“Slush Fund for Crooks”: Republican Town Hall Goes Off the Rails

GOP Representative Mike Flood had yet another disastrous town hall in Norfolk, Nebraska, on Tuesday, as his constituents drowned him out with grievances regarding the war on Iran, the White House ballroom, Jeffrey Epstein, and President Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund.

“Iran war, White House ballroom, security for the White House ballroom, immigration enforcement, Trump arch … the reflecting pool renovation, slush fund for crooks, and the farm bill. How do we pay for all this?” said one Nebraskan, according to CNN.

“I know you’re a lawyer. You’ve taken an oath as a congressman to support the laws of this land. A million Epstein files have still not been released, and … the Epstein Transparency Act you signed, the Senate signed, Trump signed, yet we still have millions of files that still have not been released,” Fremont resident Kim Stabbe asked Flood. “We know that Trump is in them tons of times; why do you continue to protect the pedophiles and Trump’s DOJ as they continue to break the law?”

“We have passed a law to release the Epstein files,” Flood replied. “Do you think that under President Joe Biden’s four years in the White House, if President Trump was in the Epstein files, it would have been released?” He was met with boos and jeers. Flood toed a hawkish line on Iran, conceding that “everything costs too much,” while in the same breath maintaining support for the war that is making everything cost so much, stating, “I also don’t want Iran with a nuclear weapon.”

The only thing Flood seemed to fully agree with the crowd on was Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund—a shameless plan to direct billions of taxpayer dollars to Trump’s supporters who felt wronged or targeted by the Biden administration—even those who attacked Capitol Police on January 6.

“I do not think we should be creating a fund for people that commit physical violence against law enforcement,” he said. “The Senate is opening an oversight effort. And we in the House have to determine whether we do the same in the Judiciary Committee or in the Oversight Committee. I clearly think Congress needs to have an oversight role in this before I can sign off or support this.”

The hostilities Flood was met with aren’t just local to Norfolk. Americans nationwide are fed up with blatant corruption, another pointless and expensive war in the Middle East, and worrying about how much it’ll cost to fill their tank.

Watch the full town hall here.

The FBI is bleeding agents over the Trump administration’s purity tests.

Deputy Assistant Director Emily Morales was terminated from the bureau last week, in what insiders are claiming is the latest in a string of partisan firings at the hands of FBI Director Kash Patel, reported MS NOW Tuesday.

Morales received a letter from the director Friday and was subsequently walked out of the building with her belongings (as is standard procedure). It was not immediately clear what was in the letter, or why Morales was given the pink slip, but the top intelligence analyst did play a role in a tactical report that angered the GOP—nearly a decade ago.

A shooter opened fire on House Republicans’ baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2017. Representative Steve Scalise sustained life-threatening injuries from the attack, which struck his hip and shattered his bones. A week later, the FBI determined that the attack was not domestic terrorism but “suicide by cop.”

The matter has since been complicated by what former FBI Director Christopher Wray described as an evolving definition of domestic terrorism. In 2021, the FBI provided a statement to the House Appropriations Committee that read, “The shooter was motivated by a desire to commit an attack on Members of Congress.”

“This conduct is something that we would today characterize as a domestic terrorism event,” the statement continued.

Earlier this month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued another report on the attack, accusing the FBI of utilizing “false statements and manipulation of known facts” in order to reach its original conclusion in the 2017 shooting assessment.

But other ousted FBI staffers with experience working on intelligence reports claim that there was nothing atypical about the bureau’s original report. “Tactical reports give an understanding of information as it’s known at the time. Anyone with crisis response experience knows that information can change, and usually does,” Tonya Ugoretz, the former assistant director of the FBI’s Intelligence Directorate, told MS NOW.

Ugoretz was fired several months ago after she contributed to a decision to withdraw a “thinly sourced intelligence report” that alleged “China tried to flood the United States with fake driver’s licenses in order to promote fraud in the 2020 election,” according to MS NOW.

“The FBI’s actions are choking the capabilities that help it stop criminals, spies, hackers, and terrorists before they act,” Ugoretz said. “I don’t know if they’re doing it intentionally or out of ignorance, and I don’t know which is worse.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin doubled down on his idiotic threat to stop processing international flights at airports in sanctuary cities.

Speaking on Fox News’s Hannity Tuesday, Mullin complained that local law enforcement had allowed a chaotic protest outside of New Jersey’s Delaney Hall, a privately operated immigration detention facility under federal jurisdiction. The secretary warned that he’d met with the White House to plot his petty revenge on any city that doesn’t get behind Donald Trump’s sweeping mass deportations.

“We’re currently drawing up plans to say, ‘Listen, in these sanctuary cities, where the local radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either,’” Mullin said. “Because they don’t want us to enforce immigration, but they want us to process immigration at their facilities, nothing about that makes sense to me.”

But Mullin’s plan lacks support from, well, everyone.

The U.S. Travel Association, a nonprofit lobbying group for all aspects of travel, has warned that such an unprecedented action would have “devastating consequences for the travel industry and communities that depend on international visitation.”

Airlines for America, the largest trade association for the industry in the country, also urged against the idea. “Reducing CBP staffing at major airports would have a devastating effect on the airline and tourism industries, causing a significant operational disruption to carriers, travelers and the flow of international cargo,” the group said in a statement.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also opposed Mullin’s plan while appearing at a House Budget Committee hearing last week. “We have people from around the world and around the country that need to be able to fly into all different kinds of places,” he said. “We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics.”

President Trump is raising the U.S. refugee admission limit by 10,000 people—but only for white South Africans.

A signed presidential determination from May 21 obtained by Reuters declared that the U.S. will be giving white South Africans, who are mostly still benefiting from the afterlife of the apartheid system, special treatment so that they can escape the “incitement of racially motivated violence.” The determination refers to “new disruptions” in the region. In a Tuesday announcement in the Federal Register, the president confirmed the news, calling it “an unforeseen emergency refugee situation.”

In reality, this is simply a reaffirmation of his Elon Musk–influenced reshaping of the refugee program, which under Trump, has bent over backward to get Afrikaners in, while denying just about everyone else.

“Farmers are being killed,” Trump said while welcoming white South Africans to the U.S. last May. “They happen to be white. Whether they are white or Black makes no difference to me.” Trump has complained about a “genocide of white people in South Africa,” and even called Afrikaners a “long-persecuted minority group.”

Those claims have been widely debunked for years, and as of 2025, white South Africans own nearly 75 percent of all farmland in the country despite making up just 7 percent of the population.

Even still, the Trump administration has doubled down on this unsuccessful program as direr refugee situations exist elsewhere in the world, and as problems at home worsen by the day.

Construction has begun on the ring for the “UFC Freedom 250” mixed martial arts event, on June 14 at the White House.

Pieces of the blue and white ring could be seen dwarfing the building Tuesday. The structure, according to what President Trump told reporters last month, will be able to hold 4,500 fans for the event, which coincides with Flag Day and Trump’s 80th birthday. An additional 75,000 to 100,000 people will be able to view the contests for free on “massive screens” set up at the Ellipse park south of the White House.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship has released renderings of the octagonal cage on the White House lawn, as well as the massive screen setup on the Ellipse. An arch covered with stars is visible in front of the White House, soaring high above the building, with the cage in front of it.

Staging such an event has attracted criticism for multiple reasons, not least among them the fact that it’s a cash grab for Trump and UFC CEO Dana White. Sponsorship packages for the fights including ringside seats are going for as much as $1.5 million, and neither the White House nor the UFC has said where the money is going.

While tickets are technically free, the president and the fight organizations are choosing who gets in, and that could include anyone from business executives to foreign leaders. White told The New Yorker this month that he has 200 tickets to give out, while Trump has 1,000. The CEO of UFC’s parent company, TKO Group Holdings, Ari Emanuel, has 200 tickets to distribute, according to White, and the rest of the tickets will allegedly go to members of the U.S. military. But the whole process is extremely opaque.

The event will include weigh-ins held at the Lincoln Memorial, various fan events on the National Mall, fireworks, and a light show, and will supposedly cost $60 million. While the UFC is paying for the White House ring’s construction, it’s not paying for the gargantuan security costs, which will be covered by taxpayers. Making America Great Again, indeed.

The “Broadview Six,” the anti-ICE protesters whom the federal government tried to slap with felony conspiracy charges carrying a maximum sentence of six years in prison, had their case thrown out last week after District Judge April Perry determined top federal prosecutor Andrew Boutros botched the case.

Things are now getting even worse for Boutros and his team.

Christopher Parente, an attorney for one of the six defendants, suggested on Tuesday that Boutros had improper personal contact with the grand jury. After the allegation came to light, Perry summoned the lawyers present to discuss the matter privately in her chamber.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur said her fellow prosecutors would likely accept the release of grand jury transcripts, subject to redactions, so the public may be able to see what kind of personal contact Boutros had with the jurors in the future.

The “Broadview Six” were arrested after surrounding an ICE agent’s SUV outside a detention center in Broadview, Illinois, in September in an attempt to slow it down. The crowd “pushed and scratched and otherwise damaged,” the vehicle, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Like many charges made against anti-ICE protesters, the government’s over-the-top prosecution failed to hold up. The government first gave up on charging two of the six. Then they threw out conspiracy charges against the other four—Brian Straw, Michael Rabbitt, Andre Martin, and then–congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh—and instead tried to convict them of a far less serious crime: one misdemeanor count each for impeding a federal agent.

In the end, Boutros couldn’t even do that. He dropped the charges with prejudice—meaning they cannot be refiled—after being criticized by Perry for more grand jury misconduct. Boutros’s assistants took transcripts of themselves explaining conspiracy law to the jury pool, then reportedly redacted some of the transcripts when Perry asked for them.

According to the Sun-Times, these transcripts included proof of one prosecutor staking her personal credibility in order to support the charges, another communicating with jurors outside the assigned jury room, and a third excusing jurors who didn’t agree with the prosecution’s argument.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing fire from his own people.

The U.S. health secretary has angered anti-vax activists by extending liability protections to drugmakers working on a hantavirus vaccine.

Kennedy signed a Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness, or PREP, Act declaration late last week, giving pharmaceutical companies additional legal coverage as they work on experimental treatments—such as favipiravir—during the public health crisis.

“This action helps remove barriers to research and response efforts while we continue monitoring the recent outbreak linked to the South Atlantic cruise ship,” Kennedy wrote on X earlier this month.

The expanded legal protections permit the companies to treat passengers possibly exposed to the Andes hantavirus strain, or individuals who were in close contact with people on board the M/V Hondius cruise ship.

But acolytes of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda were not swayed. One such skeptical supporter was Kennedy’s former campaign communications director Del Bigtree, who questioned whether Kennedy was sticking to his guns on corporate accountability.

“Bobby, I remember so many inspiring strategy discussions during your campaign. Providing liability protection to corporate interests for a virus that killed three people out of seven billion was not one of them,” Bigtree wrote.

Kennedy, however, was undeterred.

“Don’t believe Internet fearmongers. [The Department of Health and Human Services] defends public health AND supports medical freedom—period,” Kennedy wrote in a separate post over the weekend, underscoring that the latest HHS action doesn’t pave the way for a new mRNA vaccine or offer Big Pharma limitless protections from liability.

More than 40 people in the U.S. are currently being monitored in connection to a hantavirus outbreak aboard a Rotterdam-bound cruise ship last month. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that there are currently no cases in the U.S. and that risk to the general public remains “extremely low.” So far, the rare disease has caused 11 confirmed infections and three deaths in connection with the ship.

A Dutch couple were identified by the WHO as the first passengers infected with the virus. It is believed that they were exposed to the virus while birdwatching at an Argentinian landfill. Both the husband and wife died as a result.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has been embroiled in a yearlong lawsuit with two former clients who have accused him of malpractice and forgery.

Vanity Fair reported that twin brothers Adam and Daniel Kaplan, both New York financial advisers, sought Blanche’s services through the Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft law firm in 2021 over concerns they would soon be prosecuted for fraud by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The brothers claimed that Blanche told them they’d receive a massive discount from the firm, and that he “did not want to make money on the representation.”

Yet just a year later, the Kaplans owed Blanche and Cadwalader over $1.65 million. Blanche pulled his representation in 2022 over the debt, and the Kaplans sued the following year, accusing him of forging their signatures on an engagement document and misleading them regarding the fees. Blanche and Cadwalader denied all allegations, and countersued the twins for their debt of more than $1 million in 2023—the same year Blanche became Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and just two years before Blanche became the most powerful prosecutor in America.

The Kaplans were later convicted on 16 counts of money laundering and wire fraud, in July 2023, one month after they filed their lawsuit. But they still haven’t dropped their suit, which raises serious questions about the attorney general’s ethics. The case is expected to continue through the year.

White House staffers are losing their minds over media coverage pointing out that the president often falls asleep on camera. 

The Trump administration’s Rapid Response 47 X account spent much of Tuesday attacking CNN with photos and short videos of the network’s hosts blinking or looking down, facetiously claiming that they were sleeping or showing signs of decline. 

The schoolyard taunts began just after 12:30 p.m., taking aim at CNN personalities including Kate Bolduan, Kevin Liptak, Dana Bash, Jake Tapper (calling him FAKE TAPPER), and Brianna Keilar, posting photos of all of them with story chyrons about Trump’s health. Even guests who don’t work for the network but were interviewed about Trump’s sleeping habits, such as The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey and Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Jeremy Faust, were targeted.

Earlier in the day, President Trump went to Walter Reed for his third medical checkup in 13 months. CNN has been covering the event, pointing to past incidents that raise concerns about the president’s health. Trump said Tuesday that “everything checked out PERFECTLY” at his visit, but did not offer more details.

The White House press office has often resorted to trolling in the past, including using “your mom” taunts against reporters it disagrees with. White House communications director Steven Cheung has basically made hurling insults at reporters his full-time job, and called Democratic Senate staffer Rachel Cohen a “retard” last month.  

It also does little to combat the indisputable evidence of Trump’s visible cognitive decline and his issues staying awake. At nearly every televised meeting during his second term as president, Trump can be seen dozing off as someone else speaks, whether it’s a member of his Cabinet or even a foreign leader. White House staffers can make all of the sarcastic social media posts they want, but all of us can plainly see Trump’s physical condition every time he’s on camera. 

South Carolina has decided not to get involved in President Donald Trump’s redistricting war.

The state Senate voted 24–20 Tuesday to leave their House districts alone for the upcoming midterm elections. Twelve Republicans broke ranks to join all Democrat state senators in the decision, which will likely save the state’s one blue seat held by Representative James Clyburn.

A few Republican legislators, such as state Senator Richard Cash, changed their votes due to timing. Early voting in South Carolina primaries began on Tuesday.

“Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway,” Cash said.

The state Senate will now recess until June 10. State primaries take place a day prior, eliminating GOP hopes of gerrymandering before the midterms.

Mid-decade redistricting was a rarity until Trump broke precedent in July 2025, when he called on Texas Governor Greg Abbot to redraw his state’s maps in order to benefit Republicans. The dutiful Abbot and Texas’s MAGA majority approved the change, kicking off a gerrymandering war. Republicans got an additional boost in April after the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to meddle with majority-Black and Latino House districts.

Missouri, Florida, Tennessee, Ohio, and North Carolina have approved maps expected to create new red seats, while California and Utah have done the same on the blue side. Virginia voters approved a Democratic gerrymander before their state Supreme Court overturned it on May 8.

South Carolina’s decision is a surprise rebuke to Trump. On May 14, Governor Henry McMaster called a special session to redistrict while under pressure from the Trump administration; it was widely accepted Clyburn’s seat would disappear. Republicans who voted to keep the maps as is may now find Trump endorsing their primary challengers in future elections, as the president continues to rage against anyone who dares advocate for fair elections.

This story has been updated.