Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, pledged not to be involved in a second Trump administration, instead claiming that he would be focusing on his private equity company. But Kushner has been involved in nearly every consequential foreign policy negotiation since Trump returned to office. These negotiations are not going well. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, the Russia-Ukraine war has intensified, and Israel is rejecting U.S. leadership in Gaza.

Polymarket has touted its prediction market as a “global truth machine.” Yet official Polymarket accounts on X have repeatedly spread brazen misinformation. Most recently, a Polymarket account posted a false graphic claiming babies in the U.S. receive 72 vaccine injections.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been absent from the Senate for two months after suffering a fall in June. McConnell is still being paid his $174,000 Senate salary while out sick. This is a luxury many Americans don’t have, in part because of McConnell. Popular Information identified at least 23 times since the start of his Senate career that McConnell has voted against creating or expanding medical leave, paid or unpaid.

The best of the rest

A Texas Tribune analysis of federal government data found that at least 60 children have been held by the Trump administration “in the Dilley detention center for 100 days or more — far exceeding the 20-day limit for detaining immigrant children.” (Texas Tribune)

General Dynamics was paid $533 million in taxpayer money for an artillery factory that never produced one usable shell. Despite this, “the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor… publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.” (ProPublica)

House Democrats opened an insider trading investigation this week after the CEO of Energy Fuels bought 74,000 shares of his own company just a week before the Trump administration drastically shrank Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument. The change will be a boon to Energy Fuels, which owns the last conventional uranium processing site in the U.S. Previously, the mill was just a mile from the monument border, meaning much of its surroundings were closed to mining. Now, there are over 1 million acres of uranium-rich land ready to be mined nearby. (The Salt Lake Tribune/Grist)

The Trump administration has awarded a contract worth up to $244 million to Our Rescue to represent unaccompanied minor children. The company was founded by Tim Ballard, a former ICE agent who quit to join efforts to rescue children in sex trafficking rings. Ballard is currently facing two lawsuits accusing him of coercing sexual acts, sex trafficking, and forced labor. (The Washington Post)

Numerical information

Over $238 million: Trump Media & Technology Group’s net loss for its second quarter. The company had a revenue of less than $2 million.

$2.1 trillion: The projected fiscal 2026 federal deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This is $200 billion more than originally projected.

Up to $2.9 million: The amount that a judicial watchdog estimates Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has earned from his fossil fuel industry investments since being nominated to the Supreme Court in 2005.

Quote of the week

“Prices are dropping fast. Iran is going absolutely fine. We totally control the Strait of Hormuz… and things are going great for our country.”

– President Trump

In fact, the Consumer Price Index is up 3.4 percent compared to last year and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, with traffic through the strait near a three-month low.

Photo of the week

Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire and the Republican nominee in Ohio’s gubernatorial race, served as the frontman for a dubious pharmaceutical company and then cashed out weeks before its dramatic crash.

In 2014, Ramaswamy founded Axovant, a company he used to buy the rights to an inauspicious Alzheimer’s drug that had repeatedly failed in clinical trials. Axovant then hired Ramaswamy’s mother, who, despite lacking relevant research experience, helped massage data from old clinical trials to make the drug appear more promising. The extent of the elder Ramaswamy’s role has not been previously reported.

In 2015, touting his mother’s reinterpretation of the data to potential investors and regulators, Ramaswamy led Axovant to a $1.4 billion initial public offering, the largest in biotech history at the time. He spent the ensuing two years promoting the drug intepirdine as a possible breakthrough for the millions of Americans who have Alzheimer’s disease.

Then, after structuring the company to insulate himself and other insiders from potential losses, he cashed out through a private back door weeks before another clinical failure cratered the stock price. One state retirement fund for teachers lost more than $1 million.

Ramaswamy, whose gubernatorial candidacy has received tens of millions in combined financial backing from fellow right-wing billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Yass, and Bill Ackman, reaped an estimated $260 million from Axovant’s parent company.

Ramaswamy has maintained that he is “proud” of his work on intepirdine. “There is probably nothing in a meaningful way we could’ve done differently in the decision of advancing that drug,” he said at a 2018 conference held as the Axovant share price hovered around the $1 mark. “Given those same set of facts… with a different drug today, I think we would make the same decision.”

The Ramaswamy campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Daniel Skinner, a professor of health policy at Ohio University, noted that while Ramaswamy was never charged with a crime, he profited substantially off of his intepirdine marketing right before the failure of its last clinical trial. “That’s where people have a lot of questions, whenever you kind of pump and dump something,” he said in an interview with Oligarch Watch. “You look back at his words, and he was extremely effusive — really right up to the very end — about the prospects of this working.”

How Ramaswamy’s mother massaged data from failed drug trials

After completing his undergrad at Harvard in 2007, Ramaswamy cut his teeth by co-managing the biotech portfolio of a New York hedge fund. He used the experience to start his own company in 2014: Roivant Sciences, which launched a web of subsidiaries to buy up floundering pharmaceutical drugs from major developers with the goal of bringing them to market.

One of Ramaswamy’s early reclamation projects was SB-742457, a drug to improve cognitive functions in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Axovant, a Roivant subsidiary, acquired the drug in December 2014 and rebranded it to RVT-101. It later settled on the international nonproprietary name intepirdine.

Axovant purchased the in-license for intepirdine from GlaxoSmithKline for a $5 million upfront payment — a sum that was tantamount to “lunch money,” as one industry publication observed at the time. (A 2026 analysis by Ambrosia Ventures found the median going rate for similar pharmaceutical licensing deals was $50 million.)

The bargain-bin selloff reflected the drug’s troubled developmental run, which concluded with Glaxo discontinuing it, according to AlzForum. At Glaxo, it had failed multiple Phase 2 clinical trials, including the two most recent trials — involving 576 and 684 patients — before its acquisition by Axovant.

But once in the hands of Axovant, Glaxo’s failed clinical trials were reevaluated to make intepirdine appear full of promise as an Alzheimer’s treatment.

In 2015, Ramaswamy, who was 29 years old at the time, hired his own mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, as Axovant’s vice president of medical and scientific strategy. By July of that year, within weeks of Axovant raising $315 million in its record-setting IPO, the elder Ramaswamy had co-published two analyses on intepirdine despite having no experience conducting clinical trials, an investigation by Oligarch Watch found.

While Geetha Ramaswamy had previously worked in the neuroscience divisions of Abbott Laboratories and Merck, her roles were primarily focused on management, relationship building, and recruiting and training, according to her LinkedIn. “Played a key role in Speaker training .[sic] Valued as a scientific peer by national experts,” reads one of her LinkedIn career bullet points. But Geetha Ramaswamy appears to have never conducted a clinical trial before or during her time at Axovant, nor did she produce significant original research during her career.

At Axovant, her co-analyses pulled from Glaxo’s 48-week, Phase 2b clinical trial of 684 Alzheimer’s patients that found the drug had “failed to achieve formal statistical significance” and had not “met the overall criteria for success.”

However, by omitting huge segments of the original trial data, a “responder analysis” co-authored by Geetha Ramaswamy concluded there was enough evidence to “support the initiation of a Phase 3 confirmatory study evaluating the efficacy of RVT-101 [intepirdine] in mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease in the second half of 2015.”

Instead of measuring patients’ exact cognitive performance while on intepirdine, her analysis merely divided them into two classifications: “responder” and “non-responder.” Put another way, if it were an academic test, a responder analysis would use pass-or-fail grading instead of a numeric system.

An article published last year in the leading peer-reviewed journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia objected to responder analyses for increasing the risk of “causal fraud” when used to evaluate the clinical benefits of Alzheimer’s treatments. “Statistical approaches that rely on a dichotomized binary outcome, including responder analyses… result in a loss of information and reduced statistical power, increasing the risk of false positives and negatives,” wrote University College London’s Kathy Liu and colleagues.

In smoothing over clinical findings that were a liability for her son’s ascending company, Geetha Ramaswamy also stood to profit financially. Along with her annual salary of $250,000, an Axovant regulatory filing from 2015 reported that she was “granted a stock option for 262,500 common shares… with an exercise price of $0.90 per share.”

The other analysis she co-published shortly after Axovant’s IPO was a “completer analysis” that again sugarcoated Glaxo’s failed 684-patient trial — this time, by excluding the more than 30% of patients who had dropped out during the 48-week duration. “Given the low drop-out rate, this analysis provides an accurate representation of the study,” Geetha Ramaswamy and her colleagues wrote in their reanalysis that comprised only “patients with complete data at each study visit.”

Completer analyses have long been panned within the medical research field for producing biased or inadequate findings due to the exclusion of data. In a 2011 article, Thomas R. Fleming, a biostatistician who co-developed the leading statistical method for monitoring clinical trials, criticized completer analyses as “simplistic” and for inducing biases. “Missing data on outcome measures in clinical trials meaningfully reduce the integrity and interpretability of results,” he added.

But the controversial method produced the numbers that Axovant needed.

Days before its record-setting IPO, Axovant shared identical completer analysis data in a June 2015 filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, in which the company asserted that its drug “has the potential to be a best-in-class 5-HT6 receptor antagonist for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease based on its safety, tolerability and efficacy for up to 48 weeks.”

Axovant also cited the completer analysis in a July 2015 press release to claim that patients treated with intepirdine suddenly showed “statistically significant benefits” and argue that a Phase 3 trial of intepirdine was justified.

Additionally, analysis co-authored by Geetha Ramaswamy combined three separate patient performance and dementia severity yardsticks: Clinical Dementia Rating - Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB), Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale - Cognitive Subscale (ADAS-Cog), and Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study - Activities of Daily Living (ADCS-ADL). The composite approach seemingly helped Axovant mask the pivotal failure of the original trial’s CDR-SB objective — a test that scores disease severity in Alzheimer’s patients — which Glaxo had used as one of two primary objectives to decide the trial had failed.

Nevertheless, Geetha Ramaswamy’s responder co-analysis pointed to the ADCS-ADL scale as proof that patients on intepirdine had shown improvements, even though it was not deemed to be an essential co-primary endpoint in the clinical trial. The change meant the tests that previously torpedoed the trial no longer had to stand on their own. Geetha Ramaswamy and her team ultimately came away with a contorted but improved p-value score, pulled from the same clinical data that showed the drug had failed.

“A unique drug that we actually think could help millions”

Ramaswamy used his mother’s dubious math to help raise $315 million during Axovant’s $1.4 billion IPO, figures the company reached on no revenue.

In submitting its pre-IPO S-1 form to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Axovant claimed that Glaxo’s Phase 2b clinical trial — the same one that had failed, the same one that Geetha Ramaswamy then cherrypicked from — showed subjects who received 35 mg of intepirdine “in combination with donepezil achieved a statistically significant improvement in cognition at 12, 24 and 48 weeks following initiation of treatment.”

“We believe this is a meaningful result,” the filing continued.

The structure that Ramaswamy used to launch the IPO meant that four parties controlled more than 90% of Axovant shares. Three-quarters of the equity stayed with Roivant, and 13.15% went to Visium Asset Management and RA Capital Management in the IPO. Janus Capital Management, a hedge fund, purchased less than 2%. Public investors and traders were provided a free float of approximately 10%.

In its red flags for identifying potential pump-and-dump schemes, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has pointed to a limited public float and the concentration of a company’s IPO shares into a few hands as two marks that investors should watch out for.

To boost the stock, Ramaswamy boasted on CNBC that Axovant was in the catbird seat “for delivering value” to the five million Alzheimer’s patients in the US. Intepirdine, he added, was a “unique drug that we actually think could help millions of patients.”

“If you think about it, we own global rights to a drug that has already demonstrated in a large Phase 2b study efficacy on the two parameters that the FDA has historically required for new Alzheimer’s disease drugs,” he claimed in an interview with Jim Cramer shortly after the IPO. “And actually, we’re only — we believe — we’re only one additional Phase 3 study away from the approval of this drug.” (Along with not having any of its own clinical data, Axovant launched its IPO without a single recruit for future clinical trials.)

One factor contributing to the excitement around intepirdine was the “great hope” shared by patients and their family members who desperately wanted a cure, explained Skinner, the Ohio University health professor. “There’s been extraordinary failure in the Alzheimer’s space,” he added.

Ramaswamy, who signed an SEC filing claiming intepirdine had “best-in-class” potential, fed into that hope by telling Forbes that the drug would make “a huge difference” if approved.

But reality eventually caught up with his claims. In February 2016, Pfizer discontinued its analogous 5-HT6 Alzheimer’s drug because it met pre-specified futility criteria, meaning researchers determined there was no reason to continue clinical trials. A separate 5-HT6 drug being developed by Lundbeck also failed three Phase 3 trials within a six-month span beginning in September 2016.

Unable to sell 75 million Axovant shares on the open market without risking a market nosedive and regulatory disclosures, Ramaswamy monetized Roivant’s position through a private $1.1 billion SoftBank investment. (Ramaswamy never held a direct personal stake in Axovant, instead maintaining indirect ownership through Roivant.)

An SEC disclosure from September 2017 reported that SoftBank had gained “beneficial ownership” over Roivant’s 75 million Axovant shares.

Less than one month later, intepirdine failed its Phase 3 trial, causing Axovant stock to crash 70% in one trading day.

“Heads I win and tails I also win”

After the collapse of the Phase 3 trial, the value of Axovant shares held by the California State Teachers’ Retirement System fell from $1,228,000 to $68,000, per SEC filings. Axovant eventually rebranded to Sio Gene Therapies and lost 99.8% of its value before shuttering completely.

Ramaswamy, meanwhile, made an estimated $260 million during his time at Roivant, according to Forbes.

Since winning the Republican nomination in the Ohio gubernatorial race, Ramaswamy has shied away from discussing his time in biotech, choosing instead to cast his business success story in more vague terms, noted David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati.

“One of the defining questions of the campaign will be, are Ohioans talking about this in October — are they aware of how well he did, and how poorly most other folks did on that Alzheimer’s drug?” Niven said in an interview with Oligarch Watch.

The basic reality of how Ramaswamy ran Axovant, Niven added, “was heads I win and tails I also win, in terms of the outcomes of the trials or whether the drugs actually proved useful or not.”

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was hospitalized on June 14 after suffering a fall that left him unconscious. He remained hospitalized until mid-July, when he was transferred to a rehabilitation center. On August 6, McConnell announced that he was discharged and was continuing his recovery at home.

But, two months later, McConnell has not returned to work in the Senate. Over that period of time, he has missed 59 floor votes. Nevertheless, McConnell has continued to receive his Senate salary of $174,000 per year.

McConnell is fortunate to be employed in a job with excellent benefits. There is no federal law, however, that provides guaranteed paid sick leave. In 2025, about 27 million private sector workers had no paid sick leave.

One reason: Mitch McConnell.

Since he entered the Senate in 1985, McConnell has voted against creating or expanding medical leave — paid and unpaid — at least 23 times.

Notably, near the beginning of his tenure, McConnell supported the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which provided up to 12 weeks of unpaid medical leave to care for yourself, a child, a spouse, or a parent. On June 14, 1990, McConnell delivered a floor speech declaring that the law was necessary “to promote the well-being of American families.”

The Senate approved the FMLA by voice vote the same day. But it was vetoed by President George H. W. Bush.

A year later, however, the Senate took up the FMLA again and McConnell reversed his decision. “I understand the reason for the Family and Medical Leave Act. We need to protect employees, and strike a balance between the needs of the marketplace and the needs of individuals who work in that marketplace. That was my reason for supporting similar legislation last year, although no recorded vote ever was taken on the issue,” McConnell said in 1991. “Today, however, we are mired in a continuing recession. Our Nation’s economy is in feeble health, its fiscal arteries clogged by tax increases and massive regulatory burdens.”

McConnell declared that he “cannot support any massive work force mandates like the measure before us today” and urged his colleagues to “revisit this issue when the economy is on a sounder footing.”

In the 35 years since, McConnell has never again voiced public support for medical leave and consistently opposed efforts to expand paid and unpaid medical leave.

McConnell’s long record of opposing medical leave

In October 1988, McConnell opposed a cloture vote on the Parental and Medical Leave Act, the precursor to the FMLA, which would have provided eligible employees with unpaid leave for a new child, a child with a serious illness, or for a serious health condition. In September 1988, McConnell also supported an effort to delay the legislation.

After his initial support in 1990, McConnell spent years opposing efforts to pass the FMLA and supporting amendments to weaken the bill. In 1991, McConnell opposed an amendment to create the FMLA of 1991. The same year, McConnell supported an amendment that would have required employees to enter arbitration procedures if their employer violated the law. McConnell also supported the Republican alternative to the bill, the American Family Protection Act, which did not guarantee medical leave. In 1992, McConnell voted against overriding Bush’s veto of the FMLA.

In February 1993, McConnell voted against the FMLA again, which was ultimately signed into law by President Bill Clinton. During consideration of the legislation, McConnell supported at least six efforts to weaken the bill. For example, McConnell supported an amendment that would have instead provided tax incentives for employers that adopted “flexible family leave policies.” McConnell additionally supported an amendment that would have allowed employers to satisfy the FMLA requirements “by offering such leave as a benefit in a cafeteria plan,” which could have required employees to give up other benefits to qualify for medical leave. In July 1993, McConnell also supported efforts to “eliminate a family and medical leave requirement” from the National Service Trust Act of 1993.

In 2015, McConnell also voted against adding an amendment to the congressional budget to establish “a deficit-neutral reserve fund for legislation to allow Americans to earn paid sick time.”

In 2019, senators debated whether to accept a provision in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act to expand paid medical leave for federal employees. McConnell voted against a resolution to accept the House version, which would have granted federal personnel paid leave to take care of sick family members, as well as new children. Instead, McConnell voted for a provision that favored “voluntary compensatory time programs” and tax incentives over family and medical leave.

At the start of the Covid pandemic, the House passed a bill with bipartisan support to temporarily mandate paid leave, although many of its provisions were watered down due to pressure from the Trump administration and business groups. The House bill mandated 14 days of emergency sick leave for the next year, with the government reimbursing businesses for the cost.

McConnell voted against a proposal in the Senate to make the paid sick and family leave mandate permanent. He then voted in favor of another proposal to cut the paid leave from the bill, instead routing funding to state unemployment agencies.

The final version did include paid sick leave, but it was reduced to 10 days. McConnell nevertheless derided the medical leave provisions as “a new, untested mandate on small businesses” imposed at “literally the worst time in living memory,” before voting in favor of the bill. Two days later, McConnell introduced legislation to allow the administration to issue waivers to employers.

Later in the pandemic, McConnell voted in favor of striking a provision from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 that created a fund to give federal employees up to 600 hours of paid Covid-related leave. The vote failed and the provision remained in the ARPA, which McConnell ultimately voted against.

Most recently, as rail workers threatened to strike in 2022 over work attendance policies that gave them inconsistent time off and penalized workers for taking sick time, the federal government stepped in to impose a new contract for the workers and avert a strike. McConnell voted against a proposal that would have added seven days of paid sick leave to the contract. Although it received bipartisan support, it fell short of the 60 votes needed to pass. Eventually, McConnell voted in favor of the final contract, which imposed wage increases and added one personal day, but did not add any sick time for rail workers.

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan says his company is a “global truth machine.” Coplan has argued that Polymarket is “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now“ and creates “an information landscape with less sensationalism and more truth.” In June 2025, Coplan announced a partnership with X because the “two top truth seeking apps on the internet are stronger together.”

More recently, Polymarket, in an apparent effort to increase engagement, has been using X to promote brazen misinformation.

On August 10, an official Polymarket account on X posted a graphic falsely claiming that, in the United States, babies receive 72 injections. President Trump, according to the Polymarket post, was ending this practice.

This graphic, which was previously posted by the White House in January, is false, according to multiple independent fact checkers. PolitiFact, which rated the graphic “False,” reported that babies “received anywhere from 12 to 30 shots before their second birthday depending on the use of combination vaccines and annual COVID-19 and flu vaccines.”

Trump also personally claimed on Truth Social that the United States required “72 ‘jabs’ for perfectly healthy babies.” PolitiFact found that figure “takes into account 18 years of recommended vaccines, including an annual flu and COVID-19 shot, and assumes that each vaccine dose would be given as a separate injection.”

FactCheck.org similarly found the claim was incorrect. It noted that “a person could complete the U.S. childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule as of early 2025 while receiving less than two dozen shots and oral vaccines.” The claim also failed fact checks by STAT News and CNN.

This is not an isolated incident.

On August 3, Polymarket’s main X account posted that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that he would require an ID to make purchases at city-owned grocery stores.

This claim is false. It was never “revealed” by Mamdani or anyone else. It was a baseless rumor that spread widely on right-wing media outlets, according to the Associated Press. “When we’re talking about a city-run grocery store, one in each borough, which by the way, you do not need an ID to shop at, no matter what you’ve just heard in the news of today,” Mamdani said during an August 3 media interview.

The false claim, which was not corrected, garnered 19.6 million views on X. Polymarket used the attention to promote its prediction market on whether Mamdani would open a city-owned grocery store by December 31.

The tactic reveals that Polymarket’s business is not “truth.” Polymarket seeks to maximize attention for its markets. That frequently involves spreading false information.

Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.

A market for misinformation

Popular Information identified numerous other occasions where Polymarket has spread misinformation on social media platforms. On August 8, for example, Polymarket posted on X, “JUST IN: WNBA Commissioner announces the league is meeting to review what a woman is, after multiple former NBA stars announced plans to join the league.” Polymarket used the post to promote a market about whether Enes Kanter Freedom, a former NBA player who claims he will enter the WNBA draft, will be selected in 2027.

But this is not accurate. The Polymarket post seemingly refers to an internal memo sent to teams by WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert. The memo, obtained by the Associated Press, said that the topic of “transgender athlete participation in women’s basketball” would “be discussed further by a task force of team presidents and general managers at a previously scheduled meeting.” But there was no announcement and no planned review of “what a woman is.”

On July 3, a Polymarket account promoted a post from Trump claiming that the U.S. spent significantly more on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) than other countries. The post claims that the U.S. spent $999 billion on NATO.

But this is not true. The annual NATO budget was around €4.6 billion in 2025, and is estimated to be up to €5.3 billion (or over $6 billion) in 2026. According to NATO, “[a]ll allies contribute to funding NATO using an agreed cost share formula derived from the Gross National Income of member countries.” The U.S. is among the top contributors, financing around 14.9% of the budget from 2026 through 2027. But many other countries pay similar amounts, including France (10%), the United Kingdom (10%), and Germany (14.9%).

The graphic posted by Trump and promoted by Polymarket is seemingly referring to the total defense spending per country. According to NATO estimates, the U.S. spent $980 billion on defense in 2025.

Polymarket has also promoted misleading information about elections. On June 1, Polymarket posted that Los Angeles mayoral candidate Karen Bass “surge[d] in the Los Angeles Mayoral Election odds — & tomorrow is Election Day.” Polymarket stated that there was a “64% chance” she was re-elected.

But June 2 was only the primary election for the Los Angeles mayoral race. To win the election outright, a candidate has to receive over 50% of the primary vote. (Bass did not receive 50% of the vote during the primary and will therefore be running in the general election in November.) The Polymarket odds included in the post were not for the primary election, but instead for the overall election winner.

Polymarket’s checkered history

Polymarket’s habit of posting false or misleading information on social media is a long-established pattern.

In a March review of Polymarket’s social media accounts — which have millions of combined followers — the New York Times identified hundreds of posts containing false or misleading information.

Frequently, the subjects of Polymarket’s misinformation are opponents of the Trump administration. (Polymarket is connected to Trump through Donald Trump Jr., who has invested in the company and serves as an unpaid advisor.)

In November 2025, for example, Polymarket made a misleading post about Mamdani, who was running for New York City mayor at the time. The post, made on Election Day, said that Mamdani’s name would appear twice on the ballot.

The post did not mention that candidates’ names often appear multiple times on New York City ballots because they can be nominated by multiple parties. Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s name also appeared twice on the ballot. Regardless, Polymarket’s post set off a conspiracy theory that the election was rigged in Mamdani’s favor.

Another frequent target for MAGA and Polymarket is Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN). In a post from December, Polymarket pushed conspiracy theories about how Omar’s net worth has increased since 2019. The post did not mention that her net worth now includes the assets of her husband, who she married in 2020.

While liberal politicians are often the subject of the misleading posts, Polymarket has also posted misinformation about other prominent figures.

In January, for example, Polymarket posted on X that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had advised young people to work at McDonald’s or Palantir before starting their own companies.

Within a few hours, Bezos replied with his own post saying, “Nope. Not sure why [P]olymarket made this up.”

In fact, Polymarket’s claim seems to be a distortion of an answer Bezos gave during an interview at Italian Tech Week months earlier. Bezos actually said, “I always advise to young people: Go work at a best-practices company somewhere where you can learn a lot of basic fundamental things [like] how to hire really well, how to interview, etc.”

Bezos did not mention working for Palantir or McDonald’s.

Prior to his work with the Trump White House, Kushner’s main professional experience was as a real estate developer. He almost bankrupted his family’s development company by purchasing an aging New York City skyscraper for $1.8 billion.

After assuming a broad foreign policy portfolio during Trump’s first term, Kushner leveraged his connections with autocrats in the Middle East to raise billions for a new private equity company, Affinity Partners, in 2021. Kushner then pledged not to be involved in a second Trump White House. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said in February 2024. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.”

Without explanation, Kushner broke that pledge and has been involved in nearly every consequential foreign policy negotiation since Trump returned to the White House in early 2025. But he has been pursuing these high-level negotiations as a side hustle, and continuing his role as an investor.

It has not been going well.

Since Trump’s October 2025 speech, the hotspots in Kushner’s portfolio have all deteriorated. Kushner has guided the United States into a substantially worse strategic position. In all cases, the prospects for a lasting peace are further away.

None of this seems to be bothering Kushner.

The Strait of Hormuz is closed, the fighting in Ukraine has intensified, and Israel is rejecting American leadership in Gaza. Meanwhile, Kushner is taking a family vacation in Iceland.

Gaza peace deal crumbles

On Sunday, after months of negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a peace plan for Gaza touted by Trump. The plan would have involved Hamas “hand[ing] over its weapons in stages to a new Palestinian administration in Gaza” in exchange for Israel withdrawing its forces from Gaza.

The plan was negotiated by Trump’s “Board of Peace.” In January, Trump appointed Kushner to the Board of Peace’s Executive Board, as part of his “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict.”

Trump celebrated the peace deal at the end of July, writing on Truth Social, “Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY.”

But now, the deal has hit a roadblock. “Israel rejects the 15-point document,” Netanyahu reportedly said in a cabinet meeting, stating that the military “will not make any withdrawal until Hamas is truly disarmed and will continue to thwart threats against our forces and citizens.”

At the beginning of August, an exiled Palestinian official alleged that Kushner was involved in the peace deal, writing on social media that “Kushner confirmed to us that he had agreed with the Israeli side to halt the attacks on Gaza beginning tomorrow morning,” the Jerusalem Post reported. (He later edited the post to state instead that “Kushner has informed us that he is working with the Israeli side to stop the attacks on Gaza.”)

Kushner has been involved in negotiations surrounding Gaza for months. Last fall, Trump called on Kushner to help negotiate a ceasefire agreement in Gaza. “We called in Jared,” Trump said in October 2025. “We need that brain on occasion. We gotta get Jared in here.”

Kushner has also been heavily involved in plans to reconstruct Gaza. In January, Kushner presented a plan to develop Gaza at the World Economic Forum at Davos. The plan involved building Gaza into a luxury urban development. Kushner described it as a “destination.” But in the months since, that plan has “shrunk dramatically from an ambitious blueprint for the reconstruction of the whole territory to a small pilot project in the south of the strip,” according to the Guardian.

A diplomatic catastrophe in Iran

Kushner has been one of the Trump administration’s key negotiators in the war with Iran, traveling to the Middle East several times for talks with leaders from the region. Since the beginning of the war, Trump has repeatedly claimed that these negotiations were on the brink of success and the war was nearly won.

Yet months later, the war is ongoing and negotiations are at a standstill. Last week, Trump threatened Iran with “decapitation” if they did not agree to a deal soon. But on Sunday, he told Axios that his administration was “low-keying it” and “only semi-negotiating” while waiting for Iran to cave to economic pressures. Meanwhile, Iran has said it will keep the Strait of Hormuz closed until the U.S. meets a sweeping set of demands. Kushner’s performance in negotiations with Iran has drawn sharp criticism, with one former Middle East negotiator for the U.S. giving Kushner “an F in diplomacy.”

While Kushner has been negotiating on issues that could significantly impact Middle Eastern countries, Affinity Partners has collected tens of millions of dollars in fees from these same governments, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Intensifying fighting in Ukraine

Kushner has also been involved in months of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, with little success. The war between the countries has continued for over four years. In December, Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly met with Russian President Vladimir Putin “for around five hours.” In February, Kushner and Witkoff were also involved in hours of negotiations between the two countries in Geneva.

But after the U.S. began the war with Iran, Kushner and Witkoff’s mediating between Russia and Ukraine stalled. Officials from both countries were reportedly frustrated by the delay. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CBS News that he understood “that there are challenges in the Middle East,” but that Ukraine needed “more, more than words.” Russian officials were reportedly “desperately waiting for the return of Witkoff and Kushner,” according to the New York Times.

Now, fighting between the two countries is intensifying. Kushner and Witkoff are rumored to be visiting Kyiv and Moscow in the coming weeks to pick negotiations back up.

Mass protests in Albania

While Kushner flails as a negotiator, one of his major real estate developments is also in jeopardy.

In 2024, Kushner unveiled plans to develop Sazan Island and a nearby peninsula on the coast of Albania into a luxury resort with 10,000 hotel rooms. The development, backed by Kushner and a group of other investors, has been the subject of ongoing protests, known as the Flamingo Revolution, and an investigation by Albania’s corruption watchdog.

Most recently, questions have emerged about how Kushner and the development group acquired the land for the luxury resort. In September 2024, a group of residents of the peninsula sent a letter to Kushner, warning him that the residents were the rightful owners of the land, but a man named Artur Shehu had stolen it from them. The development group bought the land from Shehu anyway. In June, Albanian prosecutors accused Shehu of leading an international drug-smuggling operation, which included laundering money through stolen property. According to the prosecutors, Shehu used forged ownership documents to acquire land on the peninsula, which he then sold to Kushner’s development group for $120 million.

Congressman Max Miller (R-OH) is facing serious allegations of domestic abuse. On May 7, The Daily Mail reported that Miller is “accused of years of documented physical abuse against his ex-wife, Emily Moreno.” The alleged abuse includes a June 2024 incident where Miller hurled “a pot of boiling water at Emily during an argument inside their Ohio home, with some of the water striking her chest, while their then eight-month-old daughter was present.”

The Daily Mail also reported that on February 1, 2026, “Miller allegedly grabbed and struck Emily, 32, during a custody exchange at his Ohio home, leaving bruises on her arm, elbow, and torso as the couple’s two-year-old daughter Ruth looked on.” The Daily Mail published several photos documenting injuries from the alleged attacks.

“The photographic evidence speaks for itself. These images, combined with the documented history in court filings, directly contradict years of Mr Miller’s denial,” Moreno’s attorney told The Daily Mail.

The allegations, including the assault with hot water, were also included in a May 27 court filing by Moreno:

On Saturday, June 8, 2024, I told Congressman Miller that I was planning to leave him. He got extremely upset. He took hot water from a pan he had just cooked eggs in and threw it at me. Shocked, I fell to the floor and lay there in a fetal position. Congressman Miller took the sprayer from the sink and continued to spray me with hot water.

Miller has denied the allegations and sued Moreno for defamation. He has accused his ex-wife of being “mentally ill, a liar, a stalker and a dangerous individual.” On August 2, Miller publicly released a trove of documents that he claimed proved his innocence. The materials included a photo of “his toddler daughter nude.” Miller blamed his attorney.

The same day, Moreno’s father, U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH), called on Miller to resign from Congress. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives,” he said. “I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.” Ohio’s other U.S. Senator, Jon Husted (R), also called on Miller to step down.

Before becoming a Congressman, Miller served as an aide to President Trump. Asked about the allegations against Miller on August 3, Trump called Miller “a very good person,” adding “I’m going to let the families figure that out.” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) also continues to back Miller. “There’s all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time, it’s not my business to get engaged in it,” Johnson said.

Trump and Johnson are not the only ones who continue to support Miller. Dozens of corporations are financially backing Miller’s campaign. Prominent corporations who donated $2,000 or more this cycle include Stanley Black & Decker, AT&T, Kroger, DraftKings, Nike, and Walmart.

Several companies, including Elevance, Altria, Pfizer, John Deere, and TD Bank sent donations to Miller that were received after the publication of the Daily Mail article.

Concerns about Miller’s personal conduct, however, have been public since July 2021, when Politico, citing three sources, reported that Miller pushed former Trump aide Stephanie Grisham “against a wall and slapped her in the face in his Washington apartment after she accused him of cheating on her.”

Miller also denied those allegations and filed a defamation suit against Grisham, who included those allegations (without naming Miller) in a memoir. That lawsuit was settled but Grisham sued Miller in July, alleging that he violated the terms of the settlement and last week filed for a restraining order.

Popular Information contacted all of Miller’s corporate donors and asked if they continued to support Miller’s candidacy. Citi declined to comment. The other donors did not respond.

One of the outlets that published the New York Post’s false narrative was CBS News New York. But this week, CBS News New York aired a new segment highlighting people with family members who died on 9/11 “defending Mayor Mamdani’s inclusion in this year’s solemn remembrance ceremony.”

One Nation, an opaque nonprofit affiliated with Senate Republicans, spent $1.7 million in less than a week on a new ad attacking Senator Jon Ossoff (D). The ad received 78 million impressions across Georgia. But almost nothing in it is true. The ad attacks Ossoff for positions that have actually been pursued by Republicans, including cutting the child tax credit.

Popular Information uncovered a network of fake news sites created by One Nation, the Senate Republican dark money group. The sites target at least six states with key Senate races. While they claim to be “independent” news outlets, they produce partisan propaganda. One Nation is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Meta promoting articles published on these sites that praise Republican Senate candidates or attack their Democratic rivals.

The best of the rest

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is quietly spending billions of dollars buying up private immigration detention centers. In July, CoreCivic announced that the government bought two of its centers for $1.5 billion. Sources told TIME that the plan “is for ICE to take over private detention facilities while building new ones alongside them.” (TIME)

Many sponsors of Freedom 250’s Great American State Fair did not properly disclose their donations, including Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, and UnitedHealth Group, a NOTUS analysis of federal lobbyist contribution reports found. This could violate federal lobbying law. (NOTUS)

For at least six months, Jennifer Mascott continued to run a D.C. public affairs firm after being appointed and confirmed as a judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in October 2025. Judicial ethics experts said Mascott was operating in a gray area. The firm went out of business in June after hemorrhaging clients and staff. (Politico)

Last year, Trump signed into law a ban on intoxicating hemp products. Now, senators are working at the administration’s request to delay the ban from coming into effect. The son-in-law of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles stands to benefit. He is the CEO of companies that sell such hemp products. (New York Times)

Numerical information

6.81%: The average interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage hit its “highest level in over a year” last week.

350,000: The number of Haitian immigrants who lost their temporary protected status after a federal court ruling.

$275 billion: The total projected cost for 15 new “Trump-class” battleships. The price tag is 50 percent higher than the original government estimate.

Quote of the week

“When we go all the way back to 2015 and 2016, and people in the media looked at President Donald J. Trump, and everyone came out with allegations. Dozens of women, dozens of crazy allegations, dozens of nasty criminal misconduct [allegations]. And you know what he did? He stayed in the fight.”

–Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) when asked if he would drop out of his reelection race after domestic abuse allegations by his ex-wife.

Photo of the week

The Alaska Navigator bills itself as “independent news covering the Last Frontier.” On June 10, the outlet published an article headlined, “As Fentanyl Deaths Rise in Alaska, Sullivan Pushes Tougher Penalties and Enforcement.”

The piece, which has no byline, reports that Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) — who is locked in a competitive campaign against Democrat Mary Peltola — “is leading efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking and support law enforcement agencies confronting the epidemic.”

Curiously, although Sullivan has been in the Senate for more than a decade, the piece cites only one piece of evidence: Sullivan’s vote for the HALT Fentanyl Act in March 2025. Sullivan was one of 84 senators to vote for the bill, which classified fentanyl-related substances as schedule I narcotics. But Sullivan did not lead the effort to pass the HALT Fentanyl Act. He was not the bill’s sponsor or one of its 16 original co-sponsors. (Sullivan became a co-sponsor on March 6, 2025, about a week before it passed the Senate).

The Alaska Navigator also reports that “Retired Alaska Wildlife Trooper Director Doug Massie, who spent 25 years in law enforcement… credits Senator Sullivan with supporting tougher penalties for traffickers and policies aimed at reducing the drug’s impact on communities throughout the state.” But there is no direct quote from Massie, who is running for the Alaska state legislature as a Republican, or an explanation of why Sullivan deserves credit. There is no record of Massie making a public statement about Sullivan on fentanyl or any other topic.

Both the content and tone are highly unusual for an independent news outlet. That is because the Alaska Navigator is not an independent news outlet. Rather, it is a website fully controlled by One Nation, a dark money group that works in concert with the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the super PAC of Senate Republicans. One Nation has directly contributed over $70 million to the SLF this political cycle.

Other content published by Alaska Navigator includes “Senator Dan S. Sullivan’s Legislative Record of Supporting Alaska’s Veterans,” “Sen. Sullivan’s tax policy helps Alaska businesses thrive,” and “Opinion: Dan Sullivan has earned another term by delivering for Alaska.”

One Nation has ensured that Alaskans see this content by spending tens of thousands of dollars on Meta ads promoting Alaska Navigator articles since June. These ads further distort reality. For example, the fentanyl article was promoted with an ad declaring there was a “New Bill to Crack Down on Fentanyl Trafficking, Supported By Dan Sullivan.” But the only bill mentioned in the article was the HALT Fentanyl Act, which was signed into law in July 2025.

While the ad discloses it was paid for by One Nation, it does not disclose that Alaska Navigator is owned and operated by One Nation. That fact is only revealed in small, faint type at the very bottom of the Alaska Navigator website.

Alaska Navigator’s domain, thealaskanavigator.com, was registered on March 20, 2026. The website, however, includes an article dating back to January 2026, making it appear more established. That article was added using a tool called FakerPress, according to the website’s source code. FakerPress markets itself as “a clean way to generate fake and dummy content.”

The fake Alaska news outlet is one of at least six operated by One Nation in states with key U.S. Senate races. Popular Information identified these sites through disclosures in their Meta advertisements. The other five sites in the network include:

Maine Policy Updates (“Maine’s News Source”)

Ohio Pulse (“Your trusted source for local news, investigative journalism, and community stories across the Buckeye State”)

Iowa Voice (“Stay Informed. Stay Iowa”)

Peach State Post (“Georgia’s Premier News Source”)

New Hampshire Daily (“An independent news organization dedicated to covering the stories that matter most to Granite State residents”)

Collectively, One Nation has spent between $198,900 and $274,640 promoting these sites on Meta platforms. Maine Policy Updates has been operating since January, but most of the ad spending for the other sites began in June.

Iowa Voice features a story headlined, “Iowa Farmers Say Potential ‘Death Tax’ Threatens Family Succession Plans.” The piece praises Ashley Hinton, the Republican candidate for Senate, for being “an original cosponsor of the Death Tax Repeal Act, legislation that would permanently repeal the federal estate tax.” The piece highlights that supporters of the bill believe it would “make it easier for family farms and small businesses to remain in family hands across multiple generations.” The piece does not mention that the estate tax impacts only 0.3% of farms. It also does not quote or paraphrase a single farmer.

Other content on these sites mirrors One Nation’s TV ads. A July 30 article on Peach State Post falsely suggests that Senator Jon Ossoff opposes increasing the Child Tax Credit. A One Nation political ad, which has blanketed the state over the last several days, contains the same attack.

The sites attempt to appear more legitimate by cutting and pasting content from actual news outlets. The Peach State Post recently published a story under the headline “Former Atlanta city officials Bickers, Beard who were convicted in corruption cases denied clemency by Trump.” At the end of the piece it says, “Read more here” and links to 11Alive, an Atlanta news website. But the story on Peach State Post contains the full text of 11Alive’s story. There is nothing more to read. There is no indication that Peach State Post secured permission to repost 11Alive’s work. The article is presented as Peach State Post’s original work.

One Nation, which is organized as a 501(c)(4), is not required to disclose its donors. So it is unknown who is bankrolling its fake websites or other activities.

One Nation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After inquiries from Popular Information, CBS News New York changed their story, but failed to include an editor’s note about the correction. The main CBS News accounts on Instagram and X, which have millions of followers, also quietly removed posts based on CBS News New York’s reporting. “Once we were told that CBS News New York’s reporting was inaccurate, we took our post down,” a source inside CBS News told Popular Information.

This week, CBS News New York has radically changed their coverage. A segment that aired Monday highlighted that many people who lost a family member on 9/11 are “defending Mayor Mamdani’s inclusion in this year’s solemn remembrance ceremony.”

The story features an interview with Elizabeth Miller, who lost her father on 9/11, and serves as the project director of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. “Mayor Mamdani has assured 9/11 families that he wants to be there to honor our loved ones and I think he should be allowed to do that,” Miller told CBS News New York. Her group represents 250 individuals who lost family members during the terrorist attack.

CBS News New York notes that the petition seeking to ban Mamdani has attracted 72,000 signatures “from the public.” The network has spoken to “two petitioners” who lost family members on 9/11 and support the petition. The New York Post, which assigned ten reporters to the task after Popular Information exposed its errors, has now identified ten individuals who are family members of 9/11 victims and signed the petition.

In an interview with Popular Information last week, one of those individuals, Giovanni Galante, who organized the petition, described Mamdani as “a Muslim that has thoughts to get rid of all Jewish people, and to agree with 9/11.” A statement by September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, aired in the new CBS News New York segment, said the group “strongly condemn[s] the anti-American accusations and Islamophobic sentiment underlying the effort seeking to prevent him from being at Ground Zero.”

Mamdani plans to attend the 25th anniversary ceremony. “I will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them,” Mamdani said.

Almost nothing in the ad is true. More than once, the ad attacks Ossoff for positions that have actually been pursued by Senate Republicans.

“$2,100. That’s three months of groceries,” the ad states. “$2,100. That’s the tax increase Jon Ossoff supported. Ambitious and liberal, Ossoff voted with national Democrats to gut your child tax credit. He even voted for higher taxes on Social Security recipients earning under $75,000. A $2,100 tax increase on Georgia families.”

“Jon Ossoff doesn’t care about people like us,” the ad concludes. “Tell Senator Ossoff to stop voting for higher taxes.”

These claims are all false. Ossoff did not vote to “gut your child tax credit.” He provided a key vote to pass the largest child tax credit (CTC) expansion in history, over the vehement opposition of Senate Republicans, and advocated to make it permanent.

Ossoff voted against President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), over concerns about deep cuts to Medicare and other programs. While the OBBBA did include a small increase to the CTC, it left “out many of the poorest children from its full benefits,” according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Further, the ad claims Ossoff supported a “tax increase” of $2,100, making it harder for working Americans to provide groceries. But this is another reference to Ossoff’s vote against the OBBBA. Far from easing the burden at the grocery store, the OBBBA reduced household resources for Americans struggling to make ends meet.

According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), under the law, the poorest ten percent of households will see resources reduced by around $1,200 per year on average between 2026 and 2034, while the wealthiest households will see resources increase $13,600 per year. Additionally, the Penn Wharton Budget Model found that the OBBBA “will make most households worse off because they will lose more from the spending cuts and negative economic effects of higher debt than they will gain from the tax cuts,” estimating that the law “will make households with incomes in the bottom 80 percent worse off over their lifetimes.”

The law also included massive health care cuts. The cuts cut federal Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) “spending by $990 billion over the next ten years,” according to the CBO. The CBO estimated that the OBBBA “will increase the number of people without health insurance in 2034 by 10 million.”

Finally, the ad claims that Ossoff “voted for higher taxes on Social Security recipients earning under $75,000.” But the OBBBA did not change the tax treatment of Social Security income. Rather, it created an additional $6,000 deduction for seniors, regardless of whether or not they collected Social Security. It begins phasing out for taxpayers with incomes over $75,000 and will expire in 2028.

Ossoff is running for reelection in a competitive race against Representative Mike Collins (R-GA). A win for Collins would be a major pickup for Senate Republicans as they aim to maintain a majority in the Senate.

There is no information about who is funding the ad, as One Nation does not have to disclose its donors. The group’s primary purpose is to keep the names of its donors secret. The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the Super PAC that is associated with One Nation, can accept unlimited contributions and has more flexibility on how it can spend the money. The key difference is that the SLF has to report its donors to the Federal Election Commission.

The history of Republican opposition to expanding the Child Tax Credit

Despite the ad’s claims, it is Republicans who have opposed meaningful expansions of the CTC while Ossoff has supported such expansions on multiple occasions.

In 2021, as a part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the CTC was increased to a maximum of $3,600 for each child under six and $3,000 for each child aged six to 17. Most importantly, the law made it so that low-income families could claim the entire credit. As a result, 19 million more children received the maximum benefit and child poverty dropped to a record low of 5.2 percent. The ARPA was passed without support from a single Congressional Republican.

Ossoff voted in favor of the ARPA and said he supported making the CTC expansion, which was set to last only one year, permanent.

Later in 2021, the Biden administration sought to extend the expansion through its signature Build Back Better (BBB) policy. The plan was to revert to the pre-pandemic $2,000 maximum after one year, while leaving in place the provision that allowed low-income families access to the maximum credit. However, CTC expansion became a target for corporate lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. Republicans argued that by including low-income families, the expanded CTC would “lead many lower-income Americans to work less or entirely sever their connection to work.”

Ultimately, a trimmed-down version of the BBB which did not include the CTC provision was passed in 2022. When the expanded CTC lapsed, 3.7 million children fell into poverty.

Recognizing the impact of the CTC on child poverty, a bipartisan group of legislators in the House passed a plan in 2024 to make a small change allowing more low-income families to claim the full CTC. However, Senate Republicans opposed the bill, saying it would make then-President Joe Biden “look good” and that “all Republican leverage will be lost.” The opposition was led by Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), who criticized the measure as a “subsidy” instead of a tax relief, providing undeserved relief to families who don’t contribute to the tax base. After allowing the bill to languish in committee for several months, the Senate ultimately rejected the bill 48-44, with all but three Senate Republicans voting against it. Ossoff voted in favor of the CTC expansion.

This was false, according to the version of the story that was posted online. That article claimed that the petition “has collected over 1,100 signatures in a little over a week, including from at least 300 victims’ families.”

A Popular Information interview with petition organizer Giovanni Galante on July 27 revealed that the lower number was also unsubstantiated. Galante admitted that he did not maintain a list of victims’ families who signed the petition, and the 300 figure was simply an estimate of how he believed the petition spread. “We don’t have a list,” Galante said. “If you know 10 people and they give it to 10 more people they know that lost. That’s how we got the 300 number.” Galante added that he does not “go through the list” of people who signed the petition “and look at the names.” The interview was published by Popular Information on July 28.

In response to this reporting, the New York Post did not issue a correction. Instead, it quietly edited the article for a third time. On July 28 at 3:20 PM, according to the article’s metadata, the New York Post article was altered to say the petition “is circulating widely among 9/11 families and Galante estimated that between 3,000 and 7,500 of the signers are relatives of victims.”

Two things are notable. First, the New York Post is now distancing itself from the accounting, framing it instead as an estimate from Galante. Second, Galante dramatically increased his estimate from 300 to “3,000 to 7,500” less than 24 hours after his interview with Popular Information.

It is an apparent effort by the New York Post to surreptitiously justify the original July 26 cover and its baseless claims that “thousands” of 9/11 families signed the petition to exclude Mamdani from the 9/11 anniversary ceremony.

The New York Post did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, the New York Post has continued to promote the anti-Mamdani petition. Since its initial piece it has published seven more articles about the petition in print and online.

The most consequential piece, which involved the efforts of at least ten New York Post reporters, is headlined, “More 9/11 families urge defiant Mamdani to stay home for 25th memorial ceremony: Here are their stories.” The piece is framed as a response to “Mamdani apologists” who “have criticized the petition’s creators and alleged The Post overestimated the number of victims’ families who don’t want Hizzoner at the solemn remembrance.”

The piece identifies a total of ten individuals who lost a family member on 9/11 who signed the petition. The views of these individuals should not be discounted, but ten is a lot less than 3,000, the minimum number of victims’ family members that the New York Post currently claims signed the petition. According to the story, the New York Post connected with “dozens of relatives” who “said they support the petition but declined to go on the record.”

Meanwhile, a group of 250 family members of 9/11 victims known as September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows issued a statement supporting Mandani’s attendance. This group was dismissed by the New York Post as a “far-left group… trying to silence 9/11 families.”

“Mayor Mamdani has consistently affirmed his intention to bear witness and honor the families, survivors, and first responders, whose lives were forever changed by the attacks,” September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows said in a statement. “In doing so, he will be carrying out the same responsibility that New York City mayors before him have undertaken: to stand with all New Yorkers in remembrance and honor those we lost. We strongly condemn the anti-American accusations and Islamophobic sentiment underlying the effort seeking to prevent him from being at Ground Zero.”

In response to the statement, Galante told the New York Post that the petition has “nothing to do with Islam or Mamdani being Muslim.” In his interview with Popular Information, Galante described Mamdani as “a Muslim that has thoughts to get rid of all Jewish people, and to agree with 9/11.”

From the New York Post to CBS News

The New York Post’s reporting was quickly picked up by CBS News New York, which published an article on the evening of July 27. The piece began: “Thousands of 9/11 victims’ families are asking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend this year’s solemn remembrance ceremony.” After Popular Information contacted the listed author of the piece, that line was struck from the piece and the headline was changed that evening to: “Petition asking NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend 9/11 remembrance ceremony purportedly draws thousands of signatures.”

No disclosure was added to the piece noting the initial error or correction.

On July 28, the headline was changed a third time to: “Petition from 9/11 families asks NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend remembrance ceremony.” This version, which remains in plase today, falsely suggests that the petition represents the view of 9/11 families as a group.

On July 28 at 3:08 p.m., the CBS News New York story was picked up by the main CBS News Instagram account, which has 3.3 million followers.

On the evening of July 29, however, the video was removed from CBS News’ Instagram account without explanation. CBS News also reposted an X post from CBS News New York linking to the story, which was also removed.

“CBS News did do a social post following CBS News New York’s reporting,” a source inside CBS News with direct knowledge told Popular Information. “Once we were told that CBS News New York’s reporting was inaccurate, we took our post down.”

So why is the CBS News New York article still online if CBS News believes it’s inaccurate? The CBS News source emphasized that “CBS News New York is entirely separate from CBS News.” While they share the same parent company they are “in two different silos.”

A spokesperson for CBS News New York issued a statement to Popular Information: “The story broadcast on CBS New York was accurate, and the underlying facts reported in the digital article were correct. The headline and opening sentence of the digital article were later updated for added clarity. An editor’s note should have accompanied those updates, and we regret the omission.”

Fox News and other outlets butcher the story

As the story spread through right-wing media, it became further distorted. On the July 27 edition of The Evening Edit on Fox Business, anchor Elizabeth MacDonald falsely reported that “9/11 families, more than 15,000 want Mamdani banned from 9/11 ceremonies.”

In a July 28 editorial, the Washington Times claimed that “[m]ore than 1,100 family members of 9/11 victims have asked organizers of a ceremony commemorating the 25th anniversary of the World Trade Center attack to exclude New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.” The publication appears to be conflating the total number of signatures the New York Post originally published with family members.

The story got a major boost from Washington Times reporter Kerry Picket, who had previously covered the petition. On July 29, Picket posed the following question to Trump:

We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And a good number of 9-11 families have called on New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani to not attend a number of these memorial services. What are your thoughts on that?

Trump responded that “anybody having to do with 9-11 right now on the victim side, and there are a lot of them. They’re very unhappy with what’s going on in New York, and they’re very unhappy with the mayor.”

Trump’s response was featured on CBS News’ X account, which has 9.7 million followers.

On Sunday, the New York Post ran a story with the headline: “STAY AWAY: Thousands of 9/11 families demand Mamdani be banned from 25th-Anniversary.” The story covered a petition on Change.org started by Giovanni Galante, whose wife was a victim of the 9/11 attacks. But in an interview with Popular Information, Galante acknowledged that there was no actual list of family members who had signed the petition.

The second Trump administration has been waging war on the Smithsonian Institution. Recently, this fight led to a report accusing the National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism” and an executive order calling for warning signs outside the museum. Why is President Trump so worked up about this? Popular Information explored the influence of fake “historian” David Barton and his son Tim.

The far-right news outlet Newsmax announced this week that it struck a deal to allow Meta to train its AI products on its reporting. Newsmax’s CEO is close friends with Trump and the outlet has frequently pushed misinformation, including the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. https://popular.info/p/meta-will-train-its-ai-on-far-right

The best of the rest

Last year, DOGE delayed a $10 million grant that would have funded efforts to thin out about 4,000 acres of forest at high risk of burning in Minnesota. According to the Washington Post, “[m]ost of that work never got started.” Now, some of these same forests are ablaze. (Washington Post)

Mother Jones obtained a July 2025 report that revealed that “at least two officers affiliated with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) systematically collected vehicle, license plate, and social media information from everyday people last summer, and at times entered that data into a digital evidence management platform.” Some of these people attended anti-ICE protests, but another “simply drove his Jeep around a public parking lot.” (Mother Jones)

MAGA influencer Nick Adams has been celebrated by the Trump administration for the work of his nonprofit, Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness (FLAG), which provides civics education to American children. But a ProPublica investigation found little evidence that FLAG has actually provided any educational materials to students or schools. Meanwhile, the nonprofit has been paying Adams and his mother a combined compensation of over half a million dollars — roughly half of its annual revenue. (ProPublica)

Numerical information

Over 600: The number of soldiers wounded in the Iran War, according to new data released by the Pentagon. Eighteen soldiers have been killed in the war.

1.5%: The US economy expanded at only a 1.5% pace during the second quarter of the year.

$10 million: The amount the Trump administration is seeking from Congress to cover extra expenses incurred during its Freedom 250 events earlier this month.

Quote of the week

“Fidel Castro was a billionaire. Putin is a billionaire. The leaders of communist regimes are always rich. They steal and rob from those they govern.”

– Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)

(Trump made over $2 billion in 2025 alone, while in office.)

Photo of the week

That is how investigative reporter I.F. Stone, who died in 1989, described his role as a journalist. Stone pursued these goals by publishing I.F. Stone’s Weekly, an independent newsletter, from 1953 to 1971. Stone, best known for his indefatigable scrutiny of government documents, is considered one of the top journalists of the 20th century.

Eight years ago, inspired by Stone’s legacy, I started Popular Information. Today, you are one of 540,000 people who receive Popular Information in your inbox. I am proud of what it has accomplished so far.

The reporting in this newsletter helped secure guaranteed sick leave for 170,000 restaurant workers, prompted dozens of major companies to cut off funding to Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election, and exposed a scheme to cripple Social Security, forcing the Trump administration to scrap its plans.

In 2026, this newsletter was honored with the David Nyhan Prize for Public Policy Journalism from the Harvard Shorenstein Center, which praised Popular Information’s work as “meticulous investigative reporting” that is “timely, fearless, and factual.” In 2023, Popular Information was featured in the Washington Post as one of a handful of “news outlets reimagining political journalism in smart ways“ and “addressing some of political journalism’s long-standing shortcomings.” In 2020, Popular Information won the Online Journalism Award for Excellence in Newsletters.

Stone was fiercely protective of his independence and, therefore, relied on readers — not corporations — to fund his work. Popular Information has taken the same approach. And for the next 24 hours, to mark our 8th anniversary, you can upgrade to a paid subscription for 28% off.

Upgrade to paid

The truth is, only a small percentage of Popular Information’s readers are paid subscribers. Part of the reason is that we do not have a paywall. I believe that access to Popular Information’s reporting should not be determined by whether someone has disposable income.

But it is paid subscribers who have allowed me to hire two talented colleagues, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Simms, who make Popular Information’s most ambitious reporting possible. In the last month, paid subscribers enabled us to purchase a new tool that tracks political ads across the country — allowing us to follow the money with new precision.

If a few more people upgrade to a paid subscription, Popular Information could expose more lies, root out more corruption, and call out more hypocrites. So, if you can afford this discounted rate ($36/year or $4.32/month), please support this work.

Support accountability journalism

There have been more than 1,500 editions of Popular Information since we launched. If you missed an issue or two, I understand. I’ve included some highlights from the last eight years below.

Please keep reading. And, as always, feel free to get in touch. You can reach me at judd@popular.info.

Here’s to another eight years!

With thanks,

Judd

“Watershed moment for the restaurant industry.” As the pandemic began to take hold of the nation in early 2020, Popular Information reported that restaurant group Darden Restaurants, the parent company of Olive Garden, was not offering employees paid sick leave unless required by law. Popular Information spoke to several current and former Darden employees who shared stories of workers who came into work sick to avoid missing a shift. Ten hours after Popular Information published its reporting, Darden, which previously lobbied against paid sick leave legislation, announced that all employees would receive paid sick leave benefits, effective immediately.

“...After the journalist Judd Legum pointed out its long history of fighting sick-leave policies, Darden Restaurants, which runs several restaurant chains, including Olive Garden, said that its 170,000 hourly workers would now get paid sick leave,” wrote Opinion Columnist Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times. Business Insider described the move as a “watershed moment for the restaurant industry.” The story was picked up by the New York Times, The Financial Times, CNBC, and Fox.

Research published in August 2021 by Harvard professor Daniel Schneider and UCSF professor Kristen Harknett in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs looked at the impact of Popular Information’s report on working conditions at Olive Garden. According to the study, this reporting “was highly effective,” dramatically increasing “employee-reported access to paid sick leave.” Further, the change in sick leave policy significantly reduced the number of employees who came to work sick at Olive Garden. “We have shown that online investigatory journalism coupled with social media activity led to substantial changes in corporate practices,” the study concluded.

Exposing and preventing a plan to cripple Social Security. On March 17, 2025, Popular Information exclusively published an internal Social Security Administration (SSA) memo that revealed plans to significantly limit phone service beginning April 1. The memo said the plan would flood already overburdened field offices with millions of additional people, creating “service disruption,” “operational strain,” and “budget shortfalls.”

After the publication of Popular Information’s report, major national news outlets, including Axios, the Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, and Newsweek, picked up the story. Popular Information was featured on The Rachel Maddow Show and Democracy Now! to discuss the report. Millions of people read the story online. Powerful advocacy groups, including the AARP, blasted the proposal.

On March 26, however, the SSA announced it was delaying the implementation until April 14. Then, on April 8, the SSA announced that it was canceling its plans to limit phone service entirely.

Support accountability journalism

“Corporations’ Political Reckoning Began With a Newsletter.” Following the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Popular Information contacted 144 corporations and asked if they would continue to support members of Congress who voted to overturn the election. In response to Popular Information’s inquiry, three companies — Marriott, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, and Commerce Bank — announced that they were suspending their donations to the 147 Republicans who objected to the certification of the Electoral College.

The report had vast ripple effects in the corporate world and was picked up by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Financial Times, Reuters, MarketWatch, Forbes, Business Insider, The Daily Beast, Axios, and other publications.

“One after another, major companies pledged this week to stop donating to politicians whose objections to America’s election results led to a riot at the U.S. Capitol. They were reacting to pressure that began with an article not in the New York Times or Washington Post, but a newsletter called Popular Information,” Bloomberg media reporter Gerry Smith wrote.

Eventually, dozens of the world’s most prominent corporations — including AT&T, Amazon, Intel, Disney, and Walmart — announced they were also suspending donations to Republican election objectors. An even larger group of companies said they were suspending all corporate PAC donations.

After our initial reporting, Popular Information tracked which corporations maintained their pledges — and which returned to business as usual.

Revealing how Trump’s Argentina bailout enriched one well-connected billionaire. On October 22, 2025, Popular Information revealed that the Trump administration’s $20 billion bailout of Argentina would benefit hedge fund billionaire Robert Citrone, a personal friend and former colleague of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Popular Information’s reporting became national news, with outlets like CNN, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and CNBC picking up the story. Our work was also cited in a letter from over 50 members of Congress demanding answers from Secretary Bessent about his ties to Citrone.

Upgrade to paid

Accountability for right-wing billionaire Charles Koch. On March 14, 2022, Popular Information broke the news that Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by billionaire Charles Koch, was continuing business in Russia following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The report was picked up by several major media outlets, including the New York Times, CBS News, Newsweek, Marketwatch, Salon, and The Daily Beast.

Two days later, Popular Information uncovered how a network of pundits and groups publicly arguing against the imposition of economic sanctions on Russia was receiving funding from Charles Koch’s nonprofit network. Koch Industries made its first public statement acknowledging its Russian operations on March 17. The company insisted that exiting Russia would “do more harm than good.”

On April 6, 2022, Popular Information obtained an internal email from Charles Koch’s umbrella non-profit, Stand Together, stating the group’s opposition to economic sanctions. It also explicitly linked this position to Koch Industries’ decision to maintain its operations in Russia. On April 18, a Popular Information report revealed that a foreign policy analyst funded by Stand Together was publicly casting doubt about whether Russian forces were attacking civilians in Ukraine. On April 21, under increasing pressure, Koch Industries announced that it was halting business operations in Russia.

Protecting democracy in North Carolina. On April 15, 2025, Popular Information reported that at least 29 people had their ballots in the 2024 general election wrongly invalidated by the North Carolina Supreme Court. The state’s highest court ruled that about 260 ballots must be tossed because they were cast by people who were “never residents” of the state. The ballots — and thousands of others — were challenged by Jefferson Griffin, a Republican candidate for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court who lost by 734 votes to Democrat Allison Riggs. On April 16, the North Carolina Board of Elections filed a notice in federal court, citing Popular Information’s reporting, stating that the votes of people who were wrongly identified would be restored. On May 5, in a decision that referenced Popular Information’s reporting, a federal court declared Riggs the winner and Griffin conceded.

Support accountability journalism

Expanded sick leave at the nation’s largest supermarket chain. As COVID-19 cases began to soar in 2020, Popular Information reported extensively on Kroger’s inadequate sick leave policies. At the time, many employees told Popular Information that they were not receiving paid sick leave, which created an incentive to work while ill. Those who did have paid sick leave explained that it came with significant restrictions. Kroger proceeded to attack Popular Information, telling HuffPost that the newsletter “only serves to divide people at a time when we should all be pulling together to manage this public health crisis.”

Popular Information then reported on Publix’s much more expansive paid sick leave policy for COVID-19. The following weekend, Kroger announced a significantly expanded paid sick leave policy for COVID-19 that largely mirrored Publix’s policy. David Leonhardt of the New York Times credited Popular Information for pressuring Kroger to change its policies and expand leave. The story was also featured in Business Insider and the podcast On the Media.

Uncovering a multi-million dollar GOP dirty tricks operation. In May and June of 2026, Popular Information exposed that Lead Left, Real Change, and other purportedly “progressive” super PACs spending millions in Democratic primaries were actually part of a GOP dirty tricks operation connected to the House Republican super PAC. Within 24 hours of our initial report, Speaker Mike Johnson was forced to respond. The story was also featured on CNN.

Pulling back the curtain on the ideological agenda of a media giant. In July 2024, Popular Information revealed that the lead anchor of Sinclair’s national evening news broadcast, Eugene Ramirez, resigned over concerns about the accuracy and right-wing bias of the content he was required to present on air. The broadcast, known as The National Desk, appears on at least 70 local television affiliates owned by Sinclair. The report detailed how a small group of operatives embedded in Sinclair’s headquarters pushes right-wing propaganda dressed up as news to local outlets, where it is given the imprimatur of mainstream media brands, including NBC, ABC, and CBS. The story was covered in The Daily Beast, the Columbia Journalism Review, and NPR.

Upgrade to paid

Exposing the consequences of Trump’s pardons. Jaime Davidson, a drug kingpin convicted in the murder of a federal law enforcement officer, had his life sentence commuted by Trump. In September 2024, Popular Information uncovered that Davidson, after being set free by Trump, was accused by authorities of strangling his wife during a 2023 dispute. Davidson was subsequently convicted by a jury of domestic violence, and sentenced to three months in jail. Our reporting was picked up by the New York Times, Newsweek, the New York Daily News, the Orlando Sentinel, the Syracuse Post-Standard, and other outlets.

A scandal in Tennessee, exposed. In April 2023, Popular Information broke the news that Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) secretly purchased a $600,000 home in Nashville. Our reporting forced Sexton to admit that his family lives in Nashville and raised serious questions about whether Sexton can legally represent a district two hours away. We also revealed that Sexton overcharged Tennessee taxpayers $78,000 by collecting per diem payments reserved for representatives who live more than 50 miles from Nashville.

The news generated a flurry of national and local media coverage, including a lengthy piece in the Tennessean, the state’s largest paper. A non-profit watchdog group called for state and federal criminal investigations into Sexton’s conduct. More than a dozen residents of Sexton’s district filed a civil complaint with the Tennessee Attorney General based on Popular Information’s reporting.

This week, Newsmax — a far-right news organization with a strong allegiance to President Trump and a history of pushing wild conspiracy theories — announced it had struck a deal with Meta. Under the agreement, Meta will “draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said the company was “pleased to work with Meta to help ensure users have access to timely, high-quality journalism through AI technologies.”

Although Meta’s AI products are currently less popular than those of OpenAI and other rivals, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is investing hundreds of billions in data centers and other infrastructure to catch up. Zuckerberg is also aggressively integrating AI into Meta’s suite of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which collectively have over 3.9 billion monthly users. In short, how Meta’s AI products are trained could have enormous impacts.

The financial terms of Meta’s deal with Newsmax were not disclosed.

Newsmax is not an objective news source but a far-right organization that routinely distorts reality to suit its ideological goals. NewsGuard, which uses journalists to rank the credibility and reliability of news outlets, gives Newsmax a 20 out of 100. Newsmax “is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalism standards,” NewsGuard concluded. Newsmax received similar ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check (”Low“ for factual reporting) and Ground News (”Very Low“ on factuality.)

Ruddy is a longtime friend and informal advisor of Trump. He is a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where the pair frequently dine together. Ruddy was described in the Washington Post as a “pioneer of America’s looming misinformation complex — making a name for himself by pushing stories that badly lacked substantiating evidence.”

After the 2020 election, Ruddy praised Trump for attempting to undermine the credibility of the election, saying it made more people interested in the news. “You know what? At the end of the day, it’s great for news,” Ruddy told the New Yorker in November 2020. “The news cycle is red-hot, and Newsmax is getting one million people per minute, according to Nielsen, tuning into Newsmax TV. I think it’s good.”

Newsmax aggressively promoted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, using the false claims to bolster ratings. For example, on November 16, 2020, Newsmax played a clip of lawyer Sidney Powell claiming there was “massive election fraud.” According to Powell, the fraud involved “Dominion and its Smartmatic software,” which allowed people to “drag and drop Trump votes to a separate folder and then delete that folder.”

Nearly a month later, Newsmax was still promoting Powell. On December 13, 2020, Mike Huckabee introduced Powell as someone who “says she has evidence of voter fraud on the biggest scale in world history.” Powell then claimed:

We also identified the fact that the Smartmatic Dominion people left VPNs wide open and unencrypted to allow access by all kinds of foreign actors, the night of the election. This election was manipulated by evil nations like China Communist Party, which owns 75% of the investment company that owns Dominion, and then, also by Iran, there were Serbian people in the system at the time. Lichtenstein, I mean, there were hackers all over in our own election system during the election.

Newsmax was ultimately sued by both Smartmatic and Dominion. The cases were settled for over $100 million combined after judges issued several rulings favorable to the plaintiffs. The 2020 election coverage that resulted in these settlements is part of the “archived content” that Meta will apparently be using “to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.”

The AI-training deal with Newsmax is the latest by Meta with a right-wing outlet that pushed pro-Trump conspiracies. Meta has also agreed to train its AI on content from Fox News, which pushed election conspiracies and settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion for $787 million. It has made similar deals with other right-wing outlets with poor reputations for factual accuracy, including The Daily Caller, The Washington Examiner, and News Corp, the parent company of the New York Post. Meta has also included several mainstream outlets that provide centrist coverage, including USA Today, CNN, and People Inc.

Meta has no AI-training partnership with left-leaning outlets. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Misinformation-maxxing

Newsmax has promoted misinformation on topics beyond the 2020 election.

In 2019 and 2020, according to the Washington Post, a member of the Qatari royal family invested about $50 million in Newsmax as the network was struggling to keep up with rival Fox News. Senior leadership instructed reporters to soften their coverage of Qatar and Ruddy reprimanded a host for a critical comment on air.

A 2021 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Newsmax as one of ten sites contributing to 69% of user interaction with climate misinformation on Facebook. According to the report, Newsmax was the third most common site linked to in posts containing climate misinformation. Newsmax has posted articles promoting conspiracy theories about chemtrails and denying that climate change is caused by humans. (Facebook objected to the report’s methodology.)

In 2014, Newsmax aired and promoted a film pushing conspiracy theories about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. An article on the film published by Newsmax states that it “presents compelling forensic and eyewitness evidence, previously unavailable to the public, supporting [Mafia hit man James] Files’ contention that he, and not Lee Harvey Oswald, fired the fatal shot at America’s 35th president.”

In addition to spreading misinformation, Newsmax has also silenced criticism of Trump.

During a September 2021 interview with an Iraq War veteran, Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield abruptly cut off his guest when he started to criticize Trump over his efforts to get U.S. citizens out of Afghanistan. Stinchfield attempted to interrupt the guest, but when he continued speaking, Stinchfield shouted, “Cut him off please, cut him off now!” The guest quickly disappeared from the broadcast.

Last Friday, President Trump released an executive order directing officials to install signs outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) informing visitors that the museum presents history inaccurately.

The order is the latest attack in a lengthy campaign by the Trump administration to discredit and control the Smithsonian Institution. The Trump administration has argued that the institution, which includes 21 museums and the National Zoo, has a liberal bias.

The order cites a 162-page report released by the White House on July 4. The report, written by the White House Domestic Policy Council, argues that the “Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.” The report criticizes the NMAH for “extreme political activism,” “anti-White activism,” “transgender activism,” and supporting illegal immigration.

The executive order states that the temporary signs outside the museum should tell visitors that exhibits should be altered to reflect the report’s findings and “direct visitors to locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.” It does not specify where visitors will be redirected.

Trump’s war against the Smithsonian began shortly after the start of his second term. In March 2025, Trump issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that stated that the Trump administration would “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.” The Trump administration has since threatened to withhold federal funding, ordered a comprehensive review of eight museums, and released a list of exhibits it did not agree with.

Congress has also gotten involved in the Trump administration’s battle. Last week, Anthea Hartig, the director of the NMAH, was questioned by a House subcommittee, during which Republicans accused the Smithsonian of being “infected by a woke ideology.”

“Examining the harder chapters of our history is not the same as hostility toward America,” Hartig said in her testimony. “We can and do honor the Declaration, the Revolution, the Constitution, and our national symbols, and also tell the truth about the times the country fell short of its own founding ideals. Telling our history fully is not anti-American.”

So why does the Trump administration care so much about controlling the Smithsonian Institution? One factor: the influence of right-wing Christian nationalist “historian” David Barton and his son Tim.

Who are David and Tim Barton?

The father and son are founder and president, respectively, of WallBuilders, a Christian nationalist advocacy organization founded in 1988. WallBuilders aims to “teach US history and how our beginnings were overwhelmingly rooted in Christian ideology.”

Despite having no degree in history, David Barton calls himself a historian. He has amassed a large collection of documents related to America’s founding and published several books. For decades, he has pushed the view that the founding fathers never intended for there to be a separation between church and state. David Barton’s work has been rejected repeatedly by actual historians. Most notably, a book he published in 2012 about Thomas Jefferson was pulled from the shelves by its publisher after a group of historians from Christian universities accused him of including distortions and false information.

This has not prevented David Barton from gaining political influence. In Texas, David Barton has advised the Texas State Board of Education on public school curricula. According to Barton’s own social media posts and statements, he has attended several meetings at the White House during Trump’s second term and has been in communication with Trump officials about the “crazy stuff” in the Smithsonian museums.

How the report mirrors the Bartons’ ideology

While the exact role of the Bartons has not been disclosed by the White House, there are several instances in which the report closely mirrors their ideology.

For example, the report accuses the NMAH of presenting slavery too negatively. “[The museum] should tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices, but also how the words, actions, and ideas of America’s Founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery,” the report states.

The Bartons strike a very similar tone, arguing that the issue of slavery actually demonstrates “American exceptionalism.” A page on their website says, “[A]nti-American revisionism forgets that America’s record of anti-slavery actually is exceptional compared to the rest of the world.”

Both the Bartons and the report treat Christopher Columbus as an “American” hero and any attempt to criticize his actions as an effort to undermine the American historical narrative. Additionally, the report calls out the Smithsonian for its support of the 1619 Project, which the Bartons criticize frequently.

The report also alleges that the NMAH does not give proper attention to the founding fathers or the Declaration of Independence because it does not want to show that Christianity had an influence on them. The report states, “it was Christian moral philosophy that undergirded the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of God-given, unalienable rights.”

The idea that historians downplay the role of Christian values in the founding is something the Bartons have championed for many years. In a May podcast episode, Tim Barton said, “Literally the first paragraph [of the Declaration of Independence], they talk about the laws of nature and nature’s God. That’s the foundation that they’re building on.”

What the Bartons say about their involvement in the Smithsonian report

Over the last year and a half, the Bartons have frequently discussed the Trump administration’s campaign against the Smithsonian and repeatedly suggested that they have been involved.

On an April 2025 podcast episode, David Barton said that he and his son had discussed the Smithsonian “a little bit when we were up in DC with some individuals with the White House.”

Later, in a podcast episode from January 6, 2026, the Bartons said that the White House had asked them to help identify problematic Smithsonian exhibits. “Dad, you and I have gone through and reviewed several of the Smithsonian [museums] and there’s some crazy stuff there,” Tim Barton said. “You turned that over to the White House on how bad the stuff was, how misleading it was,” David Barton replied.

In a June 1 episode, Tim Barton said, “We might have been invited to help with some other initiatives and projects going on” as a “rebuttal” to the Smithsonian’s programming for America 250. The White House report was released a little over a month later.

Most recently, on a podcast episode released last week, Tim Barton said that members of the Committee on House Administration, which held a hearing last week about the report, had called the Bartons for advice on questions to pose during the hearing. One member of the committee, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), also said on a separate podcast that he had spoken with the Bartons on the day of the hearing.

What comes next for the Smithsonian?

Neither Trump nor Congress has the power to oust museum leadership. This power lies with the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents. So, Trump and Congressional Republicans are focused on stacking the board with conservatives.

There are currently three vacancies on the board and three more will open in October. The board nominates members itself and sends their names to Congress for approval. But according to the New York Times, Vice President JD Vance, who is a member of the board, has “delayed action on the names because President Trump hoped to substitute more like-minded candidates.”

On a podcast last week, Loudermilk said that he was working with the White House to try to make these leadership changes. In what he described as a “half-serious comment,” Loudermilk said, “Let’s just let David Barton… or some of these others obtain some of the artifacts that [the Smithsonian has]... And let’s just let those guys run our national museums.”

The New York Post story is about a petition on Change.org started by Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace Catherine Galante was among the nearly 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks. “[W]e, the family members of those murdered on 9/11, write to express our concern regarding the potential inclusion of Zohran Mamdani in the 25th-year commemorative events,” the petition states.

The story went viral on right-wing social media, garnering millions of views on X. Within hours, the story was being featured on Fox News, the cable network that is also owned by Murdoch.

“I can fully understand why the families wouldn’t want him there,” Fox News pundit Tomi Lahren said Sunday. On the same program, Fox News’ Senior National Correspondent Rich Edson suggested that Mamdani could demonstrate “respect” for the families by not showing up. On Fox Business, host Cheryl Casone said she understood the position of the families because Mamdani “does not have much sorrow about 9/11“ and “if it was 25 years ago, he’d be probably supporting the attackers on the World Trade Center.”

But the text of the New York Post article directly contradicts its cover. While the cover says that “thousands of 9/11 families demand Mamdani be banned,” the article itself says the petition “has collected over 1,100 signatures in a little over a week, including from at least 300 victims’ families.”

That “300 victims’ families” claim was initially repeated across right-wing and Jewish press, including RedState, The Times of Israel, The Daily Wire, The Post Millennial, The Jerusalem Post, Just the News, and i24News.

By Monday evening, the story had hit CBS News New York. “Thousands of 9/11 victims' families are asking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend this year's solemn remembrance ceremony,” the network reported. After Popular Information reached out for comment, that line was removed. A revised article on the CBS website says the petition has “purportedly drawn thousands of signatures, including some victims' families.”

In an interview with Popular Information, Galante acknowledged that there was no actual list of family members who had signed the petition. “We don’t have a list,” Galante said. Rather, the 300 figure that organizers shared with the New York Post was an estimate based on how they believe the petition spread before it received much publicity. “We all know each other, so…think about it. If you know 10 people and they give it to 10 more people they know that lost. That’s how we got the 300 number,” Galante explained. “I don’t go through the list and look at the names.”

As of Monday afternoon, almost 16,000 people have signed the Change.org petition. Change.org lists these as “verified signatures,” but that verification means the signatures are “from real people” and not bots. Neither Change.org or the petition organizers have verified that 300 or more people who lost a family member on 9/11 have signed the document.

The New York Post article quotes three individuals who lost a family member on 9/11 and have signed the petition. The author of the story, reporter Rich Calder, did not respond to a request for comment.

Galante also provided more detail on his motivation for starting the petition. In the interview, Galante described Mamdani as “a Muslim that has thoughts to get rid of all Jewish people, and to agree with 9/11.” At another point in the interview, Galante claimed Mamdani “believes 9/11 should have happened to us.” (Mamdani has called suggestions that America deserved to be attacked on 9/11 “objectionable and reprehensible.”)

Galante is a registered Republican who donated $250 to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2019.

The petition includes somewhat more staid criticism of Mamdani, suggesting he has not demonstrated a “respect for the victims, recognition of the gravity of the attacks, and a clear rejection of the ideologies that contributed to such violence.”

The petition’s evidence, however, relies primarily on guilt by association. It cites views or remarks by Mamdani’s father, a Brooklyn Imam, and a Congressional candidate. It does not contain any direct quotes from Mamdani himself.

Mamdani was asked about the petition during a Monday press conference and indicated that he planned to attend the 9/11 anniversary ceremony. “I will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders, forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them at this year’s 9/11 commemoration, reaffirming that we will never forget the solemn day felt by all of us who call this city home and, frankly, by all of us who call this country home,” Mamdani said.

Sometime before the anniversary, Galante says the organizers will go to Mamdani’s office to deliver the petition. They will deliver the full list of everyone who signed on Change.org with no designation of which signatories lost a relative on 9/11.

“I can’t separate,” Galante said. “[Change.org] doesn’t give you much information as far as who they are, where they came from.”

American taxpayers are spending billions every year providing Medicaid benefits to hundreds of thousands of employees of Amazon and Walmart, a new analysis by Popular Information reveals.

Amazon and Walmart are two of the largest and most profitable companies in the country — collectively generating $100 billion in profits in 2025 — but many of their employees still qualify for Medicaid because their take-home pay hovers around (or below) the poverty line.

As taxpayers keep their workers afloat, the wealth of the two companies’ largest shareholders is increasing exponentially. The Walton family, the largest shareholders of Walmart, saw their collective wealth increase from $238 billion in 2021 to $513 billion at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, Amazon founder and current executive chairman Jeff Bezos saw his net worth increase from $187 billion to $255 billion over roughly the same time period.

Popular Information calculated the public subsidy to Amazon and Walmart by cross-referencing several publicly available data sources. Last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report examining the top 25 employers of Medicaid enrollees in six states: Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island. This provided state-level Medicaid enrollment for Amazon and Walmart workers in all six states, with the exception of Amazon in Maine.

Popular Information compared these figures to the total number of employees working for Walmart and Amazon in each state, sourced from company disclosures, to establish an average Medicaid enrollment rate for each company. The average Medicaid enrollment rate was then used to establish an estimated Medicaid enrollment for employees of each company in the remaining states.

Finally, the estimated number of employees receiving Medicaid in each state was multiplied by that state’s average annual cost of a non-elderly, non-disabled Medicaid enrollee, as published by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC).

Using this methodology, Popular Information estimates that, nationwide, over 156,000 Walmart employees are enrolled in Medicaid at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $1.04 billion.

This figure significantly understates the true cost of Medicaid for Walmart employees to taxpayers. First, the calculation only includes the direct cost of Medicaid for the employees themselves. But Walmart’s low wages for these employees also makes their families eligible for Medicaid. Taking into account dependents, the cost to taxpayers would roughly double. Further, the most recent data on Medicaid cost per enrollee from MACPAC is from fiscal year 2023. Costs for 2025 and 2026 are likely significantly higher.

In Walmart’s 2026 fiscal year, then-CEO Doug McMillon was paid over $29.2 million in total compensation while the median Walmart worker earned $30,520 — a ratio of 958 to 1. The earnings of an average worker put them well below the cutoff for Medicaid eligibility for a family of three.

For Amazon, the same methodology finds that an estimated 123,000 Amazon employees are enrolled in Medicaid at a cost to taxpayers of $927 million.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was given a massive compensation package of $212 million in 2021, mostly in stock that vests over 10 years. Jassy’s compensation has been smaller since; he was paid another $2.1 million in 2024. Meanwhile, the median Amazon employee earned $40,206 that year. This global number includes the many higher-paid technical employees who work at Amazon. Warehouse workers in the United States, and others in blue collar positions, make much less, making them eligible for Medicaid.

“Amazon is one of the largest job creators in the country, so looking at raw numbers instead of percentages is misleading,” an Amazon spokesman said in response to Popular Information’s request for comment. “Also, eligibility for both SNAP and Medicaid is based on total household income and family size, not individual wages or benefits – so employers that offer part-time options for those who want them, like we do, are likely to have more people who are eligible.”

While Walmart ranked first in terms of “raw numbers” of employees on Medicaid, Amazon had a higher percentage of its workforce on Medicaid (11.7%) than Walmart (9.4%).

Not everyone who works parttime does so by choice. In June 2026, 4.7 million “individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Moreover, according to the GAO, 66.1% of employed individuals on Medicaid work full-time.

Walmart declined to comment on the record. According to the company’s corporate website, starting wages at Walmart have increased by 93% since 2015.

After two fatal shootings by ICE agents in Texas and Maine, during which officers were not wearing body cams, White House Border Czar Tom Homan defended the agency. He said Democrats held up the purchase of body cams and “as soon as [ICE] had funding they bought them.” That funding was provided in April. Documents uncovered by Popular Information show that it was not until July 17 and 20, days after Homan claimed the purchases had already been made, that ICE spent over $30 million on body cams.

On May 26, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter to pharmaceutical company QOL Medical with serious allegations that could pose an existential threat to the company. Days later, QOL Medical CEO Frederick Cooper wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could pave the way for the kingdom to enrich uranium. The deal comes after the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund. Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is continuing to collect fees from the Saudi government as he has resumed his role as a top foreign policy aide in the Trump administration. Nearly all major media coverage of the nuclear agreement ignored Kushner’s financial conflicts.

The best of the rest

Crypto investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their crypto company donated over $10 million to MAGA Inc. The donations were made “less than a month after the Trump administration moved to vacate a Biden-era enforcement action against the brothers’ crypto exchange, Gemini.” (The Lever)

Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds (R) has received large donations from multiple companies seeking to build data centers in the state. According to Politico, “[a]t least four developers that are actively pursuing or had previously proposed data centers… have offered five- and six-figure donations to Donalds’ political action committee.” (Politico)

Afraid to leave the house during ICE’s crackdown in Minneapolis, many undocumented single mothers lost months of work, putting them and their children in precarious financial situations. Now, some who are authorized to work under their Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status are being forced to pay upwards of $1,000 to renew it. (The 19th)

Shortly after Trump’s reelection, his son Donald Trump Jr. announced that he was joining an investment firm founded in 2023, 1789 Capital. Since then, the firm has invested in multiple companies that either have government contracts or have benefited from decisions by the Trump administration. 1789 Capital has generated 200% returns, far higher than the 21% average returns of other firms started the same year. (The New York Times)

Numerical information

$4.09: The average price of a gallon of gas nationwide as of Thursday, according to AAA. Gas prices crossed the $4 a gallon threshold again this week after the war with Iran resumed.

$37.5 billion: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Senate committee this week that the war with Iran has cost $37.5 billion so far. A Popular Information analysis, however, found that the U.S. spent over $103 billion on the war in the first 120 days.

2,295: The number of measles cases reported so far in the U.S. in 2026. Just over halfway through the year, the number of cases has already exceeded all of 2025.

Quote of the week

“It comes down to one simple fact: these people failed to comply with law enforcement… If they did, they’d be alive today.”

– White House Border Czar Tom Homan on the two people fatally shot by federal immigration agents in Texas and Maine.

Photo of the week

On Wednesday, the Trump administration signed a 30-year nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that paves the way for the kingdom to enrich its own uranium. The Saudi government has been aggressively seeking such a deal for years, eager to gain an edge over regional rivals. The agreement lacks safeguards that previous administrations, and many independent foreign policy analysts, viewed as essential to prevent nuclear proliferation.

The deal comes after the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners. Since 2021, Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has collected over $110 million from the Saudi government in management fees. In March, Kushner was seeking billions more from the Saudis. (After Kushner’s fundraising was exposed, his efforts were purportedly put on hold.)

Kushner also has a close personal relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) — the pair are known to communicate regularly over WhatsApp. In 2021, when the PIF committee originally recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal due to the high price and Kushner’s inexperience, MBS overruled the recommendation.

As he continues to collect fees from the Saudi government, Kushner has resumed his role as a top foreign policy aide to Trump. He has played a key role in virtually every significant foreign policy negotiation since Trump returned to the White House.

Kushner’s specific involvement in the nuclear pact, if any, has not been disclosed. But the fact that one of the president’s top foreign policy advisors is receiving large, ongoing financial payments from the Saudi government is unquestionably relevant to the story.

Nearly all major media coverage of the US-Saudi nuclear agreement ignored Kushner’s financial conflicts — including articles by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, AP, and CNN.

Semafor, for example, called the deal “a major win for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” who has been negotiating with Trump for months, but did not note the potential conflict of interest stemming from his involvement with Kushner. The New York Times explained how the deal with Saudi Arabia broke a precedent for nuclear deals set by previous administrations, but did not examine the unprecedented relationship Trump has with Saudi Arabia through his son-in-law.

As of Wednesday, Popular Information could only identify one article on the deal from a prominent outlet mentioning Kushner. Mediaite briefly discusses the funding that Kushner’s private equity firm has received from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. (A Forbes piece focused on the Trump Organization’s financial ties to Saudi Arabia, but did not mention Kushner.)

This is not the first time that the media has ignored Kushner’s conflicts of interest.

In April, Popular Information reported that in 202 articles published by major outlets about Kushner’s role in negotiations with Iran, only six mentioned his financial connections to Saudi Arabia. The silence continued after it was reported that MBS had pushed Trump to initiate the war with Iran and later to continue attacking.

The information landscape in the United States is busted. Billionaires are using the powerful social media platforms and media outlets they control to curry favor with Trump.

Google paid Trump $25 million to settle a bogus lawsuit.

Jeff Bezos purged Trump critics from the Washington Post opinion page.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg canceled fact-checking on Facebook.

A pro-Trump billionaire bought CBS News — and is now buying CNN.

The only way to fight back is to build up independent media that is free from the influence of billionaires and corporate America.

If you believe in independent accountability journalism and can afford $50 per year or $6 per month, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Upgrade to paid

A sweetheart deal for MBS

The deal with Saudi Arabia will reportedly allow the kingdom to begin a civilian nuclear program. The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the approved deal, reported that it was a “30-year, multibillion-dollar deal.” (The full text of the agreement has not been released.)

The reported details of the deal involve American companies developing the program and providing Saudi Arabia with “new power reactors and other nuclear technology.” The Trump administration argues that U.S. involvement would prevent a weapon from being developed.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the agreement “would have American companies build a uranium enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia if a joint U.S.-Saudi study determines such a step would be warranted.” If a nuclear enrichment facility is not built under the terms of the agreement, Saudi Arabia would be prohibited from advancing enrichment activities for 10 years.

The agreement takes effect automatically unless Congress blocks it, but that is unlikely. It requires a two-thirds majority to override a Trump veto.

The facility would be built under a “black box” agreement that purportedly would prevent the transfer of sensitive technology to the Saudi government. Critics argue that the reported deal does not include enough safeguards to prevent Saudi Arabia from eventually attempting to develop nuclear weapons.

While Saudi Arabia is a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), “the agreement is not expected to include the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, which would allow for more monitoring, inspections and verification,” the Associated Press reported.

Trump administration officials said that there is a separate agreement that “will still provide for adequate monitoring of the U.S.-provided sites,” but critics argue that would be “inadequate to investigate suspected nuclear activities that don’t involve the U.S.”

The new agreement could also increase tensions with Iran, as the U.S. is currently involved in negotiations with Iran to limit its nuclear program. While Saudi Arabia “insists its intentions are peaceful,” MBS said in 2018 that his country would “without a doubt” develop a nuclear weapon if Iran did first.

Saudi Arabia is not the only country with connections to Kushner that the Trump administration has recently negotiated with despite security risks. Politico reported that the “Trump administration ignored warnings from career staff at the Commerce Department when it granted the United Arab Emirates sweeping access to advanced American semiconductors and other technology.” The UAE has invested over $200 million into Affinity Partners.

QOL Medical sells Sucraid, a drug that treats congenital sucrase-isomaltase deficiency (CSID), a rare but serious medical condition. Sucraid is effective at treating CSID but is very expensive. The list price can exceed $12,000 per month or $150,000 per year.

The FDA letter accused QOL Medical of using “false or misleading” advertising to sell more Sucraid. The marketing materials, according to the FDA, encouraged doctors to prescribe Sucraid to “patients suffering with unresolved IBS-like symptoms, including gas, bloating, diarrhea, and/or nausea.”

But Sucraid cannot treat irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or its symptoms. It can only be used to treat “sucrase deficiency.” Overall, the FDA said, the advertising creates a “misleading impression.” As a result, the FDA informed QOL Medical that it was in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which prohibits the misbranding of drugs in advertising.

This letter must have been of particular concern to Cooper. In November 2024, QOL Medical and Cooper agreed to a $47 million settlement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) for using a kickback scheme and aggressive sales tactics to induce doctors to prescribe Sucraid to patients who did not need it. As a result, the DOJ alleged, QOL Medical defrauded federal health systems.

“Let this case be a warning to others that we will aggressively pursue all those, motivated by greed, who try to unlawfully enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense,” Jodi Cohen, FBI Special Agent in Charge, said in a statement.

In return for the $47 million payment, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agreed not to seek to exclude QOL Medical and Cooper “from Medicare, Medicaid, and other Federal health care programs.” Exclusion from federal health care programs would be a devastating blow to nearly any medical company.

The agreement by HHS, however, was contingent upon QOL Medical and Cooper abiding by the terms of a Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA), which the parties signed simultaneously with the DOJ settlement. The CIA requires QOL Medical and Cooper to comply “with the statutes, regulations, and written directives” of the FDA. Any material breach of the CIA “constitutes an independent basis for QOL’s exclusion from participation in the Federal health care programs.”

Specifically, under the agreement, any “probable violation of FDA requirements relating to the marketing or sale of Government Reimbursed Products” would be considered a “reportable event.” The letter the FDA sent to QOL Medical unambiguously qualifies as reportable. Ultimately, the Office of the Inspector General of the HHS makes a determination about whether any conduct constitutes a material breach.

In any event, the FDA’s May 26 letter gives QOL Medical 15 working days to respond. On June 8, MAGA Inc. received a $1 million check from Cooper.

This isn’t Cooper’s first donation to MAGA Inc. Cooper also donated $2 million to MAGA Inc. in February 2025 and another $1 million in October 2025. Cooper’s donations to MAGA Inc. in the last two years dwarf all of his previous political donations.

As of now, QOL Medical’s alleged violation appears to still be pending. The FDA has not posted a “close out letter,” which would indicate that the issue has been resolved.

Inside QOL’s fraudulent scheme

QOL Medical and Cooper’s 2024 settlement with the DOJ involved an aggressive marketing scheme to increase Sucraid prescriptions. According to the settlement agreement, starting in 2018, QOL Medical began offering health care providers free Carbon-13 breath test kits for people with common stomach and digestive symptoms, claiming that the test kits could “rule in or rule out” CSID.

But the breath test, which was not FDA-approved, did not actually diagnose CSID. It tested for sucrase activity, and other conditions could cause a positive result. According to the settlement, around 30% of the breath tests provided by QOL Medical came back positive. QOL Medical then used these positive tests to convince doctors to prescribe Sucraid to patients.

Between 2018 and 2022, QOL Medical paid for a laboratory to run more than 75,000 of the breath tests, paying around $105 for each test to be analyzed. QOL Medical also paid for the results to be sent to the health care providers and QOL Medical. While the results delivered to QOL Medical did not contain the names of the patients, they “did contain the name of the health care provider who ordered the test, along with the patient’s age, gender, symptoms, and test result.”

QOL Medical then “disseminated this information to its sales force with instructions to make sales calls for Sucraid” to providers of patients with a positive breath test. The company kept track of whether its sales representatives converted positive test results into new prescriptions for Sucraid. According to a press release, “Cooper was aware of and approved the implementation and continuation of this marketing program.”

According to the settlement, some members of the QOL Medical sales teams made unsupported claims about the test’s ability to diagnose CSID. In 2019, at a national sales training, QOL Medical said in slides reviewed by Cooper that sales representatives should tell providers, “If you have a positive breath test, the patient will not improve unless you treat with Sucraid.”

This was all part of a scheme to charge the government, private insurers, and others thousands of dollars a month for a highly specialized drug many patients did not need. QOL Medical’s conduct “resulted in some patients taking Sucraid even though it wasn’t medically necessary,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a January 2025 press release.

In the settlement, the United States contends that QOL Medical and Cooper “caused the submission of false claims to Medicare, TRICARE, VA, and Medicaid.” These false claims were significant because the “restitution” portion of the settlement was $23.5 million. The remainder of the settlement is a penalty for the fraudulent conduct.

If the Trump administration, however, determined that QOL Medical violated its CIA, the economic consequences could be even more severe.