💣 NOT IN THE ROOM, NOT ON THE SAME FLOOR, DIDN’T FIRE A SHOT
The Washington Post reviewed the high-resolution surveillance video this morning and reports what Truth Social did not. Cole Tomas Allen ran sixty feet through the Hilton corridor with his shotgun pointed at the ground. A Secret Service officer fired four times. There is no muzzle flash from Allen’s gun. The bullet holes in the wall match handgun rounds, not buckshot. TSA agents flinched and ran for cover from the officer’s first three shots; those rounds appear to have been fired in their general direction. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche walked back his ABC line that Allen shot the officer; on Monday the bureau was still “looking at that.” Six shots in one-point-four seconds, one weapon firing. Three days ago, Narativ described this presidency as the one that cries wolf. The video is now consistent with the same theory. There was no actual assassination attempt; it was a convenient prop to launch a new attack on Trump’s critics and indict Jim Comey.
⚖️ SCOTUS TURNS BACK THE CLOCK
The Supreme Court took Black voting power out of the South this morning, six votes to three. Louisiana v. Callais threw out the second majority-Black district that elected Cleo Fields and gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the same opinion. Justice Alito wrote that the statute “should not have imposed liability on Louisiana.” Justice Kagan delivered the dissent from the bench and warned that any state can now “announce a partisan gerrymander” and walk free. Sunday’s Texas ruling locked in five Republican House seats. Today’s ruling opens the rest of the South — Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina. Apartheid South Africa drew its lines this same way, defended them with this same vocabulary, for forty years before its own courts called it what it was. The man writing this lived under that rule.
🪖 HEGSETH REVEALS IRAN WAR COSTING $25 BN
At ten this morning, Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine took chairs in front of the House Armed Services Committee for the first time since the Iran war began on February twenty-eighth. They are defending a one-point-five-trillion-dollar budget for an operation the Speaker insists is not a war. Trump greeted the day at four in the morning with a Truth Social post — an AI image of himself holding a rifle, captioned “NO MORE MR.” Brent crude opened at one hundred sixteen dollars and fifty-three cents, up four-point-seven-four percent on the morning. Friday is when the sixty-day War Powers clock runs out, when Adam Schiff forces a sixth floor vote, and when Senate Democrats decide whether to sue.
📜 BONDI WILL TESTIFY AFTER CONTEMPT.
House Oversight Democrats — Robert Garcia, Summer Lee, the full ranking minority — filed a contempt resolution after Pam Bondi skipped her April 14th deposition. Trump fired her April 2nd over the Epstein files. The Justice Department said the subpoena had been served to her in her official capacity and “no longer obligates” her testimony. The contempt resolution did the rest. The Oversight Committee has her on the calendar for May 29th.
🌍 CHARLES REMEMBERS
King Charles laid a wreath at Ground Zero this morning after reading Magna Carta into the chamber yesterday.
🎯 THE PATTERN
The president invents the threats he wants, prosecutes the people he doesn’t like, determines who wins and who loses in business, and believes he’s above the law. Everything King Charles warned about yesterday when he addressed Congress. A president who believes he’s above the law rushes into unauthorized wars he cannot end and permits a corruption that reinvents apartheid in the American South. The president is also the presidency, and when he makes up lies to justify actions, it corrupts us all and reshapes the world where truth no longer exists.
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Forwarding this. Thank you, Zev!