The Abandonment

For nearly two decades, Ungaro and Zampolli were one of only two couples at Melania’s table — White House Easters, Christmases, New Years. Melania was the first to call Ungaro’s son Giovanni every birthday, 7 AM, Secret Service arriving with presents. When Ungaro was taken — ten police breaking into her Miami home in an arrest she says Zampolli orchestrated through an ICE contact who has since been promoted — she got word to the First Lady and asked for help. “She looked like she was in shock, but she didn’t do anything,” Ungaro said. Three and a half months in detention. A prosecutor who tried twice to convert it into prison time; an email found by her son in which Zampolli wrote she should serve six years. “She knows me since I’m 18 years old. She knows who Paolo is. For me, it’s done. She lost her values.”

The Agreement

The interview’s most consequential thread ran through the East Wing. Zampolli’s claim to fame — that he introduced Melania to Donald Trump in 1998 — is, Ungaro said, a story he maintains by arrangement. “The investigators, they have proof it was Jeffrey Epstein” who made the introduction, she said. Zampolli’s reward for keeping the official version alive: access. He is close to Melania, not Trump — “they text each other all the time.” He asked the First Lady for an ambassadorship — Paris, London, or Rome — but, as Ungaro put it, a man like Zampolli could never pass a security clearance. The consolation prize was Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, a title with no apparent duties beyond travel and photographs with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. When Melania made her extraordinary unprompted statement in April denying any relationship with Epstein, Ungaro believes the First Lady was preempting her — responding to a post Ungaro had put online days earlier.

The Epstein files provides several documents that bolster the claims that it was Melania Jeffrey Epstein, not Zampolli, who introduced Melania to Donald Trump

The Plane

Ungaro was 16, a working model recruited out of Brazil at 13, when her agent Jean-Luc Brunel told her they’d catch “a friend’s plane” to a New York job. She boarded Epstein’s 727 and counted close to thirty girls — 14, 15, 16 years old, sitting on laps, worked by Ghislaine Maxwell “like best friends.” “They don’t look like models,” she told Brunel. “They look like students.” When they landed in New Jersey, Brunel tossed her a small bag and told her to put it in her purse. She realized it was drugs and threw it back. He threw it again. She threw it back again. She never saw Epstein after that day — but her name was on the manifest the DOJ released in 2021, beside Brunel’s.

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Trump spent Thursday governing by press release — and got caught at every turn. He named a new spy chief on Truth Social, posted a ceasefire Iran says never happened, and let the rest of the machine grind on: a Supreme Court finishing off the Voting Rights Act, a Justice Department indicting protesters while the named walk free, and a New Mexico crime scene dug to bedrock with nobody allowed to

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look. Five stories, one tell — the performance is the policy now, and the institutions built to call it are folding instead.

5️⃣ The Supreme Court Finishes Off the Voting Rights Act

The Court gutted what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act this week and cleared Alabama to run the GOP map a three-judge panel had already called intentional race discrimination. The map stands. The discrimination finding doesn’t. Alabama heads into the 2026 midterms with six Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic — the lines drawn, the remedy removed.

Dean and Zev tied it back to the rot underneath: a billionaire’s court that decides one day for the Constitution and the next for Trump’s immunity, with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, Alito, and Roberts as the standing exhibit. Zev pointed to Denver Riggleman, who had the receipts on Ginni Thomas and January 6th and asked for a subpoena — until Liz Cheney said no. The point isn’t a single ruling. It’s that the body meant to be the last check keeps choosing not to be one, and stops pretending to be embarrassed about it.

4️⃣ Zorro Ranch — the Hole, the Blackmail, the Next Names

Somebody carved a hole the size of forty-seven Olympic pools out of Epstein’s New Mexico ranch — 155,000 cubic yards, 20 to 25 feet deep, next to the main house. Narativ’s shadow analysis of drone and satellite imagery shows a squared, leveled structure that appeared around 2014–15 and vanished this year. Eddie Aragon dates the dig to late January, early February — before the Epstein files went public, and before the search. The likeliest read, Zev’s read, is a crypto-mining vault tied to Epstein’s crypto years, not the biolab the speculation wants; either way, the timing is the tell. You don’t move forty-seven pools of dirt to resurface a garden.

The cover-up is the story now. New Mexico’s AG was told to stand down by the federal government. No mainstream outlet will touch the dig. And it widened on air: Bill Gates testified this week — on the record, for the first time — that Epstein tried to blackmail him, vindicating the reporting Zev first broke in 2019. Todd Blanche and Kash Patel are now set to be hauled in. Leon Black is next. The ground proves something was there; the silence proves someone wants it gone.

3️⃣ The DOJ Indicts Eight Protesters While the Named Walk Free

The Justice Department indicted eight pro-Palestinian activists it says ran a harassment campaign against University of Michigan officials and the Jewish Federation of Detroit to force the school to divest from Israel. Set that beside the segment that came right before it — the names in the Epstein files walking free — and the two speeds of this DOJ are the whole point: fast on dissent, frozen on the powerful.

Dean carried it north. Hours after a Toronto officer was killed investigating a shooting at the U.S. embassy, Trump’s ambassador Pete Hoekstra used a symposium to lecture Canada about buying American booze and F-35s. Same regime, same instinct — punish, posture, alienate — whether the target is a Michigan protester or a neighboring country.

2️⃣ Clayton Replaces Pulte at DNI — the Cold Open

The show opened on the break: minutes before air, Trump posted to Truth Social that Jay Clayton is his pick to run national intelligence, pushing Bill Pulte out eleven days before he was due to take the chair. It’s about FISA. With Section 702 lapsing and Republicans in open revolt over arming Pulte — a man who’d used his housing post to chase mortgage-fraud claims against Trump’s enemies — the President swapped in a company man: former SEC chairman, current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a Sullivan & Cromwell alumnus.

Zev’s read: Clayton is a serious figure, which is exactly why he won’t last long — Trump would rather have a loyalist than a professional, but with the midterms 150 days out and his approval at 27 percent, he needed the appearance of seriousness. The swap quiets the FISA fight and buys a veneer of integrity heading into an election. The intelligence chair changed hands by social-media post, the same way this President now does everything.

1️⃣ Trump Fakes an Iran Ceasefire — and Iran Says It Never Happened

For the second straight night the U.S. bombed Iran, and Trump promised a third — “very hard tonight” — and threatened to seize Kharg Island. Then, at 1:28 p.m., he reversed it on Truth Social: he’d “canceled the scheduled strikes,” he wrote, citing a deal approved by the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, and a half-dozen more. Zev fact-checked it live. Iran’s IRGC rejected the claim as “totally baseless” — no agreement, no memorandum, no consultations. An Israeli officer told Channel 12 the same: nothing reached, no one talking.

So the headline beat of the war was a ceasefire that exists only in a post. Dean and Zev read it as theater for the markets — telegraph a strike, cancel it, move oil and equities into the weekend, repeat. Hegseth fronts the announcements while the CENTCOM commander stays off-camera. Inflation sits at 4.2 percent, Iran still effectively holds the Strait of Hormuz, and the war runs on a president’s clock with no vote in Congress and no fact behind the latest claim. The bombs were real this week. The peace was a press release.

THE PATTERN

Thursday was a day of governing by post — a spy chief named, a war called off, a deal invented — and a day of institutions declining to say no: a Court that won’t, a DOJ that won’t, a federal government that told New Mexico to stand down. The performance and the impunity are the same machine. The open question for next week is the only one that matters: who is left with the power to check him, and what cracks first when they keep choosing not to use it. Amanda Ungaro starts answering tonight.

The Fivestack airs Mon–Fri, 3 PM ET. Tonight on Narativ Live, 7 PM ET: Amanda Ungaro — former partner of Epstein associate Paolo Zampoli — in her first long-form interview. Subscribe free at narativ.org to watch live; paid subscribers get every replay and the full archive.

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New York in the 1990s belonged to the men who owned the models. Not the photographers, not the designers — the agents and their financiers, a small set of middle-aged men who ran the agencies by day and hunted their own rosters by night. John Casablancas of Elite Models judged teenage contestants at Donald Trump’s Plaza Hotel, represented Ivanka at 15, and married a 17-year-old Look of the Year finalist. Jean-Luc Brunel of Karin Models had already been the subject of a 1997 “60 Minutes” report on drugging and raping the young women he scouted. Trump founded his own agency in 1999. Jeffrey Epstein financed Brunel’s next one — MC2, $1 million, offices in New York, Miami, and Tel Aviv. An industry insider decoded the name for Page Six in 2007: “E equals MC squared… E equals Epstein. He just thinks everyone is too dumb to figure it out.”

These men were not businessmen who happened to employ beautiful women. They were a playboy set who built the business so the women would have to come to them. The agencies supplied the visas, the apartments, the castings, the parties — and the owners worked the supply. Elite executives allegedly kept a scoreboard: younger scored higher, virgins scored bonus points. The girls came from Brazil, from the former Soviet republics, from anywhere a 13-year-old could be promised a runway and put on a plane.

The agencies served a second function the runway never showed. They were collection operations. A model on an agency visa could be moved across any border, placed in any room, seated beside any billionaire or minister — and what happened in that room could be recorded. Epstein monetized exactly that, and his recruiters came off the same rosters: Adriana Ross from Zampolli’s ID Models, who told the FBI she was recruited to Epstein’s operation through the agency itself; Kira Dikhtyar, an Epstein victim turned recruiter who trained as a gymnast under Alina Kabaeva, Vladimir Putin’s companion, before Zampolli installed her at the United Nations. An email in the released Epstein files, sender redacted, describes Zampolli flatly as an associate of Russian oligarchs and Russian recruiters.

One of those planes was Epstein’s Boeing 727. In June 2002, a 16-year-old Brazilian model boarded it beside her agent, Jean-Luc Brunel — the man who had recruited her out of Brazil at 13 and who would die in a Paris jail cell twenty years later, awaiting trial for the rape of minors, under the same circumstances as Epstein himself. The Department of Justice released that flight log in 2021. The girl’s name is Amanda Ungaro.

The fourth man in the set was Paolo Zampolli, an Italian agent mentored by Casablancas from the age of 15, who sold his late father’s toy company to Silvio Berlusconi and moved to New York in 1995 to found ID Models. Zampolli introduced Melania Knauss to Trump in 1998 — by his own telling — and has been in business with Trump ever since. Today he is the United States Special Envoy for Global Partnerships. He travels with JD Vance. He sits inside the administration that controls the Epstein files.

Last June, Amanda Ungaro — by then the mother of Zampolli’s son, after a 20-year relationship she says began when she was a minor — was arrested in Miami, held in ICE custody for three and a half months, and deported to Brazil, the country she was trafficked out of as a teenager. She was deported without trial, days before a Florida court was expected to grant her full custody of their child. Zampolli, she says, was conveniently in her neighborhood when the arrest happened, ready to take the boy. The cell phone she was arrested with in Florida now pings at Zampolli’s diplomatic residence in New York.

Zampolli has denied wrongdoing. He has not been charged with any crime. But the paper trail Ungaro left behind has started to surface — and it contradicts him on the record.

What follows is what the emails show.

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Somebody carved a hole the size of 47 swimming pools out of Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch — and the timing is the tell. According to a New York Times account cited on the show by Albuquerque radio host the Rock of Talk, Eddie Aragon of KIVA, the excavation broke ground at the end of January, the start of February this year: the same window the Epstein files were being released. Before the searches. As the documents went public. That’s when the digging started.

On tonight’s Narativ Live, Zev Shalev walked Aragon through Narativ’s scientific evidence that a structure was built under Zorro Ranch in 2014-2015 and then removed the week the Epstein files were released. Aragon had once worked for the firm that laid the ranch’s original foundation — through the evidence frame by frame. The conclusion they reached isn’t that they know what was under the ground. It’s that the ground itself proves something was there, and that someone went to extraordinary expense to take it out.

What the ground shows

The cut measures roughly 1.7 acres — about 76,000 square feet — and runs 20 to 25 feet deep, gauged against the 25-foot buildings beside it and confirmed by shadow analysis. That’s 155,000 cubic yards of displaced earth, the dirt volume of 47 Olympic pools, hauled out and then back in to refill the hole. It sits directly next to the main mansion, not out in the hills. A box cut, squared and leveled, on undulating high-desert terrain that doesn’t square itself.

Foundations don’t go this deep, this clean, this close to the house, with the spoil staged to bury it again. The geometry reads as removal, not construction. As Aragon put it: there is no ordinary reason to dig that up like that.

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👀 STORIES TO WATCH

⛽ THE WAR COMES HOME AT THE PUMP

The war Trump is fighting abroad showed up on the price tag this morning. Consumer prices rose more than sixty percent of the jump came from energy, with gasoline up 40.5% over the year. That isn’t the market misfiring; it’s the Strait of Hormuz, the blockade Trump calls the most successful in naval history, billed straight back to the voter who fills up on the way to work. He brags about choking Iran’s economy and leaves out that the same squeeze runs through every American supply chain. Core inflation held cooler at 2.9%, which tells you this is a supply shock he created — not demand he can pin on anyone else. The Fed meets next week with. a new chairman with no clean move: cut and feed the fire, or hold and choke the economy he needs through the midterms. Watch the pump all summer — every day the Strait stays contested, the number he printed this morning gets harder to walk back.

🎙️ GROF, GATES AND UNGARO

Bill Gates sits for a closed-door House Oversight interview today — the richest name yet to answer for the friendship — a day after Epstein’s assistant of eighteen years, Lesley Groff, told the same committee she placed calls between Epstein and Trump about once a quarter, against twenty years of “we fell out.”

Thursday, Amanda Ungaro takes the chair on Narativ Live: the model who flew Epstein’s plane at seventeen and was deported to Brazil after a call from Trump’s envoy Paolo Zampolli.

💥 THE IRAN WAR AD INFINITUM

The truce that held 24 days collapsed overnight. Hours after a US Apache went down over Hormuz Monday night, Trump struck southern Iran — and by morning the IRGC had hit the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and US bases in Kuwait and Jordan, claiming twenty-one targets. Tehran says it’s done negotiating; Trump says Iran “will pay the price.” Seal the Strait and the war stops being Iran’s problem and becomes everyone’s — starting with the number in story one.

🕵️ CONGRESS WON’T TRUST TRUMP’S TOP SPY

Trump’s surveillance power dies Friday, and he pulled the plug himself. Naming Bill Pulte — a housing regulator with no intelligence background who’s been firing criminal referrals at Trump’s enemies — as acting spy chief handed Democrats the reason to let Section 702 lapse. The warrantless program he wants expires because he couldn’t resist putting a loyalist over it.

🚐 ICE SURGES IN NEW YORK AND LA

The one lever he fully controls got locked in through the term: the House cleared $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol 214–212, Trump signs today, and the money runs on past any Congress that might switch it off. Watch New York and LA as Trump surges ICE in those cities.

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

The bills for electing Trump are coming due, all at once. On top of 4% inflation at the pump and in the grocery aisle, taxpayers are about to foot the rumored $300 BN reparation bill to Iran. Another $315 Billion is being blown repatriation - the American Immigration Council pegs a full deportation near $315 billion. The peace deal he sold came down with that Apache over Hormuz. The Epstein files won’t stop singing, and the song is Trump-Epstein — his own people, under oath. Next it moves to the streets: fund an ICE surge and LA and New York, the cities that rose a year ago, are where it breaks first. Pick any promise and it’s collapsing on schedule.

Today we expose what lay beneath Zorro Ranch and tomorrow we sit down with Amanda Ungaro.

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Three men spent a decade selling the same product: invincibility. On Tuesday, all three ran out of it at once. Trump got booed out of his own city. Putin watched Ukraine torch his supply lines and his hometown. Netanyahu’s government kept crumbling while his last patron edged toward the door. And running underneath every one of them — the Epstein files, still naming names. Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell stacked the day from the smallest humiliation to the largest, and the through-line wrote itself: the strongman act only works until the room stops playing along.

5️⃣ Booed Out Of His Own Building

Trump walked into Madison Square Garden expecting a coronation and got a verdict. The second his face hit the jumbotron during the anthem, tens of thousands of Knicks fans drowned out the music — middle fingers up, “fuck Trump” chants rolling courtside. The control room yanked him off the screen within seconds. Fox News dubbed in cheers anyway.

He spent the rest of the night asleep beside James Dolan, the MSG owner riding an $8 billion development deal that runs straight through Trump’s desk. Asked later about the reception, Trump insisted he heard “mostly cheers” — a man narrating a different reality back to himself in real time.

You can measure exactly how much it stung by what he did next. Roughly an hour after the boos, Trump greenlit a major ICE surge into New York City. Booed in public, he answered with force — the tell of a 27% president who can’t take a room he doesn’t own. He’s skipping Game 4.

We found our next story on Groundnews.com using their Blindspot feature

4️⃣ Putin Is Losing Crimea — And No One Will Say It

This week’s Ground News Blindspot is the biggest story MAGA media won’t put on a screen: Putin is losing, badly, and the mainstream won’t report it because it embarrasses the president who bet everything on him. Zev walked through what Navy veteran Ken Harbaugh brought back from two weeks on the ground in Ukraine — Odessa, Kharkiv, the Donbas, Kyiv.

The map is turning. Ukraine controls the land bridge into Crimea and has spent five weeks picking off the radar and air-defense protecting the M14, Russia’s only land-based resupply route to the peninsula. More than 400 fuel tankers, destroyed. The Black Sea Fleet, gone. Crimeans now queue six to twelve hours for gas — some wait two days — in an oil-producing country reduced to horses and buggies. Russian speakers and FSB officers are quietly pulling out. Ukraine retook the 600-square-kilometer Kinburn Spit. A refinery in Dagestan burned Tuesday; neighborhoods near Moscow evacuated.

For years Putin promised Russians the war would never reach home. This week it reached St. Petersburg and Moscow’s suburbs, because the air defense that should guard them is busy guarding oligarchs’ homes instead. The myth was the whole product. The myth is gone — and the silence around it is the story.

3️⃣ Netanyahu Crumbles — And Trump Walks Away

The third strongman is cracking from inside and out. Netanyahu’s coalition is falling apart at home: the ultra-Orthodox parties walked, stripping his majority and forcing the country toward elections. Abroad, even his oldest insurance policy is lapsing — Trump.

The pattern of the week told the whole story. Trump tells Netanyahu to stop the strikes; twenty minutes later, Israel hits. Trump says stand down on Lebanon; thirty minutes later, Hezbollah targets in flames. Netanyahu never wanted the peace deals because he was never interested in peace — but the leverage he spent fifty years building inside American politics is finally draining away. Democrats are done with him. Republicans are tired of him. And the grip he held over Washington is loosening exactly when he needs it most.

There’s even a quiet quid pro quo hiding in the rubble: the CNN merger Trump still has to approve, the kind of favor that used to flow automatically between allies and now hangs as a question mark. When the favors stop being automatic, the alliance is already over.

2️⃣ Iran Downs A U.S. Apache — And Trump Promises A Deal Anyway

Tuesday morning, Trump said Iran shot down a U.S. Army Apache — the first American helicopter lost since the war began — and declared the U.S. “must, of necessity, respond.” The crew was rescued and is safe. The reported weapon: a roughly $20,000 Shahed drone against an $80 million machine. The IRGC denies it. On day 100 of this war, it’s gotten easier to weigh Tehran’s denials against the administration’s claims.

In the same breath, Trump said a deal with Iran was in its “final throes.” It’s a familiar throes. The New York Times counted the times he’s promised a deal “in a couple of days” since the war started: 37. Once every two and a half days, sometimes twice in one. He’s posted some version of “everything’s going to be fine” more than a hundred times — even floating that he “can’t wait to meet the new Ayatollah,” the man now leading the regime whose predecessor Trump tried to kill. Escalation and reassurance in a single sentence isn’t a contradiction he’s failing to manage. It’s the only move he has.

1️⃣ Epstein’s Right Hand Says She Saw Nothing

Lesley Groff sat at Jeffrey Epstein’s side for twenty years. Her name appears in the files more than 150,000 times. On Tuesday she told the House Oversight Committee she scheduled the massages, ran the calendar, coordinated the travel — and somehow never knew the girls were children. Survivors didn’t believe a word of it. Neither did the room.

It’s the same defense every insider reaches for. Lutnick: I had no idea. Wexner’s circle: I didn’t know. Now Groff, who managed the day-to-day more directly than Ghislaine Maxwell did after 2008, claims two decades of pure ignorance while booking three and four appointments a day with girls in school uniforms. She returned to work for Epstein after his conviction — after the court record spelled out exactly who he was. By her own account, she scheduled calls between Epstein and Trump, though she insisted they came before the presidency. When those calls happened is its own piece of news waiting to surface.

Bill Gates testifies Wednesday. And here’s the thread that ties the whole show together: Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump are all features of the Epstein file. The strongmen cracking on camera this week are the same names that keep surfacing in the documents — three men who built empires on what other people didn’t know, watching the record finally catch up.

THE PATTERN

The masks are off. For years Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump ran the same play — project strength, control the cameras, never let the room see weakness. This week the cameras turned on them. A booed president narrating phantom cheers. A czar losing a peninsula he swore was safe. A prime minister abandoned at home and abroad. None of them care about their countries or their people; each one has only ever been running the same survival algorithm — stay in power, stay relevant, stay out of jail. And the Epstein files, naming all three, are the reminder of where that kind of power came from in the first place. It took Putin twenty-six years to fall this far. The other two are moving faster.

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🔥 IRAN WAR COULD SPLIT ISRAEL AND US ALLIANCE

Israel ordered all of Tyre to evacuate Tuesday — Christian quarter included — and struck the southern Lebanese port hours later. It moved after Trump spent the morning selling a deal he says is “days away,” one that ends the war and reopens the Strait. That’s the bind Trump is in: he wants this foolish war finished, Netanyahu wants it to continue, and Netanyahu no longer takes the order. Trump warned him to stop or “you’ll be on your own very soon” — and Bibi struck Tyre anyway. The strikes aren’t a move by a united alliance; they’re the alliance pulling apart. And the cost lands on the Americans caught in between: a US Army Apache went down near the Strait of Hormuz overnight, both crew pulled out alive, the second such incident in days. What’s breaking on Day 100 isn’t the ceasefire — it’s American and Israeli foreign policy splitting in real time, no longer able to agree on what a successful outcome looks like, or the best exit ramp to take.

🐻 VLADIMIR PUTIN’S HUMILIATION

Putin is in a retreat of his own. Russian troops are abandoning the Kinburn Spit at the mouth of the Black Sea, supply lines cut by Ukrainian drones they can no longer shoot down. Ukraine’s commander says his forces have retaken more than 600 square kilometers this year — in May gaining more ground than they lost, the first real reversal after years of Russian grind. A Russian general now warns Kyiv is massing for a push on Crimea itself. And a cornered Putin is the dangerous kind: the Kremlin answered the losses by reaffirming it will use “all available means, including nuclear weapons.”

📺 TRUMP STILL HOLDS THE CNN CARD OVER BIBI

The tell is a single hire: Paramount is recruiting a business partner for Bari Weiss — the signal that when its $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery deal closes, CBS and CNN fall under one roof, Weiss over all news editorial across both. But the deal can’t close without the FCC and DOJ approval Trump controls — which makes CNN the one card he still holds over a defiant Netanyahu, because handing Ellison the network Israel wants turns two of America’s biggest newsrooms into a single pro-Israel machine. Weiss has already fired Scott Pelley, who says he was ordered to “inject falsehoods and bias” for the president’s version of events. The FCC once barred one company from owning two stations in a single market; now Trump can give or withhold the thing Israel wants most — which is why this fight ends at his desk.

🕵️ SETTING DOWN THE TOOLS TO SEE

At the same time as America’s newsrooms are being swallowed up by pro-Israeli forces, America is set to lose one of its sharpest intelligence tools because Trump’s new spy chief can’t be trusted. Section 702 — the surveillance authority the agencies call indispensable — slides toward expiration because Democrats won’t reauthorize it while Bill Pulte runs national intelligence in an acting capacity. A more dangerous world arrives just as Washington puts down one of the instruments it uses to watch it — over a fight about a single appointment.

🗽 BOOED, THEN LYING ABOUT IT

At Madison Square Garden, Trump — the first sitting president at an NBA Finals — was booed so loudly that the anthem was nearly drowned out. He told reporters later that it was “mostly cheers”; the video says otherwise. Maybe Trump dreamt of a different reality as he slept throughout the NBA game.

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

Zoom out and today is one story: the strongman alliance is cracking — and it’s cracking because all three of them are weak at once. Putin is in retreat, his forces pulling out of the Kinburn Spit as Ukraine retakes 600 square kilometers and drones gut his supply lines, a humiliated Kremlin now rattling its nukes to cover the losses. Trump is exposed by a midterm he could lose in November, and a line of legal and corruption fights that lie waiting beyond it. Bibi’s continued assault on Lebanon risks the peace talks and the strongman alliance. If Trump-Putin-Bibi can’t find a way to rebound, which militarily and politically seems very difficult— self-preservation kicks in and no-one knows who will win.

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The strongman act runs on a single assumption: that no one gets to say no. Monday, on five different fronts, someone did. A fired anchor said it to the network that bent toward the president. The man who built the Hunter Biden smear said it about his own operation. A reporter on a Wisconsin farm said it until Trump walked off the set. A federal judge said it to the name on the building. And an Iranian missile barrage said it loudest of all — by forcing Israel to stand down and exposing the rift Washington can no longer hide. Five stories, one crack running through all of them.

5️⃣ “There Is No Democracy Without Journalism”

Scott Pelley got fired from 60 Minutes, and this weekend he told the New York Times what it felt like: the death of a spouse. Thirty-seven years at CBS, forty-two years married — “that’s the depth of my devotion.” Then he named the cause. CBS’s new editorial chief, Bari Weiss, put “a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events” — a level of political interference Pelley said he had never seen in nearly four decades.

The breaking point was a story. Weiss wanted protesters painted as more violent and Renee Nicole Good cast as a domestic terrorist aiming her car at police. Pelley looked at the same footage and refused — she wasn’t that person, and he wouldn’t make her one. He stopped being a “team guy” the moment he wouldn’t lie. The new executive producer, Nick Bilton, then accused Pelley of physically assaulting him, only to retract it in the room the second Pelley denied it. No one was fired for the false accusation. Pelley was fired for the truth.

Zev, who covered alongside Pelley in his CBS years, vouched for the man behind the patriotism — the correspondent who sat on the steps of the tour bus writing notes, who crawled through deserts and slept in foxholes filling with water. Asked about Trump calling him a “stiff” who doesn’t care about his country, Pelley’s answer landed like a verdict: he’s never worn the uniform, but he’s been shot at in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait for this country — and he’s not aware the president has ever done the same. “There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. And that is why I am a journalist.” The lawsuit, Dean noted, is coming sooner than people think.

4️⃣ The Man Who Built the Laptop Lie Sat Across From Hunter Biden

For a decade the hottest topic in American politics was Hunter Biden’s laptop. The second-hottest was the man who helped engineer the operation behind it. This weekend, on Dean’s “Coffee & Tea with Lev and Dean,” both men sat at the same virtual table — Lev Parnas, the Giuliani fixer who went hunting for Biden dirt, and Hunter Biden, the human being that machinery was pointed at.

Parnas said plainly what he’s already said under oath. The laptop held the nudes, the footage of addiction, the wreckage of a man deep in his disease — and nothing else. No espionage. No foreign agent. No corruption. The other eighty percent, the Biden-crime narrative that nearly turned an election, was invented. Parnas knows because he was inside the machine that built it. The man Marjorie Taylor Greene put on the House floor in graphic detail sold $225,000 of his own paintings; the families running half-million-dollar access clubs and routing rare-earth and Kazakhstan deals through the White House go unmentioned.

But the segment wasn’t a takedown. It was an amends. Parnas apologizing to Hunter was part of his recovery; Hunter — early in his own sobriety — accepting it was part of his. Two men who no longer have to hide, Dean said, looked freer than anyone in MAGA. Both Zev and Dean see something the GOP should fear heading into 2026 and 2028: a comeback story America tends to love, run by a man who owns every receipt instead of running from them.

3️⃣ Trump Walked Off the Farm

Kristen Welker asked Trump for evidence. He didn’t have any. Pressed on his 2020 fraud claims and the $1.776 billion “weaponization” fund that could compensate the January 6 rioters who beat police, Trump ran the routine Zev has watched a hundred times — lean in, raise the voice, the finger in the face, the blowup. Then the question came one more time. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.” He crushed his lapel mic underfoot and left. “I’ve had enough.”

The walkout is the answer. He’ll hold court for hours when he’s winning; the instant the questions reach the money and the mob, he’s gone. And the target, both hosts noted, is rarely random. The cabinet members he’s fired, the reporters he savages — overwhelmingly women, met with a contempt he saves for them alone. The rage isn’t new. It’s the oldest thing about him.

2️⃣ The Name Comes Down

Monday the Kennedy Center deleted Trump’s name from its website — not by choice, by court order. A federal judge ruled the renaming illegal: Congress named the living memorial to John F. Kennedy, and only Congress can change it. The board he packed had voted in December, the signage went up overnight, the merch hit the gift shop. A single paragraph from the bench unwound all of it.

And tonight he walks into Madison Square Garden for the NBA Finals, where the welcome is an eight-foot iron fence, TSA-level screening, and a Knicks crowd told there will be no tailgates and no watch parties because one ego insisted on coming. He was booed at the Commanders game. He was booed at the UFC card in Miami. Humiliated in the courts downtown and on his own home court uptown — same day, same man.

1️⃣ Israel Loaded the Reprisal — and Didn’t Fire It

Iran hammered Israel. Israel loaded its response. And then, within the hour, it stood down. No retaliation on Iran. Not because Netanyahu blinked — because Trump made him. The rift the Fivestack has tracked for weeks just crossed out of name-calling and into the kinetic: real bombs, real missiles, real lives, and a public fracture between Washington and Jerusalem that neither man can paper over now.

The reveal is the weakness underneath it. Trump doesn’t need these two to stop hating each other; he needs the war to stop so he can wear the peacemaker’s crown — and he can’t make it stop. Iran has no elections to lose. Trump does, at roughly 30% approval, with the war bleeding him at home. So every time he announces a deal is near, Israel strikes, Iran strikes back, and the lie gets exposed again. Two days ago he insisted he was the shot-caller. Twenty minutes later Netanyahu bombed Iran anyway.

Iran read all of it and played it flawlessly. It proved Trump weak, proved the United States weak, and proved the alliance that once attacked it is now breaking apart — the best position Tehran has held in a generation. The danger sits with an Israel that hasn’t grasped where this leads: a future without American backing, telling itself it can go alone. Zev’s read is the one to carry forward — this rift doesn’t shrink from here. It grows, and grows, and grows.

THE PATTERN

The performance of strength depends on never being contradicted. Monday the contradictions arrived all at once — from a newsroom, from a reformed operative, from a reporter, from a judge, from an adversary half a world away. The Kennedy Center name didn’t come off because Trump relented; it came off because a court made him. Israel didn’t holster the reprisal because Netanyahu chose peace; it holstered because the alliance is cracking and the weaker partner felt it. Strip away the convoy and the bulletproof glass and the packed boards, and what’s left is a man who can’t take a question, can’t win a war, and can’t keep his name on a wall. Told no, five times, in a single afternoon.

The Fivestack airs weekdays at 3PM ET with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev. Watch the full episode and subscribe at narativ.org. Hunter Biden’s sit-down with Lev Parnas — “Coffee & Tea with Lev and Dean” — is at deanblundell.substack.com.

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🔥 THE RIFT WITH NETANYAHU BREAKS OPEN

The two men who started this war together no longer agree on how to end it. Sunday night, Benjamin Netanyahu moved to blow up Trump’s peace deal — Israel hit Beirut’s southern suburbs, a petrochemical plant in Iran’s southwest, and a line of military targets, and Iran answered with missile barrages, the worst exchange since the April truce, on the war’s 100th day. Trump called Netanyahu and ordered him to stand down — and to take the Iranian salvo without firing back. An American president just told the world the United States will absorb Iranian missiles and do nothing, a thing Washington would never have swallowed a year ago. Netanyahu wants to keep pounding Iran until the regime breaks; Trump wants out, because the war is bleeding his poll numbers and his own voters have turned against it. So Trump sided with Tehran over his closest ally, and the rift between the two men cracked open. Israel still wants to prosecute the war; Trump says no. The no is the tell on how weak he has become, but it makes clear what has been evident up until now. Netanyahu is willing to risk the US relationship with Israel, in exchange for an ongoing war with Iran.

🎙️ AT HOME, THE WEAKNESS COMES OUT AS RAGE

That same weakness has a louder face at home. Kristen Welker only had to ask Trump about his $1.8 billion fund to pay the people who stormed the Capitol — and he insisted the rioters “lost everything,” that FBI agents “ushered them into the building,” that the 2020 election “was rigged.” Welker told him he had no evidence. Trump called her crooked, called her stupid, and walked off his own interview. A president sure of his ground answers the question; this one fled it, still defending January 6, still selling a stolen election five years gone. The rage isn’t an act — it’s what’s left when the facts run out.

🗳️ THE CANDIDATE NOBODY CAN SINK

Graham Platner keeps generating scandals, and Maine Democrats keep not caring. The oyster farmer turned Senate frontrunner has survived a tattoo critics likened to a Nazi insignia, a trail of old inflammatory posts, and now his own wife flagging the explicit texts he sent other women — and he still leads Susan Collins 48 to 43 heading into Tuesday’s primary. Janet Mills, the establishment’s recruit, quit in April for lack of cash and left him the lane. Tomorrow, Maine decides whether the Bernie-backed harbormaster his own party keeps trying to disown is the one who finally beats Collins.

🕵️ THE SPY LAW DIES FRIDAY — OVER PULTE

The government’s warrantless-spying power runs out Friday, and the Senate just let it happen. Early Friday seven Republicans — Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul among them — joined Democrats to block reauthorization of Section 702, 47 to 52, balking at Trump’s choice of his attack dog Bill Pulte to run the spy agencies and sign the surveillance certifications. Unless Trump’s own party reverses itself this week, Washington’s most powerful surveillance tool goes dark on June 12 — killed not by privacy activists but by senators who don’t trust the man now holding it.

🎥 HUNTER BIDEN COMES BACK SWINGING

Hunter Biden sat down Saturday with Lev Parnas and Dean Blundell and pointed across the table at Parnas as the man who flew to Ukraine and Austria to build the “laptop” — sourced, Hunter said, from Kremlin-linked oligarch Dmytro Firtash and sanctioned agent Andrii Derkach, months before the Delaware repair-shop story ever surfaced. The man the smear machine was built to destroy walked back onto the national stage and named the operatives he says ran it.

🎭 ALSO LAST NIGHT — Broadway crowned Schmigadoon! Best Musical and Liberation Best Play, while Death of a Salesman took six Tonys; in a week of real wars, the stage picked a parody of small-town nostalgia.

🎯 THE PATTERN

When you have to publicly distance yourself from an ally in order to get a bad peace deal with your enemy, you are not winning. By launching its attack on Israel, Tehran exposed two realities: how weak the United States is in the region, and a rift between the two allies who launched the war against it. What should concern Israelis the most is that by launching this senseless and expensive war, their leader Bibi Netanyahu is revealing his antipathy towards America and its people. It may ultimately cost Israel its true democratic partner in the world, and that may well be the death knell for democracy in the entire region.

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Sarah Kellen sat in front of a congressional committee this week and dismantled the only version of herself the public ever knew. “I have read articles online labeling me as Ghislaine’s lieutenant,” she told the members. “That is a gross misrepresentation. I was a literal indentured slave. In fact, she even referred to me as her slave and minion.”

For years Kellen has been the villain in the margins of the Epstein story — the assistant, the scheduler, the woman named alongside Maxwell in the 2007 non-prosecution agreement. Her transcript, released this week and read aloud on tonight’s Narativ Live by Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer, tells a different story. Kellen started where most of Epstein’s girls started: with nothing, and nowhere to go.

She was raised, she testified, in “a religious cult of Jehovah’s Witnesses” in North Carolina, “in a faith where women did not speak unless spoken to.” At thirteen, an eighteen-year-old man began pursuing her. She dropped out of school at fifteen to marry him, did marry him at seventeen, and was carried off to Hawaii thousands of miles from everyone she knew. Three years later he served her divorce papers at an airport — she signed without a lawyer because she did not know she was allowed one — and had her excommunicated. From one day to the next, her parents, her siblings, every friend she had were forbidden to speak to her. She was twenty-one, marooned on an island, no degree, no family, no money.

That is the raw material Epstein hunted. He did not have to break Sarah Kellen. Someone had already done it for him.

The introduction came through a celebrity hairdresser, Frederick Fekkai, who flew her to Maui for a hair show that did not exist and assaulted her in his hotel room. Then he offered to introduce her to his friend Jeffrey Epstein, “a scout for Victoria’s Secret.” Epstein flew her to a hotel casting, told her to undress, told her to come back at four. She had a plane to catch. She figured she would never see the man again. About a year later, a coworker mentioned a wealthy couple in New York who needed an assistant. The couple was Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. “Unfortunately,” Kellen testified, “I got the job.”

Ellie called the coincidence what it was on air — not a coincidence. The same man, surfacing ten months later through a different mouth, in a different city, to close the door he had left open in a Hawaii hotel room.

What followed she described as indentured servitude. Twenty-five thousand dollars a year, on call every hour of every day, months at a time with no day off. “I understood the math exactly,” she told the committee. “I was being paid in part to be raped.” The abuse, she said, ran weekly and turned violent — a night in the Palm Beach gym where Epstein lowered the hurricane shutters, blasted the music so no one could hear, choked her and raped her. It continued, she testified, while he was supposedly serving his Florida sentence, by Skype, from a computer inside the Palm Beach County Stockade.

And all the while she sat in the most powerful rooms on earth. A room in Cuba with Fidel Castro. Asia and Africa with Bill Clinton, including lunch at the home of the Sultan of Brunei. Princess Beatrice’s eighteenth at Windsor Castle. Across a table from Ehud Barak in Israel. “I was a silent body in a chair beside men who started and ended wars,” she said. In 2007 two FBI agents approached her and another young woman at the St. Thomas airport. Epstein told them to wait, walked over, spoke to the agents himself, came back ten minutes later and said, “Let’s go.” The agents were gone.

Then the government did to her what Epstein had been doing all along. Later that same year, federal prosecutors wrote her name into Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement as a co-conspirator. No one asked her. No one questioned her. She learned her own name was in the document only after it was signed and made public. The United States branded her a criminal in a secret deal with her own abuser, and never spoke a single word to her.

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💣 EPSTEIN CASTS SHADOW FROM THE GRAVE

It’s official: the Department of Justice has completed its transformation into the Department of Jeffrey. Trump named Todd Blanche — his own former defense lawyer — as nominee for permanent Attorney General, and within hours House Oversight released Pam Bondi’s closed-door transcript, where the former AG tossed every aspect of the Epstein cover-up directly into the lap of the Acting AG. Instead of owning the process — or revealing what Donald Trump told her — Bondi blamed Blanche for “the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.”

Bondi is likely doing what she was told: by heaping the blame on the acting AG, she shields Donald Trump from being suspect #1 in the cover-up of the Epstein files — but it also forever labels Blanche as Donald Trump’s Epstein fixer. By nominating him to the permanent Attorney General position, Trump is fundamentally remaking the Department of Justice into something else — one that caters to launderers rather than imprisoning them, buys politicians instead of convicting them, and puts profit over service.

The Department Of Justice is no more. The Department of Jeffrey is what replaced it.

🚔 ONE IN SIXTEEN

Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 rioters with one signature on his first day back. Lawfare finished counting Thursday: at least 97 of them have since been arrested, charged, or convicted of unrelated crimes — child molestation, reckless homicide, grand larceny, sex offenses against minors — nearly one in sixteen. Earlier tallies by the New York Times and CREW found 33 to 39; the true number is more than double. Five committed their new crimes only because the pardon freed them early; one, Andrew Paul Johnson, drew a life sentence for child molestation in February. And Todd Blanche, testifying in May, wouldn’t rule out paying some of these men from the $1.776 billion fund — the one the Senate refused to ban in a pre-dawn vote Friday.

⚖️ KELLEN NAMES TWO MORE

Sarah Kellen kept Epstein’s calendar for more than a decade. Last month she sat with House Oversight and named names the committee didn’t expect: Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell abused her, she testified, and so did Philip Levine, the former Miami Beach mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and Frédéric Fekkai, the celebrity hairstylist. Thursday, Comer’s Republicans asked the Justice Department to investigate both men — the department Blanche is about to run.

💵 THE NUMBER AND THE SHADOW

The economy added 172,000 jobs in May, more than double the 80,000 economists expected, and unemployment held at 4.3 percent — a third straight month of growth since spring 2025. Look past the headline and it thins: leisure, hospitality, and government did the lifting while manufacturing, construction, and retail went flat and finance shed another 22,000. Wages rose 3.4 percent, but inflation runs faster and a gas-price shock still hasn’t landed — Americans are earning more and buying less.

🦞 MAINE PICKS ITS FIGHTER

The Democratic Senate primary in Maine is Monday, and Graham Platner — the oyster-farming Marine who cleared the field when Governor Mills quit in April — is still the frontrunner. He’s there despite a New York Times story this week in which former girlfriends describe him sexting while married, one calling the behavior “unsettling.” Platner blames a dark stretch of undiagnosed PTSD and drinking, says he’s staying in, and the polls say Maine Democrats are staying with him.

🎯 THE PATTERN

Trump is transforming Washington, DC, in his own image. His 250-foot triumphal arch won design approval even as planners flagged the flight path overhead; he announced a promenade to the Potomac he wouldn't mind calling the Trump Promenade; he ordered the Reflecting Pool coated blue for the July 4 party — a reflecting pool that no longer reflects. The monuments are the easy part. The harder remake is the government itself, and when your nominee for Attorney General was your own defense attorney, there's very little chance you'll ever be held to account for anything,

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💣 Trump Nominates His Epstein Fixer For AG

Wednesday night, at a closed Rose Garden event, Trump told Dan Scavino he wanted it made official, and by morning Scavino had posted the video: Todd Blanche, the lawyer who once defended Trump in a courtroom, would be his nominee for permanent attorney general. Blanche has spent his months as acting head of the department doing the one thing Trump prizes above all others, executing the demand without flinching — clearing the prosecutions of the president’s enemies, carrying the $1.776 billion fund built to pay the president’s friends, and absorbing every hard question that came his way about the Epstein case.

💰 Trump’s $1.776 BN Slush Fund Resurrected

Blanche told Congress that the weaponization fund was finished, but it actually never died - the machine that pays Trump’s allies didn’t need the fund. When Lindsey Graham suggested the government simply use existing law, Associate AG Stanley Woodward answered with three words, “We’re on it,” and then deleted the post. The law is the Federal Tort Claims Act, a 1946 statute, and Trump’s allies are already filing lawsuits to claim their cash. 400 claims from Jan 6 insurrectionists were dropped off at the DOJ yesterday.

🎖️ Bolton’s Diary Becomes A Felony

John Bolton, the mustachioed hawk who served as Trump’s national security adviser and then spent the years since warning the country against him, has agreed to plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally retaining national security information — notes he kept in a private diary that only his wife and daughter ever read. The Justice Department had charged him with eighteen counts; it will take the one, a fine north of $2 million, and the spectacle, with up to five years on the table when he changes his plea on June 26.

🛢️ One Dead Soldier Away

The House voted 215-208 to cuff Trump’s war powers, four Republicans crossing the aisle to do it, even as Trump quietly set his own trigger: he has told aides he won’t return to all-out war with Iran unless American troops are killed.

📉 The Gates Are Closing

Blackstone capped withdrawals from its $79 billion credit fund on Thursday after redemption requests reached 10 percent, and Partners Group now says the run is spreading out of private credit and into private equity. Pimco’s Dan Ivascyn calls it the first sustained loss cycle in years.

🎯 THE PATTERN

Trump seems to defy gravity and logic as he anoints Todd Blanche for AG, forces John Bolton to plead guilty, and proves he’ll just ignore Congress on his $1.776 Bn fund. The most worrying sign out there is the credit markets tightening— a signal that Trump continues to steer the good ship USA into total economic collapse.

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On Monday, New Mexico’s Epstein Truth Commission met for the first time and aimed its subpoena power. More than a dozen subpoenas are going out — to banks, to federal agencies, to law enforcement. The first focus is not a flight log or a wire transfer. It is a single email.

A former Zorro Ranch staffer sent it in November 2019, three months after Jeffrey Epstein died in his Manhattan cell. Two foreign girls, the email said, strangled during fetish sex and buried in the hills on the orders of Jeffrey and Ghislaine. One Bitcoin for the proof.

Narativ found that email buried in the FBI’s own released files soon after the Epstein Files were first published in compliance with the Epstein Transparency Ac. Our exclusive — The Bodies Buried at Zorro — was the first report anywhere of a logged federal tip alleging murder at the ranch. No other outlet had touched it. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury later carried the same document to the state attorney general. Every search and every subpoena that has followed traces back to a tip the FBI chose to ignore and a document we chose to publish.

The man who carried it

Eddy Aragon has lived with that email for six years. Albuquerque knows him as the Rock of Talk. He received the tip, recognized that whoever wrote it knew the property from the inside — the shorthand “Madam G,” the staff-only details — and walked it straight into the FBI’s Albuquerque field office, handing it to the agent who logged the intake. The Bureau dropped it into case 50D-NY-3027571 and stamped it “Pending Inactive.” Filed. Forgotten. In six years, Eddy told me tonight, not one agent ever called him back.

He is blunt about what that means: without his tip, there is no state investigation, no truth commission, no subpoenas this week. He is right. The federal government had the same document and sat on it. A radio host in New Mexico did the work the FBI would not.

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For eight days the most photographed man alive went unseen — no podium, no rope line, no walk to Marine One. The last live sighting was May 27th, the day after his third Walter Reed visit in thirteen months; since then, only a Truth Social feed running twenty-seven posts a day and one pre-recorded interview the White House wouldn’t date. We asked the question all afternoon: where is the president? Then, as the show was ending he answered it — Trump surfaced in an Oval Office press conference, his first live appearance in over a week. The press event doesn’t erase the eight days, or the staged-tape pattern, or the cardiologists asking why a man needs three physicals and four cognitive screens in a single year. Where has the president been for over a week and did the White House implement what was essentially a cover-up to mislead the country about his health?

5️⃣ Iran reopens the war — and the cameras look away

At dawn, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired missiles and drones into Kuwait and Bahrain, killing one and wounding more than sixty at Kuwait’s airport, after a U.S. Hellfire crippled an Iranian tanker bound for Kharg Island; by midday the U.S. struck back at Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. The truce Trump and Netanyahu broke three months ago is finished, the Fifth Fleet’s neighborhood is under fire, and American outlets barely covered the worst day of the Gulf war in months — the silence around the strike as telling as the strike itself.

4️⃣ Three elections, one direction

Tuesday, three in five Los Angeles voters backed someone other than Mayor Karen Bass, sending reality-TV villain and registered Republican Spencer Pratt — AI ads, Trump-world applause and all — into a November runoff in a city that votes Democratic four to one; the same day, the Supreme Court let Alabama erase a Black congressional district 6–3 and unsigned, and Trump reached past the border to endorse the right-wing candidate in Colombia’s race. One day, three contests, one project — bend the electorate until it returns the right result — though Iowa, where a Trump-endorsed candidate for governor just lost his primary to an anti-Trump Republican farmer, is a reminder the map cuts both ways.

3️⃣ The fund dies, the immunity lives

Todd Blanche told a Senate panel the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund is dead, then kept the part that mattered: the settlement still bars the IRS from ever auditing Trump, his family, or his companies, and he wouldn’t put the reversal in writing. The fund was always the decoy and the audit shield the prize a manufactured lawsuit was built to buy — and a judge is now asking whether the whole arrangement was a fraud on the court, with answers due June 12th.

2️⃣ Purge the investigators, seat the attackers

Elias Irizarry was nineteen when he carried a metal pole onto a Capitol balcony on January 6th; Trump pardoned him in 2025, and someone then seated him inside the Pentagon office that runs hostage rescue and embassy security — every desk top-secret cleared — the same week the Justice Department’s list of FBI agents who worked January 6th sits marked for removal and Trump hands the whole intelligence community to mortgage chief Bill Pulte. Even Republicans flinched: Thom Tillis won’t back Pulte for DNI, and Scott Bessent confirmed on camera he’d once threatened to “kick his ass” — but the pattern holds, purge the people who investigated the attack, install the people who carried it out, and leave the seats that protect Americans abroad empty.

1️⃣ The 60 Minutes bloodbath

Scott Pelley said Bari Weiss was “brought in to kill” 60 Minutes; Tuesday night he was fired “for cause,” no payout, and Wednesday Weiss called it “the path that he chose” — so Pelley, who kept a transcript, answered with receipts: management told him to inject “falsehoods and bias” into a politically sensitive story, politicians were invited to pick their own correspondents, one report came within nineteen minutes of not airing, and when he asked why Weiss fired Tanya Simon, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi without cause, the answer six times was “I’m not answering that question.” Trace it back and it doesn’t end at Weiss: CBS paid Trump $16 million to settle his junk suit, that cleared Trump’s FCC to approve David Ellison’s takeover of Paramount, Ellison installed Weiss — Trump didn’t fire Scott Pelley, he built the thing that did, and Lesley Stahl and Bill Whitaker may be next.

THE PATTERN

Five stories, one hand: a war abroad, the courts and the ballot at home, the tax code bent for one family, the security services staffed with loyalists, and the most trusted newsroom in America hollowed out — all of it moving while the man whose name sits over it stayed out of sight for eight days. He’s back on camera now. The damage he left running while he was gone is still in plain view.

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📺 CBS FIRES SCOTT PELLEY

Scott Pelley spent thirty-seven years at CBS News, and Monday he stood up in a staff meeting and accused his new boss, editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes.’” Tuesday night they fired him — “terminated for cause, effective immediately,” in a letter signed by Nick Bilton, the tech writer Weiss installed to run th…

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5️⃣ Six States Vote — and Only One Date Matters

Six states held primaries Tuesday — California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota — and the one worth watching is Iowa, where Randy Feenstra is the only Republican carrying a Trump endorsement, a quiet test of whether that endorsement still moves a state cooled on the president by the economy and the war. Read the rest honestly and it tells you less than the cable graphics will pretend: California is its own animal, and everywhere else the loyalists and far-right performers win the primary and then lose the general. None of it settles anything until November — the only poll that decides whether any of this can be undone.

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4️⃣ “You’re Crazy” — Trump Turns on Netanyahu

Israel drove its offensive against Hezbollah deeper into Lebanon on Monday, and the escalation threatened the Iran deal Trump has chased for weeks — so Trump got Netanyahu on the phone and, by Axios’s account, unloaded: “You’re crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” He killed a planned strike on Beirut on the call, and by evening Israel held off the capital, even as Tehran announced it was suspending talks and Trump told CNBC the negotiations had “started to get very boring.” Hold it at arm’s length, though: every one of those quotes traces to the single reporter who has sourced every collapsed ceasefire of this war, whose stories keep landing in the same 24-hour window, making Trump look reasonable and buying Netanyahu another reprieve from his own courtroom. The quotes may be true. Trump may be right that Bibi belongs in a cell. But there is still no deal — six ceasefires, six collapses, and billions in suspiciously well-timed trades around each one.

3️⃣ “She Was Brought In to Kill It” — Pelley Torches 60 Minutes

Scott Pelley does not say things like this — the gold standard of American network journalism stood up in a staff meeting Monday and accused CBS News chief Bari Weiss of murdering 60 Minutes to the face of the man she’d hired to do it, telling new executive producer Nick Bilton he would never be respected, never be welcome, before Bilton walked out and the room applauded. “She does not love this place,” Pelley said. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s doing exactly that.” That was a resignation in all but name, and it tells you the kill is real: Weiss installed Bilton after “Black Thursday,” when she cut veteran EP Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega in one stroke, and CBS is now reportedly sounding out a new host — one name floated is Joe Rogan. You don’t hand the show that sets the country’s daily agenda to an outsider on the orders of a Netanyahu apologist unless wrecking it is the point. Paramount settled Trump’s lawsuit rather than fight it. This is what came next.

2️⃣ The Fund They Swore Was Dead

This is the story the right wasn’t telling its audience Tuesday: Todd Blanche sat before a House appropriations subcommittee at four o’clock to defend the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund his Justice Department built to pay Trump’s allies, and the administration’s claim that it’s dead is a lie of omission — Judge Leonie Brinkema only paused it through June 12, the money still earmarked and waiting, which is why lawmakers spent the afternoon demanding confirmation it’s actually killed and not just parked until the cameras leave. Trace how it was born and you see why even Republicans flinched: Trump’s DOJ filed a ten-billion-dollar suit against the IRS, dropped it when the court signaled no merit, then announced a settlement on a lawsuit that no longer existed — what Sheldon Whitehouse calls fraud on the court and on the taxpayer, an investigation now reopened. Strip the legal language and it’s a billion and a half dollars routed toward a man who’ll need to pay people in a contested midterm — and Blanche had to answer for Epstein in the same chair, where eighteen survivors say he lied under oath in May.

1️⃣ Trump Hands the Spies to a Name in Epstein’s Ledger

We broke this at the top of the show because it couldn’t wait for the count: Tuesday morning Trump named Bill Pulte — thirty-seven, the housing regulator they call “Little Trump,” a Mar-a-Lago member who bought into the orbit with donations and the 50-year-mortgage pitch — acting Director of National Intelligence, keeping his housing job and the Fannie and Freddie chairmanships while taking the CIA, the NSA, and sixteen more agencies without one hour of intelligence experience. We’ve watched what he does with access: Pulte is the man who mined private mortgage data through his housing perch to refer Lisa Cook, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell for fraud — indictments that went nowhere — and a man who manufactured fraud cases from housing files can manufacture an election-fraud narrative from intelligence files, just in time for a midterm Trump knows he’s losing. Then there’s the part the wires won’t touch: Pulte’s father, the developer Mark Pulte, appears in Epstein’s own emails — Epstein spelled it “Pulty,” which is why it never surfaced in a search — named as one of three men in the staged auction of the Maison de l’Amitié, Epstein setting the floor, “Pulty” the counter-bid, Trump the buyer who walked away with it before the house was flipped to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev at a fifty-million-dollar markup, with Mark Pulte later buying half of it himself at his own markup. We published how that deal was done months ago, in Epstein’s words. Now the son of a man inside that laundering scheme runs American intelligence — and Trump didn’t pick him despite the Epstein thread; he’s spent the week exalting that network, handing Tom Barrack, another name from the files, the embassy in Turkey. The circle is closing, and it’s closing inside the government.

THE PATTERN

Trump is afraid, and frightened men pull their loyalists close. That’s all Tuesday was — not a strategy so much as a reflex. The spy agencies to a man whose family launders with Epstein. A slush fund kept on life support to bankroll what comes next. A newsroom hollowed so it can’t report any of it. A war run by mood and a single reporter’s access. He surrounds himself with people a little dumber than he is and just as exposed — families with as much to lose as his own — because the guilty don’t testify on each other. Six states voted Tuesday. In November the rest of the country gets the only answer that still counts. Use it.

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