t know where Zapata was and were working “diligently” to find her in Congo, claiming that Zapata’s attorneys hadn’t told them her location.

The next day, Zapata’s lawyers responded in their own filing, saying that DHS had not even reached out to them, pointing out that Zapata’s address in Congo was mentioned in earlier court filings and was shared with DHS in court the day before. On Monday, DHS lawyers tried another tactic, filing a status report asking for Leon to pause his order because the country’s Ebola outbreak, announced last week by Congolese officials, made it unsafe to bring her back to the U.S.

“The premise of plaintiff’s request for conditions upon her return is for her to receive medical monitoring in the United States,” Zapata’s lawyers wrote in the filing.

DHS claims that the Democratic Republic of Congo had sent documentation saying that it could care for Zapata, prompting skepticism from Zapata’s lawyers on Tuesday. They pointed out that as recently as last Wednesday, Congo hadn’t said it could care for Zapata and that the U.S. government was using its agreement with the country as its justification for deporting her.

Sending a woman with serious medical issues to a country she has no ties to is cruel enough. But refusing to obey a court order to allow her back into the U.S. because of an outbreak that arose after she was deported is an obscene act of callousness, even for this administration. It seems clear that they are grasping at legal straws to keep Zapata from returning, ignoring her own safety.

The Internal Revenue Services’ own lawyers wanted to convince the Justice Department to dismiss Trump’s $10 billion case against them, outlining several massive issues with the lawsuit that could have served as defense against the suit, according to The New York Times. The DOJ instead chose to settle with the president, awarding him a nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a slush fund for his supporters and friends.

The 25-page IRS memorandum was given to top Treasury officials last month but it’s unclear if it ever made it to the DOJ. The memo stated that Trump’s lawsuit was filed two years too late. Federal statute requires that people suing the IRS for unfairly released tax information must do so within two years of the infraction. Trump claimed not to have known about the tax information leak until January 2024, but the memo notes that Alina Habba—one of Trump’s personal lawyers—was present at the trial of IRS leaker Charles Littlejohn in October 2023. Trump did not file a complaint until January 2026, over two years later.

The IRS also raised that it may not even be accountable for Littlejohn’s actions, as he was a contractor with Booz Allen with IRS access, not an IRS employee. Regardless of whether these arguments would have worked, it’s clear that the DOJ—controlled by another one of Trump’s personal lawyers—had no intention of making them.