BY PRIYANKA ARIBINDI, BRIAN BEUTLER
& CROOKED MEDIA

Monday, June 25th, 2018

— Permit Patty, doing bad all by herself.

INGRATES RUNNING THE ASYLUM

The Trump administration may have stopped separating children from their parents at the southern border last week, but officials are failing to clean up the mess Trump has made, and Trump seems intent upon making the crisis worse.

On Sunday, President Trump called for those who cross into the U.S. illegally to be sent back immediately without due process. Due process is a Constitutional right guaranteed to all people in America, but it’s also how the government determines who is in the country illegally and who is not. So Trump wants to end rule of law so that immigration agents can deport whomever they want, even citizens, without review. Wonderful.

On Friday an administration official said that around 500 of 2,300-plus children who were separated from their families had been reunited with them, but that has done little to allay doubts that some of the children will be effectively orphaned. Over the weekend, a 15-year-old migrant boy walked out of a shelter in Texas and disappeared after officials said they were legally not able to hold children who wanted to exit.

Last week’s tumult and the Trump administration’s continued insistence on a “zero tolerance” policy, and mass jailing of asylum seekers, culminated in protests near the border in Tornillo, TX and around the country. Nationwide protests are scheduled for Saturday. Find one near you.

ANTI-ANTIPASTO

President Trump is whipping up a harassment campaign against both a restaurant in Lexington, VA and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), after the restaurant’s owner asked  White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave, and Waters encouraged people to publicly shun top Trump officials.

Amid the controversy, the political establishment has largely taken the opportunity to lecture the owner and other anti-Trump Americans about civility.

From Brian: There are only so many official channels for enforcing moral standards in American public life. One is elections, which happen pretty rarely, and, thanks to gerrymanders and the electoral college, frequently reward popular vote losers. Another is the law, where courts are increasingly stacked against the majority. That makes shame a potent weapon, and it’s little surprise that people invested in the status quo want those who are willing to use shame to unilaterally disarm.

Read →

The Supreme Court sided with Texas and North Carolina in a case about racial gerrymandering and returned a challenge to North Carolina's district maps to lower courts. This means that most of the gerrymandered districts in these states will remain intact during the 2018 midterm elections. The stolen Gorsuch seat pays dividends once again.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince turned over his phones and computer to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in cooperation in the Russia investigation. Phones are where witches store spells.

Jason Kander, the former Missouri Secretary of State and host of Majority 54, is running for mayor of Kansas City, MO.  

Despite a mountain of awful punditry about how the politics of family separation might be good for Trump, his approval fell from 45 percent to 41 and his disapproval climbed from 50 to 55 over the past week, according to Gallup.

Facebook has hired an "Investigative Operations Team" team of ex-intelligence officers, researchers, and media buyers to test for issues and vulnerabilities in its products to avoid another Cambridge Analytica-style scandal. Fun platform.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has been frozen out of Trump’s decision-making team. He’s been reportedly kept out of the loop on major decisions including U.S. withdrawal from the Iran deal, the suspension of joint military exercises with South Korea, and Trump’s “Space Force” bullshit.

The U.S. Open will change how it will seed female players in order to avoid penalizing women who give birth.

Scott Pruitt’s scandal du jour: Emails show that the EPA administrator considered hiring a friend of his lobbyist landlord who was giving him a $50-per-night rate on prime D.C. real estate. Cooooooooooooooool.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) gave Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) the Heimlich maneuver when she started choking at a caucus lunch on Thursday, unintentionally cracking her rib. (Though Manchin did wave his copay.) In better news for McCaskill, her Republican opponent joined a lawsuit aimed at gutting pre-existing conditions protections, and she isn’t letting voters forget it.  

On Lovett or Leave It: Live from the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Jon, Symone Sanders, Liliana Seguro, and Benjamin Sawyer break down the week’s immigration news, and catch FOX & Friends getting a little too honest.

Listen →

After winning re-election in Turkey this weekend with 53 percent of the vote, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan secured more power for himself thanks to a new Constitution that essentially places Turkey under one-man rule.

“What I see is the Trump administration seizing a reporter’s records and tricking the press into writing about her sex life. It’s appalling what the Trump administration is doing and I don’t think you should enable it.”

—Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief of The Intercept, admonishing the New York Times in its own pages for the way it has covered an affair between Times national security reporter Ali Watkins and a former senior Senate Intelligence Committee aide, James Wolfe.

Federal prosecutors seized Watkins’ email and phone records in building a case against Wolfe for allegedly lying about his contact with journalists to federal investigators.

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