Articles & Videos

A federal judge just nixed the settlement underlying Donald Trump’s nearly $1.8 billion slush fund.The fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself after he dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for the unlawful leak of his tax returns in 2019. The honey pot payments were pitched as reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Justice, to virtually any right-winger that felt targeted by the previous presidential administration.“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” wrote U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in a 56-page order Monday.Williams ruled that any entities affiliated with the slush fund settlement—including the president, the Treasury Department, and the IRS—were “prohibited” from using the details of the arrangement in any official capacity. She also referred Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for possible professional discipline. She noted that while Trump had the right to pursue legal action over the unauthorized publication of his tax returns, he chose not to do so while he was still a private citizen. Instead, Trump did not bring the charges until he had returned to the White House and subsequently appointed his former lawyer, Todd Blanche, atop the Justice Department. “These officials then negotiated on behalf of the United States, with his current lawyers, including his former White House Counsel, to reach a ‘settlement,’” Williams assessed. “It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties.”The settlement between Trump and his government also included a curious addendum from Blanche that immunized Trump from further federal prosecution. The government of the United States, Blanche wrote, would be “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his business.But as Williams observed, the jaw-dropping components of the case—such as the billions of dollars in taxpayer funds proposed for undefined grievances, or the blanket immunities offered to Trump—were not put before the court. Instead, the question underlying the legality of the president’s slush fund centered around whether the entities engaged in the settlement arrangement, from government representatives to Trump’s personal attorneys, ever represented different parties while they pretended to engage in a legitimate court proceeding.“The answer is a resounding ‘no’: the Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest,” Williams wrote.That was evidenced before the nation in June, when Blanche testified before the House of Representatives that the Anti-Weaponization Fund would not be moving forward. That slip of the tongue showcased Blanche’s confidence that he could speak for, and bind, both sides of the matter, according to the judge.“In sum, the facts before this Court demonstrate there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” Williams concluded.This story has been updated.

The White House is charging David Hearn with felony-level destruction of property for reaching his hand into the pool.

A young man was shot and killed Monday morning by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Biddeford, Maine, according to reports by local media outlets and authorities.“This morning a shooting occurred in Biddeford,” Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau wrote in a Facebook post. “A person was killed. ICE was involved. State Police and the Department of Public Safety are now on scene to gather details and would expect the FBI to investigate as well.”The victim, who appears to have been shot while operating a car, was a 26-year-old Colombian man “who was authorized to work in the United States and had been issued a Social Security number,” according to two immigrants rights groups, Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine.“A 26-year-old man came to Maine to live and work, and now his family is mourning his death following an incident involving ICE,” the groups said in a statement. “This is devastating, enraging, and unacceptable. His loved ones deserve answers, and the public deserves a full and transparent account of what happened.”At a press conference Senator Angus King said the FBI would investigate the incident. King also said the agents involved were not wearing body cameras and that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had told him the victim was the target of an immigration operation “based on his immigration status.”But hours later, King amended the latter point, stating that the Homeland Security secretary had since informed him the victim was actually “not the target of the warrant.”According to King, Mullin alleged the man “weaponized” his vehicle against an agent—recalling accusations ICE has made dubiously against other victims of high-profile fatal incidents involving the agency in the past.A statement from the Maine Attorney General’s Office, citing “initial statements,” says the man “attempted to flee in a vehicle in the direction of the officer and was fatally shot.”Footage of the aftermath appears to show ICE agents standing around the deceased man in an intersection, beside a white Kia sedan whose windshield bore several bullet holes.A witness told the Portland Press Herald that he heard gunshots, then saw an SUV attempting to “ram a small white car in the intersection” before agents in vests stopped the white car and pulled the man from the vehicle. Before he died, the victim was “bleeding profusely from the head,” that witness said. “He was talking. He said, ‘I tried to stop.’” Another witness told the Press Herald that the victim’s family was apparently at the scene of the shooting. As the man lay on the street, an “older woman” was present “with a distressed family,” including a toddler—a little girl in Bluey pajamas. “You took her dad, you took her dad!” the woman yelled.This is at least the eleventh fatal ICE shooting since Donald Trump returned to office—and the second in less than a week, coming just days after ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, on July 7.Members of the community protested the fatal shooting Monday morning and afternoon. At one such protest, City Councilor Abigail Woods told the Biddeford Gazette, a local news source, that friends of hers had witnessed the incident. “It’s unacceptable to have one of our own residents in the city of Biddeford be murdered by ICE,” Woods said.This story has been updated.

Last spring, it was rumored that agents with the FBI were trained to redact portions of the Epstein files before the documents became public. On Sunday, agency officials admitted to the scheme.It took independent journalist and award-winning podcaster Allison Gill a year, a Freedom of Information Act request, and a subsequent lawsuit against the government to obtain evidence that the bureau had specifically trained its investigators to scrub the Epstein files clean. On Sunday, Gill received a stunning admission from the FBI confirming that the training videos—which were never released as part of the legal mandate—do in fact exist.Numerous federal agents from both the FBI and the Justice Department have shared their experiences of participating in the censorship effort, recounting how they would sometimes be locked in the building for 24- or 48-hour shifts to review hundreds of thousands of files, videos, and photos related to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking ring. One of the things agents were reportedly instructed to redact was mentions of Donald Trump’s name.“They confided in me that there existed an unclassified share point site where a Powerpoint deck lived, and that the Powerpoint deck had training videos embedded in it, instructing them on how to find and log and mark Trump’s name and other information for redaction,” Gill said in a video report.The bureau’s information management division was predominantly tasked with censoring the documents, despite the fact that the unit has not historically been used to scrub documents for publication. So the FBI had to create specialized training videos for the agents, instructing them how to “use an Excel spreadsheet to log Trump’s name, the page number, and the document,” reported Gill.Even still, Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the initial release of the Epstein files. His name also appeared in an FBI tip sheet listing abuse allegations, including one in which an unknown source accuses Trump of forcing one of Epstein’s victims, presumed to be 13 or 14 years old at the time, to perform oral sex on him “approximately 35 years ago” in New Jersey.

The death occurred during the historic protests against the then-government of Iván Duque. At one point during the investigation, Colombia’s now-president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella, defended the police officer who allegedly shot Cruz. BreakThrough News , July 12, 2026

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo killing was the result of the kind of operation ICE increasingly relies on to meet quotas.