Crooked Media - What A Day: Dirty pool

Are we on indictment watch? Let’s get ahead of ourselves this fine Monday. 
 

• As the Justice Department’s Special Counsel Jack Smith wraps up his investigation of disgraced former president Donald Trump’s (DFPDT’s) “mishandling” of classified White House documents, it looks like a new evidence bomb just dropped. According to a source close to DFPDT, a Mar-a-Lago employee drained the resort’s swimming pool last October and consequently flooded a room where computer servers containing surveillance-video logs were kept. 
   

• It’s unclear if the room was flooded intentionally or accidentally, but we have an educated guess! And we’re not the only ones. This incident occurred as part of a series of events that federal prosecutors found suspicious. At least one witness there has been questioned by federal investigators about the flooded server room, which came roughly two months after the FBI retrieved hundreds of classified documents from Trump’s Florida residence. 
   

• Federal prosecutors have been looking into efforts by Trump and his employees to obstruct the DOJ’s investigation after Trump received a subpoena to hand over any classified documents in his possession in May 2022, which he mostly did not, as we found out after the August FBI raid of Mar-A-Lago. At least 20 people—members of Trump’s inner circle as well as Mar-a-Lago staff—have been subpoenaed to testify in front of the federal grand jury.

Each new detail in the evidence pile points to overt corruption and obstruction of justice by Trump and his lackeys, and his legal team can sense that the walls are (maybe this time for real?) closing in.
 

• In April, Trump’s legal team protested that the classified-documents theft should be investigated as an administrative, rather than a criminal, matter. In late May, two of Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for a personal meeting to discuss what they characterized as “unfair treatment” of their client (lol) by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Lawyers asking for a meeting with DOJ officials in a federal case on behalf of their client is not unusual. Asking for a private audience with the attorney general is. On Monday, Trump’s cadre of lawyers made asked DOJ officials if the department would, pretty please, not charge Trump for stealing classified documents from the White House after leaving office. 

• All of this is to say nothing of the myriad other investigations of Trump’s contemporaneous crimes. In the past week, the Fulton County, GA, district attorney has been zeroing-in on two firms hired by the Trump campaign to “study” the question of electoral fraud in the 2020 election. The DA’s office has asked the firms for both data and information about Georgia, but also for communications with Trump officials and a detailed accounting of the campaign’s activities in other states, as prosecutors aim to build a broader racketeering case. Earlier this year, federal prosecutors obtained evidence from one of the firms, Berkeley Research Group, that Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had berated its employees for not giving him sufficient evidence to overturn the election results and “encouraged” them to find fraud that didn’t exist.
   

Big legal consequences for Trump’s shameless crime streak could finally be on the horizon. Be there, will be wild!

Pride is about fighting the freaks, but also acknowledging the fact that being gay and trans and even bi is a great time. Since this is America, we're celebrating that by making stupid memes and buying stuff. 
 

All Pride month long, you can shop from some of our favorite queer-owned businesses and authors at Crooked’s Little Gay Pop-Up Shop in the Crooked Store. Support the LGBTQ community while you browse a Crooked-curated selection of cool shit, like spices from Diaspora & Co, kids books Ron DeSantis has probably already banned, and much more.
 

Head to crooked.com/store to shop the pop-up all month long.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint in federal court on Monday listing 13 charges against cryptocurrency-exchange company Binance and its CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao. The SEC alleges that Zhao operated a “web of deception” and that Binance artificially inflated its trading numbers, diverted customer funds, failed to restrict U.S. customers from its platform, and lied to investors about its market-surveillance capabilities. Further, the claims allege that Binance and Zhao secretly controlled customer assets and allowed them to commingle and divert investor funds, which, in legal terms, is a big no-no. Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and this lawsuit marks the second time this year that federal authorities have accused the company of evading laws designed to protect investors in the United States.

Saudi Arabia announced it would make significant cuts to its oil output in July, compounding a broader OPEC deal to limit supply in order to inflate oil prices. Cool! Love those guys!

The IRS is readying its free online tax-filing pilot program for rollout as early as next year, so the major tax-prep corporations are arming themselves with a deep bench of lobbyists. Cool! Love those guys!

Someone bought a shitload of shares in Equitrans Midstream Corp—the company heavily involved in the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline—days before the debt ceiling (which greenlit the pipeline) was announced, suggesting that the special someone in question did insider trading. 

An investigation by California Attorney General Rob Bonta found that the state of Florida transported asylum-seeking migrants from the Texas border by private jet to California’s capital city of Sacramento on Monday as yet another inhumane stunt performed on the Florida taxpayers’ dime, the second in four days. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) did not mince words in excoriating Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), calling him a “small, pathetic man,” (get his ass, Gavin) and raising the prospect of kidnapping charges. 

A Utah school district has banned the Bible in elementary and middle schools for “vulgarity and violence.” Sorry kids, no Song of Songs for you, it’s too horny. 

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) claimed she intentionally skipped the debt-limit vote as a “silent protest” but a new video shows her running up the steps on her way to vote in a panic, then learning she had missed it.

A private plane flying over Washington, DC, crashed in Northern Virginia on Sunday, killing all four passengers. F-16 fighter jets were deployed to intercept the plane while it was still in the air, causing a sonic boom heard across the region, but were unsuccessful.

Former Vice President Mike Pence has officially filed paperwork to launch his 2024 presidential campaign. Someone tell Mother!

Waning voter turnout in the blue stronghold of Philadelphia has the Democratic Party worrying about 2024.

The Kremlin’s Ministry of Defense reported that the Russian army thwarted a major Ukranian attack in Donetsk, releasing a video showing military vehicles under heavy fire. Moscow claims their forces killed 300 troops and destroyed 16 tanks, but that has yet to be independently verified. Ukraine’s military spokesperson, however, said on Monday that the country had no information about a major attack on the key region. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said in an interview on Monday that the country’s long-awaited counteroffensive is “taking place in several directions,” furthering speculation that the campaign to recapture land held by Russian forces is already underway. The counteroffensive has lofty stakes: Kyiv needs to show its people and its Western allies that it can push back advances Russia has made over the winter and early spring.

We all know media outlets have bias. But sorting through the bias of every story can take a lot of time and effort. So, what’s the solution here? 
 

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A breakthrough pill for patients with non-small-cell lung cancer reduced the risk of patient death by a staggering 51 percent. 

The California State Assembly is considering a bill that would prevent landlords from charging more than one month’s rent as a security deposit.  

On Friday, the Biden administration blocked new oil and gas leasing on federal land around one of the oldest and most significant Native American cultural sites, Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.