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He signed the order on camera. His negotiators gave up the demands the same morning, in the room where the money actually moves.

5. LAKE AMERICA

Trump signed an executive order Thursday afternoon renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” effective immediately, with Doug Burgum beside him. “All it takes is a good pen and some intelligence,” he said. Fifty-seven percent of that lake is in Canada. “They want to be treated like a state, but they’re not a state,” he said.

His negotiators folded the same morning, in the room where the money actually moves: they dropped the demands over how Canadian platforms rank and label American content, Dominic LeBlanc thanked them and asked for more, and Canada gave up nothing. Howard Lutnick denied ever raising the French language: “If you think I ever said the words French.” Dean Blundell, who broke the withdrawal at 10:28, expects Ottawa to cancel its F-35 order next week.

Canada is the number one export market for 27 states, six of them swing states — Michigan 39 percent of everything it exports, Wisconsin 31, then Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota and North Carolina. Two years ago it was 36.

4. TWO THEATRES, ONE EMPTY MAGAZINE

John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow to tell the Russians not to attack NATO, and Sergei Naryshkin, Putin’s foreign intelligence chief, confirmed the meeting himself on Russian state television at 6:31 Thursday morning — hours before any American official said a word. AP and Reuters then reported American Patriot interceptor stocks in Europe are “beyond critical,” burned through in the Iran war. Ratcliffe delivered his warning the same day his own government called the magazine empty.

Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration counted 244 Chinese vessels around the island in July, a third straight record month. No exercise, no drill, nobody announced it. Romania’s president Nicușor Dan condemned Russian drones over his own gas field on 20 August. Naryshkin counts interceptors too.

3. THE BLINDSPOT: ZELENSKYY WORKS THE SENATE

Volodymyr Zelenskyy lobbied senators directly on the Russia sanctions bill — the act named for Lindsey Graham, who died in July — and Ground News reported at 12:06 Thursday afternoon that it helped shake the bill loose. Fifty-three percent of the coverage came from the left, 47 percent from the centre, and from the right, nothing. Not thin. Zero.

The editors who spiked Zelenskyy working the Senate are the editors who spiked the CIA director in Moscow.

Zev goes back to Ground News as stories break to see where the coverage comes from — on some stories nothing comes from one side at all. Ground News gives you the split and the sources, 40% off at groundnews.com/fivestack.

2. OSSOFF GIVES COLLINS A DEADLINE

Jon Ossoff stood in Macon on Thursday morning and gave Mike Collins until the afternoon to answer for Preston Parra, who worked for him and posted a swastika, “White Power,” racial slurs and an image of himself in Klan robes. Parra says he made that image with Grok, the AI generator. It is not a photograph.

Collins’s leadership PAC paid Parra $7,700; the watchdog’s own report puts the pay at $10,288.44, twice the figure the Washington Post reported. “It is the year 2026 in the state of Georgia. It’s not 1935. It’s not 1958,” Ossoff said. Collins leaves the House at noon on January 3, 2027, win or lose, and House Ethics loses jurisdiction the same minute. He only has to last until January.

1. BANK OF AMERICA PAYS $72.5 MILLION

Judge Jed Rakoff approved Bank of America’s $72.5 million settlement with Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers at 12:42 Thursday afternoon, clearing the way to pay roughly 90 women. Six outlets had touched it by air time. House Oversight released 201 pages of Jes Staley’s closed-door interview the same week.

Asked flatly whether he shared JPMorgan’s confidential information with Epstein, Staley answered “Yes.” Page 175: “I’ve got the right to use confidential information where I think it’s appropriate.” Page 179, asked whether he regretted any of it: “No.”

Second bank, second check, and no individual has ever been charged. Shareholders write it, the executives keep their money, and the accusers get a settlement instead of a defendant.

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DEVELOPING….Kash Patel ran the leak hunt out of the White House this week — three Secret Service communications staff on leave, four New York Times reporters subpoenaed, the agency that guards the president investigated from the building it guards. Dean Blundell disputed that on air: nobody has confirmed the Secret Service leaked anything, he said, calling it a purge of people not loyal to Trump and putting the catering-truck leak on Karoline Leavitt, 48 hours before she quit — Narativ has not verified that, and our reporting cuts against the purge: nobody fired, no target list.

5️⃣ Nepal — the wall of water

In the video Zev played, birds lift off before the water arrives, people run because they can hear it, and a building Nepal and China built together is gone. Ninety-five dead by Wednesday night, more than a hundred now — thirty-three in Chitwan, 150 kilometres downstream, one in the district that touches China. Nepal got no warning because no mechanism exists. Both sides agreed in principle to share flood data after the same river flooded in July 2025. Nobody signed it.

4️⃣ Meta buys its way out

Mark Zuckerberg sat through part of the trial, saw where it was going, and paid up to seventeen billion dollars. Forty state attorneys general took the deal mid-trial, and the money comes with rules — two hours a day for teenagers, teen accounts locked overnight. Meta admits nothing. Zev signed up for the last Meta settlement to see what his privacy was worth, and collected 18 cents. Congress passed nothing. The states did this.

3️⃣ The CIA director in Moscow

John Ratcliffe spent eight hours at Vnukovo on Tuesday and nobody in Washington announced it. Flight trackers caught the plane. Dmitry Peskov gave the readout: contacts through the security services, no meeting with Putin, Putin kept informed without delay. Trump called it “very sort of semi-routine.” Zev: “The CIA director does not semi-routinely head over to have conversations with the FSB.” His read: Russia is preparing something against a NATO neighbour, with the Army down to five four-star generals.

2️⃣ Canada hits back

Doug Ford told Trump to kiss his ass, then declined on CBS to take it back. “I stand by those comments,” Ford said, before turning conciliatory. Canada’s retaliation lands September 8: 15 to 50 percent on more than 700 American products, steel and aluminium doubled to 50, $7.5 billion behind Canadian business. Dean read Mark Carney’s target list as surgical — Maine lobster, Alaska, Michigan, Wisconsin dairy, Pennsylvania appliances — aimed at the midterms. American toilet paper is climbing. The pulp is Canadian.

TODAY’S NUMBER 1 STORY BROKE LIKE THIS ON GROUND NEWS: The ballot-rule story pulls 67 percent left, 33 percent centre, zero from the right. Ground News lets you see what both sides cover.

1️⃣ The ballot rule

Judge Indira Talwani lifted her own injunction against Trump’s mail-ballot rule Wednesday, and the panic started. Anne P. Mitchell read the order. The Supreme Court had tossed the case as unripe — no final rule existed when the states sued — so Talwani lifted an injunction she issued too early, and told the plaintiffs to amend and come back. “She’s going to slap an injunction on that complaint so fast that the USPS heads will spin,” Mitchell said. Sixty-nine days out, her advice: drop box, not mailbox.

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5️⃣ Dolly Parton Dies at 80

Dolly Parton died at 80. Her family announced it on her own verified accounts, in a video her nephew Bryan Seaver recorded years ago at her request. “Sadness lies with us, not with Dolly,” Seaver said in that announcement. The family released no cause. Zev met her once on the Oprah set, where she sang “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers. Blundell counted what she did with the money: Dollywood turned not-for-profit, 300 million books mailed to kids who had none.

4️⃣ Ratcliffe Flies to Moscow and Tells Nobody Why

John Ratcliffe landed in Moscow. No announcement, no readout, no press pool — the trip surfaced only because trackers followed a U.S. military plane in. Blundell said it was a C-17. Zev granted the obvious: CIA directors run these missions — Ratcliffe’s last took him to Cuba to tell Havana it was on the list. Moscow is not Havana. Trump’s presidency runs on Russia, Zev said.

3️⃣ DHS Admits the Voter-Fraud Numbers Were Inflated

NPR reported at 2:15 p.m. that the Department of Homeland Security admitted the non-citizen voter-roll figures it had been touting were inflated, on an audio call with a Nevada official. The Supreme Court handed the administration a preliminary win on the new mail-ballot order a day earlier, on numbers DHS now concedes were wrong. Blundell asked why nine justices can’t fact-check what two broadcasters check every afternoon.

2️⃣ Graham’s Sister Faces South Carolina

Darline Graham Nordone, sister of the late Lindsey Graham, carried Trump’s endorsement and, by Blundell’s count, $830,000 of his money into Tuesday’s South Carolina vote. Blundell said she answered a foreign-policy question by admitting she didn’t know much, but she liked the army. Polls closed at 7 p.m., after the show. Trump bought her a floor, Blundell said, and it may not hold.

1️⃣ Canada Matches Trump, Dollar for Dollar — This Week’s Ground News Blindspot

François-Philippe Champagne announced $27.6 billion in Canadian tariffs on roughly 700 American products — 50, 25 and 15 percent, matching Trump rate for rate, effective September 8. Energy and potash stay off the list. Mark Carney did not attend. Champagne paired them with a $7.5 billion support package: $3 million non-repayable grants, $2 million interest-free loans. Dean Blundell named the contrast: Trump has never once offered a package to the people his tariffs hurt. “This is war,” Blundell said, and aimed it carefully — not at Americans, at the Trump regime. Trump spent the day on Truth Social professing his love for French Canadians, calling Carney weak and ineffective, and floating a rename of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” Blundell countered with Lake Michigan: call it Lake Epstein, “because we don’t do business with pedophiles either.” Zev took it past the trade math — Putin wants the Arctic passage, and a compliant Canada hands it to him. And the American right is not covering any of it: Ground News scores the story 65 percent left, 35 percent centre, zero percent right, at 100 percent high factuality. The bill lands on American buyers on September 8, and half the country meets it with no warning, because the outlets their voters trust won’t call a trade war news until the checkout counter does.

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5️⃣ Carney Walks Out, and Canada Starts Fighting Back

Trump’s negotiators handed Ottawa a replacement draft on Friday night, hours before the deadline, and Mark Carney walked. Dean Blundell, who has sources on the Canadian side, read out the demands: an American veto over Canada’s deals with anyone else, price caps and first refusal on its critical minerals, Quebec’s French-language protections eliminated, and Washington deciding how much Canadian energy it takes before anyone else gets a drop. Mark Wiseman, Canada’s ambassador in Washington, had one description for it. “This is an annexation document,” Dean quoted him. “There’s no other way to put it.” Nobody could sign that, so Trump sank his own deal, then spent the weekend blaming Ottawa for last-minute demands. Fifty percent tariffs on about twenty billion US dollars of Canadian goods landed Saturday. Carney matched them dollar for dollar from September 8, called EU leaders, and sits on $460 billion of American debt he can sell whenever he likes.

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4️⃣ Points at Trump’s Human Printer

Jon Ossoff noticed how much time Natalie Harp spends beside the president, said so, and Washington started asking who she is. Harp carries a printer for Trump and hands him what she finds online, which means she decides a fair share of what he believes. When Trump slipped out of Turkey on a catering truck last week, she is the aide he took. She came out of One America News, and she spent January 6th posting for him more than a hundred and fifty times, CNN reported over the weekend. Harp screens what reaches the president, which is exactly the access any foreign service would pay for.

3️⃣ Leonard Publishes All Thirty-Seven Pages

Ellie Leonard verified and published the full set — thirty-seven handwritten pages of FBI notes, not the twenty-two she put out five days ago. Todd Blanche has told a federal judge those pages cannot come out. They had in fact been sitting in the open since March, when a Washington Examiner reporter posted them to a public document site and never wrote a word about them. The FBI interviewed Jane Doe 4 four times. Blanche released the one interview in which Donald Trump’s name never appears and withholds the three in which it does. Katie Phang is suing for them, and Blanche’s answer is due August 27. The allegations describe the abuse of a girl aged thirteen to fifteen; nobody has corroborated them, Trump denies them, and no prosecutor has charged him. She is in hiding and, Dean said, still terrified. Bill Barr ran the Justice Department through every one of those months, and Trump sat in the White House — the same months Narativ published The Secret Life of Jeffrey Epstein. A cover-up at the arrest, another at the death, and now a third.

2️⃣ Trump Explains to Cohen Why He’s Talking to Him

Michael Cohen put Trump on his Sunday radio show and let the president write his script for him. “You told stories in order to get out of trouble,” Trump told him. “And you thought about it and you recanted your testimony. And most people don’t have the guts to do that.” Cohen has recanted nothing. He does have a clemency application sitting at the White House, and Trump signs those. “It was like watching someone beat a dog into heeling that he already beat,” Dean said, before apologising to his audience for ever having worked with him.

1️⃣ Bessent Declares Economic War on Iran

Scott Bessent stood at a Treasury podium and declared economic war on Iran — its oil, its economy, and sanctions on anyone anywhere still trading with it. He would not say which leaders Trump has been calling or what he asked them for. “We’ve already seen some results,” Bessent said, and, “we do not have infinite patience here.” Bessent is threatening China, which takes no instruction from Washington and answers sanctions with sanctions. Isolate Iran’s remaining partners and China collects them. Bessent brought a press release to a war, and Americans pay for it at the pump.

Dean caught the timing. Trump picked his fight with Canada in the week the thirty-seven pages came out, and it is taking every minute of network airtime. Americans vote in seventy-one days.

Thank you Lev Parnas, LC - Silence is Complicity, Caro Henry, Cathy R. Payne, Courtney M 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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This is the smoking gun. Twenty-two pages of handwritten FBI notes the Justice Department told a federal judge were duplicative turned up on Reddit, and what they show is a conspiracy to defraud the American people of justice — a cover-up of what the Epstein files say about Donald Trump and the crimes he is alleged to have committed. The DOJ and AG Todd Blanche have proven they can’t be trusted to administer justice on behalf of the American people. Congress should appoint an independent special counsel to investigate Trump, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, and everyone else who took part in this obstruction of justice.. Ellie Leonard broke the story on her Substack a couple of hours ago and she joins us, as does Olga Lautman, who had a big exclusive of her own.

5️⃣ NATO Rings Kaliningrad and Won’t Say Why

Olga Lautman was the only reporter in the West to catch it: NATO put roughly twenty-five aircraft over northern Poland and the Baltic in a ring around Kaliningrad, unannounced. The silence is the story. NATO exercises constantly but always announces first — “you don’t want to send the wrong signal by suddenly having sophisticated aircraft,” Lautman said. This time nobody was told. She traced it to warnings from American, British and Lithuanian intelligence that Russia may be preparing a limited ground incursion to test Article Five. Washington has issued that warning twice now, something it last did in the months before the full invasion of Ukraine. Her sharper worry is a false flag staged inside Russia and blamed on a NATO member. On Wednesday the flights expanded to Moldova.

4️⃣ Trump Says There’s a Deal. Canada Says There’s a Text.

Trump stood outside the White House and declared it finished: “we’ve come to a deal with Canada,” and “basically, we have no tariffs going into Canada anymore.” Dean Blundell, who has sources on the Prime Minister’s trade council, walked through what actually exists — a framework of an understanding that might lead to a deal, with Dominic LeBlanc and Janet Charette both saying so on the record the same day. Carney corrected Trump’s Truth Social post himself. What Trump wants is not dairy or lumber but critical minerals, energy, and ownership of Canadian geology for his donors, and Carney has told him the sovereignty of Canada’s supply chains is not for sale. The fifty percent tariffs Trump imposed under a 1930 law no president had ever used still land Friday. Carney has run two countries’ central banks. Trump has not run one.

Details of the deal came from the BlindSpot from groundnews.com. Read it here

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3️⃣ Trump Demands Prison for the Man Who Testified Against Him

Alex Vindman lost Florida’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday to Angie Nixon, a state legislator who raised $975,000 against his $16.3 million and bought no television at all. Hours later the President called him a treasonous creep and demanded he be prosecuted. The voters had already finished with Vindman; the prosecution was never about winning anything.

2️⃣ Alaska Turns Into a Coin Flip

Dan Sullivan finished five points behind Mary Peltola in his own primary, in a state Trump carried by thirteen. The Cook Political Report moved the seat to toss-up back on July 1 — not on polling, but on the ballot, after Alaska’s Supreme Court ruled that a second Republican named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. could stay on it. In November that second Sullivan appears with no party beside his name. Control of the Senate now runs through Alaska.

1️⃣ Twenty-Two of the Thirty-Seven Missing Pages

Ellie Leonard spent her birthday publishing them. A tipster reached her on Signal at eleven at night pointing to a Reddit thread with four pages; a direct message produced eighteen more. The serial numbers match the FBI interviews already released. She sent them to someone who had read the originals in person, who told her: “I don’t think these are the notes that I’ve seen, but I saw about half of the notes and this looks to be about the other half” — which points to a second agent taking notes in the same room. She sat up all night waiting for legal clearance and got it at half past eight in the morning. The pages arrived with nothing redacted: the survivor’s name, her school, her friends, the prison her mother went to. Leonard redacted them herself, published no links, and reported the Reddit post so it would come down. The interviews were taken by FBI agents under the Biden administration, most of whom have since been fired. And in one of them the woman asks the Bureau to crop a second man out of her photograph of Jeffrey Epstein. The uncropped version is the picture of Epstein and Trump that everyone has now seen.

A department that told a federal judge those pages were duplicative spent Wednesday watching strangers on Reddit read them. That is not a filing error. That is the cover-up, in the open, and it will take a special counsel to prise it apart.

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5️⃣ Trump Says Kim Answered Him, Then Can’t Say If They Spoke

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that Kim Jong Un has responded to his request for a conversation. “Yeah, he has.” Asked whether the two had actually spoken, he said, “I don’t know.” On Sunday he ordered Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce the joint exercises with South Korea, citing “my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.” The grievance underneath came out in the same session: he called Seoul’s president for help against Iran and got “no thanks,” after asking $10 billion a year for the 39,000 American troops posted there. Seoul is running Ulchi Freedom Shield anyway. The Navy has already sailed the USS George Washington out of Yokosuka for the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a carrier.

4️⃣ Iran’s Guard Goes Offensive as the Deadline Dies

The sixty-day memorandum expired at 2:55 Tehran time. The Revolutionary Guard announced it is finished playing defense, promising “powerful offensive operations,” and its new commander vowed to bring “the most heavily-armed army in world history” to its knees. Trump spent the morning threatening to bomb Oman — the country mediating his deal — and the afternoon on the Strait of Hormuz: “We control it with the blockade... I like the idea of declaring it a territory.” Take Tehran at its word, Zev said on air. American economic interests worldwide are what they have named as targets.

3️⃣ The Ballroom Is a Five-Story Bunker With a Drone Port

Trump explained what sits under his 90,000-square-foot ballroom, and nobody in the room followed up. The military, he said, asked to “go down deep into the ground and build a military facility to go with the White House” — then “came up with a drone port on top.” Five stories down. Bulletproof windows, bulletproof sides, “drone proof.” He needs the room because Xi Jinping arrives September 24 and the current one seats 89. The people suing to stop it, he said, are “very, very disloyal to our country.”

2️⃣ Trump Answers a War Charge With a Children’s TV Name

Jon Ossoff said in Atlanta there is “something uniquely despicable about lying a nation into war,” and called Trump a “crook president” whose family “raked in billions.” Asked about it, Trump replied: “You mean Pee-Wee Herman? Pee-Wee Herman lookalike?” He tried the same joke at a Georgia rally and garbled it into “Pinky Herman.” The White House called Ossoff a theater kid. The same morning, the Supreme Court refused to rehear the E. Jean Carroll case. Five million dollars, final.

1️⃣ A General Says America Cannot Stop a Drone Swarm

Lieutenant General Joseph Jarrard, deputy commander of US Northern Command, was asked last Thursday whether he could defend the homeland against a drone swarm. He said no. “We don’t have the sensors... we are ill-equipped right now to handle something like that.” His boss told senators in March they defeat about a quarter of the drones they detect. Meanwhile the USS Benfold, escorting the carrier out of Asia, spent four days adrift in the South China Sea with no power, water or toilets, and the Lincoln is coming out of the Strait after 265 days at sea. Americans vote in 78 days.

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Judge Emmett Sullivan gave Attorney General Todd Blanche ten days to explain, in a sworn declaration, why the Justice Department still hasn’t produced the Epstein documents the court ordered released — then closed the hearing with a story about the one prosecutor he ever held in contempt, case citation included, so Blanche’s lawyers could look up how that ended.

Thursday’s Fivestack convened minutes after the hearing ended. Zev, Dean Blundell, attorney Anne P. Mitchell and Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer had all listened in live — and Zev read the hearing’s defining exchange straight from the transcript. It deserves to run in full:

THE COURT: Give me a date. I’m willing to work with you. Give me a date when this can be accomplished.

DOJ: I don’t have a date … it’s a little bit out of my control.

THE COURT: But you knew this was going to be discussed today, though.

DOJ: I’m not able to give you a date because, quite honestly, that date is out of my control.

THE COURT: You can’t give the court a time frame — 30 days, 60 days, whatever?

DOJ: I’m not able to, Your Honor.

THE COURT: Is there someone at the Department of Justice who can do that? … Pass the microphone to that person.

DOJ: It is forthcoming.

THE COURT: This much is forthcoming. Let’s be realistic … the public demands the time frame, not just me.

The department that indexed millions of pages in weeks cannot name a month.

The date fight was about the Epstein Files Transparency Act’s plainest requirement: every redaction gets a written justification, published in the Federal Register. Seven months after Sullivan’s injunction, the department has published none.

The day’s other fight was 37 pages of handwritten FBI notes — the agents’ original interview notes underlying the typed 302 reports in the Jane Doe 4 case. The department withheld them as “duplicative.” Sullivan wanted proof:

THE COURT: Just to take us at face value that the notes are substantially similar doesn’t really address it … All I need is proof … I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I’m just trying to do my job.

DOJ: I guess — is that an order?

“When a lawyer asks if that’s an order, it’s because if it’s an order, they can appeal it,” Mitchell said.

Leonard walked through the department’s logic until it fell over. “It’s duplicative — but also it’s under seal. Which doesn’t make any sense, because if it’s copies of stuff we already have, it wouldn’t be under seal,” she said. The department also argued handwriting is too hard to redact. “This is 37 pages. We could redact it before lunch,” Leonard said. This is the same review team that redacted “Lion King” from a released document because King is somebody’s name.

Then there are the files nobody has ever sees. “They left everything out of the files that wasn’t in English,” Leonard said. “That leaves out anything Russian. That leaves out the bank accounts.” The FBI employs linguists. An iPhone translates. The excuse doesn’t survive contact with a phone.

Mitchell compared a DOJ-redacted email Epstein sent himself against the unredacted original she already held: 30 names blacked out, and not one belongs to a victim. “The point isn’t who the names are. The point is the DOJ illegally redacted them,” Mitchell said. One name escaped the redaction team entirely — Epstein had spelled it “Donaldo Trupp.”

Why no contempt today, then? Mitchell, the panel’s lawyer, laid out the mechanics: contempt is a judge’s last resort, and Sullivan spent the day appeal-proofing it. A 15-minute recess stretched to nearly an hour while he skimmed the new binder Blanche’s team handed up — documents the plaintiff, in this unusual case, has never seen. Then he returned, told his contempt story, and put the citation on the record. “Judges don’t care if you appeal, because the trial still goes on,” Mitchell said.

Blanche will likely appeal the ten-day order. The department will keep moving the cups — Blundell called the whole performance “b******t three-card monte.” But the delay is doing something the department didn’t intend. In six months, Jeffrey Epstein has moved from dead tabloid billionaire to Donald Trump’s intimately linked associate — in the public’s settled understanding, not on the conspiracy fringe. Every stall confirms it: an innocent department would have ended this by producing the files.

Blanche has ten days — and one case citation to read first.

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Before the countdown, Dean broke the day’s business story: DOJ and SEC investigators had opened a probe into Mark Walter’s sports-empire loans — and weeks after Walter handed Trump a World Series ring at the White House, he sold the Lakers to Jared Kushner’s brother Josh and Bob Iger for a record $12.5 billion. “This is straight-up mobbery,” Dean said.

5️⃣ THE ECLIPSE

The moon slid exactly over the sun and switched off the daylight from Iceland to Spain — Spain got the rarest cut, totality at sunset. The Assyrians read eclipses as a change of kings coming. Dean isn’t superstitious. Zev counted the omens anyway.

4️⃣ HEGSETH BROKE THE CARRIER

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln are trying to go over the side — six or seven attempts, by Dean’s reporting from crew families, some of them fatal. The ship is at week 37 of a deployment that should have seen port at week six: no toothpaste, no soap, protein slop, mold in the HVAC, mail sanctioned, family rations never delivered, casualties from Iranian strikes unacknowledged. The Pentagon answered with a shrug and a stand-down while Pete Hegseth asks for $67 billion. Then the IRGC adviser told PBS the other half: Iran builds missiles faster than it fires them — and if Congress wants a real investigation, compare Trump’s assets before the war to after.

3️⃣ THE PLOT TO STEAL 2026

Trump told our cameras he won’t rule out a federal takeover of the midterms — “stranger things have happened.” Wisconsin answered overnight: Democrats refused Francesca Hong, the socialist the RGA spent $3.6 million elevating, and picked David Crowley by half a point — who promptly announced a unity tour WITH Hong, aimed at one target. The electorate is more switched on than the men buying its primaries. Also new: $20 million in electrified ICE gloves — twenty million dollars, for gloves that shock the person you grab.

2️⃣ PIRRO’S PAPER CASE

Jeanine Pirro convened a special grand jury over the Reflecting Pool — a case her own office already admitted was empty, against people who stopped to pick litter out of a public monument. A special grand jury cannot indict; it can investigate for 18 months and keep Trump’s story alive while a judge weighs killing the case for good. Trump’s pool guy remains uncharged.

1️⃣ THE DEATH-PLANE MANIFEST

Now we have the manifest. In the catering truck: Dan Scavino, Natalie Harp, and Walt Nauta — the Mar-a-Lago documents co-accused. On the decoy the White House said was targeted: Rubio, Hegseth, Bessent, and the entire press corps, told the president was aboard. Trump read the coverage and blamed the Secret Service. Lev Parnas told Narativ Live an hour earlier there may have been no threat at all — a side meeting he’s still running down. And the IRGC adviser answered the only question that matters: why would Iran kill him? “He’s busy destroying the United States of America. We’re enjoying this.”

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5️⃣ The Catering Cart Caper

A White House official confirmed the ruse on camera: Trump boarded Air Force One in Turkey for the cameras, slipped out the far side into a catering truck, and flew home on a second jet — while his press corps and most of his cabinet rode the decoy, some told mid-air they were on “a dangerous flight.” Dean noted the one exception: personal aide Natalie Harp rode out with the boss. He also pulled the Clinton precedent — a credible threat once moved a president to a private jet, and every passenger was told. Nobody told this press corps anything. No reporting yet shows the Iranian threat was real, and a president who brags he is winning this war hid from it behind the submarine sandwiches. “Truly spectacular selfishness,” Dean called it — and that was the charitable reading.

4️⃣ Republicans Bankroll The Socialist

Six states voted Tuesday, and in Wisconsin the biggest spender in the DEMOCRATIC governor’s primary was the Republican Governors Association — nearly $3.6 million in “attack” ads that every Democrat in the state read as a boost for democratic socialist Francesca Hong, the opponent Republicans believe they can beat in November. Dean called the whole practice, run by both parties, “a race to the bottom.” T extremes don’t legislate — you govern from consensus or you don’t govern — and a party that pays to nominate its opponent’s fringe has stopped trying to win arguments at all.

3️⃣ “Stranger Things Have Happened”

Wayne Allyn Root — who has spent a year begging Trump in print to seize the 2026 elections — pitched him a “national-security emergency” takeover of the midterms on Real America’s Voice after midnight. Trump answered: “Let me just say stranger things have happened. I will leave it at that.” Dean stacked the paper underneath the three words: NSPM-7 already lets Trump label opponents national-security threats, the Iran war supplies a standing emergency, and 2024’s “vote for me this one time and you will never have to vote again” supplied the intent. Cancel the elections and there is no way back. Dean’s count: 83 days to stop it at the ballot box.

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2️⃣ This Week’s Blindspot: The Quiet Iran Deal

Pakistan’s defense minister says the US and Iran are near “some sort of an arrangement” — and only 13 percent of left-leaning outlets have touched the story, this week’s Ground News Blindspot. Narativ’s Baku reporting sits directly underneath it: the hardline Revolutionary Guard wing that just took over Iran’s top security council is the same network that moved money through Trump’s Baku tower and into his Las Vegas condos. Maybe Tehran doesn’t want him dead. He’s their business partner. Dean answered the money trail with his grandfather, who walked into Berlin with the RAF in 1945: “We didn’t know how bad it was until we got there.”

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Thank you Ellie Leonard, Cat: Poli-Psych, Amy Gabrielle, LC - Silence is Complicity, Caro Henry, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Breaking off the top: Tyler Boebert — Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s 21-year-old son — faces five new felony counts in Garfield County, Colorado: three for sexual exploitation of a child, two for contributing to the delinquency of a minor; he posted $10,000 bond Sunday, the affidavit is sealed, and he is presumed innocent. The math that matters: he faces sentencing on his 2024 deferred deal September 4 and 10, and new felonies four weeks out can turn “stay clean” into a felony record.

5️⃣ The Chair

Megan Romer co-chairs the Democratic Socialists of America — the movement whose label keeps winning Democratic primaries — and Zev and Dean played her New Yorker Radio Hour interview: she believes in owning the means of production, kept the DSA’s ground game home rather than turn it out for Kamala Harris, said she would probably have attended the October 8 rally, and called October 7 “largely inevitable.” Dean’s verdict landed hardest: she handed back every inch her movement won, a nightmare for Democrats 85 days from the midterms — while Zev counted the cost of a chair who keeps arming the other side’s red-scare machine. Paid subscribers can watch the full broadcast below.

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4️⃣ Epstein Was in the Building

Ellie Leonard joined live with the document chain she built from the DOJ files: a text thread (EFTA01620474) where an “unknown” contact tells Governor Kenneth Mapp “Seeing Trump people today, can we speak?” on November 13, 2016 — matched to Epstein by his own same-day email to himself repeating its “if I feel a sneeze coming on, I ask for legal advice” line — and Linda Stone’s thread, where Epstein answers “No, Trump Tower.” That is the day Trump sat in Trump Tower picking his first cabinet, five days after the election, with Michael Cohen — who says he never knew Epstein — working the building. Steve Bannon told Epstein on tape he was the one who could sink the campaign; Michael Wolff still holds those recordings.

3️⃣ Bibi Says No

Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Donald Trump’s Gaza plan to his face — no dodge, no diplomatic hedge, just no. An ally has concluded that defying this president costs nothing, and the art-of-the-deal presidency keeps failing to close.

2️⃣ Iran Writes the Terms

Day 162 of the Strait of Hormuz closure, and Iran’s top security official put the price in writing: lift the blockade, drop sanctions, pull US forces, pay reparations, release the frozen assets. Trump’s answer — America is “semi-negotiating,” plus a post demanding Iran pay reparations. Narativ’s Baku Files investigation, published Monday morning, explains the mumble: the Capital One filing on Trump’s Baku tower alleges laundering linked to the same Revolutionary Guard now across the table in Muscat — you don’t talk tough to a partner.

1️⃣ Trump’s Lawyer Takes the Files

Todd Blanche was sworn in as Attorney General while the show was on the air — Trump’s own defense lawyer, confirmed 50-49 with Bill Cassidy casting the deciding vote, now controls the Epstein files. Wednesday at 1 PM, Judge Sullivan makes him answer for the Jane Doe 4 handwritten FBI notes his department still withholds — and Chris Armitage’s case that New Mexico can charge Blanche over the Maxwell interview is already moving.

Thank you Ellie Leonard, LC - Silence is Complicity, Lalisa, Noble Blend, Christina Reamy, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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