Saturday, July 25, 2026

Docs shed light on DOJ spending for Trump banners

trump-banners-doj-cost-01009924

Docs shed light on DOJ spending for Trump banners

The multistory banners of the presidential visage have also attracted congressional scrutiny.

By Kevin Bogardus and Josh Gerstein

07/24/2026 03:38 PM EDT

The Justice Department spent nearly a million dollars to spruce up the exterior of its Washington headquarters, including controversial banners putting Washingtonians under the watchful eye of President Donald Trump.

Records obtained by POLITICO share more details on how Trump’s visage ended up adorning the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, otherwise known as Main Justice. The department signed a contract in January for a “RFK Beautification Project” to clean the building’s exterior walls, upgrade the facade lighting system and install “Celebratory Banners.”

The project’s total price rang in at $892,192.07, according to the documents. A federal contracting database showed another $54,768 charge for the project was added under a “supplemental agreement” just this week. In the released records, officials blacked out the line-item costs for creating and hanging the massive banners.

Several federal agencies have also hung banners of Trump at their headquarters buildings, some of them ostensibly in celebration of the United States’ 250th birthday earlier this month. The decorations also fit with Trump’s penchant for self-promotion, placing his name on Washington landmarks, and have attracted congressional scrutiny.

Under the Justice contract, Llorente Enterprises, an Alexandria, Virginia-based construction services company, was to design, produce and install six banners, including two banners on the Pennsylvania Avenue corners of the building. Also in the records were “Banner Placement Illustrations” — photos of the Justice building with red squares drawn on, showing where the banners should be hung.

The banners at Justice’s headquarters facing Pennsylvania Avenue show Trump’s face above the phrase “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN,” heeding his MAGA campaign slogan, a reporter spotted earlier this week.

The banners were to take two to three weeks to fabricate once their design was finalized. “Banners will be hung after phase 1 power washing is complete,” said the contract’s scope of work.

To hang the banners on the building’s corners, small eyelet screws would be screwed into the column and base as “anchor points” — the department’s “preferred method,” the records indicated — or securing the banners with cables wrapped around the column’s decorative portion.

The contract was not just for hanging banners. It also called for low-pressure washing and cleaning of the building’s exterior surfaces as well as maintenance and lamp upgrades of the facade lighting system.

The records, which were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, spell out itemized costs for the beautification project’s various expenses. Yet those figures are redacted under FOIA’s exemption for trade secrets.

Justice Department officials declined to specify the exact cost for the banner-related work, saying that sort of information is generally considered proprietary.

“The banners were part of a broader beautification project for the historic RFK building, executed under an existing DOJ construction contract,” a DOJ spokesperson said. “We are proud at this Department of Justice to celebrate 250 years of our great country, and our historic work to make America safe again at President Trump’s direction.”

The contract’s start date was Jan. 15 and it ended May 15. It also was a sole source contract not available for competition, according to data on USAspending.gov. A DOJ official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal handling of the project, said an existing contract was tapped for the work “due to the urgent nature of this requirement and to ensure it was completed prior to the 250th anniversary.”

The government database shows Llorente Enterprises has held other federal contracts stretching back to the Biden administration, including with Justice and the General Services Administration. It has done several million dollars’ worth of work at Main Justice, renovating spaces used for a gift shop and museum, as well as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, designed to handle classified information.

The company’s website says it does construction and mechanical work for government agencies, commercial customers and hospitals in the Washington metropolitan area.

Llorente Enterprises did not return messages requesting comment.

Other agencies have hung banners depicting Trump. The Department of Agriculture spent $16,400 for banners showing Trump and former President Abraham Lincoln, according to records obtained under a different FOIA request.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a vocal critic of the president, has been investigating those in government that have displayed Trump banners.

In a statement last week, the senator said he found a $39,000 contract for the Department of the Interior’s banners featuring Trump. He uncovered another contract of up to $114,000 for similar banners at the Federal Aviation Administration.

“Not only is this a terrible waste of Americans’ hard-earned money, it is clearly against the law,” Schiff said.

The California Democrat added, “Congress has long outlawed spending tax dollars on propaganda and self-aggrandizement and an eight-story-high Donald Trump head certainly qualifies as propaganda.”

Contact Kevin Bogardus on the encrypted messaging app Signal at KevinBogardus.89 and Josh Gerstein at joshgerstein.46.

For Trump, Every Accusation Is a Confession

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-projection-human-rights-abuses/

Like authoritarian regimes elsewhere, the White House is denouncing its opponents for the very abuses it is carrying out.

President Donald Trump at an April press conference about the war in Iran.
(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Early Wednesday morning, Trump announced on social media that every time the Iranians hit a ship in the Straits of Hormuz, the US military would take out an Iranian bridge or power plant.

Under international law, the targeting of civilian infrastructure is a war crime. That doesn’t mean that previous administrations haven’t flouted these laws, but they generally haven’t publicly gloried in ordering such crimes. Trump, by contrast, is gleefully promising to do so, essentially daring the world to stop him.

In bygone years, the military’s legal watchdogs would have raised enough red flags that such threats (a) likely wouldn’t be made in the first place and (b) wouldn’t be acted on if they were made. But the Trump administration has neutered the military’s watchdogs, and with the leadership of the armed forces besmirched by having gone along with such obviously criminal acts as the assassination of sailors in the Pacific and the Caribbean, there’s little chance of seeing significant military opposition to Trump’s demands to strike civilian infrastructure.

Coopting the military leadership in the crimes of a civilian leadership is a telltale sign of authoritarian governance. The dirtier you can get the hands of the generals and admirals, the easier it is to then involve them in additional plans to solidify your power and to destroy your political opponents. Trump seems to instinctively know this. He knows, too, that his rationales for expanding the Iran war are flimsy and ever-changing—but that this shapeshifting justification for military aggression almost certainly won’t trigger effective resistance within the US military.

Witness his recent pivot to focus on Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified underground site in Iran that may or may not host some basic nuclear facilities and storage sites. This renewed focus on the remnants of Iran’s nuclear program would perhaps carry some moral weight if Trump hadn’t paired his newfound attention on this site with the signing of an extraordinary agreement with Saudi Arabia to allow the dictatorial, fundamentalist kingdom to go whole-hog on enriching its own nuclear fuel.

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To put it plainly: While the United States is now spending tens of billions of dollars in a war of choice to stop Iran—which hasn’t directly attacked the United States—from getting nuclear fuel, it is inking a deal with Saudi Arabia, home country to most of the 9/11 hijackers, allowing it to accumulate the same uranium fuel deemed too dangerous for the Iranians to possess. This is morally imbecilic.

Not surprisingly, the administration’s authoritarian actions are not confined to events overseas. Addressing an international security conference in Washington, DC, last week, Stephen Miller, architect of the most ghastly and violent of Trump’s domestic policies, not only mocked the physical appearance of left-wingers but gloried in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which, as he put it, “directs for the first time in American history all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country. It’s very important to understand that left-wing political terrorism seeks as its ultimate goal the overthrow of our system and form of government.”

Miller went on to warn that “left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery, suffering… inevitably, left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag, the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, and suffering in order to establish total control.”

Hmm… I can think of another group of people, with far more power than antifa, who seem to be experts on inflicting pain, humiliation, and suffering on vast swaths of people in the United States and overseas. This recalls, of course, the adage about the pot calling the kettle black. The White House often ascribes attributes to its opponents that most neutral observers would say best describe the administration itself.

Here we have Trump’s right-hand man, the architect of the occupation of Minneapolis and the assault on migrant communities around the country, ranting about how the left wing wants to put its opponents in prison, while, down the street, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin was putting together a plan to jail local elections officials who refuse to comply with unlawful federal efforts to intervene in state election systems, the Department of Justice was subpoenaing the phone records of New York Times journalists and their family members, and the State Department was attempting to smear, by name, an array of left-wing individuals and organizations for allegedly pro-Cuban activities in the United States. In Texas, a group of anti-ICE protesters were recently sentenced to prison terms ranging up to 100 years in length. In Minneapolis, 15 anti-ICE protesters have been indicted on charges of conspiring to “violently oppose law enforcement” after attempting to use messaging apps to coordinate a “blockade” of a federal building.

As for the inflicting of “pain, humiliation, and suffering,” perhaps Miller should look at how elder-care homes around the country are firing support staff because of the administration’s vindictive decision to remove Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Syrians, and other vulnerable groups. Perhaps he should focus on Trump’s imposition of 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian produce—a move that could result in huge numbers of Canadians losing their livelihoods—days after he threatened to levy tariffs on Canada as punishment for being the source of wildfire smoke drifting across the border into the United States. Perhaps he should look at the growing body count associated with ICE enforcement actions, including two recent fatal shootings of immigrants, one in Texas, the other in Maine. Perhaps he should read the recent Washington Post exposé of how immigrants are being held without adequate medical care and supplies of food in overcrowded rooms that lack beds, toilets, and showers. Perhaps he should talk to Cyclospora victims caught up in a public-health emergency thanks in part to the firing of so many Cyclospora experts who might have identified the outbreak in its early stages before it spread around the country.

When Trump and his henchmen accuse others of crimes, it’s a pretty good bet that they are deflecting from their own immoral actions. Today, the enemy is Iran and antifa; tomorrow—since in the authoritarian schema, new enemies must always be found—it will be some other targets of convenience.

Alaska Removes Citizens From Voter Rolls Just Before Midterms

https://newrepublic.com/post/213522/alaska-removes-citizens-voter-rolls-just-midterms

Hafiz Rashid

July 24, 2026/3:18 p.m. ET

Alaska Removes Citizens From Voter Rolls Just Before Midterms

Alaska has removed thousands of people from its voter rolls, claiming they might not be citizens.

Hasan Akbas/Anadolu/Getty Images

Alaska’s effort to appease President Trump’s claims that noncitizens are voting has ended up punishing U.S. citizens.

The Alaska Beacon reported Thursday that the state removed 3,048 people from its active voter list, including many citizens who were accidentally flagged by the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles and now have to provide extra identification to be able to vote. The director of the Alaska Division of Elections, Carol Beecher, told state legislators on Wednesday that “old data” was the reason for the mistake and that she wasn’t sure why so many Alaska residents were labeled as noncitizens.

When Alaskans apply for a driver’s license, they are asked whether they want to register to vote and if they are a U.S. citizen. State election officials cross-check the DMV’s records with voter rolls each year, and according to Beecher, “more like 200 names” are typically tagged for extra scrutiny.

The latest check found “a lot more names than we were expecting,” Beecher said.

“We believe that when we did the match, that a lot of old data was picked up somehow. So we’re still ferreting through that,” Beecher said, adding that although the number of flagged names was “very concerning,” the state has to take them seriously.

“It is not disenfranchising the individual from being able to vote, but it’s a measure the division has to take to make sure that we only have citizens voting.”

Beecher said that those who were flagged will receive a letter asking if they are citizens, and that they merely need to contact the state Division of Elections by email, phone, or regular mail, and state they are a citizen. “We don’t require paperwork. We’re not requiring documentation. Nothing like that,” she added.

Eligible U.S. citizens who were removed from the voter rolls disagree.

Chris Waigl, who got her driver’s license in 2019 and became a U.S. citizen in 2025, was alarmed to check her registration status last weekend and find that she was listed as “inactive—non citizen.”

“They were able to correct it there and then after I sent in copies of my naturalization certificate with a date before my voter registration date,” she told the Beacon via email. “It’s just ridiculous.”

Waigl said she reached out to four others who became citizens at the same time as her, and three of them were removed from the voter rolls. One of them told the Beacon by phone that they were removed despite registering in person at a DMV office and presenting citizenship information.

Some people told the Beacon that they haven’t been able to reach the Division of Elections by phone, and that mailboxes are full.

Alaska’s primary elections are less than a month away on August 18, and the general election is less than two months away in November. The state’s lieutenant governor, Nancy Dahlstrom, is in charge of the elections office and has told state officials to comply with the Trump administration’s requests to turn over copies of Alaska’s voter rolls for a national voter database.

But that national database, run by the Department of Homeland Security, has been found to be full of errors, mistakenly flagging U.S. citizens. One month ago, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan struck it down, saying that the government “haphazardly” created a database of millions of Americans it knew was “inaccurate.”

“States have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” Soonam wrote in a 75-page ruling. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

Between the Trump administration and zealous state governments like Alaska’s, thousands of U.S. citizens may not be able to vote in this year’s midterms.

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Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling

July 24, 2026/2:19 p.m. ET

Trump Tries to Blow Up Canada Bridge Deal After Opening Ceremony Drama

Trump is once again trying to change the terms of an already finalized agreement.

Cole Burston/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Gordie Howe International Bridge in Windsor, Ontario, on July 24

President Donald Trump is suddenly reneging on the terms of the Gordie Howe Bridge project after he claimed Ottawa “disinvited” U.S. officials from the Michigan–Ontario crossing’s grand opening.

“Canada disinvited the United States of America to the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge, which is fine, considering they are paying substantial TARIFFS to the United States, but the original Deal on the Bridge, which was terribly negotiated by a previous Administration, no longer stands,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday. “We changed the terms of the Deal so that the United States of America now gets 50 percent of the Profit.”

The Gordie Howe Bridge was the creation of a very different period in U.S.-Canadian relations. The international bridge was first proposed in the early 2000s and agreed upon by the two nations in 2012. Under the terms of that agreement, Canada would fully pay for the bridge to get the project moving forward and only share toll revenue once it had recovered its initial costs.

At the time, President Barack Obama was revered by America’s northern neighbors, and diplomatic relations between the two countries were good. But Trump has worked hard to undo that long-standing goodwill. Over the last year and a half, the U.S. president has repeatedly attacked Canada, punishing its people with enormous tariffs, baselessly accosting its government, and even threatening to invade its land to make another U.S. state.

The latest insult came earlier this week, when Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian products worth $20 billion. Canada rescinded its invitations to U.S. officials for the bridge’s grand opening ceremony shortly thereafter, and moved the ribbon-cutting ceremony from the international border line at the center of the bridge to a nearby inspection plaza.

“In light of trade action threatened by the United States earlier this week, it would be inappropriate to proceed with a celebratory event between the two countries,” the office of Canada’s infrastructure minister said, in a statement obtained by The New York Times. “The Gordie Howe International Bridge remains a vital infrastructure project that reflects years of hard work and will be a major economic driver.”

Now Trump is threatening the bridge by claiming that the two countries will split the revenue 50-50, which was not what was agreed upon nearly 15 years ago.

It’s not the first time that Trump has meddled with the bridge. In February, Trump promised that he would block the grand opening unless Canada “fully compensated” the U.S. “for everything” and give him “at least half” ownership of the bridge.

It was not clear, even then, what Canada needed to compensate Washington for. Canada footed the bill for the Gordie Howe International Bridge. The project created new American labor and was constructed with U.S. supplies to boot.

Trump’s take was an unexpected backtrack from how he felt about the bridge during his first term: Trump seemed to wholeheartedly support the endeavor in a joint statement issued in 2017 by himself and former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, claiming at the time that the bridge would “serve as a vital economic link” between the two countries.

Just one day earlier:

Trump Tries to Change Terms of Saudi Nuclear Deal—After It Was Signed

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Hafiz Rashid

July 24, 2026/12:45 p.m. ET

RFK Jr. Now Responsible for 35-Year Record High in Measles

Add that to the salmonella risk, the flesh-eating parasite infesting cattle, and the explosive diarrhea outbreak.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Measles cases in the U.S. have surpassed last year’s totals to reach a new 35-year high, and we’re only in July.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday that there have been 2,318 measles cases in 2026 so far, more than the 2,289 cases reported in 2025 and many more than the 283 cases reported in 2024. The last time the numbers were this high was in 1991, and the past 18 months have seen more measles cases than the last 25 years combined.

The vast majority of infected people—93 percent—were unvaccinated, according to the CDC. The number is expected to only grow higher, as new outbreaks have been reported in Wyoming, Delaware, and Arizona. It doesn’t help that the CDC hasn’t had a permanent director for most of President Trump’s second term, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is skeptical of all vaccines, has a history of dismissing measles, even though it can be fatal.

In 2000, the U.S. had declared measles eradicated in the country, but the Pan American Health Organization will review that status later this year. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s HHS isn’t openly supporting vaccination, with the secretary suggesting that vitamin A is an effective treatment for measles.

Kennedy remains on the job, even though he has reportedly checked out of his responsibilities as a Cabinet secretary with the White House stepping in to manage HHS in March. Meanwhile, the country is dealing with an explosive diarrhea outbreak caused by a one-celled parasite linked to tainted lettuce, a flesh-eating parasite infesting cattle, and a new salmonella risk for millions of America’s eggs.

Americans have little, if any, confidence that government officials like Kennedy are up to the task of solving these public health crises. With all of the budget cuts to government regulators, the U.S. probably hasn’t seen the last disease outbreak of Trump’s presidency.

Read The TNR Blue Book, our new newsletter on the Democratic Party:

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Edith Olmsted

July 24, 2026/12:04 p.m. ET

Ken Paxton Runs Away When Asked About His Alleged Voting Fraud

The Texas attorney general and Republican Senate candidate allegedly voted in six elections while registered at an address where he does not live.

Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton at a campaign event

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is literally running away from accusations of voter fraud.

A bombshell report earlier this month exposed Paxton for allegedly voting in six elections while registered at an address where he does not live.

On Friday, while entering the Ronald Reagan Republican Center in Washington, D.C., Paxton was asked point-blank whether he had committed voter fraud. Rather than face the music, the attorney general raced inside.

This isn’t the first time Paxton has run from questions about his alleged voter fraud. Earlier this week, Paxton fled a press conference when faced with tough questions, earning him the nickname “No Comment Ken.”

“This is at least the third time just this week he’s literally run away from questions of this sort,” journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X.

In another tough moment on Thursday, Paxton refused to answer whether he was ready to debate James Talarico, the Democratic Texas Senate candidate, who has publicly accused his opponent of voter fraud.

This form of voter fraud is a second-degree felony punishable by a fine up to $10,000 and up to 20 years in prison. Paxton, a fierce ally of President Donald Trump, has previously advocated for cracking down on voter fraud, while also threatening to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Ex–60 Minutes Journalist Exposes How Bari Weiss Tried to Help Trump

Weiss apparently even mixed up two wildly different states in her efforts.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

CBS News chief Bari Weiss

CBS News chief Bari Weiss has been so busy skewing the storied network’s coverage that she’s gotten basic facts wrong—including elementary details about America’s leaders and where they’re from.

Fired 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega spilled the tea at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference in New Orleans Thursday, revealing that she had endured network pressure on a number of issues before she was canned, including one particularly stunning dispute over a story on SNAP benefit cuts in West Virginia.

While stopping short of referring to Weiss by name, Vega said her decision to tell the story strictly through the eyes of West Virginians had spurred backlash from CBS’s “new” top brass because she had not interviewed Vice President JD Vance or referred to his decade-old memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

But Vance, as Vega pointed out, is from Ohio. Not West Virginia.

Other arguments bubbled up over the network’s new intent to insert political bias into the famed news magazine’s reporting, according to Vega. One such instance involved demands by network executives that she include footage of protesters attacking plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minnesota—footage that her team discovered did not exist. She said she was also tasked with inserting a line into one of her scripts that claimed Iran was “totally outgunned” by U.S. and Israeli forces—a detail that she noted was a copy-paste administration talking point.

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped to run CBS News late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast journalism, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Weiss’s business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting and the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on Vega’s 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Donald Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT megaprison.

The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from Vega to 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens and the program’s de facto face, Scott Pelley.

Saturday, July 25, 2026

Docs shed light on DOJ spending for Trump banners

Docs shed light on DOJ spending for Trump banners

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/24/trump-banners-doj-cost-01009924

Docs shed light on DOJ spending for Trump banners

For Trump, Every Accusation Is a Confession

For Trump, Every Accusation Is a Confession

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-projection-human-rights-abuses/

For Trump, Every Accusation Is a Confession

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Alaska Removes Citizens From Voter Rolls Just Before Midterms

Alaska Removes Citizens From Voter Rolls Just Before Midterms

https://newrepublic.com/post/213522/alaska-removes-citizens-voter-rolls-just-midterms