After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, dismissed concerns that his private equity firm would be a vehicle to buy foreign influence.

In December 2024, Kushner said that he “preemptively” raised $1.5 billion earlier that year. The $1.5 billion came from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Lunate, an investment fund linked to the UAE government.

The influx of cash, Kushner said, would allow his firm “to avoid any conflicts” and ensure “we don’t have to raise capital for the next four years.” Kushner made the comments on the December 20, 2024, edition of “Invest Like The Best,” a podcast hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy.

Kushner’s claim that he would not raise additional money during Trump’s presidency to avoid conflicts turned out to be a lie.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that Kushner “has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners.” Kushner’s team has “already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund [PIF].” PIF, Kushner’s biggest client, invested $2 billion with Affinity Partners in 2021. According to the report, Kushner is also seeking additional funds from Qatar and the UAE.

Kushner reportedly tried to drum up new investments while at the World Economic Forum in Davos as part of the official Trump administration delegation.

Kushner is seeking billions in additional funding from the Saudi government as he serves as one of Trump’s top negotiators with Iran. Notably, “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman [MBS] made multiple private phone calls to Trump” in February, advocating a U.S. attack,” according to reporting in the Washington Post. Last week, Trump said Kushner was one of a handful of top advisers who convinced him to launch major combat operations in Iran. According to CNN, the UAE was also lobbying the Trump administration to strike Iran.

After leaving the White House in 2021 and quickly accepting billions from PIF, Kushner acted as a de facto foreign policy advisor to Saudi Arabia. According to a Reuters report, Kushner advised MBS on “U.S.-Saudi diplomatic negotiations involving Israel…multiple times.” Since Trump’s second inauguration, Kushner has resumed his role as one of his father-in-law’s most important foreign policy advisors. Kushner has been one of the administration’s top diplomats for nearly every major foreign policy issue — from the war in Ukraine to Gaza to Iran.

Kushner’s deep involvement with the Trump administration’s foreign policy also breaks a pledge he made before Trump’s second term.

In February 2024, at an event hosted by Axios, Kushner was asked whether accepting billions in investments from Middle Eastern governments would make it “very difficult… to do any sort of foreign policy work” in a second Trump administration.

“I’m an investor now,” Kushner replied. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.” Axios titled the video, “Jared Kushner tells Axios he will not join Trump’s administration.”

During the December 2024 podcast with O’Shaughnessy, Kushner presented himself as law-abiding and scrupulously ethical. At the same time, Kushner insisted his critics were ignorant people who did not understand how business is done. “I’m not going to allow people like the media or these ethics experts, who quite frankly don’t have real jobs and get paid to try to find potential conflicts that don’t exist, to change what we think and what we’re going to do,” Kushner said.

Kushner’s dual role and the Constitution

Is it permissible for Kushner to hold a key position in the Trump administration while simultaneously accepting tens of millions in fees from foreign governments? Not according to the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits someone “holding any Office of Profit or Trust” from the federal government from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Previously, the Trump administration claimed that Kushner had no “office” and was simply acting as a volunteer. This argument was unlikely to withstand scrutiny, since the legal test is an individual’s actions, not the label assigned. Kushner is conducting high-level diplomacy on behalf of the Trump administration.

But all doubt was eliminated on February 19, when Trump named Kushner a Special Envoy for Peace. That designation formalized his role with the Trump administration and triggered a requirement to file a public financial disclosure within 30 days. Steve Witkoff, who participates in most negotiations, is also a Special Envoy and has filed his financial disclosure.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a government watchdog group, sent a letter to White House Counsel David Warrington last week highlighting this requirement. “As you know, collecting Mr. Kushner’s disclosure report is a critical first step, potentially followed by any needed divestment, changes to trust arrangements, or other steps as required by OGE to ensure that he is in compliance with federal law and the Constitution,” CREW wrote.

Kushner has five days left to comply.

President Trump imposed sweeping global tariffs during his first year as president. To justify many of the tariffs, Trump relied on a novel interpretation of a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which did not mention tariffs at all. But in February, the Supreme Court struck down the majority of Trump’s tariffs, ruling 6-3 that Trump had exceeded his authority. The court found that Trump’s tariffs were unconstitutional, as “taxation power clearly belongs to Congress.”

In recent months, thousands of companies have sued the Trump administration over its tariff policies, seeking refunds for tariff-related costs.

The Supreme Court did not discuss refunds in its ruling. But at the beginning of March, Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that companies that paid tariffs were “entitled to benefit” from the Supreme Court ruling. The order directed U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to begin the refund process and to stop collecting the tariffs that were struck down. (The judge later “temporarily suspended his order to give the government time to prepare” after CBP said in an affidavit that “immediate compliance was not logistically possible,” Bloomberg reported. CBP estimated that it could start offering refunds by late April.)

The federal government could now be responsible for issuing “refunds worth $175 billion,” according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

While it seems likely that companies will eventually get refunds from Trump’s tariffs, much of the cost was borne by consumers. Many companies publicly stated that they were raising prices due to the tariffs. But now that the tariffs are being refunded, only a few companies have pledged to refund customers or offer discounts.

Popular Information contacted 18 companies— including Lululemon, Dollar General, and Crocs— that said they hiked prices due to tariffs and are suing the Trump administration for tariff refunds. We asked whether they would offer customers refunds or discounts once the refunds are processed. None of the companies responded.

Major companies offering refunds or discounts

Costco is one of the few companies that has promised to pass some of the refunded tariff money back to customers.

“As we’ve done in the past, when legal challenges have recovered charges passed on in some form to our members, our commitment will be to find the best way to return this value to our members,” Costco CEO Ron Vachris said during an earnings call last week. Vachris said that the company would return recovered tariff money to customers “through lower prices and better values,” but noted that “it is not yet clear what the process will be, what refunds, if any, will be received, and when this will happen.” Costco executives also said during the call that the company took steps to absorb some of the increased cost caused by tariffs instead of passing it on to customers.

In November, Costco sued the Trump administration over its tariff policies and sought refunds.

FedEx has also pledged to refund a portion of any tariff money it receives to customers. “Our intent is straightforward: if refunds are issued to FedEx, we will issue refunds to the shippers and consumers who originally bore those charges,” FedEx said in a statement on its website. “When that will happen and the exact process for requesting and issuing refunds will depend in part on future guidance from the government and the court.”

In February, FedEx also sued the federal government for a full refund of tariff-related costs.

Companies that will not commit to refunding customers

Unlike Costco and FedEx, several companies that have sued the Trump administration for a tariff refund have not pledged to refund customers, despite publicly stating they were raising prices due to tariffs.

Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing brand that also owns Hollister, raised prices late last year and announced that it would continue to do so for its spring inventory. Despite passing some of the cost of tariffs along to its consumers, Abercrombie & Fitch has not said that it will share any refund it might receive from the federal government if it wins its lawsuit. “We feel good about the [tariff] mitigation strategies that we put in place,” the company’s CFO said on a call with analysts last week.

Similarly, Columbia Sportswear is suing the government, but has not indicated that it will share any potential refunds with its customers. Columbia was among the companies that announced planned price hikes before Trump had even been elected to his second term in anticipation of his tariff plans. In October 2024, Columbia CEO Tim Boyle told the Washington Post, “We’re buying stuff today for delivery next fall. So we’re just going to deal with it and we’ll just raise the prices. … It’s going to be very, very difficult to keep products affordable for Americans.”

GoPro announced price increases on its cameras in August. In a report on its 2025 Q2 earnings call, GoPro said, “We expect to offset half of our expected tariff costs with modest price increases.” Although GoPro expected price increases to cover a significant portion of its tariff costs, the company has not publicly announced plans to pass any refunds from its lawsuit against the government back to consumers.

Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo announced price hikes in the U.S. during a July earnings call. One executive said during the meeting, “It will be difficult to absorb all costs. Our approach will be to raise prices where possible and not where it isn’t possible, while ultimately focusing on creating a sustainable business that securely generates profits.” Uniqlo has not said that it will reimburse customers who absorbed the cost increases for their products if it wins a refund from the Trump administration.

Other companies that raised their prices to account for tariff costs and are now suing the Trump administration for a refund, but have not announced plans to refund consumers include:

Steve Madden

Crocs

EssilorLuxottica (Ray-Ban’s parent company)

Lululemon

Deckers (parent company of UGG and Hoka)

Dollar General

Trek Bicycle

Yeti

Helly Hansen

Brooks Running

Allbirds

Dyson

Puma

Nintendo

The customers strike back

At least two companies that have sued the federal government for tariff refunds are facing lawsuits of their own from consumers.

Although FedEx has promised refunds to customers, one consumer says that their promise is not enough. In a class action lawsuit filed one day after FedEx announced its refund plans, plaintiff Matthew Reiser claimed that FedEx’s pledge “creates no legally enforceable obligation and is expressly contingent on future government and court guidance that may never materialize.”

The lawsuit seeks a refund of the tariffs that FedEx customers paid — regardless of whether FedEx wins any money from its own lawsuit against the government — and a refund of the “ancillary brokerage and clearance fees for processing customs entries” that would not have been necessary if it were not for the tariffs.

Another consumer has filed a similar lawsuit against EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban. Unlike FedEx, EssilorLuxottica has not promised consumers a refund if it wins its lawsuit against the Trump administration.

“Despite seeking an order entitling it to a refund of the duties collected as a result of the subject tariffs, EssilorLuxottica continues to collect and has not refunded the tariff surcharges it collected from consumers,” the lawsuit alleges. “EssilorLuxottica’s retention of those surcharges unjustly profits EssilorLuxottica at the expense of consumers.”

UPS is also facing a lawsuit from a customer seeking a refund for tariff costs that UPS passed on, although the company itself has not sued the government for a refund.

At a press conference on Monday evening, President Trump said his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was one of a handful of top advisers who convinced him to launch major combat operations in Iran. The disclosure raises additional questions about the role of Kushner, who is being paid tens of millions of dollars annually by Middle Eastern governments that were reportedly lobbying Trump to attack Iran.

“The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return… based on what Steve and Jared and Pete and others were telling me, Marco is so involved, I thought they were going to attack us,” Trump said, referring to Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Kushner, who has no formal title.

“Within a week, [Iran was] going to attack us, 100 percent. They were ready,” Trump said at a different event Monday. “They had all these missiles, far more than anyone thought, and they were going to attack us.”

Witkoff and Kushner were dispatched by Trump to Geneva to participate in mediation with their Iranian counterparts, in what was described as a last-ditch effort to avoid war. Kushner’s participation violated his pledge not to be involved in foreign policy in a second Trump administration. Instead, Kushner had said he was focused on running his private equity fund, Affinity Partners, which has raised billions of dollars from foreign governments.

Kushner’s largest investor is the Saudi Arabian government, which provided Kushner with $2 billion in funding in 2021. Each year, Saudi Arabia pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, $25 million, as a “management fee.” Meaning he has received in excess of $100 million from the Saudi government over the last few years.

Notably, “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump” in February, advocating a U.S. attack,” according to reporting in the Washington Post. Trump’s comments reveal that Kushner used his role in Geneva to push Trump toward the outcome favored by his biggest client. Affinity Partners also received more than $200 million from the UAE. According to CNN, behind the scenes, the UAE was also lobbying Trump to strike Iran.

It is unclear precisely what Kushner told Trump about his mediation session with the Iranians. The Times of Israel, quoting an anonymous administration source, said that Kushner told Trump that Iran was “basically playing games.” According to the source, Kushner told Trump that it would only be possible for Trump to strike an “Obama kind of deal“ with Iran and even that “would take months.”

The claim that Iran was planning an imminent attack against the U.S. — the conclusion that Trump took away from his discussions with Kushner and others — is directly contradicted by U.S. intelligence agencies. Shortly after the war began, “Trump administration officials told congressional staff in private briefings on Sunday that U.S. intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to launch a preemptive strike against the United States interests,” according to ABC News. CNN reported that Trump administration officials “acknowledged to congressional staff that Iran was not planning to strike US forces or bases in the Middle East unless Israel attacked Iran first.” Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the intelligence committee who receives classified briefings, said, “I saw no evidence that Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States of America.”

President Trump allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl who was trafficked to him by Jeffrey Epstein, according to documents released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) last Thursday. The White House insists the allegations are “completely baseless“ and “backed by zero credible evidence.”

For three decades, the victim only told her mother and one close friend about the alleged assault by Trump. The DOJ became aware of the allegation when that friend called a tipline that had been set up for Epstein victims. By that time, her mother was deceased.

In 2019, the victim told the FBI that her mother advertised her babysitting services in Hilton Head, South Carolina, in the 1980s. She was 13 years old. Epstein, known to her as “Jeff,” responded.

She said that when she arrived at Epstein’s condo, he was alone, and offered her drugs and alcohol. As the room went blurry, the victim alleged, Epstein began to sexually assault her. She said the rapes and abuse continued for several years — both in South Carolina and in other states.

When she was between 13 and 15 years old, the victim said she was transported by Epstein “to either New York or New Jersey” and taken to a “very tall building with huge rooms.” At that point, according to her account, she was introduced to Trump.

The victim told the FBI that Trump cleared the room and said something like, “Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be.” Trump then unzipped his pants and forced her head onto his penis, the victim alleged. In her FBI interview, the victim said that she “bit the shit out of it” in response, and Trump retaliated by hitting her on the side of the head.

Since the initial release of the documents, two important developments have bolstered the credibility of the alleged victim. This new information has received little national media attention.

First, the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, the nation’s premier journalist on the Epstein scandal, has revealed new information about how the FBI assessed the victim. Brown, citing a DOJ source, reported that the FBI agents who interviewed the victim “found her to be credible.” The DOJ source told Brown that they would not have interviewed her four times if they suspected she was lying. This does not mean they were able to verify the substance of the victim’s allegations, but it is significant.

Second, the Post and Courier, a media outlet based in Charleston, South Carolina, verified key aspects of the victim’s story around the time of the alleged Trump assault. For example, the victim claimed “her mother became aware that Epstein had nude photos of the teen from their sexual encounters and was demanding money to keep them hidden.” She told the FBI that this “extortion demand caused her mother to steal funds from her real estate company.” The Post and Courier obtained public records showing that her mother was “accused of stealing $22,000 from the escrow account” at the time. The victim also said that these financial crimes ultimately landed her mother in “a state prison near Columbia.” Public records obtained by the Post and Courier confirm her mother’s incarceration.

Smaller details also checked out. For example, the victim told the DOJ that she once bumped into Epstein at a Rick James concert in Savannah. Archival newspaper databases show that James regularly played in the Savannah area at the time.

These new developments do not prove that the substance of the victim’s allegations is true. But, put into context with what we already knew about Trump and how the Epstein files have been handled, it suggests her claims should be taken seriously.

Three key documents about Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor were withheld

On January 30, the DOJ announced that it had completed the release of all Epstein documents it was required to disclose under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That document dump, however, only included a brief description of the allegations against Trump and a summary of one interview where the victim did not discuss the alleged sexual assault by Trump.

Independent journalist Roger Sollenberger discovered the existence of three additional interview summaries with the victim in the files of a case involving Ghislaine Maxwell. Sollenberger’s reporting was later confirmed by numerous major media outlets. Only after a public outcry about the missing files were summaries of these interviews released.

On March 5, the Justice Department released the three additional interview summaries, claiming that they were incorrectly labeled as “duplicative.” The notion that three documents that contain detailed allegations about Trump sexually assaulting a minor were accidentally miscoded strains credulity, particularly since an interview with the same victim that does not mention Trump was previously released.

Other key documents about Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor continue to be withheld

NPR reported that 53 pages of materials related to Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor were excluded from the DOJ’s January 30 release. So far, only 16 pages have been disclosed, meaning 37 pages are still being withheld by the Trump administration. The missing documents include “notes from the interviews, a law enforcement report and license records.” The DOJ has not explained why these materials are not being released.

Trump has been accused of sexual assault by dozens of women

More than two dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault. In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-90s and later defaming her. He was accused by multiple contestants of walking into a group dressing room “while teenagers were changing their clothes“ during the Miss Teen USA pageants in the 1990s. In 2005, he bragged about his ability to go into beauty pageant dressing rooms during an episode of Howard Stern.

Famously, Trump was recorded bragging about his ability to get away with sexual assault in 2005 on an Access Hollywood tape.

On February 28, President Trump announced that “the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.” The war has claimed the lives of more than 1500 people, including about 1300 Iranians, dozens in neighboring countries, and six U.S. troops. The Pentagon has estimated the conflict is costing U.S. taxpayers about $1 billion per day — and that figure may be too low.

And yet, nine days into the war, Trump and his administration have failed to clearly answer the most fundamental question: Why did the war begin?

Instead, the Trump administration has offered a bewildering series of shifting, contradictory, and factually incorrect answers. In just over a week, Trump and top administration officials have given at least 17 different responses about why the war began:

Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” last June, but the U.S. started the war because Iran refused to abandon its “nuclear ambitions.” In his February 28 announcement, Trump said that “in Operation Midnight Hammer last June, we obliterated the regime’s nuclear program.” The U.S. initiated this attack, Trump said, because Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.”

The U.S. attacked Iran to prevent a nuclear war. “If we didn’t do what we’re doing right now, you would have had a nuclear war, and they would have taken out many countries,” Trump said on March 3.

Absent an attack, Iran would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks. “If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would’ve had a nuclear weapon. When crazy people have nuclear weapons, bad things happen,” Trump said on March 4.

Iran is developing long-range missiles that “could soon reach the American homeland.” In his February 28 speech, Trump said that Iran was “developing the long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland.” The idea that Iranian long-range missiles posed an imminent threat is not supported by public intelligence assessments. An assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency published last May estimated that Iran would need ten years to develop a missile capable of reaching the United States — if it chose to pursue that capability.

The war is necessary because Iran has too much control over the global oil supply. On March 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “This terroristic regime, led by radical clerics, has the ability potentially to shut off 20 percent of global energy. That’s the kind of leverage they have because of their navy. We’re going to destroy their navy.”

The U.S. started the war because it knew Israel was going to attack Iran, endangering U.S. troops. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 2.

The U.S. did not start the war because it knew Israel was going to attack Iran. The following was an exchange between Rubio and a reporter on March 3: “Q: Mr. Secretary, yesterday you told us that Israel was going to strike Iran and that that’s why we needed to get involved… SECRETARY RUBIO: Yeah, your statement’s false.”

Trump pushed Israel to join an attack on Iran because he believed Iran would otherwise attack first. “You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. …If we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that. …So, if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” Trump said in the Oval Office on March 3.

The U.S. attacked Iran to eliminate the threat posed by its short-range missiles and drones. “The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles…,” Rubio said in his March 2 briefing. He also cited the need to destroy Iran’s “one-way attack drones.” According to Rubio, these missiles would act as a “shield” and allow them to later produce nuclear weapons. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) reiterated this claim after receiving a classified briefing the same day. “The objective was to take out those missiles, the short- and mid-range missiles, and their ability to produce them,” Johnson claimed.

The U.S. attacked Iran because “they’ve been killing Americans for 47 years.” This was cited by Trump in his February 28 announcement and by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on March 4.

The U.S. attacked Iran because Iran is “the weakest they’ve ever been.” Hegseth made this claim as a justification for the War in his March 4 press briefing.

The war on Iran was started because of the “cumulative effect of various direct threats” and Trump’s “feeling, based on fact, that Iran does pose an imminent and direct threat” to the U.S. “This decision to launch this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the United States of America, and the president’s feeling, based on fact, that Iran does pose an imminent and direct threat to the United States of America,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press briefing on March 4.

The war is personal payback for Trump. “I got [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] before he got me,” Trump told ABC News on March 1. “They tried twice. Well, I got him first.” Trump was referring to intelligence that Iran was plotting to assassinate Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. This rationale was repeated by Hegseth during a March 4 press briefing. “The leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed. Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh,” Hegseth said.

The U.S. started the war because the Iranians were not negotiating in good faith. “Tehran was not negotiating. They were stalling, buying time to reload their missile stockpiles and restart their nuclear ambitions,” Hegseth said on March 2.

Trump started the war to secure freedom for the Iranian people. “All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told the Washington Post on February 28.

The U.S. attacked Iran because it was the “last best chance” to do so. “This was our last best chance to strike…and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime,” Trump said on March 1.

The war is a response to Iran’s efforts to interfere in U.S. elections. Trump posted this article on Truth Social on February 28: “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States.”

Nevertheless, Hegseth has described the war’s mission as “very very clear“ and “laser-focused.” Rubio said the war had “a very clear goal“ and he didn’t understand why there was any “confusion.” Leavitt said that Trump had laid out “achievable objectives.”

On Truth Social, meanwhile, Trump declared that the war would continue until he achieved his “objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!“

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched major combat operations in Iran. Iran has retaliated by striking multiple U.S. military facilities and embassies across the Middle East, including in Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). As of Wednesday, the war had claimed the lives of six U.S. service members, 10 people in Israel, and over 1,000 civilians in Iran, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency.

Due to the intensity of combat in the Middle East, other countries not directly involved in the conflict quickly began evacuating their citizens from the region. The Italian government has facilitated the evacuation of 2,500 Italians on commercial flights. The Czech Republic sent multiple flights to evacuate people stranded in the area. Several other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Greece, had organized flights scheduled for Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Americans in the area are in danger of being targeted, but the State Department did not advise citizens to leave the region before the strikes began. Before the 2003 Iraq War, in contrast, the State Department advised citizens to prepare to evacuate weeks in advance and ordered a final evacuation days before fighting began.

This year, Americans in 14 countries were not advised to evacuate until three days after the Trump administration began major combat operations in Iran. By that time, much of the region’s airspace and most airports had closed.

According to the BBC, between “500,000 and one million US nationals are estimated to be living in the Middle East.”

The State Department told Americans to use “available commercial transportation“ to evacuate. On Tuesday, when Americans called a phone number publicized by the State Department, they received an automated message: “Please do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation. At this time, there are currently no United States evacuation points.” (When Popular Information called the hotline on Wednesday afternoon, the recorded message said that the U.S. is “committed to helping U.S. citizens who want to leave the region to do so.”)

An American businessman who has been stranded in the UAE told NOTUS that when he reached a live operator, he was told to sign up online for State Department security alerts but was not offered any other help. Several news outlets spoke to stranded Americans who described feeling “trapped” and “helpless.”

“I’m just very shocked and upset that I see other nations getting their citizens out and we’re just stranded here,” one U.S. citizen stuck in Abu Dhabi told NPR.

Meanwhile, U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East announced that they were shutting down or unable to help stranded Americans. On Tuesday, the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem posted on X that it was not able “at this time to evacuate or directly assist Americans in departing Israel.” The embassy noted that Americans in Israel may be able to take ground transportation to Egypt and depart from Cairo’s airport, where flights have not been interrupted. However, the embassy’s post said that “the U.S. government cannot guarantee your safety” if Americans took this option.

Similarly, the U.S. embassy in Qatar told Americans they “should not rely on the US government for assisted departure or evacuation” and should “take advantage of commercial transportation options.”

Other U.S. embassies, including those in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Lebanon, told Americans they could not offer assistance. Some also closed and cancelled appointments. Several countries in the region — including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Egypt — currently lack Senate-confirmed U.S. ambassadors.

When asked on Tuesday why there was no evacuation plan for Americans in the area, President Trump argued that it was “because it happened all very quickly,” adding, “I thought we were going to have a situation where we were gonna be attacked.”

Damage control

On Tuesday, after coming under intense scrutiny, the Trump administration began scrambling to shift the narrative that it had abandoned U.S. citizens in the Middle East.

A State Department spokesperson posted on X that the department was “actively securing military aircraft and charter flights for American citizens who wish to leave the Middle East,” and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted a very similar statement. Later in the day, Trump joined the chorus, posting on Truth Social: “We are already chartering flights, free of charge, and booking commercial options, which we expect will become increasingly available as time goes on.”

But several major airports remain closed, and the airspace over much of the region was still nearly empty as of Wednesday.

A statement released Wednesday by the State Department said that “over 17,500 American citizens have safely returned to the United States from the Middle East,” although most did so without any assistance. The State Department said “nearly 6,500 Americans abroad” received what they described as “security guidance and travel assistance.” But this is a small fraction of the estimated number of Americans in the region.

On Wednesday evening, the State Department announced in a post on X that a “charter flight of American citizens departed the Middle East in route [sic] to the United States.”

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have questioned the Trump administration’s approach to evacuating citizens. Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) called on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “promptly appear before Congress and explain to the American people how they so poorly planned for the protection and evacuation of Americans.” When asked by Roll Call about the lack of Marines trained in evacuations in the armada around Iran, Republican Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “We may be asking about that soon.”

On Friday afternoon, Liberty University Law School emailed its first and second-year students about an “exciting opportunity to intern with the Department of Labor in DC.” The available positions covered the full breadth of the DOL’s activities — “litigation, appeals, regulations, policy, etc.” The email, sent by Derek Green, an associate director at the law school, stressed that those accepted into the program “will make incredible connections that will payoff [sic] later.” For second-year students, the internship “could lead to a full-time job offer for after your 2027 graduation.”

One important caveat: only passionate devotees of President Trump would be considered. Students who “aligned politically with President Trump” and were “willing to work hard” were strongly encouraged to apply, even if they had poor grades.

The email was provided by a source on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution from the school. Contacted by phone, Green told Popular Information he could not speak without approval from Edie Swann, Liberty University Law School’s Director of Public Affairs. Swann did not respond to an email request for an interview.

Excerpts from Green’s email were reported earlier by the legal blog Above the Law.

Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell Sr., is a conservative Christian institution based in Lynchburg, Virginia. Falwell Jr., who took over the university after his father died in 2007, was an advisor to Trump. Falwell Jr. resigned after a sexual scandal in 2020, but Liberty University has maintained a key role in connecting the Trump administration to the evangelical community.

Green stressed that anyone interested in the DOL legal internship should “ABSOLUTELY apply” because “the person conducting the interviews is Vittoria D’Addesi, a 2025 graduate of Liberty Law, along with a representative of the White House Liaison Office.”

According to Green, D’Addesi will ask applicants a variety of political questions, including “[D]id you vote for President Trump?” and “Do you disagree with the President on anything?”

Green concluded that his goal was “to get double digit Liberty Law students in this program this summer.”

Appended to the Green email was a more staid message from D’Addesi. In her description, D’Addesi writes that “[o]nly students who are interested in advancing the President’s initiatives and delivering wins for the American Worker should apply.”

D’Addesi did not respond to an email requesting comment.

The legality of a political litmus test for government jobs

In most cases, it is illegal to condition federal employment on a candidate’s political views.

In her email, D’Addesi describes the internship as “a political position in which interns will serve the Trump Administration for the duration of their internships.” This suggests the DOL is treating these internships as “Schedule C“ positions, which are defined as “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating.” The Supreme Court, in Elrod v. Burns and subsequent decisions, ruled that only these policy positions can be conditioned on political beliefs.

But the DOL would have a difficult time arguing these low-level internships qualify for a “Schedule C” designation. A confidential position, by law, “is identified by its close working relationship with the President, head of an agency, or other key appointed officials who are responsible for furthering the goals and policies of the President and the Administration.” It seems highly doubtful that these summer interns will be working closely with agency heads or other top officials. Further, summer interns are not tasked with determining, making, or advocating for policies. Green’s description specifically notes that some of the DOL internships involve day-to-day litigation, appeals, and regulations.

Berkley Law Professor Catherine Fisk, an expert in employment law, told Popular Information that, regardless of the internship’s designation, the hiring process described in the Liberty Law School email was illegal. “Summer clerks, whether Schedule C or not, are not exempt from the requirements of the Hatch Act, which prohibits political tests for hiring,” Fisk said.

In the 2000s, a less brazen version of the DOL’s legal internship hiring process became a scandal.

An Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation found that in 2006, the Department of Justice improperly conditioned acceptance into the Summer Law Intern Program and related positions on political ideology. The OIG found that candidates were not asked directly about their political views, but reviewers sought to suss out their political leanings through the application process.

For example, some candidates were eliminated for submitting an essay with “leftist commentary and buzz words like ‘environmental justice’ and ‘social justice.’” Others were excluded for “membership in certain organizations like the American Constitution Society, having a clerkship with a judge who was perceived as a liberal, having worked for a liberal Member of Congress, or having worked for a liberal law school professor.”

As a result, the OIG determined that at least two members of the screening committee “took political or ideological affiliations into account in deselecting candidates in violation of Department policy and federal law.”

Compared with the selection criteria described in the Liberty email, their methods seem quaint.

On February 28, the United States and Israel began major combat operations in Iran. For some, the consequences of this action were fatal. By Monday, the war had claimed the lives of at least six U.S. soldiers, hundreds of people in Iran, and dozens more in neighboring Gulf states. The bombardment of Iran reportedly destroyed a girls’ primary school, killing about 150 people, the vast majority of them students. A spokesman for the U.S. military said CENTCOM takes the reports seriously and is “looking into“ the allegation.

For others, the beginning of the war was simply a money-making opportunity. In the hours before the strike, six newly-created accounts on the prediction market Polymarket raked in nearly $1 million by betting that the U.S. would strike Iran by February 28.

Many observers, including the analytics site that first flagged the suspicious trades, suspect that the accounts benefited from insider knowledge. But it’s impossible to say for sure. The international version of Polymarket, where the bets were made, does not require users to identify themselves and accepts bets in crypto.

One such account, “dicedicedice,” made a single wager of nearly $30,000 that the U.S. would strike Iran by February 28. Hours later, the account recorded a profit of about $120,000.

Overall, “$529 million was traded on contracts tied to the timing of the strikes” on Polymarket, Bloomberg reported.

The White House “denied anyone in Trump’s orbit was behind the lucrative trades.” It’s unclear which members of the administration would be considered “in Trump’s orbit.” Donald Trump Jr. serves as an advisor to both Polymarket and its chief rival, Kalshi.

Moving forward, Polymarket is offering dozens of markets on war-related developments.

On its website, Polymarket describes allowing wagers on acts of war as a public service, claiming it provides vital information to “those directly affected by the attacks.”

The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and 𝕏 could not.

Popular Information contacted Polymarket and asked which people directly affected by the attacks had spoken with the company and why prediction markets could provide them with “the answers they needed.” The inquiry was not returned.

Prediction markets that serve U.S. customers are formally prohibited by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) from offering any market “that involves, relates to, or references terrorism, assassination, [or] war.” Polymarket offers its war-related markets on an offshore trading platform that technically does not accept customers from the United States. Nevertheless, many people in the U.S. use Polymarket and shield their true location with a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Polymarket is also rolling out a separate prediction market for people in the U.S. that will comply with CFTC rules.

But even for Kalshi, which operates a single prediction market that is regulated by the CFTC, the restriction on war-related markets has little practical impact. Kalshi offered a market on “Ali Khamenei out as Supreme Leader?” by various dates.

The CFTC allows prediction markets to self-certify each market, and Kalshi certified that this market was not related to war.

Controversially, after Khamenei was killed on February 28, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said the market would not resolve to “YES” because the company has a rule not to resolve a market based on someone’s death. Instead, everyone who bought a position in the market will receive the value of that position just before Khamenei died. This means traders who expected to receive $1 per share will instead receive about nine cents.

Mansour said he “learned a lot” from the Khamenei market and will handle things differently in the future with markets “where a death might be a likely scenario.”

War-related prediction markets are not just an opportunity for insider trading — they create a national security risk. A letter from six Democratic Senators sent to the CFTC last month argued that these markets create “incentives to incite violence, foment geopolitical conflicts, and disclose classified information.”

In mid-February, two Israelis — a military reservist and a civilian — were charged with “serious security offenses” for placing bets on Polymarket based on classified military intelligence. Several others were arrested, but have not been charged.

The Israeli military called the bets a “serious ethical lapse,” but said that they had caused “no operational harm.”

Prosecutors did not release the names of those arrested or information on the nature of the bets. However, Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported last month that the government was investigating an anonymous Polymarket account that placed a series of bets related to Israeli military operations during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran in June 2025. The user walked away with over $150,000, raising suspicions that the bets had been based on insider information.

A familiar playbook

Issues with war-related markets did not begin with the new war in Iran. On January 2, just hours before Trump announced that the U.S. had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, an anonymous account on Polymarket bet over $30,000 that Maduro would soon be ousted. When the bet was made, Polymarket showed just an 8% chance that it would prove correct. However, by the next morning, the account was cashing out over $400,000 in winnings.

This bet, and the rest of the account’s betting history, raised suspicions of insider trading. The account appears to have been created in December 2025, placing its first bet on December 27 — $96 saying that the U.S. would invade Venezuela. The account placed several more bets related to U.S. operations in Venezuela in the following days, leading up to the final bet of over $30,000.

Experts on prediction markets and insider trading told several news outlets that the bets had the hallmarks of insider trading. One expert told CBS News that the most suspicious factors were that the bet was placed late at night just before the event occurred, a large amount of money was bet, and the bet was placed in a relatively unregulated and opaque market.

There have also been issues with markets related to the war in Ukraine. In November, a live map tracking the war was falsely manipulated to show an advance of Russian troops shortly before a Polymarket bet on the conflict resolved, 404 Media reported. Users had placed bets on if Russia would capture the city of Myrnohrad by various dates, generating “more than $1 million in trading volume.” Shortly before one of the bets was set to resolve on November 15, the map that Polymarket relied on for the market was edited to show that Russian troops had taken control of an intersection in Myrnohrad. But after the market resolved, the Russian advance was removed from the map. According to Responsible Statecraft, the edit “triggered payouts as high as 33,000%” for those who bet that Russia would gain control over the city by November 15.

Polymarket uses a map tracking the Russia and Ukraine war from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). A statement by ISW said that “an unauthorized and unapproved edit” to the map was “made on the night of November 15-16” and “was removed before the day’s normal workflow began on November 16.”

In a statement to 404 Media, ISW condemned the use of its map for prediction markets. “ISW has become aware that some organizations and individuals are promoting betting on the course of the war in Ukraine and that ISW’s maps are being used to adjudicate that betting,” ISW said. “ISW strongly disapproves of such activities and strenuously objects to the use of our maps for such purposes, for which we emphatically do not give consent.”

In private calls over the last several weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) reportedly urged President Trump to attack Iran. Iran is a top regional rival of Saudi Arabia, and MBS had become concerned about Iran’s growing military capabilities.

The lobbying campaign achieved success on Saturday, when Trump announced he had begun “major combat operations in Iran.” Trump launched a war even though U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. In June 2025, Trump publicly declared that more limited strikes “completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.”

MBS’s influence with Trump has grown as the Saudi government has invested billions in projects that personally enrich Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Despite the glaring conflicts-of-interest, Trump installed Kushner as a top negotiator with Iranian officials. Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff participated in a mediation session with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva on Thursday, billed as a last-ditch effort to avoid war.

The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the largest investor in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners. PIF invested $2 billion in Affinity Partners in 2021, even though the PIF committee that screens investments recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal, citing “inexperience” and “excessive” fees. The committee’s recommendation was overruled by MBS, who heads PIF’s Board of Directors.

PIF pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, or $25 million, annually. The Senate Finance Committee estimates that Kushner will be paid $137 million in management fees from PIF by August 2026. Further, in September 2025, PIF, Affinity Partners, and others jointly acquired Electronic Arts, the publisher of iconic video games like The Sims and Madden NFL, for $55 billion. The deal, which is the largest leveraged buyout in history, will likely be very lucrative for Kushner.

After raising billions for the Saudis and other foreign governments, Kushner dismissed concerns about conflicts of interest, pledging he would not be involved in Trump’s second term. In February 2024, Axios’ Dan Primack asked Kushner whether his business relationship with foreign governments would make it “very difficult… to do any sort of foreign policy work” moving forward. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner replied. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.”

Yet, after Trump took office, Kushner resumed his central role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. In an October 2025 interview on 60 Minutes, Kushner argued that financial conflicts made him and Witkoff more effective. “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner said.

CNN reported that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE lobbied Trump to strike Iran. Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE has significant financial ties to Kushner and Trump.

The UAE is another major backer of Affinity Partners, directly investing about $200 million with Kushner’s firm. Additional money came via Lunate, a supposedly private Abu Dhabi investment firm that is financed by government money and tied to the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds.

Witkoff is the co-founder of the crypto firm World Liberty Financial (WLF) and retains an 8-figure stake in the company. Trump and his family also own significant pieces of the company. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security advisor and head of the country’s largest sovereign wealth fund, purchased 49% of WLF days before Trump’s inauguration. Of the $250 million paid up front by the UAE, $187 million was directed to Trump family entities and $31 million to the Witkoff family. In May 2025, MGX, a company controlled by Tahnoon, purchased $2 billion of crypto tokens from WLF.

Following the conclusion of the mediation on Thursday, Kushner and Witkoff “ominously issued no statement,” and the pair was reportedly “disappointed“ by the Iranian negotiating position. After presumably being debriefed by Kushner, Trump said, “we’re not thrilled with the way they’re negotiating.” According to Trump, it would be “wonderful” if the Iranians “negotiated in … good faith and conscience but they are not getting there so far.”

The new Iran War comes weeks after PIF financed a $7 billion development deal in Saudi Arabia with the Trump Organization. Under the agreement, Dar Global, a developer with close ties to the Saudi government, will build a “Trump-branded hotel and golf course,” along with “500 mansions, priced between $6.7 million and $24 million.” The project is part of Diriyah, a $63 billion development funded entirely by PIF.

When Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May 2025, MBS took him on a tour of Diriyah and showed him a model of the development. According to Jerry Inzerillo, who heads the Diriyah Company, a PIF subsidiary, Trump was “amazed“ with the quality and scale of the project.

Trump maintains full ownership of the Trump Organization and will profit from the deal. Typically, these deals involve the developer paying millions in fees simply to license the Trump name. About 80% of the money will flow directly to Trump, according to Forbes’ reporting on similar deals. (The Trump Organization has been nominally transferred to a trust controlled by his son, Donald Trump Jr. — an arrangement ethics experts have dismissed as meaningless.)

While Trump discussed a potential war with Iran in multiple calls with MBS, he has spent little time justifying the war to the American people. In lieu of a traditional live address from the Oval Office, Trump announced the war in a short, edited video, delivered in a baseball cap and posted on his social network, Truth Social. The video was recorded at his Florida home and private club, Mar-a-Lago. On Saturday night, Trump attended a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser there for the primary pro-Trump Super PAC, MAGA Inc.

After the beginning of hostilities on Saturday, Iran launched attacks on the Saudi capital of Riyadh and numerous targets in the UAE. In response, the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement saying it would “mobilize all its capabilities“ against Iranian aggression, and the UAE warned Iran of “grave consequences.”

By Sunday, the war claimed the lives of three U.S. service members and hundreds of Iranians.

“We did not protect President Trump.”

That is what Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on January 30, after what he described as the final release of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

It turns out that was not true.

According to a new report by NPR, the DOJ is withholding “more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.” The New York Times also reported Wednesday that the DOJ withheld summaries of three FBI interviews with the woman about her interactions with Trump. They released a fourth FBI interview, where the woman made allegations about Epstein.

The missing files were first discovered by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger.

The failure to disclose the interviews about Trump and related files seemingly puts the administration in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That law, signed by Trump last year, prohibits the withholding or redacting of documents “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”

The DOJ released a statement on Tuesday claiming that any document withheld “falls within one of the following categories: duplicates, privileged, or part of an ongoing federal investigation.”

The interviews about the allegations against Trump, however, are not duplicates. Nor is it clear what legal “privilege” would allow the DOJ to disclose FBI interviews where the woman is questioned about her allegations against Epstein, but not interviews with the same woman about Trump. On CNN earlier this month, Blanche indicated that there were no ongoing investigations, saying that the DOJ already determined in July “there was nothing in there that allowed us to prosecute anybody.”

In a second statement, released by the DOJ on Wednesday afternoon, the DOJ directly addressed the missing interviews, referring to them as “documents produced to Ghislaine Maxwell in discovery of her criminal case.” The suggestion was that the documents were withheld pursuant to a protective order in that case. But the DOJ, in a court filing, already acknowledged that those documents were not subject to the protective order. Further, as Sollenberger noted, the DOJ released many other files from the Maxwell discovery.

Congressman Robert Garcia (D-CA) said, “The DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes.”

The withheld documents also undermine Trump’s claim that he was “totally exonerated“ by the release of the files. Trump cannot be exonerated by the release of the files when key documents related to serious criminal allegations were not disclosed.

Released files reveal the woman “came forward in July 2019,” days after federal officials arrested Epstein. The woman alleged, according to a summary of one interview that was disclosed, that Epstein “repeatedly assaulted” her in the 1980s, when she was a minor.

Summaries of three interviews regarding the woman’s allegations against Trump are being withheld. But a brief description of the woman’s allegations was included in a 2025 DOJ slide presentation that was released.

According to the slide presentation, the woman claimed that Trump attempted to force her to perform oral sex. When she resisted, Trump allegedly “punched her in the head.” This allegedly occurred when the woman was between 13 and 15 years old.

The revelation that FBI interviews with the woman about Trump are being withheld raises serious questions. Why did the FBI interview the woman three times regarding her interactions with Trump? Why has the DOJ gone to such extremes to keep these interviews from the public?

Today in Geneva, Switzerland, Jared Kushner will represent the United States in meetings with Iranian officials — a last-ditch effort to avoid war. Kushner, however, has serious financial conflicts that could make reaching a deal more difficult.

Kushner has played a central role in all of the most important foreign policy negotiations during Trump’s second term. He has been at the table representing the United States in talks concerning the future of Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and now Iran.

Today’s meeting comes at a critical time. Trump has ordered a large military buildup and publicly said he is considering attacking Iran. It is not clear exactly what Trump wants from Iran, but his demands include new limitations on Iran’s nuclear program. (Notably, Trump claimed that his attack on Iran in June 2025 “completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.”) According to reports, if Trump’s new demands are not met, a U.S. attack on Iran could come as soon as this weekend.

Kushner, however, only works as the chief U.S. foreign policy negotiator in his spare time. His main job is as the founder and CEO of Affinity Partners, an investment firm that has raised billions of dollars from foreign governments. Three of the firm’s largest clients are the governments of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Kushner collects tens of millions in management fees annually from these countries.

Before Trump returned to the White House, Kushner publicly acknowledged that this was a debilitating conflict of interest and pledged not to be involved with the incoming Trump administration.

In a February 2024 interview with Axios, Kushner stated that he would not resume his role as an adviser if Trump were to win the presidency again. Kushner told Axios’ Dan Primack that he made commitments to run his investment firm “for the long term” and “my commitment is to my investors, to my firm, to my employees, [and] to my partners.”

Pressed by Primack, Kushner said he would not accept a role in the new administration even if asked by Trump. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.”

Kushner’s conflicts could make a deal with Iran less likely. Any Iran deal is likely to involve Iran agreeing to restrictions on nuclear development in exchange for the relaxation of economic sanctions. The biggest carrot on the sanctions side is removing sanctions on Iranian oil.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar — Kushner’s clients — are all significant oil producers. A relaxation of sanctions on Iranian oil would increase supply and potentially lower oil prices. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are part of OPEC, an organization that works to keep oil prices elevated by restricting supply.

Saudi Arabia is Kushner’s first and largest investor, committing $2 billion in 2021. In August 2026, Saudi Arabia will have the right to renegotiate its agreement with Affinity Partners or withdraw its funds, giving the country considerable leverage.

Kushner’s central role representing the Trump administration in multiple foreign policy negotiations while accepting tens of millions of dollars in fees from foreign governments may be illegal.

The Trump administration has tried to avoid legal issues by classifying Kushner as a “volunteer” rather than a government official. But a seminal 1977 opinion by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) found that “an identifiable act of appointment may not be absolutely essential for an individual to be regarded as an officer or employee in a particular case where the parties omitted it for the purpose of avoiding the application of the conflict-of-interest laws.” The OLC found that an individual “engaging in a governmental function” and “working under the direction or supervision of the President” should be considered an SGE.

In Geneva today, Kushner is engaged in activities that can only be conducted by government officials. The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in negotiations with foreign governments without authorization. Kushner is acting in an authorized capacity, under Trump’s direction, which creates a host of legal issues. As a de facto government official, the millions in fees Kushner is collecting from foreign governments violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down sweeping tariffs that President Trump had imposed globally. Trump had claimed authority under a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). But the IEEPA did not mention tariffs and, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump exceeded his authority.

Trump, in a fit of pique, immediately announced that he was imposing a new 10% global tariff, citing Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The next day, Trump raised the tariff to 15%.

Several prominent outlets falsely reported that the Trade Act gives Trump the legal authority to impose temporary tariffs of up to 15% in response to trade deficits:

Axios: “The text of the law says the president can impose a tariff of up to 15% for 150 days to address trade deficits.”

Business Insider: “This weekend, he announced plans to impose a 15% ‘worldwide’ tariff. That’s thanks to Section 122, which allows him to briefly implement tariffs broadly. However, they can only remain in place for up to 150 days.”

The Hill: “The president is enacting the policy under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, a provision that allows for tariffs of up to 15 percent for 150 days to address ‘large and serious’ trade deficits.”

Forbes: “Trump announced Friday he would sign a global 10% tariff into effect under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974—which he raised to 15% on Saturday—which allows presidents to impose tariffs of up to 15% for up to 150 days to resolve trade imbalances.”

Similar claims were made on television news, including CNBC and NewsNation:

These outlets are spreading misinformation about the law.

Section 122 of the Trade Act gives the president the authority to temporarily impose tariffs in response to “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits,” not trade deficits. The United States does not have a balance-of-payments deficit, much less a large and serious one.

Balance-of-trade and balance-of-payments are two distinct concepts. Balance-of-trade looks at the goods and services sold to other countries and subtracts the goods and services imported. If a country imports more goods and services than it exports, it has a trade deficit. In 2025, the United States imported $4.3 trillion in goods and services and exported $3.4 trillion, resulting in a trade deficit of about $900 billion.

Balance-of-payments goes beyond trade in goods and services and covers all the money flows between countries. There are large inflows of foreign capital into U.S. Treasury bonds, stocks, and other financial instruments. That is why, despite a large trade deficit, the balance-of-payments deficit is zero.

For technical economic reasons, it is effectively impossible for the United States to have a balance-of-payments deficit today.1 As a result, the Senate Finance Committee noted at the time of passage that the authority to temporarily increase tariffs in response to a balance-of-payments deficit “is not likely to be utilized.” Trump, in fact, is the only president ever to invoke Section 122.

The Trade Act of 1974 mentions balance-of-trade but only authorizes tariff reductions in response.

Trump Solicitor General John Sauer emphasized the distinction between a trade deficit and a balance-of-payments deficit in an August 2025 legal filing in the tariff case that ultimately reached the Supreme Court.

[T]he President’s actions here do not identify or focus on balance-of-payments concerns of the type addressed by Section 122. Instead, the concerns the President identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.

In contrast, Trump’s presidential proclamation imposing the new 15% tariff seeks to conflate the two issues. It cites the “goods trade deficit” and other economic data, and then concludes that “imposing an import surcharge would deal with the large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficit.” But the proclamation does not establish that the United States has a balance-of-payments deficit, because it does not.

Other media outlets suggested that the Trade Act gives Trump broad authority to impose global tariffs of up to 15% for 150 days, without mentioning the limitations:

The New York Times: The law “allows [Trump] to impose an across-the-board tariff for 150 days.”

CNBC: Trump “increased the global tariff rate to 15% — the legal maximum which can be in place for 150 days.”

CNN: “Presidents can impose up to 15% in tariffs using Section 122, but those duties are temporary and require congressional approval after 150 days.”

Wall Street Journal: “The new tariffs will be imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, Trump said, which allows the president to impose tariffs for up to 150 days.”

LA Times: “The president late Friday signed an executive order imposing a new 10% tariff, citing a 1974 law. Under that law, the tariffs can last for only 150 days.”

Washington Post: “Trump’s new strategy consists of a one-two punch of replacement tariffs. First, the 15 percent global import tax, which legally is valid for just 150 days.”

This kind of coverage bled into television reporting, like this CBS News segment:

This reporting has created the false impression that the temporary 15% measure is on firmer legal footing than the tariffs that were just struck down by the Supreme Court. In reality, the new tariffs are just as illegal as the ones they replaced.

In a document quietly filed with the Federal Election Commission on Friday night, MAGA Inc., the primary Super PAC supporting President Trump, revealed that it received a $5 million donation from Crypto.com on January 23, 2026. The donation was made in the name of Crypto.com’s parent company, Foris Dax, Inc.1

25 days later, on February 17, the Trump administration’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), intervened on Crypto.com’s behalf in high-stakes lawsuit in federal court.

Last year, Crypto.com sued the Nevada Gaming Control Board, arguing that it has the right to offer “prediction markets” on the outcome of sporting events without obtaining a Nevada gaming license. In October 2025, a federal court denied Crypto.com an injunction, and the company is now appealing the decision.

In addition to filing a formal amicus brief in support of Crypto.com’s appeal, CFTC chairman Mike Selig published an op-ed supporting Crypto.com’s position in the Wall Street Journal and posted a video supporting Crypto.com on X.

The timing of CFTC’s intervention raises serious ethical questions.

Selig, during his November 2025 confirmation hearing, was asked whether he believed it was legal for prediction markets to offer contracts on sporting events without complying with state law. Selig testified that the issue is “working its way through the courts, and so I will respect the decisions of those courts.”

He was also asked directly if he considered placing a bet on the outcome of a football game to be “gambling,” which would place it outside the jurisdiction of the CFTC:

Senator SCHIFF. Well, I mean, let me just ask—maybe even break it down more simply. If you and I bet on who wins the Bills game tomorrow, would you consider that gambling?

Mr. SELIG. Senator, on this issue, I would look to the courts, so I would look to what the courts say about that issue.

In a matter of weeks, Selig went from telling Senators under oath that he would defer to the courts on the issue to arguing on behalf of Crypto.com that the courts have erred.

He publicly announced he was considering intervening in the case during a public appearance on January 29 — less than a week after Crypto.com’s $5 million contribution to MAGA Inc. “I’ve directed CFTC staff to reassess the commission’s participation in matters currently pending before the federal district and circuit courts,” Selig said during his first public remarks as CFTC chairman.

On February 5, Selig explicitly stated that he believed it was legal for prediction markets to offer bets on sports, regardless of whether the company complied with state law.

Few companies have spent more money to ingratiate themselves politically with Trump than Crypto.com. Including the $5 million in January, Crypto.com has donated a total of $35 million to MAGA Inc. since 2025. It is the Super PAC’s largest donor, accounting for more than 10% of total funds.

Prior to its support for MAGA Inc, Crypto.com’s only political giving was a $1 million donation to Trump’s second inauguration in 2025.

Crypto.com has also formed an extensive partnership with Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), Trump’s money-losing media conglomerate that has recently pivoted into cryptocurrency and nuclear fusion. Among other integrations, Crypto.com and TMTG announced in October that Crypto.com would integrate its prediction market with Truth Social, TMTG’s social network. The joint venture will be called Truth Predict. President Trump is TMTG’s largest shareholder.

Crypto.com’s thin legal argument

Crypto.com and other prediction markets — and now the CFTC — argue that creating markets for sporting events is fundamentally different than sports gambling. In practice, however, it looks identical.

The CFTC has jurisdiction over event-related contracts or “swaps” that provide “for any purchase, sale, payment, or delivery… that is dependent on the occurrence, nonoccurrence, or the extent of the occurrence of an event or contingency associated with a potential financial, economic, or commercial consequence.” (Emphasis added.)

The traditional example of this is a contract to buy corn at a certain price in the future. This serves as an economic hedge against price fluctuations that can affect producers of tortilla chips, for example.

There are theoretical arguments that betting on the outcome of a sporting event could serve as an economic hedge. The CFTC, in its brief in support of Crypto.com, tries to make this argument:

Broadly speaking, sporting events are economic enterprises that generate billions of dollars in economic activity and materially affect both regional and national markets… For these reasons, hotels likely adjust pricing models, restaurants expand staffing to accommodate increased demand, vendors increase supply orders, and cities allocate resources to accommodate projected crowds. All of these decisions pose economic risk, which is precisely the type of economic exposure that derivatives markets are designed to mitigate.

Of course, this is not how prediction markets on sporting events are used. No one is wagering on a basketball game to hedge against hotels raising prices. They are used by people who want to gamble on sports, particularly in states where sports gambling is not currently legal. On popular prediction markets like Kalshi, sports betting accounts for over 90% of all trading volume.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) mocked Selig’s position on X. “I don’t remember the CFTC having authority over the ‘derivative market’ of LeBron James rebounds,” Cox wrote. “These prediction markets you are breathlessly defending are gambling—pure and simple.”

The district court noted that, under Crypto.com’s interpretation, if every bet on a sporting event qualified as a “swap” subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the CFTC. That would mean it would no longer be permissible for people to place sports bets in casinos. “Had Congress intended such a sea change in the regulatory landscape, it surely would have said so,” the district court wrote.

Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the parent company of Truth Social, has an unrivaled free source of publicity. President Trump, who is also TMTG’s largest shareholder, posts extensively on the Truth Social platform, sometimes dozens of times in a single day. He is essentially leveraging the full weight of the presidency, the world’s most powerful office, to drive awareness of TMTG’s offerings.

Yet, by all objective metrics, TMTG is failing.

The stock price, which trades under the ticker symbol DJT, peaked at nearly $62 in March 2024, shortly after the company went public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). On February 17, DJT stock closed below $10 per share, an all-time low. (It rallied modestly on Wednesday, closing at $10.48.)

What happened?

First, the fundamentals of the business are poor. In the three months ending September 2025, the most recent quarterly data available, TMTG reported $972,000 in revenue and a net loss of $58.4 million. The business is burning money at an alarming rate and has done so since its inception. It has never brought in more than $4 million per year while losing hundreds of millions of dollars.

TMTG’s core business, Truth Social, has remained tiny despite Trump’s frequent promotion. SimilarWeb estimated Truth Social had around 359,000 daily active users in 2025. Its top competitors, X and Threads, each have more than 100 million daily active users.

In its 2021 pitch deck to investors, TMTG projected it would have $1.8 billion in revenue in 2025 and 69 million users on Truth Social. It also estimated that it would have 23 million paid users of its TMTG+ video streaming service.

TMTG has launched a video streaming service, Truth+, but most content is available for free. The company has not disclosed how many people have subscribed to its $9.99 premium service. The same pitch deck projected 2026 revenue would double to $3.67 billion

With its core business stagnant, TMTG has sought to diversify its business to prop up its stock price. Its biggest swing came in May 2025 when TMTG announced it was raising $2.5 billion to buy Bitcoin and Bitcoin related securities. The goal was to transform TMTG into a bitcoin treasury company, tying DJT stock to the price of bitcoin, rather than the performance of Truth Social and other business activities.

TMTG executed this strategy by issuing 55.8 million new DJT shares, which diluted the value of existing stock, and issuing $1 billion in zero interest convertible notes.

This turned out to be a massive mistake. By December 2025, TMTG had purchased 11,542 Bitcoin at an average price of $108,000. The price of Bitcoin has since collapsed to about $67,000, generating an unrealized loss of about $472 million.

Beyond buying Bitcoin, TMTG has expanded into a number of other industries with little or no connection to social media.

“America First” investment products

In January 2025, TMTG announced the launch of Truth.Fi, through which it would offer various financial services. Through Truth.Fi, TMTG has created exchange traded funds (ETFs) with themes that match Trump’s political agenda — “Made in America,” “America First,” and “Bitcoin Plus.” It has also offered separately managed accounts (SMAs), a more bespoke investment vehicle for high-net worth individuals. These were pitched by TMTG and its partners as not just as an investment vehicle but as “a declaration of support for businesses essential to our economy, national security, and enduring freedoms” and an endorsement of “America First principles.”

Whether Truth.Fi’s ETFs and SMAs will meaningfully contribute to TMTG’s revenue remains to be seen. The ETFs only launched in 2026 and face competition from countless other investment vehicles.

The Crypto.com partnership

In September 2025, TMTG announced that it would offer Crypto.com’s Cronos tokens (CRO) as rewards for engagement on Truth Social. As part of the announcement, TMTG purchased 684.4 million CRO at a price of 15.3 cents per token. CRO tokens now trade at about 7.8 cents, creating an unrealized loss of over $51 million.

Crypto.com and TMTG also announced a plan to create a separate company, Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, Inc., that would hold billions in CRO tokens. With the price of CRO collapsing, the new company has not yet come to fruition. TMTG is also partnering with Crypto.com to create a prediction market, similar to Kalshi and Polymarket, called Truth Predict. It has not yet launched.

Under the Biden administration, Crypto.com was under SEC investigation. The Trump administration dropped the inquiry, and shortly thereafter Crypto.com became TMTG’s most important business partner.

The nuclear fusion tie-up

TMTG’s wildest move came in December 2025, when it announced a merger with TAE Technologies, a nuclear fusion company. The deal is valued at $6 billion and is expected to close later in 2026.

After an initial bump in the share price, investors appear to have cooled on the idea of merging a failing social media company with an energy company focused on speculative technology. The deal has raised practical concerns — no one has successfully produced energy using nuclear fusion at scale — and ethical ones. Nuclear fusion will likely need extensive support from the federal government to become viable.

Trading at an all-time low, TMTG still has an absurdly high valuation

Even at around $10 per share, TMTG still has a market capitalization of $2.9 billion. DJT stock is buoyed by retail investors who view it as a proxy for support for Trump himself. It also benefits from investor conviction that TMTG, given its relationship with Trump, will find a way to succeed. Its performance to date, however, has done little to validate that conviction.

CBS forbade Late Show host Stephen Colbert from interviewing Texas State Representative James Talarico, a Democrat running to unseat Republican Senator John Cornyn. The incident is a chilling example of how the Trump administration and allied media organizations are colluding to suppress critical coverage of the administration.

Addressing the incident on Monday night’s show, Colbert said he was also told by CBS’ lawyers not to discuss the decision to spike the Talarico interview. But Colbert, whose show is being canceled in May, ignored that directive.

At issue was the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) “equal time rule,” which states that if a broadcast radio or television station provides time to a candidate for political office, it must provide equal time to all other candidates. (The rule does not apply to cable, streaming, or other non-broadcast platforms.) There is, however, an exception to the rule for news coverage and interviews. And, for decades, that exception has also applied to interviews of politicians by talk show hosts.

In a January 21 “Public Notice,” the FCC declared that interviews of political candidates on late night and daytime talk shows would no longer have a blanket exemption. Rather, the FCC would make a case-by-case determination of whether a program was conducting interviews for “bona fide” news purposes or for “partisan purposes, such as an intention to advance or harm an individual’s candidacy.” The notice did not provide any guidance as to what makes a show “partisan.”

Without the exception, airing political interviews would be effectively impossible. For example, there are 15 declared candidates running for U.S. Senate in Texas. Without the exemption, if the Late Show interviewed Talarico for 10 minutes, every CBS affiliate in the country would need to provide 10 minutes of primetime airtime to the other 14 candidates — including those with little support and no chance of victory. Recent polls show Talarico in a virtual dead heat with Cornyn in a hypothetical general election matchup.

“Let’s just call this what it is,” Colbert said Monday. “Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV.” At a January 29 press conference, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr (R), a Trump loyalist, said the Commission would not grant an exception to the equal time rule for broadcasts it considers “fake news.”

In a Fox News interview, Carr made clear that the rule was targeting Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel. Carr said that if Colbert or Kimmel did not want to comply with the new requirements, they could move to cable or a podcast, which are outside the FCC’s jurisdiction.

FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez (D) noted that the FCC “has not adopted any new regulation, interpretation, or Commission-level policy altering the long-standing news exemption or equal time framework.” She called the Public Notice “misleading” and “an escalation in this FCC’s ongoing campaign to censor and control speech.” She urged broadcasters to “not feel pressured to water down, sanitize, or avoid critical coverage out of fear of regulatory retaliation.”

CBS, however, is using the Public Notice as justification to censor the broadcast of an interview with a Democratic political candidate. Notably, the network was recently sold to a new owner in a transaction financed by billionaire Larry Ellison, a major Trump supporter. The CEO of CBS’ new parent organization, Paramount Skydance, is David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. In October, David Ellison installed Bari Weiss, a conservative pundit, as the new Editor-in-Chief of CBS News.

In a statement issued Tuesday afternoon, CBS denied that it prohibited Colbert from airing the interview.

Not every broadcast network is falling in line. ABC’s The View interviewed Talarico on February 2. An anonymous FCC source then leaked to Fox News that the Commission had launched an investigation into the interview. “Fake news is not getting a free pass anymore,” the FCC source said.

Carr turns a blind eye to right-wing talk radio

While the equal time rule applies to broadcast radio as well as television, the FCC’s January 21 Public Notice only mentions broadcast television. Talk radio shows typically lean more conservative, and would likely be forced to include more Democratic guests if the equal time rule was also enforced in radio.

Carr was asked in the January 29 press conference if the new guidance applied to “political talk radio.” Carr noted that while the equal time rule “applies to broadcast radio and TV,” the new guidance “was focused on those TV precedents.”

Carr argued that the FCC “wanted to be very clear” about the precedents for broadcast television because “there had been some broadcast television-related decisions by the FCC over the years, and it had appeared that some in [the] industry had misread, overread, or misconstrued those decisions.” Carr argued that the guidance was not necessary for radio, as “there wasn’t a relevant precedent that we saw that was being misconstrued on the radio side.”

Later in the press conference, however, Gomez reiterated that the equal time rule applies to radio as well. “And I also want to note what the administration is not focusing on, that these rules apply to all broadcasters, television and radio,” Gomez said. Gomez argued that the rules “must be applied evenly to the administration’s friends and critics alike.”

How Carr has weaponized the FCC

Since the start of the second Trump administration, Carr has used the FCC as a cudgel to intimidate news organizations and advance the Trump agenda.

On January 22, 2025, Carr reopened an investigation into whether CBS had deceptively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes in October 2024. Carr’s investigation was launched as Paramount, CBS’s owner, faced a defamation lawsuit from Trump over the Harris interview. Paramount was also seeking FCC approval for its merger with Skydance.

In February 2025, the New York Times reported that Paramount executives hoped that settling the lawsuit with Trump would pave the way for the FCC to approve the merger. Ultimately, the lawsuit was settled on July 1 for $16 million, and the FCC approved the merger three weeks later. The approval was granted on the condition that CBS hire an ombudsman to review bias in news coverage and that Paramount and Skydance shut down all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

A few weeks after Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to “combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences,” Carr sent a letter to Comcast, which owns NBC, saying that the FCC was investigating its DEI policies. The letter said, “the FCC will be taking fresh action to ensure that every entity the FCC regulates complies with the civil rights protections enshrined in the Communications Act and the agency’s EEO rules, including by shutting down any programs that promote invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”

Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T have also caved to Carr’s threats and ended DEI programs to secure FCC approval for proposed mergers.

In the last year, Carr has also threatened several other media companies for unfavorable coverage of the Trump administration. For example, early in Trump’s term, the FCC launched an investigation into San Francisco radio station KCBS over its coverage of ICE operations in San Jose. According to the AP, the station’s news directors told employees to ensure that the station’s coverage did not anger the FCC.

Carr’s most high-profile threat came in September when he implied that ABC could face punishment after Kimmel made a comment about the murder of Charlie Kirk. On a podcast with MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Carr said, “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Within hours, Kimmel was suspended by ABC, although it was reinstated about a week later.

Congressman Andy Barr (R-KY), who is running to replace Mitch McConnell in the United States Senate, released his first television ad earlier this month. In the ad, Barr speaks directly to the camera and declares, “It’s not a sin to be white.”

The language used by Barr is a variation of the phrase “It’s OK to be white,” which has been adopted by white supremacists. It has been designated as a “hate slogan“ by the Anti-Defamation League.

According to campaign finance records reviewed by Popular Information, Barr’s campaign ad is being bankrolled by dozens of major corporations, including General Motors, State Farm, JPMorgan Chase, Delta, and Microsoft.

“It’s OK to be white,” sometimes abbreviated as IOTBW, was popularized on the notoriously racist message board 4chan in 2017. It was then adopted by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, who plastered schools and other public spaces with flyers featuring the slogan. Former KKK grand wizard David Duke, a prominent white supremacist, promoted the campaign:

It was also championed by the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.

IOTBW “has a fairly long history in the white supremacist movement,” according to Mark Pitcavage, a researcher who studies extremism. In 2001, the phrase was used as the title of a song by the “white power music band Aggressive Force.” ADL has been tracking it since at least 2005 and, in 2012, a Ku Klux Klan group, United Klans of America, used the hashtag #IOTBW on Twitter.

The purpose of the 2017 campaign was to “trigger“ liberals and journalists with a purportedly innocuous phrase to prove that they are motivated by a hatred toward white people.

The Barr campaign appears to have similar goals. Barr concludes the ad by stating, “I’m Andy Barr, and I approve this message to give woke liberals something else to cry about.” In a press release, the Barr campaign bragged that the ad had already “inflamed woke leftists.” The campaign gleefully reported that it “prompted unhinged tweets from woke liberals across [Kentucky] and the country.” The press release includes a sampling of “woke liberal meltdowns” in response to the ad.

The ad also lambastes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, saying the acronym really stands for “Dumb, Evil, Indoctrination.” According to Barr, “Woke liberals spew it, corporate losers fall for it.” As Barr decries “woke liberals,” the ad features a still image of a Black man in a Martin Luther King Jr. t-shirt, holding a sign that reads “Stay Woke America.”

Barr’s campaign announced it would spend $1 million to promote the ad across Kentucky on broadcast, cable, and digital platforms. Former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is Black, is Barr’s top Republican primary opponent. The two were virtually tied in two polls conducted before Barr released the ad.

The ad has drawn comparisons to an infamous ad, “Hands,” aired by the campaign of the late Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) in 1990. “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?” the narrator in the ad asked as a pair of white hands crumpled a piece of paper.

Barr is not a stranger to racial controversy in his campaigns. When Barr first ran for Congress in 2010, it was reported that he was a life-long member of a country club, Idle Hour, that was all-white until 2009. Barr’s campaign responded by saying the news was the result of dirty politics by his opponent and did not apologize for his association with the club.

Corporate PAC donors to Barr’s campaign

Barr’s Senate campaign has raised nearly $1.4 million from PACs, including dozens of PACs representing corporations and trade associations. A Popular Information review of Barr’s filings with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) revealed contributions from at least 67 major corporations.

Some companies that donated to Barr appear to be the “corporate losers” that he attacks in the new ad. In 2022, for example, MetLife CEO Michel Khalaf said:

MetLife’s purpose calls on us to build a more inclusive and equitable world for all our stakeholders. The breadth of these commitments demonstrates that we are significantly advancing our DEI efforts on every front. Setting clear expectations for our progress will hold us accountable and sustain our momentum.

In 2025, MetLife’s PAC donated $5,000 to Barr’s Senate campaign.

A top Delta executive said last year that, despite pressure from the Trump administration, it remained steadfast in its commitment to diversity. “​​DEI is about talent, and that’s been our focus,” Delta Chief External Affairs Officer Peter Carter said. “And, of course, the key differentiator at Delta is our people.” A few months later, Delta donated $5,000 to Barr’s Senate campaign.

In other cases, corporations have supported Barr as they scaled back efforts to promote diversity. Microsoft, for example, ceased publication of its annual diversity and inclusion report in 2025 and donated $5,000 to Barr. Last year, Wells Fargo “discreetly deleted its DEI page detailing a long history of diversity and inclusion work dating back to the early 1800s” and donated $5,000 to Barr’s campaign. It was a dramatic about-face for Wells Fargo, which pledged $50 million to the NAACP in 2023.

Other corporate donors to Barr’s Senate campaign that recently donated to the NAACP include JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Nationwide, and UPS. Meanwhile, Comcast, Bank of America, and TD Bank donated to Barr and are listed as the ADL’s Corporate Partners Against Hate.

Popular Information contacted all 67 corporate PAC donors to Barr’s Senate campaign for comment. All of the corporations either did not respond or declined to comment.

Prediction markets, including Kalshi and Polymarket, are exploding in popularity. Kalshi alone saw over $1 billion in trading volume on Super Bowl Sunday.

Remarkably, more than $100 million was wagered on what song Bad Bunny would play first during his halftime show. That kind of market has raised concerns about insider trading. Not only is Bad Bunny in control of which song is played, but this information is also known in advance by dancers, musicians, crew, and anyone who happened to be around during rehearsals.

This is likely why, just before the big game, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour announced a laundry list of efforts to crack down on insider trading. This included partnering with a forensics lab, hiring an intelligence advisor, setting up a “surveillance audit committee,” and investing in “behavior monitoring and pattern recognition tools.”

Mansour said that “insider trading erodes trust” and when “people believe a market is unfair, they stop trading.” Serious violations, Mansour said, would be referred to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for criminal prosecution.

One issue, however, is that the CFTC is a relatively small government agency with a budget of less than $400 million and limited experience prosecuting insider trading.

More fundamentally, all of these steps depend on a functional definition of insider trading for prediction markets.

Mansour appeared on CNBC on Tuesday and was pressed on what constituted insider information in a market like Bad Bunny’s first Super Bowl halftime song. Andrew Ross Sorkin asked if Kalshi would consider it insider trading if one of Bad Bunny’s dancers, who knew the first song in advance, bet in the market.

Mansour said that the same rules applied to Kalshi bets as the stock market. He said that anyone who trades on “material non-public information” on Kalshi violates insider trading rules.

The hosts, however, point out that executives of publicly traded companies have a legal obligation not to share financially material non-public information outside of regular public disclosures. Bad Bunny and his employees do not face the same legal constraints and have nothing to do with the market set up by Kalshi.

Mansour offered a pat response: “Either this information can be public, and that’s okay, or it’s information that cannot be public beforehand.”

Mansour appears to be leaning on the CFTC’s more lenient stance toward insider trading. Under CFTC rules, trading on non-public information is permitted, as long as you didn’t obtain the information through fraudulent or illegal means:

The failure to disclose information prior to entering into a transaction, either in an anonymous market setting or in bilateral negotiations, will not, by itself, constitute a violation. However, depending on all of the facts and circumstances, trading on the basis of material nonpublic information in breach of a pre-existing duty (established by another law or rule, agreement, understanding, or some other source), or by trading on the basis of material nonpublic information that was obtained through fraud or deception, may violate final Rule 180.1.

“This has been an age-old question for all types of financial markets, right?” Mansour asked rhetorically. “Should the farmers be able to trade on grain futures, you know, because they have more information about the crops?” Farmers are allowed to trade on grain futures.

Becky Quick, the other CNBC host, noted that if that is the standard, dancers who knew the song in advance would be free to participate in the Kalshi market:

It’s not material information that can’t be shared. You’re making it that by putting it on this betting platform, but they have no obligation to say we’re not going to tell anybody our opening lineup because there might be money made on this other place that’s now betting on this… the responsibility is not on them.

Mansour conceded the point. “If that’s the position that people are taking… It’s basically, you know, it’s okay to actually talk about which song is gonna be played… then that it’s okay and it’s totally fair game, and I agree with you in that case,” he said.

“That just doesn’t seem like a fair market trade,” Quick replied. “[T]here’s an advantage to people who have this information [and] there’s no way you could go after them because it’s… this is not material information.” The discussion concluded with Mansour suggesting that Bad Bunny revealing the song in advance to people who place bets on Kalshi was “fair game” and part of “the risk in the market.”

In response to Popular Information’s request for comment, Kalshi provided the following statement:

People who participate in large commercial events, activities, etc often sign contracts or agreements not to disclose info, maintain confidentiality, etc. Where users have a legal duty not to disclose info and then they do disclose it, it can be insider trading. Of course, cases depend on specific facts and evidence.

Numerous markets offered on Kalshi carry similar risks. For example, there are individual markets on whether dozens of people will attend President Trump’s State of the Union address on February 24.

At some point before the speech, Barron Trump will know whether he’ll attend. There is nothing to stop him from telling his buddies at New York University. Barron Trump is not obligated to keep his plans secret because Kalshi has set up a market.

Major corporations — including Mastercard, Deloitte, and ExxonMobil — are spending millions to promote President Trump and some of his most divisive policy initiatives. The corporations are sponsoring Freedom 250, which bills itself as a “non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday.” But internal documents obtained by Popular Information reveal that Freedom 250 is bankrolling events promoting Trump and his political agenda.

Corporations pay between $500,000 and $10 million to become a Freedom 250 sponsor. Those who donate $1 million or more get invited to a private reception with Trump. For $2.5 million or more, sponsors receive a speaking role at the 4th of July celebration in Washington, D.C. The benefits for sponsors were first reported by the New York Times.

Freedom 250 will purportedly use the money to host events across the country celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday. But an “Events Toolkit” produced by Freedom 250 and labeled “DRAFT DELIBERATIVE NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION” reveals the events will actually promote pro-Trump political talking points.

For example, a “Talking Points & Messaging Guide” suggests partner organizations feature “issue-based messaging.” One featured message: “President Trump and America First leaders are restoring election integrity and protecting the voice of every legal citizen.” The idea that election integrity needs to be “restored” is based on the conspiracy theory, promoted by Trump, that the 2020 election was stolen. It also promotes the falsehood that “legal citizen” votes are being diluted by ineligible voters.

The “Events Toolkit” also instructs organizational partners that the “CORE THEME TO ELEVATE” is “President Trump’s Freedom250 Vision.” This entails praising specific executive orders issued by Trump, including “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

That order, which was signed last March, has resulted in “the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks.” New brochures at the former home of Medgar Evers, who was murdered by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, will no longer refer to Evers’ killer as “racist.” In other cases, signs “referring to the forced removal of Native Americans“ were removed from parks.

Freedom 250 is now telling partner organizations to say that this kind of historical erasure is “uniting Americans across the country.”

Other “talking points” explicitly call on partner organizations to align themselves with Trump’s political project: “[W]e’re proud to stand with the America First movement.”

The document also calls on partner organizations to use Freedom 250 events to mobilize “America First” voters, urging them to pair rallies for “election integrity” and “parental rights” with “voter registration booths.”

Deloitte, Mastercard, and ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.

Deloitte, however, has won over $100 million in new work from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) since Trump took office in 2025, according to an FT analysis. Among the new assignments is a contract for “internet research and data analytics support services” to support ICE’s targeting operations. A donation of a few million to Freedom 250 is a small price to pay if it keeps Deloitte in the Trump administration’s good graces.

Mastercard, meanwhile, faces a threat to its core business after Trump proposed a 10% cap on credit card interest rates. Although there were reports that Trump would issue an executive order imposing the restriction, he has not done so. Trump also has endorsed legislation that would bring more competition to the lucrative credit card processing fee industry. Thus far, that legislation has not advanced. All of this means that, for Mastercard, the access to Trump provided by sponsoring Freedom 250 could be extraordinarily valuable.

ExxonMobil is seeking to repair its relationship with the Trump administration after its CEO, Darren Woods, drew Trump’s ire at a high-profile White House meeting. Woods said that Venezuela, absent a change in local laws, was “uninvestible.” Trump was using the event to highlight the economic opportunities in Venezuela after the capture of President Nicolás Maduro in a military raid. Trump said he would seek retribution against ExxonMobil. “I didn’t like Exxon’s response,” Trump told reporters. “I’ll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out.”

The full list of corporate donors is unknown. A representative for the National Parks Foundation, which is serving as the legal vehicle for Freedom 250, told a Congressional committee on Tuesday that it would keep donors anonymous upon request.

Freedom 250 is separate from America250, a bipartisan group that was established by Congress in 2016. America250 is engaged in traditional activities, such as promoting volunteerism and collecting stories from Americans. (Deloitte is also a sponsor of America250.)

In contrast, Freedom 250 is planning an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) match on the White House lawn on Trump’s birthday, along with a 250-foot-tall “Independence Arch” in the style of the Arc de Triomphe.

In an October 2025 interview with the New York Post, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick gave a detailed account of his relationship with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. According to Lutnick, their interactions consisted of one trip to Epstein’s home in New York City in 2005, three years before Epstein was convicted. Lutnick, who was Epstein’s neighbor, said he found the visit so disturbing that he decided not to have any further contact with Epstein. “That’s my story,” Lutnick said. “A one and absolutely done.”

Lutnick said that after moving into his home in 2005, he and his wife were invited to Epstein’s house for coffee. (Lutnick emphasized that Epstein was “arrested in like, ‘08, I think.”) While he was there, Epstein offered to give Lutnick and his wife a tour of his house. During the tour, Epstein opened some double doors off the dining room to reveal “a massage table in the middle of the room and candles all around and stuff.” Lutnick asked Epstein how often he got massages. “Every day,” Epstein said, according to Lutnick. “And the right kind of massage.”

After that comment, according to Lutnick’s account, he and his wife immediately told Epstein they had to go. Then, “in the six or eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.” Lutnick declared, unequivocally, that, after that day, “I was never in the room with [Epstein] socially, for business, or even philanthropy” because “he’s gross.”

There is only one problem with Lutnick’s story: it is not true.

In December 2012, four years after Epstein pled guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor and seven years after Lutnick claimed he cut off contact, Lutnick emailed Epstein to arrange a get-together at Epstein’s infamous island, Little St. James.

Lutnick confirmed plans to have lunch with Epstein. On December 24, 2012, Epstein’s assistant passed along a message to Lutnick: “Nice seeing you.”

A few days later, on December 28, Lutnick and Epstein became partners in a business venture. They each acquired stakes, through LLCs, in an advertising technology firm called Adfin. They signed the share purchase agreement on consecutive pages. Although the company has now shut down, they both remained investors until at least 2014.

In May 2011, a year before the island meeting, Lutnick and Epstein met for drinks at Epstein’s house, according to emails. Lutnick apparently left his phone at Epstein’s place.

Lutnick has not explained the contradiction between his October 2025 interview and these subsequent meetings with Epstein. “This is nothing more than a failing attempt by the legacy media to distract from the administration’s accomplishments, including securing trillions of dollars in investment, delivering historic trade deals and fighting for the American worker,” the Commerce Department said in a statement.

Lutnick maintained ties to Epstein for many years. In 2015, for example, Lutnick invited Epstein to a “very intimate fundraising reception“ for Hillary Clinton. (There is no record of Epstein donating.) Epstein did donate $50,000 to a 2017 dinner honoring Lutnick that benefited Jewish charitable causes. In May 2018, Lutnick wrote Epstein to warn him about the expansion of a nearby museum, which could “block our park views.”

Although none of this implicates Lutnick in Epstein’s crimes, it does raise serious questions of why Lutnick lied about his relationship with Epstein and maintained ties long after it was clear that Epstein was a sexual predator.

Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY), Congressman Robert Garcia (D-CA), and Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) all said that Lutnick should resign or be fired. “Howard Lutnick clearly went to the island if we believe what’s in these files; he was in business with Jeffrey Epstein, and this was many years after Jeffrey Epstein was convicted,” Massie said. “He’s got a lot to answer for, but really, he should make life easier on the president, frankly, and just resign.”

European officials held accountable for connections to Epstein

In contrast to the United States, officials across Europe have lost their posts due to their connections to Epstein.

In the United Kingdom, newly released files showed that Peter Mandelson, Britain’s former ambassador to the U.S., had a closer friendship with Epstein than was previously known. In 2009, Mandelson forwarded Epstein a confidential document outlining “a potential sale of government assets” that had been sent to the then-prime minister. The following year, Mandelson gave Epstein early notice that a “€500 billion bailout had been agreed to tackle the eurozone crisis.” Other documents suggest that Mandelson received $75,000 from Epstein, but Mandelson denies receiving the money.

Other documents have revealed that after Epstein was convicted for soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008, Mandelson wrote to Epstein and encouraged him to “be incredibly resilient, fight for early release and be philosophical about it as much as you can.” Mandelson and Epstein appear to have maintained contact until 2016. Mandelson was fired by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in September after an earlier release of Epstein-related documents.

On Sunday, Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, resigned. McSweeney, a “longtime protégé” of Mandelson’s, said he had “advised the prime minister” to appoint Mandelson to ambassador, and that he took “full responsibility for that advice.” On Monday, Starmer’s communications director, Tim Allan, also resigned to “allow a new No. 10 team to be built.”

In Slovakia, Miroslav Lajčák, national security advisor to the prime minister, resigned at the end of January after released emails showed that Epstein “invited him to dinner and other meetings in 2018.” Communications between Epstein and Lajčák also included suggestive communications about “gorgeous” girls.

On Sunday, Mona Juul, Norway’s ambassador to Jordan and Iraq, also resigned. Both Juul’s name and her husband’s name appeared “several times” in the Epstein files, Politico reported. A change to Epstein’s will made shortly before his death reportedly intended to leave Juul’s children $10 million. In a statement announcing her resignation, Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it had opened an investigation “into Juul’s knowledge of and contact with Epstein.” In Sweden, Joanna Rubinstein resigned after it was revealed that she visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2012. Rubinstein was president of UNHCR in Sweden, a group that fundraises for the UN Refugee Agency.

During a December 2 cabinet meeting, President Trump unleashed a torrent of bigoted invective against Somali migrants. “We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “They come from hell, and they complain and do nothing but bitch.”

At the same meeting, Trump made clear that he wanted all Somalis to be kicked out of the United States. “I don’t want them in our country,” Trump announced. “Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.”

At a December 10 event in Pennsylvania, Trump reprised his dehumanizing tirade, calling Somalia a “shithole” nation. “The Somalians should be out of here,” Trump said, describing their homeland as “filthy, dirty, disgusting, [and] ridden with crime.”

It is clear what Trump wants, but all migrants in the United States have due process rights under federal law. Specifically, Somali migrants have the right to appear before an immigration judge and seek asylum based on a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, political views, or another protected category. This is a particular risk in Somalia, where al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group, is responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.

The Trump administration, however, appears to be manipulating the judicial process to dramatically reduce the chance that Somali immigrants are granted asylum.

Matthew Hoppock is an immigration lawyer based in Kansas City. He currently represents eight Somali migrants in immigration court. On February 4, Hoppock said that all his cases had been reassigned to a new immigration judge. While the cases will still be heard in Kansas City, this new judge will preside via video conference from Louisiana. According to Hoppock, other immigration lawyers representing Somalis have had their cases reassigned to the same judge on the same day.

The judge who will now be hearing these cases involving Somali migrants is Sherron Ashworth, Popular Information has learned. Ashworth is a former ICE prosecutor with a track record of quickly rejecting most asylum claims and accepting the Trump administration’s most specious legal arguments.

Unlike other court systems, immigration courts are run by the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR). Although it is normally handled as a bureaucratic matter, the DOJ and Attorney General Pam Bondi can reassign immigration cases.

Who is Sherron Ashworth?

Ashworth was first appointed as an immigration judge in July 2020. She was named to the post as part of a cohort of 46 immigration judges by former Trump Attorney General William Barr. She was hired as part of a push by the first Trump administration to install immigration judges more skeptical of asylum claims. From 2009 to 2020, Ashworth worked as a prosecutor for ICE.

Ashworth has delivered. Between 2020 and 2025, Ashworth has rejected 85.3% of asylum claims. Nationally, the average rejection rate was 58.9%. In 2025, Ashworth denied asylum in more than 95% of cases.

Her work has not gone unnoticed. In January 2026, the DOJ promoted Ashworth to Acting Assistant Chief Immigration Judge, overseeing the cases for several Louisiana immigration courts. This is a critical position because there is a high concentration of immigration detention centers in the Louisiana area, making these courts a major hub of activity.

Ashworth and the case of Rümeysa Öztürk

Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Turkish national and Fulbright scholar, was a student at Tufts University when, on March 25, 2025, she was apprehended by six plainclothes ICE agents and handcuffed. Over the next 24 hours, she was transported over 1,300 miles to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile. That facility is overseen by the Oakdale Immigration Court, meaning Öztürk’s detention proceedings would be considered by Ashworth.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he had summarily revoked Öztürk’s visa because she was a “lunatic.” Öztürk’s lawyers say she was never notified that her visa was revoked.

Lawyers representing Öztürk sought her release on bond. But Ashworth rejected that request, finding that Öztürk was “both a flight risk and a danger to the community.” Ashworth’s decision was based entirely on a Department of State memorandum, which only cited Öztürk’s co-authorship of a 2024 student op-ed critical of Tufts’ stance on Israel and Palestine.

A March State Department memo, later reported in the Washington Post, “determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization.” Further, according to the memo, “Rubio did not have sufficient grounds for revoking Öztürk’s visa.”

In May, after being detained for six weeks, Ashworth’s decision was effectively overturned by a federal district court judge. District Judge William Sessions said there were “very substantial” and “very significant” claims that Öztürk’s First Amendment rights were violated. “Her continued detention cannot stand,” Sessions said. “There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the op-ed. I mean, that literally is the case.”

More Somalis may end up in immigration court after March

On January 13, the Trump administration announced that it was ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somali nationals. TPS is a humanitarian measure used to protect migrants who would not be safe if they returned to their home country. It has been afforded to Somali nationals since 1991, but will expire on March 17.

“Allowing Somali nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interests,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said. “We are putting Americans first.”

TPS currently benefits about 2,400 Somalis, according to ABC News. Once TPS expires in March, this group could be subject to deportation. Somalis will still be able to argue for asylum on a case-by-case basis in light of the ongoing violence in their home country. It is not known how many Somalis will seek asylum after TPS expires, or whether those cases will also be diverted to Ashworth.

In his derogatory comments, Trump has not distinguished between undocumented Somali migrants and other Somalis living in the U.S. According to U.S. Census data, about 80% of the foreign-born Somali population — 93,000 of 115,000 — are naturalized U.S. citizens.