Hartmann Report

Congress passed the laws. Previous presidents signed them. The Supreme Court has now declared they can be ignored whenever this particular president chooses (but not Biden)... Something happened inside the Supreme Court chamber on Thursday that almost never happens: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so disgusted by what the six radical, on-the-take Republican appointees had just done that she read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Justice Samuel Alito, who’d written the majority opinion, snapped back at her in real time, a breach of the Court’s normally stage-managed decorum that left veteran reporters in the room visibly startled in slack-jawed amazement. On the surface they were fighting about asylum seekers. But Sotomayor understood, as Alito surely did, that the real question wasn’t who gets to cross the border: it was whether the laws Congress writes still mean anything once a neofascist, imperial president (like Alito and his peers want) decides he’d rather not follow them because he’s above the law.

Why Americans are embracing policies they were taught to fear, while rejecting a stupid, oligarchic economic model that's failed us all (except the oligarchs)... On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening. Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than thirty points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assembly member Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway. As Bernie Sanders put it afterward, the message is pretty clear: Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.

The pattern is becoming impossible to miss: the hidden report, the voter-roll purges, the gerrymanders, and Postal Service changes targeting mail ballots in Democratic states.. Somewhere inside the White House right now there’s a federal intelligence report sitting in a drawer, and Trump’s lickspittles who put it there are betting you won’t see it before you vote in November. It’s an assessment of the security of America’s voting machines, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Reuters revealed last week that White House officials have spent months refusing to authorize its release even as the 2026 midterms come barreling toward us. The findings are almost comic in their irony, but they could also become the weapon that brings down our democracy this November. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the backstory.

The Pentagon investigation is finished. Congress still hasn’t seen it. The families of Minab deserve answers—and so do we... On the morning of February 28th, the first day of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab were at their desks a little after ten o’clock when the missiles arrived. The name of the school means “The Good Tree.” By the time the dust settled, as many as 175 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Iran’s confirmed count came to around 155, and the list its state broadcaster released documents dozens of dead little boys, dozens of dead little girls, more than two dozen dead teachers, several dead parents, a dead school bus driver, and a dead pharmacy technician from the clinic next door. The teachers had started phoning families the instant the attacks began, begging them to come collect their children. There wasn’t enough time. Some parents reached the school only in time to claw through the rubble looking for their daughters, and according to first responders and a Reuters stringer the building was hit a second time, a so-called “double tap” (which is a war crime), with the survivors and the rescuers caught in that second blast and blown to pieces.

A conservative Italian newspaper used the blunt type of word American journalists keep avoiding, and exposed how far our press will go to normalize the abnormal... This weekend, the right-wing Italian daily Libero, a major conservative newspaper that shares a fair amount of Donald Trump’s politics, ran a one-word verdict on the President of the United States across its front page. The Italian word is coglione. The polite translation is “idiot.” The translation that George Conway and half of social media reached for, and the one the paper plainly intended, is a good deal blunter than that and more dictionary accurate: “asshole.”

Who was J.C. Bancroft Davis? And why would he commit such an audacious fraud? The answer lies in his connections to the railroad oligarchs, his own ambitions within America’s elite power structure, and—most importantly—whose interests he was really serving when he wrote that fraudulent headnote. Davis wasn’t just helping the Southern Pacific Railroad win a tax case. He was helping an entire class of oligarchs acquire a constitutional weapon they could use against democracy itself, against the Progressive Era reforms that threatened their power, against the labor movement that demanded dignity for workers, and ultimately against every democratic effort to build what would later be called the American Dream.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump just handed America’s spy agencies to a man with no intelligence experience and no security clearance and that’s the whole point. — The head of the Justice Department cannot bring himself to tell a federal judge the truth in writing. — Trump’s closest friend in Europe just learned the lesson everyone who has ever worked with him eventually learns: flatter the man-child or get smeared — Washington, D.C. just elected a democratic socialist mayor, and the pearl-clutchers are missing the point so completely it’s almost impressive. — A scientist looked at Trump’s new research rule and said the quiet part right out loud: “the purpose of the rule is fascism.” — Good News Alert!

I've spent enough years behind a microphone to know the difference between entertainment and a sales pitch dressed up as entertainment, and I know which one this was. Rogan does, too... It takes a particular kind of hubris to stand on the South Lawn of the White House, on a sitting president’s 80th birthday, calling the fights for a cage match that the president personally dreamed up, hosted, sat ringside for, and bought stock in, and then go on your podcast a day later and tell the rest of the country that anybody who noticed the politics of it all should just: “Shut the f*ck up!” But that’s what Joe Rogan said this week, complaining that “so many people are trying to make it a partisan thing” and pleading with everybody to just please settle down and stop. It would be funny if it weren’t such a perfect little distillation of how the whole GOP con works. There’s nothing accidental or apolitical about erecting a structure taller than the White House itself on the patch of grass where Marine One usually lands, all so two men can choke each other bloody in front of America’s Caligula on the day he happens to turn eighty.

The pre-crime apparatus is no longer theoretical. Americans are now being prosecuted for meetings, messages, and protest activity… Back in April I wrote here about what I called the Department of Thought Crimes, the pre-crime apparatus the Trump regime had quietly stood up inside the FBI and DOJ to hunt for Americans who might someday break a law because of what they believe. Ken Klippenstein first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7,” which is apparently the basis for these arrests. It identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse: “[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.” Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime — specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police departments across America.

For half a century, the evidence surfaced after the winners took office. This election may be the first where the public sees it beforehand… Republicans have gotten away with it four times now, in a big way. Each time it was because Democrats didn’t realize — until it was too late — the crimes the GOP was willing to perpetrate just to seize and hold power. In August of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey negotiated an end to the Vietnam War with both the North and South Vietnamese. Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon for president in that year’s election and planned to announce the deal in September or early October. He was running ahead and would’ve easily won the presidency with the peace deal.