Trump Moves to Make It Easier to Bribe Public Officials

The Trump administration is moving to strip a rule barring private equity officials from engaging in “pay-to-play” schemes with government officials.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is planning to revoke Rule 206(4)-5 under the Investment Advisers Act, arguing that it chills employees’ political speech. The regulation, known as the “Pay-to-Play” Rule, bars investment advisers from getting paid to advise government clients for two years after making a political contribution to certain officials and candidates.

In the 16 years since the rule was implemented, it has only resulted in a handful of penalties. The proposed change comes after private equity spending increased in 2024, and flipped towards Republicans.

SEC Commissioner Mark T. Uyeda released a statement last week arguing that the “blanket ban” had functionally undermined advisers’ constitutional rights. “Many investment advisers found it easier to simply prohibit all political contributions by their employees, thereby chilling speech and conduct otherwise protected by the First Amendment,” Uyeda said.

But the rule was intentionally written to be broad in order to address the difficulties state and local prosecutors had in proving quid pro quo deals, Axios reported Tuesday.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins also released a statement last week supporting the proposal, claiming that the rule “discourages full participation in the electoral process through contributions to candidates.”

“People should not have to choose between their political-speech rights and a job in a particular industry,” he said.

If approved, the change will unleash a flood of bribes to public officials, and even invite private equity to pay tithes to President Donald Trump himself.

The Department of Homeland Security is running a police unit that uses Americans’ financial records to predict whether they could commit crimes and is turning over their names to local police.

404 Media reports that the DHS’s Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams, or PITT, are feeding intelligence to local law enforcement, who are then pulling people over who are not suspected of any specific crimes. In one case, a PITT unit analyzed the financial activity of Kyle Olson, who was driving across Montana. Local police pulled him over, claiming that his license plate was obstructed. He was later charged with a DUI, according to the publication.

The documents from that case are what led to 404 Media’s discovery. Olson was provided a DHS document explaining the rationale behind his traffic stop, written by Border Patrol Agent Matthew Phelps, who is assigned to the “Spokane Sector Border Patrol Targeting & Intelligence Division (TID)—Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team (PITT).”

Phelps wrote that his job entails reviewing “law enforcement–sensitive databases,” including financial activity, to build intelligence before the government hands it over to local police. Phelps handed over “information contained within law enforcement-sensitive systems suggesting financial activity patterns commonly associated with illicit narcotics activity,” the document states. He handed it over to Montana Highway Patrol, who pulled over Olson.

“It was relayed to me by U.S. Border Patrol targeting analyst Matthew Phelps that he had identified a vehicle that had indicators of possible narcotics trafficking,” wrote Sergeant James Beck of the Montana Highway Patrol. Olson had marijuana edibles, marijuana cuttings, and butane hash oil in his car from his job at a licensed cannabis farm in California, which he was transporting to his home in Wisconsin.

At least one PITT unit is based near Spokane, Washington, and patrols the U.S.-Canada border, while another is based near Laredo, Texas, near the border with Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, which is also part of DHS, already uses automatic license plate readers, and those are integrated into the agency’s predictive policing tactics.

The concept is ostensibly to find people who may have already committed crimes, but 404 Media didn’t find any instances of this occurring. Instead, the government seems to be using predictive policing to create pretexts to pull over and detain people. Border Patrol refused to answer the publication’s questions about what financial activity it’s monitoring, and if it had a warrant to pull over Olson.

A CPB spokesperson told 404 Media in an email that “U.S. Border Patrol uses intelligence-informed analysis and planning to support national security operations, allocate resources, and help identify potential threats and bad actors to public safety. These efforts are conducted consistent with applicable law, policy, privacy protections, and oversight requirements.”

“For operational security reasons, we do not discuss specific analytical methods, data sources, targeting criteria, investigative techniques, system capabilities, or deployment details. Public disclosure of such information could compromise law enforcement operations and investigations as well as creating safety risks for agents and the public,” the statement said.

The units raise a number of disturbing questions about whether the Trump administration is obtaining data illegally, then using it to illegally charge people with crimes. The Trump administration has shown numerous times that it’s willing to flout the Constitution, and in this age of mass surveillance, it doesn’t seem to feel limited in any way.

A Georgia National Guardsman was arrested earlier this month in Washington after he allegedly pulled a loaded gun on a fellow guardswoman on one of the city’s busiest streets.

Specialist Zion Mitchell, 21, was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a firearm during a crime of violence, according to an arrest affidavit filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

The heated exchange took place in a black van, stationed outside of a Popeyes on northeast H Street, where six other members of the National Guard bore witness.

The victim, who was not identified in the affidavit save for a detail connecting her to New Jersey, told investigators that the original disagreement was over hairstyles, and whether their respective ones followed current Army regulations as set by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. At one point, Mitchell allegedly told her he would “slap the Jackson 5 out of you.”

The victim was seated shotgun in the vehicle, while Mitchell was in the row just behind, to her left. After a fiery back-and-forth, the victim said she heard what she could only describe as hearing a “holster click.” One of the witnesses then accused Mitchell of having “almost shot” them in the hand, according to the affidavit.

The victim did not know until other National Guard members informed her after the fact that Mitchell had drawn his weapon and pointed it at her.

One witness confirmed that Mitchell’s weapon was loaded at the time, with a round in the chamber. Another told authorities that the victim had previously shared that Mitchell frequently threatened women, and that the two of them had allegedly not gotten along since she rejected his advances.

Thousands of National Guard members have been patrolling Washington’s streets since Donald Trump ordered their deployment to the supposedly crime-addled capital last summer (violent crime in Washington is at a 30-year low, according to federal estimates).

Guard members told NPR last month that they felt Trump had “exploited” the National Guard. The seemingly pointless mission—which has amounted to little more than installing a military presence in the city—had left such a bad taste in the mouths of some members that they questioned whether they should fulfill their duties at all.

“If we continue down this path, where this kind of ‘presence patrol’ mission becomes the new definitive image of the National Guard, it’s going to completely rebrand everything that was noble about the National Guard into being mundane at best and threatening at worst,” one guard member told the public radio syndicate.

The Smithsonian’s chief official, Lonnie G. Bunch III, will retire by the end of the year.

The 73-year-old historian said Tuesday that his decision to step down was not tied to the various pressures stemming from the Trump administration, which has spent the last year and a half strong-arming Smithsonian officials into revising portions of U.S. history.

Bunch founded the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and became the Smithsonian’s first Black leader in 2019, overseeing 21 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, numerous research centers, and several education units and centers. Over the course of his career, Bunch spent 38 years working for the institution, advancing public education.

“I have spent nearly half of my life working at and being part of the Smithsonian family, and what a privilege it has been,” Bunch wrote in a statement. “There is no place like the Smithsonian—it has been one of the great loves of my life, and I am extraordinarily proud of what we have accomplished together. I leave with pride and sadness, gratitude and joy, and with enormous confidence in the people who will carry this remarkable institution forward.”

Bunch’s exit will nonetheless catapult the institution into another era of tumult and change, at a time when federal forces have already placed dramatic emphasis on the organization’s restructuring.

Last summer, the White House sparked alarm among Smithsonian staffers after officials laid out detailed plans to eliminate exhibits that they determined represented “improper ideology.” The memo challenged the application of educational lenses on race, gender, and oppression in U.S. history, and accused the Smithsonian directly of advancing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.”

The administration’s critiques were eugenics-adjacent, torching a specific Smithsonian exhibit for accurately describing race as something that is “not a biological reality but a social construct.” The White House further flamed the institution for emphasizing that “race is a human invention.”

Failure to correct these wrongs would turn the faucet off on funding for the world’s largest educational institution, effectively crippling the Smithsonian and nixing two-thirds of the organization’s revenue. Smithsonian staffers described the situation as an “impossible position,” arguing that the Trump administration had ordered them to be nonpartisan while forcing them to follow an extraordinarily partisan directive.

Around the same time, the Smithsonian removed Donald Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under direct pressure from the White House. The “American Presidency” wing’s revised signage explained that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal” over the course of American history. The change was the result of a White House–initiated content review in the wake of an art director’s ousting.

Much of the institution’s compliance was a part of a broader effort to save Bunch’s job, as staffers have described him as “loved” and “respected.”

The pressure has not let up. In June, Trump signed an executive order offering his administration officials unprecedented control over the independent organization’s operations in an effort to “restore trust.” The executive order cited a report by the president’s Domestic Policy Council that claimed the Smithsonian “does not present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated, but instead views American history as a ‘prime tool’ to advance ideas of social justice and the radical transformation of our society.”

President Donald Trump has spent months falsely claiming that the United States has already won its war against Iran—until now.

“Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday. “Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon.”

Trump has previously claimed the U.S. had already “won” the war against Iran at least 66 times, according to an analysis by The Daily Beast.

Trump’s pledge to bring gas prices down came after Americans saw record high fuel prices for Labor Day weekend, and diesel prices jumped to their own record high.

Now Trump is promising to get gas prices down to less than $2 a gallon—but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. The White House is secretly planning to escalate military action against Iran after the midterm elections in November, which Republicans may find a lot harder to win without Trump securing a decisive victory in the Middle East.